Category: words

Country folk get a bad rap in the English language (indeed, in most languages). Five months ago, we glanced at the word villain. The word once denoted a farmhand, but now universally refers to the antagonist of a story or a situation. Back in October, I puzzled about why we should equate productive men of the soil with calumny and scheming. After all, none of the great villains of Shakespeare or Virgil are peasants.

As it turns out, we can chalk up the journey from rural hired hand to malefactor to garden-variety classism. Workers bound to a villa (plantation) were considered rough and unmannered, especially compared with knights and squires. Indeed, villeins formed an official social class in feudal Europe, much as peóns did in colonial Latin America. Since hayseeds couldn’t tell a dinner fork from an oyster fork, and also since they knew nothing of courtly manners, they must be to blame for crimes most foul, at least in the minds of the nobility. Hence, villain, the bad guy/gal.

Two other English words also make the leap from “country rube” to “disagreeable person,” meaning-wise. Boor means “farmer,” and comes from the same Germanic root that gave us the Dutch boer. And like villain, the word assumes a certain lack of refinement — in fact, that is the very definition of boor in modern English. Churls were one rung above the villeins, being free farmers rather than serfs, but all that means is they got off the hook for murder, theft, and world domination. Instead, their coarse ways gave us the adjective churlish and the noun churl, an ill-tempered, rude person. I’d rather have world domination.

Lest we let the upper classes off the hook too easily, the words bourgeois and bourgeoisie came to describe the middle and upper-middle classes. It acquired its perjorative connotation of vain materialism during the French revolution, when it was well-earned. Karl Marx hammered the final nails in the coffin of bourgeois respectability, at least in common-use English.

Interestingly, both bourgeois (think burgher) and villain are words which etymologically suggest “city dweller.” So I guess the agrarians get their linguistic revenge in the end, proving that an Arkansas toothpick beats an oyster fork any day.

 – Otto E. Mezzo

220 and 284 walk into a bar. “Hey!” the craft mixologist yells, “we don’t serve your kind here!”

“I thought public houses are open to the public!” the outraged numbers shoot back.

“We recently re-branded as a social club. We only serve sociable numbers.”

“We assure you, we won’t cause trouble,” the still fuming numbers insist. “We’re quite amicable.”

“You don’t look very friendly to me,” sneers the cocktail artisan, refreshing his mustache wax. “Come back when you’re betrothed and we’ll talk.”

“What about me?” asks 496, sitting at the bar typing on a vintage Underwood.

“You can stay. You’re perfect!”

MAN: “1. An adult human male; 2. A human being of either sex; a person.”

WOMAN: “An adult human female”

– Oxford English Dictionary

Lexicide’s mailbox is often stuffed with myths, mishearings, and misapprehensions. One of the most common misunderstandings we get involves the origins and usage of man and woman.

First things first: woman does not mean “from man (a male person).” That folk etymology comes from Genesis 2:23:

And Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (King James Version)

In Hebrew, the words for woman and man (אִשָּׁה ishah and אִיש ish) might carry this relationship, although there is considerable debate about that. In English, however, the origins of the words man and woman are clearly recorded. Woman comes from Old English wifmann, meaning “female person”, and man comes from Old English mann, meaning… “person.”

If you’re wondering why Old English was so sexist as to use the same word for “human” and “male”, well, it wasn’t. The male counterpart to a wifmann was a wermann, wer* being a cognate of the Latin vir, meaning strength or power (as in a virile triumvirate). Wif gave us the obvious “wife” and meant… “wife.”

Okay, so maybe Old English had a male-centric bent. I had heard once that wif was related to weave (women presumably doing much of the warping and woofing), but current scholarship no longer favors that connection. Women were meant to be wives and wermen were meant to have power. Hey, no one said pre-Enlightenment Anglophones were enlightened.

For modern English writers, the question arises: is it okay to use man as a stand-in for all people? The situation is complicated by our rich treasury of man quotations:

For man also knoweth not his time… (Ecclesiastes 9:12, KJV)

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… (John Donne)

Man is the cruelest animal. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

I could go on. Proponents of gender-neutral language would urge us to use person, humanity or humankind in place of man, and I certainly grant that when it works, go for it. But in other instances, might sometimes man be the right word?

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2)

Setting aside the fact we don’t mess with Shakespeare’s words, would this monologue be improved if it were “What a piece of work is humanity”?

What about Neil Armstrong’s famous utterance? Would it have had the same power if he’d said “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for humankind”?

Those are good questions. But most of us are not Shakespeare, Donne, or Armstrong. For that matter, most of us won’t ever address the human condition in a brochure or web page. If we do, we have the option to craft phrases which are inclusive and poetic at the same time – at least until the client changes them.

 – Otto E. Mezzo

*Wer survives today in only one modern English word: werewolf (“man wolf”).

References: http://www.balashon.com/2008/10/ish-and-isha.html

https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman

https://medium.com/interesting-histories/interesting-histories-female-male-woman-man-fd8f436a554c

Were ancient ‘wives’ women?

I didn’t expect to write five posts on demonyms, but here we must brake the trolley, this time outside the Anglosphere. My aside on growing up Chinese American (as opposed to, say, Chinish or Chinesque American) took me back to the days of Chinese school, those glorious Sunday afternoons spent indoors practicing calligraphy and vocabulary instead of playing kickball or jumping bikes off curbs. In Chinese, we learned, the United States was mei guo (美国), literally “the beautiful country.” Americans are mei guo ren, or “beautiful country people.” I don’t know which Chinese came up with that, but as an American, I am flattered.

Also as an American, I’m conflicted, as there are two continents called America, so technically Chileans and El Salvadorans are also American. No other country seems to have the awkward co-opting of an entire continent, much less two. Well, there is Australia, of course, but the country and the continent are synonymous. For the one other nation that takes the name of its continent, South African rolls easily off the tongue in a way that United States of American does not. But non-Americans tell me there’s no cause for angst. Spanish speaking Latin Americans describe residents of the United States as estadounidense. And everyone else in the world just calls us Americans without a second thought. My sister reported that her German freunden used the informal Ami.

Too bad we and the rest of the world don’t pay Deutschlanders the same consideration. No other country’s name (in my limited store of knowledge) is mangled overseas more than Deutschland. The French, Spanish, and Arabs call the country after the Alamanni tribe. The Finns call it Saksa after the Saxons. And the majority of the world, from Anglophones to Hindi speakers to Somalians, derive their designator from the Latin name for the region: Germania. (I have never read that Germans are put off by this, but they should be by the Lakota Sioux, whose word for Germany translates to “bad speaker land.”) Only the Swedes, Danes, Dutch, Norwegians, and Icelanders — interestingly, all linguistic neighbors to Germany — choose to honor the natives’ choice of country name with their own versions of Deutschland.

Wait, there’s one more people who get it right, or try to — the Chinese. Their name for Germany is de guo (德国), which literally translates to “Deutsch country,” but sounds like “land of virtue.” Ausgezeichnet!

— Otto E. Mezzo

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany