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Word of the Week: Gloaming

6/24/2014

gloaming

\ˈglō-miŋ\

I have been in Maryland for the last couple of days visiting my brother—we’ve spent several lovely long summer evenings sitting on the porch in the gloaming, discussing family lore, and watching fireflies. We agree that gloaming is a very fine word. (He put in a plug for “crepuscular,” which is also a fine word, but we’ve been Latinate here for a few weeks now and it’s time to change that up. Get your own blog, bro.)

By Wildfeuer (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

Gloaming comes from Old English glóm, meaning twilight. It probably stems from the Teutonic root *glô (meaning to glow)—but it might also just possibly be related to gloom.

I really like this, because gloaming describes that moment poised right on the balance-point between glow and gloom—twilight. Where we sit, watching fireflies and trading stories.

The word fell out of favor in English for a while, but the Scots (God bless them) kept it current. I can see why they hung on to it: a word like that is especially useful in a place like Scotland that has generous endowments of both gloom and glow.

Take one of the OED usage citations: “This fell furth in the gloming” (1620). Not a very illuminating or exciting quote, but the “furth” part caught my eye. So I tracked down the reference in Robert Pitcairn’s Ancient Criminal Trials of Scotland (which turned out to be a very entertaining read, btw!) And I got a family story. Here's what went down in the gloaming:

Sir James MacDonald, 9th chief of Clan MacDonald of Dunnyveg, was being held in Edinburgh Castle, accused of committing acts of mayhem against various rivals, including his own father. (The indictment says that young James went to his father’s house in the dead of night with 300 “barbarus, wikked and bludie Hieland-men” in tow, barricaded his father inside the house and then set it on fire when he refused to yield himself up. [The parents survived.])

While locked up, MacDonald and a fellow prisoner somehow tricked their guards into dropping their swords and leaving the room. (I like to imagine they pointed and said something like “Hey! What’s THAT over THERE?!?!”) At any rate, once the guards had obligingly disarmed and turned around, the prisoners shut them in a shed, took the swords, rushed the Castle gate, and escaped over the wall. The other prisoner got clean away but MacDonald, who was wearing leg irons throughout these escapades, broke his ankle when he jumped from the parapet. He was eventually found hiding in a dunghill and taken back into custody. Condemned to be beheaded, he managed to escape again (more successfully this time) and made his way to Spain.

Our own family stories are mostly less harrowing. There’s the cousin who is said to have deserted from the Confederate Army. There’s the great great grandmother who may have had an affair with Sanford White. There’s the Quaker ancestor who was whipped for refusing to report for military service. No one shows up at his parents' house with a hundred bloodthirsty thugs, but there is war, madness, adultery, criminality, and desertion (both marital and martial). There are ordinary people leading lives that flash out for a moment and then go dark.

There is gloom, and there is glow.

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Word of the week: Meretricious

6/16/2014

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meretricious

\ˌmer-ə-ˈtri-shəs\

"Meretricious" is a slippery word. It means flashy but cheap; gaudy. It’s the kind of sneer that a highbrow critic might lob at a rival’s work. Bravura, but no substance.

But whenever I run across the word I have trouble remembering that it’s supposed to be an insult. I wondered at first whether some bit of glamour from its near-homophone “meritorious” was clinging to it? After all, “meritorious” is a noble word, with noble associations. It means “worthy, deserving of praise.” Here’s Fabian’s Chronicles in 1494:

Good and merytoryous deedys shulde be holden in memorye.

Or the alleged last words of Alexander Pope (1744):

There is nothing meritorious but virtue and friendship.

(I am skeptical about this attribution, actually, because Pope has been credited with several different sets of last words, most of which are much funnier. Still, it sounds pretty good.) And so when I see something like this, I get a touch of cognitive whiplash:

Let us be thought over-much plain and simple, even bare, rather than gaudy, flashy, cheap and meretricious. Let us manifest the taste of gentlemen.

(That’s Frederick Law Olmstead in 1893, pointing out that the worst thing you could possibly be is [shudder] Tacky.)

But it turns out that on some level my confusion is, well, merited. Because in fact meritorious and meretricious come from the exact same root: the Latin merērī, which means to earn money or to work for hire. Merērī is related to the Greek μείρεσθαι (meiresthai), which means to deserve, or to earn as one’s share.

So what happened, that one branch of the word is laudatory and the other an insult?

Alas, it’s one of the oldest stories in the world. Merērī—whence “meritorious”—often referred to a soldier earning wages. A praiseworthy endeavor. But “meretricious” comes from an offshoot noun, meretrix—meaning a woman who works for pay. Therefore a prostitute, because Obviously. What else?

Here’s Sir Francis Bacon in 1626, using the word in its more literal sense:

The Delight in Meretricious Embracements (wher sinne is turned into Art) maketh Marriage a dull thing.

There’s so much to unpack here! Those “meretricious embracements” (i.e. women having sex in exchange for money) make “sinne” into an art form. And then the women’s clients, lured away by the gaudy & flashy (but fundamentally empty) attractions of the courtesan, get bored with the meritorious procreative sex they are supposed to be having with their wives. Note the slaps here not only against women, and sex, and men, but also against Art, which you had better not enjoy too much, because it might really just be tarted up sinne.

When the word began to be used in a more figurative sense things started getting really ugly. Here’s a 17th century Protestant getting all riled up about the Catholics:

…the meretricious Gaudiness of the Church of Rome, and the squallid Sluttery of Fanatick Conventicles.

Now I’ve been to the Vatican, and I will grant that it is pretty darn gaudy. But this is not just about bad taste. This guy wants you to be repulsed by Rome’s wealth and corruption, so naturally he emphasizes how gross and female it all is. Not only have you got a gesture towards the Whore of Babylon (a favorite Protestant trope), all bedizened on the outside and corrupt and stinking within, you’ve ALSO got the prurient fascination with sluttish “Conventicles,” themselves presumably riddled with madness and disease. (There is an entire genre of anti-Catholic screeds that essentially boils down to Nuns Gone Wild.)

The Whore of Babylon, riding the 7-headed Beast of the Apocalypse. From the Luther Bible (1534), of course. (Image from Wikipedia)

So what should have been an honest word has acquired a train of unsavory associations. “Meretricious” may have started out referring to hard work for a deserved wage, but it’s now gotten all tangled up with harlotry/sex/sin/corruption/venereal disease/glitz/Vegas/flash—and pretty soon you’ve got guys like Frederick Law Olmsted (who may have been a brilliant landscape architect but also seems to have been a pompous jerk) going on about how we have to have Gentlemanly taste and not get snookered by shallow and showy ornamentation. Because that’s for harlots, amirite?

Perhaps this is why I find myself unwilling to accept “meretricious” as a pejorative. I am a woman who works for pay. And I don’t like to see a meritorious word end up saddled with the whole messy baggage of the Patriarchy.

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Word of the Week: Ungulate

6/9/2014

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ungulate

\ˈəŋ-gyə-lət\

A few days ago I asked a table of friends and family what my next Word of the Week should be. Grimbert piped up: “How about ungulate?” he said.

Ungulate? This was pretty much out of the blue. Why? I asked him.

“Don’t know,” he replied. “It’s just a cool word.”

I am an indulgent parent, so I agreed. Ungulate.

But I have to say my first association with this word was tinged with desperation. When I was a child my family would visit the San Diego zoo on our summer vacation. And every single trip, we would find ourselves marooned mid-afternoon in the farthest, hottest part of the park, trudging past enclosure after enclosure of antelope. I was not impressed then with the majesty of the ungulate. I wanted to sit down. I wanted some shade. If at all possible, I wanted some ice cream. And none of these were forthcoming—only more antelope. Every year we would plan our route to avoid this purgatory: perhaps we could visit the antelope first, on our way to the elephants? Or take a detour by the tigers? Or just hang out all day in the cool darkness of the reptile house?

To no avail. Three o’clock would roll around and there we would be, grumpily contemplating the lesser eland, with miles of baking pathway between us and the nearest lemonade stand. Honestly, if you had asked me then what “ungulates” were, I would have said they are sore-footed, sun-struck misery.

But my beloved son had made a request, so I girded my loins and set forth into the furnace of inquiry! An ungulate is a hairy, hooved land mammal like an antelope, a sheep, or a yak. The term comes from the Latin ungula (hoof), which comes from unguis (nail or claw). These animals run about on their tippy toes, with the weight-bearing toe or toes protected by a hoof—a modified nail that works sort of like a dancer’s toe-shoe, supporting that tiny little bone.

All well and good. But apparently the zoological world has been struggling for some time with what exactly it means to be an ungulate in a taxonomical sense. It seems that when people began making up family trees they started by focusing on how things look. So when they saw creatures with hooves and creatures with “sort of” hooves (like elephants and hyraxes with their big flat nails) they naturally assumed that all of them came from a common ancestor. As a result the category of ungulates got very very large so it could contain all these hooved and sort-of-hooved creatures in one big happy family (well, Order, actually).

Then genetic mapping knocked everything into a cocked hat. Not only did the “sort of” hooved animals come from a completely different branch of the tree from the actually-hooved animals, even the story of the actually-hooved animals proved to be way more complicated than anyone thought. When you look deep into the DNA, it turns out that “even-toed” ungulates like giraffes and hippos are actually more closely related to dolphins than they are to “odd-toed” ungulates like horses and rhinos.

This is all very peculiar, but that is how science works. I am grateful to the good folks at the Ultimate Ungulate page, which has a great deal more detailed information, plus some really fine pictures of yaks.

The upshot, according to these dedicated zoologists, is that “ungulate” should be considered a descriptive term but not a scientifically definitive one. In other words, an ungulate is a hairy land mammal with hooves. But don’t get all technical about it.

Image courtesy of www.ultimateungulate.com © Copyright Brent Huffman, 2000

While the Ultimate Ungulate page is unsurpassed when it comes to detail, once again the prize for evocative usage goes to the OED. One of the earlier documented usages of the word comes from Van der Hoorven’s Zoology in 1858:

“Feet tridactylous, with all the toes insistent, ungulate.”

That is a phrase so gorgeous that even miserable eight-year-old me might have glimmered for an instant on the death march past the dik-diks. I believe it refers to a rhinoceros, which is certainly three-toed, ungulate, and fairly insistent.

Of course when it comes to insistent tridactylous feet, even a rhinoceros cannot compete with “The Irish Washerwoman” which, if you clicked through on the link at left, is now stuck in your head and will remain so for at least the next 6 hours. (Sorry about that.)

I am an adult now and I take my own children to the San Diego Zoo. But we have learned from my childhood travails. When we weary of the okapi and the gazelle, we summon the SkyBuckets and are whisked from the antelope mesa back to the lush oasis of the flamingo pond and the slushee vendor. Cooling drinks in hand, we watch the streams of tourists flowing through the gates like migrating wildebeest, yakking away.

Grimbert's right. It's a pretty cool word.

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Election Day

6/5/2014

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By Cary Bass (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

For many years we have hosted a polling place in our garage. And for about as many years Everett and (more recently) I have also been serving as Precinct Inspector for good old 110270-Garage-Howe-Residence.

Maybe I watched too much Schoolhouse Rock at an impressionable age, but I find the whole thing almost unbearably touching.

Take the Election Supply Box.

Here we are in a major democracy, the largest economy in the world, a SUPERPOWER. We are going to exercise our most sacred civic responsibility, evoking Lincoln and Jefferson and marble halls and lofty ideals about human equality and the right of self-determination. There are ballots and procedures and safeguards designed to make sure people can vote freely and securely and have their vote count. And that is WAY cool.

But along with the ballots and pens and Official Seals I also get a stapler and a roll of masking tape and a little packet of thumbtacks. Because you also need these things to make democracy work.

A week before Election Day I will be sitting in the midst of the unpacked supply boxes, taking inventory and filling out paperwork, and suddenly I will find myself clutching a packet of thumbtacks and fighting back tears. Because the Big Important Things like how we run our community and the future of our nation depend not only on ballots, but also on tiny mundane things. Like making sure the poll workers have some thumbtacks to post the street index so a campaign volunteer can get out the vote.

And that just about kills me Every Single Time.

So Monday night we prepped the garage as we have so many times before. I pulled out the bikes and assorted impedimenta (I forgot we even HAD a wading pool!). Everett hung up a set of old tablecloths (red white & blue, of course) to conceal the shelves of tools and paper towels and weed killer. I swept up the dust and grit that had accumulated since the last election, dragged in a table, a few chairs, and a lamp, and set up the booths.

We had our thumbtacks.

We were ready for democracy.

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Word of the Week: Cakewalk

6/2/2014

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cakewalk

\ˈkāk-ˌwȯk\

This week I was asked to assist with organizing a cakewalk. Hey, I thought, sounds great! There’s walking, and there’s cake: that’s two of my favorite things right there!

As we started mapping out the coordination of volunteers and donations, someone asked about the origin of the term—and things began to get more complicated. Wasn’t a cakewalk a dance? Waitaminute—wasn’t a cakewalk a dance performed in minstrel shows? There’s something about ragtime? And someone’s kid was playing a neat Debussy piece about a cakewalk—called something odd. Oh right: “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk.”

Whoa.

If Golliwogs and minstrelsy are being invoked, then a cakewalk, considered in its full context, is probably more than a sugar-frosted walk in the park.

A little research was clearly in order.

It turns out the cakewalk has its roots in the American South before the Civil War. Most sources seem to agree that it originated among slaves as a rest-day entertainment in which slaves made fun of their owners’ performance at formal balls. These parodic dances involved all kinds of exaggerations of ballroom steps: extravagant bows and curtseys, high kicks, nose-in-the-air mincing and strutting promenades.

When slave owners got wind of these performances, some thought they were hysterically funny and promptly co-opted them. These owners would bring slaves into the house and have them dress up in fancy clothes and dance for assembled guests who got to act as judges. The couple with the greatest style or the fanciest steps would win a cake as a prize. It’s not clear whether the owners realized the extent to which they were being mocked. The slaves, however, were unambiguous on this point; at the same time many also remembered the dances as a rare opportunity for fun (and cake) in an otherwise grueling life. [Wikipedia has some excerpts from oral histories given by former slaves—and there are lots more in this really interesting 1981 article from the Journal of Social History.]

After Emancipation, the cakewalk persisted in the black community as part of dance parties and socials. This appears to be when the idea of a “cakewalk” as “something easy” originated—not because the dance is easy but it looks easy and often graceful, and because it was associated with weekends and leisure.

It also became a staple of minstrel shows. Some of these were created by whites in blackface providing sentimental accounts of the “good old days” down on the plantation. And some of them were created by African American artists looking to make a living as performers in post-Reconstruction America. And many many more were an uneasy mix of the two.

The Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876 featured a group of African American dancers performing cakewalks in a faux plantation setting, and professional dance troupes played to crowds in major cities across the country. Stage plays (and later, movies) of Uncle Tom’s Cabin almost always included a cakewalk troupe as part of the entertainment.

Cakewalk dancers in the 1890s.

At social dances and exhibitions alike, the tradition of having a cake as a prize for the best performer persisted. (This is where the phrase “takes the cake” comes from, and possibly the term “it’s a piece of cake” as well.)

By the turn of the 20th century the dance had become wildly popular among the general public; it was the first American social dance craze and the first to cross over from the black community and gain widespread popularity among whites.

At the peak of its fame (1890-1905), African American cakewalk artists toured the US and Europe to great acclaim. King Edward VII requested cakewalk lessons for the British royal family. The syncopated music of the cakewalk was a major influence in ragtime and early jazz, and dance historians say the cakewalk was one of the origins of the Charleston and the Lindy Hop.

The dance ultimately fell out of favor in the 1920s but cakewalks are still around in the form of the carnival game beloved in church basements and PTA fundraisers coast to coast. No dancing or skill involved: this is basically a mashup of a raffle and musical chairs where the winner goes home with a cake.

Sugar-frosted? No. Walk in the park? No. A perfect slice of the bittersweet cake that is American history? Yeah, that’s about right.

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Word of the Week: Gloaming

Word of the week: Meretricious

Word of the Week: Ungulate

Election Day

Word of the Week: Cakewalk

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