In his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, Tim Walz described waiting to hear the results of his wife’s IVF treatments like this: “The pit in your stomach when the phone would ring, and the absolute agony when we heard the treatments hadn’t worked.”
In a recent book group book, My Side of the River, I read that author Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez also had a pit in her stomach.
But “pit in your stomach” isn’t the expression, or it didn’t used to be. Until a few years ago, we instead felt something inthe pits of our stomachs.
Apprehension or disappointment gives you a sick feeling, way down deep in your abdomen. There’s science to this: your body’s nervous system registers strong emotion, which you feel not just in your mind but, in this case, in your abdominal cavity, in the bottom, or pit, of your stomach. Like this: “I felt a flutter of nervousness in the pit of my stomach.”
But the expression has apparently evolved. Apparently folks believe the expression describes feeling something heavy in their stomachs and call that something a pit. The website Quora entertains lots of questions about this, many of them worded something like, “Why do I have a pit in my stomach?” One person asks, “How do I get rid of the pit in my stomach?”
A snarky responder says, “What? Did you swallow a peach?”
We snarky traditionalists can shake our fists or howl at the moon, but there’s probably no going back. Language changes. The horse is out of the barn, to use another old expression. We no longer have feelings in the pit of our stomach. We have pits in our stomachs.
After the 2016 election, my Pollyanna side (perpetually battling my inner Eeyore) posited a hopeful theory. Possibly, I thought to myself, Donald Trump will bring Americans together. Possibly, I thought, his very badness would open Republicans’ eyes, and we would, kumbaya, come together in common purpose to impeach, to un-elect, or to somehow ditch. At least to oppose.
You all know how that turned out. By and large, Republicans closed ranks around DJT.
Recently, though, certain Republicans and former Republicans have nudged my little Pollyanna self awake. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney, Olivia Troye, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, and other GOPers, having turned against Trump, are now joining forces (more or less) to defeat him and elect Kamala Harris.
One of the most interesting of these renegade Republicans to me is Tim Miller, author of Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell (2022). I talked about his book’s au courant slang in my last post.
Almost everyone except for MAGA diehards wonders what happened to the Republican party. How did it become anti-trade, anti-NATO, pro-Putin, and anti-teacher, and rabidly supportive of an adulterer, sexual assaulter, crooked businessman, and Bible and gold-shoe-selling hustler.
Tim Miller offers some answers. His book begins, “These were my people. I should know.” Miller never supported Trump, but before 2016 he was involved in Republican politics up to the eyebrows. He worked for Jon Huntsman, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and others. The first half of his book is a mea culpa for some of the moral compromises and dirty tricks he was involved in. “America never would have gotten into this mess if it weren’t for me and my friends,” he confesses.
Miller considered it a coup, for example, when he got Jeb Bush on Steven Bannon’s radio show in 2016. Now he realizes the coup was all Bannon’s. Bannon contrived to host the mainstreamiest of Republican politicians, thereby lending credibility to his yucky show and his icky self.
In the rest of the book, Miller interviews friends from his past, some of whom have escaped MAGA’s sway and some who haven’t. His friend (probably former friend) Caroline Wren, still a Trumper, is driven by her boiling hatred of liberals. She tells Miller, “I just don’t feel the need to drive around my Prius drinking a coffee Coolatta with a coexist bumper sticker. . . .Me moving from plastic to paper straws is not actually moving the needle [on climate change].” She is tired of being told what to do, of judgmentalism, and of diversity employment requirements and “left-wing sanctimony.”
Miller’s heartfelt reaction illustrates his witty and adroit style, as well as his good sense.
I was genuinely dumbstruck by this. As someone who loves a chocolate shake, I also find forcible paper-straw usage to be an utterly moronic inconvenience of modern urban life. But connecting that to support for Donald Trump? Being upset with Joe Biden about private companies switching to deteriorating straws? This anger didn’t click with me at all. I mean, seriously. Who cares? What even is a coffee Coolatta? I had to google how to spell it! Are we sure Coolattas are an elite lib thing? Apparently it’s what Dunkin’ Donuts calls their frozen coffee. This feels like the Armstrong of stretches.
(Full disclosure. I drive a Prius, frequently with a coffee in hand. But my coffee is often from Starbucks, not Dunkin’ Donuts, surely a more elite lib thing. I always refuse a straw. Caroline Wren would despise me.)
Miller has left the Republican party and now identifies as an independent. He works as Writer at Large and podcast host for The Bulwark–a website, podcast publisher, and newsletter. The Republican-led outfit’s mission is “to put country over party, to know that we’re all in this together, and to build a home for the politically homeless.” More bluntly, their mission is to defeat Donald Trump and elect Democrats not only to the Executive Branch but to legislative and local offices as well. Find them on YouTube. I don’t always agree with them but am very glad they are there.
The eye-opening content and transgressive humor of Tim Miller’s Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell (2022) deserve attention, but they will have to wait for another day. Instead, I want to focus on Miller’s hip lingo and confess my ignorance of the current colloquialisms lacing his prose.
If I’d been reading Why We Did It on a device, I could have clicked my way to comprehending these words and phrases. Instead, with an antique paper product in my hands, I had to jot down the slang or interrupt my reading to grab my phone. Alas, sometimes I just plowed on and thereby forgot some notable usages. I’ll share with you here a few that I noted, and if you already know them, feel free to dance a superior dance.
Humina, humina, humina (or simply humina) often has a hubba-hubba sexual connotation, but it can also imply a strong emotional reaction that cannot be expressed in words. Miller uses it more like Seinfeld’s yada, yada, yada, meaning “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” Interestingly, it derives from Jackie Gleason’s avoidance of incriminating questions, usually from his wife, Alice, stuttering, “Humina, humina,” instead of answering cogently. Why millennials would have picked up a phrase from “The Honeymooners,” which ended in 1956, escapes me.
“Finkle is Einhorn. Einhorn is Finkle” also derives from popular media. It’s Jim Carrey’s critical line when famous pet detective Ace Ventura figures out who the villain is: his co-investigator Lois Einhorn and perpetrator Ray Finkle are one in the same person! Tim Miller, discussing how some Republicans valorize Mike Pence, demurs: “From my vantage point Pence and the boss [i.e., Donald Trump] were one and the same. Finkle is Einhorn. Einhorn is Finkle.”
In one sentence, Miller provides me with two more puzzlers. He’s writing about Alyssa Farah Griffin, one of the young women who worked in the White House and later became a Never Trumper. Her father, Joe, “the human manifestation of Trump’s political id,” edited a right-wing website called WorldNetDaily. It seems, Miller muses, that Joe should have been working for the White House, not daughter Alyssa. He was, after all, “no more porangi than half the other jabronis walking around the West Wing.”
Maybe you’re way ahead of me, but in case you’re not: the Maori word porangi means “crazy, mad,” and a jabroni is a “foolish or contemptible person.” The latter is an alteration of the Italian giambone, meaning “ham.” There you go: two vivid insults to add to your arsenal.
In another passage, Miller accuses Trump of punishing his staff with boar-on-the-floor treatment. You “Succession” viewers have an advantage here. On that series, the boss humiliates heirs by forcing them to crawl on the floor, oinking, in a competition to find sausages. I didn’t even watch that series but found the scene painful to watch on YouTube. Making Miller’s pop-culture reference bitterly pointed.
If you know any of my selected terms, it’s probably lulz. I’ve seen the term at least three times since i began writing this post several days ago, indicating that it was here all the time, and I just didn’t see it. Lulz answers a question you may never have asked: What’s the plural of lol , that is, “laugh out loud”? (I don’t know why the spelling changes to a “u.”) Miller points out that Trump fires employees on Twitter, such as Reince Priebus, merely for the lulz. Just for the fun of it.
I did not find Tim Miller’s use of these unfamiliar idioms off-putting. I found his style funny, original, and engaging, as is the whole book. (Also depressing.) I’m talking about Why We Did It to everyone and will talk more to you about it in a later post.
Why is a cobbler both a delicious dessert and also a little old man hunched over his bench making shoes? Inquiring writers, enjoying the former, wanted to know.
This is not a riddle. It’s a gnarly etymological question that I can’t adequately explain but will attempt to elucidate.
The root of it all is cob, an old English root that means something like “lump” or “bump” or some sort of rounded object. Think cobblestones, right? A blueberry cobbler, to choose a delectable example, forms a crispy, usually rough and lumpy topping over the bubbling fruit; a cobbler’s top looks cobbled like a cobblestone street.
The shoemaker muddles the issue. Etymological sources employ weaselly phrases like “uncertain origin” and “evidently” and “appears to derive.” So the experts aren’t certain, but cobble, as in cobble together, arose in the 16th century, meaning “to make, mend, or patch.” I like Etymonline’s explanation: “perhaps a back-formation from cobbler (n.1), or from cob, via a notion of lumps.”
I hope to incorporate the phrase “via a notion of lumps” into a future conversation somehow.
I guess a shoemaker, then, cobbles together shoes from lumps of leather, making him a cobbler.
As a lump or a bump, cob can also refer to heads, which are rounded like cobblestones. So a male swan, as head of his family, is called a cob. The word can also mean a spider. (Apparently one of the last appearances of the word in that sense was in The Hobbit in 1937.) Cobs as spiders create webs which decorate my house’s corners and ceilings. A corncob is lumpy and bumpy and woody.
A cob can also mean a sturdy, rounded loaf of bread, and, as you may have encountered in other English novels, a horse of particular type. An equine cob (see photo above) is solid and stocky, lumpier and bumpier than a sleekly elegant steed.
A recent Italian film has furnished us a perfect Wednesday Word: chimera.
La Chimera, written and directed by Alice Rohrwacher, stars Josh O’Connor (Prince Charles in The Crown) as a thief who, with fellow gang members, raids Etruscan tombs and fences ancient artifacts. That prosaic description comes nowhere near the fantastical experience this movie creates. The title itself is a better representation.
In everyday usage, a chimera might be world peace or your dream job or the ideal mate–something you imagine that will never materialize. In science, a chimera is a creature with more than one genotype, created when two zygotes merge.
That scientific usage gets us closer to the word’s root. Imagine a creature composed of a goat, a lion, and a dragon. Oh, and she could breathe fire. According to Homer’s Iliad, she was “of divine stock not of men, in the fore part a lion, in the hinder a serpent, and in the midst a goat, breathing forth in terrible wise the might of blazing fire.”[The Greek roots seem to mean “she-goat” and “winter,” because the monster somehow personified winter. The word came to denote any monster which combined different creatures; it later generalized to any illusion, any imaginary creation of the mind. (I.e., world peace and ideal mates.)
Fortunately for all of us, the Greek hero Bellerophon, with the help of the trusty Pegasus, slew the actual Chimera. You can rest easy. At her death, she was banished to Hades, where I trust you will never go.
Cleveland lies in the path of the April 8th solar eclipse, and everyone’s a-twitter, including Twitter. The Guardians’ home opener also happens today, and the big women’s college basketball championship games were here in Cleveland this weekend. Traffic will be snarled! Pets will be terrorized! Heedless viewers will be blinded! States of emergency have been declared!
Kerr County, Texas, officials are expecting an influx of double or triple the resident population. They have warned their citizens, “Make sure your vehicles are tanked up, that you have sufficient grocery supplies, that your prescriptions are filled and that you are stocked up on provisions for any animals in your care.”
Alas, I read these warnings too late here in Cleveland, and have neither tanked up nor stocked up, nor shopped, nor filled. Having failed my family, desolate in my home, I’m diverting my mind from the oncoming disaster by exploring the roots and meanings of the word eclipse.
The Latin eclipsis derives from the Greek ekleipsis, from a verb meaning “to leave from.” Today, the sun will leave, in effect. Eclipse means “to fail to appear” or “to abandon an accustomed place,” terms which seem to blame the sun (in this case) unfairly.
Perhaps sometimes you forget which is a solar eclipse and which is a lunar eclipse. The heavenly body that disappears names the event. Because the sun, this time, is abandoning its accustomed place, this is a solar eclipse. The moon is eclipsing it.
Think about the word’s usage in other contexts. The musician Livingston Taylor, for example, has been eclipsed by his more famous brother James. That’s a Livingston eclipse. Remember that astronomically the heavenly body that disappears names the eclipse. In a lunar eclipse, the moon (Livingston) fails to appear while it’s hidden (“eclipsed”) by its brother Earth (James).
I enjoyed reading this informative article in Time. You might want to peruse it in solidarity with us in Cleveland from about 2:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time to its totality around 3:13 and beyond. Send a little prayer that we have enough to eat, our medications hold out, and that Roxie’s provisions are sufficient for the duration.
Mandamus is one of those legal terms being bandied about these days. It’s a court order that commands an official to do his or her duty or forbids him or her from doing something he or she shouldn’t be doing. Pundits are discussing this possible writ regarding the Trump documents case in Florida to push Judge Cannon to get a move on.
If you remember amo, amas, amat, amamus, etc., from your first day of Latin class, you might recall that the endings on that verb provide a pronoun subject. Amo means “I love.” Amas means “you love.” Amat means “she, he, or it loves,” and amamus means “we love.” If you studied French or Spanish instead of Latin, you might remember similar endings on those Romance languages’ verbs. (But you should have studied Latin.)
The ending on mandamus, then, means “we.” The verb itself means “command” or “order.”A writ of mandamus is not messing around. It means “we command,” and could result in the removal of an official who doesn’t hop to it. It’s the root of mandate and mandatory.
Like many other terms, mandamus has an Anglicized pronunciation. In Latin, one would say “mahn-dah-moose.” Today’s jurists, however, will not be prosecuted for saying “man-day-mus.” Commonly used in English, the word has taken on an English pronunciation. Imagine, for example, pronouncing bona fide as it would sound in Latin: “bona-feeday.” You’d sound like a pretentious jerk. Normal English speakers make “bona fide” rhyme with “fried.”
Similarly, habeas corpus (literally, “let you have the body”) takes on a long A in the first syllable: “hay-bee-us core-pus.” In Latin, the two A’s in habeas would have that “ah” sound.
More than once over my years of teaching Latin, an eager new student would stop at my desk to report an egregious error on the part of a family member. “I told them it’s pronounced ‘way-toe,’ not ‘vee-toe,'” they might report. I usually didn’t have the heart to correct them.
Keep on pronouncing veto, alter ego, ultimatum, via, ad litem, and ad hoc as you always have. You’re communicating with other English speakers, not ancient Romans.
I never encountered paraprosdokian before, but I liked it as soon as we met.
David Bordwell introduced us, by way of his 2016 book, The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture. Bordwell, one of my husband’s favorite critics, died a couple of weeks ago, and I overheard as John listened to a discussion of the book online.
James Agee, one of Bordwell’s subjects, piqued my interest. I love Agee’s novel A Death in the Family (1957), as I do his 1941 non-fiction examination of Depression-era sharecropping families, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (an affection I share with Jimmy Carter). Agee is one of four film critics Bordwell discusses, the others being Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler.
It’s Farber who most often employs paraprosdokian, sentences that do a 180-degree turn at the end. Here’s an example: “Stalag 17 is a crude, cliche-ridden glimpse of a Nazi prison camp that I hated to see end.” Agee, too, tries his hand: “Stage Door Canteen is a nice harmless picture for the whole family, and it is a gold mine for those who are willing to go to it in the wrong spirit.”
You can probably guess the word’s roots are Greek. (That k is a giveaway.) Coined around 1896, the compound consists of para-, meaning “against,” and prosdokia, meaning “expectation.” A paraprosdokian sentence has a surprise ending, in which the end of the sentence causes you to reevaluate the beginning.
Groucho Marx (see photo above) pumped out some famous ones. “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.” Also, “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read,” often attributed, at least, to Groucho.
Noted wits Dorothy Parker and Will Rogers used the device. Guess which one is whose: “If all the girls attending the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised” and “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”
Read more good ones here. Tell us your favorites in the comments, or, even better, share some of your own!
What? you exclaim. There were no cars in the 1840s! How could there have been dashboards?
You’re right about cars, of course. Karl Benz developed the first car in Germany, acquiring a patent in 1886. Henry Ford’s Model T, regarded as the first successfully mass-produced car, appeared in 1927.
But those autos, you’ll recall, were dubbed horseless carriages (though the term dates back to steam engines). That term demonstrates humans’ propensity for comparing what’s new with what came before, and actual carriages, that is, horsey-carriages, included a dashboard. It didn’t warn the driver that the horse needed fuel or that passengers’ seatbelts weren’t fastened. It didn’t flash or beep.
It consisted instead of a board that protected the driver from mud flung up by the horses’ hooves, mud that was said to be dashed.Dash can have the meaning “hurl,” “smash,” “crash,” “throw,” “toss,” or “pitch.” Think of ships dashed upon the rocks. An angry executive might dash his lunch onto a wall. Psalm 91 says that angels will bear you up “lest you dash your foot against a stone.”
Dirt would be dashed back upon a carriage’s driver, and the dashboard shielded him or her. Modern dashboards are in roughly the same position, that is, in front of the driver, and the name carried over to the new-fangled vehicle.
I looked this word up because the page on this site where I find reader statistics is called the Dashboard, piquing my curiosity. The website’s dashboard contains useful information, like our modern cars’ dashboards. The meaning has strayed from its etymological roots.
No mud is dashed into my face as I face my screen. Only pleasant, informative comments, which you should feel free to add below.
I wrote about R. Eric Thomas here, describing Thomas’s hilarious take on Mister Rogers and the mythical land of Bubbleland in his book of essays, Here for It, or, How to Save Your Soul in America.
Last week I read Thomas’s YA novel Kings of B’more. It’s such a good book. If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably not a Young Adult, but don’t let that stop you. If you enjoy meaningful, original, and funny fiction, it’s the book for you.
The main characters are two young gay Black men, Harrison and Linus, who live in Baltimore. They are funny, smart, and real. Like most adolescents, they watch their parents’ behavior carefully, trying to figure out how to become adults. But they watch with a skeptical, ironic attitude.
Here’s just one example of how gently, realistically funny this book is. The boys observe that their fathers, casual friends, take forever to say goodbye to one another. The two men seem unable both to carry on a conversation and end one. Near the novel’s close, Harrison’s father, Wally, calls Linus’s father to try to resolve some difficulties between the boys and their families. Linus is riding in the car with his dad, Obed, listening in. This is what he hears:
“What’s up, man?’
“How you doing?”
“All right. All right. How are you?”
“Can’t complain, brother. You know.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Right?”
“Right.” Linus was amazed that these two men were apparently friends, possibly good friends . . . and yet they seemed to have nothing to say.
After a while, it becomes clear that Obed is out of the loop. He’s not aware of the problems the boys have been having and doesn’t even know the whereabouts of his wife and son.
“Man, ain’t nobody in this house. . . . I don’t know. I just live here.”
“I know that’s right.”
“Tell me about it.”
Both men laughed. Incredible.
“All right,” said Wally. “Thanks . . . for your help with everything, Obed.”
“Course. Absolutely. Y’all drive safe, okay. We’ll see you soon.”
“All right.”
“Okay.”
“Take care.”
This went on for a while. Linus tuned out slightly.
The boys’ parents are likeable and rounded characters, as are their friends. Harrison’s older sister Corinne seems distant and troubled at first, but ends up shadowing him around the city to keep him out of trouble. This is just one of many sweet surprises in this book.
