My father was a devoted reader, especially of William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, James Thurber, and Rex Stout, and like Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe (see buckram) he was a language precisionist.  Looking up from a Phoenix Gazette news story headlined “Murderer Executed,” he might say something like “you know, it ‘s not the criminal who’s executed.  He’s electrocuted in the chair, or gassed.  It’s the sentence of death that’s executed.”

In this, my father was not quite right.  According to the OED, the word’s “put a criminal to death” meaning goes back centuries.  Historically speaking, it’s as well established as the meaning “carry into effect the intention of a law or a judicial sentence.”   And yet my father was right that the root sense of “execute” is to do something, to follow something out to completion; the Latin words from which the word derives are ex (“out”) and sequi (“follow”).  All the derivatives of “execute” partake of this general meaning.  For example, the file extension .exe marks an executable file, that is, a program which runs and does something (if you’re lucky), while the executor or executrix of a will carries out its provisions.   (Nowadays, at least in Massachusetts, these two terms have been supplanted by the blander but gender-neutral “personal representative.”)

And then there is “executive,” meaning a person who manages the affairs, directs the actions, of a business.  Though an executive himself, in the construction industry, my father always felt out of place in American business and viewed his fellow executives with a certain skepticism.  He would have been sarcastic about how the word in its adjective form has recently been employed.  It’s become a marketing tool, an all-purpose honorific, a brand.  Consider “executive house” and “junior executive house,” standard terms in the real estate industry for relatively modest but well-appointed dwellings.  “Executive” is pure status symbol here, subliminally conveying the idea that living in the right sort of dwelling will automatically confer executive-suite or at least larger-cubicle stature.  But what sort of status is being conferred in the title of the economy parking operation which my wife and I patronize when we fly from our local airport, “Executive Valet Parking”?  Do we become executives by virtue of the act of leaving our Subaru and boarding the shuttle bus?  It’s clear that this “executive” means nothing, really.  It’s like other advertising honorifics, “A-1,” “Veribest,” “Tiptop,” and as such is silly enough, an exercise in sheer brazen meaninglessness.  But finally it’s not as silly as the “executive” I once encountered in a delicatessen, waiting for my sandwich to be made.  I glanced idly into the cold case and saw there displayed, among the plastic-wrapped sausages and hams and cheeses, something proudly labeled “Executive Turkey Breast.”  What marketing executive thought that name up, I wondered.

Our German son-in-law once showed me over a late 1920s building next door to his and our daughter’s apartment block in Bremen, in the north of the country.  The building–now housing government offices–was an Art Deco masterpiece which he rightly thought would interest me.  Besides handsome brickwork and impressive stairwell details, it featured a working “paternoster,” an old-fashioned European elevator with small doorless compartments going up and down in constant slow motion.  Ulrich and I tried it, cautiously, stepping into a compartment and then stepping out when it reached the floor above.  Here’s an amateur video of a very similar paternoster in Prague:

If you ever have the chance to see Doris Dörrie’s very funny German comedy Männer (1985), be sure to watch the credits, which feature cast and crew going up and down in a paternoster.

But why the name “paternoster”?  In Latin, the Lord’s Prayer begins “Pater noster,” “Our Father,” and hence at a very early stage of both English and German “paternoster” became a name for the prayer itself, or for a similarly powerful invocation or charm.  In the Middle Ages witches reputedly recited the “black paternoster,” i.e., the prayer chanted backwards, but this is probably not something you should try yourself.  In Dickens’s Bleak House, Guster, the little maid of all work in a ramshackle London house, firmly believes there is money buried under the cellar, “guarded by an old man with a white beard, who cannot get out for seven thousand years because he said the Lord’s Prayer backwards.”

Early on, “paternoster” could also mean a rosary, that is, a set of beads on a string which, fingered, could assist the penitent’s memory, and then by figurative extension any set of identical things on a string or in a series.  In fishing, a “paternoster line” is one set with multiple hooks at regular intervals; in geology, “paternoster lakes” are small, circular—that is, bead-shaped—bodies of water left in a line down a valley by a glacier.  The compartments of a paternoster elevator, though not bead-shaped, are identical and installed in a seemingly endless series.  As the maker of that video of the Prague paternoster emphasizes, the contraption is somewhat dangerous.  Perhaps one should utter a prayer while using it, and in that case, why not a Lord’s Prayer or a Vater Unser or a Pater Noster?

“LIMEY PROF. TO DOPE YANK TALK,” runs part of a headline in the October 18, 1924, issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune.  The “limey” (= “English”) professor was in fact a Scotsman, Sir William Craigie, then editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and he had been hired by the University of Chicago to co-edit, with James Hulbert, a projected new Dictionary of American English.  Fourteen years later its four volumes appeared.  Among the Americanisms “doped” therein is “sticks,” in the sense “backwoods.”  Some later authorities have dated this usage to Kentucky in the 1800s, when extensive logging was going on, others to the turn of the twentieth century, but all agree that “sticks” refers to tree trunks, logs, woods, hence forested backcountry with primitive cabins, outhouses, dirt roads and other evidences of nonurban living.  In The American Language H. L. Mencken observes that for theater people, any place outside New York City constitutes “the sticks.”

“Sticks” has plenty of slangy semantic company, not just “backwoods” but “boondocks,” a term of considerable interest since according to the OED it is the only English word derived from Tagalog, one of the main indigenous languages of the Philippines; there bundok means “mountain.”  In World War II American soldiers in the Philippines dubbed the rough backwoodsy country they were fighting through “the boondocks.”  “To boondock” now means to camp without electrical or water hook-ups, off the grid; according to some authorities, it also means “to make love in a car.”  Meanwhile, as teenagers going to high school in northern California, my friends and I used a different term to refer, scornfully, of course, to where hicks came from: “the tules,” alluding to the tule plants or bulrushes growing thickly in the local backwater, the flatlands of the Sacramento River delta.

If “sticks” has nevertheless stuck, has remained the most popular slang synonym for the backcountry, it might have something to do with a single famous appearance of the term.  In 1935 the show-biz magazine Variety printed an article reporting that, contrary to what might have been expected, rural Americans did not especially want to see movies about themselves.  Here’s the article’s headline, even more than “LIMEY PROF. TO DOPE YANK TALK” a virtuosic expression of the headline-writer’s art:

Source: www.stltoday.com

The color red has multiple, often contradictory significations: blood and sacrifice, anger, high rank and luxury, celebration.  It appears on the ceremonial vestments of cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church and, as a hue long associated with socialist revolution, on the flag of the People’s Republic of China.  Louis XIV of France liked modishly red shoes, as does the heroine of the contemporary German film Barbara.  Worn even while she bikes, red high heels bring a touch of chic to the otherwise drab East Germany of the 1980s:

Source: genevaanderson.wordpress.com

You want to be given red roses on Valentine’s Day, find in your mailbox a red envelope from Netflix, or bring up on your computer screen the red icon of You Tube, but you do not want to see red ink on your balance sheet or be shown a red card on the soccer pitch.  The only thing all these significations would seem to have in common is vibrancy: red is a color meant to be noticed.

A “rubric,” from Latin ruber (“red”), originally something noteworthy printed in that color, say instructions for conducting a church service or the heading for a book chapter, now means more generally “instructions,” “guidelines,” a “set of rules”; teachers are supposed to follow “grading rubrics,” which are invariably disseminated in the staid black typeface of reports from the local Department of Education.  This semantic evolution is like that seen with “etiquette,” namely a shift from the literal to the conceptual, from words on a physical document to what those words are concerned with. 

As for the related term “red-letter,” its meanings have evolved too.  In the Middle Ages, red letters on a calendar marked out church festivals or important saints’ days,

Source: www.playbuzz.com

whereas in current usage “red-letter” refers to any day which anyone deems highly successful or otherwise significant.  We have democratized the term.  One would expect that in the calendar app of an iPhone, red would be used to single out dates to which a memo’s been added—e.g.,”dentist appointment 10:30,” “report due 😥 ,” “buy milk on way home!!!”—but no, those dates just get a little dot underneath them.  The only date colored red is . . . today.  That fact seems to say something about the cyberworld, where what really matters is not plans for next week and certainly not the history of yesterday, but today, this very moment, right now.

Should you be searching for the most glamorous pair ever to have engaged in lexical research, go to Howard Hawks’s 1941 comedy Ball of Fire.  There, Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), on the hunt for slang terms to write down in his notebook, finds an informant in the nightclub performer Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck).  Here’s the latter’s big number “Drum Boogie,” performed along with the Gene Krupa Band and incidentally with Martha Tilton, not Stanwyck, actually doing the singing.

As Sugarpuss uses it, “boogie” means “party”; a “drum boogie” is a party with jazz percussion—“You hear the rhythm rompin’, / You see the drummer stompin’ . . .”  The word came into circulation, with the particular meaning “rent party,” around 1920, at the same time that another “boogie” appeared, this one a derogatory, highly offensive term for black people.  Could these two meanings be related?  It’s possible.  Certainly, all the citations listed by the OED for the “party” sense come from the jazz or blues world.  A boogie to raise the rent for an apartment in Harlem or on the South Side of Chicago might lack Gene Krupa and Barbara Stanwyck but have a blues pianist in to entertain everyone.  A couple of decades later, the music he played, with a strongly rhythmical repeated bass line, would be called “boogie woogie.”

As for the source of “boogie,” that would seem to be a cluster of related terms—“bogy,” “bogey,” “bogle,” “the bogey man”—referring to the Devil, the Evil One, a goblin, a figure to scare children with, and so on.  From that starting point meanings spread out and diversify, but curiously, tend to preserve the sense “something unwelcome.”  “Bogey” is an English criminal’s word for the police.  Also, something which with clinical precision the OED calls “a piece of dried nasal mucus.”  Also, an enemy aircraft, as in that warning shouted into the cockpit microphone in dozens of World War II movies—“Bogeys!  Ten o’clock high!”  Speaking of movies, a non-crew member wandering onto a set during filming and getting in the way is a “bogey.”  And, finally, on a golf course the word means “one over par.”  How the sporting term came into use is the subject of one of the OED’s longest and most captivating word histories, involving two late-nineteenth-century gentlemen proceeding from hole to hole on an English course, plus—here we return to Sugarpuss O’Shea’s world of musical performance—a hit song of the 1890s, “The Bogie Man,” from the “operatic extravaganza” Sinbad.

You should read the complete etymology in the OED.  It’s a “killer diller,” as Sugarpuss would say.

This word, which can be either a noun or an adjective, derives from the French verb tromper, to “cheat” or “delude,” and in English originally meant “fraud” or “deceit.”  From there, by an easily understandable process, “trumpery” took on the sense “worthless stuff, trash, rubbish,” as the OED puts it, and in due course it also came to mean “nonsense,” “intellectual rubbish”; in horticulture, “weeds,” “refuse”; or as a clothing term, “showy but insubstantial apparel, worthless finery” (the OED again).  When in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (4.1.186) Prospero orders Ariel to bring bait for the drunken nitwits Stephano and Trinculo, it’s this last meaning the magician draws on:

The trumpery in my house, go bring it hither
For stale to catch these thieves.

Ariel fetches the clothing, Stephano and Trinculo think it’s mighty fine, but even Caliban (see mohock) recognizes it for what it is: “Let it alone, thou fool!  It is but trash.”

Meanwhile, “trump,” the shorter word within “trumpery” (see sweep), can have the obsolete sense “thing of small value,” but chiefly means a suit of temporary trick-taking power in bridge, or, in another old-fashioned usage, the trumpet, the powerful brass instrument which at the end of time may resound over all creation (“The Last Trump”) but which in ordinary circumstances is sometimes played too loudly, too brazenly.

I am writing this essay in the midst of the primary election campaign of 2016, during which one Republican candidate has come to the fore.  Unless his party’s establishment or the primary voters at large succeed in stopping him, he will be the party’s nominee in the general election:

Perhaps I do not need to explain why at this moment the words “trump” and “trumpery,” in all their meanings—deceit, worthlessness, nonsense, trash, loud brass instrument—come so readily to mind.

Nearly everywhere, this would be a misprint, either for “crops” or “corpse.”  But not in this text:

Life, he himself said once, (his biografiend kills him, in fact, verysoon, if yet not, after), is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather . . .

For Finnegans Wake, his fantasy about the mighty combining power of the dreaming imagination, James Joyce invented an artificial language.  It is based on multilingual puns, creative misspellings, and what in Through the Looking-Glass Lewis Carroll called portmanteau words, that is, combinations like “biografiend,” which packs “biographer” and “fiend” into the same verbal suitcase in order to denigrate biographers.  Reading Wakespeak can be fiendishly difficult, especially when passages from the book are taken out of context, and I do not intend to interpret the two lines above except to say that “seedfather” denotes Adam, father of mankind, and in particular the Adam whose expulsion from the Garden of Eden resulted in mankind’s need to grow food (“breadwinning”), and hence a need for seed.  “Cropse” suggests both the “crops” which seeds produce and the “corpse” or body of Adam, whose expulsion also, we are told, brought death into the world.

The word “crops” comes from ancient Germanic terms meaning “head or top part” of a plant, say an ear of wheat, which is of course the part harvested to produce crops.  “Corpse” derives from the Latin corpus, “body.”  So the words are completely unrelated, except as Joyce brings them together in a neologism succinctly expressing one of the main themes of Finnegans Wake, which is (to simplify) that fecundating corpses may give rise to new crops, that you cannot separate death from life, that endings circle around to beginnings.  The title of Joyce’s book refers to the “wake” mourning the death of the Irish laborer Tim Finnegan but is also an instruction to all the Finnegans of the world to “wake up!,” as indeed Tim Finnegan wakes up when mourners sprinkle whiskey (“water of life” in Gaelic) over his body.

One more meaning of “corpse”: as a verb in British theatrical slang, it means to mess up your own or another actor’s performance (thus creating a fiasco) by forgetting your lines or especially by breaking out into laughter at the wrong moment.  No one knows for sure where this usage comes from, though it may go back to an instance when an actor playing a corpse onstage just could not lie deathly still but instead broke out into lively laughter . . . an etymology which would greatly have pleased James Joyce.

In an Italian restaurant of a bygone era—red-checked tablecloths, amateurishly but lovingly painted mural of the Bay of Naples, “O Sole Mio” or “Funiculì Funiculà” on the sound system—you might order a vino rosso, perhaps a Chianti, to accompany your spaghetti and meatballs or pizza.  The wine would arrive in a special bottle, slightly bulbous and straw-encased: a fiasco, the Italian word for “flask.”  Or a decorative item on your table might be an empty fiasco transformed into a candle holder, with melted wax dripping colorfully down the neck:  

Source: www.pinterest.com

Buon appetito!

How do we get from the “bottle” sense of “fiasco” to its current sense, “catastrophe, balls-up, total flop,” which fiasco also has in modern Italian?  We go to Italian theatrical slang, where the phrase far fiasco means “to mess up a performance,” say by forgetting your lines or stumbling over the stage furniture.  According to a quotation cited in the OED, this meaning of “fiasco” came into English as early as 1855: “what the theatrical people call a fiasco” (note the italics: it was still a foreign word). 

So far, so good.  It makes sense that an actor’s failing might lead to a catastrophe for the whole play.  But what does a bottle or flask have to do with an actor’s failing?  The authoritative Dizionario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana, at first scrupulously skeptical (“No convincing explanation has been given”), then proceeds to give a historical explanation which even if incorrect is too charming not to record.  In the seventeenth century, so the story goes, the great Italian actor Domenico Biancolelli specialized in the role (or “mask”) of Arlecchino in the commedia dell’ arte, Arlecchino being a witty, resourceful servant who dressed, like the French Harlequin, in checkered motley:  

Biancolelli was famous for his croaking voice, and no doubt it was in just such a voice that, one evening, he improvised a monologue about the bottle or fiasco which he was carrying.  But the audience failed to laugh.  So the actor turned to the bottle and said “It’s your fault if I’m a jerk this evening” (I am translating somewhat loosely), then threw the bottle over his shoulder.  Afterwards, when actors experienced misfortunes onstage, people said “É il fiasco d’Arlecchino!,” “It’s Arlecchino’s bottle!,” a phrase destined to be shortened in time to the one word “fiasco.”

Two thousand years ago, or thereabouts, the Roman poet Horace wrote a verse epistle giving advice to writers, the Ars Poetica.  The poem insists that different genres require different styles, highflying when actors wear the tragic buskin, informal when they don the comedic sock (see socle).  But Horace adds that in certain circumstances—when characters grieve, for instance—even tragedy needs simplification, needs to rid itself of bombast and sesquipedalia verba, “words [figuratively] a foot and a half long.” Sesquipedalia simply combines the Latin words for “one and a half” and “foot,” and even today the measurement, foot-and-a-half sense survives in the scientific name of the yardlong or Chinese long bean, Vigna unguicolata, subsp. sesquipedalis:

Could this legume have been named by a classically trained, Horace-reading, tape-measure-wielding botanist?  In fact, the bean’s length seems closer to 18 than to 36 inches, sesquipedalis a more accurate descriptor than “yardlong.”

In the seventeenth century sesquipedalia gave rise to the English word “sesquipedalian,” which might refer to a literal length, but much more frequently to verbal length—that is, to elaborate, polysyllabic, often Latinate words, diction meant to dazzle rather than be understood. The OED cites a 1661 reference to “Noddle puzling sesquepedalian words.”   A century earlier, these were called “inkhorn” terms. Holofernes the Pedant or Nutty Professor of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost likes the sound of them on his tongue (“extemporal,” “apostrophus,” “thrasonical,” “peregrinate”), though in the play it’s the clown Costard who achieves the ne plus ultra in sesquipedalianism with the almost completely meaningless, thirteen-syllable-long Latin word honorificabilitudinitatibus.

What interests me about “sesquipedalian” is that the word is itself sesquipedalian: polysyllabic, elaborate, Latin-derived, mouth-filling.  It does not merely signify a meaning, it enacts or embodies that meaning.  It is what it’s about, and so belongs to the category linguists call “autological words” or “autonyms” (“self words”).  For many other examples, including “pentasyllabic,” a term meaning “five-syllabled” that is five syllables long, and “wee,” a very small word meaning “small,” and “green” and “italics,” see the list in Wiktionary.  There can be autological phrases, too.  My favorite is something heard all the time these days, a phrase which might be thought the diametric opposite of “sesquipedalian” because it works by shortening rather than expanding, by excising rather than multiplying syllables.  What do many people say in place of that hoary formula “to make a long story short”?  They say “long story short . . .”

Many names for the rooms of a house are perfectly simple and self-explanatory, like “dining room” and “bedroom,” while others, no less clear in meaning, have something to tell us about the complicated history of humans and their habitations.  Attics are so named from the space at the top of an ancient Greek building, a space often enclosed by a façade with columns in the Attic order.  The English “drawing-room” was originally “withdrawing room,” that is, a smaller chamber adjacent to a grander one, where company might be received (see episodes of Downton Abbey, passim) or to which the ladies could withdraw toward the end of a formal dinner, leaving the gentlemen to their brandy and cigars.   A “pantry,” should you be lucky enough to have such a thing in your house, is where you keep glasses, cutlery, the soup tureen given you as a wedding gift and seldom used, or perhaps canned goods; formerly it was a storeroom for bread (French pain).  A “mudroom” in a New England house, floored in tile, equipped with hooks for your coats and a bench for you to sit on while you take off your muddy boots, speaks volumes about what spring is like in that part of the world.  

Meanwhile, “den” brings with it a whole history of civilization, from “animal lair” to “a place of retreat” or “secret lurking place of thieves” (OED), then to “small confined room,” especially one “unfit for human habitation” (OED again), and finally to what it generally means in this country, a cozy room with Barcalounger, perhaps books, certainly big-screen television.  Beyond that, a cultural-studies dissertation might be written, probably has been written, about the semantic shift from “den” to “mancave.”

No name is more interesting than “boudoir,” however.  Witold Rybczynski’s wonderful 1986 book Home: A Short History of an Idea traces the advent of the room to the French eighteenth century, when builders started providing the lady of the house with a “part dressing room, part sitting room,” a place “where special intimates could be received.” Boudoirs responded to the era’s new liking for privacy, and beyond that to a lady’s need for a space peculiarly her own, where she could arrange furniture and décor to her liking, write letters or diary entries, drink chocolate.  The phrase “intimates could be received” hints at the meaning “boudoir” has developed since the eighteenth century: a room where a lady appears fetchingly en déshabillé and ready for sexual intimacies. This is the meaning implied when the “Guy Noir” sequence comes on in Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, with its theme song praising the private eye: “He’s smooth, he’s cool, he’s fast with a gun, / A master in the boudoir . . .”

What Rybczynski fails to mention in Home is the origin of the word “boudoir.”  It means a “place to sulk in,” from the French verb bouder, to pout or sulk. It’s hard to know what to make of this.  Does it embody a sexist assumption, the notion that if a woman wants to go off to a room of her own, depriving herself of masculine company, it could only be that she’s in a bad, sulky mood?  Possibly.  Certainly the origin of the word makes some kind of value judgment about women and their spaces. The nineteenth-century English author Charles Kingsley renders that judgment explicitly (and condescendingly) in his novel Yeast, where we encounter this description of a willful, ultra-feminine, given-to-moods female character:

But what was Argemone doing all this time? Argemone was busy in her boudoir (too often a true boudoir to her) among books and statuettes, and dried flowers, fancying herself, and not unfairly, very intellectual.

Note the careful italics for the second “boudoir.”  Clearly, Kingsley knew it was a French word and what that word originally meant.