May 6, 2019--Jack's List

"I hear you're coming my way."

"In fact we're already in Maine."

"Thought you could slip into my territory without my noticing did you?"

Jack was half right. We did get to Maine on Sunday and to tell the truth I wasn't that eager to be under pressure to see him.

"I'm ready for you," he said, sounding rambunctious. "In fact, in anticipation of your showing up I even made a list of the things we need to talk about."

"Need?" I had the hope that his catch-up list was more about the Red Sox and Yankees than Trump and Barr.

"Top of my list," he said, "is our attorney general, Barr."

So much, I thought, for the Yanks and Sox.

"Barr, for example. He seems to pride himself as being a linguist," Jack said. "A couple of weeks ago, to give you an example, in response to a congressman who was questioning him, he said something about 'abjure.' It's the first time I ever heard that word. And since it appeared that was also true for some House members, Barr smirked and said 'OK, forget the 'abjure.'"

"We have to talk about this? I'm not in Maine to . . ."

"It came up when he was pressed about his saying, the last time he testified, that the FBI was 'spying' on Trump's campaign and when he was called out about it he said, and I'm quoting. I wrote it down so you couldn't wiggle off the hook."

"What does his calling what the FBI was doing in its routine work, investigating possible criminal activity by some of Trump's people, rather than calling it 'investigating' them he used a loaded up term--'spying'-- to slander their efforts and make what's going on sound conspiratorial? From the Deep State?"

In spite of myself I was all riled up.

Ignoring me, Jack said, "Let me read a snippet about this from, I think, your New York Times: "Barr called 'spying' a 'good English word' and expressed no regrets for previously testifying that President Trump's campaign was spied on." Jack added, still quoting, 'I'm not going to abjure use of the word 'spying.'"

"You're exhausting me, Jack. Why do we have to talk about this. You put this at the top of your list? With all that there is to talk about . . . ?" Not that I wanted to talk with him about any of it.

"Like Clinton's, Bill Clinton's famous 'It depends on what the meaning of the word is is.'"

"I can't believe with everything that's happening this is what's on your mind. Top of your list." 

I realized Jack, cleverly, to snare my attention, was trying to divert me into a deep discussion, of all things, about Barr's syntax. Which is largely overblown and pseudo-intellectual. It's almost as if Barr wants to say that though I may be the illiterate Trump's mouthpiece, notice by my choice of words, mainly Latinate, and sentence structure, compound sentences, I'm not one of them. I operate on a higher plane.

I thought Jack was doing a version of the same thing. By plucking "abjure" from Barr's hours of testimony he was attempting to say something about himself. That he, Jack, operated on that high plane as well.

"I've got to go," I said. "But do me a favor."

"Anything."

Let's agree to talk about the Red Sox. At least until I'm settled in."

"As long as you don't ask me to abjure them as they struggle to get started this spring."

"Ugh."

"Or we could always talk about Benghazi. That's on my list too."

I hung up.

February 10, 2015--Latest Homograph

Reading about the Pax Romana early yesterday morning in David Abulafia's The Great Sea, I came across, for me, a new homograph--two words with different meanings and pronunciations but spelled the same way.

Refuse as in to turn something down and refuse as trash, something to throw away.

Etymologically, they come from similar Old French sources--

Refuser, in the case of the verb refuse meaning to reject, literally to avoid; and with the homograph noun pair refuse or trash, etymologically from refus, meaning waste product.

As I have wondered here in the past, how puzzling, how strange, how truly unnecessary that with English so rich with more than 1,025,109 words, and new ones being created every day, that we have any homographs at all. Why not have refuse just mean to turn something down and another word entirely to be a synonym for trash. Say a portmanteau word such as refrash?

But there could be a problem with that since when googling refrash this came up--

Mooning with refrash shout out to Refrash of Nebula

Whatever this means. I think perhaps something having to do with an electronic game. But you get my point.

I do, though, have a speculation as to why we still have homographs.

The Old French etymological roots of refuse/refuse go back to the 14th century when our language was a lot less nuanced and so, at that time, for the sake of efficiency, and since people were busy just trying to survive, there were many homonyms, homophones, and homographs. Over time, as living conditions improved, English filled out exponentially (thanks in substantial part to Shakespeare who was both a wordsmith and multi-thousand word-creator), it would have been easy to clean this up. But English speakers decided not to do so.

Perhaps to leave traces of where we have been as a people, how much we "advanced," and how much ambiguity and mystery we wanted to retain in our language. Linguistic footprints in our amazing English, which, when you think about it, is a magical collective creation. As are all the world's other 7,000 extant languages.

There is no organization, business, or government entity whose job it is to generate new words in response to changing circumstances. Even in language-obsessed France!

We all pitch in from IT entrepreneurs to hip-hop artists to kids on the street.

June 3, 2014--Take My Wife . . . Please.

I always thought the roots of Jewish humor were those described by Sigmund Freud in his book, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

He argued that most Jewish jokes indicate Jewish people's ability to (a) engage in a thorough self-criticism of themselves, (b) advocate a democratic way of life, (c) emphasize the moral and social principles of the Jewish religion, (d) criticize the excessive requirement of it, and (e) reflect on the misery of many Jewish communities.

If you think of Woody Allen as the quintessential schlemiel and self-mocking jokester, only (a) and (e) pertain. Jewish humor is all based on self- and communal criticism and the resulting inner turmoil, misery, and self-pity. There's nothing in Woody's humor or any really funny Jewish humor about democracy or the moral principles of the Jewish religion.

It's hard to think of anything funny to say about any of these high-minded concepts. But Freud was a theorist without much of a sense of humor and so . . .

Recently, I have come to a very different conclusion--

Much of Jewish humor is derived from Jewish food.

Not the food itself, which when ingested can cause all sorts of inner misery and gas (both subjects of many jokes), but the names of our favorite traditional foods--from Bagels to Knishes to Tsimmis.

What other food traditions have so many foods with funny names? Veal Parmigianna? Cog au vin? Meatloaf? Corn beef and cabbage? Not even close to being as funny as Flanken, Ruglach, or Gedempte Fleisch.

A crepe is not funny, but a Blintz is. A porterhouse steak may bring you culinary pleasure, but not as many laughs as Brisket. It could be worth lingering over sweet and sour soup but Matzoh Balls, though tasteless, are funnier.

Neil Simon has a theory that words beginning with K's (or hard Cs) are funny. In the Sunshine Boys, one of the Boys, Willie, an old vaudevillian, gives his nephew a lecture about what's funny--

Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know words that are funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny. You say "Alka Seltzer" you get a laugh . . . Words with "K" in them are funny. And with Cs. Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny.

People who study what's funny agree. There are some sounds in English that are by their nature funny. Those that begin with P's, B's, T's, D's, hard-C's, and especially K's.

These sounds are called by linguists plosive consonants because they are plosive, they "start suddenly." And thus for some reason make us laugh.

Though not funny, this helps explain why Jewish foods, the plosive names of Jewish foods, are so funny. Also, since Jews spend a lot of time dealing with phlegm, often the result of eating the wrong thing, we thus specialize in sounds and words that make creative use of it. Think, for example, of Felix Unger's honking in Neil Simon's Odd Couple.

P-foods include pickled herring, pirogue (dumplings ), pletzel (flat bread), p'tcha (calves foot jelly) and of course pastrami.

B-foods are among the most familiar to non-Jews (and gentile New Yorkers)--babka (two b's plus one k), bialy, borscht, blintz, brisket, and the universal bagel.

T-foods include teiglach (small sweet pastries) and tzimmes (a stew of carrots, yams, and raisins). Both delicious and funny.

Foods beginning with G's are the well-known goulash and gefilte fish as well as chicken skin cracklings called gribbenes, perhaps my all time favorite Jewish food name.

And finally there are all the funny food names that begin with K's--kasha varnishkas (groats with farfalle pasta), kichel (egg-dough cookies), kneidlach (the Yiddish name for matzoh balls), knishes, kreplach (similar to pierogi), kugel (a sweet and savory casserole with lots of broad noodles), and kishke (beef intestines that also is used in expressions such as the alliterative, "Kick him in the kishkes").

When you grow up eating food with these kinds of names (and don't forget lox), a predisposition to humorous stories and jokes is inevitable. Couple this with self-mockery and gas and, Freud aside, there you have the real roots of Jewish humor.