Fifty Shades of Black
Page 13
That’s how we picked up algebra (Arabic), skeleton (Greek), grotesque (Italian), mosquito (Spanish), keelhaul (Dutch), pyjamas (Urdu), zombie (West African), ski (Norwegian), blitzkrieg (German) and potlatch (Nuu-chah-nulth)—just to name a handful.
But we don’t just steal words, we invent new ones all the time. Some words that gained official status in the Oxford English Dictionary recently include: wonky, WiFi, looky-loo and low-rent. Some words the OED honchos tossed over the side to make room for the newcomers: abstergent (cleansing), caducity (perishableness) and griseous (streaked with grey).
I won’t miss those words (mainly because I never knew they existed) but the authorities also deep-sixed a number of worthies that I think still have plenty of tread on their tires. What’s wrong with “embrangle” (to confuse or entangle)? Why are we ditching a splendid word like “niddering” (cowardly)? And isn’t “fubsy” (short and stout, squat) just too good to kill? A malison (curse) upon the heads of the butchers who excised these words from our lexicon. And yes, “malison” is also on the chopping block.
Speaking of chopping block, the British Sociological Association, an umbrella group for many professors, lecturers, researchers and other sundry British academics, has announced that its members will henceforth be enjoined from using the term “Old Masters” when referring to, er, Old Masters. Why? Too sexist, old chap. What about all those Old Mistresses, eh wot? The BSA (ironic abbreviation, that) is also banning the “racist” words “immigrant,” “developing nations” and—I’m not pulling your leg—“black.”
I guess name-wise, the BSA has left me SOL.
Not to worry. I consider the English tongue to be—at the risk of being slammed for sexism—a feisty old broad who’s outmanoeuvred tougher foes than the British Sociological Association.
She has to be tough—look at the idiots who abuse her. From monosyllabic teenagers who can’t string a thought sequence together without slapping on bandages and twist ties like “awesome” and, well, “like” . . .
“So she wuz like, ‘You know that dude? Awesome!’ An’ I wuz, like, ‘Whatever.’”
. . . to Bureaucratese. How would a civil servant suggest that someone might be lying? Here’s how Sir Humphrey Appleby did it in Yes, Minister:
“Sometimes one is forced to consider the possibility that affairs are being conducted in a manner which, all things being considered and making all possible allowances is, not to put too fine a point on it, perhaps not entirely straightforward.”
Words, all words. “Words are like loaded pistols,” according to Jean-Paul Sartre. Rudyard Kipling called them “the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
More than eight centuries ago a Zen master named Dai-O Kokushi explained words in a koan:
Wishing to entice the blind,
The Buddha playfully let words escape from his golden mouth;
Heaven and earth are filled, ever since, with entangling briars.
Or, as George Carlin put it: “I don’t have to tell you it goes without saying there are some things better left unsaid. I think that speaks for itself. The less said about it the better.”
Name That Town
When it came to slapping names on chunks of this country our forefathers (and mothers) were a relatively adventurous lot. They tapped royalty (Victoria, Regina, Alberta), explorers (Vancouver, Hudson), local topography (Montreal, after Mount Royal), forgettable politicians (Kitchener, Hamilton) and saints (Sault Ste. Marie, St. Catharines, St. John and just in case we missed the point, St. John’s).
Occasionally they aped their betters (London, Warsaw, Paris, Berlin—all in Ontario); other times they realized they couldn’t improve on the originals and simply stole the First Nations names already in place: Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto, Mississauga.
Eclectic and wide-ranging—not a dull or boring name in the lot.
Not like, well, Dull and Boring. You’ll find the former in Scotland and the latter in Oregon. Dull (population eighty-four) is a tiny village in Perthshire; Boring is a not-so-tiny burg of ten thousand or so Oregonians located about twenty miles south of Portland.
Ironic when you think about it. We Canadians are the ones with the rep for being dull and boring, but you wouldn’t know it by the names of our towns and cities. As a matter of fact, a visitor might get the impression Canucks are downright colourful—and unabashedly randy.
From the Far North (Steambath Lake, Yukon; Hump Island, NWT) to the Deep South (Middlesex, Ontario), Canada has a steamy sheet of place names that would make Madonna blush.
British Columbia has a Sin Lake, Moan Creek, Shag Rock and Peekaboo Falls. Alberta can claim Sexsmith and Spanking Lake. Saskatchewan? Well, there’s Lust Lake and Climax, for starters. Manitoba gives us Love Lake, Cuddle Bay and Strip Rapids.
In Ontario there’s Flesherton, Bottomlands and Peeler Lake.
And Quebec? Quelle surprise. La Belle Province teems with suggestive nomenclature—Lac Brassière, Lac de la Caresse, Lac Eros and even Lac Latex.
Plus—gasp!—the Gaspé Peninsula.
The Maritimes won’t be left behind in the erotic topography department—not while there’s a Kissing Brook or a Lover’s Cove to be found on your GPS.
And then there’s Newfoundland. Even if the entire upper two-thirds of the North American continent was as dull and boring as, well, Dull and Boring, we’d still have Canada’s youngest province whistling and twirling its moustache, winking like the porch light on Hugh Hefner’s pad.
Look at the names in that province! Never mind the obvious Dildo and Come By Chance—how about Bare Bum Pond? Naked Man? Leading Tickles? And my favourite: Pinch Gut Tickle.
I’m not sure if that’s an S&M option or an illegal wrestling hold but it sounds way more intriguing than Lloydminster or Sydney.
Naming geographical entities is a tricky business; you want to be careful who gets the honour to take it on. There’s a city named Å in Sweden and a bay named Y in the Zuider Zee. France has an island named If, a river named As and a lake named Oo.
On the other hand, there is a town in Wales that goes by the name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
Some people think we’d avoid confusion and misunderstanding if citizens got to vote on the names of towns, rivers, public buildings, etc.
Don’t bet on it.
Recently, a Slovakian government opened online voting to name a bridge over the Morava River. Seventy-five percent of the populace came up with the same choice.
And that’s why the new span over the Morava River will be known to posterity as Chuck Norris Bridge.
Errors and That Typo Thing
I was a good typist; at my high school typing was regarded as a secondary female sex characteristic, like breasts.
—Margaret Atwood
I’m not surprised that Margaret Atwood was a good typist. She’s great at everything she does. Me? I’m a lousy typist (my breasts are no hell either) but I don’t fret about it because when it comes to typing, Fate has given all of us, ept and otherwise, a great levelling device.
The typo.
Anybody, saint or sinner, genius or journeyman, can make a typographical error. It’s simply a mistake made in the typing of a document or other printed material. Now, thanks to that infernal computer Nazi called spell-check, typos are even easier to make.
Yew sea wad eye mien, daunt ewe?
Typos are usually meaningless but occasionally hilarious. Not long ago the Toronto Sun ran a short item apologizing for an error. “Incorrect information appeared in a column,” the piece began. Unfortunately it ran under a boldface headline that read “CORRERCTION.”
A college catalogue description for a course in Shakespeare: “Intensive analysis of Hamlet, Macbeth and Anatomy and Cleopatra.”
A luncheon menu: “Today’s special: Dreaded Veal Cutlet.”
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And the New York Post is a two-time loser. On Monday it ran a story that said: “Sergeant Alfred Blaine is a twenty-year defective on the New York police force.”
The next day it ran a correction: “Sergeant Alfred Blaine is a twenty-year detective on the New York Police Farce.”
My favourite typo occurred nearly 150 years ago. It was made by a German chemist studying the iron content of vegetables. In transcribing data from his notebook, the chemist ascribed thirty-five milligrams of iron to each one hundred gram serving of spinach.
Big mistake. He should have put a decimal point between the three and the five, i.e., 3.5 milligrams per one hundred grams.
It was only a dot—the smallest typographical mark you can make—but it transformed a so-so green into a miracle muscle-builder and eventually gave us Popeye the Sailor Man:
I’m strong to the finish
’Cuz I eats me spinach
I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.
The popularity of the Popeye comic strip increased American consumption of spinach by over 30 percent.
So. If we had Truth in Advertising?
Me muskels is hard
’Cuz I eats me chard.
Nah. Just doesn’t sing.
The Not-So-Grand Ole Opry
I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, “denigrate” means “put down.”
—Bob Newhart
I’m not quite as dismissive as Mr. Newhart is on the subject of country music. I have more of a love-loathe relationship with the genre. I love the simple honesty of a Hank Williams père tune, the stately grace of a Carter Family ballad and the intricacies of anything finger-picked by Doc Watson. I loathe the hokey, flag-waving, rhinestone cowboy maudlin crap into which so much country music has descended of late.
Maybe it’s the artists. Perhaps it’s the audiences. What has seventy-two legs and twenty-three teeth?
The front row of a Willie Nelson concert.
It’s easy to make fun of country music because so much of it is excruciatingly bad but that doesn’t mean it can’t be taken seriously. Recently, a scientific paper appeared in the pages of the Review of General Psychology, the very title of which must have tweaked a few scholarly eyebrows. The paper was called “Cheatin’ Hearts and Loaded Guns.” It wasn’t a smackdown of country music; it was a sober investigation of what those hurtin’ songs really mean. According to Robert Kurzban, the paper’s author, “Country music feeds our desire to learn about things that carry high fitness consequences in the world.”
That’s convoluted psychobabble that really means country songs are morality tales. They tell the listener what happens when you go off the straight and narrow. All those mournful yodellings about trucks and gals and bars and jails aren’t really about trucks and gals and bars and jails, they’re actually musical instruction booklets full of advice about human survival and sexual reproduction.
Sexual reproduction? You bet.
How about Loretta Lynn’s “Don’t Come Home a-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)”?
Survival? I give you “I Been Roped and Throwed by Jesus in the Holy Ghost Corral.” Not to mention “Drop Kick Me Jesus, through the Goalposts of Life.”
On a more secular plane, country songs address the eternal verities like Heartbreak: “I Got Tears in My Ears from Lying on My Bed Crying on My Pillow over You.”
Or the even more magnificent Garth Brooks lyric from a ditty called “Papa Loved Mama”: “Papa loved mama, mama loved men; mama’s in the graveyard, papa’s in the pen.”
Alcohol looms large in country music. Witness the songs “80 Proof Bottle of Tear Stopper” and also “I Want a Beer Cold as My Ex-Wife’s Heart.”
Failed relationships are prominent too, as in George Strait’s “All My Exes Live in Texas.”
Occasionally a country song comes along that manages to turn a double play. Here’s one that addresses gambling and heartbreak: “I Gave My Heart a Diamond and She Clubbed Me with a Spade.”
Personally, I prefer the simpler titles such as “Bubba Shot the Jukebox” and also “Velcro Arms, Teflon Heart”—but I’ve always been an incurable romantic.
It’s a macho world, is country music, but some of its biggest stars are women and female sensibilities are beginning to make inroads. A singer by the name of Miranda Lambert croons a vengeful little ballad that includes these lines: “Slapped my face and he shook me like a rag doll. Don’t that sound like a real man? I’m gonna show him what a little girl’s made of. Gunpowder and lead.”
A little too John Wayne–ish for me. I prefer the caustic wit of Deana Carter’s song “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”
Professor Kurzban, the man behind the paper “Cheatin’ Hearts and Loaded Guns,” insists country music survives because it “satisfies an informational need.” Well, maybe—but it’s funnybone fodder too. Hard to improve on a title like “Walk Out Backwards So I’ll Think You’re Walking In.”
Cole Porter, eat your heart out.
You know what happens if you play a country music song backwards, don’t you? Your girlfriend returns, your pickup is un-repossessed, your hangover disappears, your dog comes back to life and you get a pardon from the warden.
Shoo Fly, Don’t Bother Me
I am walking in the woods with my dogs. I am peaceful. Centred. At one with the Great Green Goddess. I spy another couple walking down the path. I know them slightly and we pause to chat.
But something is amiss. We palaver amiably enough but they seem ill at ease, unwilling to meet my gaze. They look to the heavens; they study their shoelaces. They crane to the east and they peer to the west. They will not look me in the eye.
After several awkward moments we part company and I am left with my dogs to wonder—a forgotten slight? Something I wrote perhaps? A few hundred yards down the trail my hand brushes across my thighs and I solve the mystery.
Oh crap. My fly’s open again.
I don’t know if it’s a harbinger of impending geezerdom or mere wishful thinking, but I find my fly seems to be at half-mast more often of late. Odd, when you consider that “doing up your fly” is something all lads are supposed to master before they get out of knee pants. Doubly odd, when you consider that a gaping fly is a no-win condition. Mortification all around.
Geoffrey Chaucer and his Middle Ages pals didn’t have to worry about accidental breaches in their breeches. They wore codpieces—a kind of sliding manhole cover (think of it as a man bra but with only one cup).
Codpieces were functional but less than subtle, fashion-wise. Along about 1700, tailors came up with what they called a “fall front”—a flap of fabric that functioned something like the breechclout that North American Indians had figured our centuries before.
When you think about it mankind has never had a rock-solid solution for the codpiece/fall front/button/zip fly problem. What complicates the conundrum is that men are lazy slobs. We want to get ’er done with a minimum of interruption and inconvenience. Women don’t have a fly problem because they sit down and do the job properly.
And obviously, women don’t have an open fly problem either. If they did, they would doubtless have come up with a diplomatic, non-humiliating way to say, “Hey, buddy . . . your fly is open.”
Not that there haven’t been some splendid attempts. General euphemisms for informing someone that their clothing is in need of adjustment abound. I’m rather fond of “Paging Mr. Johnson . . . Paging Mr. Johnson . . .” I’m also intrigued with the idea of putting on a big black studly voice and rumbling, “I’m talkin’ Shaft—can you dig it?”
“Security breach at Los Pantalones” isn’t half-bad, nor is “Our next guest is someone who needs no introduction . . .” But personally, I prefer the individual touch—warnings custom-crafted for the poor schlub with the open portal probl
em.
For a dishevelled computer nerd: “Excuse me, but you have Windows on your laptop.”
For vegetarians: “Don’t look now but the cucumber has left the salad.”
For rock fans: “Attention, attention . . . Elvis Junior has left the building.”
For nautical types: “Now hear this: Sailor Ned’s trying to take a little shore leave.”
For airline passengers with a fly problem: “Time to bring your tray table to the upright and locked position, sir.”
For lovers of classical literature: “Quasimodo needs to go back in the tower and tend to his bells.”
What’s also missing is a suitable retort to the news that your fly is open. Usually it’s a mumbled “Oh, geez, thanks eh?”
Pretty lame.
Winston Churchill knew how to handle such a situation. Using the facilities in the House of Commons one day during his final years in office, Winston turned from the urinal to the washstand, only to be confronted by a fellow MP who fluttered about trying to tell him the bad news as delicately as possible.
“Ah, Sir Winston, you should know . . . ah, that is to say, er. You . . . um . . . oh dear. It seems your flies are open.”
“What of it?” growled the ninety-year-old Churchill. “Dead birds don’t fall out of nests.”
Best Job in the World
I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life, but I still remember my first one with great fondness. I started out as a newspaper editor.
The Editor’s Chair is not usually offered to a greenhorn kid with no relevant experience but this was different—I owned the newspaper. I was also the Publisher, Advertising Manager and (lone) Feature Reporter.
I’m fairly certain the editorial departments of The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star didn’t lose a lot of sleep over the launching of my periodical. It only lasted for a single edition, peaking at a circulation of one. It consisted of one front page that featured a news flash hand-printed on kraft paper and accompanied by a (very bad) drawing of something with feathers. The headline: UNUSUAL BIRD SPOTTED ON MR. RUTHERFORD’S LAWN.