In a column on Shakespearean insults, Angela Tung says this use of catastrophe refers to the butt, but Falstaff is actually threatening to kick the addressee’s bottom, not tickle his anus. Just FYI.
Original llama image via.
Showing posts with label shakespeare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shakespeare. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
I’ll Tickle Your Catastrophe
You may be asking why I used valuable time to do this. The answer, as it frequently happens to be, is “procrastination!!!” Well, that and the strange feeling that the end of this one line of Falstaff’s from Henry IV — “Away, you scullion! you rampallian! you fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe” — sounds remarkably more like a Belle & Sebastian lyric than an actual threat. Hence…
In a column on Shakespearean insults, Angela Tung says this use of catastrophe refers to the butt, but Falstaff is actually threatening to kick the addressee’s bottom, not tickle his anus. Just FYI.
Original llama image via.
In a column on Shakespearean insults, Angela Tung says this use of catastrophe refers to the butt, but Falstaff is actually threatening to kick the addressee’s bottom, not tickle his anus. Just FYI.
Original llama image via.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Flies That Blow
A book I’m reading mentioned bluebottles and greenbottles in the same sentence, in a way that presumed that I would know the difference between these types of insects, and I realized I hadn’t a clue about bottles of any color. “Daggurnit, he doesn’t know his bluebottles from his greenbottles!” is what some hay-chewing old man might say about me in mockery of my citified, bug- and bottle-ignorant ways. Personally, I’d rather not be mocked, so I looked it up. It turns out both colors of bottles are the same bug, which is neither bottle-like in any observable way nor is it generally all blue or all green. It looks like this:
(Apparently opalescentbottle was a mouthful.)
The same bug is also known by the name blowfly, which I’d heard without ever understanding. But in the same way that bluebottle seems like an arbitrary name for this creature, blowflies don’t actually blow on anything. They got that name, apparently, from an Early Modern English term flyblown, which describes meat — animal and otherwise, butchered and living — that has been contaminated with fly eggs. In fact, there’s even a word flyblow that describes the eggs themselves. Citing a Texas A&M textbook, Wikipedia notes that the first recorded instances of the word blow being used with flies themselves — as opposed to the eggs, I guess? — are Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra. So, you see, even the lowly fly can benefit from William Shakespeare’s verbal magic.
Blowfish, on the other hand, got their name as a result of their fondness for recreational oral sex. (Research ongoing. Will update with proper sourcing shortly.)
(Apparently opalescentbottle was a mouthful.)
The same bug is also known by the name blowfly, which I’d heard without ever understanding. But in the same way that bluebottle seems like an arbitrary name for this creature, blowflies don’t actually blow on anything. They got that name, apparently, from an Early Modern English term flyblown, which describes meat — animal and otherwise, butchered and living — that has been contaminated with fly eggs. In fact, there’s even a word flyblow that describes the eggs themselves. Citing a Texas A&M textbook, Wikipedia notes that the first recorded instances of the word blow being used with flies themselves — as opposed to the eggs, I guess? — are Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra. So, you see, even the lowly fly can benefit from William Shakespeare’s verbal magic.
Blowfish, on the other hand, got their name as a result of their fondness for recreational oral sex. (Research ongoing. Will update with proper sourcing shortly.)
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
The Cow Crashed Into the Moon
Late this week, but you’ll just have to forgive me. And you will, because it’s a good one.
So great, there’s a fun word to call the English majors you despise, but I wonder what, exactly, the Europeans of centuries past thought the moon would do and, more importantly, how they thought embryonic ruination could have been prevented. Wouldn’t any pregnant animal be as helpless to the presence of the moon as it would be to, for example, night? Perhaps they pulled their pregnant women in side for the duration of their gestation, but would they do the same to the farm animals? Did they have some sort of village preggo room? Any practices along these lines, I’d imagine, would be equally as harmful to fetal development. “Wife, you’re with child, so now you must live underground, with the cow and the pig. You’ll have lots to talk about.”
Previous strange and wonderful words:
mooncalf (MOON-kaf) — noun: 1. a fool. 2. a freak.Now I can’t remember what reminded me of this great Shakespearean insult, which Stephano calls Caliban in The Tempest. Regardless, here it is. The term mooncalf derives from an apparently widespread belief that the moon’s dark powers could inhibit the proper development of a fetus — bovine or otherwise — and render it an “abortive, shapeless, fleshy mass,” as Etymonline puts it. From there, the extension to “monster” and then just “stupid thing” seems fairly logical, as far as insults go.
So great, there’s a fun word to call the English majors you despise, but I wonder what, exactly, the Europeans of centuries past thought the moon would do and, more importantly, how they thought embryonic ruination could have been prevented. Wouldn’t any pregnant animal be as helpless to the presence of the moon as it would be to, for example, night? Perhaps they pulled their pregnant women in side for the duration of their gestation, but would they do the same to the farm animals? Did they have some sort of village preggo room? Any practices along these lines, I’d imagine, would be equally as harmful to fetal development. “Wife, you’re with child, so now you must live underground, with the cow and the pig. You’ll have lots to talk about.”
Previous strange and wonderful words:
- acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
- barrack, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer
- catholicon, cecaelia, cherpumple, chilver, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, culaccino, cummingtonite
- deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingbat, dingle
- eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui, exoterica
- fabiform, Feghoot, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, froward
- gallinipper, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
- hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus
- ignivomous, iracund, isabelline, itaiitai
- jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
- kaffir, kakopygian, kayfabe, knipperdollin
- leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
- malacia, malison, milt, mongo, morepork
- narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
- ochanee, ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
- pace, pareidolia, pavonated, perendiate, perigee, petrichor, pettifogger, pismire, pogonip, pong, pruniferous, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
- quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
- ronion, roynish, rubirosa, rumpsprung, runcible
- salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, shebang, sinople, stan, stevedore, suovetaurilia
- tappen, teratogenesis, tergiversate, tetromino, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tutoyer, tyro
- ucalegon, ultramontane, umiaq, umquhile
- veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
- weeaboo, widdiful, williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
- xenodocheionology, xyster
- yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
- zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Shakespeare’s Scabby, Flabby Onion
I had something else planned out for this week’s word: a French-derived beauty whose melodic sound was matched by a pleasant definition. Then I began to feel that the word was not appropriately strange — wonderful though it might have been. This happens sometimes. Perhaps I’m underread. Or it could also be that I just blow past certain words, never properly grasping what they mean and otherwise ignoring them until I happen across them in dictionaries, the letters in sequence finally laid out side-by-side with pronunciations and definitions. Whatever the case, you will not be reading much about reverie, “a state of abstract musing, a daydream,” here today. In its place is something foul andmean-spirited, though every bit as French in its origin.
Most dictionary definitions put the etymology of runion as a possible relation to the French rogne, “scab.” And indeed that would be insulting. Peter Bowler’s The Superior Person’s Book of Words, however, notes that the word may instead come from the French rognon, “loins,” and could therefore imply fatness. The word appears again in Macbeth, in the First Witch’s line “‘Aroint thee, witch!’ the rump-fed ronyon cries,” and would seem to be implying this second interpretation rather than what the word has come to mean. Not that it gets used all that much anymore.
I prefer the spelling ronion over alternatives, if only because I’d imagine most women wouldn’t appreciate being compared to onions, what with their round shape and their layer after layer of acird-smelling surprises. Besides, the existence of bunions and Funyuns has taught me to expect bad things from anything whose name consists of a consonant in front of the word onion.
Previous words of the week:
ronion (RUN-yun) — noun: a scabby or mangy creature.Merriam-Webster claims use of the word — which is also often spelled ronyon and less often runnion — dates back to at least 1598. The most popular usage, however, seems to be Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, first published in 1602. Mister Ford hurls the term at Falstaff, who is dressed as a woman at the time. The line, in full, reads as “Out of my door, you witch, you rag, you baggage, you polecat, you ronion! Out, out!” It’s an interesting string of words. Some editions use hag instead of rag. All that I saw use baggage, which American Heritage Dictionary claims ca be used to mean “a prostitute” or “an impudent girl or woman.” It’s a new one to me, and I wonder if has any connection to the insult old bag, which I had previously assumed referred more to the recipient’s resemblance to a formless, leathery sack than to their personality.
Most dictionary definitions put the etymology of runion as a possible relation to the French rogne, “scab.” And indeed that would be insulting. Peter Bowler’s The Superior Person’s Book of Words, however, notes that the word may instead come from the French rognon, “loins,” and could therefore imply fatness. The word appears again in Macbeth, in the First Witch’s line “‘Aroint thee, witch!’ the rump-fed ronyon cries,” and would seem to be implying this second interpretation rather than what the word has come to mean. Not that it gets used all that much anymore.
I prefer the spelling ronion over alternatives, if only because I’d imagine most women wouldn’t appreciate being compared to onions, what with their round shape and their layer after layer of acird-smelling surprises. Besides, the existence of bunions and Funyuns has taught me to expect bad things from anything whose name consists of a consonant in front of the word onion.
Previous words of the week:
- adulterine, ambeer
- barrack, bissextile, breastsummer
- catholicon, cecaelia, cranberry morpheme, cummingtonite
- deasil, decussate
- epeolatry, espalier
- fabiform, fissilingual
- gallinipper, grandgore
- honorificabilitudinitatibus
- itaiitai, ignivomous
- jehu, jumentous
- kaffir, kakopygian, knipperdollin
- leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
- malacia, milt, mongo
- nihilartikel, nobiliary particle
- ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
- pareidolia, petrichor, pismire, pong
- quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
- roynish
- scrutator, shebang
- tiffin, tittery-whoppet, toby
- ucalegon
- veneficial
- witzelsucht
- xenodocheionology
- ypsiliform
- zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic
Monday, February 23, 2009
The H-Bus
Two days after blogiversary festivities and one day after the required post-festivities period of recuperation, I’m back on track, making up for the word of the week I neglected to do this weekend. It’s more than a doozy. A doozleplex? A doozydoozy? A doobleoozy?
Quite a mouthful, especially when honorableness would do the trick, as Word Web points out. This verbal oddity gets mentioned fairly often in word nerd circles, for all the right reasons.
First off, it is considered by some to be the longest word coined by Shakespeare, though dissenters might point out that he simply borrowed it from Medieval Latin. It’s the word honorificabilitudinitas, in the plural ablative form. (The ablative case is used in Latin more or less in specific prepositional constructions. Of all the languages one might learn in a typical American high school, I’m pretty sure Latin is the only one that uses the ablative, at least by that name.)
It’s also the longest word Shakespeare ever used, counting the ones other people made up. Though it’s used in Love’s Labour’s Lost and I have read this play, I have no recollection of it. It’s spoken by Costard in the first scene of the fifth act. “O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. / I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; / for thou art not so long by the head as / honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.” As if I needed to cram more worthless information into this post, I’m going to explain that last reference. A flap-dragon — which is apparently interchangeable with snap-dragon — apparently can be several things, though it seems most likely that Costard means the first one in the below list:
Despite this fact, it does not use the letter “e,” the most common vowel. The next-longest word to omit this letter is the equally phenomenal floccinaucinihilipilification — “the act of habit of describing or regarding something as useless,” which just happens to be what most people do to honorificabilitudinitatibus.
Wikipedia points out that by virtue of being used only once in Shakespeare’s collective works, honorificabilitudinitatibus is also a hapax legomenon, a fun title to give to words that only appear once in the written record of a language or a single text. For example, until the posting of this entry, floccinaucinihilipilification was a hapax legomenon on Back of the Cereal box. But it ain’t no more.
James Joyce also used honorificabilitudinitatibus, as World Wide Words points out, but no one apparently cares about this as much as Shakespeare’s use of it. I’m guessing Joyce used it more than once, thus preventing it from being a hapax legomenon but possibly also indicating that Joyce was the better writer since he found more than one apt occasion to use it.
Finally, and perhaps most spectacularly, the word is notable because Baconophiles — that is, those who love Francis Bacon — take its presence in Love’s Labor’s Lost as evidence that Bacon himself wrote the play and all of the other Shakespeare plays as well. Apparently this is a thing that people like to think. The word happens to be an anagram for the Latin phrase hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, meaning “these plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world.” This website takes it a bit further and gets into numerological theories that tie the word with creepy Rosicrucian stuff. More germane to the discussion of the play’s authorship, the appearance of honorificabilitudinitatibus in Love’s Labor’s Lost is followed by another strange line. Armado’s page Moth asks, “…what is a / B, spelt backward, with the horn on his head?” The conspiracy theorists allege that Moth’s question is a coded reference to Bacon — “Bacorn,” with the first two letters being those “spelt backward” and the corn meaning “horn” in the sense of unicorns and tricorn hats. Very strange, but suitably so, given the subject at hand.
Previous words of the week:
honorificabilitudinitatibus (hah-no-rif-i-ka-bil-i-too-dee-nee-ta-bus) — noun: the state of quality of being able to achieve honors.(And I am only guessing on the pronunciation. Most articles on the word focus more on its strange history than on how to say it, I’m guessing because you probably wouldn’t ever speak this work, even if you wanted to. As for which syllables would be accented, I can only guess.)
Quite a mouthful, especially when honorableness would do the trick, as Word Web points out. This verbal oddity gets mentioned fairly often in word nerd circles, for all the right reasons.
First off, it is considered by some to be the longest word coined by Shakespeare, though dissenters might point out that he simply borrowed it from Medieval Latin. It’s the word honorificabilitudinitas, in the plural ablative form. (The ablative case is used in Latin more or less in specific prepositional constructions. Of all the languages one might learn in a typical American high school, I’m pretty sure Latin is the only one that uses the ablative, at least by that name.)
It’s also the longest word Shakespeare ever used, counting the ones other people made up. Though it’s used in Love’s Labour’s Lost and I have read this play, I have no recollection of it. It’s spoken by Costard in the first scene of the fifth act. “O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. / I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; / for thou art not so long by the head as / honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.” As if I needed to cram more worthless information into this post, I’m going to explain that last reference. A flap-dragon — which is apparently interchangeable with snap-dragon — apparently can be several things, though it seems most likely that Costard means the first one in the below list:
- A worthless or trivial thing.
- A Dutchman or a German, though to speak of such people in this way would not endear you to them. (It’s something to keep in mind if you travel back in time to seventeenth-century Europe.)
- A fiendish sounding game that apparently bored people played on Christmas Eve in which they would attempt to snatch raisins out from a bowl of flaming brandy. (This could have been the game of kings back in the day, but I can’t help thinking that those who played flap-dragon then would be the ones smoking meth today.)
- The bowl itself.
- The raisins themselves.
- Or whatever other fruit you decide to play the game with.
- The one thing that Costard’s remark isn’t referring to, apparently, is the one thing I knew as a snapdragon prior to writing this post: those flowers that look like a dragon’s head and move when you squeeze them. The name for the genus is antirrhinum. The flower is oddly mentioned nowhere on the page for flap-dragon, despite that the flower is the one children should be encouraged to play with.
Despite this fact, it does not use the letter “e,” the most common vowel. The next-longest word to omit this letter is the equally phenomenal floccinaucinihilipilification — “the act of habit of describing or regarding something as useless,” which just happens to be what most people do to honorificabilitudinitatibus.
Wikipedia points out that by virtue of being used only once in Shakespeare’s collective works, honorificabilitudinitatibus is also a hapax legomenon, a fun title to give to words that only appear once in the written record of a language or a single text. For example, until the posting of this entry, floccinaucinihilipilification was a hapax legomenon on Back of the Cereal box. But it ain’t no more.
James Joyce also used honorificabilitudinitatibus, as World Wide Words points out, but no one apparently cares about this as much as Shakespeare’s use of it. I’m guessing Joyce used it more than once, thus preventing it from being a hapax legomenon but possibly also indicating that Joyce was the better writer since he found more than one apt occasion to use it.
Finally, and perhaps most spectacularly, the word is notable because Baconophiles — that is, those who love Francis Bacon — take its presence in Love’s Labor’s Lost as evidence that Bacon himself wrote the play and all of the other Shakespeare plays as well. Apparently this is a thing that people like to think. The word happens to be an anagram for the Latin phrase hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, meaning “these plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world.” This website takes it a bit further and gets into numerological theories that tie the word with creepy Rosicrucian stuff. More germane to the discussion of the play’s authorship, the appearance of honorificabilitudinitatibus in Love’s Labor’s Lost is followed by another strange line. Armado’s page Moth asks, “…what is a / B, spelt backward, with the horn on his head?” The conspiracy theorists allege that Moth’s question is a coded reference to Bacon — “Bacorn,” with the first two letters being those “spelt backward” and the corn meaning “horn” in the sense of unicorns and tricorn hats. Very strange, but suitably so, given the subject at hand.
Previous words of the week:
- adulterine, ambeer
- barrack, bissextile, breastsummer
- catholicon, cecaelia, cranberry morpheme, cummingtonite
- deasil, decussate
- epeolatry, espalier
- fabiform, fissilingual
- gallinipper, grandgore
- itaiitai
- jehu
- kaffir, kakopygian
- lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
- malacia, mongo
- nobiliary particle
- ooglification, ordured, orf
- pareidolia, pismire, pong
- quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh
- roynish
- scrutator, shebang
- tiffin, tittery-whoppet, toby
- ucalegon
- veneficial
- witzelsucht
- xenodocheionology
- ypsiliform
- zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Bubbling, Doubling, Taco Sauce
The following is something I’d realistically be better off not sharing with the world but I am compelled to publish online anyway.
Shakespare’s Macbeth finds an archrival in the form of Macduff, and it’s likely no coincidence that the two have very similar names. They’re actually similar people, in some ways, but with significant differences. In modern texts — and perhaps in older ones as well, depending on how the transcriber decided he wanted to spell — this relationship is underscored by the fact the lowercase “b” in Macbeth’s name looks exactly like a flipped-around lowercase “d,” as you see in Macduff’s name.
That all being said, can the same opposite-rival-“b”-and-“d” relationship be applied Taco Bell and Del Taco?
Shakespare’s Macbeth finds an archrival in the form of Macduff, and it’s likely no coincidence that the two have very similar names. They’re actually similar people, in some ways, but with significant differences. In modern texts — and perhaps in older ones as well, depending on how the transcriber decided he wanted to spell — this relationship is underscored by the fact the lowercase “b” in Macbeth’s name looks exactly like a flipped-around lowercase “d,” as you see in Macduff’s name.
That all being said, can the same opposite-rival-“b”-and-“d” relationship be applied Taco Bell and Del Taco?
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Call an Opthamologist
Downsides of my office: Fluorescent lights, limited parking, and a particular cheap brand of coffee that I like to call “gut rot.” Upsides: among a few others, occasional, interesting conversations about words.
A few weeks ago, a co-worker — who, as a result of her upbringing, has very good reasons to be unfamiliar with the New Testament — asked me if a person who gave an interview with the paper could have possibly misquoted Jesus. The sentence was this: “Don’t worry about the mote in your brother’s eye, worry about the beam in your own.” Without really reflecting on the word mote, she interpreted the passage to mean that one shouldn’t waste time worrying about a moat — as in, the body of water — when one has some sort of wooden plank that could be used to cross such a barrier. Which makes sense, really, if you haven’t already been told what we’re supposed to think that Jesus actually meant with this strange chunk of syntax. (I’m sure it sounded great in Aramaic.) The quote struck my ears as strange as well, because my Catholic education had familiarized me with a different though not necessarily better translation of the quote: “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” This one avoids using the word mote, which doesn’t get used all that much in modern American English. I think that alone helps the (supposedly) intended meaning to be clearer: Don’t rag on someone for some small fault when you yourself are guilty of something even worse.
To me, the problem with this bit of Christian wisdom is that the wording of it always distracted me from the meaning. When seven-year-old me first heard this one, I was too amused or horrified or just generally preoccupied with the notion of a guy walking around with a portion of Abraham Lincoln’s childhood home sticking out of his eye socket. (What if he turned around? What if a woodpecker lived on him? If he fell forward, would it kill him?) Really, it reminds me of the whole “Lily Allen has a ladder in her tights” thing, which itself was confusing and ridiculous until I found out what it meant.
Beam doesn’t help the situation much, either, especially because now it makes me think of someone taking a laser pointer to the face. Actually, that might be the best way to explain it to seven-year-olds today.
According to this website, which conveniently lists specific Bible passages as different editions translate them, the following are also considered fair game, at least by some whacko sect of Christianity somewhere:
As I said earlier, mote is almost equally problematic, especially if the passage is being recited and not read from the page. Which is too bad, really, because mote is a cool word. Say it to yourself. Ten times. Loudly. Now don’t you feel a little bit better about life?
Aside from confusion with the water-filled river that you put around your castle to keep out invaders, mote is notable for one other reason, as one Shakespeare-savvy intern pointed out during the offices original discussion of this matter. Mote is also a character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which itself should not be confused with A Midsummer Night’s Cream. Mote appears as one of Queen Titania’s attendant fairies, alongside Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Mustardseed. It’s easy to forget about Mote, however, because she — or possibly he, I guess — never speaks. In fact, some productions of the play leave the character out altogether.
To complicate the matter even further, some editions of the play render the name as “Moth” instead, which pretty much eliminates the possibility that a reader could interpret the name as a pun on the word mute, which the character could very well be, since she or he has no lines.
Following that logic, I personally would like to read the Jesus quote as “Don’t point out the moth in your neighbor’s eye, when you have the trunk of General Sherman, the tallest tree in the world, in your own.”
Unless that overstates the point.
EDIT: At Spencer’s request and for the sake of accuracy, this post has been retitled “See an Ophthalmologist” from its original title, “See an Optometrist.”
A few weeks ago, a co-worker — who, as a result of her upbringing, has very good reasons to be unfamiliar with the New Testament — asked me if a person who gave an interview with the paper could have possibly misquoted Jesus. The sentence was this: “Don’t worry about the mote in your brother’s eye, worry about the beam in your own.” Without really reflecting on the word mote, she interpreted the passage to mean that one shouldn’t waste time worrying about a moat — as in, the body of water — when one has some sort of wooden plank that could be used to cross such a barrier. Which makes sense, really, if you haven’t already been told what we’re supposed to think that Jesus actually meant with this strange chunk of syntax. (I’m sure it sounded great in Aramaic.) The quote struck my ears as strange as well, because my Catholic education had familiarized me with a different though not necessarily better translation of the quote: “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” This one avoids using the word mote, which doesn’t get used all that much in modern American English. I think that alone helps the (supposedly) intended meaning to be clearer: Don’t rag on someone for some small fault when you yourself are guilty of something even worse.
To me, the problem with this bit of Christian wisdom is that the wording of it always distracted me from the meaning. When seven-year-old me first heard this one, I was too amused or horrified or just generally preoccupied with the notion of a guy walking around with a portion of Abraham Lincoln’s childhood home sticking out of his eye socket. (What if he turned around? What if a woodpecker lived on him? If he fell forward, would it kill him?) Really, it reminds me of the whole “Lily Allen has a ladder in her tights” thing, which itself was confusing and ridiculous until I found out what it meant.
Beam doesn’t help the situation much, either, especially because now it makes me think of someone taking a laser pointer to the face. Actually, that might be the best way to explain it to seven-year-olds today.
According to this website, which conveniently lists specific Bible passages as different editions translate them, the following are also considered fair game, at least by some whacko sect of Christianity somewhere:
- “sawdust” and “wooden beam”
- “grain of dust” and “bit of wood”
- “splinter” and “beam”
- “craisin” and “pineapple”
As I said earlier, mote is almost equally problematic, especially if the passage is being recited and not read from the page. Which is too bad, really, because mote is a cool word. Say it to yourself. Ten times. Loudly. Now don’t you feel a little bit better about life?
Aside from confusion with the water-filled river that you put around your castle to keep out invaders, mote is notable for one other reason, as one Shakespeare-savvy intern pointed out during the offices original discussion of this matter. Mote is also a character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which itself should not be confused with A Midsummer Night’s Cream. Mote appears as one of Queen Titania’s attendant fairies, alongside Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Mustardseed. It’s easy to forget about Mote, however, because she — or possibly he, I guess — never speaks. In fact, some productions of the play leave the character out altogether.
To complicate the matter even further, some editions of the play render the name as “Moth” instead, which pretty much eliminates the possibility that a reader could interpret the name as a pun on the word mute, which the character could very well be, since she or he has no lines.
Following that logic, I personally would like to read the Jesus quote as “Don’t point out the moth in your neighbor’s eye, when you have the trunk of General Sherman, the tallest tree in the world, in your own.”
Unless that overstates the point.
EDIT: At Spencer’s request and for the sake of accuracy, this post has been retitled “See an Ophthalmologist” from its original title, “See an Optometrist.”
Saturday, August 23, 2008
The Roynish Clone
Wish I could remember where I found this one, but I can’t. It simply appeared mysteriously on my unsorted list of candidates for word of the week. I chose it for this post simply because we’re now at “R” and it was the first on the list to begin with this letter. It’s also the first word of the week to have strong Shakespearean association, as many definitions of it cite a line spoken to Duke Frederick in As You Like It: “My lord, the roynish clown, at whom so oft Your Grace was wont to laugh, is also missing.”
The Wiktionary claims that roynish comes from the French rogneux, which in turn came from the French word rogne, meaning “scab,” “mange,” or “itch.” Through Answers.com, I found another etymology. (And, yes, I realize that comparing Wiktionary information against Answers.com information could possibly be as worthwhile a venture as comparing bus stop restroom graffiti with tenement elevator graffiti. “This one says ‘Mexico sucks balls’ while the other says ‘U.S.A. sucks cock.’ What to make of this disparity?”) According to an Answers.com affiliate called simply “Obscure Words” — which itself is rather obscure, as it’s not linked to in any way from Answers.com — roynish traces back to the French roin, “scurf”or “scab” to the Vulgar Latin ronea. My non-Vulgar Latin dictionary doesn’t have an entry for ronea and efforts to find an online Vulgar Latin dictionary resulted only in online dictionary definitions of the term “Vulgar Latin,” so I guess that path ends there.
The “Obscure Words” definition also offers the spelling roinous, which Microsoft Word AutoCorrect insists on changing to ruinous. While I’m on the subject of technical failures, a Google search for the spelling roinish offers the correction “Did you mean finish?” No, Google, I didn’t. I’m not yet that stupid.
Regardless of precisely where the term came from, I enjoy it as a wonderfully awful alternative to the overused stable of pejorative adjectives we English-speakers have to use against unpleasant people. As this blog demonstrates in the post “Thou roynish, eye-offending hedge-pig,” roynish appears as one of the mix-and-match terms in the Elizabethan Curse Generator, which surely will delight us all.
Previous words of the week:
roynish (ROIN-ish) — adjective: mangy; scabby; mean; paltry; troublesome.This tragically out-of-use word, which is sometimes also spelled roinish, probably doesn’t mean all of those things at once but can instead mean any of them in a given social situation. You have to admit, however, that one word that could potentially pack in all five slams against one’s hygiene or demeanor is pretty great, especially because it doesn’t sound like a bad word. If put in the proper context, it could sound downright regal.
The Wiktionary claims that roynish comes from the French rogneux, which in turn came from the French word rogne, meaning “scab,” “mange,” or “itch.” Through Answers.com, I found another etymology. (And, yes, I realize that comparing Wiktionary information against Answers.com information could possibly be as worthwhile a venture as comparing bus stop restroom graffiti with tenement elevator graffiti. “This one says ‘Mexico sucks balls’ while the other says ‘U.S.A. sucks cock.’ What to make of this disparity?”) According to an Answers.com affiliate called simply “Obscure Words” — which itself is rather obscure, as it’s not linked to in any way from Answers.com — roynish traces back to the French roin, “scurf”or “scab” to the Vulgar Latin ronea. My non-Vulgar Latin dictionary doesn’t have an entry for ronea and efforts to find an online Vulgar Latin dictionary resulted only in online dictionary definitions of the term “Vulgar Latin,” so I guess that path ends there.
The “Obscure Words” definition also offers the spelling roinous, which Microsoft Word AutoCorrect insists on changing to ruinous. While I’m on the subject of technical failures, a Google search for the spelling roinish offers the correction “Did you mean finish?” No, Google, I didn’t. I’m not yet that stupid.
Regardless of precisely where the term came from, I enjoy it as a wonderfully awful alternative to the overused stable of pejorative adjectives we English-speakers have to use against unpleasant people. As this blog demonstrates in the post “Thou roynish, eye-offending hedge-pig,” roynish appears as one of the mix-and-match terms in the Elizabethan Curse Generator, which surely will delight us all.
Previous words of the week:
Wednesday, July 9, 2003
Armitage Shanks
Just when I think it’s sunk in, I realize it hasn’t and I’m a stranger again.
The novelty of living in this old city never struck my mind more sensationally than when the spit flew from the mouth of an Shakespearean actress on landed on my forehead. The construction of the Globe affords me the privilege of groundlinghood — I’m standing with my stomach pressed against the stage, the cast of an all-female production of Richard III screaming, crying, and dueling no more than six inched from my awe-stricken face. The actress playing Richard defies the confines of gender with a malicious grin; the actress playing Anne, who would be pretty if she didn’t have the nose of the pigfaces from that “Eye of the Beholder” episode of the Twilight Zone, is the one whose saliva has splashed on my head. Her Anne is both dignified and pathetic. It was the second performance of a Shakespeare play at the reconstructed Globe within twenty-four hours, the previous being an all-male Richard II. I never thought I could like the history plays like this.
I live among the unnervingly wealthy here. The bitchy, British judge from American Idol shops at the grocery store we went to the first day. We saw him. The Dutch embassy is our next door neighbors. They’re nice people, I’m sure. Our front window looks out onto Hyde Park, a sprawling green better than any strip of brush we call a park in the States. Aside from the palace within the park, there’s a golden statue of Prince Albert — ahem — and the Serpentine Galley, which is presently featuring a show by Cindy Sherman.
The flatmates are good, certainly better than I expected from a school that admits cows into its undergraduate program. Some of them suck beyond the telling of it, but mostly I’m happy.
In the interest of conserving the flat’s most prized resource — toilet paper — I braved the bidet today. Webster defines “bidet” in a way that makes me smile: “a bathroom fixture used especially for bathing the external genitals and the posterior parts of the body.” Truthfully, I think the toilet’s little sister is a fixture made only for women. The male genitals hang in such a way as to be teased annoying by the bidet’s stream of water. While the stream does clean the desired parts, it strikes the seldom-stuck region to the rear of the nut sack in the process, causing an unpleasant slap-slap-slap that does not make me smile. I think Bidet Town is an area of the European lifestyle I will leave uncharted after all.
And most impressive above all these things: I learned how to use the tube without getting lost.
Where do I go from here?
The novelty of living in this old city never struck my mind more sensationally than when the spit flew from the mouth of an Shakespearean actress on landed on my forehead. The construction of the Globe affords me the privilege of groundlinghood — I’m standing with my stomach pressed against the stage, the cast of an all-female production of Richard III screaming, crying, and dueling no more than six inched from my awe-stricken face. The actress playing Richard defies the confines of gender with a malicious grin; the actress playing Anne, who would be pretty if she didn’t have the nose of the pigfaces from that “Eye of the Beholder” episode of the Twilight Zone, is the one whose saliva has splashed on my head. Her Anne is both dignified and pathetic. It was the second performance of a Shakespeare play at the reconstructed Globe within twenty-four hours, the previous being an all-male Richard II. I never thought I could like the history plays like this.
I live among the unnervingly wealthy here. The bitchy, British judge from American Idol shops at the grocery store we went to the first day. We saw him. The Dutch embassy is our next door neighbors. They’re nice people, I’m sure. Our front window looks out onto Hyde Park, a sprawling green better than any strip of brush we call a park in the States. Aside from the palace within the park, there’s a golden statue of Prince Albert — ahem — and the Serpentine Galley, which is presently featuring a show by Cindy Sherman.
The flatmates are good, certainly better than I expected from a school that admits cows into its undergraduate program. Some of them suck beyond the telling of it, but mostly I’m happy.
In the interest of conserving the flat’s most prized resource — toilet paper — I braved the bidet today. Webster defines “bidet” in a way that makes me smile: “a bathroom fixture used especially for bathing the external genitals and the posterior parts of the body.” Truthfully, I think the toilet’s little sister is a fixture made only for women. The male genitals hang in such a way as to be teased annoying by the bidet’s stream of water. While the stream does clean the desired parts, it strikes the seldom-stuck region to the rear of the nut sack in the process, causing an unpleasant slap-slap-slap that does not make me smile. I think Bidet Town is an area of the European lifestyle I will leave uncharted after all.
And most impressive above all these things: I learned how to use the tube without getting lost.
Where do I go from here?
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