Shillelagh: Symbol, Walking Stick, Irish Martial Art

Hello again, everyone! It's been several months since I posted anything here, and I'm glad to be back writing again. In the off chance that anyone's been following this blog, I've been prepping for a big exam all winter, which is now over. Despite my newfound post-exam free time, I've been slow in returning to any kind of regular writing in my spare time... maybe my brain just needed several weeks of laziness to rest up. But now St. Patrick's Day is upon us, and so today's post shall be about a word often associated with Ireland. In fact, this word was one of the first words I came across in Cormac McCarthy's western masterpiece - Blood Meridian - that I didn't understand, which gave birth to my idea of writing a blog post for every unfamiliar word in that book.

That word is "shillelagh." It is not pronounced phonetically as I first thought when I tried to read it out loud (my random guess was "SHILLY-lah") but the correct pronunciation is "shi-LAY-lee." My Celtic friends would probably laugh at my ignorance of the shillelagh, the club or walking stick often associated with Ireland and Irish folklore. I had never seen it in literature before. The word appears on page 10 of Blood Meridian, in the first of countless violent encounters in the novel. The young protagonist known as "the kid" has just bumped into an unfriendly stranger outside an outhouse in the rain, where there is only room for one person to cross the wooden boards over the wet street. Both refuse to yield for the other to pass, and so a deadly fight begins. Because that's the only logical way to solve any problems in the Old West.

"But someone else was coming down the lot, great steady sucking sounds like a cow. He was carrying a huge shillelagh. He reached the kid first and when he swung with the club the kid went face down in the mud. He'd have died if someone hadn't turned him over."

Aside: Isn't it crazy how death in the West always seemed like just a minor misunderstanding away? Or, as Mick Jagger would have said... "just a shout away." Or, as Seth McFarlane would have put it, there are "a million ways to die in the West." However you want to phrase it, McCarthy does a wonderful job bringing the constant dangers of the newly-settled West to life in his story.

But back to today's word: "shillelagh." Where does the word itself come from? Originally, it comes from sail éille [ˈsalʲ ˈeːl̠ʲə], a cudgel with a strap. As with many Irish words, like the names "Sean," or "Siobhan," the "s" sound in sail éille is pronounced as a "sh" sound.

Oxford's dictionary traces the word's origin to County Wicklow in Ireland, from the forest or wood located in the barony of Shillelagh, renowned for its oak trees, which gives the stick its name. Originally, in the 1600s, the word "shillelagh" was merely the term for the wood used to make  cudgels or clubs. It later became associated with the sticks themselves - specifically a heavy walking stick with a large knob at the top. The sticks were typically made of hard blackthorn wood, or else oak. Wood from the root was especially prized because it was less prone to cracking. The wood would be smeared with lard or butter and stuck up a chimney to be cured, giving it a shiny, black appearance. Many shillelaghs had a strap at the top to go around the user's wrist. In popular culture, leprechauns are often pictured holding such knotted sticks. Here's a picture of some different kinds of shillelaghs.

                                                      The many faces of "the ugly-stick."

And hell, because it's St. Patrick's Day, here's a picture of a leprechaun with a cutesy shillelagh.

                                                   "They're all after me lucky charms..."

However, shillelaghs were anything but cute. In fact, they were all business. According to Wikipedia, the heavy top knot could be hollowed out and filled with lead to make it heavier and more formidable as a fighting weapon. In the early 1700s, shillelaghs were used as dueling weapons to settle gentlemen's disputes, much in the way pistols were used in colonial America. More on their origins, if you're interested, here. According to experts and researchers, shillelagh-fighting evolved out of the use of shorter and shorter spears and wattles, and then eventually just blunt walking sticks, shorter clubs and cudgels. In fact, there's a form of Irish martial arts surviving to the present day called Bataireacht, which studies the use of the shillelagh closely. Use of  the shillelagh as a gentleman's weapon eventually fell out of favor in Ireland after its use became widespread by mobs in Irish faction fights, along with other assorted heavy farm equipment. And of course, guns eventually became common, eliminating the practice of shillelagh fighting. But the study of the shillelagh as a weapon lives on among people with strong interests in Irish heritage and western martial arts.

Today, the shillelagh is recognized mainly as a symbol of Irishness, especially in sports and folklore. The Boston Celtics have a logo with a leprechaun leaning on his shillelagh. Also, the famous Jeweled Shillelagh is the trophy for the winner of the college football rivalry game between the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the USC Trojans.

                                                                         The coveted Jeweled Shillelagh

So there you have it - another word we can add to our arsenal, thanks to Blood Meridian. Since reading the novel, I've tested the word on friends, to see if it was familiar to them. To my disappointment, more people seemed to know what a shillelagh was than I had expected. Oh well... at least it's one more entry done.

Despite lacking a drop of Irish blood myself, I want to wish all of you readers a happy and blessed St. Patrick's Day. I hope you enjoyed learning a new word with me through this post, and feel free to check out my other posts if you liked this one. Until next time!

Prestidigitation: Neither Voodoo, Hoodoo nor Hindu

Growing up, I watched a lot of old movies. I stand by my prejudice that older movies - at least in terms of dialogue - weren't as stupid as a lot of movies today. Many of them, including movies geared towards young viewers, used intelligent language and made references to events that required the audience to have some educated knowledge of history before they turned the movie on. It was films like these that shaped me into the nerd I am today. My dad would buy us VHS cassettes of old Disney films and other classics that he had watched as a child. "The Adventures of Robin Hood" with Errol Flynn is still one of my favorite movies of all time - it's a dream adventure in Technicolor. As a 7-year-old boy, it was all I could ask for in a movie. "Pirates of the Caribbean" has absolutely nothing on it in terms of swash or buckle. Or real joy.

                                                              Or timelessness. Jack Sparrow, eat your heart out.

Another favorite was "Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier." A live-action Disney film from the 1960s, it featured the taciturn Fess Parker as the coonskin-capped frontiersman, with the lovable Buddy Epsen as his historical... buddy (argh!) and co-adventurer, Georgie Russell, whose signature phrase throughout their journeys was, "Give 'em what-for, Davy!"

Sometimes, I'll remember a word or phrase from my childhood because it was in an old movie like that. For example, "give 'em what-for" is something I'll never forget. Today's word, "prestidigitation" - in keeping with the idea behind this blog - is brought to you in part by Cormac McCarthy's novel, Blood Meridian, which contains some of the most impressive language I've ever read. At first glance, I thought I'd never encountered that word before in my life. But, thanks to my incredibly random memory of movie quotes heard in childhood, I can prove that this word is also brought to you in part by Disney's "Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier."

But let's get the word out of the way: "prestitigitation". It means trickery or deceit by use of one's hands. So basically parlor trickery. By my count, the word "prestidigitant" appears just once in McCarthy's novel, and even then, not in the main text. Instead, it appears in a chapter synopsis. Each chapter of Blood Meridian begins with an episodic summary of what will happen in that chapter (much like every chapter of Huckleberry Finn does). One pre-chapter synopsis contains the following fragment, describing a scene in the upcoming chapter: "the judge prestidigitant." I remember reading that word for the first time and being dumbfounded.

The judge - that is, Judge Holden - is the terrifying and fascinating villain of Blood Meridian, who chillingly shares certain characteristics of the Prince of Lies himself, and may be responsible for much of the evil circumstances that befall the book's characters. Much of the story's dialogue revolves around whether the judge is a man, or something more - hinting that he is an agent of evil forces, or perhaps even the devil incarnate. He possesses skill and knowledge of things that man would not (or should not) have reason to naturally understand. But I won't dwell on that now. Instead, see my earlier post on the judge here. For now, we'll talk about one of the judge's skills - magic. In the Bible, magic and sorcery are consistently referred to as "false" and evil; by their nature, they are not-of-God. But in Blood Meridian, the judge's tricks are mere sleight-of-hand. Or are they...? Consider: the judge has the ability to throw a coin out over a large campfire and send it glittering across the desert at night, only to have it return to reappear in his hand. Such a feat only helps blur the lines for the reader as to whether the judge is a wily human or a malevolent avatar of supernatural evil.

In the chapter where the word "prestidigitant" appears in the synopsis, the judge works his magic on a poor Mexican boy who is selling puppies in town. He does a coin trick for the boy to get the puppies, and then moments later tosses the helpless dogs into a nearby river to drown. That's just a taste of the judge's unpredictably random, casually nihilistic violence. The judge's creed - his gospel message to the other characters throughout Blood Meridian - is that evil is the only constant core "value" in this world. Notice the perverse religious imagery McCarthy uses here (A ciborium is a vessel used in Catholic liturgy to hold the species of bread shared as the Body of Christ during communion.):

The dogvendor took this for a bargaining device and studied the dogs anew to better determine their worth, but the judge had dredged from his polluted clothes a small gold coin worth a bushel of suchpriced dogs. He laid the coin in the palm of his hand and held it out and with the other hand took the pups from their keeper, holding them in one fist like a pair of socks. He gestured with the gold.

Andale, he said.

The boy stared at the coin.

The judge made a fist and opened it. The coin was gone. He wove his fingers in the empty air and reached behind the boy's ear and took the coin and handed it to him. The boy held the coin in both hands before him like a small ciborium and he looked up at the judge. But the judge had set forth, dogs dangling. He crossed upon the stone bridge and he looked down into the swollen waters and raised the dogs and pitched them in.

After I'd first read that chapter, I still didn't know what "prestidigitant" meant. Had I remembered some of my Latin, I wouldn't have been so frustrated. In Italian, "presto" simply means "fast" or "quickly." I should have made that connection from my classical music background. "Presto change-o" is a comedic exclamation I also remembered from old kids' cartoons. "Presto" comes from the Latin "praestus," meaning "ready at hand." And a "digit" is a finger, coming from the Latin word for finger, "digitus." So, prestidigitation is the art of fast hands, or sleight-of-hand. In a word, it's magic. Here's a dictionary definition:

prestidigitation 

1. A performance of or skill in performing magic or conjuring tricks with the hands; sleight of hand.

   My favorite prestidigitation was when he pulled the live dove out of that tiny scarf.

2. A show of skill or deceitful cleverness.

   His writing was peppered with verbal tricks and prestidigitation.

   
   

When I was a kid watching "Davy Crockett," I didn't understand half the words uttered during the riverboat gambler scene (which I'll provide below), but I still got the gist of it. Crockett and Russell meet a future ally named Thimblerig (whose name is a joke in itself). He challenges Davy to a bet over a parlor trick, hiding a pea beneath one of three thimbles and asking him to choose which one has the pea beneath it. Thimblerig assures onlookers that "no chicanery is at work here, nor are any natural laws violated" - and that his game is prestidigitation, "an old and honorable art - neither voodoo, hoodoo, nor Hindu!" When I was small, I thought he was just making up magic words like, "nadavoodoo, hoodoo, nahindoo." But now, understanding that he's an educated charlatan, I see that his character was supposed to possess a flashy vocabulary that viewers (such as my 7-year-old-self) would instantly recognize as a foil to Davy Crockett's honest, backwoods persona. The scene comes about 3 minutes into this clip.

                                          Skip to the three-minute mark for the prestidigitation scene.

Sidenote: I later found out that Hans Conreid - the wonderful actor playing Thimblerig in the Davy Crockett movie - was also the voice and physical inspiration for Captain Hook in Disney's "Peter Pan." It's funny to see Conried's faces and mannerisms in "Davy Crockett" now, and realize how well the Disney animators caricatured the man in their rendering of the debonair pirate captain.

 

 The resemblance is wonderful.

Sidenote 2: "Sleight-of-hand" is pronounced as "slight of hand," not "slate of hand." So don't mispronounce it at future cocktail parties!

One of my favorite things about blogging so far is that it gives me a channel to share my memories while exploring words - like these random childhood memories of dialogue in "Davy Crockett", which I must have watched dozens of times growing up. In a different medium, or in person, it just wouldn't be the same. So thanks for reading, and subscribe below!

Crenellated: Medievally Speaking

Honestly, I just like the sound of it... "Crenellations. Crenellate. Crenellated." Try saying one of those out loud. Really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? A wonderful blend of crunchy and mellifluous consonants together in the same word. The acclaimed author/human thesaurus Cormac McCarthy has a penchant for using words that have no reason to be recognized in our current society. If you don't understand the backgrounds and contexts of the words in his bag of tricks, you'll likely miss out on the images he's invoking. By my count, he uses the word "crenellated" just once in the novel Blood Meridian, but it's used masterfully to bring a visual pattern or an effect to mind. 

I actually used to know what crenellations were when I was younger (and nerdier). I wasn't kidding  about how I sensed my vocabulary retracting after high school. Anyway, I'm happy to announce that, after seeing this word in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, I've returned it to my vocab arsenal. My gut instinct on first sight was that it either had to do with royalty (coronations, being crowned) or the top of the head (cranium, or also being crowned). As it turns out, it's not THAT far removed from either of those things. Crenellation is a pattern found on top of castle walls, but it's not a cognate with "cranium" or "coronation" as far as I can tell.

 This is an example of crenellation: 

                                            Specifically, the ridges and spaces at the top of the wall.

According to Wiktionary, the word "crenellation" originates from the Latin crenella as a diminutive of crena (literally “a notch or serration”). The word also appears in Old French as cren (“a notch”) or crener (“to notch”). The word shares its origins with the common English word cranny, similarly meaning “a small opening, as in a wall or rock face; a crevice.”

McCarthy uses the word "crenellated" quite wondrously in one of his most grandiloquent passages in Blood Meridian, in which he describes horsemen, seeming to be made of the rocky environment itself, materializing through the shimmering heat of the desert: 

“Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.”  

Perhaps you're asking, "How do you get an adjective used for describing solid castle walls to describing shimmering heat?"

McCarthy is using an incredibly specific, archaic word to describe the visible heat in the desert, shimmering and rising from the ground in an almost solid pattern of crests and valleys - reminiscent of the ridged pattern atop a castle wall. It's likely that he's just trying to tell us that the heat makes the ground seem to rise and fall like the undulating crests and valleys of a wavelength. But where did McCarthy come up with this word?

In ancient and medieval times, towns were surrounded by fortress walls to deter invaders. The tops of these walls had walkways called parapets where defenders could hurl things down onto attackers. Architects and stoneworkers created patterns on the tops of castle walls called battlements, where archers could stand and quickly shoot down, but then take cover while reloading. The patterns formed rectangular ridges and blocks, separated by smaller spaces - gaps where the archers could stand when shooting down. To reload or take cover from enemy fire, they could step to the side and hide behind the ridges of the wall. The ridges or blocks were called "merlons." "Crenels" were the names for the spaces between the merlons on the battlements. If this isn't making sense, just look at this picture of a battlement.

                                      Making sense now? A pattern of crenels and merlons is called crenellation.

The dictionary definition probably explains its function most clearly:

crenellation (plural crenellations)

1. A pattern along the top of a parapet (fortified wall), most often in the form of multiple, regular, rectangular spaces in the top of the wall, through which arrows or other weaponry may be shot, especially as used in medieval European architecture.
2. The act of crenellating; adding a top row that looks like the top of a medieval castle.

I used to know what crenellations were, because as a young boy, I was really into knights and castles, and the names for their weapons, fortifications, and equipment. Alas, I must have cleared some of those terms from my brain around the time I needed to free up some space for biology terms and algebraic equations. Shame, because I don't remember those anyway. But there you have it - the meaning and origins of "crenellated." Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

As always, thank you for visiting. If you're a fan of learning more about weird words and their origins, then feel free to subscribe to Senseless Twaddle to stay updated on my posts. Hope you enjoyed this entry and see you next time!

Suzerain: Principalities, Powers, and the Prince of Darkness

Ahhhh, so. Now we finally come to one of those wonderful words from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, as promised in my introductory post. In case the title's not clear, today's word is "suzerain." No, it doesn't refer to the reign of a matriarch named Suzie or something. However, it does have to do with rulers and subjects. Put simply, a suzerain is a feudal overlord. But in the context of Blood Meridian, where I first encountered it, "suzerain" carries layers of fascinating meaning.

First, allow me to introduce the book for the uninitiated, since I expect to draw on its many archaic words frequently for blog-fodder. Blood Meridian is the most senselessly brutal novel I've ever read, following a posse of mercenaries through Mexico and the American Southwest on a killing spree based on historical events surrounding the Glanton gang - a small regiment of thieves, murderers, rapists and ex-soldiers who earn their commission with the Indian scalps they bring back from the desert. In addition to exterminating the Apaches, they kill and scalp almost everyone who crosses their path, often after taking advantage of their hospitality. There is no remorse among the killers, and no real motivation offered for their almost reflexively violent actions; it is simply "the way things were" in the Wild West, according to McCarthy. He uses the cosmic isolation and natural danger of the desert, along with the unchecked violence of that lawless period, to construct a broader fatalistic outlook of the entire world - one that recognizes no divinity or goodness in the earth or the body, but only (perhaps) in the soul.

For this reason, many literary critics have identified Blood Meridian as a decidedly Gnostic text. Historically, Gnosticism was an early competitor to Christianity during its rise in Hellenistic cultures. It remains one of the most infamous of Christian heresies, for its rejection of the inherent goodness of the body and of creation in general. In Gnosticism, evil is not separated from the goodness in the world; evil is simply everything that "is." Similarly, the violence in the novel is different from violence in most novels, in that it exists as neither a plot device nor a moral teaching point. It's just always there - impersonally, like everything else, without apology or explanation - as an intrinsic quality of the world. Thus, the world of Blood Meridian is inherently cruel, and human history from the beginning is described as a cycle of war and destruction with no real meaning - senselessly violent, nasty, brutish and short. Among all its variables, history's one constant is war: "War is god."

McCarthy's mouthpiece for this doubtful yet compelling discourse is the novel's fascinating figure: Judge Holden. The Glanton gang is goaded and guided by this supreme intellect, described as an enormous, hairless, seven-foot-tall albino man who speaks multiple languages, and who possesses superhuman strength, marksmanship, knowledge of chemistry, geology, botany, history, anthropology, philosophy, scripture, art, law, and even magic tricks. He dances and plays the fiddle marvelously, he never seems to age, and he boasts that he will never die. Adding to his mystique is the fact that every man in the company claims to have seen him earlier in life, prior to riding with him in the Glanton outfit. The judge is evil personified, and he sows evil wherever he goes. Many times, the judge displays an almost supernatural knowledge of mankind and the world. He is based on a supposedly historical person named Holden, but McCarthy lends him a literary air of impossible charm and wisdom that belies a bottomless evil. He is a scholar, a sadist, a pervert and a liar. Throughout the book, he incites mobs, orchestrates massacres, presumably rapes and scalps small children, and kills a litter of puppies after buying them. In his dialogues with men, he is always smiling or laughing, usually in a knowing, sinister manner. One of the most repeated and chilling lines in the book is, "The judge smiled."

                                                             He's a bad dude alright. 

Apart from the judge, the story is episodic and repetitive, with long, monotonous stretches of desert travel punctuated by sudden, graphic, and matter-of-fact violence. After countless acts of atrocity, even the violence becomes banal and boring to the reader. And this is the Gnostic point McCarthy is trying to convey throughout the entire novel - that violence in this world holds no moral or special symbolic meaning, outside of the fact that it exists and always will exist, because the world is irredeemably evil. So why celebrate such a dark, difficult book, and why is it widely considered McCarthy's greatest work? There are many answers, but great art speaks for itself. So, I'll present you with the following snippet, in which the judge - the great orator of the novel - expounds his nihilistic views upon the Glanton gang like a perverse Christ to his apostles:

"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. 

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

Needless to say, after about 350 pages of such language, the standard for your mind's diet of reading material becomes significantly raised! At least, that's how I feel after finishing the book. Very few writers will ever be able to match McCarthy's prose, which critic Steven Shaviro aptly described as "cosmically resonant, obsessed with open space and with language, exploring vast uncharted distances with a fanatically patient minuteness," much like Herman Melville's detailed descriptions of seafaring life in Moby Dick. It almost feels as if the language has been handed down from on high, as a sort of Gnostic gospel. McCarthy uses precise and archaic words that I've never come across in any other book. He casually tosses around "pluviophile," "siliceous," and "thaumaturge" (all of which I hope to touch upon eventually in this blog). Yet, in the midst of this alphabet soup, he stops and takes the time to define one word for us: the word "suzerain." This signals to the reader that it must be of thematic importance. Naturally, the word is explained by the ever-eloquent Judge Holden, the arch-villain in a novel bepopulate (see what I did there?) with villains. Halfway through the novel, the judge explains to the gang that nature is dangerous to man because it is still unknown and not fully tamed. The judge holds the following dialogue with a gang member:

"[O]nly when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before [man] will he be properly suzerain of the earth.
What's a suzerain?
A keeper. A keeper or overlord.
Why not say keeper then?
Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgments. [...] 
The judge placed his hands on the ground. [...]This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation."

The relevant definition of "suzerain" from Merriam-Webster's dictionary is "a superior feudal lord to whom fealty is due" (presumably even from other lesser lords). It originates from the Middle French suserain, from sus (meaning "up") and -erain (as in "soverain" or "sovereign"). So, literally an above-reigner; an over-lord. The sus- prefix comes from the Latin sursum, which comes from sub ("up") + versum (the neuter of versus, past participle of vertere ("to turn").

This notion of being a "suzerain" or ultimate ruler over the earth is a Gnostic concept. How so? Well, the ancient Gnostics considered the material universe inherently evil, while the nonmaterial universe beyond it was good. The malevolent creator-god of the material world was known as the "Demiurge." For followers of Gnosticism, the Demiurge was not the same deity as the transcendent God who stood outside space and time, but rather a sort of demigod who only ruled over the material world. The Demiurge and his minions, known as Archons (the Greek word for "ruler" -ἄρχων, pl. ἄρχοντες) jailed and fed on the souls of the dead. "...[T]he soul is the food of the Archons and Powers without which they cannot live, because she is of the dew from above and gives them strength." Gnostics believed their souls could only escape the Archons and other evil powers and reach God through gnosis ("knowing") - an attainment of secret spiritual knowledge and separation from the things of the material world. Interestingly, the Christian Bible makes a couple passing references to evil spiritual forces known vaguely as "principalities and powers." As they've cropped up in church readings, I've often wondered what those titles meant and where they came from. As it turns out, principalities and powers are parallel to, and may actually stem from the Gnostic concepts of the Demiurge and Archons - the malevolent spiritual keepers or jailers of this world. How cool is that?

The judge, therefore, may be seen as an Archon - a demonic keeper-spirit who walks the world collecting souls to himself, devouring and destroying them in the process. As evidenced by his speech about the world, he stands opposed to Creation and the divine spark of free will that animates every creature. He lectures that none of our actions matter, and that our existence is chaotic and predetermined to end in calamity. He resents the autonomy of life on earth and wishes to catalog every single living and nonliving thing in a sketchbook he carries with him throughout the novel. In doing so, he says he will eventually gain control and power over the whole world. In short, he's probably the biggest "control-freak" in literature. But his mission stands incomplete by the end of the novel, giving the reader some hope that not all is yet under the stewardship of evil. Obvious parallels can be drawn to the Devil in Christian literature and scripture, who is called "the prince of darkness" and the "ruler of this world."

Nick Cave (another amazing wordsmith) wrote an unsettling, hypnotic song called "Red Right Hand," which I now interpret as a skin-crawling illustration of this shadowy, charismatically evil figure poised to become the world's overlord. I wonder if Cave has ever read Blood Meridian... his spooky, Western-tinged warning of a tall, sinister man who enlists insecure, vulnerable and weak souls to become "microscopic cogs in his catastrophic plan," comes eerily close to describing the judge - a man who appears out of nowhere in the birthplaces of darkness, vice and crime: at the edge of town, in the slums and barrios, in nightmares, and even "in your TV screen," which may be symbolic of the harmful worldly influences we're exposed to and fed by the media today.

                                          "He's a ghost, he's a god, he's a man, he's a guru."

As we've seen, the judge is out to win over, and then forcefully dominate, all life. The men in his gang are his followers as well as his unwitting prey. John Joel Glanton, the shrewd captain of the Glanton gang, seems to have made a Faustian pact with the judge, and he frequently benefits from the judge's counsel on the trail. But all his tactics and successful raids are for naught - like the rest of his crew, Glanton meets an unremarkably nasty end by the end of the book. But the judge slips away, conceivably to find a new band of followers to intellectually dazzle and dominate, leading their souls to ruin through war and consuming them through violence. To any churchgoing Christian, such characteristics are  reminiscent of the Devil, who is likened by St. Peter to a ravenous beast who roams the world, luring souls away to their destruction: "Be sober and watch: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour. Whom resist ye, strong in faith: knowing that the same affliction befalls your brethren who are in the world. But the God of all grace, who hath called us into his eternal glory in Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little, will himself perfect you, and confirm you, and establish you." (1 Peter 5: 8-10.) So the judge is a Gnostic Archon - a Principality - a Christian demon, representative of the "father of lies" - Satan himself. What a frightening, rich literary character!

On a tangential, pop-cultural note, McCarthy's judge is also very similar to Christopher Nolan's incarnation of the Joker in the film, The Dark Knight. A self-described "agent of chaos," the Joker is a charismatic liar with an intimate knowledge of human weakness. He is an orchestrator of destruction who incites his followers to evil, but casually discards them after their roles in his plans run their courses.  He exists solely to upend the plans of the film's moral characters, whom he dismisses as "schemers trying to control their little worlds" - trying to show them "how pathetic their attempts to control things really are." He is albino-white and permanently smiling, much like the judge, at humanity's feeble and self-righteous attempts to impose moral order over the cruel world, taunting: "Why so serious?" He is evil without conscience or purpose - he is simply the chaotic evil that always exists.

                             "I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are."

Do I buy into the thought-provoking worldview of the Joker - the worldview of Blood Meridian? No. In case it's not evident from my previous post about death and loss, I'm a Catholic who recognizes the sin of despair inherent in Gnosticism. It's a needlessly fatalistic worldview that discounts all the concrete goodness to be found in the world. Nonetheless, it's still interesting to ponder and it touches upon the truth that suffering exists and will continue to exist in spite of our attempts to limit it. However, the human mind can never comprehend all the things of the world - and no one ever has been a suzerain over all the earth. Not yet, at least... the book of Revelation speaks of a time when the Devil, or the influence of evil, eventually comes to rule the entire world, culminating in the end times. (But like any good practitioner of exegesis, I would never read a highly symbolic book like Revelation literally like that.)

This wraps up our first official "McCarthy" word for this blog - suzerain. Hope you got something out of my discussion and explanations. Feel free to sound off in the comments section below. And as always, thanks for visiting and reading!

Introduction: "There Are No Dirty Words, Ever."

That quote was uttered by the Canadian poet laureate and internationally revered songwriter, Leonard Cohen. Black-and-white film footage from a 1965 hagiography titled, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, shows the young Cohen in a recording session. A producer's voice is heard, saying: "...and if at any place you should come across a dirty word [in the poetry about to be recorded], you have to delete it." This warning provokes a sharp retort from the characteristically genial and self-deprecating songwriter: "Yeah, well, there are no dirty words - ever."

And with that, hello there! Welcome to "Senseless Twaddle," my little armchair linguist project. I started this blog to actively expand my own vocabulary, because frankly, I felt myself getting dumber and less articulate every year after leaving high school. If your grammar school experience was anything like mine, you probably had to learn "vocab lists" of new words each week. I don't know about you, but I actually miss those lists nowadays. So, through this blog, I'll be making up my own lists of vocabulary words - hopefully one or two new words per week, or as time allows.  (Update: that goal is way harder that I anticipated when I originally wrote this post.) It'd be cool to create my own nerdy niche in this small corner of the internet, where fellow language and literature nerds could find informative posts, leavened with irreverent humor and pop culture references along the way. Hopefully the tonal cocktail will come out to about 3 parts Webster's Dictionary, 1 part Cracked Magazine. That's the idea, anyway. I'll focus mostly on rarely-seen, interesting words, and archaic or unusual phrases or idioms that have fallen out of common usage in speech and writing. At some point, I hope to dip my toe into the rogue's lexicon of 19th century street crime, just to sample some of the colorful terms used by unsavory types back then. Interesting, no? And yes, the Rogue's Lexicon is actually a thing.

When beginning a blog about words, it's hard to find a better inspirational starting point than Leonard Cohen, the aforementioned poet and songwriter. He interweaves everyday human behavior with a cosmic mysticism; he mentions sacred texts in the same breath as vulgar jokes; he chuckles wryly at the tragicomedy of the human condition while offering up his sage, poetic lyrics like some secular musical priest. The spirit of Cohen's title quote, emphasizing the power that imbues even the crudest of words, subtly resurfaces again and again in his best songs. On film, though, he delivers his thesis with such bluntness that we're obliged to stop and think on it for a moment.

                                      
                                       See the quote at 00:30; watch the rest for an overview of Cohen's illustrious career.

After reflecting on that quote myself, I assure you that I didn't go gleefully screaming obscenities through schoolyards at my first convenience (as fun as that would've been). But I did turn a corner in my thinking about language. My ah, shall we say "extended" vocabulary - previously relegated to locker-room-status unfit for dinner-table discussions - suddenly appeared equal in rank to all other "respectable" words in its ability to communicate a thought. I realized that "swear words" sometimes convey a specific meaning more serviceably than any other word, and that they can be useful or even admirable in the proper context. Looking back through history, it's evident that some words once considered "bad" have since become dulled by time, stripped of their shock value. As children, we're taught not to use certain words; and yet, as we grow up, they often lose their sense of scandal, becoming casual and commonplace. (But maybe we're just jaded because our list of gross and offensive terms in English seems to have grown exponentially.)
 
So why the obsession with words? Why devote an entire blog to them?

Maybe it's because I find words equally magical and practical. Having a mastery of vocabulary is impressive, but one rarely needs to understand the exact definition of a word to sense its general meaning - its color, its connotations, its message. The mere sound of certain words can help us piece together a feeling or an image otherwise unexplainable. We may not understand every single word discretely, but in their proper contexts we feel their meanings. THAT is the closest I can get to articulating my love of words.

To illustrate my point, consider the fact that even total nonsense is capable of stirring some sort of meaning in our minds. Take Lewis Carroll's famous poem, Jabberwocky. Sure, he was probably a tad more blitzed on his opiates than usual when he penned, "'Twas brillig..." that particular day. But don't tell me the sound of "slivy toves" and "borogroves" being "mimsy in the gabe" doesn't conjure up some kind of pastoral scene in your own (presumably opiate-free) mind. Without question, the verses of Jabberwocky evoke sound-scenes that you can't quite put your finger on. The words are complete codswallop, yet they're still connotative of... something, in spite of their meaninglessness. Isn't that fascinating? Those "slivy toves" could easily have been "sighing doves," had English evolved slightly differently, Ray Bradbury-style, a la the eerie butterfly effect in A Sound of Thunder. But I digress.

The existence of this artistic image is proof that the fearsome Jabberwock - a creature described in almost complete gibberish  - can still stir something tangible in the human mind:

                                                But seriously, Mister Dodgson, you need to lay the hell off the opiates...

There's even a rich history behind our most crass expressions. To this day, people cannot come to a consensus over the etymological root of the word "fuck," which has been around for hundreds of years. (And no, it's not from "Fornication Under Consent of the King.") By virtue of its mystery, that so-called "dirty" word glows with the wealth of cultural information we can glean from the history surrounding it (scholarly dissertations have been attempted), not to mention the varied and entertaining forms it can take today. It functions as a verb, noun, adjective, adverb, and a whole range of interjections, spanning the emotional spectrum from rage, frustration and disgust to humorous emphasis, excitement and even intense joy. Because it may be used solely for emphasis, devoid of any additional meaning, "fuck" and its related forms often become filler for purposes of scansion, e.g., as syllabic placeholders in rap lyrics. Thus, the F-Bomb and its progeny can be dropped nearly anywhere for emphasis or humor, rendering them almost as meaningless, and yet just as real, as Carroll's "slivy toves." The cringe-inducing F-word is indeed so ubiquitous in pop culture now that its shock value has significantly diminished, and its actual meaning has faded. Yet its origins and history continue to provide fodder for discussion (e.g., this very blog entry). So, there's significant truth to Cohen's claim that all words, no matter how ugly or taboo, contain some kind of beauty, inasmuch as we're willing to investigate them.

On the lowest (scientific/utilitarian) level of analysis, what are words worth? They're simply lifeless tools for a species' communication and, by extension, survival. On a slightly higher, philosophical level, words may amount to something more than just tools, but at best they are still mankind's inadequate attempts to grasp at the Forms and to convey their essences to each other. But at an aesthetic level, words may finally attain the exalted status of Art. Used deftly, they can burn original, haunting, painful, glorious, iconic images indelibly into our memories. And at a theological level, words can transcend even Art, affording mankind a noble means of imitating the divine; they allow us to "recreate," or take some small part in Creation with a capital C. After all, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Creation involved God "speaking" the cosmos into existence. In Genesis, Adam speaks to give names to all the animals of the garden, thereby signifying mankind's dominance over them. The opening of the Gospel of John states, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The original "Word" in Greek (λόγος or Logos), was fraught with layers of meaning for the ancients that our English translations can never hope to fully capture. In the Christian tradition, the Logos is equated with God himself - the divine Truth and the very meaning of life.

Similarly, our words have the power to cause being - to beget the existence of things - even if only in the mind. To participate in the work of Creation is the highest of honors, and it may help us at least partially understand Leonard Cohen's near-religious reverence for all words.

At this point, if this all sounds a bit long-winded or pretentious, you're probably right. I apologize, and I don't expect my future posts to ramble quite so much. But hey, I'm allowed to wax a bit grandiloquent in my mission statement, am I wrong?

                                                                  Alright then.

So now, at last, comes the point of all this rambling - the reason behind my idea for this whole blog. I'm constantly fascinated by language. I'm curious about the origins and intersections of different dialects; the separation points between a dialect and a fully different language; the idiomatic phrases used by foreign cultures; and even those discontinued colloquialisms glimpsed in near-extinct pockets of my own American culture. There's a library's worth of such hidden words just waiting to be uncovered and brought back into common knowledge, even if only as novelties. If I can blow the dust off of archaic terms and present them in my own little trove to a new group of readers, however small, then I guess I'll have accomplished my goal with this blog.

                                                                                   Start out small, right?

To that end, I hereby put forth my intention to form a compendium of English words and phrases seldom encountered in modern speech and writing - words orphaned by time and neglect, buried under generations of non-use, or shunted into ignorance and obscurity alongside the forgotten trades and obsolete industries that birthed them. I want to mine the rich vocabulum of old-time crooks, criminals, critics, saints, singers, sailors, robbers, cowboys, pirates, farmers, merchants, clergymen, highwaymen, artists, gamblers, carnival barkers, and countless other colorful characters in the changing historical landscape of the modern English language.

Right now I'm reading a truly staggering novel by Cormac McCarthy, a master wordsmith who at times almost requires a thesaurus and a dictionary to understand, thanks to the breadth of his vocabulary. But that's the kind of bog in which I'll gladly struggle. Or even wallow. So, I'll begin this catalog with some of the more unique words that Mr. McCarthy employs in his work.

If you've read this far, then I hope you'll join me again in my pursuit of words unusual, challenging and arcane. Although blogging feels to me like a minor exercise in narcissism (or maybe a major one, considering the amount of time I've spent rereading and editing this post), I do hope to add my own, hopefully worthwhile markings to the already graffiti'd walls of The Internet. And if you have a word you'd like to learn about, please don't hesitate to let me know in the comments... Hopefully we'll both learn something here.

 Thanks for following!