Popepourri

In San Miguel de Allende, the application of paint to a wall is a widely popular form of artistic expression (a word for which we balked at coining in an earlier viabrevis posting [“Paper, Pen, and Ink, or, Up Against the Wall Writing”]). Shop signs, product logos, street names, portraits of La Virgen de Guadalupe (Mexico’s patron saint), and, relatively recently, American-style graffiti may all be seen on the city’s walls.

Hair Salon (Tagged)

Not surprisingly, anticipation of Pope Benedict XVI’s recent visit to Mexico inspired a flurry of wall-painting activity as it did considerable coverage in the other media, not all of it enthusiastically welcoming. Mexico, after all, has had a long history of conflict over the boundaries between Church and State, the secular and the profane. Indeed, around the  time of the Pope’s arrival, the national legislature was winding up a two-year debate on a constitutional amendment that would add the word “secular” (laica) to make explicit the definition of the Mexican state as a secular republic (una República representativa, democrática, laica…) while ensuring such human rights as the free exercise of religion (which opponents feared might open the door to teaching religion—specifically, Catholic doctrine—in the public schools or—ahem—holding religious services in public). On the other hand, Mexico’s population is overwhelmingly Catholic by tradition and current practice, and even for nonbelievers, a visit from a pope is a noteworthy event.

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Two other events of recent and immediate history have helped to a greater or lesser degree to focus public expression on the papal visit. The first was the clerical abuse scandal involving the high-profile Mexican priest Marcial Maciel, the investigation of which, begun under Pope John Paul II, was closed not long ago by Pope Benedict XVI in a way that the victims and their families, by all reports, did not find satisfactory and were hoping (in vain) to meet with the pope to discuss during his stay. The second event (or nonevent) was the “quiet period” (known as the veda) during which all announced candidates running for president are barred from publically campaigning, which would include advertising in any of the conventional media or stenciling your party logo with an exhortation to vote for you on a wall. This period was due to end shortly after the Pope’s visit.

Here, then, is an example of a stenciled notification of the Pope’s imminent arrival:

Ya viene el PAPA (1)

Or, writ large:

Ya viene el PAPA (2)

The message “Ya viene el Papa” [‘The Pope is coming soon’] is pretty straightforward, and the resemblance of the squared circle enclosing the word “Papa” to the logo (soon to be ubiquitous) of one of the major political parties (PAN, the Partido Acción Nacional) is presumably coincidental.

The following photo is of the part of the wall immediately adjacent to the one in Ya viene el PAPA (1):

Hay viene el Papa

“Hay viene el papa” [literally, ‘There is/are the Pope is coming’] contains a misspelling—a slip of the spraypaint can—possibly for the not quite homophonous “Ahí” (‘Here, Hither’), “Hoy” (‘Today’), or—and this is a bit of a stretch—“Ya” (“Soon,” as in the stencil). Take your pick (and say nothing about the schools). We may infer from the differently-colored paint that the grammatically and orthographically correct  “Esconde a tus hijos” [‘Hide your kids’] is a response to the above.

While the reference to clerical sexual abuse is obvious in the response, it is worth noting that, while grammatically masculine in gender, “hijos” is semantically unspecific in this context: Like the other Romance languages, Spanish uses the grammatically masculine form (when there is one) as the default when referring to an aggregate that may contain members of both genders. Indeed, a cartoon that appeared in the newspaper Reforma during  Benedict XVI’s visit showed a bishop whispering to the Pope “¡¿Y esos monaguillos?!” [‘And those altar boys?!’], referring to the presidential candidates of the three major parties (one of whom is a woman) depicted at the pope’s side dressed as, yes, altar boys.

 

Pox and Pains (Stage 3)

Here are two questions that were left lurking under the covers of the recent “Pox and Pains (Stage 2)” posting to this blog:

1. What was syphilis called in England between the time of the outbreak of the epidemic of circa 1495 and the  publication of Nahum Tate’s1686 translation of Fracastoro’s 1530 Syphilis sive morbus gallicus from which the disease got its name?
2. Is there any linguistic evidence in English for the occurrence of the disease in the Old World prior to 1493? (If there were, obviously, we would conclude that syphilis was not an import from theNew World as has often been suggested.)

 One approach to answering these questions would be to look in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED). Published in 2009, the HTOED encompasses the lexical corpus afforded primarily by the OED, supplemented by some of the contents of A Thesaurus of Old English, a work compiled by two of the HTOED’s four editors (Roberts and Kay). As the first thesaurus to offer both synchronic and diachronic views of our language, this marvelous book (or rather pair of them—the thesaurus proper and its index) is invaluable not only as a compendium of the lexicon of contemporary (written) English but, uniquely, because it is a historical thesaurus, affording multiple views of our language at various times, superimposed on each other. Hence, any given entry can show you what the word for X was (if any) at such and such a date and what replaced or supplemented it at later dates.

 Syphilis appears in the HTOED under the entry for Venereal disease [HTOED 01.02.01.01.04.18.18 (n.), where the numbers represent the word’s address in the HTOED’s taxonomy: 01. (the world).02 (life).01 (health and disease).01 (ill health).04 (a disease).18 (disorders of the internal organs).18 (venereal disease). The entry is worth quoting in full:

“Venereal disease burning 1382-1860 ∙ bone-ache 1398–1606; 1900 ∙ venerean disease 1612 ∙ crinkums/crincums 1618-1719 ∙ venereal disease 1658-  ∙ bone-ague 1659 ∙ crankums 1661 ∙ venereal 1843; 1843 ∙ V.D./v.d. 1920-  ∙ a certain disease 1927-  ∙ social disease 1978 01 person fireship 1672-1748 (slang) ∙ venereal 1788; 1933 02 attack of a dose 1914- ∙ load 1937 (slang) 03 syphilis pocks 1480-1529 ∙ grandgore 1497-1716 (chiefly Scots) ∙ Spanish pocks 1500/20-1681 ∙ French pox 1503; 1740 ∙ great pox 1529-1819 ∙ pock 1530 ∙ French pocks a1548 ∙ pox 1550- ∙ French crown 1590 ∙ French marbles a1592 ∙ Neapolitan favour 1592 ∙ verol 1596 ∙ French disease 1598; 1760/92 ∙ verola 1600 ∙  the foul evil 1607 ∙ Spanish pox 1608 ∙ grincome 1608-1678 (slang) ∙ Scottish fleas 1623 ∙ Neapolitan 1631 ∙ lues 1634- ∙ scabbado 1651-1725 ∙ Neapolitan disease 1657-1777 ∙ Neapolitan scab 1671 ∙ Covent-garden gout 1694; 1700 ∙ Spanish gout a1700 ∙ common-garden gout 1700 ∙ Neapolitan consolation a1704 ∙ syphilis 1718- ∙ syphilide 1829-1897 ∙ syphiloderm(a) 1852; 1876 ∙ neurosyphilis 1878- ∙ vaccino-syphilis 1878- ∙ syphiloid 1890- ∙ syph/siph 1914- (slang) ∙ bejel 1928- 04 gonorrhoea gonorrhoea 1547- ∙ running of the reins 1569; 1607 ∙ shedding of nature 1584 ∙ clap 1587- ∙ r(hea) 1935- (joc.) 05 other venereal diseases Winchester goose 1611-1727 ∙ Winchestrian goose a1637 ∙ crystalline 1647 ∙ soft chancre 1859- ∙ chancroid 1861 ∙ soft sore 1884- ∙ granulomatosis 1911- ∙ trichomoniasis 1915- ∙ granuloma inguinale 1918- ∙ LGV 1949 ∙ chlamydia/Chlamydia 1984- 06 disease caused by masturbation wanker’s doom 1950- (slang vulgar).” (AIDS, in case you were wondering, is listed elsewhere, under Bacterial/viral disorders [HTOED 01.02.01.01.04.24 (n.)] 02 viral disorders 02.01 Aids acquired immune deficiency syndrome 1982- (Medicine/Obstetrics) ∙ AIDS/Aids 1982- ∙ gay plague 1982- (colloq., orig. US) ∙ Slim (disease) 1985-. )

 Clearly, there were several terms or phrases preceding syphilis that speakers of English could use to refer to the disease. (For an entertaining and informative exposition of a number of these, see Paul Brewster’s “A Note on the ‘Winchester Goose’ and Kindred Topics,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 13, issue 4 [1958].) Most of these are etymologically pretty straightforward, though some, like crinkums/crincums, crankums, and grincome are quite obscure (and not, as one might have guessed, derived from the name of a Jacobean law firm). The origins of the terms  grandgore and the marbles of French marbles are, respectively, surely and probably borrowings from French—marbles is probably Medieval French morbilles ‘(smallpox) pustules’ from Latin morbilli ‘pustules, pox;’ while grandgore is from grand/grant (‘great’) plus gorre/gaurre, a word of obscure origin that may or may not have anything to do with gorre (Old French gore) ‘sow, piglet’ or another gorre attested in the 1400s meaning ‘luxury, fastidious appearance.’ So much for question #1.

What about question #2? Well, as far as the lexical evidence goes for the existence of the disease of syphilis in Europe before Columbus’s round trip to Hispaniola, the returns are not exactly what one would call clear cut. Burning, bone-ache, and pocks/pox, all of which are attested before 1490, are problematic in their imprecision. That is, all three terms could refer to any of a number of afflictions, not just syphilis specifically. For example, the HTOED (perhaps hedging its bets) lists burning 1382-1860 under both Venereal disease and Eruptive diseases [HTOED 01.02.01.01.04.11 (n.)] 04 erysipelas, which Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary (27^th ed. 1988) defines as “[Gr. erythros red + pella skin] an acute form of cellulitis…chiefly characterized by a peripherally spreading hot, bright red, …plaque with a raised undurated border.” (Shingles and smallpox appear as erysipelas’s next-door neighbors, at 16.2 and 17, respectively.) There is a similar problem with pocks/pox, which could refer to a number of pustule-raising diseases—indeed, it wasn’t until the early 1500s that the distinction between the great pox and small(-)pox came into currency—and so makes an appearance in multiple entries in the HTOED.

 But this is one of the problems with writing a thesaurus: sometimes you’re not sure what pigeonhole to put a word in because you aren’t sure what the word actually refers to—X  could refer to Y or it could refer to Z, or both, or maybe something that’s like Y and Z but it’s not exactly clear what—so pocks/pox can go in multiple places on the grounds that it can refer to multiple distinct entities; Winchester goosecan go in a catch-all category because we know it refers to a venereal disease but we’re not sure which one (syphilis or gonorrhea being the most likely); and wanker’s doom can be in a class by itself (appropriately enough) at least until dhat makes it into the OED.

 

Pox and Pains (Stage 2)

So, how did syphilis get its name? The short answer is that syphilis is an eponym—like boycott, guillotine, aphrodisiac, and the venereal of venereal disease—that is, syphilis takes its name from a person (in this case, fictional) irrevocably associated with it. (Charles Cunningham Boycott was a rent collector famously shunned during the Irish Land League movement in the late 1800s; Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a prominent reform-minded proponent of a more socially egalitarian and expeditious mechanism for performing capital punishment, namely, the head-lopping device invented in the mid-1800s by Antoine Louis and originally dubbed the louisette; venereal is the adjectival form of Venus, Roman goddess of love; and aphrodisiac harkens back to Aphrodite, Venus’s Greek counterpart.) Syphilis was the hapless shepherd immortalized in Girolamo Fracastoro’s Syphilis sive morbus gallicus [‘Syphilis or the French Disease’], a poem in three sections (libri, literally, ‘books’) published in 1530 for which Nahum Tate produced an English translation in 1686.

 Fracastoro, a scientist and physician renowned in his day and often credited subsequently as the father of the germ theory of contagion, was born in Verona in 1482 in time to experience the return in 1493 of Columbus from his voyage of discovery to the New World, the French invasion of Naples in 1494, the expulsion of the French shortly thereafter by, among others, the Spanish, and a major epidemic of syphilis that rapidly spread throughout Europe circa 1495. The closeness of the dates for contact with the New World, the various military maneuvers in Naples, and the eruption of the syphilis epidemic made for much finger-pointing regarding the genesis of the disease at the time, neatly summarized by D. Luis María Ramirez y de las Casas-Deza in a note to his 1863 Spanish translation of Fracastoro’s poem: “It was called [in Italian] the morbo gálico, or French disease, which was the most common popular name, but it was also called lots of other things by other people. The Spanish, thinking that they had caught it from the French, called it the French Disease [mal francés]; the French, thinking that they had caught the disease in Naples, called it the Neapolitan Disease [mal napolitano]; the Germans, perceiving that congress with the Spanish had given it to them, called it Spanish Scabies [sarna española], and others called it Measles of the Indies [sarampión de las Indias]…”

What is left unacknowledged here, of course, is the old and widely used linguistic practice of employing the name of an enemy or otherwise disfavored nation or people in idioms with negative connotations, often designating or relating to various of our bodily functions (especially those involving sexual congress). For example, the English and the French from their long history of on-again-off-again hostilities have accumulated a wealth of  such expressions. For example,  a condom has been known as a French letter or Frenchie in English and, in French, as a capote anglaise  (lit., ‘English bonnet,’ though there is apparently no French equivalent to the English French tickler); since the redcoats triumphed at the bloody battle of Waterloo, the French can say that les anglais sont arrivés (ont débarqué)—‘the English have arrived (have landed)’—when you get your period, while to French can mean a variety oral activities–the kiss, known in France in the 19^th century as un baiser florentin—‘a Florentine kiss’—is now typically called un French kiss. There are likewise numerous English expressions referring to the Dutch in less than laudatory terms though, with the exception of Dutch cap ‘pessary,’ sometimes known in French as a truc américaine (‘American thingamajig’), these tend to refer to other nonsexual stereotypical traits. Indeed, nobody apparently ever referred to syphilis as “the Dutch disease.” Or, for that matter, with the exception of the Scots, as “the English disease.”

 Suffice it to say the questions of where and how syphilis actually originated and the specifics of how it was spread were murky and clearly tinged with xenophobic overtones—one can’t help noting the parallels in this regard between the syphilis epidemic of the 1490s and that of AIDS five centuries later.  As for syphilis’s geographical origin,  the question is open to this day as to whether the disease was an import from the New World or whether it was already extant in some form in Europe. Fracastoro, arguably influenced by his sympathy towards the Spanish, cast his vote for the already-extant origin of the disease, conjecturing that the agent of contagion—the causal “seeds” (semina)—had simply been dormant and were essentially air borne as the result of Nature unpredictably stirring things up. As for the details of how the disease was communicated, it wasn’t until after the publication of  Syphilis that the role of sex in its transmission was fully understood.

The poem itself is actually less concerned with where the disease came from than with its recommended treatment. Book I presents Fracastoro’s take on the story of the disease’s origin and transmission—the French (not the Spanish), brought it to Italy but it was really Nature that was responsible for managing the seeds of contagion. Book II offers a cure—the elimination of bodily fluids, mercury being a “medicine” effective in stimulating the salivary glands and, applied to the skin, in causing the sufferer to sweat profusely. The revelation of this cure is made in the context of a mythic tale of a hunter named Ilceus who is punished with the disease for killing one of Apollo’s deer but is rescued by the goddess Callirhoë, who takes him underground where he is bathed in mercury and is cured. Fracastoro finishes by recommending this cure with instructions for how to administer it.

That would have been the end of the story (and we would perhaps be calling the disease ilceus instead of syphilis) had it not been for the discovery in the New World of guaiacum (Spanish guayacán from Taíno waiacan) and its apparent superiority, when its bark was properly prepared, to mercury as a miracle cure. (It is an ironic twist to the AIDS story that guaiacum was first brought back to Europe from Haiti.) To take account of the new treatment, Fracastoro added to the first two books a third in which guaiacum is the cure for another mythic character who ran afoul of the gods–this time the victim is a shepherd named Syphilis who is punished for an act of hubris but is then forgiven thanks to the intercession and ministrations of the goddess Juno. The rest is history: Though guaiacum was eventually discredited as a cure for syphilis, the eponym for the disease has survived to this day.

 

Pox and Pains

A recent attack of shingles—the disease, not the building material—caused me to seek answers to the following questions:

1.  Had the shot I had gotten to prevent this affliction been a dud and, if so, could I get my money back?
2. Why is the condition called “shingles” and, more generally, how do diseases get their names anyway? (When William Burroughs said, “Language is a virus from outer space,” he may have had in mind the way in which such simple questions as “Why is the condition called ‘shingles’?” can metastasize to a blog posting.)

 The answer that my primary care physician offered in the first case was that the inoculation against shingles wasn’t really 100% guaranteed but that it undoubtedly made the attack milder than it would have been without it—sort of like TARP—and, no, I couldn’t have my money back (also sort of like TARP).

The answer to the second question about the origin of the word shingles as the popular name for the affliction known in Medicalese as Herpes zoster is succinctly offered by the OED, which defines it as “An eruptive disease (Herpes zoster) often extending round the middle of the body like a girdle (whence the name); usually accompanied by violent neuralgic pain,” the accompanying etymology being “Representing medieval Latin cingulus (MS. gloss in Du Cange), variant of cingulum girdle, used to render Greek ζώνη or ζωστήρ in the medical sense.” Greek ζώνη and ζωστήρ both meant ‘girdle, belt;’ originally, the former applied to an article of women’s clothing worn just above the hips, while the latter referred to a warrior’s belt, which, according to Liddell and Scott, “passed around the loins and secured the bottom of the cuirass.” Borrowed from Greek, Latin zona was a ‘girdle, belt’ and appears in Modern French as zona ‘shingles’ and, as in English, zone, whose various meanings reflect the notion of a belt or ring. (Gürtelrose is the German term for ‘shingles.’) The Herpes part of the medical term, like ζώνη and ζωστήρ, is also Greek and is glossed by Liddell and Scott as “herpes, a cutaneous eruption, that runs on and spreads, esp. around the body,” the noun being derived from the verb ἕρπω ‘to creep,’ whose root appears in ἕρπ ετόν ‘creeping thing, snake’ (compare English serpent), making “Herpes zoster” somewhat like wearing both lexical suspenders and a belt.  (As for the shingles used to tile your roof, the word’s  origin is unclear but surely has nothing to do with belts.)

 Shingles, typically a disease of one’s golden years, has its origin in the chickenpox you caught as the result of having been sent to Billy’s house with all the other neighborhood kids to play when word got out that he was contagious. (Or if you somehow avoided the disease when you were a kid, you might have had the ill fortune to catch it from your own children and be really sick.) So, why is it called “chickenpox?” Just as shingles the malady has nothing to do with shingles the building material (from Late Latin scindula, a variant of scandula ‘wooden slat used for roofing’ and of obscure origin), so chickenpox has nothing to do with birds, or not much anyway: The disease neither afflicts chickens, nor do humans catch it from them. (Contrast cowpox, which affects only cattle, or avian flu, a virus that is passed from birds to humans.) Essentially, the chicken part of chickenpox seems to refer to the relative blandness/insignificant nature of the disease when compared to, say, smallpox, which, though considered more serious than chickenpox, was not thought to be as serious as the great pox (syphilis). The relative seriousness of the (typically childhood) diseases of chickenpox and smallpox are reflected in their Latin names (varicella and variola, respectively, both diminutive forms of Latin varus ‘pustule,’ possibly influenced by Latin varius ‘spotted’). As has often been the case, the Latin terms came into currency at a later date than the corresponding common names for the diseases, a sociolinguistic phenomenon on which Siddhartha Mukherjee has written illuminatingly (in his The Emperor of All Maladies): 

“Unable to find a unifying explanation for it, and seeking a name for this condition,  Virchow ultimately settled for weisses Blut—white blood—no more then a literal  descriptions of the millions of white blood cells he had seen under the microscope. In 1847 he changed the name to the more academic-sounding ‘leukemia’—from leukos, the Greek word for ‘white.’”

He then goes on to say, “Renaming the disease—from the florid ‘suppuration of blood’ to the flat weisses Blut—hardly seems like an act of scientific genius, but it had a profound impact on the understanding of leukemia. An illness, at the moment of its discovery, is a fragile idea, a hothouse flower—deeply, disproportionately influenced by names and classifications. (More than a century later, in the early 1980’s, another change in name—from gay related immune disease (GRID) to acquired immuno deficiency syndrome (AIDS)—would signal an epic shift in the understanding of that disease.)”

So, here are some answers to our initial general question: How do diseases get named?

• By metonymy: Diseases get named after their most notable symptom(s). So, leukemia gets its name from the proliferation of white blood cells that characterizes the disease just as shingles and the various the poxes get theirs from their pustules, or, pocks. Measles and rubeola belong to this club as well.  
• Greco-Latin fancification: leukemia is a literal translation of weisses Blut (plus the suffix –ia denoting a condition); variola and varicella convey the notion that the main feature of their diseases is pustules (pocks), and each is less severe than the great pox (for which, apparently, no one has thought to coin a one-word Latin name, a matter that we will explore later).
• The process by which GRID and AIDS got their names is not so easy to characterize. The fact that GRID and AIDS are handy acronyms makes them easy to remember but doesn’t tell us about their symptoms. Perhaps like influenza—literally, ‘influence,’ because it was the influence of the heavens that was thought to have made you sick—the affliction now known as AIDS was originally named somewhat obliquely after its supposed cause (gay sex).
• Another “how” zipped by under the radar here, namely: the origin of the word syphilis. The spoiler is that “Syphilis” was the name of a (fictional) person who famously suffered from the disease, but thereby hangs a tale to be told in a subsequent posting. Stay tuned.

 

Are You Do Glass?

One morning as I was sitting in the courtyard of San Miguel’s Biblioteca Pública, I noticed a woman in white standing to one side intently scanning the area. Our eyes met a couple of times as I began to survey the courtyard in reflexive sympathy. Eventually, she came over to where I was sitting and asked me what sounded like “Are you do glass?” ([aryúdúglas?] to which, after the brief pause required to reparse the question as “Are you Douglas?” I replied, “No. Sorry.” I was not surprised when it subsequently turned out that Douglas was a guy about my age, coloring, and dress sitting nearby who was waiting to be  tutored in Spanish by the woman in white, the courtyard of the public library being a popular place for such activities.

 It occurred to me (later, of course) that there were any number of more imaginative responses I might have given to the question “Are you Douglas?” than the vanilla, “No. Sorry,”  such as:  “No, Douglas is my evil twin (my Doppelgänger, understudy, imaginary companion…);” “Sí, pero creo que busque usted a mi tocayo” [‘Yes, but I think you’re looking for my namesake’]; or, simply, “Yes.” Less imaginative (i.e., serious, truthful) possibilities would have been one or another of the names by which I am actually known—my given name (Paul Alexander Humez), my nickname (Alex), or (stretching a bit), my tecnonym (Andrea’s Dad), a tecnonym being the name (ὄνυμα/ὄνομα) given to a parent based on that of his or her child (τέκνον)—in this case, a combination of the first name “Andrea” plus the hypocorism “Dad”—as in “Hey, Andrea’s Dad, is your name by any chance Douglas?”

When the Cyclops said to Odysseus, “Tell me your name” [Μοι τεòν ὄνομα εἰπὲ], the latter replied, “My name is Nobody” [Οὖτις ἐμοί γ’ ὄνομα], setting in motion a shaggy dog story that ends very badly for the Cyclops. In Homer’s day, a Greek, whether male or female, was given a single name (a tradition echoed by such modern-day celebrities as Madonna and Sting). Among the Romans, a male received a  praenomen (a first name, e.g., Gaius), a nomen (the name of his clan [gens], e.g., Julius], possibly supplemented by a cognomen (originally, a nickname, e.g., Caesar, which might be passed down as a subclan name), sometimes topped off by an  agnomen (an additional cognomen, e.g., the “Africanus” of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus). As for Roman women, according to The Oxford Concise Companion to Classical Literature, “at least in the upper classes, the praenomen was virtually abandoned, and they were usually known by the feminine form of their nomen or clan name, e.g., ‘Cornelia’, ‘Claudia’. A person’s nomen was of course the same as the (legal) father; women did not change their name upon marriage.”

Homeric Greek and Roman parents had a fair amount of liberty when it came to choosing a first (or only) name for their offspring, as we in the U.S. do today, witness, for example, the given names of the Zappa children: Moon Unit, Dweezil, and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen—their sibling Ahmet was more conventionally named for Ahmet Ertegun—or the Campbell children, Adolf Hitler, JoceLynn Aryan Nation, and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie. (We may take at face value the speculations that Pigeen is a misspelling of pigeon and Hinler is essentially Do Glass for Himmler.) In other countries, one’s choices when it comes to personal names may be constrained not only by convention but by law. In France, for example, article 57 of the civil code (http://jiel.b.free.fr/prenom.html) states in part that when one or another of the first names chosen by the parents strike the civil service official in charge of vetting names as not in the best interests of the child or a violation of the rights of some third party, the matter goes to a judge who, if necessary, can assign the kid a noncontroversial name. (For gleeful elaboration on the legal constraints on personal names, see http://www.yabiladi.com/forum/prenoms-interdits-90-4111903.html.)

Just as there are restrictions on what you can name your child in some countries, so are there restrictions on what you can legally change your name to if you don’t like the one you’ve got.  For example, in Québec, we read (http://www.educaloi.qc.ca/loi/citoyens/54/  under “Quelles sont les raisons légalement acceptables pour changer de nom?” [‘What are the legally acceptable reasons for changing a name?’]): “Thus, a person named Julie could not, for example, present a request for a change of name on the grounds that she would like to be called Fantasia ‘because it’s more original.’ Nor could she change her name because the fact that it’s a common one causes her some inconvenience, for example, if she often receives the mail for another Julie Tremblay who lives in her neighborhood,” surely a reference to the classic joke in which a man comes before the magistrate with a request for a change of name. “What’s your name?” the magistrate asks. “John Turd.” “Yes, well, I can see why you might want to change your name. To what would you like to change it?” “Franklin Turd.” “??!!” “You see, there’s a guy down the street from me named John Turd and I keep getting all his mail.”

Nicknames, of course, are not typically a matter for the courts. (The word nickname was originally eke-name, getting its initial n as the result of the misparsing of an eke-name, an eke-name being, according to the OED “obs. An additional name, a nickname,” the eke- part being “an addition, increase; a piece added on; a supplement,” cognate with the aug- of augment. Eke-name has also been proposed as the origin of the word moniker, but that is another matter.) Usually, your nickname is foist upon you (for good or ill) by others, though under certain circumstances you may select your own, as in the following case:

 A burglar enters Mr. and Mrs. Jones’s bedroom and finds them in bed. Pointing his pistol at the woman, he says, “I’m going to kill you, but first I want to know your name.” “My name is Elizabeth,” she manages to say. “Ah,” the burglar says, “My sainted mother was named Elizabeth. In loving memory of her, I can’t bring myself to shoot you.” Turning his gun on the woman’s husband he asks, “And what’s your name?” “My name is Douglas,” the husband replies, “…but everybody calls me Elizabeth.”

 

Semiotics 101

 

All in the (Facebook) Family

One of the Outlaws

I recently received a notice that a member of my extended family had listed me on his Facebook page as a relative and asked me to confirm that the claim was legit. This led me on a trek to locate my “Friends and Family” FB page and, once having found it, to ponder the stereoscopic image of contemporary American society provided by the side-by-side, slightly offset kinship vocabularies of common everyday life and the special world of Facebook. I should say up front that I did not really expect to find a Facebook term for the particular family relationship in question, namely: son of wife’s first cousin, a.k.a. wife’s first cousin once removed—my first cousin once removed by marriage? my first cousin by marriage once removed?

Obstacles to such a term, even forgetting the “by marriage” part, include the following:

• · Many people are unclear about the difference between first cousin once removed and second cousin (1^st cousin once removed being my first cousin’s child/my parent’s first cousin; 2^nd cousin being a child of my grandparent’s sibling) and so would rather not speak up.
• · Some have trouble getting their heads around the generational ambiguity of the “removed” relationship (as opposed to the collateral relationship denoted by the numbers), and so etc.
• We generally don’t have single-word terms for relationships we don’t consider all that important. Put another way, if there’s no single-word term (even hyphenated) for a specific kinship relation, the chances are the relationship is not a major player—your uncle is important, but whether he’s your father’s brother or your mother’s is not particularly remarkable as far as our society is concerned, though the distinction is and has been in other societies: In Roman times, your father’s brother and your mother’s brother merited separate terms (patruelis and avunculus, respectively). Your nepos, on the other hand, could be your undifferentiated grandson or nephew (or, later, a favored “nephew,” often an ecclesiastic’s illegitimate son, with reference to whom the term nepotism would be coined).  Similarly, in French belle-fille can be either ‘step-daughter’ or ‘daughter-in-law,’ for the latter of which the disambiguating alternative bru—a borrowing of a Germanic term cognate with English bride—can be used to designate the woman who married your son.

Which brings us to my Facebook “Friends and Family” profile:

 

Facebook Family Profile

Facebook lets you identify yourself by two kinds of relationship by picking an item from each of two lists, one of which might loosely be termed “marital status” and the other of which might somewhat less loosely be termed “kinship tie.” The “marital status” list is a mixture of the traditional single, engaged, married, and widowed of which your great-grandmother would have approved, plus separated and divorced, which she would have recognized but with considerable discomfort, plus a handful of more recent possibilities that would have been quite unthinkable—open relationship? The horror! The horror! One wonders how many people actually identify themselves in their Facebook profiles as non-monogamous/polyamorous, especially when they could just as well punt and say “It’s complicated,” which could be a euphemism for all sorts of other possibilities that might appear in an expanded list such as the following:

Relationship Status, Revised

The “kinship tie” list appears when you click “Add another family member” before you select the Facebook member whom you want to list as kin. (If you enter the name first, as in the example from Alex’s profile page, Facebook populates this list with gender-appropriate terms.) Note: The prospective family member doesn’t actually have to be related to you; he or she must simply be among your Facebook “friends.” God gave you your relatives but thank heaven you can pick your own friends? Call it hubris if you like, but Facebook lets you pick your relatives too (albeit only from among your Facebook “friends”): Don’t like your mom? Simply replace her with one or more of your Facebook friends or assign her a more appropriate relationship status from the list, say, “uncle:”

Facebook Kinship Terms

Note the rather creepy “Expected: Child” for which you can add the expected due date. (How you insert a photo—a sonogram?—is left as an exercise for the student):

 

 We can excuse the missing terms for half-siblings, the god-parents, the foster children, and the former relatives lost to divorce, such as my aunt’s former husband or my sister’s former second husband’s daughter. The numbered and removed can count as cousins (or nephews or nieces or uncles or aunts), no questions asked. The absence of “fiancé” and “fiancée” is a bit odd, however, given that “engaged” is one of the options on the “marital status” list. Perhaps, like “going steady,” “fiancé” and “fiancée” are considered too quaint, notwithstanding one informant’s gloss of “fiancé” as ‘my boyfriend who has no intention of marrying me but we live together.’ File under “In a relationship.”

 

So what about “Partner?” The only non gender-specific term besides “Expected: Child” on the list, “Partner” appears twice presumably because it belongs on both of the gender-specific lists, not because you might have multiple partners though, of course, you might. Otherwise, “Partner” by its presence calls attention to the absence of a term for the other member of the dyad (or polyad) in which your choice in the “marital status” list identifies you as the other (or another) participant. If “It’s complicated” can cover a multitude of what great-grandma would have called sins, surely there should be terms for one’s significant if formerly unspoken others from which to choose. We offer the following for starters:   

Facebook KInship Terms, Enhanced

 

Tastes Just Like…

On my first trip to Mexico, I sat down at a lunch counter next to a local resident who was savoring a dish that looked like something I might want to try at home. I asked, “¿Cómo se llama lo que come?” [‘What’s what you’re eating called?’] to which he replied, “El almuerzo.” [‘Lunch.’] Concluding that it might be prudent to abandon informant work with this particular subject, I resolved instead to look for a cookbook, preferably one with pictures, to ascertain the recipe for “Lunch.”

The term recipe, abbreviated ℞ in both the pharmaceutical and culinary arts, is originally the second person singular imperative form of the Latin verb recipere ‘take, receive,’ which typically preceded the list of “ingredients” your doctor prescribed for you to take to cure your current ills. The kind of recipe you follow to cook a dish is accordingly a list of ingredients with instructions for what to do with them, like a physician’s prescription, to cure your current hunger. The cookbook as we know it today can trace its origins to a work of the third or fourth century C.E., Apicius’s De obsoniis et condimentis sive de re culinaria [‘On Catering and Seasoning, or, On Cookery’], apparently the first of its kind. There is some debate as to the identity of the author of De re culinaria—a fellow named Caelius or Coelius is a prominent contender—though it is likely that the cognomen “Apicius” was adopted as a deliberate reference to Marcus Gavius Apicius, “a famous Roman epicure who lived during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. Having, it was said, spent one hundred million sesterces (about $3,600,000) in procuring and inventing rare dishes, he balanced his accounts and found that he had only ten million sesterces ($360,000) left. Unwilling to starve on such a pittance, he destroyed himself.” (The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, 1894-1895.)

The first translation of De re culinaria to be published in English is Joseph Dommers Vehling’s Apicius: Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome, reprinted by Dover Publications in 1977 and now widely excerpted on the Internet, the copyright having expired. Vehling’s introduction, footnotes, and glossary make this translation well worth chasing down. His remarks on the havoc wreaked on the text as it was passed down over the years are suggestive—one imagines copyists’ errors caused by food stains on favorite recipes in the original—as are his arguments that De re culinaria was essentially a “fake book” for pros, rather than a prototypical Joy of Cooking aimed at the public, and as such understandably terse and, at times, incomplete: Professionals would not have to be told how to make a common marinade, and the author might omit some details to preserve the secret of his signature dishes.

Here’s a sample recipe from Vehling, preceded by the original Latin text:

Pullum Frontonianum: pullum praedura, condies liquamine, oleo mixto, cui mittis fasciculum anethi, porri, satureiae et coriandri viridis, et coques. ubi coctus fuerit, levabis eum, in lance defrito perungues, piper aspargis et inferes.

Chicken à la Fronto¹
Pullum Frontonianum

A half-cooked chicken marinaded in a pickle of broth, mixed with oil, to which is added a bunch of dill, leeks, satury and green coriander. Finish it in this broth. When done, take the chicken out2 dress it nicely on a dish, pour over the sauce, colored with reduced must, sprinkle with pepper and serve.

¹ Named for a Roman by the name of Fronto. There is a sucking pigs à la Fronto, too. Cf. ℞ No. 374. M. Cornelius Fronto was orator and author during the reign of Emperor Hadrian. According to Dann. a certain Frontone under Emperor Severus.
² List., G. V. levabis; Tor. lavabis, for which there is little or no occasion. He may mean to clean, i.e. remove skin, tissues, sinews, small bones, etc.

Vehling’s translation raises some questions:

(a) What should we make of  pullum praedura? Mileage varies among translators: “A half-cooked chicken, ” “Start to fry chicken, ”  “Brown the chicken, ” “Fry the chicken to start browning the skin, ” “Roast the chicken a little to brown it.” “Blanched” and “parboiled” have also been suggested for the operation performed on the chicken [Latin pullus].  Leaving aside the meaning of the verb praedurare (‘to harden’ [cf. durus ‘hard’]) and its associated adjectival form praedurus, -a, -um (which would make more sense if applied to an egg than to a chicken, really), one could read praedura as an imperative except that it’s immediately followed by a present indicative form (condies), and the other Apicius recipes tend to use the future or present indicative rather than the imperative. On the other hand, if praedura is an adjective, it disagrees with pullum in both grammatical gender and case. Why it’s pullum rather than pullus, if it’s not a direct object,  is another question. Or if it is a direct object not of praedurare but some other (implied) verb, what’s that verb? Perhaps a smear of liquamen or defritum obscured the original text.

 (b) What were liquamen and defritum (orig. defrutum)? Vehling says of liquamen (here rendered as  “a pickle of broth ”) that “[i]t may stand for broth, sauce, stock, gravy, drippings, even for court bouillon—in fact for any liquid appertaining to or derived from a certain dish or food material.” He renders defritum/defrutum as ‘must,’ which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as ‘The fermented or fermenting juice expressed from fruit, especially grapes.’ For a useful exposition of liquamen, see  http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/roman/fetch-recipe.php?rid=roman-garum.

 (c) ubi coctus fuerit, levabis eum, in lance defrito perungues, piper aspargis et inferes. There is some disagreement among translators as to whether it’s the chicken or the plate [lanx, lancis ‘plate, charger’] that you smear [perungues] with must. One translation (http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/apicius-aeropetes-6.php) cleverly dodges the issue: “When it is done remove [the bird] from [the pan], and arrange on a serving dish sprinkled with defrutum.” Today, we’d drizzle.

Ora y cocina

 

Mstory Story

You receive a letter offering you the job of your dreams. The letter is signed “J. B. Cust, Director of Human Resources.” Assuming that all you know about J. B. Cust is that this individual is the company’s Director of Human Resources, how should you begin your letter of acceptance, given the limitations of the inventory of courtesy titles that English puts at your disposal? The question is not a new one, as suggested by the following piece that appeared in the Springfield, Massachusetts newspaper the Springfield Sunday Republican on Nov. 10, 1901:

“There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill. Every one has been put in an embarrassing position by ignorance of the status of some woman. To call a maiden Mrs is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title Miss. Yet it is not always easy to know the facts. When an author puts on the title page of a book Marion Smith, it is not even possible to be certain of the sex of the writer, and it is decidedly awkward for a reviewer to repeat the name in full over and over again. It would be a convenience if explanatory titles were added to the signature, but it seems to be regarded as “bad form.” Signatures to letters also cause no end of trouble to correspondents. The “Miss” or “Mrs” sometimes added in brackets are but an awkward makeshift, and often it is taken for granted that the recipient of the letter will remember the proper style of the writer, when, as a matter of fact he does nothing of the sort. Now, clearly, what is needed is a more comprehensive term which does homage to the sex without expressing any views as to their domestic situation, and what could be simpler or more logical than the retention of what the two doubtful terms have in common. The abbreviation “Ms” is simple, it is easy to write, and the person can translate it properly according to circumstances. For oral use it might be rendered “Mizz,” which would be a close parallel to the practice long universal in many bucolic regions, where a slurred Mis’ does duty for Miss and Mrs alike.”

Indeed, Miss and Mrs(.) have a common origin, nicely explained in the 1880 Century Dictionary entries for miss², missis, missus, and mistresswith which the Springfield journalist may or may not have been familiar.

• Miss², : “[An abbr. of mistress, at first prob. as a title, the form Mistress, as written Mrs. and pronounced mis´ez, being still commonly abbreviated in rustic use in New England and among the Southern negroes, to Miss, often printed Mis’.] 1. Mistress: a reduced form of this title, which, so reduced, came to be regarded, when prefixed to the name of a young woman or girl, as a sort of diminutive, and was especially applied to young girls (corresponding to master as applied to young boys), older unmarried girls or women being styled mistress even in the lifetime of the mother; later, and in present use, a title prefixed to the name of any unmarried woman or girl.”
• Missis, missus: “1. Mistress: a contracted form in colloquial or provincial use. The word thus contracted is spelled out chiefly in representations of vulgar speech; but as a title it is in universal spoken use in the form *missess or rather *misses (mis´ez), and is almost invariably written Mrs. See mistress. 2. A wife. [Dial. and colloq.]”
• Mistress: “[Formerly also mistres, mistris, misteris; < ME. maistresse, mastresse, < OF. maistresse…< ML. magistressa, magistrissa, magistrix (for L. magistra), fem. of L. magister, master, chief: see mister¹, master¹. In familiar use the word has been contracted to missis or missus, a form regarded as vulgar except when written Mrs. and used as a title, correlated to Mr.: see missus. The term is also abbreviated Miss, esp. as a title, now of different signification from Mrs.: see miss2.] 1. A woman who has authority or power of control…2. A title of courtesy nearly equivalent to madam, formerly applied to any woman or girl, but now chiefly and specifically to married women, written in the abbreviated form Mrs.… 3. A woman who has mastered any art or branch of study… 4. A woman who is beloved and courted; a woman who has command over a lover’s heart… 5. A woman who illicitly occupies the place of a wife. 6†. In the game of bowls, the small ball at which the players aim; the jack.”

While mistress still designates a woman of power in a few compounds (e.g., concert mistress, the principal violinist in the orchestra), as a stand-alone term, it has largely lost its luster (a fate shared by madam, as in the contrasting Madam Secretary and the mayflower madam), assuming a basically negative sense, arguably as a casualty of the social upheavals centering around “women’s place” that came in the aftermath of World War II and found expression in such general-circulation writing as Mario Pei’s 1949 best-seller, The Story of Language: “‘Mister’ is originally the Latin magister, ‘headman,’ ‘commander,’ ‘steersman’ (the root is mag-, ‘great’). The educational, intellectual or occupational headman becomes the ‘master,’ the maître, maestro and mastro of the Romance languages, even the Meister of German. Socially, he turns into a person who is respected because of his prominent position. ‘Mistress’ is the same word, to which is added a Greek feminine suffix –issa, which in French becomes –esse. ‘Miss,’ an abbreviation of ‘Mistress,’ was used under Charles I to denote a woman of ill-repute, but later began to be applied to an unmarried woman, with the spelling ‘Mis.’ In Shakespeare’s days, ‘Mistress’ was used for both married and unmarried ladies, and feminists, who object to the distinction between Mrs. and Miss and its concomitant revelatory features, have often proposed that the two present-day titles be merged into a single one, ‘Miss’ (to be written ‘Ms.’), with the plural ‘Misses’ (written (‘Mss.’), even at the cost of confusion with the abbreviation of ‘manuscripts.’”

Fortunately, times change and we change with them, sometimes kicking and screaming, sometimes more cautiously, as suggested by the usage note accompanying the American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed. 2000) entry for Ms. (which it defines as “A courtesy title before the surname or full name of a woman or girl…” and derives from a “blend of MISS and MRS.”]): “Many of us think of Ms. or Ms as a fairly recent invention of the women’s movement, but in fact the term was first suggested as a convenience to writers of business letters by such publications as the Bulletin of the American Business Writing Association (1951) and The Simplified Letter, issued by the National Office Management Association (1952). Ms. is now widely used in both professional and business contexts. As a courtesy title Ms. serves exactly the same function as Mr. does for men, and like Mr. it may be used alone or with a full name. Furthermore, Ms. is correct regardless of a woman’s marital status, thus relegating that information to the realm of private life, where many feel it belongs anyway. Some women prefer Miss or Mrs., however, and courtesy requires that their wishes be respected.”

Problem solved? Well, maybe. But what about J.B. Cust, Marion Smith, and the myriad others for whom a gender-agnostic courtesy title would be handy? A recent possibility has been suggested (pace Prof. Pei) by performance artist Justin Vivian Bond (http://justinbond.com/?p=537): “I don’t like any of the prefixes currently in common usage as none of them seem to apply… check one: _Mr. _Mrs. _Ms. _Miss. None of these work so I have adopted Mx because it implies a mix which is the least offensive and most general way I’ve been able to come up with to find a prefix that clearly states a trans identity without amplifying a binary gender preference, or even acknowledging the gender binary at all.”

J. B. Cust

Will Mx make it into general usage as a courtesy title for not just the transgendered but for anybody whose gender is unknown or irrelevant? Stay tuned.

 

BFF

Better Halves

All loving relationships have a trajectory each stage of which comes with a rich vocabulary referring to the participants and to the stage of the relationship itself. That this vocabulary is both extensive and often ambiguous is perhaps not surprising, given the fluidity of such relationships and the scrutiny and speculation to which we can’t help but subject them, whether the principals be our nearest and dearest or Kate and Wills.

Popular culture provides the basic template, sometimes adding, omitting, or reordering the essential components. For example, in their 1958 hit “The Book of Love,” the Monotones offer the following scenario: Chapter One profess your love for her; Chapter Two proclaim that you will never (never never never never) part; Chapter Three “remember the meaning of Romance;” and in the fourth and final chapter, break up but “give her just one more chance.” The writers abandon the narrative at this point, tacitly acknowledging that once it has become clear to “her” that we’re talking about lust rather than love, the relationship is probably doomed (the sentiments expressed by the Shirelles in “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” notwithstanding).

Perhaps a better model is the playground taunt that might have been directed at the Royals had they met as children:

Kate and Wills sitting in a tree
K-i-s-s-i-n-g:
First comes love, then comes marriage,
Then comes Kate with a baby carriage.

We may assume that “First comes love” is a gloss on kissing rather than that lust precedes love, the precursor to marriage and subsequent parenthood—these words are from the mouths of babes, after all. (Interestingly, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, the evolution of the expression “to hook up” has gone in the precisely opposite direction: At the beginning of the 20th century, “hook up” meant ‘meet’ and ‘marry,’ in the 1980s ‘become romantically or sexually involved,’ and in the 1990s ‘engage in kissing, petting, or (usu.) sexual intercourse.’) Out of the mouths of the media, the story of the grown-up Kate and Wills (whom we will presently give a well-deserved rest) basically runs like this: They meet and become friends, then form a romantic attachment, live together, roundly deny rumors of Kate’s pregnancy, and eventually get married.

The scenario of friendship first leading perhaps to some kind of romantic couplehood is perhaps the gold classic. Diogenes Laertes in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers tells us that when asked “What is a friend?” Aristotle replied, “A single soul housed in two bodies” [μία ψυχὴ δύο σώμασιν ἐνοικουσα]. The idea that a friend is someone with whom you share a single soul shows up in Horace’s ode (I.3), a propempticon in honor of his friend and fellow poet Virgil’s impending trip to Greece. (A propempticon—literally, ‘something accompanying’—is a sort of literary carry-on for you to take on a journey and by convention is addressed not to you but to your means of transport, in this case, a ship.) Horace refers to Virgil as “half of my soul” [animae dimidium meae]. Less than a century later, Statius in his “Propempticon Maecio Celeri” [‘Propempticon for Maecius Celerus’] goes Horace one better, referring to his subject as “the greater part of my [lit. our] soul” [animae partem nostrae maiorem]. Fast forward to 1590 and Sir Philip Sidney’s posthumously published The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia in which Argalus addresses his wife Parthenia as “My deare, my deare, my better halfe” and on to the OED, which informs us that the expression “better half” is “orig. my better half, the more than half of my being; said of a very close and intimate friend…; esp. (after Sidney) used for ‘my husband’ or ‘wife’; now, jocularly appropriated to the latter.”

While the assertion that the epithet has come to apply exclusively to the female member of a couple perhaps betokens more a trend than a fait accompli (at least in America), the concomitant evolution from serious to jocular usage is indisputable. Compare “my old lady” (as in “Who was that lady I seen you eating peas with last night?” “That was no lady: that was my wife.”). “My old lady” (like “my old man”) while gender-specific is, out of context, relationship-ambiguous: Your old lady (old man) can be either your mate or your mother (father). It’s not clear if this example of semantic overloading belongs in the same class as the familiar use of such kinship terms as daddy-o, brother, sister, or, originally, pal—a borrowing of the Romany word for ‘brother’ with which it is cognate—to designate people not related to you by blood.

Such ambiguities are not restricted to English. In Spanish, your better half is your media naranja (literally, ‘half [an] orange,’ presumably because if you cut an orange evenly in half, the two parts that form the whole are indistinguishable from each other). Grammatically feminine but semantically unmarked for gender, your media naranja can be either male or female. Also grammatically feminine but semantically unmarked for gender is Spanish pareja, which can refer to a couple or to either member of a couple, to a dancing partner, or to a mate, all of which English glosses are themselves gender-agnostic. Indeed, mate goes so far as to be even species-agnostic, a fact no doubt responsible for the disambiguating adage “One man’s mate is another man’s person.”