Traditionally it is ants that ruin a picnic, but ants are linear, and are usually on a surface against which they can be squashed. Flies are at one with the atmosphere. The sight of a fly on a beautiful deviled egg encapsulates so much of the human condition: goody cut with dammit.
Not that flies give a rip for the human condition. Everything else being equal, they would no doubt prefer some good stationary manure to us, but manure doesn’t grow on trees these days, and manure is low on sugar. That, science tells us, is why flies find us so attractive: even when we don’t have watermelon juice on our hands, forearms, face, and neck, we are sweet, willy-nilly, to flies. Like your old aunt Mae bearing down on your underchin when you were a tot, flies are saying, in the only language they know, “Gimme some sugar.”
Flies are excellent at reproducing. How they go about it is something not to be gone into. As to how they eat—they taste things with the hairs of their legs, okay? Then it gets worse. And they feel fully entitled to do this to our baked beans, while we are trying to eat them—our baked beans— ourselves. I bit down on a fly once, at a picnic. I can still taste it. A little like motor oil, or axle grease, only very slightly crunchy.
But what I was going to ask was, can we find a way to keep flies from getting on our nerves? Maybe, just maybe, we need to consider what we and flies have in common:
1. Reproduction
2. Love of potato salad
3.
Okay, let’s do this. Let’s give flies credit for having just about the most fundamental name in creation. What other animal is called so simply what it does? (Bee doesn’t count.) But come to think of it, that is irritating too. Why should flies get such a cool name? Why wouldn’t a pretty bird be called a fly, and a fly be called something worse, a pester, or something that might derive from the Latin for “tastes your food with its leg hairs”? That is just like flies, to get away with being called flies.
When I was a boy, people put cotton on their screen doors to keep flies away. I could never understand that, until I learned that the original idea, since forgotten, was to soak the cotton in DDT. These days, restaurants with outdoor dining areas often half fill plastic sandwich bags with water and staple them up where flies would bother diners. Supposedly, a fly’s multifaceted eyes are disoriented by reflections from the water. I have yet to see flies frantically backpedaling away from any of these water bags, but I haven’t seen any flies perched on them, either.
In fact, I don’t think there are as many flies around as there were years ago. Back in the sixties, a friend of mine went to a Coca-Cola bottling plant on business. The receptionist met him at the door. “You’ll need this,” she said and handed him a flyswatter. The manager who showed him around carried one too. I doubt that Cokes are bottled amid so many flies anymore.
Air-conditioning is hard on flies, for flies like heat. When the temperature drops, they drop, like flies. These days people stay closed up inside their houses, instead of letting fly-bearing zephyrs in through open windows. But let’s not delude ourselves that flies are an endangered species. The only way, other than swatting, to get the better of flies …
Well, going back to my boyhood again, there were some boys, cruel boys, who would pull the wings off flies, and mock them, saying, “What do you call a fly with no wings? A walk.” I didn’t do that. For one thing, my motor skills weren’t that fine. For that reason, I probably would not be able to do what a college friend of my wife’s did with a fly and a strand of her hair, which enabled him to tell a fly, in effect, “Okay, Mr. Essence of flying, fly for me.”
When my wife was in college, her hair was fine and straight and long enough for her to sit on. This nimble-fingered friend of hers relieved her of a single strand and tied a loop in one end of it. He caught a fly. He attached the hair to the fly. Then he had a fly on a leash. Eventually he set his pet free, but it flew off trailing the long drifty hair, which must have caused this one fly to provide people—look at the tail on that fly—with a little wonderment for a change.
flulike
We so often read in the sports pages that D’queem Pong-Roscoe, or whoever, “sat out the first three games with flulike symptoms.” Why do we need a word like flulike? Why not “flu symptoms,” or “symptoms of the flu”? Is the newspaper worried that it will get sued if the sickness turns out to be something other than the flu? It could turn out to be something resembling flu, maybe something much worse than flu. But if symptoms indicate possible flu, they are flu symptoms. The symptoms, themselves, aren’t like the flu. You wouldn’t say something has “a chickenlike taste.” Oh, I suppose you could. I still don’t like flulike.
You wouldn’t say “a recoverylike sign.” “A doomlike omen.” “A disasterlike prediction.” “A warlike portent.” “Thunderlike clouds.”
See peeve.
foil
Are you ready for some serious alphabet juice? You don’t have to be religious. Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877, “God’s Grandeur”:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.
That’s what I’m talking about. Go, thou, and look up the whole damn poem, an astonishing gush (not the right word, but if it weren’t pejorative, it would be)—an astonishing eruption (not the right word either) of vision, movement, sound, and, too, sentiment that in any other setting would be too sweet:
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.
Setting means a lot. In a toilet stall in a men’s room of a highly respectable university’s student center many years ago, amid all manner of scurvy allegations, gross insults and counterinsults, directions on how to defecate well and truly (“If you would shit with force and ease / Put your elbows on your knees, / With your hands, grasp your chin / And move your asshole out and in”), talk of rim jobs and ruder-than-necessary drawings of cocks, I discovered this, in a small and not too graceful hand, off to one side: “You know that you are in love when another person’s needs become more important than your own.” Below this, and connected to it by an arrow, someone had written: “True.”
Speaking of Hopkins, check out his “The Windhover,” for instance its use of the word gash (there, in context, is a right word for you); and note, incidentally, that its connecting plod to shining almost contradicts the opposition of trod to shining in “God’s Grandeur.”
But I want to focus on one word in that poem. “English,” writes John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “has three separate words foil.” The oldest, meaning to thwart, as in “Curses, foiled again,” originally meant to trample. It probably derives from the same Latin source as the verb full, meaning (AHD) “To increase the weight or bulk of (cloth) by shrinking and beating or pressing.” (Compare felt and its kinship to the second syllable of anvil.) Originally a fuller (whence the surname of Buckminster Fuller) fulled cloth by treading on it.
Another foil, meaning a light sword with a blunted point used in fencing, which OED first locates in 1594, may in fact be akin, by virtue of the puncture-preventing tip, to the first meaning, but there is no etymological evidence for that, nor for Ayto’s on-the-contrary suggestion that this foil may have evolved from the meaning of foil that we are coming to, as a sword’s blade evolved from a leaf’s.
It is from Latin folium, leaf, that we get the meaning of foil (and of folio and foliage) that Hopkins had in mind: metal compressed into a paper-thin (page-thin, as long as pages are paper) sheet, or leaf. This foil shines. Once crumpled and smoothed, it glimmers and glints multifariously. The sense of foil as someone who by contrast sets off the qualities of another—as the unprepossessing, five-foot-two, excitable, agonizing, gloom-prone Hopkins set off the Rock of Ages—comes from the practice of enhancing a jewel’s brilliance by backing it with foil. We don’t ordinarily think of shaking foil blazingly out, but a marvelous hand could do it with a big enough sheet, or poetry can in a few w
ords.
For one thing, shook foil shakes it in a way that shaken foil would not. “Sprung rhythm” is what Hopkins called the way he would jam two stressed syllables together (or three unstressed ones as in “gathers to a greatness”) to generate more torque, more explosiveness, than regular meter could muster. Hopkins, himself, was wound tight. He became a Jesuit priest and lifetime celibate after the shock of finding himself infatuated with a young man named Digby. He was so retiring and his poems so strange that none of them were published until after his death. In his journals and letters he wrote about the “inscape” and the “instress” of things. By inscape he meant something like the complex of characteristics that give a being its individual nature. By instress, a kind of inner force field that holds the inscape together and projects it through the poem to the reader.
The image “flame out, like shining from shook foil” is transcendentally visual, but it wouldn’t be without alphabet juice. Consider the inscape and instress potential in the word foil: the puff of f and the flow of l surrounding the bouncy oi sound shared by sproing, boing, oil, boil, coil, loin, joint, joy, ahoy. (No, not so much by Roy. I wish.)
Those three meanings, those three word histories, of foil are separate. But we know them all, at once. Unless we have looked up the etymologies, we don’t connect the treading of cloth into a dense thinness with metal flattened into a reflective sheet—but why did full and folium both turn into foil?
Full came to mean “spoil a scent or trace by trampling over it.” I’m not saying foil in the sense of thwart is a mash up of full and spoil, but I am saying that trading uh (as in, uh) for oi (as in, from the foiler’s perspective, oboyoboy and, from the foilee’s, oy) makes a more than casual difference.
Latin folium became English foil (at first meaning simply leaf) by way of French foille, leaf (which evolved into modern French feuille, from which we get feuilleton, a light essay). French has a sound like Latin o, but to the French a leaf called for a more bendable sound.
As for the fencing foil, it’s metal. It’s flexible. Its use entails a lot of thwarting. This is not true etymology, any more than cockroach is what you get when you cross a rooster and an insect. But the springiness of Hopkins’s image partakes of all the associations that foil evokes. Not only the metallic paper but also the sword and the thwarting are foils to the inscape of glory divine.
See upaya.
fond
The verb fon originally meant to lose savor, as in salt that was fonned. Later, to fon—also, to fun—meant to cheat, to fool, to make fun of someone. So someone who was fonned or fond was fooled, or infatuated (from the Latin fatuus, foolish).
Later fond softened, somewhat, into foolishly affectionate. (“Why so pale and wan, fond lover?”—Sir John Suckling, seventeenth century.)
Now, to be fond of someone is a good thing. And fun is, too, but a wisp of caution hovers—“no more fun and games.” And to fondle is still to fool around.
fool, e.g., Will Somers (or Sommers)
After I gave a speech somewhere outside the South and mentioned some of the glories of Southern humor, someone in the audience asked:
“How much of Southern humor is intentional?”
“More than you realize,” is what I might well have said. But my instinct, perhaps in part Southern, is that to return a fool’s unconscious insult with a conscious one is less telling than to return it in a way that pretends it warrants graciousness. So I said, “Some of it. A good deal of it. But no doubt, not all. To be a good fool you have to know first that you are one.” Something to that effect.
The word fool comes from Latin follem, meaning bellows (surely the f is not arbitrary) or, by extension, windbag or empty-head. In the old days a great household would enjoy the antics of a “harmless lunatic,” as OED puts it, but the best fools were in on the joke. Those jokes have generally not aged very well, as such, even when told by Shakespeare. But here, according to A Nest of Ninnies by Robert Armin (1608), is a bit of jesting from Will Somers (or Sommers), royal fool to Henry VIII. The king needs cheering up. Will comes through:
“Now tell me,” says Will, “if you can, what it is, that being born without life, head, lip or eye, yet doth run roaring through the world till it dies?”
“This is a wonder,” quod the king, “and no question. I know it not.”
“Why,” quod Will, “it is a fart.”
At this the king laughed heartily and was exceeding merry; and bids Will ask any reasonable thing, and he would grant it.
“Thanks, Harry,” says he. “Now … I need nothing, but one day I shall. For every man sees his latter end, but knows not his beginning.” The king understood his meaning, and so pleasantly departed for that season. And Will laid him down amongst the spaniels to sleep.
Will remained royal jester to Henry’s successors well on into the reign of Elizabeth I. It’s a wise fool, I’ll warrant, who’ll call the king Harry and then, for warmth, will sleep with the dogs. Humility, and not just tactical.
See Xit.
form
When you say the word form, slowly and reflectively, don’t you feel your vocal apparatus—bear with me—forming something? Something sort of ovoid? Starting with a breath-of-life lip puff, f-, then making a tour, -or-, of the whole oral chamber (wrapping an orb of void), and then coming back around to the lips, together, satisfied, -m? You don’t get those particular sensations from saying, say, scratch, or gobble, or deflate, do you? I’m just asking. I don’t want to weird you out.
So let’s get scientific, etymological. Where do we get form from? We don’t know, for sure. But form may have been formed from a morphing (more precisely a metathesis, switching of consonant sounds) of the Greek morphe, which means form or shape.
No authority seems to want to entertain, even, the notion that form comes from from. Soundwise, morph is from backward. And John Ayto says frame comes from from, and furthermore that furnish , first , for , fore , foremost , former, and before all come from pr-, the same PIE root (Chambers calls it promo-) from which from sprang forth.
Ayto says former means, etymologically, “more most before.” Chambers makes this clearer: former was formerly the comparative of forme, meaning first, so that at first it meant, in effect, “more first”—but it was “patterned on formest, ‘foremost,’” which came before, and that the residual element of most comes from “the m … , a superlative element as old as Indo-European.”
Weee-oooo.
fox
“The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible,” was Oscar Wilde’s definition of foxhunting. Who says you can’t eat fox? In the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English entry on tasted of, we find: “He said he tasted of everything he ever killed, every varmint, even a buzzard.” I talked to a man once who said he ate bear bacon. You know what the old boy said when asked how crow tasted: “About like owl.” I used to think “You can kill us but you can’t eat us” would be a good slogan for the Florida Marlins baseball team, but I came to find out you can eat marlin.
Fox after a foxhunt is treyf. “You shall not eat any flesh that is torn by beasts,” it says in Exodus 22:31. This in fact was the original meaning—eventually extended to all nonkosher food—of treyf. “The biblical equivalent of ‘roadkill,’” as Michael Wex puts it in Born to Kvetch. But if you’re gentile, or secular, and careful (Oscar Wilde was two out of three), you can eat roadkill.
Foxes may have a gland that causes their meat to become foul, but so do deer and raccoons, you just have to avoid piercing it.
Fox too smart to eat? Foxes are regarded as not just clever but cunning, which suggests uncanny shiftiness. Foxfire is an eery luminescence that emanates from decaying wood, but the fox part may derive from faux. On the other hand the fox in foxglove, the flower, may derive from folk’s.
Too pretty to eat? A deer is pretty, people eat deer.
People eat snails (though my friend Jan Constantine says she never ate another escargot after seeing one “walking down the street” in Pari
s), turtle, snake, armadillo, shark, possum, squirrel. I have eaten all those, and ants and fried worms. Never ate fox, never had the opportunity. Not sure how I would react if I did have it.
Too much like dog? People in many cultures eat dog and other animals that Westerners think of as pets. Every year Peruvians consume an estimated sixty-five million guinea pigs—an animal so entrenched in the culture that one famous painting of the Last Supper in the main cathedral in Cuzco, Peru, shows Christ and the twelve disciples dining on guinea pig. Today guinea pig meat is exported to the United States and Japan.
Foxy wine is musky smelling. Maybe foxes stink. It’s not what they’re known for. And musky isn’t necessarily off-putting. In 1640 an Englishman wrote that “the Foxe Grape … smelleth and tasteth like unto a Foxe.” Sounds bad, but descendants of the fox grape include the Concord grape and the scuppernong, both of which are richly tasty.
Fox’s root may be puk-, bushy haired. Sanskrit for tail was puccha-s, “possibly involving some taboo,” says Chambers. Foxy means sexy. As far back as 1877 it was American slang for amorous.
Maybe just English people don’t eat fox. I’ll bet Chinese people have eaten fox, if there have ever been any foxes in China. In a market in Beijing I saw a man making snake tartare by gradually lowering a whole live snake, tail first, into a meat grinder.
Isaiah Berlin quoted the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin sided with the fox, who stands for pluralism, the notion that there are many different, not necessarily compatible but equally valid ways of living. The hedgehog knows to roll up into a spiny ball, and that’s about it. The fact that both strategies work, at least for the animals in question, is itself a point for pluralism.
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