Try to Remember

In all of this recent brouhaha over the so-called "Ground-Zero Mosque," I heard some guy ask, "Okay, it's hollowed ground, but just when does the grieving stop?"

Never, sir, for an historian. Historians go to Gettysburg, stand over the mass graves there marked only by regiment, unspool the Gettysburg Address or the poetry of Emily Dickenson in their heads, (Ample make this bed/Make this bed with awe/In it wait till judgement break/Excellent and fair) and then cry like babies.

The passage of time does not make an injustice magically just, nor does it make suffering any the less tragic, or heroic. In the last great Jewish revolt of the 2nd century, Rabbi Akiba was skinned alive by the Romans, slowly, spouting Torah the whole time. I still shiver to think of it. No longer a teen-ager, I can watch the end of Spartacus with dry eyes, but I can't think of Daniel Pearl without weeping. If you're waiting for me to get over the image of Americans crossing themselves and then jumping off the 104th floor to keep from being burned alive, I'm afraid you've got a very, very long wait.

If your name were Ufuk Ince, wouldn’t you change it to John Krapp-House Dore?

English is a remarkable language. I’m proud to call it mine own. I’ve studied and loved many tongues, but for my money, none can touch the sheer joy of English. It’s so filled with idiom and rule-breaking grammar that it’s very difficult for foreigners to learn; French is a cake walk in comparison. Personally, I think only Mandarin Chinese is harder. That’s due to its diverse sources, for it is not merely a Romance language built upon Latin, as are French and Spanish. Born and bred in Britain, it began with the Sanskrit Indo-European language of the island’s Celts, then absorbed Latin from its Roman conquerors, (as well as from later Church Latin). Next came the waves of Germanic and semi-Germanic invaders, the Angles, the Jutes, the Old Norse, the Frisians, the Saxons, all from that same vast area of the Netherlands and its off-islands, Denmark, Germany, Jutland, etc. Finally came the last major conqueror, the Norman French, who tried to ban the Anglo-Saxon tongue altogether and failed, nevertheless leaving their Romance-language mark.

Accordingly, English is considered to be the largest language in the world, with over 500,000 words, and this exclusive of 20th century scientific and technical terms.

Being a complete nutcase on the age of sail, (which makes sense for a pudgy and pasty native of a landlocked state) I’ve always been a fan of Joseph Conrad. I read my first one, Lord Jim, at the age of fourteen. (And the film version with Peter O’Toole is a pip.) Conrad’s works, from novels like Nostromo to short stories and novellas like Heart of Darkness, upon which Coppola based the film Apocalypse Now, are all priceless treasures of our linguistic heritage. Along with using the sea so effectively as a psychological metaphor, his works were known above all for the beauty of their language.

But there was much I never knew about the man himself until many years later. I always loved telling this story to adult students struggling with English. Joseph Conrad was, in fact, born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Poland in 1857. As a child, his father was sent into exile in Siberia for his political views, so as a boy must have picked up a little Russian. But in truth he only spoke Polish, and later French, which he learned as a young man when he went to school in Switzerland, and then to sea from the port of Marseilles. He read the great works of fiction in these two languages. At the age of 21 he skipped out of the French merchant marine and into the British one, at which time he had only a few words of English. He served in the British merchant marine for another 16 years, where he slowly picked up the language, not as a scholar, but as a seaman. He became a British subject in 1886. His experiences sailing in Indonesia and the Congo would color all of his work. But the astonishing thing is that he didn’t publish his first stories until the age of 37 - in English. None of these books were translations from his native Polish, or French. Conrad wrote in the language he learned last, and last of all. So much for old dogs and new tricks. He always said that he loved English for its myriad subtleties, for the fact that there were more ways to say the same thing in English than in any other language.

How right he was. An English thesaurus is three times as long as a French one. There are more ways to express the same idea in English than in any other language I know. And, even better for a writer, these various words often have oh-so-subtle differences in meaning. You can hate a guy. But you can also despise him, detest him, abhor him, loathe him and abominate him, as well as holding him in contempt, finding him odious, or bearing him a grudge. Not to mention the fact that he just plain pisses you off. And this only scratches the surface of how revolting, galling, irksome, obnoxious, despicable, repugnant, base and ignoble you find him.

Sorry. Started to sound like a politician there for a minute.

The symphonic tones of English run the gamut from the explosive 1812 Overture to the delicate minor keys of Chopin, from the lyrical beauty of Emily Dickenson, (Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me / The carriage held but just ourselves, and immortality) to the talkover excitement of a battlefield scene in an MGM war picture or the rat-a-tat dialog of an early thirties talkie: Nothing matches the elasticity, the vibrancy, and the sheer sensuous pleasure of English.

So why is that, of all the bounty to be had from this tongue of poets and kings, the word that will be written across our tombstone ten thousand years hence is, without doubt, “Fuck?”

Of course, it would be hard to overstate the impact of English all over the world, far and above the influence of any single word - it is definitely our lingua franca, the world’s common tongue, a term that dates to the old days of the Mediterranean sea trade, when the seamen came up with a patois of their own that included elements of Spanish, Arabic, Italian, French, etc., so these traders could understand one another. It is now English that is spoken all over the world. Though I’ve become convinced that the “ugly American” tourist is pretty much of a myth (we tip big, we’re polite as hell, and we take a lot of crap), the fact is that one of their legendary statements, along with “That American green’ll spend anywhere!” is quite true - “They all speak English, you know, even if they pretend they don’t.”

We’re lucky, and we’ve traveled a great deal. I’d heard English the world over, but I think it was when I was in China that I really began to see the impact of it all. As in India, there are literally dozens of dialects there, and, as in India, they can’t always understand one another. This is why the nation of India had the good sense to make English their official language of government, while still working to protect every native dialect. In China, we learned a set of hand gestures in order to shop the bazaars and the hysterically misnamed Friendship Store, a department store for foreigners mainly to buy cheap silk pajamas. These hand gestures are the ones they use with one another when there’s a dialectic wall of stone between them.

But, in a nation cut off from the West for so many years, what surprised me most was the number of Chinese people I heard speaking English to one another. For two Chinese guys from different regions, English, even broken English, was often the only common language they shared.

And the fact is, the English foreigners speak better than any other, apart, perhaps, from “Are you ready to order,” is English profanity. As it rises over the traffic noise of Paris or floats above the cheering masses of soccer fans in Istanbul, the single word or’whelms all others, a constant reminder of America’s international impact: Fuck you, fuck all (a newer British noun; Brits love turning verbs into nouns, and vice-versa - have a “lie-down,” or, “Speak up! I’m Hoovering!”), fuck this and that and the other, and by the way, fuck off. Unbelievable.

In the Latin, sex was either concubitus or coitus, both of which survive only in scholarly or medical phrases. “Fuck” has a far earthier paternity.

According to my most treasured possession, the entire twenty-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary (Praised Be Its Name), “fuck,” often spelled “fucke,” goes back in printed form to at least the 16th century. It is doubtless far older. And the OED (Praised Be Its Name) points out its usage in various classic works, from Burns to Lawrence.

According to another favorite source, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by an antiquarian named Captain Francis Grose, who wrote it to make the unintelligible cant slang and profanity of the London streets understandable to the educated who were being vilified without realizing it. (Though he, of course, cautions them not to actually use it.) Originally published in 1785, with several new editions and copious notes in modern editions by Eric Partridge, it speaks of the word’s many 15th century companions, including the very Shakespearean “swive,” then mentions a possible Latin root in futuere, or the Greek phuteuo, neither of which are in my squeaky clean dictionaries, as well as the gentle French root foutre. Another dictionary describes the Roman root as “psuedo-Latin,” whatever that is, probably slang, the word being fuccant. But I think he really gets to the point when Partridge mentions briefly a Teutonic root for the central consonant “c”.

And the Oxford English Dictionary (PBIN) gets there eventually as well, mentioning briefly the Germanic root word fuken.

Here, I think, the scholars have hit the mark, though they may have missed its import. I’m no fan of German, but I believe it was the addition of that jarring consonant at the center that turned the word from one of many to a stand-alone classic. It’s the onomatopoeic aspect of the thing, the simple impact of its sound as it falls upon the recipient’s ear. I suppose it’s that touch of German in our glorious tongue that gives the word that harsh and discordant flair. I must admit, as much as I love French, my Christopher is right - when your house is burning down, it just doesn’t have the same impact to be mincing around shouting, “Feu! Feu!”

“Fuck” also has an astonishing, nay an endless number of variants. I think that most people, no matter how potty-mouthed, have a particular vulgarity they hate. For me, it’s the disgustingly Oedipal M-F word, the coarse hyphenate every rapper loves even more than Keats loved his Grecian urn. I shall not sully my electronic pen to repeat it even here in this free-wheeling gallery of the fun and profane, for I will play no part in giving it any legitimacy, nor will I provide it an audience.

This does not mean, however, that I have no romance with profanity, in all languages. Our swear words tell us as much about ourselves as do our art museums and our bathrooms. Or, as a proud British bellboy, showing me the power of the flush and the showerhead in our hotel room once said, “Great, isn’t it? I know how you Yanks love your plumbing.”

Us Yanks love our swear words, as well. Perhaps a tad too much, truth to tell. The film 48 Hours with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy was a wake-up call for me. It came out while I was in film school. My mother had already taken note of the fact that hanging out with film students all the time had not improved my vocabulary. I was swearing more than I ever had in my life in those days, a habit I have since curbed. It’s like not turning up the radio when your hands are wet. You do things for your mother.

At any rate, in my opinion, the movie 48 Hours was a turning point in American film culture, such as it is. I never missed a movie in those halcyon days, and cinema by that time was pretty raw. Yet, even as I worked on film sets and cussed like a sweaty stevedore, 48 Hours got under my skin. It seemed more than merely profane; it was almost like a physical assault. There were times I wanted to get up and leave the theatre; my eardrums could simply stand no more.

In those pre-Internet days, we used to go to the American Film Institute Library in order to read the great scripts and study them.

As we left 48 Hours, I glanced at Chris and said, “Wouldn’t you love to see the screenplay? Maybe we could find some of the dialog.”

Of course, 48 Hours has since been left in the dust by film after film that used profanity as a substitute for imagination. Now, it seems almost quaint. Although it is even more comical to see a channel that edits for language trying to run the thing; there are so many bleeps it sounds like a car alarm going off in the parking lot. It reminds me of ABC’s infamous airing of its fifty-seven minute version of Midnight Cowboy. I never even got the fact that Jon Voight was a male prostitute.

And though we’ve both noticed a fresh new trend in a lot of American films, this being a bit of talent in the screenplay, the fact remains that, all in all, American movies that aren’t period pieces are just drowning in profanity, until you tune it out, you just don’t hear it anymore. Well, I still hear it, but I’m from out of the Stone Age.

And yet, I repeat, I’m not especially anti-profanity. When I’m tutoring a kid, I tell him he can use any profanity he wants. So long as he is able to give me the complete derivation of the word, including its original tongue and its complete conjugation, as well as noting the Latin or Greek derivatives. It seems to be a worse punishment than the paddle.

In Monty Python's The Life of Brian, I am reminded of one scene in particular. All the Jewish freedom fighters are saying "What have the Romans ever done for us?" Unfortunately, they slowly start raising their hands and mentioning things. By the end, an exasperated John Cleese shouts, "All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? "

I always think of that scene whenever someone accuses America of being “imperialist.” We’ve given the world all of the above and more, collecting no tax from them as the Romans did, and by the way not crucifying them. The fact that people from Kiev to Marseilles love Levis jeans and Coca Cola does NOT make us an imperialist nation, except, perhaps, a passive one. We’ve given people all over the world clean water, food in famines, new methods of agriculture, AIDS-fighting programs that have saved untold millions of lives, troops to drive out the Hun, and just plain handouts and goodies galore.

Yet, it seems that, in the historical sense, the most universal thing we’ve given the world as a whole is the word “fuck.”

As with the remains of the Roman empire to be found in the ruins of Epheasus or Bath, when archeologists dig up what’s left of our American empire, they will doubtless note the well-worn path of this single epithet. In moments of rage or frustration, I have heard it issuing forth, virtually free of an accent, from the lips of Egyptian hack drivers, Greek waiters, Turkish policemen, Provencal waiters, Venetian gondoliers, Chinese bureaucrats, British mystery writers, Arab souk proprietors, Mexican pilots and Italian grand prix drivers. (Or cab drivers; in Italy, it’s hard to tell the difference.) They use it in all of its variants and tenses, as noun, verb and adjective, in both the active and the passive voice, as well as the imperative “fuck off.” You hear it a lot in Paris; the French version, foutre, just doesn’t seem to carry the same weight. You still hear it, but they seem to be pretty much abandoning it, as we’ve abandoned “Gee, whiz.”

What is it about the sound of the word, what is it about the look of it scrawled across a bathroom wall, what is it about the mystical, emphatic one-note impact of it, that has made it so cherished the world over, deathless even in an age of incessant and constantly shifting vulgarity?

My mother used to say that swearing is a sign of ignorance of a broader vocabulary. Though she was, of course, always right, in this one little thing I’m not certain I completely agree. No matter how eloquent the speaker, there are some check-bouncing, meat loaf-burning, finger-caught-in-the-car-door moments in life for which the eruption of “Fuck!” is the only word in the English language that can truly express the furious knot of rage in the stomach. And I use the word “express” as a verb here in both its meanings, for it almost seems to help rid your body of the tension of your fury, like a miniature exorcism, as if some of the frustration within is expelled in a “whoof” of sharply-consonanted air.

But be they physical or emotional, whatever its charms to those of every class, race and level of IQ, the word isn’t going anywhere. In a recent column by one of my favorite brainiacs, John Derbyshire, he told of the corps of Russian sleeper agents in America finally caught by authorities, and of the various Americanized monikers they were hiding behind. He then mentions the fact that the only bizarre name in the whole bunch belonged to a finance professor at the University of Washington commenting on the story who had taught many of them in his class, this being one Ufuk Ince.

The word simply will not lose its ability to entertain. Thank God I was home in my comfy chair, where I could laugh all I wanted, as I was inevitably reminded of a party I attended a few years ago, when an affable gentleman stuck out his hand to me with a beaming smile and chirped, “Hi! I’m Dick Bender!” I finally had to slink off to the Ladies Loo in order to get it out of my system before I could face him again. It was still tough. Wouldn’t you just call yourself Richard?

BTW, if you want to see a film that expresses the incessant ebb and flow of ever-changing slang, over 48 Hours I'd recommend Ball of Fire, from 1942. Despite the millions of women who swooned at the mere mention of Gary Cooper’s name, he’s never been a favorite of mine. People don’t realize how popular a sex symbol he was; they say that part of the reason the HUAC committee finally got shot down in flames with the public was when they questioned the patriotism of the United States Army and Gary Cooper. The great costume designer Irene, a friend of Coop’s, jumped out of a hotel window after slashing her wrists when he died; she’d secretly loved him for years. Still, whether he turns you on or not, he’s not everyone’s idea of a mousy professor. And my very favorite actress of all time, Barbara Stanwyck, isn’t everyone’s idea of a femme fatale. But together, in this riotous Howard Hawks classic, they’re dynamite. Look for Elisha Cook, Jr. in a bit part as a hep-cat waiter - “She’s root, zoot and cute, and solid to boot.” At least he doesn’t get shot, again. The script, by the best of the best, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, is a masterpiece, a Valentine to American slang, which had reached its absolute apex during and after World War II. Sample dialog: When Stanwyck describes her supposed sore throat, she says “Are you kidding? It’s redder than the Daily Worker and twice as sore.” It’s all so rapid-fire, you may have to screen it more than once to catch them all. Don’t miss this one, even if you haven’t got a romance with the English language. Pass the popcorn.

And for a perfectly scholarly explanation of the work fuck, have a look at this animation (possibly with the volume turned down), which sounds astionishingly like the Oxford English Dictionary (PBIN) entry.

Rude Britannia

London's Tate Museum is featuring a wonderful exhibition of historical cartoon art called Rude Britannia through September 5th. Cartoonist Gerald Scarfe describes the English as favoring a "Carry On" style of comedy, "all bums and boobs." Anyone who's ever seen one of the classic "Carry On" movies knows just what he's talking about. (*sigh* To tell a family secret, I'm a softie for Syd Fields.)



From the website:

Gasp, cringe, or have a sly chuckle: Rude Britannia will certainly cause a reaction. See politicians brought down to size and the great and the good exposed; blush at the saucy postcards and laugh out loud at the slapstick fun - but watch out for that banana skin!

Put together with some the country's best-known cartoonists and comedy writers, this exhibition explores British comic art from the 1600s to the present day. Bringing together a wide array of paintings, sculptures, film and photography, as well as graphic art and comic books, the exhibition celebrates a rich history of cartooning and visual jokes.

He’ll be comin’ round the mountain when he comes!

This tale is out of the November 7, 1874 issue of American Medical Weekly, the 19th century version of the Journal of the AMA. According to Dr. LeGrand G. Capers of Vicksburg, a patient and friend of his was a soldier who was shot in the family jewels. This happened a lot in duels, because some nimrod decided that the best place to shoot a man to prove your honor without killing him was in the hip, which often led to wounds in the groin and bad romance novel dialog like in the abysmal Louisiana - “What? Shot off?” Dr. Caper’s unfortunate patient had a ball of shot carry off his left testicle in the Battle of Raymond, a minor but fairly bloody skirmish in the Vicksburg Campaign.

Bullets in those days were called “balls of shot” because they were more like little cannon balls, with a similar range and potential for collateral damage. This particular bullet passed through the wall of a nearby house and into the side of the abdomen of a 17-year-old girl within. Nine months later the startled young lady gave birth to a bouncing eight-pound baby boy, leaving her parents in something of a pickle. But in truth the baby wasn’t perfectly healthy; three weeks after he was born, Dr. Capers had to operate on the child to remove part of a smashed miniball. Astonished, he concluded that the young lady had been a virgin, and that the ball of shot had passed through his other patient wounded in the battle nearby, then passed into the poor girl’s ovary, carrying hitchhiking spermatozoa on it and impregnating her. It was literally a virgin birth, with no dove required.

And here’s where the story gets really spiffing. Actually, it’s a lot like the story of Joseph and Mary. For when Dr. Capers reported to his friend on what had happened to the girl, and on the fact that none of the neighbors believed her, the young man paid a call on her, even though he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. But he liked her, and soon after, he asked her to marry him, which she promptly did.

The surprisingly happy couple had three more children, but none of them looked as much like their father as the first one. C’est la guerre!

---

The truth, after additional research, is that Dr. Capers made the "Tale of the Miraculous Bullet" up. It was submitted to the American Medical Weekly as a joke, parodying the rash of wildly exaggerated tall tales being circulated about incidents during the Civil War being circulated at the time. Capers submitted the article anonymously as a gag, but the journal's editor recognized the well-known doctor's distinctive handwriting, and stuck his name on it. As a result, the story eventually appeared in England's The Lancet and other medical journals, and was passed off as authentic as late as the 1950s.

The Perils of Pasta

“Let’s talk about Me!”
—An actor. Any actor.

It will be a rare thing on this blog for me to talk about myself, history being so endlessly fascinating, and my own life being a crashing bore. With the occasional oddball twist. This twist was irresistible to add.

When checking my sources for the Civil War saga above, I grabbed the nearest one, this being the original of The Book of Lists by Irving Wallace, a huge hit two and three decades ago. Everyone had one by the loo. But by the time he got to volume three, you’d have had to keep them in the bog for five years to get through all the material. Consequently, I haven’t read them all.

As I was flipping through it, my eye fell on a list of the Ten Weirdest Reasons People went to the Emergency Room. I got a bit huffy over it. That’s because my trip was Number One.

Okay, they didn’t use my name. As with the story above, they had that much discretion. But it’s no fun sharing a chapter with Ten Eminent Constipation Sufferers.

After all, maybe it was a little weird, but not that weird. Kind of like that great episode of the immortal Dick Van Dyke show, when his wife Laura gets her toe stuck in the faucet, and he asks how in hell she did it, and she replies with exasperation, “I was playing with a drip.”

Well, I was cleaning the stove. Twenty-five years ago, when I hadn’t been married that long, we’d had a party the night before, and I served spaghetti. I was too tired to clean up afterwards. So, by the next morning, the spaghetti had, of course, dried out. And a big piece of it was adhered to the stove top. The stubborn little widget just would not come loose. So, logically, I used my thumbnail to try to lift it.

Unfortunately, I hit it too hard and at just the wrong angle, and the entire strand rammed itself in between my nail and my oh-so-naked flesh, nearly to that mysterious little half-moon at the base. I started screaming like a banshee. It being a Sunday, my Christopher took me to the nearest Medcheck. Bad idea. The “doctor” there, definitely the class anchor from a Philippino barber college, sprayed my thumb with this useless stuff that supposedly freezes your wound to numb it, then began digging for the pasta. I was not frozen. This went on for fifteen agonizing, scream-filled minutes. Even the “doctor” was sweating. Now I know why Americans always talked when the Japs used this method of bamboo torture in the war. You’d talk, too. Unfortunately, I had nothing pertinent to tell the little bastard apart from some colorful suppositions about his family tree.

Finally my Christopher could bear no more, and he yanked me off the table and to the nearest real hospital. For you see, what the barber at the Medcheck failed to realize was that, as the strand of hard spaghetti was imbedded in my warm skin, it was literally cooking, expanding, getting bigger and bigger. And, of course, it was now soft, as well. So, nitwit, it’s not a toothpick. You can’t get hold of the edge with a pair of tweezers and just yank.

The real physicians at the hospital numbed my hand and removed the nail completely. But what struck me most forcefully was the level of interest. In a place that gets everything from gunshot wounds to sickos who masturbated with Comet, they seemed fascinated by my small faux pas. One other doctor, two interns and no less than three nurses stuck their head into my little curtained cubicle to ask, “Are you the spaghetti lady? Can I look?”

Come on, guys, it wasn’t that weird. But that’s what you get for playing with a drip.

Bundling

A bundling board in place at the Benchmark Inn in Provincetown, Massachusetts,

in case you are looking for a proper New England way to spoil a fun weekend.

In my post on Pauline Bonaparte, I mentioned the fact that, from about 1780 to about 1820, an Enlightenment window opened on the world, and people were far freer in both language and sexuality, until Victorianism arrived on the heels of Romanticism in the late 1820's and slammed that window shut again.

In 1859, an historian named Henry Reed Stiles, mired in Victorianism, wrote a book on the history of Connecticut, in which he spoke scathingly of “the camp vices and recklessness” that descended on New England after the Revolutionary War, which “flooded the land with immorality and infidelity,” and caused both church and temperance to be ignored.

And then he said,

“Bundling, that ridiculous and pernicious custom which prevailed among the young to a degree which we can scarcely credit, sapped the fountain of morality and tarnished the escutcheons of thousands of families.”

Wrong move, Hank. They didn’t mind being called drunken and licentious pagans, but when he slammed bundling, they came out of the woodwork, according to Stiles, “buzzing around my ears.” How dare you label such a fine old New England custom as immoral? Stiles attempted apologies all around, but got a very cold shoulder. And so, as a mea culpa, he wrote a little book on the subject, taking a far warmer and less judgmental attitude. Apology accepted.

You may have heard the term before, and been confused about its meaning. Here’s the skinny. In the first century of its history, America suffered from a chronic shortage of beds. Inns were few and far between, and usually grotty. And so, “bundling,” in its essential form, was simply two people, often not of the same sex, sleeping in the same bed, either fully clothed or one above the covers and the other below.

But fairly soon, bundling came to mean something quite different. It became a custom of colonial America in which young men and women who were courting or engaged were allowed to sleep with one another in the same bed, usually in the fashion stated above. Astonishingly, it was most prevalent in Puritan New England and Quaker Pennsylvania, both areas notorious for their sexual prudery. There was even a thing called a “bundling board” that could be laid between them to help to insure there was no hanky-panky.

Stuffy British historians loved to imply that bundling was a strictly American phenomenon, but this is not the case. It was practiced in the same period and under the same name in Wales, and the old custom of “hand-fasting,” a period of trial marriage in Olde Scotland, was related to it. In Holland, (where of course, they were to stick strictly to conversing with one another) it was called “queesting.” In Switzerland, it was the “kiltgang.” And so it goes.

It wasn’t always easy to court in those days. Finding privacy and personal space was often a problem (the drive-in hadn’t been invented yet) and everyone knew what it meant when a couple took a walk or went off to see if Mom’s roses were in bloom. Also, in the countryside, young men sometimes had to travel quite a distance to come a’courting and spend a little time with their lady love, and so they often spent the night with the family. Houses were much smaller then, and on the surface, anyway, it seemed as if it would be difficult to indulge in much more than some whispered conversations, with Mom and Pop sleeping just across the short hallway in the tiny shotgun house. But what’s really bizarre about the custom is the way that parents tended to wink and turn a blind eye to the inevitable kissing, groping, and just plain shoving the damn board under the bed.

So, of course, it was inevitable that lots of couples jumped the gun. In fact, the figures differing from time and place and from scholar to scholar, it’s still a fair guestimate to state that about one-quarter of colonial brides going down the aisle were pregnant already. In early Puritan days, a seven-months baby could get both the husband and wife a literal public thrashing, but thinking softened a great deal by the late 17th and the 18th century, and seven or eight-months babies happened in the best of families. A lot.

And what’s even more interesting is that, typically, the parents on both sides were perfectly serene and content with the situation. There are several reasons for what seems such a reversal of expected attitudes. First, most parents in those days wanted their children happily married and producing grandkids as quickly as possible. Keep ‘em out of trouble. Elements of this attitude remain for many married thirtysomethings whose mothers are always carping about “When are you going to start your family?”

But there’s another explanation that sprang from attitudes of this period, one being that a state of betrothal between a couple was looked on quite seriously. In fact, by the early Victorian period, a man who walked out on an engagement could find himself smacked with a “breech of promise” suit, ordered to fork over major sums for the emotional damage he’d caused, nearly as if it were a divorce. Other, less well-known customs sprang from the same source.

For example, mostly in Germany, there was a tradition of paying what was called “wreath money” in a similar situation, the payoff termed Kranzgeld in German. (Wasn’t it Kipling who warned us that once you have paid the Danegeld, you’ll never be rid of the Dane?) This was money paid to a woman whose fiancé walked out on her after having taken her virginity, thereby lowering her chances of marrying well considerably. The money was compensation for this loss. Virginity had enormous value in these cultures; symbolically, in the same part of the world, a woman was entitled to wear a wreath of myrtle when she was a virgin being married, but if she’d lost her virginity, it was a wreath of straw.

It’s a little like that great commercial from a few years ago, when the smiling bride leans down to the little boy at the reception, and he says sweetly, “My mommy says you’ve got a lot of nerve wearing white.”

Can you really get thrown out of the club for saying “putz"?

In the truly bizarre Cartoon Network show Sealab 2021, there’s a notorious episode where the crew joins the underwater secret society of the Neptunati, locked in an eternal struggle with their sworn enemies, the notorious “Five Jew Bankers.” They blather on about these men who rule the universe, until finally a character in full Hasidic regalia arrives with a cafeteria tray and shouts,

“Hey! Enough with the tchotchke kosher mohel meshuggah! Dreidl!"

For the uninitiated, I shall translate: There is no translation.

It makes no sense at all, just a bunch of funny Yiddish words strung together. Tchotchke has many spellings and about a dozen meanings, including a plaything, a little bit of nothing, a prank, or a sexy broad who’s brainless; kosher means food that’s pure or something done the right way; a mohel is the guy who performs the circumcision at a bris, which is a Jewish baptism ceremony; meshuggah means crazy; and a dreidl is a toy, a spinning top that was a popular Hanukkah gift for children. String it together for yourself; it doesn’t mean bubkes.

But it’s still funny, isn’t it? Yiddish just plain sounds funny.

Despite the fact that languages are something of a hobby with me, I never could bear the sound of German. A Korean friend of mine said he loved English and hated his own language; he claimed that when Koreans name their baby, they overturn the silverware drawer, “K-chang, T-ching, G-chong,” and that’s what the poor kid’s stuck with. But me, I hate the cacophony of the Hun. Even Alan Rickman doing his Colonel Brandon voice couldn’t make it sound like they’re not spitting out “Juden raus!” That’s why it’s so strange that one of my most beloved languages, Yiddish, is a bastard child of German. And I’m not even Jewish, more’s the pity.

Yiddish was brought to America by Jewish immigrants from Western and Eastern Europe in the 19th century. There have always been several dialects of it, most notably the Western, Ashkenazi Yiddish, mostly annihilated in the Holocaust, and the Eastern, Slavic-influenced Yiddish, which of course took quite a hit of its own. The language is a patois, a mix of elements of German, Hebrew, Aramaic and various Slavic languages, and even a little French and English, written with Hebrew letters. For Jews shut out of the cultures of these various nations, it was their language with one another. Millions spoke it then; about a million and a half do now. Hebrew is the official language of Israel, and many Yiddish speakers, especially in America, lost it by cultural absorption. But in Yiddish’s glory days, from out the slums of Five Points and the Lower East Side, numberless words have worked their way into the American idiom; many people don’t even know the original meaning, or the fact that it was, or is, off-color. Yiddish made its way into the language, especially into some of the tough street slang.

That’s because, on the lower East Side of Manhattan, growing up side by side during the depression with the Italian mafia was the “Kosher mob,” its most ruthless commanders being Bugsy Siegel and the far saner but equally ruthless Meyer Lansky, the closest friend of Lucky Luciano, head of the Five Families. A Jewish mob? This was a shock in those days. Nice Jewish boys just didn’t do this sort of thing. Their parents tried to keep them away from those awful Italian boys, without much success. How you gonna keep’em down on Delancy, now that they’ve seen 42nd Street? Consequently, a colorful percentage of mob slang came straight out of the Russian Pale.

In the great American noir films of the 1940's, epitomized by The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon, Yiddish pops up all the time. My favorite, for being so obscure to the uninitiated, is in The Maltese Falcon. The three men who are after the “Black Bird,” these being played by Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook, Jr., have a definite preening air about them that, in those days, was a way of suggesting homosexuality somewhere in the brew. Poor Elisha Cook, who always seemed to end up dead by the middle of any film he was in, plays the piss-boy for Gutman, the Greenstreet character. At any rate, the Bogart character, the immortal Sam Spade, refers to Cook contemptuously as Gutman’s “gunsel.” Most people just scratch their heads and go on watching a great flick. After all, it was the forties, the glory days of American slang.

Of course, it’s Yiddish. The word gunsel was born out of German for goose (gendzel) or gosling, as in an annoying little bird who followed the mother around. In Yiddish it became genzel, with early use as a slang word for a boy who helped the rabbi at Temple, and moved from there to be a pejorative for a young kid who followed along after one of the Kosher mob, usually with a gun to protect his hero, becoming eventually, of course, a word for his personal hoods, with the convenient “gun” prefix telling it all. From there, it sort of fell, as these things do, into implying that the gunsel was the boss’ piss boy, if not his butt boy, thereby attaining, by the 1940's, a whiff of homosexuality to go with the violence.

It wasn’t a very nice thing to say.

What’s even more important and far less understood is how much of the rhythm of so much American slang comes from Yiddish, filtered mostly through the “Borscht Belt” New York comics who played the predominantly-Jewish retreats in the Catskills of upstate New York every summer, and slipping from there into books, movies and common usage. An incredible roster of America’s comedic giants got their start there, many continuing to work these beloved venues all their lives: Henny Youngman, Don Rickles, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, Jack Benny, Rodney Dangerfield, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen - the total list would need a web site of its own.

But the influence doesn’t stop with the classic Jewish jokes: “Take my wife - please,” or “Did you hear the one about the rabbi knocked down by a streetcar? They asked him if he was comfortable, and he said, ‘I make a nice living.’” There are so many ways in which we express comical ideas, particularly sarcastic ones, that invoke a Yiddish tone that wouldn’t have been understood by an American two centuries ago. The simplest example would be the classic “affirmation/disbelief” syntax used on your 32-year-old son living in your basement: “Suuuure you’re gonna get a job.” More apt to the overall rhythm, however, would be an exchange from the hysterically funny and grossly underrated TV show F-Troop. All the Indians, the entire Hekawi tribe (a clean play on the old gag about the “where the Fuckarwe” tribe) are all Jewish. So the Native-American Yiddish flows like Mogan David over maze. The medicine man says, “It happened many moons ago. Many moons. Many, many, moons. So many moons you wouldn’t believe it.” At which point Chief Wild Eagle snaps, “Enough with the moons already!” Classic Yiddish timing. Absolutely musical.

And so, in this spirit of gratitude to the glorious Yiddish tongue, I’ll give off now and again with a great term from this language that’s slowly dying, but has left on us such an indelible mark. Starting with my personal favorite, because it’s my blog, and I can do as I damn well please.

Pisher - My absolute favorite, particularly in our Age of the Almighty Bureaucrat. There’s even a diminutive, pisherkeh, a little pisher. It comes from the German word “pissen,” which is the verb for taking a piss. Same in French, actually; the word for dandelion in French is pissenlit, “lit” being a bed, because dandelions were a natural diuretic.

A pisher, pronounced pretty much like it looks, is what an American might call a “little shit,” but it’s really so much more. It implies a young man, wet behind the ears, a nobody, often a nobody with a job that makes him think he’s a somebody. So, next time you want to cuss out some IRS weasel and you don’t dare swear, hope he’s not Jewish and call him a little pisher. Remember to put that emphatic Yiddish “p” sound at the opener; if you spit on the guy, you’ve probably got it right.

Shooting Your Mouth Off

Death really shouldn’t be funny. After all, never ask for whom the bell tolls; it’s tolling for thee, schmuck, which means we all should feel that little shiver of empathy that affirms our humanity when hearing of anyone’s death.

Nevertheless, sometimes, you just can’t help but laugh.

And so it was with the death of General John Sedgwick, the highest ranking officer killed in battle during the American Civil War. He died at the battle of Spotsylvania, in Virginia, and his last words have gained a rightful place of honor in American folklore.

The general was in command of the VI Corps of the Army of the Potomac. Like many great generals from Washington to Napoleon to Patton, he had a reputation for not batting an eyelash under fire. But on May 9, 1864, he should have batted one, for a group of Confederate snipers had already begun sporadic firing before the battle, and the men along the Union lines were getting a little spooked. The sharpshooters were about a thousand yards away.

But snipers were getting better in this period, and so were their rifles. It’s often been noted by historians that, in many respects, the absolute bloodbath of the Civil War was a tryout for the equally pointless carnage of World War I; many of the tactics of that conflict, including trench fighting, were first tried out on the bloody battlefields of Virginia and Pennsylvania. And the use of snipers, which had been done at least since the Battle of Trafalgar in 1804, when sharpshooters went up the shrouds and picked off officers from above, was really coming into its own during the Civil War, a tactic that would remain fixed in all armies ever afterward.

And so, as men were ducking for cover, General Sedgwick had the bad taste and the worse sense to walk up and down the line, chiding them for their supposed cowardice.

“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance!” he finally shouted.

And then promptly dropped dead, from a bullet right between the eyes. You know, some people are just asking for it.

The Lady Freemason

The Pearl was a collection of erotic tales, rhymes, songs and parodies published in London between 1879 to 1880. The magazine was shut down by the authorities after just 18 issues for publishing rude and obscene literature.

For all my Masonic friends, and being married to the Dark Overlord of the World Freemasonic Plot, I’ve quite a few - here’s a little ditty from The Pearl.

Strictly Private, except to Brothers, BY ORDER, THE LADY FREEMASON.

As a brother of old, from his lodge was returning,
He called on his sweetheart, with love he was burning,
He wanted some favours, says she,
"Not so free," Unless you reveal your famed secrets to me."

"Agreed - 'tis a bargain - you must be prepared,
Your legs well exposed, your bosom all bared."
Then hoodwinked and silent, says she, "I'll be mum,
In despite of the poker you'll clap on my bum."

To a chamber convenient his fair charge he bore,
Placed her in due form, having closed tight the door,
Then presented the point of his sharp Instrumentis,
And the Lady was soon made an "entered apprentice."

His working tools next to her gaze he presented,
To improve by them seriously she then consented,
And handled his jewels his gavel and shaft,
That she in a jiffey was passed "fellow craft."

She next wanted raising, says he, "There's no urgency,"
She pleaded that this was a case of emergency,
His column looked to her in no way particular,
But she very soon made it assume perpendicular.

He used all his efforts to raise the young elf,
But found he required much raising himself;
The task was beyond him. Oh! shame and disaster,
He broke down in his charge, and she became master.

Exhausted and faint, still no rest could betide him,
For she like a glutton soon mounted astride him,
"From refreshment to labour," says she, "let us march.
Says he, "You're exalted - you are now royal arch."

In her zeal for true knowledge, no labour, no shirking,
His jewels and furniture constantly working,
By night and by day, in the light or the dark,
With pleasure her lover she guides to the mark.

"The Beast with Two Backs"

This charming phrase for two bodies writhing in passion's wrestling ring was first used in English in 1604 by Shakespeare in Othello. Iago says, "I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs."

It appears in French in Rabelais' 1532 work, Gargantua and Pantagruel, in this delightful line: "In the vigour of his age he married Gargamelle, daughter to the King of the Parpaillons, a jolly pug, and well-mouthed wench. These two did oftentimes do the two-backed beast together, joyfully rubbing and frotting their bacon 'gainst one another."

Perhaps the origin of the term makin' bacon...

Letter from Molly

Unfortunately, lots of victims of a public education think that sex was missionary position and just plain lousy until 1968, despite ample evidence to the contrary, much of which will be presented on this blog. In the first edition of the terrific book The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People, a research task so daunting it was put together by the entire Irving Wallace family, the book closes with a letter of unknown origin, written around 1882, from a young newlywed named Mollie. Having promised to let her cousin Julia back east know what to expect on her wedding night, she mailed a graphic and delightful description of the joys of being deflowered.

It really ticks me off that, in the long-awaited new edition of the book that came out in 2008, the letter below has been removed, as has a charming chapter in the end on several famously happy marriages, to serve as counterpoint to the general warped but entertaining misery haunting the volume as a whole. It’s got to say something about our culture and its attitude, that marital sex is boring, period, that this letter was excised. Look at some of the accouterments under my own marital bed of thirty years before making that call. But young editors will have their way, and the addition of a few new subjects tossed in here and there, like Kurt Cobain, do not serve to take the place of what follows. Incidentally, it is reproduced here with its punctuation, or lack of it, in place. Spelling, too, was more a matter of opinion than hard fact in those days. But, for me, it's not a spoiler. To the real historian, it only adds to the charm.

My dear cousin Julia
I am now with much pleasure about to fulfill my promise of writeing to you after the consumation of my marriage with Albert so you may have some Idea of the thing when you and Harry are united which I hope will be soon You will please remember this is strictly confidential if we were not so intimate I would not write so plain but you know when we were together what one did the other knew so I will keep nothing back from you Albert and I where married day before yesterday our minister E. Hodge performed the ceremony all of our folks were present and nothing occured to mar the pleasures of the day all went off as weddings generaly do with fun frolicking cackes & wine &c But oh dear Julia you can but faintly comprehend the felicity I have experienced since that ever to be remembered night I thought I had some Idea of the enjoyment of married life but I was a novice in the mystries I will now endevor to give you a faint description of our married life The first night I lay with my dear Albert a thrilling sensation shot with the rapidity of lightning through my entire system Oh-the bliss of that moment So sensitively alive it excelled any thing I had ever experienced it was superlatively nice We lay a few moments enfolded in each others embrace our naked bodies in close contact for by some unaccountiable means my night clothes had all slipped above my waist my blood boiled and rushed through my frame like molten lava my prespiration ceased entirely at entervals and my head throbed almost to bursting a dizziness amounting almost to stupeifeication over came me a felcitiy not to be expressed in words my breath seemed to leave my body I felt paralysed and lay motionless and calm as some southern sea on a still summer morn When as to test the utmost tension of my nerves Albert took my hand and by degrees (I did not resist I suspected his intentions) in tremulous excitement conveyed it down his body until it came in contact with his-0! Heavens the thrilling sensation of that moment you know what I mean It was swollen to an enormous size my hand immediatley and tenaciously grasped it though I declare it was as much as I could do to fairly span it The soft velvet like feeling of its head gave additional impulse to my already excited feelings When to cap the climax of my felicity he gently raised himself on one knee and with the other between my thighs he separated my legs so as to admit his body between them and then in a moment he "was gently heaving up and down with an undulating motion when I felt it enter my person When the head entered it appeared to me that I was attacked with a spasm for I raised with sudden emotion as he bore down on me and this mutualy kept up had the effect of driving it quite into my person and then a shock suddenly passed through me as if from a galvanic battery a dizziness overcame me my eyes closed my bosom heaved my arms relaxed my perspiration ceased I was actually gone for I fainted When conciousness returned Albert was hugging & kissing me clasping me in his arms in the estacy of the moment I forgot all the world except my dear Albert we lay quite exhausted for about twenty minutes when he again conveyed my hand to that Dear member that had given me so much pleasure it was some what less in size but as soon as it felt the pressure of my hand it resumed its original proportion Albert made another attempt to raise himself upon me but I begged him more from delicacy than disinclination to desist wich kind soul as he is he did but I could not long resist for he thrust in between my thighs and kissed me so that longer resistance was impossible and I once more yeilded to his solicitation I did not faint this time though the pleasurable sensations were more acute than the first I would sooner have risked my soul's salvation than to have had Albert withdraw from his embrace I was some what sore and stiff in my parts next day but at present I feel as chirp as a squirrel I think he has done the work for me I think I am pregnant Now dear Julia the day is coming to a close and I must conclude this letter for I expect Albert at any moment and I would not for the world have him know what I have been writing to you so good bye for the present and in my next I will tell you more of the pleasures of married life. Give my love to Anna T Uncle and inquiring friends.
I remain your affectionate cousin Mollie

Twisted Sister

Some people have heard the title ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, perhaps from one of the two films made of the story. Most don’t know just how old the title is, nor how freighted with infamy. In the scandalous 1633 play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, playwright John Ford wrote an unbelievably twisted story that would draw fire if it were performed next week in über-liberal Manhattan, this being the tale of a passionate affair between a brother and sister, Giovanni and Annabella. No, Ford didn’t cop out and do it in the Greek fashion, in which the two don’t find out they’re siblings until the tragic end when they pay for a crime they didn’t commit in their hearts. (But as Woody Allen said from prison in the hysterical Love and Death, “Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed? The difference is that all men go eventually, but I go six o'clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at five o'clock, but I have a smart lawyer.”)

Shockingly, the mutual passion of brother and sister is openly discussed from the first lines of the play, and is consummated soon after. As Shakespeare did so often, Ford set his play in Italy, as if to imply that this sort of debauchery might occur in hot-blooded Napoli, but never in the cool and clean-living pastoral countryside of England. And of course, just about everybody but the cat ends up dead in the end, in a horrifically graphic and grisly bloodbath of heavenly retribution. None of it helped. Though the play was performed, appropriately enough in the Cockpit Theatre near Drury Lane, most considered the material unpalatable, and it was in later years often removed from collections of Ford’s plays.

It didn’t grow more tasteful with the passage of three and a half centuries. Luchino Visconti directed a version of it with the luscious Romy Schneider at the Théâtre de Paris in 1961, while Roland Joffé directed a version for the BBC in 1980. Charlotte “I’ll peel for anyone” Rampling starred in a lousy Italian film version in ‘71, though in all fairness, the film is only available in America in a gutted version. Other than that, both the play, and the subject of incest as entertainment, has pretty much remained the province of porn, hard or soft at the core.

Actually, incest is, like child pornography, one of the only remaining taboos in our anchorless society that takes all the fun out of things being dirty because not much is dirty anymore. Not many “respectable” works have dealt with the subject; it does pop up a lot in the fiction of John Irving, most notably in The Hotel New Hampshire, which makes one wonder about his home life. In the few other serious works on the subject, punishment is swift and sure; in England, Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure features a stunningly grim ending with suicidal children as the moral payback when two cousins run off together. Kind of hypocritical, when you think about it.

Few societies have tolerated incest, and it was looked on with particular horror in England, probably because it struck a nerve; the blooded class was always running around marrying their first cousins, a relationship considered too close in other cultures for making the beast with two backs. And all in all they were probably right, when you take a look at what consanguinity in the Windsors wrought, in the bat-boy ears and low criminal forehead of Prince Charles.

They say that one of Britain’s most notorious seducers, the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, was done in by the temptation of fishing in home waters. As a young man he fell hopelessly in love with his half-sister, one Augusta Leigh; they shared a father in John “Mad Jack” Byron, who was married three times and dropped, probably of exhaustion, at thirty-five. Eventually Byron fled England in 1809, returning long enough to cause a scandal with Lady Caroline Lamb before leaving for good in 1816. The first time, it was probably because he was afraid of prosecution for incest. He would have done time for it.

Of course, we’ll never know for certain whether or not Byron slept with his sister, because his family burned his letters to Augusta after his death. This happened a lot in Victorian times, which really pisses historians off. From about 1750 to 1820, an Enlightenment window opened in both Europe and America, for good and ill as these things go, but a fresh breeze nonetheless. Sex was freer, adultery more common, belief in a personal God of fire and brimstone way down in the polls, and swearing was very, very popular. The educated classes in those days were fanatical letter-writers and journal-keepers, which would normally be a gold mine for historians. But from Aaron Burr to the explorer and anthropologist Sir Richard Burton, family members often burned their “lewd” journals and letters after their deaths, depriving posterity of the juiciest bits they left behind. Some, like George Washington, even purged their journals of coarse language while they were still alive, many having been born into the Enlightenment world and survived to the Victorian one, in which even the bare legs of pianos were covered for modesty’s sake.

About Alice Hodapp

Alice was born in Greenfield, Indiana, at a July picnic her mother probably should have given a miss. Alice discovered after a bit of family research that her mother, Vera Vonkannon, and father, Robert Funcannon, were distant cousins, which explains a great deal. And the two of them went to Concannon High School, which actually made Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Hoosiers, however, are at least not as consanguineous as the Windsors, a comforting thought whenever Prince Charles’ ears heave into view.

Alice had a colorful education at a series of colleges, starting at Indiana University before following her husband on his five-colleges-in-seven-years plan. She has a degree in film production from L.A. Valley College, and in history from Cal State Northridge. She is fluent in French so long as they don’t talk at the speed of light, and is presently studying Latin, languages being something of a hobby. After Latin comes re-learning Hebrew, which got lost somewhere after college. She is a fanatic on both ancient history and the age of sail. Her other hobbies include perennial gardening and making jewelry—growing restless, like many who share this passion, she’s looking forward to the purchase of her first anvil and blow torch, which will undoubtedly reqiuire a great deal of marital wrangling.

On the subject of wrangling, she has been married to writer/lecturer/TV producer and all around great guy Christopher Hodapp since they graduated high school three decades ago. And they said it wouldn’t last. Alice and Chris have traveled a great deal, in Europe, the Middle East, Turkey, Greece and China, and while Chris is very much at home in London with his fellow Freemasons, Alice prefers Paris with her fellow neurotics. In a spirit of compromise, they Chunnel a lot. Together in life on a continuous voyage of discovery, learning patience, humility, and the incredible expense of divorce, they have evolved the theory that any marriage that hasn’t reached year seventeen simply doesn’t count. There is no license to gripe until you’ve endured at least four presidential administrations together.

Alice and Chris live in Indianapolis, where they attempting a training program with their entirely too French poodle, Wiley. He has them responding to basic commands.