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February 2014

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

If April is planning on being the cruelest month this year it has some catching up to do, because January and the first half of February have just about convinced me to move to the tropics, and I loathe even the concept of the tropics. Horrid places, full of sweat and bugs, sweaty, biting bugs, bugs building nests in your ears, spiders the size of poodles….  Anyway, I remember standing in our north field on a very cold winter day right after we moved out here from Manhattan, icy wind spitting freezing rain in my face, looking at the horizon across several hundred desolate acres of frozen corn stubble, and thinking, “Y’know, if I didn’t have that nice warm house to go back to, I would die rather rapidly out here.” (Yes, I can be hired for parties.)

So when I innocently clicked on my weather widget the other afternoon and discovered that it was 20 degrees below zero out there (actual temperature, not “wind chill”), I started to freak. I grew up in suburban Connecticut, and lived in New York City for more than 20 years. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times the electricity went out. That’s fewer than the number of times it’s gone out here, often for days, in the past year. In warm weather, it’s merely a colossal drag. But if the power goes out in this kind of weather, we’ll be in serious trouble within about 1/2 hour. A few years ago, we had to squeeze five cats and two dogs into a tiny flea-bag motel room (on Christmas Eve, no less), and I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t work. Not an option.

Meanwhile, in the world of popular culture, we finally caught up with the third season of Homeland last month after dodging spoilers for weeks and, boy howdy, the Nattering Nabobs of Negativity were absolutely right. Utterly moronic, the entire season. It started stupid and went downhill from there. Don’t get me started. It probably didn’t help that they killed all the interesting people and left us with the most relentlessly unpleasant troubled teen in TV history. Whatever. I hadn’t paid any attention to Mandy Patinkin since The Princess Bride, but now he’s the only conceivable reason to watch the show, which probably means he hasn’t long to live.

Anyway, in an attempt to reboot my mind, I decided to re-read John le Carré’s so-called Karla Trilogy, consisting of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honorable Schoolboy, and Smiley’s People (Karla being the pseudonym of the head of Soviet Intelligence). Unlike the idiots who cook up nonsense like Homeland, le Carré was an actual intelligence officer, running field agents for MI6 until his cover was blown (and his career thus ruined) by Kim Philby, a Soviet “mole” (le Carré popularized the term) who spent decades in the highest precincts of British intelligence. Tinker, Tailor, not coincidentally, centers on the detection and capture of a Philby-esque Soviet mole in MI6.

Continue reading this post » » »

Take the studs

You’re not the boss of me.

Dear Word Detective: I grew up in the Tennessee Valley, and all my life I’ve heard the phrase “took the studs,” meaning to become stubborn. It’s usually used to refer to a mule — a mule “took the studs” when he refused to pull the plow any further. But it’s also applied to people who are being unreasonable on a given subject, as in “Mom wanted my brother to become a doctor, but he took the studs.” Any clue where this came from? Does anyone anywhere else in the world use this phrase? — Judith Weaver.

This is my favorite kind of question. Someone asks about a word, phrase or saying they’ve heard all their life. They understand the meaning perfectly, but the logic of the phrase and its origin are a complete mystery. I, having never heard said phrase in my life, poke around for a while in the musty “dead tree” reference books people keep telling me I should throw away. Finally, with one hand tied behind my back (shooing cats off the keyboard, actually), I hit pay dirt and solve the mystery. Yay me! Of course, as a wise person once said, “If I see further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants … and stolen their stuff.”

Now comes the hard part, actually explaining “took the studs,” which, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), is used in the US South and South Midlands to mean exhibiting “a fit of stubborn opposition, balkiness” (“Pap has taken the studs, and I have made up my mind to leave here for good and all,” 1891). The earliest citation in DARE for “take the studs” (or “get” or “have”) comes from 1797, and it’s clear that it’s a term primarily applied to balky horses and mules, and, by figurative extension, to uncooperative people.

There are two “stud” nouns in English. The older is “stud” meaning “a post or support” (as in the “studs” inside the walls of a house) or “something projecting from a surface” (as in the “stud” of an earring or cuff-link). This “stud” dates back to about 850 and comes from Germanic roots with the sense of “support.” The other sort of “stud,” which appeared about 1000, comes from Indo-European roots with the meaning of “stand,” “things standing,” or “herd,” and originally referred to a herd of horses or other animals kept by one person, especially for breeding.

And now the good news (for me, at least): neither of those “studs” has anything to do with “take the studs.” The US phrase “take the studs” is actually a modified form of the old English dialect phrase “take the sturdy” or “take the sturdies.”

“Sturdy” in common usage means, of course, “solid,” “strong,” “resolute” and similar things. One of its older meanings, first appearing in Chaucer in the late 14th century, is “defiant of destructive agencies or force; strong, stout” (Oxford English Dictionary (OED)) as a house or bridge might be described as “sturdy.”

In senses applied to people, all now considered obsolete, “sturdy” meant “hard to manage, intractable, refractory; rebellious, disobedient” and “obstinate, immovable in opinion” (OED) (“My sonn doth begine to be [too] sturdie for my government,” c. 1635). That’s “take the studs” as applied to animals and people in a nutshell. The change in form from “sturdy” to “stud” was simply the result of time and the distance, geographic and cultural, from 14th century England to the southern US. To “take the studs” thus means “to take a stubborn and uncooperative stance or attitude.”

Soporific / Annihilate

To sleep, perchance to vaporize.

Dear Word Detective: Recently, I was re-watching an episode of one of my favorite TV shows, The West Wing, when I heard a particularly good line from the President (who is played by Martin Sheen). He is remarking to an assistant that he has a meeting with the Treasury Secretary, “… a man so soporific one shouldn’t operate heavy machinery in his presence. A meeting that would feel interminable at three minutes is likely to stretch into a soul-annihilating 50….” I’ve been in meetings like that as, I’m sure, have you. In any case, I think “soporific” is a great word, exceeded in greatness, perhaps, by “annihilate” which bears little resemblance to any other words I know how to spell. If I have to choose, I’d rather learn the history of “soporific” — but I hope I don’t have to choose! — Fernando.

The West Wing! Hey, did you hear they’re going to be bringing that series back in a remake starring Charlie Sheen? Jon Cryer is gonna play a Biden-esque doofus VP, and they’re relocating the White House to Vegas. This all sounds entirely too plausible, doesn’t it? I must admit that I never watched The West Wing when it was on because I have a deep and abiding … let’s call it an allergy … to Aaron Sorkin. I tried to watch his Newsroom on HBO a while back and just the memory of that ten minutes is making it impossible to finish this sentence in a family-friendly manner. But a lot of people I like love him, so there’s that.

“Soporific” is a great word, much better than merely “dull” or “boring.” The root of “soporific” is the Latin noun “sopor,” which means “sleep,” plus the suffix “fic,” which is a form of the verb “facere,” meaning “to make.” So “soporific” means literally “causing sleep.” English borrowed “soporific” from the French “soporifique” (everything sounds classier in French) back in the late 17th century, and used it initially to mean things (drugs, medicines, etc.) that literally put a person into a state of slumber (or at least caused extreme sleepiness). “Soporific” as a noun is still used to mean a class of drugs that promote sleep or drowsiness. (Interestingly, so is “hypnotic,” from the Greek “hypnos,” sleep.)

Given the natural aptitude some people have for boring the pants off other people, it’s not surprising that “soporific” was also almost immediately applied figuratively to people, topics of conversation, books, plays and other elements of culture that were deemed likely to either put people to sleep or to make them wish they were asleep (“Hibernian matrons thus of old, Their soporific stories told,” 1727). Less commonly, “soporific” is also used to mean literally “drowsy or sleepy” (“The soporific tendencies of … a portion of the congregation,” 1896).

It’s quite a leap from “soporific” to “annihilate,” but this column can turn on a dime, so fasten your seat belts. “Annihilate” means, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) so cheerfully explains, “To reduce to non-existence, blot out of existence.” Whoa. Can’t we talk about this? Anyway, “annihilate” (which I’m glad you can spell, because I have some weird mental block about the word) comes ultimately from the Latin verb “annihilare,” which meant “to reduce to nothing” and was formed by combining “ad” (to) with “nihil,” meaning “nothing.”

“Annihilate” has all sorts of modern uses both figurative and literal; for instance, it turns out that the scientific term for when a subatomic particle encounters its antimatter “antiparticle” is “annihilation.” And in theology, “annihilation” means “to destroy the soul as well as the body” (“God can no more be the Author of Evil, than he can Annihilate himself, and Cease to be,” Daniel Defoe, 1727), which would make Mr. Sorkin’s phrase “soul-annihilating” a teensy bit redundant. So there’s “annihilate” (and I’m still trying to spell it annihiliate”). Not cheery, granted, but every word has its uses, and when nothing but utter obliteration will do, “annihilate” is just the ticket.