Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  There are foxes, and foxes. In African-American folktales, Br’er Fox’s elaborate predatory schemes are always outsmarted by the superior, heartier, freedom-loving trickster, Br’er Rabbit. However he strains, Br’er Fox is a conventional thinker. Br’er Rabbit is spontaneous, inspired, and at home in the maze of the briar patch. He always outfoxes the fox.

  In cartoons, it’s Coyote vis-à-vis Roadrunner. In the American Revolution, it was regimented redcoats versus wily, light-traveling, indigenous bluecoats. In Vietnam, it was Agent Orange versus black pajamas.

  And downhill since then.

  It used to be a truism that Americans root for the underdog. Assuming the underdog is no fool. In foxhunting, that would be the fox. If I see a little red free-range canine running for dear life from a pack of baying hounds followed by horsey swells in uniform fancy dress, I am thinking “Go, fox”—not Br’er Fox but, say, the Swamp Fox, Colonel Francis Marion, who outslicked superior British forces in South Carolina with guerrilla tactics and intimate local knowledge of swamps through which to retreat. The world’s superpower, on other people’s territory, can’t very well embody that spirit.

  Might eating fox help? Diligent Googling turns up this recipe, from one Ed in Australia:

  First lock away the dogs, those sensitive creatures. Skin the body (of the fox) and soak the carcase in running water for three days. Gut the beast, clean it and cut into joints. Heat olive oil in a large enamel pan. Brown.

  Fox meat can be bitter and acrid and the secret to overcoming this is to wait for the juices to be released and reabsorbed. Then add some mashed garlic cloves. Add thyme, tarragon and fennel fronds plus salt—my current fave being the eco-sound Murray River Salt.

  When browned add a glug or two of decent full-bodied red wine, tinned tomatoes (this is really a winter recipe), two bay leaves and some home made beef stock.

  Cook in the oven with the lid on at 150C until the flesh melts.

  This recipe also works well with goat and badger. We don’t have badger here, but I plan to give this a go with wombat.

  Tallyho!

  “Until the flesh melts”? Is Ed making a sly allusion to Hamlet’s immortal “O that this too too sullied [or sallied, or solid] flesh would melt”? Or to “the melting pot”? “The Melting Pot” was a 1908 play by Israel Zangwill, an Englishman, who wrote, “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming.” I once interviewed Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwa activist who said of America, “I don’t want it to be a puree. I want it to be a stew,” an amalgam of complementary but identifiable ingredients. That is what the American English language still is, if we appreciate its particulars.

  free speech

  According to The New York Times, a documentary titled Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech includes an interview with the professor Ward Churchill, who lost his faculty position for making an absurdly callous statement about people killed on 9/11. “In a film in which the phrase ‘free speech’ is heard a lot,” reports the Times, “Mr. Churchill gives the best assessment of it: ‘If it comes at a price, it’s not free.’”

  Oh, yeah? Everything that has any impact comes at a price. If speaking freely didn’t cost anything, everybody would do it—I mean, even nonanonymously, even elsewhere than the Web. You know what Mark Twain said: “It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.” There is even a certain justice, and a certain tempering (in the sense of toughening) in the fact that to get away with anything really telling in the way of free speech, even in the United States, you had best be clever.

  frequent

  The adjective, as in “frequent-flier” (poor devil), came first. Odd for it to become (with the stress switching from the first to the second syllable) a verb. You wouldn’t say to someone you have met in a bar or some other place of assembly, “Do you often here?” Some New York newspaper or good-government group might, however, have editorialized as follows:

  Let us be clear: we do not frequent prostitutes ourselves. We do not even seldom them. But we believe that Eliot Spitzer should have been retained as governor even if, for all we care, he had continued to occasional one or two.

  Frisian

  I’m reading a Harvard Magazine article about recent genetic research indicating that the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain displaced not only Roman-Celtic civilization but also, as a result of widespread ravishment, all Roman-Celtic Y chromosomes (except, for some reason, in Wales). And I come upon a remarkable statement.

  According to this article, one of the lands that the Anglo-Saxons embarked from on their way to Britain was “Friesland … and the language spoken there is the closest living relative to English.” Interesting. But here’s the remarkable bit, from Mark Thomas of University College, London: “Listening to a Frisian speak is like listening to somebody speak English with a frog in their mouth.”

  Whoa! I would prefer “with a mouthful of frog,” or some other way of avoiding (ugh) “their mouth,” but here is a more pressing issue: What does English with a mouthful of frog sound like?

  “Hello ribbit I’m Frisian”?

  “Hel-ribbit-lo I’m Fris-ribbit-ian”?

  Or am I on the wrong track here and Frisian sounds like English spoken in such a way as to avoid disturbing, or tasting, a springy green amphibian?

  “H’o I’uh Frih’n”?

  I think we can set aside the possibility that by “frog,” Professor Thomas means “French.” So is he alluding to a figure of speech, so to speak? In London, can a fetching-faced person who speaks with cold-blooded tongue be accused of coming on “with a faceful of bunny and a mouthful of frog”?

  Frogs, in their natural state, are far from frizzly. Yet both WIII and Etymonline.com connect frizz and frizzle to an Old Frisian word, frisle, meaning “curly hair.” OED deems this etymology groundless: “the interpretation of the ethnic name of the Frisians as ‘curly-haired’ being a mere assumption.” OED does give us a nice example of frizz: “Dr. Parr’s wig … swells out into boundless convexity of frizz”—Sydney Smith.

  Chromosomes aside, here are some words that came into English from Frisian, according to Etymonline.com: yet, tusk, hoop, moor, rip, wall, and slobber. That last one might have a frog-in-mouth connection. OED quotes Jonathan Swift:

  But, why would he, unless he slobbered,

  Offend our patriot, great Sir Robert.

  (Some texts make that slobber’t.) Sir Robert Walpole, chief minister of the British state (whose son coined serendipity, see Google-logisms), honored Swift with a dinner and took him aside to talk of Ireland. Swift believed Sir Robert to be no friend of Ireland and told him so. Sir Robert never had Swift over again. In the same poem, “On the Death of Dr. Swift,” Swift quotes a criticism of Swift: “He never thought an honour done him / Because a duke was proud to own him.” Swift, he went on to say of himself, “Would rather slip aside and chuse / To talk with wits in dirty shoes.” Good for Swift.

  What were we talking about? Oh:

  frog

  An excellent word, up to a point. The fro- evokes propulsive force, but that hard –g ending leaves the frog gathered up unto itself—not so much “solid as a gob of mud,” as in Mark Twain’s description of the famous Calaveras County frog’s postlanding posture, but rather all prepared to spring and yet unsprung. The Old English frogga was better: it let the frog go on and jump.

  As John Ayto puts it, frogga “probably started life as a playful alternative to the more serious frosc or forsc.” Playful, shmayful—if we can’t have -ga, we need, for sufficiently serious purposes of representation, that g, at least. German never put it in and is stuck now with Frosch. Spanish and Italian for frog, rana, is even worse. The French isn’t bad, grenouille—it captures the leap, but maybe the suggestion of wheee (or ouiiii) in there is a bit much. Something to be said, hopwise, for the Indo
nesian, katak, which however is too brittle. Slovenian Zaba, Lithuanian varle, and even Hungarian béka leave me cold.

  Did you know there was such a word as froghood? Not that there’s any reason there shouldn’t be. OED quotes Christopher Smart, 1770: “Too hard for any frog’s digestion, / To have his froghood call’d in question.” It’s from a fable mocking duelists—a mouse calls a frog a coward. They go at each other with swords. And a vulture,

  Quick to decide this point of honour,

  And, lawyer like, to make an end on’t,

  Devour’d both plaintiff and defendant.

  Not the earliest lawyer joke.

  fudge

  Origin obscure, but the sound is rich. OED’s first citation is from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766): “The very impolite behaviour of Mr. Burchell, who … at the conclusion of every sentence would cry out Fudge!”

  This usage, OED goes on, “seems from the context merely to represent an inarticulate expression of indignant disgust.”

  What’s “inarticulate” about it?

  full disclosure

  I kept seeing in newspaper and magazine articles—in which the writer felt obliged to divulge any possible sources of personal bias—sudden parenthetical confessions like “McQuorquedale’s exquisite tact (full disclosure: her mother and mine share a nutritionist whose daughter and mine are in a playgroup … ).”

  So I wrote the following, which appeared in The New Yorker as “The Media Beat Goes On”:

  As if “occupation, diarist” weren’t cushy enough for tax purposes (theoretically you can write off everything)—and as if he had not already made an absolute enlighten-mint from his blockbuster hey-why-not-a-spiritual-memoir Shoulda Woulda Buddha—the hydratalkingheaded Kirbo Flange … who not so many years ago was regularly captivating some .5 percent of the adult Saturday-morning crowd with his mock-ironic (I guess) interactive audio art-talk series, Like Watching a Kandinsky Dry … now proposes to take his on-line journals public.

  Let’s face it, our old friend Flange (full discolosure: Before surviving—by the skin of his botched-bleach-job teeth—the “Content Blab” fiasco, before belatedly bagging the whole concept of telemarketainment, before embarking on his short-lived cable show Behind the Insights, which every week spotlighted a different pundit’s assistant … on which I was to be showcased the week Hofstra-StrideRite pulled the plug, I being in those days a dewy-eyed layer of pipe for the Zeitmeister, oh yes, Warren DeCoverley With the Views … and long before anyone knew him as pay-per-view’s Indecent Docent, Flange and my third ex-stepfather’s sometime goodgal Fortuna Ruh … who may be recalled, through gauze, as Simplicity on Simplicity Herself, from which desultory natter-com I was once literally bumped by a literal dog-and-pony act, the pony, Toby, having made a name for himself on the Barnyard Channel, and there I am trying to establish myself as Mr. Mitch the Multimedia Maven when I am literally bumped out of the frame by this foreshortened horse, with a tiny vicious dog on its back, and the crew all guffawing because I wasn’t union then and I suppose the pony was, people don’t know what it was like on some of those bandwidths in those days … anyhoo, that dynamic duo co-scripted an odd sort of ink-sniffing old-media column in Shafts, a semimonthly, marginally postcoherent schlub-pub in large part underwritten by the As If Foundation, whose director, Simon Cork, was subsequently “deposed,” as conspiracy buffs would have it, “in a palace [some palace] coup” which I—so I am told to my secret amusement—am widely suspected of having been a party to … this when yours truly was a downy-cheeked, very unpaid As If intern relegated to logging drafts of workshopped poop sheets, mind you … but even had I plausibly been involved—which is ludicrous on the face of it to anyone who has felt the chill of my absolute indifference toward persons who occupy what they themselves may consider to be positions of, how you say, clout—my views can hardly be regarded as compromised by any however-juicy rumors of my involvement given the fact that Alysse Letts, the Corkster’s shall-we-say squeeze emeritus … whose own vaunted scruples did not prevent her, in one of her patented clit-lit-crit snits over Cork’s supposed disrespect for Modern Bride Studies, from erasing his entire collection of bootleg Deborah Norville blooper tapes … is after all the very person who, in her self-appointed capacity as the picture-your-ad-here conscience of the World Wide Web, and in the festering heat of her increasingly exaggerated recollection of a certain “incident” … let’s just leave it that quite late one evening in my more flaneurial days I inflicted upon her frequent screening companion Mr. Hervé God-Forbid-Anybody-Should-Pronounce-It-Harvey DeLaBarbara what I have been advised by counsel to stipulate as “perceived physical discomfort” by dint of a simple whap on the upper arm that any halfway robust schoolchild would scarcely have registered let alone greeted with soap-operatic DeLaBarbarian howls of transparent anguish and much sloshing of Cosmopolitans and, I seem to recall, vintage back-issues of Cosmopolitan, which he was wont to carry around with him from boîte to boîte for reasons best kept to himself and a few faux-bosomy hangers-on of otherwise indeterminate nature … yes, she has taken it heavy-handedly upon her curiously assymetrical shoulders to pillory my offhand contribution to the Zeitmeister Festschrift e-conference as both “cankered” and “soft,” although I might mention I have never been physically intimate with Ms. Letts ((not)) or any member of her rather glaringly permeable circle … which if I had been—under the transient sway of God can only imagine what sort of cheap subveterinary stimulants—and immediately and vocally regretted it, might not only explain my disinclination to bob and weave to the tune of her gala-hopping air kisses—she who is forever unpacking one’s gender with the use of her cunning little satirical hand puppet Tex Tosterone, oh I’m so unmasked—but also just might account for the lady’s need-driven characterization of my well-advised reserve toward her person as some sort of inverse acknowledgment of her being in a position to impact upon my critical reputation, when, sorry, Homey don’t play that, as everyone who has really known me since I was knee-high to, I don’t know, something very small with knees, must realize … especially in light of my recent demonstrable determination to hold to an unbending standard the increasingly reedy pronunciamentos of that watcher of watchdogs, my old mentor manqué, the aforementioned Zeitmeister, Swami-meme, who himself to his credit has always tended—with, as he would and indeed frequently does put it, “due reservations”—to acknowledge my own views with as much enthusiasm as anyone can expect the never-less-than-thoughtful, never-more-than-that-either masscommeister to muster these days in light of his actual age, his regime of questionably prescribed medications, his letter-from-Dad compositional style, and his tenuous pension-track niche in the dank, miasmal duodenum of the YahooSmithBarney media mini-Leviathan—itself a virtually owned subsidiary, not so incidentally, of Marco’s Macrosystem Group, whose flagship yogurt-chain giveaway organ listed my Tuesday evening one-man pick’n’pan-slam in its “Hap’nin’” section for twelve straight weeks, even after the show folded in large part owing to the perpetually overstretched Marco’s evident inability to correct one crucial typo without making several others … and yet it was Marco, ham-fisted typeface comic though he may be, who perhaps said it best—if only he knew!—late one Sunday-closing predawn when I logged on to vent and surf for context: “Ve are too soon oldt undt too late schmardt”) has lost his edge.

  That exercise seems to have purged me of motivation to write a certain sort of thing.

  fuss

  Perhaps, says John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “simply onomatopoeic, imitating the sound of someone puffing and blowing and making a fuss.”

  OED: perhaps “echoic of the sound of something sputtering or bubbling, or expressive of the action of ‘puffing and blowing.’”

  Etymonline.com: “perhaps an alteration of force, or imitative of bubbling or sputtering sounds, or from Dan. fjas ‘foolery, nonsense.’”

  We’re talking sonicky. But people who are particular about how words are used
are often dismissed as fussy. As in (OED), “habitually busy about trifles.” Hey, sometimes it takes fussiness in that sense to cleanup, tighten up, a mess of wordage, to render it relatively see-through and slick as a whistle.

  OED quotes Leslie Stephen: “The butterfly … is much too fussy an insect to enjoy himself properly.” That’s very British, isn’t it, “enjoy himself properly.”

  See Dionysian, Apollonian, blended, briefly.

  future, the, caught for the moment

  David Carr, in The New York Times, on the introduction of the iPad: “‘Isn’t this awesome?’ Mr. Jobs says. It is, but everything looks good on stage. Nothing ages faster than the future when you get it in your hands.”

  fuzz

  OED: perhaps “imitative of the action of blowing away light particles.” No one knows how, or whether, that sense is connected to the slang word for police (which goes back, in print, to 1929) , but if fuss may be an alteration of force, why not fuzz? It’s usually “the fuzz,” as in “the (police) force.”

  g · G · g

  Etymologically, G-string, a narrow nethergarment, leaves more than you might think to the imagination. We do know that the term goes back farther than the striptease, for “the strip and tease” has not shown up in print before 1930, and a writer referred to the string holding up an American Indian breechcloth as a gee-string in 1878. In 1885, gee-string was used for the string and cloth together, and in 1891 we read “Some of the boys wore only ‘G-strings’ (as, for some reason, the breech-clout is commonly called on the prairie).” The first recorded reference to a stripper’s last vestige of modesty is John Dos Passos’s gee-string in 1936. G-string took over after that.