Cardinal Men and Scarlet Women: A Colorful Etymology of Words That Discriminate

Cardinal Men and Scarlet Women A Colorful Etymology of Words That Discriminate Cardinal Men and Scarlet Women A Color...

Author: Jan Keessen

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Cardinal Men and Scarlet Women A Colorful Etymology of Words That Discriminate

Cardinal Men and Scarlet Women A Colorful Etymology of Words That Discriminate

By

Jan Keessen Illustrations by

Bill Hannan

Marquette University Press Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-3141 All rights reserved. www.marquette.edu/mupress/

founded 1916

©2009 (Text)Jan Keessen ©2009 (Illustrations)Bill Hannan Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keessen, Jan, 1943Cardinal men and scarlet women : a colorful etymology of words that discriminate / by Jan Keessen ; illustrations by Bill Hannan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-87462-022-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-87462-022-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English language—Terms and phrases. 2. Discrimination—United States-Terminology. 3. English language—Etymology. I. Hannan, Bill, 1938- II. Title. PE1689.K44 2009 422‚—dc22 2009032274

Cover art by bill hannan Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

contents Acknowledgements.............................................................................. 9 Introduction.......................................................................................11 Chapter One: Blame the Bastard, But Beware!.............................15 1. Blame the Bastard, But Beware!...................................................16 2. Villains or Victims?.......................................................................17 3. Living in the Promised Land with Those Unholy Philistines..19 4. The Mystery of a Brothel: Can Something Profitable Be WorthÂ�less?...................................21 5. Right-Handed Majority and Left-Handed Rights....................22 6. No Colored Allowed.....................................................................23 7. Blameworthy Words.....................................................................25 8. Bushman and Bushmeat: Human or Animal?...........................27 9. Black as Sin or White Lies?..........................................................29 Chapter Two: Cardinal Men and Scarlet Women........................31 1. Cardinal Men and Scarlet Women .............................................32 2. Lady and Lord: Well-Bred or Half-Baked?................................34 3. Good and Bad Genders: Laudable Wizards and Loathsome Witches...............................36 4. A Man of Easy Virtue?..................................................................38 5. Extra Virgin?..................................................................................39 6. Swearing by Your Sacred “Little Witnesses”...............................40 7. Shrewish Women and Shrewd Men...........................................41 8. Poetic Justice in Ducking Stools..................................................43 9. Pandora’s Jarring Curiosity...........................................................45 10. Female Chauvinist Pigs or Uncle Toms?..................................46 11. Separating the Werewolves from the Wives.............................48 12. Liberating the Animal.................................................................49 13. The Call of the Wild and the Coward’s Way Out...................50

6 cardinal men and scarlet women

Chapter Three: The Lock and Load Jesus.....................................53 1. Raised in a Christian Home.........................................................56 2. Onward, Christian Soldiers..........................................................57 3. Crusaders at Cross Paths..............................................................59 4. Yellow-Ribboned Puritans............................................................61 5. Taking Comfort in God’s Providence..........................................63 6. Ben Franklin’s Barbary Pirates.....................................................64 7. Cannibals, Pagans, and Christian Kindness...............................66 8. The Golden Rule...........................................................................68 9. Patriots Sell....................................................................................69 10. The American Frontier and the New Garden of Eden...........71 11. Oh, Say, Can You See?................................................................73 12. Are Eagles Democratic?..............................................................75 13. Bikini’s Bombshell.......................................................................75 14. How Entertaining Is a Blockbuster?.........................................77 15. Amnesty: Living with the Memory of Unforgivable Crimes......................78 Chapter Four: Fairy Tales and Family Values...............................81 1. Fairy Tales and Family Values......................................................82 2. Cinderella’s Erotic Feet..................................................................84 3. A Peculiar Institution....................................................................85 4. Indecent Exposure.........................................................................87 Chapter Five: Vamps, Bunny Boilers, & Amazon Women Warriors..........................................................................................89 1. Bon Appetite à la Dracula.............................................................89 2. Amazon Women Warriors...........................................................91 3. Bunny-Boilers: Newest Members of the Club...........................93 4. Salty Figureheads...........................................................................94 5. Hello Girls Brought Temptation over the Telephone................96 6. Are There Really Any Happy Hookers?.....................................97 Chapter Six: Wolf Whistles..........................................................101 1. “Woof!”..........................................................................................102 2. Bedding and Baiting Bears..........................................................104 3. Where the Buck Stops................................................................106 4. Heel!..............................................................................................107 5. Dead Cat Jokes.............................................................................108

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6. Whipping up Horse Metaphors................................................109 7. Home, Home on the Range........................................................111 8. Snowball, the Killer Goat...........................................................113 9. The Raven’s Ravaged Reputation...............................................114 10. Cormorant: A Greedy Rapacious Fisherman.........................116 11. Behaving Like a Cuckoo...........................................................118 12. Turkey’s Fowl Reputation.........................................................119 13. Swan Song: Libretto of a Dying Poet.....................................120 14. The Clash of Cricket Gladiators..............................................122 Chapter Seven: Maroon, the Other Color: In the Race of Caste and Class.......................................................................................125 1. Maroon, the Other Color...........................................................126 2. Slaves and Orphans Forced to Pledge Allegiance....................128 3. Gilding the Lily: The Artwork of Foot Bound Women..........130 4. The Rise and Fall of Oriental.....................................................132 5. Yellow Peril and Jaundiced Journalism......................................133 6. Racism in a Nutshell...................................................................135 7. Barbaric Virtue . ..........................................................................136 8. Being Impressed . ........................................................................138 9. Indentured Servants Take a Bite................................................140 10. Pirates: Democrats or Mercenaries?........................................141 11. The Brotherhood of Yarn Spinning.........................................144 12. Keep on Trucking......................................................................146 Chapter Eight: From Hags to Bitches..........................................149 1. From Hags to Bitches..................................................................150 2. Jerking Around Creeps, Cretins, and Fellow Christians.........152 3. Why Do We Think the Silly Are Ridiculous?..........................153 4. Highbrows and Their Shining Intelligence...............................154 5. The Cruelty of Being Put Down................................................156 6. Unspeakably Retarded, Handicapped, and Disabled..............157 Chapter Nine: A Womb with a View...........................................161 1. A Womb with a View..................................................................163 2. Gut Feelings.................................................................................164 3. Wet Humor..................................................................................165 4. The Black Plague and Its Libelous Attack................................165 5. Nightmare: Waking Up Simon Legree ....................................167


6. Measles, Mumps and the Leper Con.........................................168 7. The Excruciating History of Dentistry.....................................170 Chapter Ten: Remember, Professors Are the Ones Nobody Wanted to Dance With...............................................................173 1. Remember, Professors Are the Ones Nobody Wanted to Dance With...............................................................................................174 2. Liberal Arts Limited....................................................................175 3. Diversity: A Sinful Fall in the Language ..................................176 4. When the Zulus Have a Tolstoy, We’ll Read Him..................178 5. Loose Canons...............................................................................179 6. Story-Telling: A Collection of Flowers.....................................181 7. Blue Stocking Blues.....................................................................182 8. Adultery’s Consenting Nature....................................................184 9. Pornography and Freedom of Choice.......................................185 10. Deliver Us from Evil..................................................................187 Bibliography.....................................................................................189 Index..................................................................................................195

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Acknowledgments

wo visionaries with mischievous imaginations encouraged me to write word histories: Don Wooten and Roald Tweet, the one a Shakespearian senator, the other a colorful Professor of English and folklorist of river towns. Both are familiar voices on WVIK, 90.3 FM, Augustana’s arm of National Public Radio. On the air Lowell Dorman helped to keep me from being unduly provocative. Dave Garner made sure I kept the rhythm right and pronounced the words correctly. Ann Boaden worked hard to edit this book and make it better than it might have been. Tom Banks has been unfailing in his help with Greek and Latin. At the University of Chicago Gwin Kolb and helped significantly with suggestions for what words to use and James E. Miller helped with his own scholarly encouragement. At Holden Village, in the Washington Cascades, Kathy Calder offered important advice and Maryann Lund read the final manuscript with an eye for keeping both grammar and the personality of the book alive. Colleagues at Augustana have been generous with their time: Emil Kramer, Rachael Magdalene, Marcia Smith, Mary Jane Letendre, Shawn Beattie, Chris Tracy, and Beth Whitty. Joy Thompson collected and kept whatever was published. Margaret Skinner helped to put rhythm in the right places, and Susan Searles kept playfulness at work in a life of serious scholarship. Along with them there are other good friends who have said the right words at the right times: Jan Brummel, Gail Blom, Faye Clowe, Meg Gillette, Carla Tracy, Deb Van Speybroeck, Deb Willaredt, and Rebecca Wee. I’m grateful to the dean and president of Augustana College, Jeff Abernathy and Steve Bahls, who awarded me a generous grant to finish the book, and to the Augustana Faculty Research Committee for their support. I’m also grateful for two grants I received from the National Endowment for the Humanities which helped to advance research for this book. Regarding one of those studies, I would especially like to thank Donald Worster for his tolerance of my romance with the West and his scholarship that governed it. I’d also like to thank Andrew Tallon of Marquette University Press for his insight and vision in making this book publishable and Bill Hannan whose illustrations make us grin and think.


Finally I’d like to thank the librarians at Augustana College for their timely and innovative support. With Carla Tracy as director, our library functions as the campus living room where the librarians welcome scholars who are facing deadlines. They know how to teach us to relax and enjoy our studies, and they continue to keep us confident in our research thanks to their hard work, their sense of adventure, and the excellent resources they provide. Easily as important is their deep-seated absolutely luxurious sense of collegiality and kindness. This book is dedicated to them.

Augustana College Library Staff: Christine Aden, Sally Cobert, Anne Earel, Brent Etzel, Connie Ghinazzi, Rita Griffin, Jenny Hanson-Peterson, Sherrie Herbst, Donna Hill, Ruth Ann Hyser, Kathy Jackson, Sharon Harenke-Stoltz, Greg MacAyeal, Loretta McKamey, Amanda Makula, Leslie Meier, Jonathan Miller, Marian Miller, Jamie Nelson, Margi Rogal, Vicky Ruklic, Mary Tatro, Carla Tracy, David Weaver, Sue Williams O’Dell

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Introduction

ords tell stories, but there are also stories in the words, stories that can tell us quite a bit about the prejudices we’ve invested in over the centuries. Although we need mean words to describe mean people, most of us would hesitate to hurt someone unintentionally. But we can. In fact, all of us do. And yet, I’m not trying to argue with critics who can’t see the sense in changing manhole to personhole or why stupid should be corrected to counterintuitive. Rather, what I am arguing is 1) Etymology tells us a lot about the prejudices we’ve kept alive in our vocabulary, and 2) if we know more about the histories that color the words we use, we’ll be better informed about how prejudice develops and what establishes it. 3) Knowing that, we’ll be better able to choose what, really, we want to say. What words? As the title suggests, words such as cardinal and scarlet can describe the same color but they take on markedly different meanings when we use them to consider the worth of a cardinal man or a scarlet woman. The etymologies of cardinal and scarlet will tell us how those notions developed. Now it’s true there is nothing really prejudicial in using the word cardinal to refer to one of the men who constitutes the pope’s council, although some of us might wonder why women can’t be cardinals too. But the comparison does seem to conjure significantly more prejudice when we consider that a cardinal man is revered as righteous while


a scarlet woman is reviled as wicked, particularly in terms of her sexual activity—which would seem to require a partner who’s usually male. Even so, you never hear of a “scarlet man.” In a similar way, by contrasting other pairs of words, we’ll see how they too invite discriminatory connotations in terms of what we value: Christian and pagan, crusade and jihad, highbrow and lowbrow, wizard and witch, right and left, white and black. If the contrasting of word pairs invites certain prejudices, so does the mixing of words that can be emotionally laden with moral judgments, words such as patriotism, war, and religion. In the recent past we crusaded against the evil empire and our yellow ribbons declared, righteously and belligerently, “God Bless America.” A similar set of prejudices arises when we mix marriage and family values, familiar terms that are inevitably coupled with what’s moral and traditional. And yet, historically, marriage has always been a “peculiar” institution, peculiar having to do with property rights. Other prejudices emerge in the language when we transfer meanings metaphorically. We might say in acceptable conversation, “As a golfer, he’s a real gimp,” although we don’t necessarily mean that he has difficulty in walking. We fancy ourselves to be sensitive to the handicapped but our common vocabulary still mocks with impunity the jerks, cripples, spastics, and retards. In a similar way we claim to love animals but we dislike anyone who’s a real dog, who’s catty or horsy. Birds don’t fare much better—we use words such as chicken, cuckoo, and turkey to ridicule people. Calling someone a vulture is worse, although vultures fly with gliding grace and are helpful recyclers. Nevertheless it’s worth pausing here to ask something like this: If we call someone a swine, are we really being discriminatory to pigs? Maybe even Wilbur would agree that pigs can be hoggish. Hence while some of our metaphoric language can be hurtful, in other instances it is less prejudicial than realistic. And yet, it’s that kind of ambivalence that makes it even harder to determine exactly when we’re being careless or indulging ourselves in something even worse. I don’t own a pig and I don’t think it’s hurtful (at least to pigs) to call someone piggish. However, since I love my dog, I wince a little when someone calls a real loser a dog. Recently I’ve also taken in a cat with a good set of claws. I’ve had mice in the log cabin where I live and I’m not terribly sympathetic

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introduction

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about mice rights. But since I really like this cat, now I don’t find dead cat jokes quite as amusing as I once did. So it would seem that the prejudices we harbor often arise from our own personal preferences and judgments, and those judgments can change with personal experience. Spastics aren’t ridiculous if you’re dealing with one. Drunks aren’t funny if you have one in the family. In other instances our prejudices arise out of historical misunderstandings along with a certain amount of willful ignorance. We think women are hysterics. We think men are chauvinist pigs. We suspect gays seduce men in airport bathrooms. We regard philistines as uncultivated. We assume Berbers are barbarians. We don’t want our children to behave like Amazons. And if we want to blame anybody, we like to blame the bastard. Most of us use words like these, a lot. In light of such common usage we might ask, are words such as philistine, barbarian, and bastard really discriminatory today, especially after all these years? The answers aren’t always easy or obvious because in so many instances it’s difficult to determine exactly when we cross the line into encouraging what is downright mean-spirited and bigoted. However the question is worth pondering because, chances are, you have more to say about this than you might realize, for language changes with how we use it. In fact changes in the language are not really determined by scholars or grammarians, try as they might, but by ordinary folks who speak and write. Given that kind of power, we might want to ask another important question: Even if we are willing to be more thoughtful, do we really want to sanitize the language? Don’t we need colorful expressions? And don’t we need cruel words to describe cruel people? Absolutely! But even colorful and cruel words can be well-chosen words. I began to think about these issues when I was asked to write and narrate word histories for WVIK, 90.3 FM, Augustana College’s arm of National Public Radio. After a while some listeners wanted to read what I was narrating and they asked if I’d write a book about word histories. By then I had come to realize that etymology tells us a lot about how we learn to discriminate, and this takes some explaining. While most volumes of etymologies are typically abbreviated, this one is presented in a series of informal essays, arranged by chapter and topic, in a storyteller’s lexicon. The approach is casual. The stories even keep company with cartoons. However


I’m hoping that readers who value scholarship will see that despite its playfulness and informality, there’s a scholarly bite to the book. The research for every word I’ve discussed has been grounded in the Oxford English Dictionary, the ultimate authority for any etymologist, although even there I did find at least one reference error (see maroon, p. 125). I mention this not to crow about it, but rather to urge us to recognize that despite our honest intentions and our heady sense of importance, reputable scholars can make mistakes. We don’t know who will have the last word, but what we do know is this: looking into the history of words will tell us quite a bit about the history of humanity—and, sadly, its inhumanity.

CHAPTER ONE BLAME THE BASTARD, BUT BEWARE!

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Introduction

here are some words whose histories seem to blame the victim. If we look into the etymology of the word bastard, we can see that it stigmatizes a child regarding where and how he was conceived. In a similar manner etymology has not been kind to villains. Once feudal servants who belonged to the villa, villains were often exploited and if they rebelled, they became “vilified” and regarded as “vile.” There were other victims. Philistines were once people who were living in what came to be called the Promised Land. When the Israelites took over, they dismissed the Philistines as the unchosen and the unenlightened. Given that history, eventually the word philistine came to refer to someone who is uncultivated and hostile to the arts. There were other victims. Etymology also condemns women who worked in a brothel, a dwelling associated with “a worthless person,” although history indicates that many of these women were enslaved and abused—not exactly volunteers. When it comes to making those kinds of judgments, we can really get righteous, particularly about what position we take. Right is correct. Left is the opposite. We know what’s right. But left is sinister, a deviation from what we think is right. Hence an ostensibly innocent difference, right or left, has been loaded socially and morally with discriminatory connotations.


Words can be colored. White is pure and good. Black is not. Colored once meant any color, but by now it has taken on the wrong color. The word nigger once rather innocently described a person with black skin, but nowadays it’s a word so loaded with venom that it’s nearly unprintable. By an accident in sound we hear it as close kin to niggard, a word with a completely different etymology. And yet the meanings of words change with how we use them. Consider the swastika, for centuries a good luck symbol in different cultures in different continents until it flagged the fortunes of millions of promising men, women, and children. And then there’s Bushman, the gorilla, and Bushman, an offensive name for a member of the San people, aborigines of South Africa. It’s all part of our casual sticks and stones vocabulary. Here are some stories about that.

1. Blame the Bastard, But Beware! The word bastard has always carried a bad reputation. It should come as no surprise that its origin might be questionable, although it’s likely the word came from the Medieval Latin bastum meaning “pack saddle.” The idea was that the bastard, the illegitimate child, was conceived on a pack saddle bed rather than a marriage bed.1 In the Middle Ages people who traveled on mules used packsaddles called basts, and at night they’d take them off and sleep on them outside or inside in lodges and inns. Often those travelers didn’t like to sleep alone. However a night of good company could bring on more company later, the bastards conceived in basts. There must have been some bawdy jokes about that, maybe even medieval traveling salesmen jokes. And the French expression fils de bast meaning “son of a packsaddle” contributed to that illicit bawdy notion of bastard. To add to the stigma, the -ard ending means “characteristic of,” so words like bastard and those misconstrued by folk etymology such as retard and niggard can be mean words today, although they didn’t start out that way. Even outside of its illicit connotation, the word bastard typically refers to something inferior. In printing, a typeface that mixes two original fonts is a bastard. In book publishing, a version that misconstrues the original is bastardized. In a bird’s anatomy, a bastard 1 The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, ed. Robert Hendrickson, s.v. “bastard.”

1  blame the bastard, but beware!

17

is the wing part that corresponds to a thumb, the part with only a few short feathers. And in botany, when an inferior plant resembles a better plant, it’s a bastard. The word bastard seems to blame the victim. For humans, a bastard is the baby conceived on the wrong side of the blanket, the outside. The insiders are usually the original stock, the better class, the better race, or the legitimate. But bastards are illegitimate— ill-bred and ill-favored. Often in the American South they were the slave children whose darker features could so closely resemble those of their white master. A bastard often reminded the master’s wife and neighbors of moral hypocrisy and maybe something even worse. So for them it was easier to “blame the dirty rotten bastard.” Or, easily as hurtful, they would just try to keep things quiet. But then along came DNA. And we began to wonder whether some of our founding fathers fathered foundlings.2 During that time some folks were still calling a bastard “a natural child.” And that is telling. Natural is never artificial and always real so, ironically, today being a natural child is what makes an illegitimate bastard legitimate— and very real.

2. Villains or Victims? In a story a villain is typically the main enemy of the hero, often an evil person who brings good people to ruin. But long ago villains were victims themselves. Coming from the Latin villa meaning “country home,” and then from the Old French vilein meaning “feudal serf,” villains were peasants who belonged to the estate where they were frequently at odds with the hero lord who taxed them relentlessly. According the historian Barbara Tuchman, villains paid fees for grinding grain in the lord’s mill, baking bread in his oven, and juicing apples in his cider press. They paid a hearth tax and a clerical tithe. They were forced to contribute to the cost of his son’s knighthood, his daughter’s wedding, his mother’s funeral, and if there was any dispute about payment, it was settled in the lord’s court. Moreover since the lord funded the parish church, priests typically 2 Brent Staples, “Lust Across the Color Line and the Rise of the Black Elite,” New York Times, April 10, 2005, sec. 4.


warned villains that they might go to hell if they refused to pay taxes and tithes. When it came to farming, before he could tend to his own plot, the villain was expected to first sow the lord’s fields, cut his hay, and harvest his crops. The lord also enjoyed the first choice of cattle, horses, and sheep, and he demanded their manure for fertilizer on his fields. Through it all, the lords were lordly, but villains were vilified. In ballads and folklore, villains were depicted as vile, insolent, and suspicious. They were unshaved and unwashed, ugly and stupid. One bard even warned his audience never to allow a villain to eat beef or goose. ‘Let him eat briars, thistles, and thorns,’ he sang. ‘Let him keep watch without sleep and have trouble always.’3 While villains were reviled as ugly and stupid, it’s curious that the word villain is also related to one of the most beautiful and complicated forms of poetry you can find, the villanelle. It came through the French from the Italian villanella meaning “old rustic (Italian) song.”4 Villanelles emerged from pastoral poems that were once sung to accompany rustic dances. They were written in round form with refrains that were repeated rhythmically. Today a villanelle is a nineteen-line poem that uses two rhymes. There are five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain. And in keeping with its tradition, the refrain is still repeated in round form at rhythmic intervals. Recently, in one of the most beloved of villanelles, the poet Dylan Thomas urges readers, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”5 We 3 Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Knopf, 1978), 172, 173, 175. 4 Encarta, s.v. “villanelle.” Via Italian villanella “old rustic song.” 5 Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, 1953), 128.


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also learn that it’s a poem written for his dying father, and in reading it we might be tempted to regard death as the villain. But if you read carefully, it’s not death Thomas rages against but “the dying of the light,” the lack of opportunity to achieve your just potential. And back in the fourteenth century, wasn’t that just the kind of rage that turned peasants into villains?

3. Living in the Promised Land with Those Unholy Philistines Most of us have heard of Samson, the Bible’s strongman hero, and the Philistines, the enemy he was appointed to destroy. Even today, it’s not a compliment to call someone a philistine, a word that came from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, referring to “people of Philistia,” non-Semites who came into conflict with the Jews.6 By now the dictionary also defines a philistine as somebody who does not appreciate art. Philistines are ignorant, uncultured, and often hostile to intellectual achievement. Today a philistine would be your annoyingly successful neighbor, a beer salesman who drives around in a Hummer with a bumper sticker that brags, “My dropout kid beat up your honor student.” How we hate them! In Britain they were the interlopers threatening to take over, often the target of jokes. But in Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold was hardly joking when he labeled them enemies of culture.7 And in Germany, “Philisters” were the outsiders, the townsmen compared to the gownsmen, common and uncultivated. Where did it all come from? Historically the Philistines were members of the Aegean people who settled in ancient Philistia around the twelfth century B.C. E. They might have been long forgotten except that in the Bible, when the Israelites arrived to settle in the Promised Land, they discovered that other people were already there, people like the Philistines.8 At first those Philistines must have seemed not only tolerant but attractive because before long the Israelites were mixing with them. Samson even married 6 Encarta, s.v. “philistine.” 7 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 101. 8 Josh. 13:3 (New International Version).


a Philistine woman. And he visited Philistine brothels. Sometime later, he fell asleep with his head in the lap of Delilah, a woman with certain charms. After that, Delilah became infamous while Samson only became famous. Why? Given Delia’s bad reputation and Samson’s good one, history seems to indicate here that a woman is far more likely to be blamed for her sexual activity than a man. Along with that, it’s interesting that there’s an ethnic bias here as well: the good Israelite, one of God’s chosen, undone by the evil Philistine, one of the unchosen. There’s more. When God decided to punish the Israelites, he sold them to the Philistines for eighteen years. Later, when the Israelites displeased him again, he delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for another forty years. Nevertheless it’s the Philistines who’ve been blamed as wicked and not the Israelites who had sinned. Moreover believers hardly blame God for being relentlessly vindictive but insist he was merely attempting to reclaim his chosen people. And in all the Sunday school stories we heard, nobody ever told us that centuries later we took the official name for the Holy Land, the name Palestine, from those unholy Philistines.


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4. The Mystery of a Brothel: Can Something Profitable Be Worthless? Depending on your point of view, you might think of a brothel as a house of sin or a house of salvation, but perhaps it’s more in the line of service, service for a profit. And yet, we can’t seem to make up our minds about whether it’s something we want to embrace or erase. Coming from the Old English broðen, brothel once meant “ruined” or “worthless person.” There must have been a lot of them, judging from the long, long list of synonyms describing where they gathered, words like bordello, crib, nunnery, flesh-shambles, and house of horizontal refreshment. It’s hard to think of brothels without thinking of the prostitutes who work there, mostly women. Today feminists are divided on how to view them: Victims of abuse? Or women who have rights over their own bodies? And yet not many of us have ever met a feminist who hopes her own daughter will grow up to work in a brothel. History tells us that women who work in brothels are more often than not woman who are desperate and women who are abused. Moreover prostitution carries a long mean history. Many prostitutes were poor. Many were foreign slaves who had been caught and sold. It was big business. And of course some were more marketable than others. In ancient Greece some prostitutes lived profitably enough to pay taxes. But not all. What galls some of us and intrigues others is the fact that brothels can turn quite a profit. That can even happen in respectable neighborhoods, as the Smithsonian discovered when it began excavating a site for the National Museum of the American Indian, a site they assumed had once been a working class neighborhood. 9 How puzzled they were when excavators began to unearth artifacts that seemed to come from a surprisingly affluent household. Soon archeologists were summoned and before long they knew they were uncovering the remains of Mary Ann Hall’s brothel. Turning things over, they uncovered fine porcelain, exotic oyster shells, seeds of imported fruits, and bottles of pricey French champagne. Along with that came the detritus of fashionable corset fasteners, 9 Archaeological Investigations National Museum of the American Indian Site Washington, D.C. December 17, 1997, http://www.si.edu/oahp/ nmaidig/.


shoe heels, buttons—enough to indicate that Mary Ann Hall and friends lived lavishly. Next door? What a jaw-dropper it was, and we grin thinking about how she must have outsmarted the neighbors. But do we also grin because, despite their success, we still like to think of women who work in a brothel as ruined and worthless?

5. Right-Handed Majority and Left-Handed Rights The word right has always been upheld by the right-handed majority. Right is dexterous, Latin for “favorable,” for “the right side.” Right is adroit, from the French à droit meaning, “right or proper,” and later “skillful.” Left on the other hand, is maladroit, the mal, or the evil opposite of right. Left is gauche. It lacks grace and tact. It is socially awkward, gawky, from gawk-handed, meaning “left-handed.” Hence a left-handed compliment is clumsy and lacks credibility and lefthanded acts are ill-conceived acts. They show poor judgment. If being left is socially unsuitable, it’s also morally unacceptable.

Long ago, Latin scribes would tell you that left was sinister, or evil and ominous. When Jesus separated the sheep from goats, he sent the goats to the left, to their eternal damnation. But he sent the upright sheep to the right to enjoy salvation. After all, right conforms to justice and morality. Right is correct. It arises out of fact and reason, from right-minded people who are forthright.


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There’s also a right time. Right runs clockwise. Left runs counterclockwise. And most of us try to put things right, to get in the right state of mind, the right physical condition. We admire the right stuff. It’s not likely we’d settle for the left stuff. We know our rights. Right is intensive, it’s right away, it keeps right on going. It’s fitting and proper, like the right dress, the right girl, the right size. Even in whaling there’s a right whale, one with the right resources of oil and blubber, one that is easier to capture than the more aggressive sperm whale, a whale that was probably a leftist in whale politics, a dangerous reactionary who fought Ahab, a captain who wasn’t quite right. Right is conservative. It’s Right Honorable. In most European legislatures dominant and distinguished members were seated to the right. Hence they came from the right. Dissenters were seated to the left or in the left wing. So they became leftists. As you may imagine, for them, it was the only side left.

6. No Colored Allowed Not so long ago you could see signs lettered in black and white that said “No Colored Allowed.” The word comes from the early Middle English colur from the Latin color meaning “color or hue.” Its Indo-European ancestor meant “to hide or to conceal.”10 So from an etymological standpoint, color is a cover up, a whitewash—in color. However there’s a big difference between “color” and “colored.” It has to do with how we perceive things, and that’s a complicated process. As for color, a physicist will tell you that seeing it depends on how we perceive the frequency or wavelength of light. It’s not unlike how we hear pitch or a musical note depending on the frequency or wavelength of sound. Even so, given our cultural vision, we can see the same colors as differently as we see cardinal men and scarlet women. There are other examples. In western cultures we tend to think the color white is pure. Brides wear white in the West. In the East brides wear red which symbolizes purity while white symbolizes mourning, although some of that is changing as customs become more westernized.11 10 Encarta, s.v. “color.” 11 Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture, ed. Edward L. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2005), s.v. “wedding.” Beverly Jackson, Splendid Slippers.


Along with those differences, even in our own culture, views change. Nowadays we definitely think blue is a boy’s color and pink is a girl’s color, but hardly a century ago the Ladies Home Journal advised readers that pink, a stronger color, was more suitable for a boy while blue, a delicate and dainty color, was far prettier for a girl.12 We toy around with pink and blue, but nobody was toying around a few decades back when Martin Luther King told us, “Funtown is closed to colored children.”13 “Colored”? It’s a peculiar thing to call a child. The word first came around in 1611 when Europeans began trading slaves from Africa. Africans were called colored because they were darker than white, although the dictionary will tell you color is “not black or white.” But add a past participle ending, and then according to King, being colored means that “your first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’” It also means “you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997), 5. Alexander Theroux, Primary Colors (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 160. 12 Ladies Home Journal, November, 1890, 23. 13 Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” The Christian Century ( June 12, 1963), 767-773.


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at tiptoe stance.”14 It’s the kind of black and white definition that nowadays shows us so vividly why the word colored has come to mean “biased.”

7. Blameworthy Words “Niggard” is one of those words that makes you wince. Because of an unfortunate coincidence in sound, it has been tarred by “nigger,” arguably one of the most offensive words in the language. Part of the problem arises from its -ard suffix which seems to imply that niggard is characteristic of a nigger. We see that suffix in words like sluggard, drunkard, and wizard. And yet there are other words with an -ard ending that are not from the -ard suffix, words like hazard, leopard, and tankard. As for niggard, because of that confusion and thanks to folk etymology, many of us by now assume niggard means “characteristic of a nigger.” To make matters worse, for those who try to defend niggard on an etymological basis, so far no one has been able to prove exactly where the word originated. It appears in Middle English and Irish English, and it came to describe a mean, stingy, parsimonious person. However there is no evidence that the word targeted Blacks— who’ve been blamed for a lot of things but certainly not for being stingy. Chaucer referred to it.15 So did writers like Shakespeare, Milton, and Faulkner.16 Their niggardly characters were always misers and they were never Black. Moreover in the Qu’ran, English translations warn readers, who tend to be dark-skinned, not to be niggardly in their gifts to Allah. Again, the implication is “don’t be stingy,” not “don’t be like a nigger.” More recently, the Afro-American columnist Leonard Pitts defended David Howard’s use of nig14 Ibid. 15 Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” “no niggard and no fool,” l. 149, Canterbury Tales (New York: Norton, 1989), 218. 16 Shakespeare, Macbeth, 4.3.180. The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). “Be not niggard of your speech.” John Milton, The Complete Works of John Milton, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), A Mask (Comus), l. 726., 131. “As a penurious niggard of his wealth.” William Faulkner, “Barn Burning,” The Heath Anthology of American Literature (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), p. 1545, “a small fire, neat, niggard almost.”


gardly after public criticism of that had led to Howard’s resignation as aide to Washington Mayor Anthony Williams. Pitts argued that the word was hardly a racial slur. Even so, we don’t like how it sounds. So the question is, can some words be blamed unfairly? Not long ago Sara Boxer asked a similar question about the word swastika, a word that comes from the Sanskrit svastikah meaning “good luck sign.” In her New York Times essay titled “A Symbol of Hatred Pleads Not Guilty,” Boxer argues, “[b]efore the Nazi party adopted the swastika and turned it into the most potent icon of racial hatred, it traveled the world as a good luck symbol. It was known in France, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, China, Japan, India, and the United States. Buddha’s footprints were said to be swastikas. Navajo blankets were woven with swastikas. Synagogues in North Africa, Palestine and Hartford were built with swastika mosaics.”17 However, as Boxer explains, in 1871 the concept of the symbol began to change when the German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann began digging around in the Dardanelles at a site that he assumed was Homer’s Troy. He claimed the artifacts he unearthed there were linked to the swastikas he had seen near the

Oder River in Germany. And he claimed that such evidence helped to prove the ancient Teutons were linked to Homeric Greece and 17 Sara Boxer, “A Symbol of Hatred Pleads Not Guilty,” New York Times, July 29, 2000, sec. B.


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Vedic India. Within a few decades the Germanen, an anti-Semitic group, adopted it. By 1914 so did the Wandervogel, the militarist German youth movement. And by 1920 the Nazi party claimed it. Even so in the early 20th century Nazis weren’t the only groups who were using the swastika. Boxer tells us that in North America, Coca-Cola issued a swastika pendant, Carlsberg beer etched swastikas on its bottles, The Girl’s Club published a magazine called The Swastika, and until 1940 the Boy Scouts gave out a swastika badge. During World War I the American 45th Infantry division wore an orange swastika shoulder patch. And even the fashionable Jacqueline Bouvier wore a swastika on an Indian costume in her pigtail days. In citing this information Boxer asks, “Can the swastika ever be redeemed?” She tells us that since 1985 a group called “Friends of the Swastika” have wanted to redeem it, to detoxify and resanctify it. They ask, ‘How can a symbol be guilty for the acts of a madman?’ Still, we shudder. How can you befriend a symbol whose elite good luck flagged the fortunes of millions? Others feel the same way about the Confederate flag. You can argue that historically these symbols mean different things to different people. And yet they hardly remind some folks of good luck, or liberty and justice for all. They are the same folks who will tell you, there’s something even worse than being thought of as stingy.

8. Bushman and Bushmeat: Human or Animal? There was once a gorilla in Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago that we used to call “Bushman.”18 It’s hard to find a record of that, perhaps because by now the capitalized “Bushman” has become “an offensive term for a member of the San people.”19 Of course at the time we had never heard of the San people, but we sure had our opinions about Bushman. He was housed last in a line of glass and granite cages, the most important one in the exhibit, big and black, sit18 William Mullen, “One of the City’s Most Special Gorillas Dies,” Chicago Tribune, 2/15/2005. Newspaper Source. Accession Number 2W60422591355. http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/delivery?vid+5&hid +104&sid+0b81cacd-29d3-4379-82bc-634cc00dd18. 19 Encarta, s.v. “bushman,” an offensive term for members of the San people.


ting like the sultan of the Monkey House. He had his own gym, a big black tire hung by an insane asylum-sized chain, and there were a few lettuce leaves strewn about the floor. It would make you lose your appetite for lettuce for days afterward. Sometimes dads would reach through the iron bars and bang on the glass window, trying to get Bushman to jump around. But mostly he sat, looking at us, blinking his eyes, exposed, naked, hairy, obese, obscene, primitive, and, savage. We stared at him, wondering who his other dark relatives were. He reinforced every racist stereotype we had ever learned: he was lazy, ignorant, belligerent, black, and worst of all, almost human, but the kind you needed to keep barred away. Years later, after having spent considerable time in the Regenstein Library, I returned to the Lincoln Park Zoo and it was not without irony that I discovered that the Regensteins had also funded the zoo’s new great ape house. It seemed to put things in perspective. Today there are folks who will argue that a gorilla is indeed human. With well over ninety percent of his DNA being identical to that of a human, a gorilla might be closer to us than we’d like to admit. 20 With that kinship in mind, the word cannibal is being redefined to include people who eat gorillas. They are also people who eat bushmeat. Bushmeat is defined as the meat of any animal in the sub-Sahara that hungry people with limited choices will eat, rat meat, forest elephant meat, gorilla meat. Even so, nowadays the bushmeat trade refers mostly to the hunting and marketing of primate meat, specifically that of the great apes.21 They are easier targets. You get more meat for the bullet. And it’s mostly the logging industry that is encouraging this. They bulldoze new roads into remote regions, hire hunters to feed loggers from the bush, and hence not only deforest the environment, but cannibalize its animals. Moreover people who eat bushmeat are also more likely to get ebola and HIV-1, human diseases carried by apes since they are so closely related to us. Today, more than ever, you are what are what you eat.

20 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, May 15, 2007, “Anthropology and Archeology.” “. 21 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, May, 2007. The Environment. .


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9. Black as Sin or White Lies? As a color, black can be dirty and dishonorable. You can find it in the badge of hell, the shadow of dungeons, and the miasma of Calcutta’s black hole. It absorbs light but it’s no more enlightened than the Dark Ages. Some folks think the word black caught fire from an Indo-European base meaning to shine or burn. If so, its underlying meaning has always referred to what is scorched or made dark. Other than that, we don’t know for sure how the word originated. And maybe it’s a history that’s best left in the dark. It’s a color with a mean streak. Black humor is biting. Black magic is evil. Black art is hurtful. So is giving someone a black eye. And black ice is treacherous. Despite that, basic black can also be as stylish and elegant. Imagine cruising along in a sleek black limousine, escorted by a gentleman in tux and tails who’s taking you to a stately black tie dinner. Moreover black is sexy. Doesn’t every prowling woman need a little black dress? And don’t the most seductive nightgowns and feather boas come in black? However, as beautiful as black can be, our vocabulary mostly associates it with what’s soiled, evil, depressing, mournful, angry, and censorious. Meanwhile folks who fight for Black Pride continue to be offended by the careless use of terms like “black as sin,” “black rat,” and, “Oh, my black soul!” It may or may not help to know that language changes as we use it. Currently such terms can be hurtful even if many were developed long before most European whites were aware of a black race. In religion and mythology, the ancients associated black with the dark underworld, with hell and the devil. Or black described physical facts. When the Black Plague, or the Black Death, came along, it was called black because it caused dark deadly hemorrhages. Black sheep were undervalued because merchants demanded white wool so they could dye it whatever color they wanted. And black markets sold illegal goods underground or in dark areas where criminals of all colors hid. Blackmail originated in ninth century England when the Danes exacted a tribute, or maille, that was often associated with muddy produce or livestock. In contrast, white mail was paid in silver. However in the sixteenth century few farmers could afford to pay in silver or even pay at all. To punish them Scottish border chiefs threatened to ravage farms and crops in an effort to extort payments from these peasants. Dur-


ing this dark hour in a dark land with only a few dark goods, such extortion came to be called “blackmail.”22 Blackmail, black sheep, black humor, black art, black ice, black lies—none of those terms began as racist terms. And they shouldn’t be today—especially since the folks who like to distort them as such are probably full of white lies.

22 John Ciardi, A Browser’s Dictionary, s.v. “blackmail.”

CHAPTER TWO CARDINAL MEN AND SCARLET WOMEN

S

Introduction

ame color, isn’t it? But cardinal and scarlet take on decidedly different meanings when we use the words to determine the value of a cardinal man or a scarlet woman. Consider the reverse: Who ever heard of a cardinal woman or a scarlet man? For the most part etymology shows us that such gender biases seem to favor men, although we’ll see exceptions to that later in this chapter. We’ll also see that some of these biases are being reconsidered. Take wizard and witch. Formerly a wizard was thought to be wise, but a witch was not; however that notion is changing, especially with the popularity of the Harry Potter novels where wizards of either gender can cast their spells. Even so, in the past witches were burned at the stake, but you’d never hear of a “wizard burning” or a “wizard hunt.” Clearly there are biases about what’s said, but what about what’s not said? Both genders can be shrewd, but men are rarely shrews. In a similar way both genders can scold, but men are rarely scolds, the kind of cantankerous troublemakers who were once tied to ducking stools. Men speak “by virtue of the power vested in me,” but it’s the


women who are expected to be virtuous. Along with that, a young woman is supposed to be a virgin, but in order to be one, she must resist complete intimacy with a man—who is often ridiculed if he is a virgin. The pious like to swear that sex is sacred, and it was mostly pious men who did the swearing, by their testicles, or their “sacred little witnesses.” It was what they honestly held on to when they “testified.” Having said all of that, it would be easy to claim that our language more often than not bows to men. But men were also victimized in the language. Imagine calling a grown black man, “boy.” Or imagine a time when we assumed men were by nature male chauvinist pigs. There’s more. Today we might think it’s alright for a woman to be gorgeously flamboyant and gay, but it’s not for a “true male.” Moreover the nature of a man isn’t supposed to be predominantly sweet and kind as we’ll see in the history of animas and anima. Much of that is changing. Nevertheless introduce an obviously very kind man as the new kindergarten teacher and, chances are, you’ll be meeting with some very worried parents.

1. Cardinal Men and Scarlet Women The word scarlet is that red color with a bad reputation. And judging from its many early liaisons, its etymology seems as promiscuous as its meaning. It emerged in the thirteenth century from the Old French escarlate. Along with that, some linguists believe it is also related to the Arabic siqillāt meaning “a rich cloth,” one that was almost always colored scarlet. And there are two other bedfellows, the Latin sigillatus meaning “decorated with raised figures” and signum meaning “sign.”1 So here we have entwined 1) an eye-catching color, 2) a rich red cloth, 3) a raised figure, and 4) a sign, as scholars believe, a lavishly embroidered sign. Given that, you have to wonder if Hester Prynne was reading word histories while she sat in the Puritan jail because that’s exactly the kind of scarlet letter she created: a sumptuous raised figure lavishly embroidered in gold thread, the limbs three-and-one-quarter inches long, long enough and large enough to read from across the 1 Encarta, s.v. “scarlet.” Via Old French escarlate from Arabic siqillat, a rich cloth]. (scarlet being its usual color), from Latin sigillatus “decorated with raised figures,” ultimately from signum “sign.”

2  Cardinal men & Scarlet women

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street. Her version of it brazenly flouted Puritan custom in seventeenth century Salem which shamed adulterous women into tacking on smaller, far more sober versions. Compared to their little “A’s,” Hester’s was a big “A+.” Moreover the lower Puritan classes were hardly allowed to parade around in fabric or colors as showy as what Hester wore, a bold eyebrightening badge of scarlet and gold defiance. Indeed, Hester might have made her living by exquisitely embroidering cuffs and collars for the governor and various Puritan dignitaries, but she herself wasn’t supposed to wear anything approaching this. By doing so, she was ridiculing the finger pointers themselves along with their sense of manners and morality.2 If scarlet letters were shameful, even worse were scarlet Indians. In his 1674 Account of Two Voyages to New England, John Josselyn defines a scarlet Indian as an Indian figure cut out of red cloth and worn as a sign of punishment by any woman who “suffered an Indian to have carnal knowledge of her.”3 We might wonder, why associate the color scarlet with sin and sex—why the scarlet woman? We don’t know for sure, but it’s pos2 Alden T. Vaughan, ed. The Puritan Tradition in America 1620-1730 (Lebanon: University Press of New England, 1997), 180. Peter E. Copeland, Working Dress in Colonial and Revolutionary America (Westport, Connecticut and London, England: Greenwood Press, 1977), xiii. 3 Robert Hendrickson, ed. The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins. (New York: Checkmark Books, 2000), s.v. “scarlet Indian.”


sible that such a notion comes from the Christian scripture in the Revelation of St. John where we read of a great prostitute dressed in purple and scarlet. She sits on a scarlet beast carved with blasphemous names and she is drunk with the blood of saints. So the Bible associates the word scarlet not only with adultery, but also with drunkenness, blasphemy, and possibly even murder and cannibalism.4 However the Bible also indicates that scarlet is used as a very special color for adornment, particularly for an important priestly figure—a male figure—which sets the tone for how we regard one.5 In contrast, when women enter the picture, scarlet seems closer kin to harlot, to Rahab and her “strand of scarlet cord.” She risked her life to smuggle Israeli scouts under her roof, but she’s not exactly a role model in our Sunday school stories, not nearly as respectable as the much safer holy men who wore “scarlet vestments.” 6 So scarlet was mixing it up with the devout and the depraved— until it was contrasted with cardinal. It’s really the same color, isn’t it? But a scarlet woman is reviled as wicked while a cardinal man is revered as an important male dignitary in the Roman Catholic Church. Before that, the word cardinal meant “hinge,” a hinge in the sense on which everything else depends. Metaphorically that led to the notion of cardinals acting as a principal hinge in the church hierarchy. Then, when these principals became robed ceremonially in lavish red cloth, such an adored color became associated with the cardinals and together they became a powerful symbol of respect and piety. Centuries later, Hester Prynne showed us how colored our pious visions can be.

2. Lady and Lord: Well-Bred or Half-Baked? A lady is a woman of refined habits and gentle manners, so who’d ever think she started out up to her elbows in bread dough? Curiously, the word lady comes from the Old English hlæfðige meaning “loaf kneader.” She must have made some very tempting bread for it required a “loaf guardian” to oversee it, or a hlāfweard which eventually gave us the word lord. We can assume the lord and lady were 4 Rev. 17.14 (New International Version). 5 Ex. 39.1; Josh. 2.18 (The New English Bible). 6 Jos. 2.18.


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an ambitious pair because, in time, they abandoned common bread for the well-bred. By medieval times a lady was no longer a servant, but one who cultivated breeding, manners, and culture. Polite, dignified, and virtuous, she was regarded as a feudal superior, one who held authority over castle and community. Meanwhile a lord had become lord of the manor, an aristocrat with power. Both could be charitable and enlightened. Or they could be real crumbs. In the United Kingdom, Lord and Lady are absolutely capital, upper case and upper class. Both are titled and entitled to privilege, but even Margaret Thatcher could tell you it’s the Lord who will more likely rise to the House of Lords, the Lord Chancellor, or the Lord Mayor. They all have pretensions except for the half-baked Lord of Misrule, the clown of fifteenth century Europe who often organized twelfth night Christmas celebrations. Even today he reigns while believers still try to keep in mind the Lord Jesus and Our Lady.


Currently both sacred and secular versions of lord are still acceptable, but lady has fallen into serious disfavor, especially among feminists who don’t necessarily want to behave like a lady. For them, the word lady smacks of class, manners, and virtuous sexual restraint. So feminists prefer woman, a word that strikes them as far more equitable and independent. But let’s consider the etymology. Woman comes from wífmon, wíf for “woman” and mon for “human being.” Even so, there’s still a problem. Look up the word human and you’ll see it’s defined in terms of “belonging to man.” For an enlightened lady who’s come a long way from kneading bread dough, why would she want to revert to a woman who, historically, merely belongs to a man?

3. Good and Bad Genders: Laudable Wizards and Loathsome Witches In his A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1775, you can see at times that its author Samuel Johnson entertained certain opinions about how to define some of the words he compiled. For instance Johnson defines a witch as “a woman given to unlawful arts,” and he leaves it at that. However he defines a wizard as “an enchanter,” or “he-witch,” and then he concludes, “it probably at first had a laudable meaning.”7 It’s likely he’s right about how people distinguished them, but you can’t help but wonder why witches were never laudable. They emerged as close etymological kin, from the Old English wicce for “witch” and wicca for “wizard.” And yet, even if they look alike, we don’t know for sure if they started out as equal partners. We do know that through the centuries wizards 7 Samuel Johnson, ed. A Dictionary of the English Language, s.v. “witch,” s.v. “wizard.”


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have gotten far better press than witches—unless wizards deigned to dabble in the womanly art of witchcraft. When they did, they were viewed with derision. Even so, you don’t hear many stories about wizard hunts, wizard hangings, or wizards burned at the stake. Today a wizard is defined as a “male witch,” but he’s also defined as “somebody who is excellent at something.” Hence if we say, “He’s a real wizard,” it’s a compliment. But if we say, “She’s a real witch,” it’s not. In that line, the best a woman can be is “bewitching,” especially from a sexual standpoint. Even so, a sexy witch seems downright unappealing because most witches are not only ugly, but vicious and malicious. In keeping with that, the dictionary warns us now that the word witch is “an offensive term that deliberately insults a woman.”8 But what if, instead of a witch, a young woman were to become a wizard? Wouldn’t that upset our own Muggle sense of propriety? It’s happening, because by now millions of readers have fallen under the spell of not only Harry, but Hermione. Given her charms, she may well be revolutionizing the notion that only men can become great wizards.9 Even so, what about witches—won’t they ever come to higher regard? It’s true there have been a few good ones such as “White Witches” who were respected as natural healers, but for the most part we think witches are “from Oz,” not anything we’d take seriously. In the real world some of us have heard of witches who are followers of Wicca or followers of a natural religion; however, we don’t have a lot of respect for what they think is natural, perhaps because we’re convinced that witches are so frightfully unnatural. And yet, being unnatural can have its rewards. Imagine the fun in spooking an anxious general by brewing up a batch of “Eye of newt and toe of frog, / Wool of bat and tongue of dog, / Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, / Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing.”10 It’s a hellish broth. By peering into that caldron of omens, these women were able to foresee a precarious future, one that would bring down an 8 Encarta, s.v. “witch.” Encarta also adds, a “seductive woman.” 9 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (New York: Scholastic, 1999, c 1997). 10 William Shakespeare, Macbeth. 4.1.13-17, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).


entire kingdom of powerful men. When they gathered their omens, we don’t know where they shopped or even what kind of pantry they kept. But you can bet it was something better than a broom closet.

4. A Man of Easy Virtue? We typically think of virtue as goodness or what is righteous. Yet historically virtue has been associated with power, the power that operates within a supernatural being. Later when humans took on virtue, any one of them could say, “By virtue of the power vested in me.” Virtue was the assumed righteousness that made you an authority. And it was inherently male authority. Clearly the ecclesiastical male hierarchy found the word important perhaps because it comes from the Latin stem virtut- meaning “manliness, excellence, worth,” from vir for “man.” Only the virtuous could perform acts of superhuman power, miracles wrought by God, or by angels with manly names like Michael and Raphael. They were physically strong and courageous. They were of great worth and value. But virtue is also associated with chastity and then it’s defined as “sexual purity,” especially on the part of women. So men commanded the power, but it was the women who were supposed to be chaste. Who ever heard of a man of easy virtue? In fact women were only empowered when they resisted sexual intimacy and then they became virtuous. Indeed who could be more virtuous than the Virgin Mary? To some minds even her partner Joseph wasn’t supposed to be completely intimate with her. Most Christians think she became pregnant through the virtuous power of God and then gave birth to a Savior sent to redeem humans who were not so virtuous. So what are the guidelines for a virtuous life? There are theological virtues and cardinal virtues. The theological virtues include faith, hope, and charity. For those who strive, they enter the soul as permanent habits or dispositions. Then there are the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. They are achieved by human effort and aided by grace. Theologians, mostly men, determined what the virtues were and how to receive them. Then women were expected to comply, with grace. And so it was, they made a virtue of necessity.


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5. Extra Virgin? Who’d ever compare a virgin to a dynamo? Henry Adams did in 1893 after his visit to the Chicago Columbian Exposition.11 According to Adams, during the medieval period visions of the Virgin Mary generated enough spiritual energy to build cathedrals while in the modern era versions of dynamos generated enough electrical energy to build skyscrapers. And yet he remarked that as an icon, the dynamo lacked the sexuality inherent in the Virgin Mary. It is hard to think of a virgin without thinking of sexuality. Coming from the Latin virgin-, the word virgin refers to a woman who is chaste. But her chastity isn’t nearly so valuable unless it’s married to piety. A pious virgin is an uncorrupted virgin, one who remains steadfast and resists. And what or whom are these pious virgins supposed to resist? Men. Curiously, even though men seem to have set the rules about virgins, word histories rarely connect the word virgin with a pious man. Yet if men had to worry about their own virginity, perhaps the emphasis on a woman’s chastity wouldn’t be quite so pronounced. 11 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 319-326.


Today teens flippantly refer to uninitiated males as virgins, but the burden of virginity has always fallen into the laps of women, particularly young desirable women. Spinsters can still be virgins, but the pious don’t seem to get their knickers in a twist over old virgins. Who’d want them anyway? Be that as it may, the virgin as an icon has not only powered centuries of architecture, paintings, music, and literature, it has also added its energy to our vocabulary. Virgin wool, virgin soil, and virgin forests are unused and unspoiled. Virgin tobacco is from Virginia, an area, like the Virgin Islands, named after Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. Virgin metals and virgin minerals are uncorrupted; virgin neutrons have never collided with others; and in olive oil a first pressing was called virgin oil. But the marketers of olive oil tend to be hyperbolic about its purity. They are selling not only virgin olive oil, but extra virgin, and extra extra virgin, and even the triple strength variety. It’s supposed to have something to do with first, second, or third pressings. But today, given modern technology and centrifugal spins, that’s a misrepresentation. Even so, doesn’t the value of a virgin still mostly depend on how many times she was pressed?

6. Swearing by Your Sacred “Little Witnesses” Dramatically, when a witness would swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, he’d swear on a Bible. But before Bibles came along, a man would swear on something else he held sacred, his testicles. For that reason the Latin testiculi meant “little witnesses.” They were the little witnesses to one’s virility and well into the fifteenth century, men were still swearing by them. Perhaps Bible readers will remember when Abraham, who was getting too old to travel, asked his trusted servant to find a wife for Isaac, not from Canaan where they were living, but rather from Abraham’s home country and his own kin. When Abraham made that request, he asked his servant to swear to it, to “Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh.”12 In doing so, he was asking his servant to “testify.” It’s a story recorded in the Old “Testament,” a sacred book where you’ll find plenty of “testimony.” 12 Gen. 24.2 (New International Version).


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There are other words that are close kin to testify: attest, contest, intestate, and protest. But perhaps the most emphatic of all is detest, particularly since John Ciardi tells us that its implication was “to hate to the bottom of one’s balls.”13 This is serious stuff. And you can see how a woman could find herself in a rather touchy situation if she ever tried to testify. But there’s another custom in a similar vein: the expectation that a covenant with God would be sealed by circumcision, meaning “removal of [a] male’s foreskin.” In Hebrew scripture, that rite originated after God had appeared to Abraham and promised him he’d have as many descendants as the stars in the heavens and the sands in the sea. After that, God ordered every male in the household to be circumcised, right at a time when the childless Abraham, already ninety-nine years old, was still hoping for his promised son. So snipping off the tip of his life-generating organ must have seemed the ultimate test of faith. Since then, for centuries, God’s chosen people have been circumcised. Meanwhile the uncircumcised were typically regarded as heathens, the unchosen and the unclean. Today there are arguments about whether or not such a painful operation, performed on a strapped down baby boy with little anesthetic, is really necessary. But the stigma remains. Many of us still continue to think of the uncircumcised as unclean. That notion may well gain more ground as some men are being urged to be circumcised in an effort to help combat an epidemic that frightens all of us. And yet, throughout Africa and Asia, it’s the young women, millions of them, who are being circumcised, not to keep them from being unclean, but to butcher them into behaving. It’s a rite, and not a right. But there are millions of men who’d swear by it.

7. Shrewish Women and Shrewd Men If you want to deride or ridicule a woman, you might want to consider calling her a shrew. Coming from the Old English scréawa, the word shrew came to mean “a quarrelsome nagging woman.” 14 Although well into the seventeenth century it was also used to refer to a man, “a wicked ill-disposed malignant man,” today the diction13 John Ciardi. A Browser’s Dictionary (New York: Akadine Press, 1997), s.v. “testify.” 14 Encarta, s.v. “shrew.”


ary will warn you that a shrew is “an offensive term referring to a woman who is nagging or quarrelsome.” That metaphoric notion of linking a shrew with a quarrelsome woman may have originated from the questionable belief that a shrew had a poisonous bite. There was also the common assumption that although female shrews were tiny, smaller than their male adversaries, they could still fight fiercely, taking vicious nips with their sharp little teeth. So who’d want to tame a shrew? It’s a comic metaphor and, given the obstacles, we grin at the prospect, even before Shakespeare’s Petruchio tries his luck at taming the haughty and temperamental Katharina. Her dialogue has quite a bite to it, so it’s unlikely she’ll be easily tamed. Hence we are amused at such a wildly improbable situation where a seemingly unpromising man assumes he can easily master such a risky woman. It’s a good-natured farce, a lovable man and an ill-natured woman. You can see a similar paradigm in “Rip Van Winkle” where Irving describes Rip’s shrewish wife as a “termagant.”15 Similar to shrew, the word termagant is another word attributed mainly to a woman, an ill-natured woman. Coming from the Old French Tervagant, from the Italian Trivigante, the word termagant gets its name from a Muslim deity in medieval mystery plays, historically a violent overbearing female presence. In Rip’s case, although his behavior might be irresponsible, like the villagers, we tend to lay all the blame for it on Dame Van Win15 Washington Irving, History, Tales, and Sketches, ed. James W. Tuttleton (New York: Library of America, 1978), 770.


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kle. She tries to keep order while he nonchalantly plays. As you may imagine, everyone loves Rip who teaches children to fly kites and shoot marbles, who is always the first to help the villagers build fences and husk corn. But when it comes to taking care of his own home, Rip has “an unsuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor.”16 His children run ragged, his fences fall to pieces, weeds grow quicker in his fields than anywhere else, and whenever he thinks of working, it rains. Given that situation, what wife wouldn’t feel entitled to be more than a little cranky? However our sympathies stay with Rip who is “henpecked,” another word that marks her—and other women. After all, who ever heard of anyone being “cock-pecked”? And to make Dame Van Winkle even more blameworthy, she is also reviled by Rip’s dog Wolf who is “an honorable dog.” Under her “evil eye,” which makes her seem witchy, Wolf ’s crest falls, his tail droops to the ground or curls between his legs, and he sneaks about with a gallows air, casting many a sidelong glance at Dame Van Winkle.17 As for Rip, in avoiding responsibility, he is clever. He is sharp, good at judging people, good at gaining their support. She is the shrew. But he is shrewd.

8. Poetic Justice in Ducking Stools We tend to think of a scold as a crank who complains a lot. While we’re not certain how the word originated, it probably came from the Old Norse skáld which at the time meant “poet.”18 Perhaps during those long dark winters while they were cooped up inside, scolds wrote poetry, and scholars suspect it was satirical poetry, the kind that may have ridiculed or scolded people. There’s another thing that’s peculiar about scolds: Most of them were women. Around the seventeenth century they must have been extremely annoying because records tell us how women scolds were punished on the ducking stool. We can read in The American Historical Record about the punishment of a scold named Betsey, the wife of John Tucker, who made the Tucker household and neighborhood so uncomfortable with her violent tongue that she was 16 Irving, 770. 17 Irving, 772. 18 Encarta, s.v. “scold.”


hauled down to the town pond where she was met by a local magistrate and the Puritan minister Rev. Mather. The record tells us that the two men frequently “admonished” her which sounds a bit more magisterial than “scolded” her. Clearly they enjoyed a captive audience because Betsey was “fixed to a stool” and “fastened by cords.” You can tell who was in control because she was “allowed” to go down under the water for a space of half a minute. (Try holding your breath for half a minute, especially if you are upset.) Of course Betsey resisted. And she might have been difficult for the two men to handle because, among other things, she had a “stout” stomach. Nevertheless she was ducked five times, ironically harder to pull up than to put down. She “cried piteously.” Scolds were also called “jarring females,” “noisy dames,” “brabbling women,” and “vixens,” or even “modern Xanthippes” which recalled the wife of Socrates who was supposed to be a real termagant. It’s true that men were also punished in ducking stools, brawlers, bakers who made poor bread, and a brutal husband who beat his wife. But the records indicate that it was the scolding women who were


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far more likely to be ducked. Moreover it seemed that much of this occurred in the South where the weather was warmer and the water wasn’t as likely to freeze. Archives from Milledgeville, Georgia, recorded in 1811, tell of a Miss Palmer who was convicted of scolding and sentenced to a ducking stool because her tongue was “rather glib.” Her ducking was watched by many spectators, probably the same ones who hooted while another victim, Mary Cammell, was ducked in the Oconee River. At the time, the Augusta Chronicle described Mary Cammell as “a common scold and disturber of the peaceful inhabitants of the County.” What seemed to have irked the spectators was that Cammell remained defiant and unruly throughout her ducking. Even worse, Cammell was irreverent. As she was lowered into the water, she was heard to say, not without sarcasm, “‘Glory to God.’” And the Chronicle’s finger-wagging reporter was quick to point out that Mary Cammell said it “with ludicrous gravity.”19

9. Pandora’s Jarring Curiosity In a number of instances word histories arising from myths often blame women for being troublemakers. We can see that kind of thinking in the expression we have, “opening Pandora’s box.” Legends vary on how it started, but one common story is that Zeus decided to punish man by creating woman. Hence he ordered Hephaestus to form her from the earth and mold her into something irresistibly beautiful as well as something treacherously tempting. To make matters even worse, he insisted that each of the gods bestow upon her his own beguiling gift. So they named her Pandora, the all gifted. Tricked out as fetching bait, she was taken down to the foolish Epimetheus who invited her inside 19 Cited by Alice Morse Earle, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (Bedford, Massachusetts: Apple wood Books, 1896), 18, 19-20, 25-27.


his home. Along with her she brought a great jar, one the gods had warned her to keep safe and not, ever, to open. It was a setup because, among other things, Pandora was endowed with feminine curiosity. So she could not resist opening the jar. And when she did, she unleashed all the misery of mankind, for each of the gods had put inside her jar the vilest thing he could imagine. Out of it arose a pestilential cloud of hatred, greed, jealousy, sickness, and suffering, all the cruelties that would bring man to his knees. Since then, opening Pandora’s jar, or box as other legends say, means that you’ve opened up a collection of troublesome ills that you would not have had to face unless you acted unwisely. It happens in war and in politics. It happens in love relationships. Or it can happen when your dog paws open a low-hanging hive of critters that have the disposition of yellow jackets. Like any of us who’ve regretted acting foolishly, Pandora tried to put the lid back on the jar. But it was too late. From then on men were doomed to wrestle with the soil and live hard lives. It’s another version of woman tempting man with the forbidden fruit. We’ve been telling those stories for centuries, often debating whose fault it is—and yet you have to wonder, what kind of God would want to punish man with a woman?

10. Female Chauvinist Pigs or Uncle Toms? By now it’s hard to find a man who’d seriously tell the following joke: “What’s worse than a male chauvinist pig?—A woman who won’t do what she’s told.” In fact calling a man a male chauvinist pig today has become both dated and dull-witted. Yet the word chauvinism is still being kept alive in other arenas where its historical background helps set the scene. We get the word from the name of Nicholas Chauvin, an old seventeenth century French soldier who was ridiculed as a self-important super-patriot. Happy to be of service, he was pleased with himself and his uniform, and quick to brag that he had been wounded seventeen times. A soldier of unquestioning loyalty, Chauvin sauntered around as a tail-wagging war dog who idolized Napoleon and spoke of the glory of France with such hyperbole that he became the laughingstock of his village.


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By 1831 his name became even more risible when the dramatist brothers Charles and Jean Cogniard caricatured him, with military panache, as a fanatical, unreasoning patriot in their comedy La Cocarde tricolore. From there the word chauvinism became associated not only with outlandish patriotism, but also with a blind bellicose enthusiasm for military power and national glory. Chauvinists were big, bold, and bullish. They’d clean up on anybody. You could almost imagine them smiling with their steamshovel teeth. In the next century they bragged a lot about war and what they could do. They cheered when we dropped bombs on an avowedly deserving nation and pounded its major cities to oblivion. Flesh dripped from little girls. And by then some of us were starting to question our own sense of “national chauvinism.” We also wondered if the nuclear scientists who designed such bombs were ideologues inspired by scientific nationalism, or what came to be called “scientific chauvinism.” On the heels of that came the revolution in our own country regarding civil rights and women’s rights. At that time chauvinists were men and they were pigs, and the words became synonymous. Most of the men got the picture and we moved on. Nevertheless freedom is always hard to give and harder to understand. In demanding equal rights and more, there are now women who insist it’s their turn to be the chauvinist pigs. With retaliation in their hearts, they flex their pumped up muscles and brag that they are now the super gender, stronger, smarter, and sexier. To prove it, they’ve become sexually aggressive and raunchy. In Female Chauvinist Pigs Ariel Levy objects to such a notion of oinking bump-and-grind feminism.20 According to Levy, despite 20 Jennifer Egan, “’Female Chauvinist Pigs’: Girls Gone Wild,” New York Times, September 18, 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/


what these new feminists are claiming, they have become willing victims of a pop culture that is promoting a chauvinistic model of female sexuality, one that comes straight out of porn dens. It’s also lured little girls into being lurid. Dressed in everyday cheesecake, they are learning to lap dance before they are finished wearing braces and training bras. Levy also points to the thriving cosmetic industry where women pay exorbitantly to be puttied and sutured into more pleasing fabrications. There are other instances where women continue to cater to commercialized chauvinism—such as the Olympian athletes who’ve posed nude for Playboy. Levy suggests that these caricatures of sexuality have arisen, in part, out of a perverse form of feminism that equates power with salacious sexuality. Ironically although women have acquired power over their own bodies, it seems that now more than ever they are using it to cater to chauvinist notions of how a woman should look and behave. And in doing so, they have become the Uncle Toms of the sex industry. With that in mind, we might recall the joke: What’s worse than a male chauvinist pig? Today the answer isn’t just a woman who won’t do what she’s told. It’s a woman who will.

11. Separating the Werewolves from the Wives Speaking of disrespect, Martin Luther King, once wrote that a black man was rarely called by his given name, no matter how old he was.21 Rather, he was typically addressed as “boy” meaning “slave or inferior.” Although the origin of the word boy is uncertain, in some sense it has referred to inferiors for centuries. While it could refer to “a young gentleman,” it also commonly meant “knave.” Others suspect another version of boy came through the Old French embuié meaning “servant” and the past participle of embuier meaning “to fetter.” If so, the earlier boy may have had its meaning mixed with this other boy that once meant “fetter or a collar for a neck.” review/18egan. Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” The Christian Century ( June 12, 1963), 767-773. 21 Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” The Christian Century ( June 12, 1963), 767-773.


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Since slaves often wore fetters, you can see how this kind of boy would be associated with slavery. Today the word boy isn’t offensive for some men who might enjoy a night out with the boys. Nevertheless for many blacks, “boy” still sounds too close to a racial slur and they prefer “man,” after the custom long established in the English-speaking Caribbean. But when we consider equal rights, the word man riles plenty of women, especially the generic man, say “a countryman” or a “freshman” and the assumption that it can represent both genders. And yet originally man did represent both genders since it once meant “a human being.” At the time, if you wanted to distinguish genders you’d use wer for “man” which probably survives in werewolf and wīf which gave us “wife.” Or you could use cwene for “woman.” Then in Middle and early Modern English, man gradually took over to mean “a male person.” Today it still dominates the language in terms of gender, so now women are hoping our language will give us some better way to distinguish the werewolves from the wives.

12. Liberating the Animal When a woman describes a man who is a brute, she might say in disgust, “He’s a real animal.” On the other hand, she might think some men are powerfully attractive because they embody a certain “animal magnetism.” That somewhat oxymoronic notion of animal tells us something about how we regard our psychological identity and why we make gender judgments about the animal within. So how did that happen? In part, those notions came out of the word anima meaning “inner self,” which didn’t change much from the Latin anima meaning “breath, life, and soul.” It’s what animates us. But there’s more to the story, particularly when we approach modern psychology. According to Carl Gustav Jung, the anima is the true inner self as opposed to the outer self. In men the anima is the feminine aspect of the male personality. It’s the sweet sentimental side of a man who cries when Old Yeller dies, or it’s the tender side that shows up when the rugged rancher with gnarly hands straightens the bend in your straw hat after you’ve been riding with him through some heavy brush.


In a woman it’s not anima but animus.22 Give a woman enough animus and she’s likely to poke Peeping Tom in the eye with her knitting needle, an act that would be filled with animosity. So with animus and anima we’ve stereotyped the male side as aggressive and hostile while the female side is supposed to be nice and sweet. Both genders get a share of each but the stereotypes remain. If a woman is lifting a tractor, she has probably absorbed too much of the male animus and if a man is primping the poodle, he might just be a bit too feminine. That stereotype didn’t always exist and, centuries ago, animosity wasn’t always gender-based, nor was it necessarily hostile. Around 1616 the same word could mean “courage.” In fact for several centuries it meant “animation and spirit” for both genders, even in animals. Hence in the judgment of horse trainers it made sense that a courageous or spirited horse could be full of animosity. However by the early twentieth century, the meaning of the word animosity was changing to “hostile.” And it was associated with male hostility. Was that the fault of Jung and his gender-based theory? To insist on that would oversimplify a complex change in the language. Even so, for quite some time now we have been stereotyping men as, if not hostile, at least more aggressive than women. Meanwhile more and more women are talking about getting aggressive. We like it when Miss Congeniality takes up kick boxing. But you have to wonder, why the emphasis on aggression is seen as progressive for women? Perhaps we assume all of us need to stay on guard in this harsh world. Or perhaps we are determined not to be vulnerable. After all, what could be more vulnerable than a woman who is too kind and too tender? Given our gender stereotypes, it would have to be a man.

13. The Call of the Wild and the Coward’s Way Out Not long ago, I learned a lesson in gender issues when the Great Dane Rescue Society convinced me to adopt another dog, a female, a young reject everyone else had passed by. I already own a collie, a good-natured male, a dog who’s never met anybody he doesn’t like. Yet occasionally unwelcome visitors appear, so I had hopes that the 22 Encarta, s.v. “animus,” “anima.”


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Dane would make a better watchdog. But she arrived at the cabin with her tail between her legs. That kind of behavior gave us a word from the Latin cauda meaning “tail,” and some scholars think the underlying idea is to run away with your tail between your legs. Such a concept gave us the word coward, a word that is hardly limited to one gender. Now some folks mistakenly think coward came from the verb “to cow,” but that probably comes from the Old Norse kúga meaning to tyrannize. Others mistakenly think coward came from cowherd, a lowly bumpkin who lacked the valor aristocrats claim is their trait. It is true the Dane was no aristocrat. With one blue eye and one brown eye she’s hardly a purebred. And at ninety pounds she’s small, close to the size of the collie. But is she a coward? There are different kinds. Some are merely shy. Some are ignoble in the face of danger or pain. Some are cruel to those who are weaker and fear those who are equal or stronger, a trait that is despicable in the human world, but for dogs it’s what establishes order. The Dane eyed the collie. She had been savvy enough to survive on the street and he must have seemed easy to overpower. Within a day she had taken over his place on the rug, his food bowl, and she nosed in whenever he came to me for affection. When I gave each a rawhide chew, she wanted both. So she bit his leg. He limped around for the rest of the day looking really perplexed. It happened again the next day. The third time, he taught her a rip-roaring lesson in manners. And the fourth … . I like living in the wilderness, but I’m not anxious to entertain White Fang in the parlor. I cringed every time the two circled each other. It was a tense week. But as it turned out, he was explaining to her that he was boss. He eats first and he has first choice where to sleep. She now sidles up to him, rubs his muzzle, and licks his face. Nevertheless I wonder if she just lets him think he’s boss. If he eats first, she snatches his rawhide treat. If he takes the rug, she sits closest to me. No matter how superior he thinks he is, she seems to outsmart him. When I stopped in at the vet clinic in Preemption, Illinois, and mentioned this puzzling behavior to Dr. Bonnie Wilcox, she just laughed and said, “She’s a bitch. They don’t get that name for nothing!

CHAPTER THREE THE LOCK AND LOAD JESUS

E

Introduction

tymology shows us that we invite certain prejudices when we mix words promiscuously that evoke strong emotions, particularly words associated with religion, war, politics, and patriotism. Propagandists like to combine these concepts and turn words associated with them into buzz words and phrases in an effort to promote their own self-serving agendas. As they would have us believe, we need to fight evils in sex and science in order to protect “American family values.” Along with that, our bumper stickers broadcast, patriotically, “God Bless America,” assuming that God is always on our warring side. This kind of mixing might also explain why the meaning of the word Christian is changing. Not so long ago a Christian was defined as “someone who is kind and compassionate,” but today the dictionary will tell you that such a definition is “dated.” Mostly it would seem that the change in meaning has occurred because the word Christian has been commandeered to sanction political and marketing agendas, particularly in campaigns for the religious right. As the propaganda goes, Christians are Republicans. Christians believe in family values, although there are limits as to who’s invited home to Sunday dinner. Christians belong to the National Rifle Association and they patrol the borders in an effort to keep the land free and safe for God’s chosen people. On a far larger scale,


Christians fight the “evil empire.” That contemporary epithet seems to hark back to the medieval Crusades where soldiers of Christ set out to fight Muslim infidels. Arising from that, etymology will tell you that the word crusade means “marked by the cross.” However other reliable histories will tell you that the motives for those wars were mostly far more political than religious. Hence these histories also tell us how the meaning of crusade has been manipulated to speak to certain agendas, agendas that mix religion, war, politics, and patriotism. Although the cause was largely political, medieval Christian soldiers viewed a crusade as an epic battle in the name of God and their country. Some Christians still do today, but certainly not all. Meanwhile some Muslims view a jihad in that same light, but not all. By now Muslims have grown to hate the word crusade just as some of us hate jihad. In our need to justify war we also summoned righteous motives when we fought Native Americans. In the conflict between Pequot and Puritan, the Puritans seized upon the concept of God’s Providence to accommodate their own agenda regarding his will and how he was providing for them. In keeping with that, writers such as William Bradford and Cotton Mather also tried to redefine history as a record of God working out his divine Providence for his chosen people. Already then they were thinking, to some extent, “God Bless America” which today brings to mind our yellow ribbons. Ironically, as one theory suggests, that tradition may hark back to Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan patriots who wore yellow sashes to symbolize their loyalty to Cromwellian preaching and politics. Notions of entitlement typically arise when we mix versions of religion, war, politics, and patriotism. With an eye for that, we’ll look into the etymology of some of the words soldiers and explorers used, words such as cannibal, barbarian, and pagan. Their etymologies will tell how various aspects of racism developed when patriots rationalized exploitation to slake their own religious and political agendas. We’ll also see that the word patriotism and its accoutrements sell well. There’s something righteous, religious, and quite profitable about showing it off and then marketing it. Look around town and you’ll see that red, white, and blue business is big—along with stars-and-stripes garbage trucks and real estate signs planted with

3  the lock and load jesus

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little American flags waving, for sale it would seem. In keeping with that, you’ll see billboards and magazine centerfolds that like to advertise drivers of all terrain vehicles rough-riding on to the edge of the American frontier, another word that sells, particularly when it is loaded with patriotic overtones implying freedom and galloping independence. However etymology will tell you that the word frontier hardly carries a history of freedom or independence since it was originally defined as “an invading army.” In a similar way we’ve adopted the eagle as an icon of democracy. But eagles were never democratic. “Oh, say, can you see?” The word anthem offers yet another etymological example of the mixing of religion, war, politics, and patriotism. Anthems were once antiphonal choral arrangements; their cathedral sounds were so awe-inspiring that eventually they attracted the attention of political figures who then adopted them for their own royal pageantry. After that, the meaning of the word anthem lock-stepped into what today we recognize as a national anthem. So religious anthems gradually became patriotic anthems, many of them jingoistic, which implied that there was something triumphantly righteous in their rousing brand of patriotism. Our own anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner,” was proposed by a congressional representative who was eager to promote tourist trade in Fort McHenry, Maryland. In another mix, the word bikini was introduced in 1946 just after the Fourth of July. Marketed as a bombshell of a bathing suit, at the time it was linked to the explosion of the atom bomb and, yes, advertised as patriotic. By skimping on valuable rationed cloth, any woman who wore one was willing to sacrifice for her country as much as she could bare. Moreover the garment was supposed to be scanty enough to slide through a wedding ring, a symbol we tend to associate with sacred vows. Meanwhile around that same time the word blockbuster became a big hit. It was another marketable version of “praise God and pass the ammunition,” and it didn’t take long for us to view a blockbuster as something remarkably entertaining. What follows here is a history of words that tells us something about our righteous and racist sense of patriotism, politics, and war, and how religion, particularly Christianity, has been parlayed to support it.


1. Raised in a Christian Home Not so long ago, the local newspaper advertised some rather remarkable dogs for sale: “Bull Mastiff pups. Championship bloodlines. Parents raised in a Christian home.”1 They were selling for $800 a pup. Now a bull mastiff is definitely a force to be reckoned with, the chain-snapping comic book kind of dog that puts teeth into the word carnivore. It looks and acts something like a peppy lion. But does it make an $800 difference that the pups and their parents were “raised in a Christian home”? Nowadays you have to wonder how valuable Christians are. The word comes from the Latin Christus and the Greek Khristos meaning “anointed.” The dictionary also describes a Christian as “kind and unselfish,” but it adds that such a definition is “dated.”2 It’s too bad, because we need more kind and unselfish people, especially in the marketing world, but today it would seem that tossing in the word Christian has become a ploy to make any chosen item more marketable. Not only can you purchase a Christian puppy, but you can also get a Christian tattoo or hire a Christian massage therapist. You can subscribe to a Christian dating service which is advertised as “Christian fishing.” Or you can invest in a Christian home-based business with a loan from an organization like Christian Faith Financial, a corporation that advertises loans for people of faith. But you have to wonder how many bankers, really, will offer loans using faith as collateral. 3 Christians have also been marketed as patriots and as soldiers of Christ determined to fight the evil empire—at home and abroad.4 1 Rock Island Argus, classifieds, but there’s no record of the date. I’m guessing Spring of 2001. 2 Encarta, s.v. “Christian.” 3 www.tattoojohnny.com/christian-tattoo-designs.asp — 43k www.christiancaremassage.com www.identicards.com/links/christianfishingsites www.ChristianFaithFinancial.com 4 www.americanchristianpatriots.net patriot-american.com www.cpforlife.org/pro_life.htm www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/s/o/soldiers.htm www.sfcmm.org


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Onward Christian soldiers—it’s an old concept, one that goes all the way back to the Middle Ages and the crusades, but already then, while the issues were declared religious, they were at heart far more mercenary. “Jesus Means Business.” Currently that’s the slogan for Miss Poppy, a commercial organization devoted to ridiculing how Christianity is being marketed.5 Her logo is “What a Trend We Have in Jesus,” and she’s been selling everything from Christian panties with praying hands to refrigerator magnets with catchy proverbs like, “The Bigger the Hair, the Closer to God.” However it would seem that her hottest satire is reserved for warring Christians. There are bumper stickers that ask, “Who Would Jesus Torture?” or pray, “God Protect Me from Your Followers.” Perhaps most provocative of all is her “Lock and Load Jesus.” You can buy him as a mouse pad, coffee mug, or votive candle. He’s depicted with robe, hair, and beard flowing, kneeling behind that big rock of ages in the glow of the heavenly spotlight. And he’s leveling an assault rifle aimed at anyone not raised in a Christian home.

2. Onward, Christian Soldiers In first grade we would often march around the classroom singing, “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” During that time, we also heard of a knight in shining armor who’d rescue a beautiful damsel in distress, but we knew that was the stuff of fairy tales. Christian soldiers, however, were real. And yet the two might be far more connected than we once were led to believe, especially if you understand the history behind the word knight. The word comes from the Old English cniht for “boy” or “male attendant,” and in early medieval Europe, a knight was a mounted soldier of low rank, typically a tenant, who was expected, among other things, to fight for his feudal lord. As fiefdoms became more powerful, he became a soldier of noble rank and at the time it was also important that he became a Christian. A Christian soldier? Ah, but wasn’t it Christ who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God”?6 Even so, in an effort to empower God’s kingdom—or its rulers—Benedictine theologians 5 http://www.misspoppy.com/ 6 Matt. 5:9. (King James Version).


joined with the Pope and the patriarchy to create a chivalric code that coupled Christianity with combat. So under the banner of the cross, knights galloped off into battle on their warhorses, supposedly on a mission to defend orphans, widows, and the weak. Meanwhile the Church amassed entire countries of people and their resources, all in the name of Christianity.7 This went on for centuries. Warring Christians, who slaked their ambitions in the blood of martyrs, believed it was their God-given right to retake Jerusalem and any of God’s holy lands captured by the Muslims. In those huge armies each of the knights who did the actual fighting was outfitted with at least fifty pounds of treasurydraining defense armor. That included a helmet and beaver, so a crusading knight was literally “armed to the teeth.” He also carried an eighteen-foot lance, about the length of your neighbor’s flagpole, hoping to take a galloping poke at his enemy. If that didn’t work, he could swing his mace. Imagine macing someone then. And imagine 7 Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Ballantine, 1978), 62-64.


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what would happen if a knight were to take a swipe at you with his battle ax. Their wounds were horrific. They split each other’s skulls. They nailed necks to gorgers. They ripped muscle from mail. And after a knight hacked a path with his battle ax, with all his Christian fervor, he could see bloody stumps still pumping.8 Storybooks will tell you that once upon a time, knights in their shining armor rescued beautiful damsels in distress. But in reality knights were often brutal to the lowly and they could rape peasant women with impunity, women who were damsels in distress too, but this is no fairy tale. So it’s probably just as well that little first graders didn’t really know what happened when all those Christian soldiers went marching as to war. But you have to wonder what version of Christianity it was that would teach a first grader to march as to war.

3. Crusaders at Cross Paths By the time we reached eighth grade, we were taught church history by the town’s teacher-of-the-year, a seemingly sublime woman, who wore sensible pumps, pious lace collars, and a powdery-grey pageboy. She had a popular smile, but her eyes were arresting, pure blue and glacial. And she once told the eighth grade girls that she wouldn’t trust any of us any farther than she could throw a piano. She also commanded the charismatic ability to keep us on the edges of our seats when she taught us about the Church Triumphant, the Ecclesia Triumphans, made up of those who are in Heaven, and the Church Militant, the Ecclesia Militans, made up of Christians who are living on earth. She told us, righteously, that you had to fight for your beliefs. And so it was, we learned about the Crusades. The word comes from the French croisade meaning “marked by the cross.” Hence as children we learned about the holy wars waged by Christians on Muslims, the infidels who had somehow taken over the Holy Land. By now we know that those issues are far more complicated than we were led to believe. Religious wars always are and the differing meanings of the words reflect that. While we still regard a crusader as somebody who fights for a righteous cause, the Muslim notion of crusader has always been associated with something despicable, 8 Ibid.


with religious extremists who are on a mission to destroy them, their land, and innocent people. On the other side, what’s becoming despicable for Westerners is jihad, a word that has come to be associated with terrorists, suicide bombers, and holy wars we think are evil. Many of us define jihad as a struggle against unbelievers for the propagation of Islam. So a jihad is a religious war. We think it’s a war instigated by the Qur’an and its traditions, a war that pits Muslims against those who do not believe in Islam. And it’s a war to the death.9 For Muslims, jihad has a very different meaning. Coming from the Arabic root jhd, it means “to strive” and “to struggle.” They believe a jihad is “a spiritual struggle to attain perfect faith” as well as “a militant struggle to defend the advance of Islam.” Moreover, to Muslim thinking, a jihad is a comprehensive process in which people of faith seek to live according to divine teachings and values. It’s a struggle of good against evil, an epic struggle beyond what we’d think of as heaven and hell. Today not all Muslims believe a jihad should entail war just as not all Christians believe a crusade should rally us to battle with an evil empire. But some do, on both sides. Our teacher taught us about the courage, sacrifice, and commit9 Rachael Magdalene, Professor of Religion, Augustana College.


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ment it takes to die heroically for your faith. But at the time it never occurred to us to ask, what if the other side believes that as well?

4. Yellow-Ribboned Puritans Many of us tend to think of heraldry as something in the past, something associated with knights and their shields, but the symbols of heraldry are still with us today, perhaps now more than ever. Look at the shield on a Buick, the Masonic Seal on the United States dollar, the insignia on a Double D Ranchwear button, or the coat of arms for your favorite university and you’ll see how invested we are in symbols of heraldry. The word comes from the Old French herault, from a prehistoric Germanic compound meaning “commander of the army.” Later a herald became someone who announced important news like “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” In heraldry colors matter as much as the red, white, and blue of our flag or the blue and gold of our favorite sports team. When we flaunt them, you can see “our true colors.” It’s the same tradition that gets us to tie on those yellow ribbons, something we tend to associate with oak trees and vigils for hostages. In fact you can trace that custom back for centuries to folk songs in a variety of Western languages that equate tying on a yellow ribbon with the wait for someone you love.10 However when it comes to wearing a yellow ribbon to support the troops, although it’s debatable, there are scholars who insist that we get that tradition from our Puritan ancestors who wore yellow ribbons to support the campaigns of Oliver Cromwell. Advocates of that theory point to a well-known painting by William Frederick Yeames provocatively titled, “And when did you last see your Father?” In it Yeames dramatizes a scene where Cromwell’s Parliamentarian troops are interrogating a Royalist boy in an effort to get him to betray his father. Yeames painted this in 1878, at least two centuries after the Cromwell campaigns occurred, but some insist that his work realistically depicts how people dressed at the time. They point to the yellow sashes worn by Cromwell supporters as proof of the early use of yellow ribbons to support the troops. As the theory goes, later the Puritans took this custom with 10 Gavin Finley, “The Yellow Ribbon History,” Oct. 2004, endtimepilgrim. org.


them to America. Nevertheless not all yellowribboned patriots like to identify with a Puritan heritage. Having said that, it’s important to know that there have been about as many different versions of Puritans as there are fundamentalists. Some were fanatics. Some were ordinary folks looking for good family values and a promising religion. Some were Renaissance scholars like the New England Puritans who started Harvard University in 1636. Most Puritans believed in intellectual rigor and most found their theology compatible with the humanities and science. However in Britain, when the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell took over, his policies were not as tolerant as citizens might hope. What Cromwell saw as evil was the Roman Catholic Church, and he repeatedly blamed its members for tyranny and persecution. Not everybody in Britain agreed with him, particularly in Ireland which was mostly Catholic. The tension intensified, and when Cromwell heard wildly exaggerated reports, perhaps the kind he was hoping to hear, about how the Irish Catholics were planning to annihilate the Protestants, he seized the opportunity to send in troops to crush them. What followed were brutal battles that inflamed passions all the more, setting off a long, long history of bitterness in Ireland between Catholic and Protestant, bitterness that can still explode in Britain today.


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At the time Cromwell and his patriots believed that God in his divine Providence was directing the affairs of the world through the actions of his chosen people; they assumed God supported their activities at war. In a similar way, we decorate our cars with magnetic yellow ribbons and red, white, and blue banners that declare, “God Bless Our Troops.” It’s another version of heraldry, like “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” But it’s not like Christmas.

5. Taking Comfort in God’s Providence Many people believe in some kind of a divine plan in which God provides for them. The word provide comes from the Latin providere meaning “to prepare in advance” or literally “to see ahead.” The question is, what does God provide and to what extent? Different Protestants have debated this over the centuries, particularly in regards to their salvation. Do sinners have the free will to choose their own salvation or is it something provided for ahead of time by God? In the sixteenth century John Calvin argued that if we assumed sinners had the free will to choose their own salvation, it would take away from God’s power. To Calvin’s thinking, if God were truly omniscient and omnipotent, he would have to determine ahead of time who was saved and who was damned. If humans enjoyed free will, how then could God know or control what any one of them would do? Hence Calvin insisted that only God in his divine Providence could choose, or predestine, an individual’s salvation.11 Since then a number of believers have been quick to assume they are the chosen ones and quick to invoke God’s Providence to support their own self-serving agendas. It served Cromwell. It served the apartheid. And in America slave owners liked to argue that God in his Providence determined that some are born to reign, others are born to serve. It was to their advantage to teach slaves that if they obeyed the master’s version of God’s law, they would be rewarded in heaven. Following God’s rules tended to keep slaves more obedient. And they would be less likely to rebel if they believed their temporary life here didn’t matter much since God in his Providence had also chosen them for eternal rewards in heaven. 11 John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1950) 3.24.964-987.


Versions of God’s Providence have also influenced how history was recorded. For instance in 1637 when William Bradford wrote Of Plymouth Plantation, he set out to write a historical account of God’s providential design for his chosen people. With that in mind, he records how God “provided” for the Puritan victory in their war with the Pequot Indians and he describes how the Puritans, in following God’s will, burned Pequot homes. If any Pequots tried to escape, the Puritans grabbed them, stabbed them, hacked them to pieces, and threw their bodies into the fire. Bradford tells us it was a fearful sight to see Pequots frying, their bodies sizzling. Streams of blood threatened to smother the fire and the smoky human stench was horrific. Even so, Bradford concludes that their victory seemed a “sweet sacrifice” and they gave praise to God “who had wrought so wonderfully for them.”12 Scary, isn’t it? Imagine assuming that it was part of God’s plan to annihilate your enemy.13

6. Ben Franklin’s Barbary Pirates In 1790, in his last public address before he died, Benjamin Franklin ridiculed a proslavery speech in Congress by comparing it to a fictional speech of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, a North African Muslim pirate.14 It got people’s attention. For centuries and well into 12 William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 296. 13 “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.” This is attributed to Cotton Mather and is directly quoted by Howard Zinn in People’s History of the United States 1492—Present, 15. And Zinn repeats this undocumented quote in a number of articles he writes. In a similar fashion Mather is quoted by Noam Chomsky, “In Defense of the Student Movement,” http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1971----03.htm. And the quote has been picked up by a number of bloggers. It sounds like something Cotton Mather would say. But I can’t find the original quote. And I wonder. Not only does Zinn not document from where he took this quote, but he also implies that both Mather and Bradford are commenting on the same war, same incident. They can’t be, unless Mather was under seven years old when he said it. William Bradford lived from 1590-1657. Cotton Mather lived from 1663-1728. 14 Reprinted in “Benjamin Franklin and Freedom,” Journal of Negro History 4 ( January 1919): 48-50. See also Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Knopf, 2000), 111-12. Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815


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Franklin’s time, Barbary pirates had been traveling north and west, raiding ships and coastal communities. Even more alarming to Franklin’s audience was the frequent news that pirates were capturing significant numbers of white British and American citizens, and selling them as slaves to North African slave markets. Those actions intensified the hatred Westerners already had for the Barbars, hatred that had developed after the Crusades. The history of the word Barbar (or Berber) and its association with what was barbarous reflects that. Barbars were seen as foreigners. They were also regarded as heathens and pagans. Around 1386 when Geoffrey Chaucer referred to the “Barbre nacion,” it was no compliment. For Barbars were barbaric, a word we get from the Greeks who thought the language of a barbarian sounded like “bar bar bar.” Coincidentally the Arabian word barbara also means “to talk noisily and confusedly.” With that in mind, Arabian geographers used names like Barbar and Berber to indicate where such people lived. After the Barbars had enslaved so many white Christians, stories of those experiences circulated and many were turned into early pot-boilers that titillated the public with accounts of nearly unprintable acts on the part of Barbary pirates. The historian Linda Colley, author of Captives, takes a look at narratives that describe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 104-6. Cited by Thomas S. Kidd, “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet than the Devil? Early American Uses of Islam,” Church History, December 2003, Vol. 72, Issue 4.


what happened during that time of captivity, and while she cautions us that many of these captivity narratives were written under duress or rewritten for the sake of propaganda, she argues that some seem realistic. It raised a few eyebrows when the public learned of captives, particularly ones with hard histories, who, when given a choice, came to prefer their new culture to the class system in Britain that had formerly repressed them.15 This suggested, at least to some minds, that slavery wasn’t always as detrimental to its victims as some believed. Be that as it may, white Christians continued to hate Muslim Barbers and the literature of the time reflects that. Cotton Mather railed against them as “fierce monsters of Africa” and warned that “Mahometan Turks, and Moors, and devils” were enemies that God had sent to chastise erring Christians. 16 Generations later, by the time Franklin alluded to that Muslim pirate in an effort to discredit his Southern adversaries, condemning Barbars was not uncommon. Knowing that, Franklin outlined satirically the argument the Barbary pirates made as to why white slavery could not be abolished: 1) It would threaten the interests of the state, 2) there would be no way to compensate slave masters, and 3) freed slaves would cause trouble for the government and the people. Franklin assumed this argument would strike a familiar cord in Congress. Who else but a ruthless Barbary pirate would ever try to advance an argument as inhumane as that?

7. Cannibals, Pagans, and Christian Kindness Nobody wants to read Moby-Dick, but anybody who takes American literature seriously thinks you should. And that’s the problem. If you take Moby-Dick too seriously, you’ll miss all of the fun and most of the meaning since Herman Melville typically makes his point with irony, a word that comes from the Greek eirōneia 15 Linda Colley Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (New York: Random House, 2002), 118-119. 16 Cotton Mather, Decennium Luctuosum (Boston, Mass.: B. Green and J. Allen, 1699), 231, cited by Thomas S. Kidd, “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet than the Devil? Early American Uses of Islam,” Church History, December 2003, vol. 72, issue 4.


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meaning “pretended ignorance.” With that in mind, Melville begins by showing us a cannibal. Although he knows better, Melville realizes his readers will assume, as we do, that a cannibal must certainly be both depraved and perverse, a savage with an all too human appetite. But how did we even get the word cannibal? It comes from the Spanish Canibales, a variant of the Arawak carib, a word Columbus took to describe the Caribbeans he claimed he discovered. Moreover he assumed these natives were the kind of primitive savages who would like to take his crew home for dinner. And that’s just the kind of cavalier racism that Melville loathed. Enter Queequeg. He’s introduced, ironically, through Ishmael’s prejudiced view with every abomination imaginable. He’s a hideously tattooed pagan, a pervert who’s out “selling head,” ostensibly shrunken heads from New Zealand.17 And he’s the bedfellow from hell. Due to a shortage of rooms on a bitter New Bedford night, Ishmael is expected to share a bed with him. Of course when Queequeg returns and jumps in bed in the dark, with his tomahawk no less, there is considerable alarm on the part of Ishmael. But a little later we discover that Queequeg is not only a “clean comely looking cannibal,” but also a kindly humane individual with a deep-seated sense of civility. 18 And we take the journey with Ishmael when something melts within him and he says, 17 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Norton, 1960), 35. 18 Ibid., 40.


“No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it.”19 A redemptive savage? Ishmael concludes, “I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.”20 The irony? Until now, we’ve assumed Christians are kind. Pagans are cruel. The dictionary tells us a pagan is a “follower of a less popular religion.”21 And that’s been a prejudice for centuries. Coming from the Latin pagus, for “something stuck in the ground as a landmark,” the meaning of pagan changed from that, to “country dweller,” to “villager,” and then to “civilian.” But why pagan civilians? That definition arose after the Church assumed all Christians were soldiers of Christ. So pagans were civilians, the unpopular unbelievers. No yellow ribbons for those folks. And the irony? It depends on whatever ignorance we are willing to pretend.

8. The Golden Rule Gold is old. The ancients knew of it, and there were goldsmiths at work long before English emerged as a language. When gold did take word form in English, some scholars think it came along as one of the oldest words in the language. It comes from the Old English gyldan and ultimately from an Indo-European word that is also the ancestor of the English yellow and gilt.22 As a metal gold was valued for its beauty. Gold is also malleable, it resists rust and chemicals, and it’s rare. In the Middle Ages alchemists in their Rumplestiltskin ways tried to change inferior substances into gold. Along with its other advantages gold seemed to last forever so alchemists speculated that if they could discover how to make gold, they might find the secret to immortality. You might think that would launch the Golden Age, but actually that term came to mean “the first and best age of the world in which, according to the Greek and Roman poets, mankind lived in a state of ideal prosperity and happiness, free from all trouble or crime.” At the time the Romans believed the god Saturn brought 19 Ibid., 62. 20 Ibid. 21 Encarta, s.v. “pagan.” 22 Encarta, s.v. “gold.”


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the Golden Age to Italy. Later he was remembered annually in their Saturnalia, a golden time when war ceased, executions were postponed, and slaves ate with their masters.23 That notion seems close to the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” However Christians regarded the Saturnalia as pagan and, contrary to what we tend to think, there’s no mention of the Golden Rule in the Bible. Even if we associate the terms “Golden Age” and “Golden Rule” with something good, gold hasn’t always brought about peace and happiness. Consider the plight of the Incas who valued gold, not as a commodity, but as a religious artifact that reflected the sun god they worshipped. The Spanish who butchered them and razed their brilliant cathedral observatories had different ideas. Again, religion played a role. Along with their swords, the conquistadors carried crucifixes and within a century rulers with a mission imposed Catholicism on the entire continent; however they seemed more concerned about acquiring power and wealth than they were about saving souls. Columbus used a similar approach. According to historian Howard Zinn, when the Arawak Indians swam out to greet him, they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears. Zinn says, “This was to have enormous consequences.”24 Columbus imagined fields of gold and wanted the Indians to show them to him. But their gold existed only in little flecks garnered from streambeds. When the people failed to produce more, the Europeans enslaved them, forced them to dig for it, and then often cut off their hands when they failed to find it. Zinn concludes, “In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.”25 For them, the Golden Rule had changed.

9. Patriots Sell Today we have a lot of mixed feelings about patriots. The word comes from the Greek patriotes meaning “fellow countryman,” ul23 Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York and Toronto: The New American Library, Mentor: 1942), 45. 24 Howard Zinn, People’s History of the United States 1492--Present (New York: HarperPerennial, 1980), 3. 25 Ibid., 4.


timately from patris, meaning “fatherland.” At one time patriots were supposed to be patriotic, to proudly support and defend their country and its way of life. They were depicted as courageous, loyal, and true, the pioneering heroes who fought for freedom and individual rights, who pledged their allegiance to the principles of liberty and justice for all. You can see patriotic flag wavers all across the country. But sometimes you have to wonder why. Conservatives, who like to associate the word patriot with Republican, tend to flaunt flags in their lapels to prove it. By comparison Democrats don’t seem nearly as patriotic. And yet there are women who wonder about both groups. They look at Congress and the Senate and wonder if these patriots are still part of the patriarchy—any social, religious, or political system in which men dominate, where men are regarded as the sole authority. Others wonder too. Are patriots the ones who want to put up fence lines along Texas and Arizona? They wonder if patriotism can at times be a thinly-veiled word for racism. Still others wonder about the Patriot Act, whether the word patriot means “loyal defender of the country” or something closer to “The Grand Inquisitor.” There are also patriots who argue for the right to own guns—the kind of guns that can blow away an entire village in an instant. And there are the Christian Patriots, defiant vigilantes who claim it is their God-given right to impose the righteous justice of white supremacy. Perhaps most of all, today’s patriots are businessmen. Look around town and you’ll see how many red, white, and blue busi-


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nesses there are. Used car dealers like to feature plenty of honestlooking American flags around the perimeter of their car lots. Real estate agents plant their signs in suburban lawns with little American flags waving, for sale it would seem. Undertakers have a particular reverence for coffins with patriotic themes because they sell well. You can rest truthfully in the “Washington Cherry Wood” or inventively the “Monticello Walnut.” In the health food industry, there is a line of mail order products that promises to be better than anything medical science has yet discovered, sold by the patriotic Dr. Naturopath who is pictured smiling in a stars-and-stripes cowboy shirt. And you can see stars-and-stripes garbage trucks servicing dumpsters. By now it seems that these patriots are out for one thing: to get you to patronize, to be a loyal customer of whatever they are selling. Meanwhile those of us who still love our country, its flag, and what it stood for sometimes feel almost too ashamed to show it.

10. The American Frontier and the New Garden of Eden In 1066 when the Normans landed in Sussex, England, the word frontier referred “to the forepart of an army.” And a pioneer was “a foot soldier.” But after the invaders staked out territory, a pioneer came to mean “a settler” and the word frontier meant “border” and later, “a fortified boundary line running through dense populations.” When the word frontier reached America, it referred not merely to a border, but “a border that was advancing.” And so it was. Pioneers marched onward with their plows and barbed wire. Settlers staked out territory with roads and fence lines. Entrepreneurs hammered down railroad lines all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And then some say the frontier ended. At that time Congress defined the frontier legally as land occupied by two or more, but less than six, persons per square mile. Despite that, in the early American West, the frontier always meant “unsettled land” and “the absence of borders.” With that in mind in 1893 the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the existence of an advancing frontier helped to alleviate social and economic problems in America, acting as an


escape valve, at least until settlers reached the Pacific Ocean.26 Like Huck Finn, if things got too civilized, you could always light out for the territory. At the time, according to some politicians and romantics, our advancing frontier marched to the Manifest Destiny of America. Pioneers were the American Adams advancing onward to the new Garden of Eden where, as one theory had it, rainfall would follow the plow.27 In an effort to encourage western settlement, Congress promoted the works of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. Bierstadt’s billboard-sized paintings dramatized the distant Sierras highlighted by a heavenly glow, and Thomas Moran’s inspirational oils romanticized pioneers as blessed heroes heading west, to where the sun beamed on blissful valleys and lit a holy cross of snow centered prophetically in the crevice of sacred mountains.28 There was something righteous and reverential about heading west, to the frontier and taking over the land. Today we are still living out those frontier myths of self-reliance and independence with calendar visions of riding through moun26 “The Myth of the Garden and Turner’s Frontier Hypothesis,” Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 250-60. 27 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950). 28 Albert Bierstadt, “Among the Sierra Nevada, California,” 1868, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D. C. Thomas Moran, “Mountain of the Holy Cross,” 1875, Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles.


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tain meadows that dip and roll with wildflowers and climb on toward tall timber in the Tetons. We loved the saga of Lonesome Dove. We smoked cigarettes, thanks to the Marlboro Man. We drank Yukon Jack and cheered for Joe Montana. Caught up in the romance of it all, we still like to fancy ourselves living log-cabin lives, mourning with Willie when he sings, “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” Intrepidly, we ride around the city in wagon trains of SUVs branded with frontier names like Outlander, Blazer, Tracker, Scout, Explorer, Liberty, and Freelander. We ride herd to shopping malls where we can still find Levi jeans, Stetson hats, and Roper shirts with pearl snap fronts and western cut pockets. We follow the trail home in the sunset, if we can see it, beyond high rises that wrangle with the landscape. Lost in the American myth, we continue to carry on that ancient definition of the frontier as an invading army that is still taking over the land and its language.

11. Oh, Say, Can You See? Nowadays insurance agents and undertakers have appropriated the word anthem as a kind of health care plan or an embalming package. No doubt they know that we associate it with our national anthem, something that inspires reverence and awe. Even so, through the centuries, the history of the word will tell you that anthems have been appropriated for a variety of agendas. The word comes from the Greek antiphōnos meaning “responsive,”


from anti for “opposite” and phōno for “sound.”Later it would seem the “phone” version was substituted with “hymn.” By the fifteenth century, anthems had become antiphonal compositions in which soloists alternated with the organ and choir. Or two separate choirs sang a full anthem and a verse anthem in antiphonal arrangements where each choir echoed or responded to the other. You can imagine how awe-inspiring that could be if you hear it in a cathedral and understand how composers counted on the architecture of the building to lift and carry those soulful yet magisterial sounds. They were so impressive that by the nineteenth century royalty began to commandeer anthems to add to the importance of their promenades and other fanfare. As time passed and patterns changed, anthems became national songs of allegiance, as patriotic as the country’s flag. Ours was adopted during the Hoover Administration and sponsored by a Representative who hoped to promote tourist trade in his district, a district that included Fort McHenry, Maryland. Few of us flag-wavers realize that it was the siege of Fort McHenry that Francis Scott Key dramatized in the lyrics to the “Star-Spangled Banner.” And what was so immortal about the siege of Fort McHenry? It occurred during the War of 1812, a war according to some historians that was a silly minor war, a war that ended in a standoff. The Brits burned the White House and made sure we wouldn’t grab Canada. But we managed to keep our independence. Perhaps that’s not quite the triumph that comes to mind when we sing with hand over heart. Nevertheless we love “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It arouses patriotic sentiments even if most of us can’t quite hit the high notes. We know it’s a perilous embattled song, with red rockets glaring, with bombs bursting in air, and yet somehow it reminds us of the country we love. We don’t like to see our national anthem criticized or ridiculed, although by now some folks suspect we could have chosen a better tune or better lyrics. And yet, perhaps what matters most is the answer to what we envision when we ask, “Oh, say, can you see?”


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12. Are Eagles Democratic? On one December day when I walked to the mailbox, I heard a triumphant scream and looked up into an unusually blue sky. A bald eagle was cruising clean and easy, and then she came in so close, I could see her feathers ripple. The word eagle comes from the Latin aquila which also gave us the word aquiline meaning “something thin and curved.”Metaphorically aquiline still recalls the contour of eagle beak and talon. It’s a contour we’ve admired for centuries. For we look up to the eagle as an icon of power and patriotism. Romans, Incas, Native Americans, and Boy Scouts have adopted it to symbolize courage, grace, and that far-reaching eagle-eye vision. Yet despite its near universal adoration, the eagle has often been listed as an endangered species. When we wait for the return of the eagle, we are reminded of how precarious our environment can be. Even the careless admire the eagle’s fierce grace in love and war. It’s hard not to. At maturity an eagle’s wings can span up to seven feet. And their mating rites are spectacular. One flips upside down locking talons with the other. They tumble long enough, then break apart and continue flying. Yet, they brook no tenderness. An attacking eagle is never a pretty sight. With scimitar beak and claw, she can pounce on a fawn and tear off its head. She can snatch rabbits, ducks, puppies, whatever is open, vulnerable, and near flyweight. Or, she’ll catch fish, often stealing them from weaker birds. Eagles are hardly humanitarians. Watch what the parents do to any weakling in the nest. Survival of the fittest was never democratic. Nevertheless we like to associate them with democracy. So eagle icons perch atop our flagpoles, appear in patriotic banners, and are stamped on our national currency. The association is as puzzling as their treatment. After all, how could our democracy be associated with a large and powerful bird of prey?

13. Bikini’s Bombshell Just after the Fourth of July in 1946, a French stripper sauntered down the fashion runway wearing a bombshell of a bathing suit. It was designed by Louis Reard who introduced it as L’atome, “the atom.” Like an atom, it was the smallest part of an element


of clothing, a mere particle of matter and, at the time, advertisers were hoping that it would command the bump-and-grind power of an atomic bomb. Imagine wearing something as fashionable as an atom bomb. Eager to make a killing, advertisers timed its explosion on the runway a few days after atomic bombs were tested on an atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, an atoll named “Bikini.”29 Bikini? Indeed, compared to L’atome, bikini sounded so much more exotic and erotic. Within days the fashion industry began to parade the word about and in a flash the bikini’s starspangled-banner chemistry exploded like fireworks on the Fourth of July. Capitalizing on a sort of declaration of independence, the industry began to promote the bikini as patriotic. As the ads sincerely suggested, since fabric was rationed during the war, women who wore bikinis were women willing to make a sacrifice—as much as they could bare. They bared plenty. For a bikini wasn’t a bikini unless it was so scanty you could slip the entire get-up through a wedding ring. So here you have it: a couple of loyal parts tied up with patriotism and a wedding ring. Hence soon the bikini began to flirt with American family values. It still had enough fabric for stars and stripes, and enough for three separate colors, red, white, and blue. It was quite 29 The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, ed. Robert Hendrickson (New York: Checkmark Books, 2000), 72.


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a head-turning reminder, enough for folks to ask, with hands over hearts, “Oh, say, can you see?” The other Bikini refers to an atoll consisting of thirty-six islets in the Marshall Islands in the western Pacific. It was once another independent piece of property, the kind of place where everybody was supposed to live happily ever after. Archeologists will tell you that ancient people had been living there for over 4,000 years before the Spanish, seeking a western route to the Spice Islands, took it over. They were followed by the Germans, the Japanese, and finally the Americans. We evacuated the natives. Then from 1946-48 we used it as a Pacific proving grounds, a site where we tried out more than twenty hydrogen and atomic bombs. Even today there is still enough radio activity to light up your skeleton and to do more than tan your skin, although nobody there seems to be tuned in to the “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” By now you have to wonder how married we patriots are to our bikini heritage.

14. How Entertaining Is a Blockbuster? Nowadays a blockbuster is supposed to be something wildly entertaining. It’s Hollywood hyperbole for a sensational film, a smash hit. But not so long ago a blockbuster was a bomb, a real bomb. We started using the word during World War II when we dropped large aerial bombs on Japan, bombs called blockbusters because they were large enough to demolish an entire city block. Given that, it’s puzzling how we could so quickly associate a blockbuster with something that is entertaining. Was it crass advertising, or did that blockbuster of a word appeal to all of us who in our firecracker lives love to celebrate our independence and patriotism with a big bang, with bombs bursting in air? And yet, there are limits. Unlike a blockbuster, the word bomb isn’t quite so entertaining. While a blockbuster is a stunning success, a bomb is a devastating failure. We are hardly entertained by a film that turns out to be a real bomb. Besides that, bombs have always terrified us. Some folks still remember being unnerved when prudent neighbors built underground bomb shelters and stocked them with boiled water, canned food, and survivor manuals. At the time we feared the atom bomb, something frightfully


modern, although the word atom comes from the ancient Greek atomos meaning “unable to cut.” Atoms were supposed to be uncutable, the smallest part of an element. Before long, atom bombs went nuclear. Better than blockbusters, they could obliterate entire cities and bring an emperor to his knees. Yet, even then, few of us thought those bombs were entertaining, although they were news, big news. By now we know how it feels to be the victims of a blockbuster. We’ve seen clips of our own fall over and over. It’s still stunning to watch, but is it entertaining?

15. Amnesty: Living with the Memory of Unforgivable Crimes Are there crimes that are unforgivable? Most of us would feel justified in not forgiving an enemy who trashed the neighborhood, mutilated the men, raped the women, and brutalized the children. It happens, a lot, in war, in military coups, and when one group decides to bully another. When it’s finally over, what do you do next? Most of us would want revenge. We’d want to retaliate. We’d want justice. But there are others who are arguing for amnesty meaning “pardon or prosecution free period.” The word ultimately comes from the Greek amnēstos meaning “not remembered” and it’s closely related to amnesia, or “loss of memory.” So, do folks in favor of amnesty insist that victims simply forget about the crimes that occurred? Absolutely not. With that in mind and with the guidance of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee, citizens are raising questions about the ethics of justice, truth, forgiveness, and redemption. Can brutalized and brutalizing individuals ever live together in harmony? If that is a goal, where do you begin, and how do you get a nation full of animosity to reconcile itself? For starters, you tell the truth. In an open court, in televised hearings, the victims and their families describe exactly what happened, and the victimizers, often accompanied by their families, confess. They ask for forgiveness and offer to make amends. None of these solutions are obvious or easy, and they are treated on an individual basis rather than with blanket assumptions. It would seem the historical meanings of the words are telling. The goal is reconciliation, meaning “to make people friendly again.”It’s a word related to council, to calling together. But what


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about calling opponents together for amnesty? Are they suddenly supposed to become friends? Not necessarily. Even today, people who advocate amnesty must keep in mind what victims remember, what they’ve endured. There’s another relative to “remember,” the word mourn. Mourn? Remember? Here it would seem that the history of these words hardly insists that we simply forget. But what about forgive? That comes from the Old English forgiefan meaning “to abstain from giving.” And yet, the underlying idea is “giving up resentment.” No wonder it is so hard to forgive! Even so, perhaps keeping resentment is even harder. Because, how then do you live with the memory?

CHAPTER FOUR FAIRY TALES AND FAMILY VALUES

T

Introduction

he dictionary tells us that fairy tales were often supposed to offer moral messages. There’s a wolf that will eat your grandmother and dress up in her clothes. There’s a woman with a house full of tempting candy who likes to eat little children. There are plenty of mean-spirited, poisonous stepmothers along with dwarves—dopey, dirty, old men, who like to be tucked in bed by a little girl. There’s Cinderella, a rags-to-riches prima donna, rewarded for being such a sweet meek little girl. And there’s something terribly important about a young woman having tiny feet—if she’s going to be attractive. Fairy tales offer moral messages? If so, they seem both familiar and bizarre. Just as curious, today the moral majority preaches that fairies, often the most kind-hearted ones, are scary. And married fairies are even scarier. With that in mind, we’ll look into the etymology of the word fairy. We’ll also consider what, exactly, is meant by marriage as a peculiar institution, peculiar having to do with property rights. We’ll investigate the etymology of the word gymnasium, a place where beautiful young men exercised together, naked. And we’ll conclude by considering what Erik Satie called gymnopaedic rhythms. In these instances etymology will tell us what,


really, is traditional. That in turn should offer us the opportunity to think about what we value in the tales we tell and the gender preferences we try to impose.

1. Fairy Tales and Family Values Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a wolf that would eat your grandmother and cross-dress in her clothes. There was a witch who built a gingerbread house so she could attract starving children, fatten them up, and eat them. There were dwarves, happy, dopey, sleepy, sneezy, old men who became enamored with a sweet little girl who would tuck them into bed at night. And there were wicked stepmothers—one with a poison apple, another who forced a little girl to scrub the hearth while everyone else partied. They are all familiar fairy tale figures. Look up fairy tale in the dictionary and you’ll see it’s defined not only as “a false story” or “an unlikely explanation,” but also as “a story often containing a moral message.”1 Given the plot lines and the cast of characters, you have to wonder what kind of moral messages we are telling, and retelling. The word fairy comes from fourteenth century Old French faerie meaning “enchantment,” and before that it came from the Latin fata for “the Fates.”2 Centuries ago, the Greeks believed there were three Fates: Clotho, Lakhesis, and Atropos who were hardly those flighty stardust-and-gauze good-will nannies we think of today. Instead they were typically depicted as cold, remorseless, old crones. Clotho would spin the thread of life, Lachesis would decide its length, and Atropos would cut it. They could do what they pleased with your life and it had a lot more to do with fate than with morality. In other Greek legends a fairy could be a nymph or a beautiful young maid who lived in the woods and protected rivers, mountains, and trees. That pastoral kind of fairy appears later in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream where fairies cast spells and create mischief. There were also fairies envisioned by Irish mythmakers, darker fairies, who had been cast out of heaven along with Lucifer. He went to Hell but since they weren’t quite as bad, they 1 Encarta, s.v. “fairy tale.” 1.Story about fairies; a story for children about faries or other imaginary beings and events, often containing a moral message. 2 Ibid.

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were cast into Limbo. Supposedly from there they’d try to steal someone else’s soul and in doing so they’d often prey on vulnerable children. Such a myth is dramatized in William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Stolen Child,” where a cunning fairy sings temptingly, “Come away, O human child!/ To the waters and the wild/ With a faery, hand in hand,/ For the world’s more full of weeping than you can/ understand.”3 Here what seems a lovely invitation is actually a treacherous trick. Despite our fantasies, most fairies weren’t benevolent. Even in “Sleeping Beauty” there’s a wicked fairy who casts the spell to make the princess sleep for a century. We’re more familiar with the Disney version influenced by Tchaikovsky’s ballet but in 1697 Charles Perrault published an earlier version which would tell your child that after the Prince awakened Sleeping Beauty, they had two children, and when his mother discovered them, she planned to eat them. Just in time the children are saved and Grandma is cast into a tub of vipers.4 3 William Butler Yeats, The Poems of W.B. Yeats ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 18-19. 4 Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales (London: Constable, 1961). A. E. Johnson, trans., London: Constable & Company Limited, copyright 1961 by Dodd, Mead, & Company.


Values change and so do the moral implications of the words we use to describe them. Once upon a time fairy tales were supposed to relate moral messages to our children, but today there’s a mean-spirited moral message in the word fairy which has become a derogatory term for an individual whom some parents regard as perverse. Such unkind accusations are often made by people who claim, indignantly, to command superior insights regarding family values—which makes you wonder if there really is a connection between fairy tales and family values.

2. Cinderella’s Erotic Feet We still tell our daughters the story of Cinderella, the meek little girl forced by her wicked step-mother to tend the fire and sweep cinders. Dressed in rags, she was nevertheless pretty enough to arouse jealousy in her not-so-pretty step-sisters. Who’d want to marry them anyway, with their big egos and their big feet? But Cinderella, always obliging and obedient, married well, became a real princess, and lived happily ever after. Our daughters also learned from Cinderella that along with being meek and obedient, somehow it’s

important that you have small feet. It’s a story we’ve been telling for centuries, in books, film, pantomime, ballet, and opera. Today the word Cinderella speaks to a variety of female personalities. She is the meek young woman who


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submits immediately to stern orders. She’s the local princess who’s suddenly been forced to wash the dishes or do some other chore familiar to the rest of us. Then there’s the celebrated bride, a real Cinderella, who’s suddenly transformed in all of her lavish splendor to a beautiful princess, one who finally gets to marry the prince and live happily ever after. Despite all of that, we tend to forget about the size of her feet. The tale originated around 860 in The Miscellaneous Record of You Yang by Tuan Ch’eng-Shih, in China, in a country where the size of a young girl’s feet mattered—with bone-crushing reality. Sadly, diminutive feet were of such importance that for centuries the feet of millions of six-year-old little girls were broken, bent, and bound— tighter and tighter each month—until she had marriageable-sized feet.5 They were the kind of feet that kept a wife submissive and dependent. And they were supposed to be erotic feet, crushed and rounded to form a channel for wildly erotic stimulation. Later in Western versions of the story when the first stepsister cuts off a toe and the second cuts off her heel, they might have been willing to mutilate their feet, but they completely missed the point. What the prince was looking for was a little foot that curved around, one he could kiss, fondle, and rub. In “Cinderella” we’re also familiar with the term “fairy godmother,” that magical caring woman who suddenly appears to offer help to the heroine. She can work wonders with a pumpkin and a few rats. Even so, nowadays we have our suspicions about what we call a fairy. It can be a derogatory term for someone who is kind and yet someone who is also regarded as perverse. But does he care about the size of a little girl’s feet?

3. A Peculiar Institution The boys who drink breakfast beers at Big Rod’s Tap are joining forces with the folks from the Church of Christian Friendliness because they’re all worried about what’s happening to family values, especially since Henry Stokel and Simon Baker were just married and are setting up housekeeping in a gay-looking Victorian home right on Main Street. 5 Beverly Jackson, Splendid Slippers (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997), 2427.


Marriage has always been such a peculiar institution. Peculiar comes from peculiaris meaning “of private property.” Earlier peculiar came from pecus for “cattle or wealth.” So marriage became a peculiar institution when it was established as an alliance for property rights. Moreover as a peculiar institution it’s as old as the feudal system, the patriarchy, royal arrangements, and weddings of couples with property.6 It has become a part of what we’d call tradition, a long, long tradition. Nevertheless people who claim to be the experts on family values are insisting that when two individuals of the same gender want to get married, it violates a longstanding moral tradition. However these couples claim that they’d like to enjoy the same tax breaks, medical benefits, and property rights as those awarded to other married couples. In that sense their marriage really is traditional as well as peculiar. Not only peculiar, but downright perverse, argue the religious right and the boys at Big Rod’s. Perverse comes from pervertere meaning “to turn wrong.”7 It’s a turning of good to bad, a misinterpretation or distortion of facts. When it comes to fending off perversity, they like to cite Lot who, they argue, fended off the Sodomites. Maybe so. But in the bargain Lot offered up his virgin daughters for the Sodomites to rape. Later Lot “lay” with his own 6 William Saletan, “The Peculiar Institution,” New York Times, September 26, 2004, sec. 7. 7 Encarta, s.v. “pervert.” 14th century. Via Old French pervertir, literally “to turn wrong,” from vert.


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two daughters and both became pregnant.8 Nevertheless, it’s not Lot, but the gays who are accused of corrupting marriage and family values. It seems the argument resting on this oft-cited passage is itself perverse, an egregious distortion of what really happened. Even so, chances are the boys at Big Rod’s and their unlikely friends have pretty much made up their minds about what scripture says regarding this and good family values. Meanwhile the partners on Main Street are opening their gay home to others with family values as well. Except, when it comes to that, they’re just folks who value a different lot in life.

4. Indecent Exposure In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman describes twenty-eight young men bathing by the shore (11.199201).9 Judging from his description of them, we can tell that they are attractive, they are exercising, and it seems as though they are naked. This might seem alarming to some of us. Indeed it’s not likely a group of attractive young men will be able to find a gym class in town where they could exercise outdoors naked, although the word gymnasium, from the Greek gumnazein, once meant “to exercise naked.” We’ve admired the Greeks for centuries but some of us still have our suspicions about them. It’s hard not to admire their prohibitively beautiful bodies, well-toned and wonderfully muscular, the kind 8 Gen. 19 (New International Version). 9 Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1965), 38.


you see sculpted in world masterpieces. They walked in beauty and they competed in beauty. While the Greeks admired strength and speed in their athletic games, they also admired agility and the naked beauty of movement. Hence even in grueling decathlons these naked young men were expected to move with grace. And they were expected to dance, beautifully. They danced to honor their heroes and they danced to honor their gods. Even their war dances were beautiful to watch, and in Sparta that kind of dancing was called gymnopaedia referring to a dance performed by naked boys. The gymnopaedic cadences and rhythms of these dancers were so hauntingly beautiful that they have influenced composers for centuries. Perhaps most memorable are the Gymnopédies composed in 1888 by Erik Satie and orchestrated by Claude Debussy. They are gentle, complex, irregular pieces of music and by their very nature they reject many of the characteristics we expect to find in classical music. There’s a shift in familiar rhythms, in the actual body language of the music. Phrases terminate mid-flow and key signatures alter more than we’d expect, so at times the changes may seem a bit flighty. However the music itself is poignant and emotional. If you listen, you might come away struck by their native elegance and narrative beauty rather than by their unconventionality. Even so, listeners adamant about convention may find Satie’s music unnatural and disturbing, just as some do when they hear Whitman’s poetry. Moreover people suspected there was something unspeakable about the men themselves, about the kinds of personal preferences they harbored. It’s the same kind of suspicion we have entertained about those naked Greeks and how they exercised. We admire beauty, but not without bias. We think beauty is a virtue, but it’s important that it’s a womanly virtue. Hence we are uneasy; thinking of a man as beautiful—it’s just too womanly—and a group of them exercising together naked is enough to really put our knickers in a twist. It’s the same kind of thinking that tells us that in a gym, a real man should be balancing barbells, not a ballerina.

CHAPTER FIVE VAMPS, BUNNY BOILERS, & AMAZON WOMEN WARRIORS

I

Introduction

n this chapter we’ll look at some of the more exotic, unnerving, and fearsome aspects of women and sexuality. Indeed, aggressive women can be very scary, frightful as vamps or Amazon woman warriors. On the other hand, the public is often titillated by women who are aggressive, or at least salaciously sexy and willing. With that in mind, we’ll take a peek at the Playboy bunny. We’ll look into the history of salty figureheads. We’ll pick up on those mildly indecent “hello girls.” And we’ll consider the etymology of words such as pimp, whore, and prostitute. Finally, in light of their etymologies, we might want to ask ourselves: Are there really any happy hookers?

1. Bon Appetite à la Dracula In Sunday school we were taught that Eve tempted Adam. But it took Hollywood and the early silent film Woman to turn Eve into a seductive female vamp. 1 For some viewers, that seemed disturbingly profane, a wicked tinkering with what the Bible said. Or perhaps 1 Maurice Tourneur film Woman, 1918. Harry Waldman, Maurice Tourneur: The Life and Films ( Jefferson, North Carolina, London: McFarland), 2001, 78-80.


what seemed even more depraved was the gender switch, the idea of introducing a woman as a predator, a seductive predator. Hollywood’s female vamp was dramatized as a lust-loving temptress with long red fingernails and a secret barracuda smile. She was forbidden, but beckoning, and with her sultry, seductive, serpentine ways she managed to entice more than one respectable man to dally with her at the risk of home, family, and honorable reputation. Despite the new sensationalism, Hollywood’s depiction of a female vamp wasn’t exactly original. In 1897 in Dracula Bram Stoker introduced the earlier male version called a “vampire.” It was a relatively recent word that materialized about one-hundred fifty years earlier from the Serbo-Croat vampir. Stoker depicts his vampire as a Carpathian prowler with a predatory imagination, a depraved addict driven by a red-blooded appetite, hungry enough to want to lurk around in your bedroom. The horror intensifies when Mina Murray, a woman as innocent as Eve was, gets the bite and then rather willingly morphs into a seductive long-in-the-tooth female vamp. Even so, in depicting her, Stoker never did use the word “vamp.” That shortened version of vampire came into fashion around the time when movie goers in the 1920s were introduced to Theda

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Bara. Born as Theodosia Burr Goodman in Cincinnati, Ohio, Theda Bara became one of America’s first silent-film stars, a vamp with a past invented by Hollywood. According to the writer Sumiko Higashi, stories about Bara’s past vary, but they were all exotic: She was born on the sands of the Sahara in the shadow of the pyramids. She was the daughter of a desert sheik and an Egyptian princess. She was weaned on serpents’s blood and likened to a fiend in Hungary who slaughtered 600 girls a day just to bathe in their blood. She liked to lunch on lettuce leaves and raw beef. She waited, sated and gloating, in a wicked chamber of pleasure. And she beckoned innocent married men to her boudoir in a hotel room draped in black, the atmosphere thick with incense, smoky, and seductive. 2 During Bara’s time, a vamp was typecast in Hollywood as a hypnotic predator, a sexy rival to any virtuous wife with an honorable husband. It’s also important to know that the good women were typically blond and light-skinned while the evil seductive vamp was usually dark as an Arab. Coming from that evil empire, she was depicted as the dusky-skinned sexual terrorist who preyed on vulnerable white men and toyed with family values until things were reduced to ruin. As for the white women, the good ones who were pure in heart typically managed to stifle their wicked impulses, but the dark vamps who lacked restraint inevitably suffered the consequences of their unhealthy urges. Viewers were alarmed. But as any vamp will tell you, you are what you eat. It’s all a matter of what you bite into.

2. Amazon Women Warriors “She’s a real Amazon,” said Buck Ramshaw, one of the locals who was drinking breakfast beers with the boys at Big Rod’s Tap. He was unhappy because Saphira Febblecorn had taken up archery and now she wasn’t putting up with any nonsense, especially after he had tried out his new chainsaw on another century-old oak tree near her property. “She grazed my best camouflage jacket,” he said, pointing to a hole in the shoulder. The men looked worried. Where did women get such ideas, anyway? 2 Sumiko Higashi, Virgins, Vamps, and Flappers: The American Silent Movie Heroine (St. Albans, Vermont: Eden Press Women’s Publications, 1978), 55-58.


Today calling a woman “a real Amazon” isn’t much of a compliment. Although the word might have come from the Iranian ha-mazon meaning, “fighting together,” it’s more likely that the European version was influenced by Greek folklore. Legend had it that Amazons were frightful women warriors who lived west of the Black Sea and far north, near the outer limits of the world. They were manhaters and they were deadly competitive archers, so determined that nothing would get in the way when they pulled a bow, that each of them burned or hacked away her bow-sided breast. Because of that, they were called Amazons from the Greek a “without” and from mastos for “breast.” Other words associated with mastos are the dreaded mastectomy and the mastoid process which refers to that rounded raised area behind your ear. But perhaps the most improbable relative of Amazon is mastodon. It combines masto- with odōn meaning “tooth” because a mastodon was named for the nipple-shaped tubercles on its molars. Mastodons and their molars have rested in the soil for eons, but women warriors weren’t so easy to sink. Amazons surfaced again in 1541 after the Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana was fiercely attacked in South America by women of the Tapuya tribe. Although the men fought too, it was the women warriors who so unnerved de Orellana. After several harrowing battles, he called them “Amazons,” a name that eventually described the entire region. Now there’s no evidence that the Tapuyas had burned or hacked away their bow-sided breasts, and neither had Saphira Feeblecorn. But the implication is that an Amazon is definitely willing to make more of a sacrifice than any man would. Hence she is likely to over-


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power all of them. You can see that same psychology at work in an incident depicted in Toni Morrison’s Sula when a gang of bullies threatens to harm two young girls on their way home from school. As the bullies approach, one of the girls takes out a paring knife and cuts off the tip of her finger. She says, “If I can do that to myself, think what I can do to you.”3 The bullies back off. They don’t even want to think about what she could do to them. And all Amazon women warriors count on that.

3. Bunny-Boilers: Newest Members of the Club Gloria Steinem brightened the eyes of readers when she wrote the well-thumbed article, “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” in which she described her undercover work at one of the clubs where she exposed quite a bit more than Playboy was willing to bear.4 In the Bunny borough, she complained about the long hours of rabbiting around in lavish clubs, stepping-and-fetching for letches of leisure with limited imaginations. Given that, you have wonder why any intelligent woman would ever want to be regarded as a “bunny.” It’s a childish word for rabbit. It comes from the English dialect bun meaning, “rabbit’s tail” and from the Gaelic bun for “bottom” or “stump.” We used to think of bunnies as passive and innocuous, but then, in the 60s another lap pet version came around wearing a D cup corset along with tuxedo collar and cuffs. There were also perky satin ears nearly a foot long and a fluffy romper-sized cottontail. The entire get-up is registered as a service uniform and is listed in The United States Patent Trademark Office as patent #762,884. You can see some of the originals exhibited, with ears cocked coquettishly, in the Smithsonian.5 By now the Bunnies are collecting Social Security, but they still gather in Las Vegas for Bunny Reunions which tend to titillate some of the old boys who like to think they are still young enough. However by now the Bunnies have found another cause, soliciting for the Y-Me breast cancer organization. Why me? Given the expo3 Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Penguin, 1973), 54-55. 4 Encyclopædia Britannica’s Guide to Women’s History, s.v. “Steinem, Gloria.” 5 www.explayboybunny.com


sure, it’s a curious choice of charity, but then breast cancer has ruined more than one career. Meanwhile, following the sexual revolution, some bunnies have come to be regarded as far more aggressive and that comes out of a rather daunting episode in Fatal Attraction. After Glenn Close has seduced family man Michael Douglas, he quickly repents and tries to separate from her. Ah, but she doesn’t take rejection lightly. She retaliates by stalking him and then by threatening his family until in one hare-raising scene the family returns home to find their pet bunny boiling on the stove. With that in mind, what would you call a woman who at first seems ready for a romp but later, after being tossed aside, becomes alarmingly vindictive? A “bunny-boiler.” For weekend playboys like Michael Douglas a bunny boiler is the newest member of the club.

4. Salty Figureheads In the dining room of Pablo Neruda’s home facing the Pacific Ocean in Chile, there’s a table built from a side of tide-washed timber, laddered with the growth rings of centuries, that had thundered onto his beach. Nearby, as if to keep the diners and that ocean-riding table company, you’ll see a number of salty figureheads leaning out from the walls as though they were still standing at the prows of ships. All of them are colorful characters. Some resemble fierce warriors. At least one is a bawdy bare-breasted woman. Others are stately looking. But all have faced whatever the waves and weather have hurled at them.


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Originally the word figurehead referred to a carved figure that projected out from the bow of a ship and it represented something significant to a ship’s purpose or sponsor. Today that seems to have gone out of fashion. Instead, figureheads tend to serve metaphorically as ships of state where they might appear to head organizations but actually have no real responsibility or authority. It’s like Queen Elizabeth II. Traditionally she might command power and prestige but she doesn’t exactly run the country. Nevertheless sailors tended to take their carved figureheads seriously, especially since they serve as religious or political icons that could symbolically pilot the ship. On one of the most famous ships, the USS Constitution, a figurehead of President Jackson holds a place of honor at her bow. However in other quarters figureheads of females were far more popular, probably because many were naked, at least from the waist up. Sailors claimed such women would appease the gods of the sea who were mostly male and whose intemperate natures could kick up a storm. It gives new meaning to the term “breasting a storm.” In our imaginations perhaps one of the most recognizable ships that could sail through a storm would be the Cutty Sark, that familiar clipper ship we so often see on liquor labels, even if the original Cutty Sark was supposed to have transported tea. By now it’s become a common image with a curious name, especially if you are unaware that its figurehead, Nannie the witch, wore a cutty sark or “a short shirt.” The term comes from the Robert Burns poem “Tam o’Shanter,” supposedly a favorite of Captain Jock Willis’s who then used the phrase “Cutty Sark” to name his ship. The narrator in the poem tells us about the tipsy Tam o’Shanter who foolishly stopped to spy on Nannie, a free spirit who enjoyed cavorting nearly naked in the woods. He spoiled her fun when he watched and when she caught sight of him, she dashed after him in a rage, seeking revenge. He narrowly escaped her clutches, and instead she managed to snatch off the tail of his horse. The result has a playful symbolic meaning, particularly in how readers view a man who has indulged himself in such annoying behavior. Indeed after Tam dismounted and walked around to the backend of his horse, what do you suppose he saw? Something to remind genteel readers of what he really was.


5. Hello Girls Brought Temptation over the Telephone How do you greet someone you can’t see? That was the problem people faced when they began picking up the telephone. Until then, most greetings were determined by class, dress, or body language. But when the telephone began ringing, you couldn’t tell whether you’d be greeting the bail bondsman or the bishop. So what greeting could you use that was polite, but neutral? For the Italians it’s Pronto meaning “right away” or “here.” For the Spanish it’s Bueno for “good day” or “good evening.” For the Germans it’s often Bitte, or “please tell me what you want.” However the Americans seem to have settled on “Hello.” Some scholars think hello developed from the French holá meaning, “Stop there!” Or, it may have been influenced by hallow, a word related to wholeness and health. In that case, hallow was first associated with a blessing, with making something holy, like hallowed ground or “hallowed be thy name.” By Chaucer’s time it had become a greeting of honor and respect. By Shakespeare’s time hallow had changed to halloo, a call used by foxhunters. Then by the late nineteenth century, halloo was used as a greeting, one that was changing to hello. And hello began to attract far wider attention when it was adopted as the word we used to answer the telephone. Today, without assistance, we can telephone someone trekking across the outskirts of Mongolia but at first callers needed the assistance of an operator. She relayed doctor calls, death notices, grocery lists, and party line gossip.


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In the 1880s and 1890s around Boston some operators moonlighted as those mildly indecent hello girls. They acted as personal alarm clocks for thousands of men, and it titillated the public to think that a strange woman with a come hither voice could wake up a respectable man in his bedroom. In 1889 Mark Twain satirized that in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court when Hank, the inventive Yankee, organizes a bank of hello girls to wake up Sir Arthur’s court. Be that as it may, if hello girls roused respectable men in their bedrooms, what do you suppose came along next? Another kind of visitor who was paid for a call: a “call girl.”

6. Are There Really Any Happy Hookers? We’ve all heard of the daughter from an upstanding family who’s “gone bad.” And the history of the word whore will tell a similar story.6 Originally the word came from a fine and impassioned Indo European ancestor meaning “to desire,” the same ancestor that gave birth to a loving family of words such as cherish and caress. It’s also related to kamasutra, from kāma, for “love,” and sūtra, for “precept,” together referring to “an ancient Sanskrit text giving instruction on the art of lovemaking.” That hardly sounds sordid. In one way or another all of us desire to be cherished and loved. How many of us don’t long to have a partner who’s adept in the art of lovemaking? Well then, what became so bad about whore? According to the definition, she has sold out what we think is singularly beautiful and intimate, and she’s passed it around. Moreover she’s set aside her personal integrity in order to obtain something for selfish profit. At least that’s what the dictionary tells us. And yet, so often there’s a story behind the story. Why do women become whores? They’d have to be desperate. Are there, really, any happy hookers? By now we know that most of them have suffered long sad histories of abuse, and in the end they become even more blameworthy. What about the word prostitute? That started out in disgrace, right away, coming from the Latin prostituere meaning “to expose publicly for sale.” It was like putting a woman on an auction block, so prostitution and slavery share that common misery. Today if you prostitute what is uniquely and intimately yours, you compromise 6 Encarta. hōre. Ultimately from an Indo-European base meaing “to desire” that is also the ancestor of English cherish, caress, and Kama Sutra.


it for money or power. And similar to whore, so often it’s the prostitute who’s blamed, but rarely the buyer. We tend to think of prostitutes as women, but men can also become marketable sexual victims and they were called punks, even if at first the word punk referred to a female prostitute. In 1603 in Measure for Measure Shakespeare uses it with that implication: “She may be a punk; for many of them, are neither maid, widow, or wife (5.1.179-180).7 Around 1705, punk began to refer to “rotten wood,” something worthless, something that could be used for tinder. Before long that notion of worthlessness coupled with its sexual connotation made punk a slang term for “a young male partner of an older man or a young man who’d been sodomized.” Punks were victimized and they were rubbish, regarded as worthless, foolish, lazy, and arrogant. Not surprisingly, they were also unhealthy. Hence they were looked upon as weak in spirit, or punky. Later still, the word punk came to stigmatize homosexuality. By the 1950s the meaning of the word changed again when a punk became a petty rebel, a small-time swaggering hoodlum, the kind who’d wear a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his short-sleeved muscle shirt. At that time punk was also slang for a cigarette. Similar to inferior wood, it was slow burning and junky, not unlike resentful useless people. 7 William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 580.


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Around the 1950s punks combed and slicked back their hair into a style that was bird flipping, or duck-ass, and by the 1970s punk hair was starched into defiant neon spikes or shaved as bizarre half-done razored heads. Supposedly punks hated all people including themselves and it would seem they started piercing noses and navels to prove it. Some even bit off the heads of live chickens at rock concerts where punk music was shocking, deliberately offensive, and impossible to ignore. It was associated with names like Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols or Sid Vicious. In a way punkers are like musical terrorists and we tend to despise them as we do whores and prostitutes, except that punks are scary. It’s always scary when the victims grow up to become the victimizers.

CHAPTER SIX WOLF WHISTLES

M

Introduction

ore often than not, word histories show us how we discriminate against those who are least likely to protest. When it comes to animals, creatures that cannot always articulate to us how they feel, our vocabulary is hounded with metaphors that keep them at bay. Although we claim to admire the wolf for his courage and independence, we don’t like how he eats and we definitely don’t like how he whistles. We admire deer and horses for their beauty and grace, but it’s never a compliment to be called buck-toothed or horse-faced. We profess to love our dogs, but they continue to typify unattractive girls, contemptible fellows, decrepit cars, and your tired and smelly feet. We might hug our teddy bears, but the original rough riding Teddy was celebrated as a bear hunter. As for birds, cormorant means greedy, a turkey is a real looser, a dove can be soiled, and a raven, by a coincidence in sound is associated with what’s ravenous. Here, the history of words seems to roar, hoot, and howl, with derision. We have accumulated an entire lexicon of cat calls.


1. “Woof!” “Woof!” is that hungry belly rumble of a carnivore announcing, “I’m going to eat you up!” Coming from the Old English wulf, it’s the sound that puts teeth into the word it whelped, wolf. It’s also related to the same Indo European ancestor that gave us lupus and the mysterious lycanthropy, a word that combines the Greek lukos for wolf and anthrōpos for human being. Put them together and you’ll have the material for a horror story since lycanthropy means “the transformation of a human into a wolf.” During childhood most of us were convinced that a wolf could eat your grandmother. And oddly, after he’s done that, he’ll even dress in your grandmother’s clothes and climb under the covers, so when a nice little girl comes skipping into the bedroom with a basket of goodies, he can spring out of bed and eat her. It’s an odd story to tell a child. As we grew older, no wonder the wolf was still suspect. We don’t like how he whistles. His two-note song signals harassment. We don’t like his manners. No one cares to dine with someone who wolfs down his dinner. We want to keep the wolf away from the door. Moreover we really don’t like how he dresses. Even Aesop and Jesus warned us to beware of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.1 It would seem that wolves can cause plenty of trouble around sheep, and today shepherds and cattle ranchers will tell you that wolves will kill for sport, for the sheer fun of it. Hence they argue that wolves are the kind of gleeful killers that should be shot or poisoned. However there are others who envision dances with wolves. For them a 1 Matt.7:15 (New International Version). www.bartleby.com/17/1/39.htm

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wolf in the wild symbolizes freedom and independence. They regard wolves as endangered heroes, fierce fighters, and champions of liberty, sadly beleaguered animals who are loyal to their packs and tender as parents. Still, the negative connotations persist. Orchestras would like to tune out the wolves. When a violinist hears a defective vibration or a harsh tone, she is likely to call it a wolf. So will a harpsichordist who hears dissonance. And when it comes to political dissonance, in the Soviet they would give you a volchiy bilet, or a “wolfish ticket.” 2 It’s their version of blacklisting. So a wolfish ticket will get you a one way ride to Siberia. Given our wolfish phrases, isn’t it possible that we project on the wolf some of our own savage inclinations? Indeed there are times when our own actions reflect wolfish behavior. You can read a chilling example of that in Willa Cather’s My Antonia, when two Russian brothers, who’ve been banished from their homeland, confess why they are haunted by the howls of wolves on the Nebraska prairie.3 In their terror they recall a night in Russia when they joined a drunken wedding party that took off over the tundra on sledges, a carefree party—until wolves began to blacken the landscape, hundreds of them. Everybody sobered up, remembering recent talk about how so many wolves were starving, and how bold they were. In easy cruising strides, the wolves loped in, gaining, then closing in. One sledge overturned. Then another. And another. In the clear cold air, screams of torn friends carried through the tundra, but perhaps more terrifying was the ferocious silence that followed. More and more wolves swung in. In the last remaining sledge the panicked drivers lashed the frantic horses, but one horse was weakening. The wolves loped in closer, howling and hungry. Then, in a desperate attempt to lighten their load, the two brothers grabbed the bride and threw her to the wolves. It was survival of the fittest, something any wolf can understand. However, with wolfish behavior in mind, we might want to ask, was bride a heavy bride? 2 The Oxford Russian-English Dictionary, s.v. “wolf ticket.” William G. Rosenberg, review of Cold Spring in Russia, by Andreyev Chernov, Russian Review ( Jan. 1979): 91-93. 3 Willa Cather, My Antonia (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), 36-41.


2. Bedding and Baiting Bears For centuries we’ve been bedding and baiting bears. And that curious contrast in attitude has created a real etymological circus for the word bear. In one ring we’ve tricked him out as that cozy cuddly teddy, the bear-hugging variety you’d take home to bed or the koala you’d win at a carnival. But in the other ring we’ve watched, with glee, that bloody, drooling, beleaguered bear, the crowd-pleasing entertainment in a bear baiting. Even so, whether a bear has been embraced or embattled, its history seems more or less unbearable. At first the word was thought to describe a wild beast of northern nations. Then, before it emerged as the Old English bera, some scholars think it came from a prehistoric Germanic word meaning “the brown one.”4 Bear is also related to burden, bier, and berth. And it’s related to barrow, a hand cart, which curiously makes bear kin to wheelbarrow. Moreover bear is also related to words like fertile and birth where the connection seems to be that you carry a burden and then bear down.5 Given such a variety of associations, you can see how the social history of bear could range widely. In many views bears have been romanticized. Despite all the warnings, there are people who will still try to feed them in national parks. We’ve also taught our children to be capti4 Encarta, s.v. “bear.” 5 Encarta, s.v. “bear1.” Word Key: Origin.

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vated by cuddly versions of Winnie the Pooh, Corduroy, Care Bear, and of course, the teddy bear. But hunters like to shoot bears. It’s far more macho than shooting a deer. With that in mind, what could be more heroic than a rough riding President who was celebrated as a bear hunter? Around 1910 that association caught on in cartoons, in doggerel, and in the Bronx Zoo where visitors could view the “Teddy” bears. Soon retailers were marketing them, and then, during the next campaign, politicians urged the nation to embrace them. So at the time bears were both hunted and hugged.6 Before that, they were baited. Even the history of word “bait” seems to indicate that. Coming from the Old Norse beit for food, it ultimately derives from beita meaning “to hunt with dogs.” And to bait once meant “to set dogs on a chained animal, usually a bear or a bull, for sport.”7 It happened. For centuries, from the Roman circus to the Bear Gardens on the banks of the Thames, bear baiters would set pit dogs on to a chained bear.8 Spectators would bet on the outcome and some bears even became infamous in their own right as Sackerson was in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (1.1.294-99). However even if the bear wasn’t chained, he was forced to fight at other disadvantages. Bear-baiters liked to rip out the bear’s fangs, pull out his claws, and pry out his eyes. Watching him try to defend himself after that was oddly entertaining to spectators. Even a Renaissance queen like Elizabeth watched, and the royals who benefited from tax revenue imposed on these fights appointed an official Master of Bears and Dogs. In the midst of it all, with pit dogs snarling, the bear would rise to the bait. And that is no fish story.

6 John Ciardi, The Browser’s Dictionary, s.v. “teddy bear.” John Ayto, Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins, s.v. “teddy bear.” Encarta, s.v. “bear.” Word Key: Origin. 7 Encarta, s.v. “bait.” 8 Erica Louise Fudge, “The Contest of Bear-Baiting in Early Modern England, 1558-1660,” (PhD diss., University of Sussex, 1995). In part, the introduction speaks to how people at the time had no concept of animal rights and outlines accepted ideas at the time as to how animals should be treated.


3. Where the Buck Stops In any season a buck can bound over barbed wire with springtime in his heart. He is that regal, robust, resister of gravity who gallops through glade and thicket without tumble or tangle, his rack of antlers held high. He is elusive in life and elusive in language. We’re not sure how the word originated, perhaps from the Old English bucca meaning “male goat,” or from buc meaning “male deer,” or perhaps the origin of the word was left in a lost language. Be that as it may, we identify with him. We buck up to summon courage. In other instances we try to pass the buck. There are a number of theories regarding how that originated. Some think that before dollars became common currency, passing the buck came about when buckskins were bartered, particularly with Indians. Others think passing the buck could have originated in gambling dens where buckhorn knives were used as markers or as objects thrown into the jackpot and temporarily taken by the winner. Or, players who sat around crude barroom tables would pass the buck by stabbing the table with a buck-handled knife, staking out who dealt next. Whatever its origin, passing the buck became a figurative way for all of us to pass on responsibility.9 If we’ve learned to pass the buck, we’ve also learned how to rationalize killing one. Most deer hunters will tell you they kill out of kindness, to cull the crop, to keep deer from starving, to prevent suffering and ignoble death. Or they’ll tell you they want to commune with nature and kill their own meat. But not every hunter likes to eat venison, perhaps because the meat can take on an unappetizing tang from the kinds of chemicals released when an animal is alarmed about being hunted down. Moreover somehow the size of the rack matters. And then you hear the word trophy. Our word for trophy comes via the French trophée from the Latin tropaeum meaning “a monument to victory.” Historically a trophy was a commemorative medal or a monument, one typically associated with putting something to flight. But by now a trophy can mean, derisively, “a trophy wife” or “a trophy sports car,” something you acquire in an effort to improve your status, except that usually it’s the kind of thing that people will laugh at behind your back. Meanwhile, armed with firepower and scope, and more often than 9 The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, s.v. “buck.”

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not with “a hunter’s twelve pack,” trophy hunters will bag a buck and then typically brag about a clean kill. Whether or not they are humane, the buck stops here.

4. Heel! Centuries ago a medieval saint named Bernard wrote, “Love me, love my dog.”10 It was a plea for tolerance and a necessary one when you consider the reprehensible reputation that has pervaded our vocabulary regarding the word dog. Early on, in Middle English, dogge meant “poor and worthless.” Keeping that in mind, it would seem that metaphorically we have used the word dog to step and fetch for us for centuries. By now dogs can be unattractive girls, contemptible fellows, boring dates, jinxed cars, Broadway flops, or your tired and smelly feet. A doggish person is surly and gruff. If you’re doggoned, you’re damned. Dog-eared books are shabby, doggerel is trivial, dog paddlers are clumsy, and contrary to what dog lovers might believe, the dictionary tells us leading a dog’s life refers to “a wretched existence.”11 Moreover phrases referring to dogs can be vicious, especially in a dog-eat-dog world. Or they can be as mean as the dog in the manger, from Aesop’s fable in which a barking dog prevented the hardworking hungry ox from eating hay the dog himself did not want. In another myth, dog days became the most sweltering ones of the summer from July 3 to August 11. Stargazers in ancient Rome noticed that Sirius the Dog Star rose during that time and they believed the star added enough heat to bring on those panting dog days. Through the years these myths have accumulated to add to the despicable reputation of dog. Despite that, it would seem there is about one dog for every five people in America and most of us spend more money on our dogs than we do on the symphony or a birthday present for our mothers. Hence it is puzzling that through the centuries a more positive etymology has not emerged, especially since dogs were among the 10 Brewer’s Dictionary of 20th-century Phrase and Fable, s.v. “Love me, Love my Dog.” You can find this proverb attributed to St. Bernard in Latin, “Quo me amat, amat et canem meam,” French, “Qui aime Pertrand, aime son chien” and Spanish, “Quién bién quiérs a beliram, bien quiére a su can.” (If you love anyone, you will like all that belongs to him.) 11 Encarta, s.v. “dog.”


first animals domesticated by humans. They kept cavemen company. They warmed the hands and hearts of lonely people in igloos and Sherpa tents. They herd sheep and cattle. They keep coyotes at bay. They lead the blind, alert the deaf, rescue the snowbound. They guard your yard. They lick sticky kids clean. Best of all, they nap beside you and always wake up ready for an adventure. The socialist Antoine Toussenel has been credited with saying, “The more one gets to know of men, the more one values dogs.” We might laugh—except that Toussenel was a busy anti-Semite. For him the men who were more despicable than dogs were Jews. Hence Toussenel wasn’t necessarily a dog lover, he was just a Jew hater.12 What he said wasn’t much of a compliment to a dog either. We claim to love our dogs, and yet we continue to use allusions to them to denigrate others. So the history of words makes you wonder, if a dog is man’s best friend, what kind of friend is man?

5. Dead Cat Jokes Although the word cat can refer to a bad-tempered woman, mostly cats are cool. They are jazzy. We’re not too sure why, but we tend to admire their pajamas and their whiskers. The word comes from the Old English catt and catte, but we suspect it ultimately came from an Egyptian word, from a country where cats were adored in life, embalmed in death, and memorialized in elaborate pet cemeteries. Despite their celebrated history, for quite some time now we’ve been telling dead cat jokes. And before that, around 1747, there was even a playful dead cat ode composed by Thomas Gray titled, “On the Death of a Favorite Cat.”13 At first readers might not think the poem is as heartlessly funny as a dead cat joke, especially since an ode, from the Greek ōidē for “song,” is both solemn and ceremonial, the cat’s meow when it comes to poetry.14 As a lyric poem, an ode expresses exalted emotion in a complex scheme of rhyme 12 Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 6th ed., ed. Elizabeth Knowles (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 797. Historical Dictionary of France from the 1815 Restoration to the Second Empire, ed. Edgar Leon Newman (New York & Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press: 1987), 529. 13 Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard with the Complete Poems of Thomas Gray (Mount Vernon, New York & Peter Pauper Press, 1948), 22-23. 14 A Dictionary of Literary Terms, s.v. “ode.”

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and meter that is modeled on the choral songs of Greek drama. So odes were of Olympian significance. Elaborate, formal, stately, and grand, they were often written in honor of victors in the Greek games. But an ode to a dead cat? Even a cat lover may wonder, why? We get our first important clue when Gray warns the cat not to be attracted to anything flashy, a goldfish. Next we learn that the cat is a “she,” one who “stretched in vain to reach the prize” and then “tumbled headlong in.” Most important, as the poem progresses we begin to realize that the cat is merely a metaphor, nicely groomed reference, to the “she” Gray loved, a woman who fell for someone else, someone flashy who waved around plenty of gold. In tumbling for that, she has overreached herself. And Gray tells us that her dying isn’t easy. She surfaces eight times, mewing. No one stirs. So what’s the lesson? Gray admonishes her: Not all that tempts her wandering eyes and heedless heart is her lawful prize, nor is “all that glisters gold.” It’s a phrase that alludes to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (2.7.65).15 Today we’d say “all that glitters is not gold.” Well now, she was tempted and she did fall for another man. But to surface eight times mewing—while no one stirs? It’s supposed to be a playful poem. But you have to wonder, who’s laughing?

6. Whipping up Horse Metaphors Although a colorful figure like General George Custer has long ago been carried off by anaerobic bacteria, his horse must have seemed far more important to preserve. He still stands, saddled and

15 William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 265.


ready to ride, inside a museum at the University of Kansas with a plaque dutifully describing his heroic role.16 While the origin of the word horse is uncertain, the dictionary defines it as “an animal that neighs,” adding that it’s “a large four-legged animal with mane, tail, hooves, and a large head.”17 Given such an unappealing description, you have to wonder why we’ve been so taken with horses, with what the Apaches reportedly called “God dogs.” Now more than ever, even on big city highways, we like to ride herd in vehicles with names like Mustang, Bronco, Appaloosa. In our imaginations, we still want to keep horses running around the country. A generation ago, we wept when Black Beauty was cruelly mistreated but nevertheless carried on courageously with spirit and passion. Today that same kind of angst regarding a horse’s character is still being dramatized in best sellers like Seabiscuit, The Horse Whisperer, and All the Pretty Horses. In the past horses have been especially romanticized along with the American West. Take the horses out of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, or any other western for that matter, and without a doubt you’ll take away the romance. Even so, despite our nostalgia regarding horses, we often tether them to some mean metaphors. Imagine beating a dead horse and then complaining that it doesn’t get us anywhere. Horse laughs are loud and scornful. Horsy women are heavy and angular. Horse traders are shrewd and unscrupulous. And horse shit is human nonsense. In geological argot, a horse is derided as an obstructive rock mass. In the arts, horse opera is viewed as trite trash, a tedious western melodrama, all the more so because it features horses. And in not so artful dialogue, if you are mean, you may well be compared, indelicately, to a horse’s derrière. On the other end, look at a horse’s teeth and you’ll see how old he is: the real truth, “right from the horse’s mouth.” We get that notion not necessarily because we think horses are so truthful, but because we know horse traders are so often untruthful. Historically they have been known as hard bargainers and shrewd operators who are typically unscrupulous. Hence in many of the metaphors we 16 Encyclopedia Smithsonian, s.v. “Famous Horses.” Comanche is currently on display in a humidity controlled glass case at the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History, Dice Hall, Lawrence, Kansas. http://www. si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/nmnh/famehors.htm 17 Encarta, s.v. “horse.”

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use, we project on horses some of our own inadequacies—perhaps because all of us have so little horse sense.

7. Home, Home on the Range Indians ran thousands of buffalo over cliffs, and cowboys stopped millions with barbed wire and buckshot. In the early 1800s there were up to 73,000,000 of them, easily 100,000 buffalo for each inhabitant of the plains, enough to squander. They were easy prey, a sizeable target, neither savvy nor reclusive. You could hear them coming like a prairie rainstorm. But eight decades later what was left of them could not be counted in the millions or even the thousands, but only in the few hundreds. White men slaughtered them to near extinction, sometimes for food, but mostly for fun. During 1867-1868 Buffalo Bill Cody alone killed around 4,280 buffalo. It’s true that some buffalo were killed to supply meat for crews building railroads, but even more important, there was a political agenda behind this slaughter. By killing off the buffalo, white settlers made it increasingly difficult for Indians to survive since buffalo meat and hides were essential to their migratory existence. Settlers soon discovered that the more buffalo they killed, the easier it was for them to take over the land and force the starving Indians onto reservations. With much of that in mind, the slaughter of buffalo in the West became so pandemic that by 1889 there were, by reliable estimates, only 835 left alive.18 If buffalo were victimized, 18 Encyclopedia Britannia, s.v. “bison.”


they were also misnamed. Zoologists insist they should be called “American bison.” We seem to have gotten that buffalo misnomer from early explorers and since definitions change with how we use words, soon the word buffalo traveled around the country until it became as common as a nickel. At the time buffalo grass was also common. It withstood heavy grazing, thrived without irrigation, and cured on the ground to provide winter feed. It furnished forage for the country’s entire population of buffalo until whites arrived, some of whom paddled across prairie creeks on dried buffalo hides.19 These settlers followed what they believed was their Manifest Destiny to plow the new Garden of Eden, plant grain, raise cattle, and fill grain bins and feedlots for another world population.20 Despite our harsh treatment of buffalo, we still tend to associate them with prairie 19 Washington Irving, Tour of the Prairie, reproduced in Chronicles of Oklahoma, September, 1932, Vol. 10, No. 3, 430. “While passing the camp of a band of Osage Indians, several days before, he had secured the hide of a large buffalo. This large dry hide now came into use. A heavy rawhide cord was passed through small holes which had been cut at intervals around near the edge of this buffalo hide and then drawn up so that a hollow, trough-shaped receptacle was formed, sticks being placed athwart to keep it in shape. Into this the camp equipage was piled and it was set afloat on the surface of the river.” 20 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1978).

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landscapes and thundering freedom. But what about Buffalo Soldiers? They were the newly freed members of the African American cavalry who served after the Civil War from 1867-1896 when they fought loyally in a variety of battles. Their nickname was given to them by the Indians, but nobody knows for sure why. Curiously, their main duty was to control the Indians of the plains and southwest, particularly the Apaches who fought bitterly against being driven off their land and being confined on reservations. Compared to white soldiers, the Buffalo Soldiers were shoved aside with the worst of food and accommodations. They were issued inferior equipment, much of it made up of the rejects and castoffs of white soldiers. As for rank or promotion, the law required that their officers would have to be white. Given that, along with their earlier history of discrimination and abuse, you have to wonder if any of them ever felt a kinship with the Indians they were supposed to control who, like them, were also uprooted and enslaved in so many ways. But then, maybe the Indians who nicknamed them realized all along that Buffalo Soldiers had been buffaloed.

8. Snowball, the Killer Goat Remember Billy Goat Gruff? He was the hero who butted the troll off the bridge. Outside of that, goats usually aren’t given much credit. Now it’s true, a goat, particularly a male goat, carries an odor that’s not likely to make you want to cozy up to him. It’s also true that even an old goat can, well, not always mind his manners when it comes to the ladies. So maybe those similes, “to stink like a goat” or “to behave like an old goat” are well deserved. Even so, there’s still something judgmental about how goats have been depicted. Jesus, who was the Lamb of God, talked about separating the sheep from the goats. And the Devil, with his cloven feet, has often been drawn as lecherous and goatish, a common image in many mythologies and illustrations. Moreover when we want to blame someone unfairly, we often look for a scapegoat. That notion originated in the Hebrew Bible in a ritual for the Jewish Day of Atonement when Aaron, the high priest, was instructed to select two goats, one for the Lord and the


other to act as the scapegoat.21 The one for the Lord was killed and sacrificed. The other was loaded symbolically with all the sins of the people and then, rather than being sacrificed, it “escaped” into the desert. Hence it was called a scapegoat. Later that meaning of scapegoat changed from “somebody blamed” to “somebody blamed unfairly.”22 Hence when the metaphor changed to refer not to a goat who was victimized, but a human, by then it seemed unfair. Today we are trying to be more humane when it comes to our treatment of animals and so a few decades back it became headline news when a family tried to make a modern day goat a scapegoat for their own brand of evil. At the time a goat named Snowball was raised on a small farm outside of Atlanta, Georgia, by a man who was determined to turn him into a “watch goat.” Reportedly, he forced sticks up the goat’s nose, tormented what was tender, and treated poor Snowball to enough evil tricks to put him on guard against any human who came near. The inevitable happened. When Snowball finally had the chance, he retaliated, butting his master in the belly—hard. Later, when the man died of a stomach hemorrhage, his grieving widow demanded that Snowball be executed. By then the goat had gained a reputation, in headlines, as “Snowball, the Killer Goat.”23 Hearing the story, animal rights groups saw things differently and they began to organize protests. For days there was a well-publicized stand off between them and widow’s family. Finally the dilemma was resolved when Snowball was put out to pasture in a nature preserve, but not before he was castrated. Somehow castrating a billy goat had its appeal—even if, as a result, it was doubtful that he’d ever be able to keep the trolls away from the bridge.

9. The Raven’s Ravaged Reputation As myth has it, before the raven flew around with such a dark reputation, it started out as a white bird with snowy plumage. It was Apollo’s faithful messenger—but when it flew in with unwelcome 21 Lev. 16.10 (New International Version). 22 Encarta, s.v. “scapegoat.” 2. someone wrongly blamed. 23 “Officials Should Spare Snowball, The Killer Goat.” The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, May 20, 1991, D1. Mary Schmich, “Killer Goat Wins Reprieve… .”

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news, Apollo turned the raven’s feathers black. The raven also brought unwelcome news to Noah. It was the first creature he released from the ark, and it failed to return with proof of dry land, not like the dove returning with an olive branch.24 Ever since then, when you “extend an olive branch,” you make a gesture toward peace. But the disturbing raven was never associated with peace, good will, or anything promising. In William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lysander asks, “Who will not change a raven for a dove?” (2.2.114). Like many birds (cuckoo, bob white, chickadee) the raven was named, onomatopoetically, for the sound it makes. It came from the Old English hræin, and before that it probably arose from a prehistoric Germanic word that was an imitation of its croaking sound.25 Along the way this word also came to sound exactly like a second raven which comes from the Old French raviner meaning “to seize.” Soon that second raven also meant “to eat greedily” along with “to take something away by force.” In many minds the meanings of the two ravens converged. So the croaking raven became a greedy eater, a bird who took prey by force. Worse yet, that second seizing raven originally came from the Latin rapere, the same ancestor that gave us rape. And there are other troubling relatives: raptor, rapacious, ravenous, ravage, and rapture.26 So by a coincidence in sound and a convergence in raptor politics, the raven has become closely aligned with some less than desirable 24 Gen 8:7-12 (New International Version). 25 Encarta, s.v. “raven.” 26 Encarta, s.v., “rape1,” Word Key: Origin.


relatives. While these relatives have managed to tar the feathers of the raven, even worse, they have also muddied the vocabulary with some dangerously mixed signals regarding how women should be treated. We know a ravished woman is a woman who’s been raped. Or, a ravished woman can also mean “one who is overwhelmed with deep pleasurable feelings.” So you have to wonder if those oxymoronic definitions reflect the perverse notion that women actually enjoy being violated. Equally perplexing, how could a ravished woman be so closely related to one who is ravishing? It seems those uncomfortable bedfellows link torture with beauty. It’s a midnight dreary situation. “Take thy beak from out my heart.” But what’s the raven’s repeated answer? “Nevermore!”27

10. Cormorant: A Greedy Rapacious Fisherman In a beauty contest the ungainly cormorant isn’t likely to reign over a nice-looking bird like a peacock, a painted bunting, or even common sparrow. Hardly a show-boater, the cormorant has plowmansized feet, narrow-set eyes, a cranky-looking beak, and a long, long neck that dilates. Its feathers are a coarse slick black, the kind of garish color that seems to mess with the landscape, like an old woman sitting in church with hair that is too black. If that’s not enough, the cormorant’s etymological character doesn’t have much to recommend it either. The word comes from the Old French cormaran for “sea raven,” ultimately from the Latin marinus and mare for “sea.” While it refers to “a large marine bird,” the word can also mean “greedy.” In William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard II, John of Gaunt denounces King Richard’s risky behavior as “Light vanity, insatiate cormorant” (2.1. 38). In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Devil “[s]at like a cormorant” planning the fall of Adam and Eve (4.196).28 In both instances the bird seems greedy and menacing. In an effort to capitalize on their greediness, some individuals have tired to harness the bird’s ability to fish. Vittore Carpaccio 27 Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe Poetry and Tales, “The Raven,” ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1969), 86. 28 John Milton, The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 279.

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has dramatized that in a series of panels dating back to the 1490s. At first it’s easy to assume, as we do, that the archers in Venice are shooting the cormorants for food, but art historian Elfriede R. Knauer points out something different. First, the flesh of an adult cormorant is quite unpalatable and, second, in view of newly discovered panels adding to this scene, Knauer shows us that the archers were actually shooting the birds with clay pellets or throwing terra cotta balls at them to bring them down. Hence they are fishing with cormorants, an ancient sport where the birds were trained to catch fish and return them to the master.29 If the bird took an unsportsmanlike turn with the fish, the master could teach him a lesson by shooting at him—or he could play hardball. Historians think Europeans may have gotten the idea for this from fishermen in Japan and China who used a slightly different technique. They tightened a ring around the bird’s neck and sent it fishing. When the cormorant caught a fish and couldn’t quite swallow its dinner, the fisherman would reel it in and keep the fish for the market or for his own dinner. Today some fishermen still use rings. Others rely on training the bird, and that too has been profitable. By now in a number of tourist hotspots, cormorant fising has become a significant and lucrative attraction, a dramatic evening entertainment complete with fire lights, music, and pageantry. However in another tourist industry the cormorant is still regarded as a greedy menace. Citizens in Cedarville, Michigan, resent the cormorant because they believe the bird poses a threat to the fishermen their tourist industry is trying to attract. Vendors and guides were especially enraged when the cormorant, or at least the double-crested variety, was listed as a protected species. In an article about that controversy New York Times writer Jodi Wilgoren tells us that Cedarville’s Rob Burger would like to stomp on cormorant eggs. Brian Harrison would like to round up hundreds of hunters and pump shotgun shells into their nests. And Mark Clymer, who describes himself as a problem solver for computer

29 Elfriede R.Knauer, “Fishing with cormorants: A note on Vittore Carpaccio’s Hunting on the Lagoon” (London, England: Apollo, Sept., 2003), v. 158, 32-9.


and environmental systems, would like to call in troops and carriers—and napalm the rookeries.30 For centuries the bird and the word have stood for anyone who takes too much or strongly desires more than he needs. Given that definition, imagine, what could be worse than a cormorant? There’s also another lesson to be learned here: the etymology of cormorant shows us how easily your good name can be muddied if you dare to compete with a higher power who also controls the language.

11. Behaving Like a Cuckoo Different languages use similar sounding words to name birds because we often create onomatopoetic names for them by imitating their cries. Hence in a variety of languages you’ll hear similar versions of bob white, chick-a-dee, hoot owl—and cuckoo. Observers viewed the cuckoo as solitary and sly, the wary kind of bird that seems to skulk around in strange ways. Hence today the word can mean “strange,” “eccentric,” and “extremely unconventional.”31 To our ear the cuckoo sings a manically repetitive song so we’ve come to associate it with madness and its nest with a madhouse or an insane asylum.32 In 1962, as the title suggests in Ken Kesey’s novel, if you flew over the cuckoo’s nest, you escaped an insane asylum. The title can also be read as a metaphor for the clash between the rebellious free-spiritedness of Randle McMurphy and the needling conformity of Nurse Ratched. If the common cuckoo was regarded as idiosyncratic, it was also viewed as promiscuous. Birdwatchers noticed that a cuckoo will land in the nest of another bird and lay eggs there for others to incubate and raise, so when they heard about a man whose wife allows another man in her bed, they called the foolish husband a cuckold. We can see that dilemma dramatized in Shakespeare’s Othello when the vindictive Iago says to an easily duped accomplice, “If thou canst cuckold him, thou dost thyself a pleasure and me a 30 Jodi Wilgoren, “A Bird That’s on a Lot of Hit Lists,” New York Times, January 18, 2002, sec. A 31 Encarta, s.v. “cuckoo.” 32 John Ciardi, A Browser’s Dictionary, s.v. “cuckoo.”

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sport” (1.3.368-9).33 Iago knew that tricking Othello into thinking he had been cuckolded would deeply humiliate him. However, contrary to the stereotypical cuckold who’s too cowardly and helpless to complain, Othello retaliates with tragic consequences. And yet, unlike Othello, for centuries most cuckolds were depicted as comic, doddering, old fools—mocked in public and forced to wear a cuckold’s horns. Part of that ridicule also contributed to our notion of someone behaving like a cuckoo. There’s another metaphoric relative to cuckoo, one that can stick it to you. They are those prickly unwelcome hitchhikers that can catch a ride, particularly on the fur coat of your dog. If he decides to groom himself while you sleep, watch out. For when you wake up and plant your bare feet on the floor, it may come as a hopping surprise that you’ll be stepping into a cunningly scattered pile of “cuckled burs” or what we now call “cockleburs.” Meanwhile your dog will watch you devotedly, wondering why you’d ever want to step into anything unpleasant that he’s just left behind.

12. Turkey’s Fowl Reputation Long ago turkeys were confused with African guinea fowl. When these birds were introduced into England by Turkish traders, the Brits mistakenly called them “turkeys.” Later, Pilgrims made a similar mistaken assumption about another bird in America. 34 And yet despite the confusion, folks have enjoyed feasting on turkeys as far back as Aristotle and Pliny, but today the metaphors we are dishing up for turkey imply that the bird is being roasted by some fowl critics. A turkey is a real looser, something worthless, an easy target in a turkey shoot. If you are a failure, if you are unintelligent, incompetent, and socially inept, you’re a turkey. If a show flops, it’s a turkey. If you want to talk turkey, you’re blunt and honest, perhaps because it’s so easy to clean up on a turkey. And in hard times you could wind up “poorer than Job’s turkey.” That phrase came from Nova Scotia and was introduced by the nineteenth century Canadian humorist Judge Thomas Chandler Halliburton who wrote tall tales 33 William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1211. 34 John Ciardi, A Browser’s Dictionary, s.v., “turkey.”


under the pseudonym Sam Slick. Slick claimed that since God cast Job into poverty, Job’s turkey was so poor it could only keep one of its feathers, and it didn’t have the strength to gobble unless it was leaning against a fence post.35 Despite that, sentimentalists like to think of a turkey as that Norman Rockwell entrée all buttered up and served by grandma on her finest company platter, eagerly awaited by a table of congenial and thankful family members. However the scientific name for turkey, Meleagris gallopavo tells of a far more contentious family history. The Meleagris part was named after Meleager who fell in love with Atalanta, a woman warrior who was brave enough to wound the frightful Calydonian boar. In that fearful fight Meleager stepped in and finally stabbed the boar in the heart. Nevertheless he gallantly insisted that Atalanta should be awarded the boar’s skin, even if she was a woman. That kind of impropriety exacerbated the jealousy of his warrior uncles and so they treated Atalanta with treachery. This enraged Meleager so he killed them. That angered his mother who thought her son had “made a fool out of himself over a shameless hussy who went hunting with men.”36 So mom killed Meleager. Then Meleager’s sisters got in on the act. They cried and cried, so cacophonously that the gods finally retaliated by changing them into an annoying chorus of screeching turkeys. Imagine a chorus of turkeys. Even out on the prairie their calls are hardly melodic. You can hear them “chick” as they walk through the tall grass and wildflowers that grow around the cabin where I live. If they venture near enough, my dog seems to take great pride in startling them to flight. With him in pursuit, suddenly their chicking sounds will change into a frantic chorus of cackles, rising in measures of screeching protest—a sweet-sounding symphony to my dog’s ear. You can even see his tail wagging in applause.

13. Swan Song: Libretto of a Dying Poet We’d all agree that swans are graceful and rhapsodically beautiful, but has anyone ever heard a swan sing? The dictionary tells 35 Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Judge Haliburton’s Yankee Stories (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston), 1844). 36 Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York, Toronto: Mentor, 1942), 174-5.

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us the word swan comes from an Old English word for “singer,”37 and ancient myths relate dramatic tales about swan songs. Even so, swans are no songbirds. Many are mute. Some hiss, some bark, and only a few trumpet. Perhaps we think swans can sing because they look so lyrical, so operatic, as though they could burst into a final melodramatic swan song. According to their mythology, the Greeks adored swans as the sacred bird of Apollo, the god of poetry and song, who decreed that when a truly great poet died, his soul would glide into the body of a swan. Then the swan would sing the final words of the poet, hauntingly beautiful lyrics, in a swan song. With that legend in mind, the poet Virgil became known as the Mantuan Swan. Homer was acknowledged as the Swan of Meander and Shakespeare was celebrated as the Swan of Avalon. Socrates, who helped originate this legend, believed swans sang at their death since they thought they would soon be joining Apollo.38 Centuries later, in an era when we sent Apollo to the moon, a swan song now refers to the final public act of a person’s career. So John Glenn’s final flight could be regarded as his swan song. Other swan myths have taken flight in ballet. In Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Prince Siegfried falls in love with Odette, a swan who is changed into a beautiful maid. As the drama develops, Siegfried is tricked into deceiving her and in the end the two drown themselves in the Lake of Tears. It’s a story of tragic consequences. But even worse, now poor Odette has been doomed to pirouette in plastic on top of wind up music boxes at flea markets. 37 Encarta, s.v., “swan.” Old English, literally, “singer.” 38 Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, s.v. “swan song.”


In other myths, swans don’t sing at death but annunciate life. When Zeus in the form of a swan visits Leda, a Spartan queen, their union begins Greek civilization. Centuries later, in his disturbing poem “Leda and the Swan,” William Butler Yeats dramatized their union as a rape. Surely a swan rapist intensifies our horror. We like to associate a swan with something tender as swan’s down or graceful as a swan dive. There are other lyrical lines that metaphorically refer to a swan. In Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, the Spear-Dane warriors “sail the swan’s road.”39 Some of them confront the loathsome sea monster Grendel who “rippled down the rock, writhing in anger.” As a “fiend out of hell,” Grendel arose from “among the banished monsters, Cain’s clan.” Now we don’t know for sure if Grendel was a dragon hatched at birth. But unfortunately for Beowulf, he wasn’t just some ugly duckling.

14. The Clash of Cricket Gladiators Crickets are cozy sounding, especially a cricket on the hearth. Sometimes we think they can give kindly advice, particularly to liars with long noses. So to some extent we’ve personified crickets as congenial and well-meaning. The word comes from the French criquet meaning “grasshopper and locust.” It’s also onomatopoetic, named for the clicking sound a cricket makes. In a similar way, the English game of cricket was also named for the clicking sound a cricket bat makes when it hits the ball. Moreover cricket players are expected to be good sports, hence it’s “not cricket” to cheat. Here again, metaphorically, we’ve given the cricket a rather endearing personality for he’s not only a kindly homebody, but another version of the word also brings to mind someone who doesn’t cheat. Crickets have also been valued in China and Japan for well over 1000 years where emperors and commoners have kept them as sidekicks in ornamental cages. Some owners even regard them as prophets, perhaps because crickets seemed to have a jump on things. However more recently the cricket’s ability to jump has captured the fantasy of Chinese men who have been buying up crickets 39 Beowulf, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 2000, Seamus Heaney, translator, line 200, p. 15.

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and training them to take a leap into the arena where they can become cricket gladiators.40 The top fighters are harvested in Shandong province in autumn where thousands of men travel to buy crickets from farmers for as much as $700 a piece. Cricket scouts look for males with hearty color, strong fighting lines, and sizable legs and jaws. Before a contest, each fighter is weighed on a cricket scale. Then he’s put into a jar with a leggy female, one who’s bound to hop up his fighting juices. Next he and another excited male are dropped into an eight-inch plastic arena. They are surrounded by excited spectators, mostly betting males. According to the experts, crickets exhibit three main fighting styles: Some creep. Some charge. But the truly great champion will wait in ambush. He will wait and listen for the challenging chirrup that occurs when a cricket scrapes the thick scored veins of one wing with the sharp file edge of the other. To a fighter cricket that must sound something like whetting a knife, or with cricket couples maybe it’s the cricket version of bump and grind. Hearing that, a hopped up manly cricket will leap into action, mostly. But some are disappointingly unresponsive so their trainers will take fine brushes and tickle them into combat readiness. Finally roused and in a frenzy, they will rush at each other and rise erect on taut legs. Jaws clamp. Antennae intertwine. And men get to live out their erotic fantasies through the clash of cricket gladiators. Minutes later, amidst the carnage of crumpled cricket wings, a referee will toss out the maimed looser. And by Jiminy, that’s not cozy.

40 Erik Eckholm, “Beijing Journal; China’s Little Gladiators, Fearsome in the Ring,” New York Times, October 4, 2000, sec. A.

CHAPTER SEVEN MAROON, THE OTHER COLOR: IN THE RACE OF CASTE AND CLASS

W

Introduction

ord histories often tell us about how people were discriminated against in terms of class, caste, or race. For instance the etymology of maroon will tell us how castoffs from a variety of ethnic groups became marooned and then became Maroons. Many also had been slaves, a word we get from the Slavs who became slaves after the first Crusades, when international trade resumed and Europeans took a growing interest in the slave trade. Millions were imported from other countries but there were easily as many who became slaves in their own homelands, typically people who came from a lower caste or class. However in China another form of slavery targeted women who were supposed to come from a comparatively privileged class. These were women who were not destined to work in field or factory and, given such a status, for centuries generations of them became foot-bound women. Even if it was supposed to indicate a certain privilege, the Chinese term for that sounded decidedly unpleasant. So they adopted a euphemism which translates to the nicer sounding “golden lotus,” a phrase that pretends mutilated feet are as sweetly formed as a lotus bud. In another effort to sound pleasant, we’ve been advised not to call Easterners “Orientals” but to politely call them “Asians.” Even if


we’re trying to be more sensitive, the etymology of Oriental carries a far more valuable, light up the sky history than that of the generic Asian. Not so long ago Asians were derided as “coolies” or feared in war time paranoia as “the yellow peril.” Today, in a similar way, we worry about “the brown peril” with its immigrant “invasion” and the “rising brown tides” that threaten to wash over our California borders. These are metaphoric terms that tend to intensify our prejudices and we need to recognize them for what they are. However in other instances, metaphors used artfully can teach us in telling ways about the casual cruelty of racism. With that in mind we’ll consider some of the language Richard Wright uses. And we’ll see how Herman Melville introduces an unusual term such as “barbaric virtu” to undercut some of our pretensions regarding our own cultural superiority. Other etymologies tell of discrimination that arises from the caste and class of maritime experience, words whose histories tell us how sailors were impressed, how servants were indentured, and how the term “indentured servants” became a euphemism for exported coolies and blackbirds. There’s also the word pirate, a word we tend to associate with high seas robbery and mercenary attacks. Even so, we’ll see how pirates were often victims themselves of their own caste and class, and how when they took over ships they tended to be far more democratic than we might think. Versions of democracy also operated within “the brotherhood of yarn spinning” which can put sailors of all ranks on equal footing. The stories they tell often reveal the kinds of exploitation they endured. We’ll conclude by looking into the history of the word truck as a form of bartering and look into why a class of Newfoundland fishermen feels justified in clubbing harp seal pups. At the conclusion we’ll see how those who’ve been victimized by a class system can so easily rationalize why it’s acceptable for them, when given the chance, to now become the victimizers.

1. Maroon, the Other Color When Treasure Island was published in 1883, Robert Louis Stevenson tells us about a marooned man clothed in the tatters of old

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ship’s canvas.1 Coming from the French marron meaning “fugitive from slavery,” the word also came to describe someone who had been abandoned as a form of punishment. Even so, how were maroons connected to slavery? Much of that comes from the Maroons in Jamaica.2 They were the abandoned slaves who formed communities in the Jamaican highlands around 1655 after the Spanish left them behind when the British took over, and these abandoned slaves were soon joined by others. Some had escaped from British plantations. Some were part of the few remaining Arawaks who had escaped persecution after Columbus arrived. Some were drifters from other islands. While their ethnic backgrounds varied, collectively these renegades came to be called the Maroons. So the history of the word speaks to both slavery and abandonment. 1 O.E.D., s.v, “maroon2” 1883 R. L. STEVENSON Treasure Island I. III. xv. 126 The *marooned man in his goatskins. Actually it appears O.E.D. is mistaken here. The novel tells us the man was “clothed with tatters of old ship’s canvas and old sea cloth” (3.15.110). Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 110. The passage goes on to say these garments were tied together by “gaskins” which could explain the O.E.D. confusion with “goatskins.” If you look up “gaskin,” you’ll see they cite the same passage. O.E.D., s.v. “gaskin” [Alteration of GASKET; the ending may represent -ING1.] 1883 STEVENSON Treas. Isl. III. xv, This extraordinary patchwork was all held together by..loops of tarry gaskin. Could they have instead been to referring to Robinson Crusoe? 2 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2007, s.v “Jamacia. .


Eventually it came to describe other fugitive groups as well. In the South a maroon culture was formed when a number of runaway slaves, a mix of Indians and Blacks, joined the Native American Creeks. During the last half of the eighteenth century they moved into northern Florida where they also became known as Seminoles, a word derived from the Creek simanó-li meaning “separatist or runaway.” Moreover the etymologies of Seminole and maroon seemed to have influenced each other for scholars think Seminole may have been influenced by the Spanish cimarrón meaning “wild” and they suspect that cimarrón also contributed to maroon. To add to the confusion there’s also a homonym in the mix, the color maroon, originally meaning “chestnut” or “chestnut-colored.” Since maroons were often brown or chestnut-colored, it’s understandable that those different maroons became confused with each other. During the first half of the nineteenth century in an effort to keep white settlers from taking over more of their land, the Seminoles fought a series of wars. After the Second Seminole War ended in their defeat the tribe was forced to surrender and move to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. There they joined the Five Civilized Tribes that included the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Choctaw, all of whom had been banished from the Southeast in the 1830s by the federal government.3 Ostensibly each tribe was allotted land and allowed to govern it, but gradually much of this was also taken. What tribal landholdings remained came to be called “reservations.” The word typically refers to “an arrangement made beforehand” or “land set aside.” Reserve can also imply privilege, a reserved place, reserved tickets, a special reserve of wine. And yet, coming from the Latin reservare, it literally means “to keep back”—the kind of situation every marooned Seminole was hoping to escape.

2. Slaves and Orphans Forced to Pledge Allegiance When we think of slaves, we don’t typically think of the Slavic people. Nevertheless the word slave comes from Slav and the medieval Latin sclavus which meant “Slav or captive.” But why associate the Slavic people with slavery? As the historian Herbert S. Klein 3 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2007, s.v. “Seminole.” .


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explains it, with the advent of the first Crusades, Europeans were exposed to distant cultures, long distance trade revived, and then Christian Europeans became active in the slave trade. More specifically, as the Genoese and Venetians expanded throughout Eastern Europe and Asia Minor, their industries created a demand for slavery. Since they had conquered many Slavic people along their expanding borders, the Slavs became slaves. However Slavs weren’t the only people to be enslaved. There were Muslim slaves, Christian slaves, a variety of European slaves, and there were African slaves. Even so, how did Americans come to primarily enslave Africans? That, too, arises out of a long and complicated history. Klein argues that, in part, Africans were marketed as slaves because by the 1400s, when the Portuguese traders and explorers arrived, the system of slave trading had already been wellestablished in many African states both inside and outside of the continent. If it hadn’t been so well-established, the Portuguese and other slave traders would hardly have found slaves so accessible. Although at first the Portuguese were mostly looking for gold and ivory, given the established system, it wasn’t hard to tempt them to engage in African slave trading as well. By 1700, slaves began to surpass all other exports from Africa in value. But why was there such an escalating demand for African slaves? One of the first answers is: sugar. Sugar from Asia, had already sweetened the European appetite and when explorers, looking for a quicker route to the East, bumped into the Atlantic islands and discovered sugar there, the demand for it increased dramatically. Moreover since sugar is such a labor intensive crop, producing it brought on a significant demand for slaves to work the sugar plantations in those Atlantic island countries. Once that system was established, when Americans began to grow other labor intensive crops such as cotton and tobacco, they also developed a keen interest in the thriving slave market. So right around the years that we were fighting for our independence, we were also importing well over 6,000,000 African slaves. The African word for these slaves is bozales, a name for the nonChristian, non Romance language speakers who were taken directly from Africa. Earlier there were the ladinos, the “Europeanized” African slaves who had been exported to Europe and had by then adopted the language and culture. They were the slaves who,


according to Klein, journeyed with their masters to the Atlantic Islands and the New World where they became the first Blacks to inhabit America. 4 No matter whether they were bozales or ladinos, all slaves were forced to change their allegiance from home, family, and community to a master in a strange environment. With that in mind, it’s worth noting that the Slavic word for slave comes from the Old Slavic orbu, from the Indo European base orbh- meaning “the thing that changes allegiance.” Ironically, it’s the same base that gave us the word orphan.

3. Gilding the Lily: The Artwork of Foot Bound Women For well over a 1000 years the Chinese pursued an aesthetic ideal known as san zun jin lian meaning “the three-inch golden lily,” or

4 Klein Herbert S. Klein, “Slavery in Western Development,” The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, U.K., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1-16.


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“golden lotus.”5 Because of this ideal, millions of Chinese women endured the excruciating pain of having their feet bound. A perfectly bound foot was supposed be shaped like the bud of a lotus flower—full and rounded at the heel and coming to a thin point at the front. How is this achieved? Break her arch and bind all of her toes except the big toe beneath her foot. The ideal age to start this was not in infancy as some people believe, but rather after the arch of the foot was more fully developed, when a little girl was about six years old. A perfectly bound foot was gradually bent to such an extent that it actually appeared to be an extension of her leg, not some awkward appendage. It was equally important that there was a cleft in the foot, ideally a cleft two or three inches deep. And to be really attractive, the little foot was supposed to be no longer than three inches in length.6 Different Chinese dynasties offer different stories on how such an ideal for perfect three-inch-sized female feet originated. One theory suggests it began in the tenth century when palace dancers wrapped their feet into the shape of a lotus bud. At that time the compression was only slight. But the tiny fragile foot aroused lust and pity. So the custom caught on. And through the years the bindings got tighter. Eventually the image of foot bound feet was given another name, one that translates to “golden lotus,” a pleasant sounding euphemism which brought to mind the kind of lovely delicate feet that left little lotus foot prints.7 They were also agreeably erotic. A Chinese man longed to fondle the tiny foot, to pet and kiss it, to put it into his mouth. And the crevice in the delicate tortured foot offered a channel for wildly erotic stimulation.8 A foot bound woman not only seemed sensual but also safe. She couldn’t walk far from the bedroom. And when she walked, she swayed with a muscular tension that theoretically developed voluptuous buttocks and tightened her genitals. Besides that, little feet were light in bed, not like big feet that could turn around under the covers and cause an annoying draft. Moreover little feet were economical. You only needed scraps of fabric for shoes. And yet they were also a token of conspicuous consumption. A foot bound 5 Beverly Jackson, Splendid Slippers (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997), 24. 6 Ibid., 27, 24. 7 Marsha Smith, Professor of Sociology, Augustana College. 8 Jackson, 108.


woman was a richly kept woman. She was of a better class than a woman who worked in a field or factory, one who had to walk and work. So foot bound women sat. And many spent their time embroidering stunningly beautiful slippers for their mutilated feet. Often they would overlay their slipper fabric with gold or silver-covered thread, fastening it down with tiny stitches. The English word for that technique is called “couching” from the French couchier meaning “to lie down” and later “to overlay stitches.”9 It also brings to mind the notion of “gilding the lily.” Westerners get that phrase from Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of King John where a second (unnecessary) coronation was considered “to gild refined gold, to paint the lily”(4.2.11).10 But in the East, when a foot bound Chinese woman embroidered golden threads onto slippers for her golden lilies, sadly she too was trying to guild the lily.

4. The Rise and Fall of Oriental Today the dictionary warns us that the word Oriental is “now usually avoided because it generally causes offense.” 11 Currently we prefer Asian which has always meant “people of Asia.” But if Oriental’s glorious history would ever dawn on people, they might want to reconsider. Given its original meaning “to rise,” the word orient has been associated with position, a very important position. It faces east to where the sun rises and the day begins. It’s where we get our bearings. We look east to get oriented. Molecules get oriented into chemical bonds. Plants get oriented to stimuli like the sun and a cathedral is oriented so that its length lies east to west with the main altar at the eastern end. So Oriental is kin to a word family associated with positioning whatever is of rising importance on Earth. By comparison occidental doesn’t sound quite so appealing since it comes from the Latin occident-, from occidere meaning “to fall down.” And it can mean “to set,” particularly when the sun falls and sets, so the Occident means “the West.” However, unlike orient, 9 Ibid. 76. 10 William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. C. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 787. 11 Encarta, s.v. “oriental.”


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occident sounds awkward to us. While cathedrals are oriented, we never hear of a barn that is occidented. Nor do we think of the riders of the purple sage as heading off into the Occident. And even if Leatherstocking died facing west, he was still trying to get oriented. Indeed while occident seems to be waning, the word orient has risen to become far more promising. As a verb it can mean “position,” “position toward the east,” “direct,” and “make familiar.” As a noun it can mean “eastern sky,” “dawn,” and “something glowing.” These are all important and beautiful meanings so Orientals are in good word company. And yet, ironically, because of our growing sensitivity about diversity, the adjective and especially the label “Oriental” now offend people when the word, to their thinking, seems to generalize about many distinct ethnic groups and implies Orientals are all the same or not worth much. But how would “Asian” be an improvement? It’s even more generalized since it refers to a hemispheric casserole of countries and cultures in the largest and most populated continent in the word. An Asian is just somewhere in Asia. But an Oriental is what’s rising in the East. Nowadays it’s where China wakes, and some of her neighbors as well, but none of them seems to be yawning

5. Yellow Peril and Jaundiced Journalism In many ways yellow has been regarded as a real lemon of a color. Coming from the Old English geolu, from the Indo European base meaning “to shine,” it might be kin to gleam and gold, but even in face of its shining relatives, it would seem that yellow’s reputation has been seriously tarnished.12 While at times it can be bright as the sun or rich as egg yolks and butter, yellow is often sickly. Crops yellow and die. So do people with yellow eyes and yellow skin. Yellow can be cringing and cowardly, yellow-bellied, yellow-streaked, the yellow of your slinking neighborhood cur. Moreover in the late 19th century, the Germans cautioned everyone who’d listen about the “yellow peril,” to their thinking, the 12 Encarta, s.v. “yellow.” “d. Having a naturally yellowish skin or complexion: applied chiefly (often somewhat disparagingly) to persons of Asiatic, esp. Oriental, origin, but also in the U.S. to persons of mixed white and Black origin and (freq. as yaller) to light-skinned Blacks. In modern use also transf. in yellow peril and similar phrases, denoting a supposed danger that the Asiatic peoples will overwhelm the white, or overrun the world.”


marauding hordes of overpopulated Chinese and Japanese who threatened to overtake western nations and massacre the inhabitants. Soon fear of the yellow peril spread throughout Europe and on to America.13 During that time what was labeled as “the yellow peril” was sensationalized in news accounts that came to be known as “yellow journalism,” the kind of journalism that exaggerated threats, heightened scandals, and distorted truth. 14 Much of that was instigated by William Randolph Hearst and his San Francisco Chronicle, a paper that repeatedly warned Californians about the yellow peril of Asians landing on their shores.15 Along with its sensationalistic coverage of news, the paper also featured yellow-colored Hogan’s Alley cartoons by Richard Felton Outcault, cartoons which lampooned the yellow peril and featured the Yellow Kid as an irreverent slightly sinister slum urchin who often ridiculed upper class pretensions. The kid had vaguely Asian features.16 Whether Outcault’s intentions were satiric or something a bit more sinister, the paper’s yellow journalism did what it could to stoke yellow peril hysteria. It was the same kind of hysteria that convinced us to incarcerate Japanese American citizens and confiscate their property without the benefit of a fair hearing or trial, something we justified at the time in the name of homeland security. Ironically, the Attorney General who signed the proclamation to incarcerate Japanese Americans in California was Earl Warren. Later Warren went on to lead the Supreme Court as arguably the most influential jurist in the twentieth century in shaping civil rights, insuring separation of church and state, and insisting on 13 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2007, s.v. “yellow peril.” . Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s.v. “race.” . Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2007, s.v. “international relations.” . 14 Encarta, s.v. “yellow journalism.” 15 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2007, s.v. “yellow journalism.” . 16 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2007, s.v. “Outcault, Richard Felton.” .


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fair procedures for police arrest. At the time it seemed Earl Warren commanded a vision for black and white, but he feared what was yellow.

6. Racism in a Nutshell In order to transfer meaning from what we see to what we say, we often form words out of metaphoric language. For example we get the word muscle from the Latin musculus meaning “small mouse” because the ancients who gave us the word thought the movement of muscles resembled mice moving under their skin. In a similar way, we get dandelion from the French dent de lion because the French thought the plant’s leaves looked like lion’s teeth. And scallops with their undulating shells gave us scalloped curtains and scalloped slices of meat or scaloppini. They are all part of our metaphoric language. With that “carrying over” concept in mind, the word metaphor has come from the Greek metaphora, from metapherein meaning “to transfer, or to carry between.” It’s an implied comparison, not one meant literally. Potboiler fiction isn’t physically hot and steamy, but metaphorically it might be too hot to handle. Your wolfish neighbor isn’t literally a wolf, but metaphorically he might act like one. Because of what metaphors can imply, some scholars will show you how our metaphoric language can stoke racism. From the University of California at Los Angeles, Otto Santa Ana argues that the media is especially biased when it uses metaphors to refer to Latinos, particularly Latino immigrants. Looking into the Los Angeles Times, he points to “inundating surges of brown faces” and “rising brown tides” (his italics). He also objects to threats of “immigrants as animals or immigrants as invaders.”17 Meanwhile with metaphoric racism in mind, other critics object to the sunshiny implication that Cathy Freeman’s beguiling billboard smile represents all the happy Aborigines. This is not unlike that tin-faced Black man’s watermelon smile or pancake pictures of Aunt Jemima, the fat happy fry cook. Others object to phrases like “back list,” “black sheep,” “black money,” and “black arts.” So it would 17 Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (Austin: University of Texas Press), 101-03.


seem that the metaphoric language we use can often send out subtle but insistent racist messages that intensify our discrimination. And yet metaphors, used artfully, can also make us powerfully aware of racism and its casual cruelty. When Richard Wright describes the detritus on the ground after a lynching, he recounts “greasy hemp,” “cigarette butts,” and “a whore’s lipstick,” all objects carelessly discarded at the scene. But then he mentions “peanut shells.”18 Peanut shells? Suddenly, unforgettably, we understand the unconscionable cruelty of spectators who could so casually shell and eat peanuts in the midst of a lynching. Here a simple combination of words, “peanut shells,” teaches us something about comprehensive issues in an economical way. Metaphorically, it’s racism in a nutshell.

7. Barbaric Virtue In great books sometimes authors will anticipate our prejudices and play along, only to undercut them later. Herman Melville does just that in Moby-Dick when he introduces us to the word virtu.19 At first we might wonder if the word is misspelled. Virtu looks too much like virtue. But virtu is a word in its own right which comes, like virtue, from the Latin root virtu-. It can be defined as “a love or taste for fine art,” and it’s related to virtue because both words are associated with something of worth. Around the early eighteenth century the notion of virtu became popular when Americans began traveling to Europe in an effort to cultivate themselves. At the time, if you viewed what the Italians were calling virtu, you were considered less barbaric than you might have been. So it’s more than a little ironic that Melville describes virtu in Moby-Dick as “barbaric virtu.”20 We don’t typically associate barbarians with art, with virtue, or with anything of real worth. The dictionary even defines a barbarian as “a person from a primitive culture,” certainly more primitive than our own. 18 Richard Wright, Richard Wright Reader, ed. Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre (New York : Harper & Row, 1978), “Between the World and Me,” 246-47. 19 Herman Melville, Moby- Dick (Norton, New York: 1967), 374. 20 Melville, 374.


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Ah, but here’s where Melville undercuts our pretensions. He introduces us to a shrine in an island bower that reflects a devout love for all matters of barbaric virtu. Inside it you’ll see wood carvings, inlaid spears, costly paddles, and chiseled shells, museum quality pieces. Chief among them is the skeleton of a great sperm whale. Again, we might sneer—a whale skeleton as a work of art? Its ribs are hung with valuable trophies and annals are carved on its vertebrae in hieroglyphics that record the entire history of that island nation. So this barbaric virtu is artful, it’s historical, and since it serves in a devout setting, it’s spiritual. There’s nothing artificial about it. Venture further inside and you’ll see that the temple is blanketed vibrantly with a carpet of vines and tendrils, the warp and woof of greenery brightened by living flowers. It’s a “life restless” work of art.21 Like most critics, Ishmael thinks he can assess it. He takes out a ball of twine in an effort to measure it, except that very soon his line runs out. It runs out literally—the string is too short—and metaphorically because Ishmael is incapable of writing down lines about anything so profound. Barbaric virtu is far beyond his cultivated comprehension. In the end Melville undercuts our inflated pretensions, resoundingly, when he ridicules the museums in our own cultivated world that house whale skeletons. For instead of regarding them as art, we view them as commodities. Two pence will get you a peep at the whale’s spinal column. Three pence will allow you to hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum. Six pence will get you a view from his forehead. Hardly artful, historical, or spiritual, these exhibits seem similar to the cheap side show kitsch hawked by a carnival barker. Meanwhile those of us with established taste take great pride in the fact that what we value as art surely can’t be determined by a barbarian. Now it’s true that we need words like barbarian to describe people who are primitive or barbaric in their taste. But Melville gets us to wonder a bit about who they really are.

21 Melville, Moby-Dick, 375.


8. Being Impressed If you ever get to see one of the tall ships sail into Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport or into the port of Szczecin, Poland, chances are you’ll be impressed. Today if we’re impressed, it’s usually a feeling that lasts, one that influences us deeply, and perhaps most important of all, it’s a feeling that tends to arise from a pleasurable experience. However that wasn’t always the case during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when being impressed could mean that you were forcibly pressed to serve in the royal navy or army.22 The word impress is ultimately related to the Latin premere meaning “to stand before.” By the sixteenth century it was influenced by another press, from the Latin pressare, meaning “to keep on press-

22 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s.v. 2007, “impressment.” .


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ing” which also implied “to crush or to crowd.” Before long a definition emerged that combined the two: 1) to stand before someone, and 2) to crush him. So metaphorically impressment came to refer to what happened when civilians were overpowered and then bullied or pressed into service. It’s no wonder none of these men went voluntarily. Jobs at sea were long and risky. Pay was poor, food was rotten, conditions exploitive, and chances were many would drown, die in battle, or fall prey to some deadly disease. Meanwhile fiendishly brutal public floggings and hangings tended to intimidate any protestors. Since these men were so unwilling, the crown decided to hire what were called “press gangs” or “crimpers” who would prowl the waterfront and often kidnap sailors. In other ploys, they’d shanghai a sailor after one too many drinks. Or they’d drug him and he’d wake up on board, too late. To avoid impressment, or what often amounted to slavery, the men who feared they would be targets would sometimes try to disguise themselves as cripples, paralytics, or someone who looked mentally risky. Some men even burned themselves with vitriol in an effort to appear as though they were suffering from scurvy. Meanwhile there were also unscrupulous boarding house masters and gear outfitters who, for a bribe, would tip off the crimpers about a promising new candidate. Others would trick a man into running up exorbitant credit and then force him into service to pay his debts. 23 There were also wanted posters and ads offering rewards, typically a few guineas a head, to a crimp for any strong and able-bodied seaman he could capture. Since what they did amounted to slave trading, it’s ironic that they were rewarded in guinea coins. Worth twenty-one shillings, the guinea got its name from Guinea, the African country that originally furnished the gold to make what hence came to be called guineas. In Guinea first they took the gold. And then they took the slaves. That, too, was impressive.

23 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Canto ed., 1993), 32-34, 44. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. s.v. “impressment.” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 15 May 2007 .


9. Indentured Servants Take a Bite From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries many immigrants arrived here as indentured servants. In exchange for a passage to North America they signed a contract to work for an employer for a specific number of years. The hope was that in working they’d learn a trade or earn a parcel of land and ultimately become independent. The contract would provide a written description of what work was expected and how the immigrant would be compensated. Ironically, the history of the word indentured shows us that there was a real bite to the contract. The word is formed from in +dent and historically there are two separate words that converged to spell it. One meant “to make a hole or depression in,” such as a dent in your car. The other meant “to make notches in” and that comes from the Latin dens for tooth. Eventually this formed the basis of the Anglo-Latin verb indentare which referred to the drawing up of a contract between two people in which two identical documents on the same page were cut along a matching line of notches, or teeth, that could be realigned to prove their authenticity. Such a notched contract was typically drawn up between an employer and the person he sponsored. Because of that the immigrant came to be known as an indentured servant. Theoretically indentured servants were supposed to differ from slaves, but that wasn’t always the case. In fact some historians insist that indentured servants were often treated worse than slaves. As the argument goes, a slave was regarded as a long term investment so it was economically prudent for a slave master to keep his property healthy for long term production. But an indentured servant was considered a short-term investment so their treatment was poor to begin with and it would deteriorate incrementally as he approached the end of his service. Moreover sometimes the term “indentured servant” became a euphemism for slavery itself, particularly after 1772 with the advent of the Mansfield Decision that was supposed to have ended slave trade in Britain. However that ruling wasn’t necessarily enforced in their colonies where British slave traders continued to trade slaves from one colony to work in another. To save face they would refer to these workers as “indentured servants.”


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Along with that, there were other names used to describe them, names that weren’t so tactful. One example would be the word coolie. While the word’s origin is questionable, we do know that a coolie has always been associated with hard miserable labor. The Brits exported thousands of coolies to work in mines or sugar plantations in the West Indies and Australia. We took them to help build the Pacific Railroad. Many more were used in Peru, South Africa, Hawaii, and Malaysia, always for grueling physical labor. A century later, in a similar fashion, other slaves were called blackbirds, islanders from places like Fiji, New Caledonia, and the Samoas who were forced to work for sugarcane plantations in Queensland. No one knows for sure why they were called “black birds,” but perhaps it was because they were dark and viewed as common and expendable. Unfortunately, no matter what they were called, “indentured,” “coolies” or “black birds,” few of them ever had a contract with teeth in it.24

10. Pirates: Democrats or Mercenaries? Imagine lighting up your beard to scare people. According to some legends the infamous pirate Blackbeard did just that, braiding hemp into his enormous back beard and then lighting it, just before he charged into battle. He gained even more notoriety around 1718 when he raided ships along the Carolina coast and then blockaded Charleston. After a number of skirmishes, American sailors finally returned in triumph to North Carolina with Blackbeard’s head hanging from the bowsprit of their ship, Blackbeard having been a victim of some cutthroat tactics.25 The word pirate comes from the Latin pirata from the Greek peiratēs and peiran meaning “to attempt” or “to attack.”26 It shares an ancestor with peril which seems understandable, but then there’s also empiric. We think of empirics as guided by experience, not theory, but long ago, particularly when it came to medicine, em24 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2007, s.v. “slavery.” . Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2007, s.v. “race.” . 25 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, May 31, 2007, s.v. “Blackbeard” http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9071505>. 26 Encarta, s.v. “pirate.”


pirics were regarded as charlatans or quacks. In any event, it would seem that the word pirate comes from a family with a risky reputation. Even today there are pirates raiding ships off the shores of Somalia and the straits of Malacca.27 At first these celebrated incidents entertained the public who enjoyed watching local bandits from impoverished countries hold greedy oil companies hostage. But things changed in our minds on April 8, 2009, when Somali pirates captured a U.S-flagged cargo ship that contained emergency relief supplies for Kenya. Within a short time the U.S. crew managed to recapture their ship but not without sacrifice, for the pirates kept 27 “Piracy on the High Seas,” Britannica Book of the Year, 2006. .


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Captain Richard Phillips as hostage. When they refused to negotiate, within days Phillips was rescued and the pirates were shot dead by US Navy Seal snipers. Until then we tended to romanticize pirates as swashbuckling heroes, with eye patches and parrots, who lived adventuresome skull-and-cross-bone lives. And yet maybe the Jolly Roger wasn’t always so jolly. In his Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea Marcus Rediker tells us, “The pirate was, perhaps above all else an unremarkable man caught in harsh often deadly circumstances.”28 According to Rediker, before men became pirates, many of them had been treated brutally by harsh captains who were a law unto themselves at sea. Most came from lower social classes. Most had been exploited by a traditional imperialistic hierarchy. Given that background, perhaps what was so revolutionary about pirates was that, as a group, they tended to treat each other democratically. When a pirate took control of a ship, every sailor was more likely to have a vote. Food was distributed equitably, and profits were divided according to a share system that took into account skills and duties. It’s true some dreamed of wealth, but what seemed more compelling to them was the camaraderie that arose out of their common working class backgrounds, their maritime experience, and their lost family ties. When they banded together, Rediker says, they became “a culture of masterless men” who formed ties beyond church, family, labor, and powers of state.29 They were rebels at sea. They were game for a variety of enterprises. In some instances their lawless activities were secretly encouraged by respected governments. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when nations were competing in their efforts to trade and colonize, rivalries developed among the English, Spanish, French, and Dutch. To unofficially fight each other, their governments would often commission pirates to raid rival ships. The British called these pirates “privateers,” “corsairs,” or “buccaneers,” the kind of pirates who liked to rob and kill people in such endearing ways. The Dutch name for them was vrijbuiters or “plunderers.” Later the Spanish changed that to filibustero, referring to “a revo28 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, Canto ed., 1993), 285. 29 Rediker, 286.


lutionary” and “a mercenary.” Later still we changed that word to “filibuster.” Today we tend to think of filibusters as those windy Congressmen who try to keep legislation at bay by giving long tiresome speeches. In the face of that kind of pirating, perhaps voters should ask: Are they are really democrats—or are they mercenaries?

11. The Brotherhood of Yarn Spinning When we think of tall tales, we tend to think of stories about characters like Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Calamity Jane, or Davy Crockett, and they are mostly tales about adventures on land. But at sea, sailors spin yarns. The word yarn comes from the Old English gearn, ultimately from an IndoEuropean base meaning “entrail.” Later entrails were likened to strings of yarn. Since sailors spent considerable time braiding yarn into rope, what in sailor language is called “a line,” soon they were taking another metaphorical leap in “spinning a story line” or “spinning a yarn.”30 30 The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2000, s.v. “yarn.”


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Most sailors told yarns. Very quickly yarns established who was experienced in what, regardless of rank, age, class, caste, or race. So yarning tended to level the playing field in terms of a sailor’s social status. African-American sailors, who were often sidelined, readily took to yarning because most of them came out of long story telling traditions. So did other lowly sailors who had lived hard lives in which storytelling was one of the few diversions they could afford. On deck the characters themselves were at least as colorful as the stories they told, in part because their stories tended to be so elaborately loaded with maritime metaphors. Here’s how one began: “Old Man Knowles after unshipping his false teeth and stowing them away carefully in his starboard vest pocket, explain[ed] to the old Snug Harbor salts that composed his audience, that before commencing to spin a yarn he usually removed the molars for fear that while speaking they might break away from their moorings and float around in his mouth impeding his speech or perhaps drift down his throat and choke him . . .”31 Here, he’s hardly begun, but you can see that the style, delivery, and especially the rich metaphoric language is at least as important as the story itself. Some yarn spinners told of piratical adventures while others told of lost love. In “A Tar’s Romance,” we read, ‘She never know’d how much I loved her—blessed if I don’t feel spoony over it to this day.’32 Another told about Paddy, the Bible-thumping sailor who took to drinking on shore and then fed buckets of rum to an elephant. He should have stuck to preaching. Soon the drunken elephant went on a rampage and ravaged the palace gardens in Rangoon. According to the yarn spinner, the political ruckus that followed caused plenty of trouble for the rest of the ungodly crew. Other yarns revealed sad stories about hardship and deprivation. There’s one about a cabin boy “thin as a leaf of a psalm book,” with one eye “slewed athwartships.” As the story unfolds listeners learn that he was brutally treated and too weak to defend himself. When he was finally dropped on shore, he was “shoved on to a parson that run a sailors’ Gospel shop there in Baltimore” where the parson “made him head scavenger of that consarn.” In their homespun 31 N. Ames, An Old Sailor’s Yarns (New York: G. Dearborn, 1835). This is my best guess since the book is now lost. 32 Ibid.


metaphorical language, the yarns of sailors tell us quite a bit about the fabric of their lives.

12. Keep on Trucking The phrase “keep on trucking” implies that you carry on in a cheerful relaxed way in spite of problems.33 And that indicates trucking isn’t always easy. The big rig transport version comes from the Latin trohus for “iron hoop,” from the Greek trohkos for “wheel.” Along with that, there’s a different truck that comes from the Old French dialect troquer meaning “to barter.” It refers to “goods or produce,” and truck is often traded in goods rather than in money, so the

33 Encarta, s.v. “truck2.”


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truck system is an old-fashioned bartering system in which goods are supplied in lieu of wages. Old-fashioned or not, it’s still happening today. Here too, trucking isn’t always easy. In Newfoundland, in isolated hard-pressed communities, fishermen are typically forced to trade in truck. Like sharecroppers they owe their souls to the company store where the merchant extends credit for supplies such as groceries, clothes, or fishing equipment. He commands a monopoly on prices and he commands a captive clientele of fishermen who must get him a guaranteed supply of fish that he can in turn sell on the market. Caught in this system, the fishermen use fish as truck, to try to pay for the goods the merchant has extended to them on credit. However there’s one chance for these men to briefly escape the trucking system in the spring with the migration and birth of harp seal pups. Hence, according to maritime historian Daniel Vickers, the Newfoundland trucking system helps to explain why many of these hard-scrabble fishermen, who loathe animal rights groups, feel justified in clubbing baby seals.34 When the harbor seals come in to calve on ice flows, the fishermen are presented with their only opportuinity to get out of the trucking system and make some cash. For them it’s a bonanza because they can get around $100 cash a day for the baby seal pelts and then return to town with their only true disposable income. So clubbing baby seals offers fishermen a chance to make something more than truck. And they can do that because there’s a growing demand for these pelts in Russia, the Ukraine, and now it would seem in China. Nevertheless bystanders don’t like seeing those black and white photos, with red in them, of thousands of baby seal pups spread out on the Newfoundland ice flows as far as the eye can see. They are lying there because big men with clubs and spiked boots have pounded their skulls and then dragged their convulsing bodies back to a boat, their tracks streaked incarnadine with the blood of harp seal pups. A harp seal was named for the harp-shaped dark markings on its back, which have its appeal, but the fur of a newborn is even more appealing because it is snow-white and warm, warm enough 34 Daniel Vickers, conversation during the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Connecticut, on maritime history, Summer, 2006.


to keep a new baby cozy in the brutal cold. Ironically, that’s what makes them expendable. People will kill them for their fur, as if by putting it on they too can look innocent and warm in a brutally cold world. Meanwhile what haunts us are those eyes, looking up at us with dark and trusting pup like innocence. Then, when they meet up with men with baseball bats, they must wonder, why? But we shrug, and “just keep right on truckin’.”

CHAPTER EIGHT FROM HAGS TO BITCHES

“D

Introduction

on’t cross your eyes or they’ll stay that way.” So often we tend to unconsciously blame victims of unfortunate physical and mental conditions, and etymology will tell us stories about that. Consider the history of the term “haggard eye.” Long ago a haggard eye was thought of as something a willful child could bring upon herself when she stared or glared in a haughty or defiant manner. Others believed they could get the haggard eye from hags, a word we acquired for women who were shunned because of mental or physical peculiarities that looked suspicious. Clearly, our vocabulary has been brutal to individuals with less than desirable physical or mental conditions. Even in our enlightened age, it’s not unusual to hear people in everyday conversation say: “He’s a real idiot.” “She’s a retard.” “Our new puppy is a spastic.” It’s also true that some of the mean words we use today didn’t start out that way. For instance words such as jerk, creep, and cripple, may well have originated as more descriptive than derogatory. The silly were once blessed by God. A cretin was once thought of


as a Christian or a fellow human being. In those cases etymology seems to indicate that through the years we’ve become more cruel than kind in our treatment of such people. Word histories also show us that some of our prejudices developed when scientists claimed that a physical feature such as the size of your skull or the height of your brow marked intelligence. Hence a highbrow was destined to be far more intelligent than a lowbrow, probably a theory thought up by balding men because what we say so often reflects our own self-serving bias. However, even when we struggle to be sensitive, we stumble about trying to find the right words to use: Handicapped? Challenged? Disabled? Retarded? They all have off-putting etymologies. We think “Down Syndrome” is a polite term for “mongoloid,” but it was named to honor Dr. Down, the racist scientist who identified it and argued that individuals who had it were atavistic throwbacks to the more primitive Mongoloid race. So even when we try to be polite, we can be seriously misinformed or unintentionally hurtful. Having said all of that, what words can we use to describe people with, well, less than optimal abilities? Today it’s hard to tell. Sadly, the vocabulary we use indicates that we are much more familiar with words that are hurtful than ones that are helpful.

1. From Hags to Bitches If you’ve ever met a hag, chances are you thought she was old, cranky, and ugly, the kind of arrestingly odd woman who could give your stomach a turn. To many minds, hags looked as though they were personally acquainted with evil. For centuries in their witchy ways they conjured notions of depravity, often because of a physical deformity which people assumed they deserved to have. Hags tramped about with crooked spines, cleft pallets, or palsied hands. They were gaunt and ungainly. When they hung around, people shunned them, and then people blamed them for being antisocial, contrary, and reclusive. Folklore had it that they liked to nest rats in their tangled greasy hair, suckle cats in their bosoms, and grow warts on their wicked noses. How did such a stigma begin? Scholars don’t know for sure since the origin of the word is dark and uncertain, but we think it came from the Old English hægtesse and if it did, it’s related to the prehis-

8  from hags to bitches

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toric Germanic word that also produced Hexe meaning “witch,” no doubt the troublesome kind who could put a hex on you. Similar to that, a hag could cast a spell on you with her haggard eye. At the time, folks believed that she could cast a fish bone in your throat, a scorpion in your belly, or lice—just where you most wouldn’t want them. Moreover haggard eyes were not limited to decrepit old women. Children could get them. Supposedly if a child glared defiantly, it could fix a child’s gaze and lead to that dreadful haggard eye. Young mothers were warned about other foolish mothers who had allowed a child, especially a sulky one, to stare or glare long enough to develop that menacing haggard eye. Even today a version of this comes down in the folkloric notion, “Don’t cross your eyes, or they’ll stay that way.” Few of us would ever dare to try it for long. And you have to wonder if anybody dared to then, in the days when a victim of a haggard eye became an outcast, or perhaps cast out because of a cast in her eye. What about the linking of the word hag with haggard? That must have occurred because of their similar sounds and not their similar origins. While hag may have its witchy origins, haggard comes from the French hagard meaning “untamed,” a word that was once used in falconry to refer to a wild and unmanageable hawk. Since some hags were also wild and unmanageable, you can see how the two were connected, especially since the “–ard” part of haggard can mean “characteristic of.” Along with being unmanageable, other hags were merely women who had lived past the childbearing age, women who could become hot, flushed, and suddenly bitchy. Bitchy? That comes from the Old English bicce and it describes not only a female dog but also a


woman who is querulous, nagging, and nasty. In the animal world the male counterpart to bitch is sire, a much nicer word that is also used, respectfully, to address a lord or king. But who’d ever call the lady or queen a bitch? Perhaps only those disgruntled old women, the kind who were forced to go from hags to bitches.

2. Jerking Around Creeps, Cretins, and Fellow Christians It’s possible that some words that are derogatory now did not start out as offensively as we might think. Consider the word jerk. While its origin is uncertain, scholars suspect that a jerk first described the sound of a lash and then the jerking motion a horse made when it started to pull a plow. Later when people with spastic muscles moved suddenly, or jolted, they were called jerks. At the time the word seemed more metaphorically descriptive than derisive, but by now the dictionary will tell you that calling someone a jerk is both offensive and contemptuous. It’s not unlike calling someone a fool, a word that comes from the Latin follis meaning “bellows or windbag.” And yet there’s a considerable difference in culpability. Historically a fool has been derided for how he chooses to act while a jerk came to be ridiculed because of what he could not help. What about creep? That comes from the Old English crēopan and from a prehistoric Germanic word that may also be the ancestor of cripple.1 The underlying idea here would be “moving with a bent back.” Like jerk, creep started out as a descriptive word, but by now we think creeps are obnoxious and 1 Encarta, s.v.“creep1.” a. The action of creeping; slow or stealthy motion. (lit. and fig.).


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repellant, and a cripple is “an incapable person” or “something damaged.” What about cretin? Today calling someone a cretin is downright offensive. The word might seem even more so when we come to realize that cretin is related to Christian. Well now, should we snicker at the cretin-Christian family link, assuming it’s some kind of etymological insult? Actually, there is a far kinder explanation. That kinship came about, particularly in the Romance languages, when the word Christian was commonly used as a general term for person.2 Eventually various versions of Christian gave us cretin which at the time meant “a Christian or a fellow human being.” The underlying idea was that cretins, as fellow human beings, deserved our love and care. Along with that, folks also assumed a Christian was someone who was kind, unselfish, and helpful. However by now our current definition has lost that meaning—which makes you wonder what else we’ve lost.

3. Why Do We Think the Silly Are Ridiculous? We’ve all heard stories about maniacs who were locked up and persecuted as demon-possessed, but long ago not everyone with mental difficulties was handled with a chain. In fact some were regarded, respectfully, as silly. The word comes from the Old English saelig and it once meant “happy and blessed.” The silly were probably those bland and blissfully unaware victims of various mental disorders. And some folks regarded them as the true innocents of the world, the uncorrupted grown children of God. Around the sixteenth century, some believed the silly had been given inner gifts of peace and tranquility, that they were infused with grace, and that they were touched by the Lord. Today we tend to shun people who we think are a bit touched, and we consider the silly ridiculous. But for centuries there was nothing ridiculous at all about being silly. In 1513, Galvin Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid refers to silly Dido which at the time meant she deserved compassion and sympathy. Here it would seem that caring for the silly still meant she would be treated with kindness. A century later in a book on heraldry, witches were accused of destroying silly infants which meant 2 Encarta, s.v. “Christian.”


they were helpless infants. But around then the kindly and helpful associations with silly were eroding. In Shakespeare a silly time was a sorry and meager time. Or, it could mean rustic and lowly, which might have led us to associating silly with something inconsequential and eventually something worthy of ridicule.3 Along with that, there were still other versions of silly. Looking back to the Norman Conquest, the Normans, who were hardly inconsequential, were also regarded as silly because folks thought they had nothing to do but hunt and play. Gradually that version of silly came to mean “idle.” In The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge speaks of “silly buckets on the deck,” silly because in the dearth of activity they were idle and empty.4 During Coleridge’s time in the early nineteenth century, the feudal system had declined, labor was becoming both democratic and dignified, and the rise of industry was giving most people a chance to work. So the idle did look silly. Today we regard the silly as ridiculous, trivial, dazed, and helpless, all words that also have been used to describe someone with mental difficulties.5 So by looking at the social history of silly, we can see that what was once blessed and innocent eventually became feeble, then feeble-minded, and finally ridiculous. Now any scholar will tell you that those changes were not all directed at folks with mental difficulties. Even so, it does make you wonder, doesn’t it, what was so ridiculous about people who were silly? With that in mind, we might also want to ask ourselves, what’s so funny about people who are “a little bit funny”?

4. Highbrows and Their Shining Intelligence Can intelligence be measured by the height of your brow? In the nineteenth century several scientists with enviable reputations thought so. It was a heady theory and it explains how we got the 3 Lerer, Seth “The History of the English Language,” The Teaching Company, 1998. 4 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Broadbridge, Alderley, Wottonunder-Edge, Gloucestershire: Clarendon Press, 1975), “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 5. 297. 198. 5 Encarta, s.v. “silly.” Word Key: Origin.


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words highbrow and lowbrow. As the theory went, a high forehead indicated bigger and better brain power. Hence a highbrow came to be regarded as a cultivated intellectual, one who dealt with serious subjects, especially cultural subjects, in an intellectual way. By comparison a lowbrow was viewed as unsophisticated, unintelligent, and uncultivated, a shallow simple-minded person whose taste inclined toward the trivial. The scientists who thought up such a theory were males, mature males, mature enough to be balding, and you have to wonder if they weren’t influenced by their own heightening foreheads as they assured themselves that high brows undoubtedly cradled a very shining intelligence. That might also explain why they thought women weren’t quite so bright. After all, most women don’t lose their hair and so their brows weren’t quite so high. While the height of your forehead was supposed to indicate your intelligence, so was the size of your skull. Of course men typically have larger skulls, so they assumed, in their own big-headed view, that bigger male skulls had bigger male brains. Their theories also ranked intelligence in terms of race and gender. The celebrated scientist Samuel George Morton insisted that by measuring skull sizes of various races he could rank them in terms of intelligence. Whites like Morton were on the top, Jews in the middle, and Hindus on the bottom. Evidently Morton must


have thought he could identify a Jewish race and a Hindu race. As for gender differences, at the time the celebrated anthropologist Paul Broca argued that the brain size of most women was considerably inferior to that of most men. And his colleague Gustave Le Bon declared that the brain pan of most women was closer in size to that of a gorilla’s than a man’s. Even more inferior were the brain pans of poets and novelists. They were closer in size to that of a child or a savage than to that of an adult civilized male. Given that, it must have been a real headache for novelists like Dickens or Thackery to keep all those people and detailed plot lines straight in their tiny little tightening brains. It must have been even worse for women authors such as Bronte and Austen. Perhaps that’s why Mary Ann Evans sought comfort in pretending to be George Eliot. In The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould quarrels with such brain pan panjandrum. Although he admits the cranial cavity of a human skull provides a faithful measure of the brain it once contained, Gould suggests that these scientists measured inaccurately, sampled unreliably, and indulged in wildly speculative claims. They failed to recognize that brain weight increases with height and decreases with age or degenerative illness. Moreover Gould points out that currently scientists are still puzzling about how to relate body size to brain size. Is height a factor? If so, what about people with the same body height but different body build? And does weight matter to brain size? So far no one has created a verifiable system to correlate anatomy and intelligence.6 Maybe we should just ask some egghead.

5. The Cruelty of Being Put Down I once had a young friend named Mark who was afraid to cross the US-Canadian border. As the family car edged forward in the line-up toward border patrol, he cringed and offered to hide in the trunk or crouch behind the front seat of the car. He had Down syndrome and he was afraid he wouldn’t pass inspection. It’s tough to be stigmatized, especially when you are vulnerable to begin with. Just looking at the history of the words describing Mark’s condition might explain why he felt like cringing. People 6 Gould, 73-112.


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like Mark used to be called mongoloids. Today we think the more sensitive term is Down syndrome, after Dr. John Langdon Haydon Down, the English scientist who identified the syndrome. But if we are looking for sensitivity and tolerance, Dr. Down might not pass inspection. In 1866 he first identified the syndrome in a paper entitled: “Observations on an ethnic classification of idiots.” He described idiots of the ‘Ethiopian variety’ who were ‘white negroes, although of European descent.’ He also identified ‘others of the Malay type’ and others who came from ‘the great Mongolian family’ where he accurately described the features of a Down syndrome child.7 Why the racial implications? Because Down was claiming to link degeneracy with racial ranking. And that had to do with his version of evolution. Around that time Down and some other scientists believed the human embryo recapitulated, or repeated evolutionary stages during embryonic development. Supposedly in the early stages, human embryos had the gill slits of their fish ancestors; later a temporary tail indicated a reptilian ancestor, and so on. In keeping with that theory, these scientists also ranked races in stages of human development, so a mongoloid was a throwback to a more primitive human. Of course, a white European male was the cock of the rock. Further on down in the pecking order were the Asian and African races. Even today, the word mongol is highly offensive, especially if it’s used to refer to somebody who is affected by Down syndrome. But what, really, is so polite about “Down syndrome”? It’s another term that should make all of us cringe.

6. Unspeakably Retarded, Handicapped, and Disabled If we are concerned about feelings, we know what not to call the retarded, the handicapped, or the disabled, but what do we call them? Let’s consider the etymology. Retarded comes from the Latin retardare, from tardus meaning “slow.” It could be a realistic description, except that today calling someone “retarded,” and especially “a 7 Stephen Jay Gould, Mismeasure of Man (New York, London: Norton, 1981) 134-35.


retard,” has gotten to be really offensive, a boorish slang term that willfully insults someone’s intelligence. And handicapped? That’s more acceptable, but still, a number of folks are uncomfortable with it. During the mid seventeenth century the word came from “hand in cap,” a game or an old form of bartering that seems to have involved drawing something from a hat—a bartering ticket or a betting slip. To insure fair bartering, an umpire would decide on the value of the goods. If he decided the goods exchanged were unequal in value, he would tell the owner of the inferior goods to put up a handicap, an additional fee, to make the exchange fair. The contestants also put up some forfeit money. Then the two would put their hands in a cap. If they both accepted the barter (hands full) or rejected it (hands empty), the umpire would take the forfeit money. If they disagreed, the one who accepted took the forfeit money. So there was a bit of a gamble in trying this. There were variations to this system which led to a handicap in sports, a way to negotiate competition between opponents who are unequal in ability. Hence a handicap may determine a scoring bonus in golf, a weight allowance in horse racing, or a time allowance in sailing. While the original idea here tried to provide for equal opportunity, it was actually designed to make betting more exciting or challenging. So the history of the word handicap seems more concerned with commerce than compassion. What about the mentally or physically challenged? That seems to be the most politically acceptable term, at least for now. But it comes through the Old French c(h)alengier meaning “to accuse” and it has as its Latin root calumniare which means “to accuse falsely.” Moreover the word challenge is inherently competitive. At its best it’s a stimulating test of ability, except that by now the adjective challenged means “lacking in something” or “with a specified problem.” So it still sounds disagreeable. Today another definition of challenged is “having a specified handicap.” In that case, we’re using one questionable word to define another. Disabled is another word that we often use, and it comes from the Old French (h)able through Latin, ultimately from haber meaning “to have” and “to hold. But “diss-ing” the abled might well imply the opposite, although meanings change. Even so, it’s tough to find the right words for what we want to say but dare not speak. Is it be-


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cause we’re afraid to risk offending someone? It could be. Or, could it also be that even in our language, we’ve marginalized these folks and passed them off as unworthy?

CHAPTER NINE A WOMB WITH A VIEW

W

Introduction

ord histories will tell us something about misunderstandings that arose from medical dilemmas people faced and how ignorance regarding them led to various superstitions and prejudices that still influence our vocabulary today. For instance, we don’t typically think of men as a hysterics, but we do think women can get hysterical, a word we get from the Greek hustera for “womb.” The notion of female hysteria arose from an ancient Greek misconception that a womb had a will of its own. As the thinking went, when it got into a pique, it would wander about begrudgingly in a woman’s body, causing all kinds of mischief such as hysterical suffocation, frenzied panics, or maniacal laughter. In a similar way, the ancients thought the chest cavity or belly could also house physical and emotional feelings. They believed such sensations came out of the hypochondrium, the seat of mental and physical emotions. Even today we think of a hypochondriac as a person preoccupied with those kinds of concerns, a person whose fears we often ridicule. Ancient medics also thought it was important to keep your four body humors in balance and that their


relative proportions influenced a person’s physical and mental state. Today we still talk about keeping a risky person in good humor. Moreover we don’t like to be around anybody who’s unbalanced. While many of these misconceptions seem risible today, there are others that tell darker stories. During the era of the Black Plague citizens speculated desperately about what caused it. In central Europe, particularly in what became Germany, people blamed the Jews. Already hated as Christ killers, the Jews were accused of deliberately contaminating Christians and at the time they were also accused of “blood libel,” of ritualistically drinking the blood of innocent Christian children. So the misunderstanding of one medical problem kindled prejudices that incited even more hatred, the kind that ultimately fired gas chamber horrors. An absolute nightmare, we’d say. The ancients recognized that both genders could suffer from nightmares, supposedly caused by a mara, a heavy female goblin, who would settle down on a victim’s chest with alarming consequences. However only a woman could suffer from an incubare, an incubus, meaning “one that lies down on another.” As the thinking went, an incubus was a male demon who could lie down on and “incubate” a woman. If a willing woman found herself unmarried and pregnant, having been visited by an incubus could serve as a convenient excuse. On the other hand, if a woman were raped, or if she were raped and found herself pregnant, having been visited by an incubus may well have served as a sugar-coated euphemism for what happened when a powerful man secretly forced himself on a vulnerable woman. While some word histories surface uneasily out of what was once secret and hidden, others carry rather obvious histories. This is true of the word leper. For centuries in warmer climates leprosy was one of the most dreaded and contagious of diseases. Lepers were shunned as unclean. Even today if we want to describe someone who’s shunned, we’ll call him a leper. In medical history if there were victims, there were also victimizers. We acquired words such as charlatan, quack, and mountebank to describe those nefarious tricksters who took advantage of vulnerable people suffering from some common and very painful maladies. With that in mind, we’ll conclude with a look at tooth jumpers and consider some of the excruciating history of dentistry.

9  a womb with a view

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1. A Womb with a View1 For centuries the ancients believed wombs caused women plenty of trouble and etymology shows us that some of these ancient misconceptions led to prejudices we still harbor today. For instance, consider the word hysteria. Coming from the Greek hustera for “womb,” hysteria was brought forth when Hippocrates identified what he called “hysterical suffocation” and concluded that it was caused by a wayward womb that wandered up into a woman’s chest cavity. Hence women who were short of breath were thought to suffer from hysteria. So were women who would laugh uncontrollably or panic beyond reason. Doctors came to believe that their wayward and willful wombs were demon possessed, so for centuries they prescribed amulets for women to wear to ward off the demons that liked to crawl up and settle inside. If a woman were hysterical, she had reason to be, given her medical treatment. She was warned that if her womb were fruitless and failed to bear children, it would wander about in her body, willfully, venting its anger. Supposedly, it had teeth and could gnaw into her heart. It could paw at her liver and pounce on her stomach. It could poke around and sniff out attractive odors. Apothecaries would try to lure it back into its proper place by packing her with aromatic herbs such as laurel, rose, mint, and marjoram, as far as a feather quill could push, which must have created quite a ticklish situation. To drive it away from the upper body, the medic would coat her nostrils with seal oil or make her swallow ripe cabbage juice.2 You might wonder why the ancients thought wombs could be so willful, but consider what they must have watched: a powerful muscle that contracts when it wants to, one that wakes to its own rhythm, one that pushes new life upon us—or bleeds new mothers to death. A womb was a passion pit with an appetite. It was so determined to get with child that, willy-nilly, it beckoned its partner, the generative organ in man who was powerless to resist her. With that in mind it’s interesting that Plato also regarded the male member as disobedient, headstrong, and frantic with passion. It could be. But 1 Roald Tweet suggested this title. 2 Christopher A. Faranone, Professor of Classics, University of Chicago, Alumni Week Lectures, June, 2004.


if a womb was supposed to have teeth, what do you think happened next?

2. Gut Feelings It might seem a bit unsettling if we were to discuss our alimentary canals or intestines at the dinner table. Even so, it’s not uncommon for us to mention how we feel about our guts. A gut feeling relies on our deepest instincts. A gut issue summons our emotions, even if it’s not reasonable. A gutsy action takes courage. And when we despise someone, we hate his guts. Why? It’s puzzling because even looking at the word history of gut doesn’t tell us much. Coming from the Old English guttas, gut is related to an earlier ancestor that meant “a tube through which something pours” It’s also related to funnel which still doesn’t add much light. And yet perhaps we can explain why we have gut feelings if we examine the history of another word, the word hypochondria. Although we think of hypochondria as an imagined illness, the Greeks first identified it as an illness they associated with a variety of physical and emotional feelings, feelings that came from the hypochondrium, from hupokhondrios meaning “under or below the cartilage of the breast bone.” Here was the site where they thought melancholia originated. Nearby was where your heart “ached,” where you “knew something by heart.” So if the ancients thought emotions originated in the hypochondrium, perhaps that also explains why we have gut feelings or why strength of character could be associated with having enough guts. But what about hypochondriacs? Today we still use that word to describe someone who is preoccupied with health concerns or imagined illnesses. During the nineteenth century, in some cases, hypochondriacs were thought of as hysterics, the male counterpart to female hysteria. A male hysteric? For centuries we’ve ridiculed them. We think hypochondriacs are way too self-absorbed, and we’ve chuckled at their fears in drama, film, and fiction for quite some time. Currently you can buy Dennis Di Claudio’s The Hypochondriac’s Pocket Guide to Horrible Diseases You Probably Already Have. We laugh, uneasily. “Probably already have”? Like the preacher, a medical man is scary when he frightens us into believing.


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3. Wet Humor Long ago there was nothing funny about the word humor. In fact humor was all wet because it came from the Latin humor meaning “body fluid.” Around 400 B.C.E. Hippocrates believed that there were four different humors: 1) blood, 2) yellow bile, 3) black bile, and 4) phlegm. He also believed the relative proportions of the four humors influenced a person’s physical and mental state.3 For instance, if you had too much blood, chances were you’d have a ruddy complexion and your disposition would be optimistic and confident, or sanguine, from the Latin sanguis meaning “blood.” Too much of the second, yellow bile, was likely to make you irritable or bilious meaning “nauseatingly unpleasant.” Too much of the third, black bile, would make you melancholy, from the Greek melancholia meaning black bile. Too much of the fourth, phlegm, could make you indifferent or apathetic. And yet, as a humor, phlegm seemed to be both hot and cold. While it comes from the Greek phlegma meaning “heat,” too much of it could make you emotionally cold, or phlegmatic. In other cases the unbalance could also make you feverish and irritable, or “out of humor.” Today what humor we are in still describes our nature or mood. But how did humor get to be funny? Nobody knows for sure. And yet if humor had to do with mood, it’s possible that eventually it was associated with only one mood, a humorous one. Be that as it may, it seems no laughing matter if our humors are out of balance or if we are “unbalanced.” And that may well explain why we still regard someone who’s sadly deranged as “kind of funny.”

4. The Black Plague and Its Libelous Attack Historian Barbara Tuchman tells us that in the calamitous fourteenth century 20,000,000 people died, nearly a third of the population who lived from India to Iceland.4 They died hideously from the Black Plague, called “black” because of the dark subcutaneous hemorrhages it caused, and “plague” from the Middle English plag for “wound.” The disease often started out with a goose egg-sized 3 Christopher A. Faranone, Professor of Classics, University of Chicago, Alumni Week Lectures, June, 2004. Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s.v. “humor.” . 4 Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror (New York: Balantine, 1978), 94.


wound, usually in the armpit or groin that festered and burst into boils. Within days the victim would cough, bleed, sweat, shiver, and die in agony. Nobody knew what caused it. Astrologers worried that the planets had become ominously aligned. Geologists blamed the foul sulfurous gas that arose from earthquakes. Prophets pointed to the wrath of God. And Christians blamed the Jews. It became a compelling theory. After all, weren’t the Jews those Christ-killers who were determined to destroy all of Christendom? Hadn’t they poisoned wells and urged lepers to contaminate Christian communities? With that kind of paranoia in mind, legislators passed edicts to eradicate their civil rights. And in many medieval communities, Jews were burned at the stake. Around that time the Jews were also accused of “blood libel.” The story behind that may lend insight as to how the meaning of the word libel has changed. Coming from the Latin libellus, libel originally meant “little book” but during the era of blood libel, it changed from its then current meaning to “a written declaration” (1297) and then to “something that outlined the grounds for a lawsuit”(1340). But what was “blood libel”? It implied that the Jews participated in a bloody ritual where they would reenact the crucifixion and drink the blood of Christians. The talk was that they especially liked to drink the blood of Christian children. Chaucer’s tale of a child martyr, told by the Prioress, reflects such a superstition. She describes a community of Jews, hateful to Christ and those of his blood, who kidnapped an innocent seven-year-old Christian choir boy and cut his throat, almost to his spine. Even so, he wasn’t quite dead yet. When they laid him on an altar, he managed to convert the Jews there, who must have started tasting him, because they were converted through the taste of his salty tears. The Prioress concludes her tale of blood libel by piously urging all good Christians to continue to ask for God’s grace in converting the heathens. Although we can’t attribute the entire change in the meaning of libel to what was happening to the Jews, it’s interesting that by 1631 the word libel had come to mean “damaging statements that defame or attack somebody’s character.” Plague-ridden communities in their growing paranoia were desperately looking for someone to blame. Amidst the clamor, leaders and legislators found it


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convenient to convince anxious citizens that they needed to take whatever means they could to rid themselves of their national peril. So it seems one plague brought on another.

5. Nightmare: Waking Up Simon Legree During the Middle Ages people often blamed their medical problems on evil spirits. These superstitions have given our language some frightful words, like the word nightmare. Supposedly while you tried to sleep, a mara, or female goblin—no doubt very fat female goblin—would settle down on your chest and try to torment you. Today a heavy pressure on your chest might indicate heart disease but in that goblin-haunted era people believed they were suffering from “nightmares.” Another word related in use but not in etymology to mara is the word incubare, or incubus meaning “one that lies down on another.” Eventually an incubus became a male demon who could incubate, or lie on top of a woman and make her pregnant. So when an unmarried woman became pregnant, she could blame it on an incubus. And it’s likely that at times the word incubus also served as a euphemism, the only nice sounding excuse a woman could offer, when she was raped and found herself pregnant. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath blithely and sarcastically speaks to such a situation. She begins by suggesting that there was something even worse than an incubus, the limiter, or today what we’d call “the friar.” Bath tells us, “There is no other incubus, than he the limiter,/ And would do them nothing but


dishonor.”5 In her bawdy tale she tartly attempts to unravel a moral paradox: the church expects women to be chaste. Men value chastity in a women, but then men—particularly friars—are the ones who can so easily rob a woman of it. Today we have another word for that kind of nightmare and in literature women have dealt with it in a variety of ways. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, although Harriet Beecher Stowe is too discreet to say “raped,” you can still tell that the beautiful and abominated Cassie has been victimized by Simon Legree. In an effort to help two other women escape a similar fate, Cassie capitalizes on Legree’s growing paranoia. Due to his prodigious drinking, he now suffers from horrific delusions and she knows it. She also knows he is too terrified to sleep. Toying with that, she convinces Legree that he is now being haunted by the spirit of one of the slave women he has tormented, a ghost who is already stalking about restlessly up in the attic right above his bed, a justifiably angry ghost who’s getting ready to visit him. When Cassie taunts him about this, Legree becomes absolutely mad with horror and we read, “[H]e stared at her like a man in a nightmare.”6 For readers who enjoy revenge more than salvation, Legree’s misery is absolutely sublime. Uncle Tom can pray for him all he wants hoping that Legree will repent and ask God for forgiveness, but in our darkest hearts we love it when a bully like Legree wakes to his absolute worst nightmare: a powerful black woman who stands above him, one who, despite her nightmarish existence, still had a vision and the courage to dream.

6. Measles, Mumps and the Leper Con Imagine if a stalwart county health official stalked up to your door, grimly, and nailed up a sign that declared, “Quarantine!” Today if we saw such a sign, we might worry about some new virus or another attack of biological terrorism. But early in the seventeenth century, the Italians adapted the word from the Latin quadraginta meaning “forty” to use to describe the quarantine, the enforced isolation, of incoming ships that were ordered to stay outside of port 5 Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” lines, 886887. 6 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Norton 1994), 349.


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for 40 days when their passengers were suspected of carrying a contagious disease. We still worry about catching diseases from foreigners and we even associate some with foreign names like “the Chinese flu,” “the Mexican trots” or “the German measles.” While these diseases aren’t exactly national in their origin, in the instance of measles the word itself does seem to come from the Middle Low German masele or the Middle Dutch masel meaning “spot or blemish.” Measles, especially “regular measles,” was one of the contagious diseases doctors attempted to control by quarantine. Another was mumps, a word that comes from the obsolete noun mump meaning “grimace,” something anyone with the mumps does whenever he tries to eat or speak. Given such misery, there must have been more than one grimace or mump which might explain why the word is always heard in the plural. It’s a similar case with measles. There were lots of spots so it was measles and not just a measly measle. Another disease that was quarantined—and stigmatized—was leprosy. Remember hearing about “leper colonies”? Even today a leper is someone who is intentionally avoided by the rest of society. The word comes from the Greek lepros meaning “scaly” and it has also been connected with measles by folk etymology because the earlier mesel (which led to measles) could also mean “leper.” Either one could make you look like the kind of person who should be quarantined. Leprosy in particular was regarded as the disease of the impure and lepers were shunned as unclean. When I was six, in Sunday school I can remember that we were taught about how God in his magic could cleanse lepers whiter than snow. Looking at pictures of lepers would always make you


want to donate an extra nickel to Sunday school. But when we asked our kindly Irish neighbor if he would like to donate to the lepers so God could work his magic, he solemnly told us God did not perform magic. That was something left to mischievous little green men. And it was then that we learned about the leper con.

7. The Excruciating History of Dentistry If going to the dentist makes you ill at ease, just be glad you don’t have to go to a “tooth jumper.” According to James Wynbrandt in The Excruciating History of Dentistry, before we had dentists and comfortable recliners there was a tooth jumper who would grip your head between his knees and knock away at your tooth with hammer and peg until your tooth jumped out.7 More often than not, a tooth jumper was supposed to be ridding his patient of the dreaded tooth worm. At the time people thought a toothache was caused by a 7 James Wynbrandt, The Excruciating History of Dentistry:Toothsome Tales and Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).


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tooth worm, a little white maggoty creature with teeth that would burrow into your tooth and gnaw inside your head in important ways. Treatments varied. Teeth could be pulled, or sometimes they’d treat tooth worm with frankincense and myrrh. So when the Magi brought those gifts to Jesus, maybe they were just trying to help him get a good start on dental hygiene. Wyndbrant tells us that in other instances tooth worm dentists would fumigate a patient’s mouth with poisonous gas. Along with that the tooth jumper would grind herbs and mice heads into a tooth paste and coat your teeth with it claiming it would help to eradicate the dreaded tooth worm. While some dentists actually believed these techniques would work, others were deliberate frauds. If a fraudulent dentist wanted to insure that his diagnosis of tooth worm was correct, he would hide a little white worm inside a secret chamber of his dental pliers. Armed with that, he’d peer into your mouth, tinker with your teeth, and then he would gravely diagnose, “Tooth worm!” While you were still trying to notify next of kin, he’d strap you down and tap, tap, tap at your throbbing tooth with his loaded pliers until, presto, a little white worm would dangle loose and fall writhing on to your tongue. After a moment or two he’d pick up it up, obligingly, with his pliers. And, sure enough, there would be your tooth worm dangling from his intrepid pincers. There were other health practitioners with nefarious schemes. Along with the tooth jumper there was the “tooth drawer,” one who would draw out your tooth. The Dutch and Germans called them quacks, from quacksalver meaning “a false and smooth operator.” The Italians called them ciarlatanos for their babble and empty talk. The word later became charlatan, the Italian version of “somebody who falsely claims a special skill.” But the British called the most flamboyant tooth drawers mountebanks. That word was Anglicized from the Italian mona in banco meaning “get up onto a bench,” for quacks often hawked their goods to the public on a platform. Still others worked from horses. After collecting a fee for their services, the mounted quack would tie a string to your aching tooth and attach the other end to a saddle ring. “Giddy up,” he’d say. And out would gallop your tooth. Later, although less flamboyantly, we tried out that same technique by tying one end of a string to a door knob and the other to a


child’s tooth. Then we’d jerk the door. Once the child was consoled and the tooth was washed off, we’d put it under her pillow at bedtime and hope for the tooth fairy. However, given the excruciating history of dentistry, even tooth fairies can be suspect. In March of 1961 Charles Schultz introduced Frieda, a new Peanuts character who asked, skeptically, if the price a fairy gave for a tooth was determined by the American Dental Association.8 But does the American Dental Association recognize tooth fairies? It’s worth pondering. And with fair exchange in mind, do you suppose Snoopy was ever fairly compensated for his puppy teeth?

8 Charles Schultz, The Complete Peanuts: 1961-1962 (New York: Norton), 30.

CHAPTER TEN REMEMBER, PROFESSORS ARE THE ONES NOBODY WANTED TO DANCE WITH

I

Introduction

n this concluding chapter we’ll see how prejudice has been bred in precisely the place that should teach us to guard against it: the academy. We’ll look into the academy’s elitist language as well as its elitist history of class and privilege, how the liberal arts as opposed to the servile arts were once only suited to the liberal class, those free enough to enjoy an education. Next we’ll consider the history of language itself where diversity, currently a catchword for tolerance, was once regarded as a result of sin, a “fall” in the language. From there we’ll look at how the academy now seems to be struggling to atone for its long-standing history of discrimination regarding who is admitted and what is taught. In light of that, we’ll consider the etymology of such academic hallmarks as canon and culture, and we’ll examine efforts to revise our constructs of them. We’ll see who the blue stockings were and are. And we’ll consider how some academics are trying to redefine words such as adultery, pornography, and evil in an effort to become less judgmental. Here, as elsewhere, looking into the history of words will provoke in-


sights into the people who use them, insights that might reveal far more than we’d like to tell.

1. Remember, Professors Are the Ones Nobody Wanted to Dance With In an article on the off-putting and willfully obtuse language the academy uses, the historian Patricia Nelson Limerick tells us of a classics professor who once said, ‘We must remember that professors are the ones nobody wanted to dance with in high school.’1 Even then, their vocabulary must have been arcane and their observations confounding. Nowadays when we listen to the ones who seem to be deliberately obtuse, we suspect a lot of what they say is wrong-headed, but we can’t quite prove it. And we suspect, in the end, they wouldn’t be able to either if we just knew more about confronting them. Their talk is all part of what we call sophistry, a word whose history tells us something about what happened when wise men with great pretensions tried to make a profit on what they knew. Coming from the Greek sophistikos, a sophist was “a master of a craft” or “a 1 Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose,” New York Times Book Review, October 31, 1993, p. 3.

10  nobody wanted to dance with the professors

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man clever in practical affairs.” But the word also came to mean “a cheat.” And it would appear that sophistry got its bad reputation when Sophists used their knowledge to argue convincingly, but not necessarily truthfully. Even so, some of their strategies continue to influence rhetoric and philosophy today. They spoke on a wide range of subjects, mathematics, logic, politics, the law, and they were important enough to charge fees. However by the 5th century B.C.E., in Athens, the Sophists were commanding exorbitant fees, like celebrity lawyers, and they came to be viewed as less than forthright when many of their arguments were designed to appeal to the prejudice of a judge or an audience rather than stating the truth which they insisted was relative or nonexistent. It’s also important to know that there were many different kinds of Sophists and not just one school of thought. Moreover much of what they said has been repeated second or third hand, often by their critics, like Aristotle, who believed their arguments were false and who helped change the meaning of the word sophistry to “a clever but flawed argument.” Today sophistry is the kind of rhetoric that tends to associate patriotism with war, security with wiretapping, and hermeneutics with being educated. But why do we fall for it? Perhaps we’re lazy. Or perhaps we’re intimidated. In any event, by now we’ve linked sophistry with intelligence, and with what’s sophisticated meaning “cultured or worldly.” But in doing so, we tend to forget that the verb sophisticate can also mean “corrupt.” Meanwhile most professors pride themselves in teaching what’s true, with a logic that is uncorrupted. And in our hearts, we’d still like to be asked to dance. But what we’ve forgotten is that while a promenade might look important, dancing is a lot more honest.

2. Liberal Arts Limited In the academy liberals like to think of themselves as tolerant and socially progressive. But historically they were the elite. While etymology will tell you that the word liberal came from the Latin liberalis meaning “free,” the underlying idea was “suitable for a free and well-bred person.” Being a liberal was not like being a slave or a member of the lower classes who were certainly not well-bred and not suited for liberty. Nor were they suited for a liberal education.


So early on schools of education discriminated between slave and free. There were the liberal arts for the well-bred liberals and the servile arts for the not so well-bred servants. In the liberal arts those suitable for liberty studied the trivium: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, and the quadrivium: Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. But in the servile arts the lower classes took up manual labor and learned trades such as masonry, carpentry, or well-digging. Since liberals commanded class and quality, they also commanded more leisure time. So they could study culture and the arts. Gradually a liberal education became an education concerned with general cultural matters, with broadening the mind. That broader vision also came to mean that liberals were not literalists, not students who read word for word the literal truth. Rather, they read generously with a vision for the nuances of art and irony. If liberals read generously, they also gave generously. By the 1380s liberal could mean “free in giving” as in a liberal offer and a liberal quantity. Eventually that notion of liberality was also applied to politics. In 1792 Alexander Hamilton wrote about a “liberal construction of powers.” Before long liberals became those who were associated with tolerance and reform. During that time liberals were often contrasted with conservatives who are more inclined to think that all great truths have already emerged both in government and theology and it is their duty to protect them rather than revise them. Liberals, on the other hand, typically seem to be trying out a new angle, trying to see another person’s side of the argument. By now in the liberal arts you’ll find both conservatives and liberals because, hopefully, the emphasis is on protecting what’s true—and challenging what’s not.

3. Diversity: A Sinful Fall in the Language Currently words like multiculturalism and diversity have become buzzwords for tolerance. In the academy sometimes the assumption is that by including diverse languages and cultures in the curriculum, you can prove how tolerant you are, and often how grant worthy. However centuries ago some academicians believed multiculturalism and diversity arose as a result of sin, especially when it came to language. As the theory went, with the Fall of human


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kind, there was also a fall in the language, a fall that occurred in two ways. First language itself became ambiguous; for it fell into what linguist Seth Lerer calls a “lexicon of dissimilitude.”2 Before the Fall, when Adam named the animals, there was one essential word for everything. But after the Fall it was hard to tell a woodchuck from a groundhog. The second fall occurred at the Tower of Babel. The Bible tells us in Genesis 11 that at the time people were determined to stay together and make a name for themselves. Supposedly in their pride, in an effort to put themselves on a level with God, they built a tower that reached to the heavens. Hence, to undermine their hubristic efforts, God confused their language. Ironically during the very time the church had its theories about the sins at Babel, it was also building its own towers, cathedrals, or what must have looked like medieval skyscrapers, whose massive elevations, worked on for centuries, kept rising higher and higher toward heaven. Speaking to that, etymology indicates that these towering edifices were “edifying,” built to honor God and teach his people. In a similar way “construction” and “instruction” went together. But Babel must have been the earliest example of deconstruction, or deconstructing the language. Who’d ever think God was the first deconstructionist? Certainly not Jacques Derrida.3 And yet, Derrida had more in common with those woodchuck worried theologians than you might think for he also argued that language is inherently unstable and shifting. However for Derrida the sin or error wasn’t in diversity, but in the opposite, in not embracing diversity. Hence he theorized that it was not the author but diverse readers who give life and meaning to a text, readers who can offer their own multicultural perspectives. And yet while in theory Derrida favors diversity, in practice he writes in a language that is too difficult, too esoteric and privileged, for most of us to decipher. So while he might be arguing for inclusion, what he says so exclusively sounds to us like a lot of babble. 2 Lerer, Seth, “The History of the English Language,” The Teaching Company, 1998. 3 John D. Caputo, “Jacques Derrida (1930-2004),” Cross Currents, Winter 55, no. 4 (2006): 564-567. Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: a Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997).


4. When the Zulus Have a Tolstoy, We’ll Read Him Are some cultures better than others? This is not a popular question to ask in the academy where, given the emphasis on div e r s i t y, we are touting our studies of the expanding canon and culture. The word culture ultimately comes from the Latin cultura meaning “tillage,” from cult meaning “to inhabit, cultivate, worship.” Although by now the notion is obsolete, early Christian authors liked to link culture with worship and reverential homage. At the time they warned their followers not to depart from the culture and honor of God. If you fell away, you would not be as enlightened as you should be. Along with that, culture was also associated with cultivating the soil. Link that with worship and you can see why we still like to think there’s something sacred about tilling the soil. In a similar way, we think there’s something genuinely good about getting “down to earth.” In the academy there’s a growing tension between embracing the old culture we revere and new cultures we’re trying to foster. At first it was a little easier in the sciences where culture could mean “growing biological material in specific conditions.” Scientists developed the culture of the vine, the culture of silk, bulb culture,


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honey bee culture, and cultured pearls. Later, their cultures referred to the artificial development of microscopic organisms, especially bacteria, in specially prepared media. They tested plasmatic media that were inoculated with tissues or organs. They studied cell cultures. Eventually they were even able to culture “test tube babies.” By then who cultured what had become extremely controversial. Now more than ever, scientists, particularly geneticists, are faced with that harsh, barbed-wire and searchlight question: “Are some cultures better than others?” Such a question also continues to bedevil other branches of the academy where culture seems to speak to what we value as well as how and why. In the arts few of us can agree on exactly what that is perhaps because we agree on the general idea but disagree on the specifics. We know we should read Henry James and listen to Verdi but not everybody does. Nevertheless we do think an appreciation of culture makes us superior. The others, inferiors who are less informed, just don’t get it. Whether or not we do, thinking we do helps to keep us superior, at least in our own minds. In the study of literature we know there’s a difference between Shakespeare and rap although multicultural advocates have argued successfully for the expansion of the canon to include it as well as other works that seem questionable, at least to the uninformed. In the face of that, members of the old guard who are often criticized as exclusionary will grin at the provocative remark attributed to Saul Bellow, “When the Zulu’s have a Tolstoy, we’ll read him.” Now it’s hard to find evidence that Bellow actually said this. But such a statement has been widely attributed to him because it’s titillating to think that a famous Nobel Laureate in literature would say such a thing. Are some cultures better than others? It’s such an eyebrow-raising question because it implies to answer, “Yes,” would smack of intolerance. Instead maybe what we should be asking is, “Do the Zulus have a Tolstoy, or maybe even something better?”

5. Loose Canons When it comes to determining what particular works of literature to study, one of the most controversial questions is, “What’s in the canon?” Coming from the Greek kanōn meaning “rule,” the word


canon soon came to mean “a ruling body of religious writings” or “a list of saints.” There was something sacred about who or what was chosen, and later when “canon” came to mean “a set of artistic works by an artist or writer,” we tended to deify those creators whose great works were canonized. They weren’t exactly saints, but nevertheless, they ruled for centuries and we were devoted to them. Eventually the rules changed and the canon expanded. By 1992 in Loose Canons, Henry Louis Gates argued that in the canon, writers of diverse cultures should be represented equally. And yet, while he urges us to strive for a more equitable canon, it troubles him that the writings of diverse cultures are not necessarily equal in quality.4 Should writers like Maya Angelou and N. Scott Momaday be included in the canon along with Chaucer and Shakespeare? The Old School argued for keeping the canon pure and exclusive. Feminists complained about the canon of great white men. And multicultural advocates called for a reform of the canon’s western culture. What about Asia, they asked, or South America, the Pacific Islands, and Africa? Hadn’t any of them produced at least one or two writers worthy of the canon?5 Today many of the traditionalists tend to stay on the backburner while the canon explodes. In fact it’s gotten so diverse that if you ask incoming college students what they read, you’ll find it’s rare that any one of them will be familiar with any common text, much less literature from the traditional canon. Meanwhile in the academy we continue to argue about whose works should be read and whose should be used for cannon fodder. That other cannon, the double “n” variety, comes from the Latin canna meaning “reed or tube” and it was engineered as one of the earliest weapons of mass destruction. By now we know, whatever our agenda might be, when it comes to either can(n)on, mass destruction is always devastat4 Henry Louis Gates, Loose Cannons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 5 Paul Douglass,“Loose Canon on the Deck: Curriculum Wars of the Nineties,” Pacific Coast Philology 26, no. 1/2 ( July, 1991): 26-34. Jacqueline Bacon, “Jacqueline Bacon Responds,” College English 56 (October, 1994): 707-710. Christopher J. Lucas review of The Great Canon Controversy: The Battle of the Books in Higher Education, by William Casement History of Education Quarterly 37, no. 2, Special Issue on Education in Early America (Summer, 1997): 207-208.


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ing. Even so, it’s something any deconstructionist may find hard to resist.

6. Story-Telling: A Collection of Flowers Sometimes academics forget how beautiful literature can be, especially when they use cold clumsy words to describe it. Imagine referring to something warmly lyrical as “hegemonic,” “relativistic,” or “epistemological.” It’s enough to make you want to stop reading or never start. Another word that’s thrown around a lot to determine merit is whether or not an author is “anthologized.” Anthologized? That sounds about as inviting as an operating room where they decide what to leave in and what to cut out. Worse yet, putting it in the past seems to deaden the beautiful anthology a word that once meant “a collection of flowers.” But how did a collection of flowers get to become a collection of writers’ works? For the Greeks, who saw poetry in nature, a good poem opened up like a beautiful flower and so a handful of them became an anthology, from anthos for “flower” and logíā for “collecting.” The logíā part is related to the Latin legend meaning “an old story” or often “a group of old stories.” So you can see how a collection of them, too, made their way into an anthology. The anthos part also contributed to the beautiful Homeric metaphor “the flower of youth.” Typically we’d think that would refer to the bloom on the face of a young woman. But for the Greeks there was something beautiful, something life-affirming, about a young man who was in the flower of youth. It was a time when he was getting the first growth of beard on his face, at a time when one man wasn’t quite so shy about embracing another, especially one in the flower of youth. Later the Greeks created a homonym to their word for anthology with their word for hymnal. Homonyms are words that sound as alike as “write” and “right,” but in most cases their meanings are not as complementary as “a collection of flowers” and “a collection of songs.” Now we don’t typically attribute hymnals and hymns to the Greeks, but for them a hymn was defined as “a song or ode in praise of gods or heroes.” Already then, they set the precedent for hymns to be chanted later or sung in metrical rhythm. During the Dark and Middle Ages, hymn writers introduced new verse forms and lyrics to cathedral audiences. Particularly dur-


ing the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Latin hymns rang with the kind of cornerstone rhythms that continue to influence poets today. Through the centuries hymn meter rhythm developed until it came to be written mostly in four iambic stanzas. A good example of that kind of rhythm can be found in the familiar hymn “Oh, God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Since Emily Dickinson wrote many of her poems in hymn meter rhythm, you can try to sing her poems to that tune. However while most familiar hymns are composed as praises to God, Dickinson’s poetry can differ. Consider the following: Apparently with no surprise To any happy flower, The frost beheads it at its play In accidental power. The blond assassin passes on, The sun proceeds unmoved To measure off another day For an approving God.6 Here Dickenson seems to question an approving God whose accidental power, perhaps in the form of frost, would behead a happy flower. For someone who delights in a collection of flowers, it’s disturbing when anyone in power waylays what’s beautiful.

7. Blue Stocking Blues We laughed at Elwood and Jake, the Blues Brothers, when they wore white cotton socks with their dark suits, wildly inappropriate socks that indicated how geeky they were. After all, don’t we feel justified in judging someone’s class and mental capacity by the color of socks he wears? That was already true centuries ago when the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet was invited to speak at an academic soiree. At first he declined, fearing that his humble clothes including his blue worsted stockings wouldn’t be acceptable. Ah, but as it turned out, they were. In fact, soon he and the socks became a familiar fixture at those evening gatherings, and when 6 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (New York : Little Brown & Company, 1960), 667.


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prestigious members began dressing in kind, they became known as the Blue Stocking Society.7 It was a society that got its start in the eighteenth century when a few bright folks, bored with social evenings of cards and inane conversation, decided to start a club modeled on the salons in France where various intellects gathered with the goal of engaging in meaningful dialogue. While it was mostly women who initiated the gatherings, at first the term blue- stockings referred only to “men with impeccable reputations.” Later it did change to mean “women intellectuals,” but by then blue-stockings were sneered at as silly and pretentious. For centuries the academy remained the privileged place of learning limited to men, mostly men with blue blood. That notion of superiority emerged around 1200 when the Spanish aristocrats, eying the darker-skinned Moors, began to regard themselves as the sangre azul, having a classier blue blood which ran through their lighter-skinned veins. Such a notion of inbred superiority soon appealed to other aristocrats, particularly in Britain. But blue wasn’t always so privileged. Nor was blue always blue. In fact, the ancient version of what we see as blue was at first yellow, white, and pale before it changed to the livid color of bruised skin. Hence etymologists suspect that blue emerged as an alliteration of blow, a bruising blow. It was also associated with squandering something. Bruised? Squandered? You have to wonder if that also influenced our notion of “feeling blue” or “getting the blues.” 7 Encarta, “blue-stocking,” Word Key: Origin. The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories (Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 1991), s.v. “blue-stocking.”


Eventually folks put that feeling to music. The originals weren’t really white like Elwood and Jake. Perhaps recognizing that, the film offers bit parts to some who were the originals: James Brown is cast as the Reverend. Cab Calloway plays Curtis. Ray Charles is the blind man Ray. And Aretha Franklin gets to be the owner of the Soulfood Café. We laugh when we recognize them. Who’d ever imagine them in such a setting? The setting and the socks matter. It’s an old story both women intellectuals and blacks can tell, about being blue.

8. Adultery’s Consenting Nature The word adultery conjures our worst passions. Coming from the Latin adulterat-, it means “to change, to corrupt.” Moreover, adulterers are willing. They are not forced into being unfaithful, they do it by choice. Despite its treacherous nature, many of us have tried it, or at least been tempted, although for centuries women were far more likely to be blamed than men. Who ever heard of “the scarlet man”? Today we still live in a world where a woman caught in adultery can be sentenced to a death, even buried up to her neck in sand and then stoned.8 But what about the man, we wonder. Will he be allowed to hide among the stone throwers? Quite possibly. At the other extreme lies the view of a scholar like Laura Kipnis who gripes that the word adultery has been given a bad reputation because it is wrongly associated with broken promises and tawdry behavior. While she doesn’t come right out and ask, “What’s so bad about adultery?”, she does call into question social values that force us to conform to what she regards as unrealistic loyalties. “Infidelity makes you an infidel,” she complains. 9 In one of the leading academic journals, she compares marriage to a Marxist workplace where citizens have to “work” to maintain it, often in the face of unhappiness and grinding boredom. However, Kipnis argues, at least “adultery dares to stake out a small preserve for wanting something.” She concludes with disgust, “We have, after all, been born into social forms in which fighting for happiness looks like a base 8 “Nigerian woman fights stoning,” BBC News, July, 8, 2002 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2116540.stm 9 Laura Kipnis, “Adultery,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Winter 1998), p. 300.


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and selfish thing, and realization of desire is thwarted and fleeting at best, so often an affair of short duration.”10 So is the meaning of adultery beginning to change in the academy? It’s too early to tell. However since Kipnis advocates a change in attitude, she might find some comfort in the fact that the ancestor of “adultery” is alterare meaning “to alter.” That makes it natural kin to the word alternate, as in “alternate choice” and “alternate lifestyle.” Even so, the word adultery is also related to altruism meaning “unselfishness” or “a belief in acting for the good of others, for something that is right and good.” So adultery comes out of a family with conflicting views. Whether you take the alternate or the altruistic side, it’s important to know that, given its consenting nature, the word adultery has always allowed freedom of choice.

9. Pornography and Freedom of Choice In the academy most professors will argue against censorship, but what about asking students to study or research pornography? Historically pornography has been with us for well over 4000 years, all the way back to the Greeks. Given its social and literary history, it may well make an important topic for study. The word comes from the Greek pornographos meaning “writing about prostitutes.” So what did they write about? Too much to cover here, but we might want to begin with the story of the mythological character Porneius, from porneia, whose name meant “fornication.” There are various versions of the Porneius story and it gets even more complicated because our defi10 Ibid., 327.


nition of fornicate does not come from the Greek but rather from the Latin fornicari, from fornic- meaning “arch.” Supposedly Roman prostitutes, who were regarded as fornicators, would solicit clients under the arches of buildings. It’s also important to know that our definition of fornicate comes out of the ecclesiastical Latin, so by then it was the church, not a Greek playwright, who was defining what it meant. As for Porneius, in one episode he tries to rape Parthenia whose name meant “virginity.” When he tries to ruin her, she thrusts a spear right at him. Clearly he is foiled by this spear-chucking virgin who seems to have the power to render him impotent. Even by our own standards it’s pretty graphic and the Greeks seemed to have enjoyed their share of those kinds of stories. In the plays of Aristophanes the chorus sometimes entered with erect phalluses greatly exaggerated while, nearby, naked flute girls cavorted. But is that what we’d call pornography? Today we argue a lot about what actually entails pornography. According to the O.E.D., pornography describes the life and manners of obscene or unchaste subjects in literature or art. The hardcore variety is explicit. Soft-core is merely suggestive. Later pornography was also associated with an Indo-European word meaning “to sell.” Sex sells but when it does we like to censor it. In her book Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights Nadine Strossen argues against the censorship of women who choose to be involved in what we’d call pornography.11 Feminists like Strossen are usually aligned with the American Civil Liberties Union which tends to view women engaged in pornography with an eye on a woman’s freedom of choice. Yet other feminists argue that statistics show that women who become ensnared in porn are inevitably women who have been sexually abused. Hence they insist porn does not reflect freedom of choice and argue that it is an exploitive vehicle that profits from even more abuse.12 Meanwhile in the academy all of us would agree that freedom of choice is vital. But the growing question is, at what price? 11 Nadine Strossen, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (New York, London: New York University Press, 2000). 12 Irene Diamond, “Pornography and Repression: A Reconsideration,” (Summer, 1980), vol. 5, no. 4, 686-701.


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10. Deliver Us from Evil “Deliver us from evil.” We’ve heard it in Sunday school, we’ve heard it during war, and we’ve heard it from environmentalists. A number of believers are quite sure about how it all started, although etymologists will tell you that the origin of the word is uncertain. And yet we do know the older it got, the more sinister it became. We think it came from the prehistoric Germanic ubilaz and then from upelo-, at the time meaning “uppity.” Later it came to mean “exceeding due limits,” and by the time it reached the Old English yfel, it meant “bad or vicious.” Today it still means bad, especially morally bad, and in the academy there are referees who will caution you against using the word because they fear it plays foul by making moral judgments. Hence some scholars are trying to determine how we can make what we think is evil less morally subjective and more scientifically objective. For instance a group at New York University has developed what they call a “depravity scale,” a scale that “rates the horror of an act by the sum of its grim details.”13 Criminologists can use it as a gauge to measure what specific acts a criminal tries out when he torments a victim. Elsewhere, psychiatrists have developed a twenty-item personality test that tries to determine to what extent you are evil. Are you glib? Superficially charming? Emotionally vacuous? Do you have a grandiose sense of self-worth? Are you prone to boredom? Compared to some of evil’s barbs, it’s a comfortable tackle box of plugs, and you have to wonder if they are casting about for the politically correct version of evil. Historically there were different criteria. St. Augustine argued that evil arose from original sin. Rousseau believed it was caused by social ills. Freud, who rarely used the word, said such acts arose from unresolved conflicts in the human psyche. But it was Hannah Arendt who described real evil as banal. Did she mean boringly ordinary? Oh, yes. In fact, just think about what happens when what we would define as evil becomes so commonplace and so acceptable that ordinary folks, Hitler’s willing executioners, or Rwanda’s neighborly mutilators, no longer find it offensive. What’s important here is that, without a doubt, this is most likely to happen when 13 “For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be Evil,” Science Times, The New York Times, February 8, 2005, sec. F., col. 1, p. 1.


what’s evil becomes so unfeelingly objective that it’s void of moral judgment, especially for political reasons. So finally we have it: evil no longer tainted by moral judgments. And ironically, in those kinds of regimes, evil is now politically correct.

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