I’m going to first indirectly pick on my friend JohnnyB, who is a bit zany and has himself taken to the stage to perform comedy (all this will tie together—I promise). Johnny’s very name (without the B) is implicit in zaniness, because Johns of the world, you have further reason to take offense.

First there’s that slang for “one who partakes in prostitutes” slang. Then there’s that euphemism for toilet. And now, another offense, one not so obvious. A long time ago, John was portrayed as a clown. He was zany. Literally.

The word zany traces back (through Middle French) to an Italian theatre form called “Commedia dell’ arte,” a partially improvised farce using broad stock characters wearing masks. Among the form’s many stock characters (blowhard, geezer, girl-chaser, lovers, harlequin) is the wacky, clownish servant. Zanni. Clownish Zanni. Zany Zanni. And Zanni is a regional familiar version of Giovanni . . . or John.

By the early 1600s the word came to adjective use, first meaning “ridiculous” and then taking on the meaning of “crazy, outlandish.”

So when you call someone zany, you are invoking the insulting portrayal of that John Fool, though anyone named John would have to be really zany to actually worry about it.

(Commedia dell’ arte also gave us the name of piece of clothing generally worn by Johns, zany or otherwise, but that’s a musing for another day.)

Always use it as a verb, Mr. Brohaugh?

Yes. Without fail! . . . oops.

I bring this up because of Christopher Beam’s recent Slate coverage of the increasing use of fail as a noun (which I discovered by way of Editrix alert). I suggest that Slate’s shot at the noun was not a complete succeed. For one, modern use of the noun is slangish and a bit distracting, but I’m not sure it’s precisely the “Internet meme” that Slate would have it. Fail as a noun was first recorded near the turn of the 13th century. Chaucer used it, as did Shakespeare and Swift. It has been dubbed “obsolete” by the Oxford English Dictionary, with the exception of the fossil phrase, “without fail.”

Is the modern use a revival, or a new formation? Here’s an excerpt from Slate:

Most Internet memes have the lifespan of fruit flies. But there’s evidence to suggest fail is here to stay. For one thing, it’s easier to say than failure. (Need for brevity might explain why, in Webspeak, the opposite of fail is not success but win.) And there’s a proud tradition in English of chopping off the endings of words for convenience.

Yes, but there are other proud neological traditions, as well, such as verb-to-noun conversion? Both the original noun and the original verb use appear about the same time, both brought in from Old French; one was not—in English, at least—a conversion of the other. In the case of the modern use, I suspect it’s conversion and not shortening, just as the noun convert was converted from the verb convert. Particularly in the light that first recorded use of failure comes just under 350 years after fail the noun.

By the way, Slate points to a good blog recording fails: FAILblog, but fails to note its kin, the English FAIL Blog.

And the title of this piece? Just another excuse to honor Paul Newman:

They say we are products of our environments, but Obama, the sojourner, seems to go through various situations without being overly touched by them.

Despite their similarity (and common origin), sojourn and journey are not synonymous. A sojourn is a pause in a journey, a temporary stay. A sojourner is a visitor, a temporary lodger. Is Brooks using the word sojourner correctly here? I tend to think so, though I can’t say for certain, as the context could allow either interpretation of the word. Brooks likely means that Obama pauses to visit each situation, though “go through” tends to imply otherwise.

Either way, the word gave me pause and an excuse to linger over another interesting word, so to invite a brief stay by you, my fellow sojourner.

Bathtub caretaker Ed Darrell hit the road recently to Wisconsin, where I was born and raised. Chronicling his travels, he writes:

. . . the American open road is, as always, very interesting.

For example, according to the billboards, somewhere in Wisconsin there is a restaurant named Brisco’s (after Brisco County, Texas?), which claims to feature cuisine (a French word) of a “southwestern” flavor. What does that mean?

This is a wry comment on a word often associated with the phrase “French cuisine” juxtaposed against American Southwestern fare. I’ve seen observations that took the topic of non-French cuisine to extremes, by declaring that, say, the phrase “Norwegian cuisine” was nonsensical because cuisine denoted French food and French food only.

There is no such limitation. A cuisine is “a style of cooking,” and Southwestern cooking is a particular style. (You could argue that Norwegian cooking is a certain style, too, though items like lutefisk argue to the contrary. I pick on Norwegian cooking because my heritage, my surname, and the area of Wisconsin I grew up in all have strong Norsk ties.) Granted, our borrowing cuisine from French as early as around the late 15th Century (and technically, we didn’t borrow it because we still have it), and the commonness of the phrase “French cuisine,” seem to limit the word’s use, but remember that many words over time have changed—broadening, narrowing, or even inversing themselves.

What does that Wisconsin restaurant sign mean? In this instance, as I commented on Ed Darrell’s post:

I believe it means that English is a very adaptable language. In addition to being a French word, cuisine is a centuries-old English word borrowed from French. If we were to apply words to concepts only in line with those words’ language origins, we wouldn’t be able to refer to English grammar (as the word grammar is of Old French and ultimately Latin origin) or even to the English language (again, from Latin and brought to us by the French). Nor, for that matter, would we have my favorite Muppet, the Swedish chef.

Meantime, enjoy your travels through Wisconsin, my native state. Yes, I’m a natural-born fromage-head.

And, Ed, if a culturally mixed-up restaurant sign is the oddest thing you’ve seen in Wisconsin, you haven’t run into any 30-foot plastic cows yet. They’re out there.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, bork bork bork:

I propose that the traditional feast for TLAPD involves initials of a sort itself: BBQ. Here’s why, in the vein of my Unfortunate English: The Gloomy Truth Behind the Words You Use:

Which of the following is most notorious in the world of piracy: The pirate Blackbeard? Or the buccaneer Redmeat?

Redmeat is neither pirate nor buccaneer, of course. I’m referring to the artery-clogging red meat, the eating of which is in some circles both politically and gastronically incorrect. Before Blackbeard was spilling the blood of his victims from 1713 to 1718, the buccaneers were spilling the blood of wild red-meat oxen and wild the-other-white-meat boars in the Caribbean. And dining well. Caribbean natives used wood (and later metal) frameworks for various purposes, among them sleeping (to avoid snakes) and curing and roasting meat. Speakers of the native Carribbean language Tupi called such a framework a mukem. French explorers adapted the word as boucan, and people who used them to cook on were boucaniers. (Native Haitians used similar frameworks, which in the language Taino were called babricots. The Spanish adopted this word as barbacoa, which led to our word barbecue.)

The boucaniers moved from redmeatish pursuits to Blackbeardish pursuits, and were known by the late 1600s in English as buccaneers. Did they consult their food pyramids before all that pillaging?

For more information on the source of the word barbecue that will hurt your head even more than a grog hangover, consult my previous post on the topic, matey.

Shampooing
Shampoo

This, of course, heartened me, because I was reassured that my hair would indeed be shampooed by this shampoo—so much more preferable than, say that “Depilating Shampoo,” which, if my shower drain is any indication, seems to be the purpose of my shampoo at home.

Turns out that I was being offered some lessons in the ways of a multi-lingual world. When I examined the other little bottles (there always seem to be about 40 of them, and they regenerate overnight), I also found:

Lotion pour le Corps
Body Lotion

Aha! French—one of sthe many languages I managed to avoid in high school and college. This one was appropriate because after a day of travel, I indeed felt like a Corpse in the English spelling. Then there’s:

Conditionneur pour Cheveax
Hair Conditioner

Which I loosely translate to “conditioner you pour on your head.” (Or perhaps not.)

I drew the line, however, at:

Gel Douche
Shower Gel

Some highlights:

From an AP story (which confusingly never says specifically who won) highlighting African passion for competitive Scrabble:

“We have far less means than the French players,” says [32-year-old Elisee] Poka, who as a child in Ivory Coast made his own Scrabble set out of wood because he couldn’t afford a store-bought one. “But we keep on beating them.”

The story also mentions Ivory Coast native Joseph Kouassi, who used kitchen tiles as a kid to create the word tiles he couldn’t afford from the store. Now that’s admirable dedication to words. But what does Poka mean by “far less means”?

His French competitors used computers to spit out anagrams . . .

Oh. I suppose the French, so used to blood-doping in the Tour d’France, don’t mind brain-doping. Am I missing something, or isn’t this kind of like being able to use a dictionary at a spelling bee?

Another sign of Africa’s growing influence is the number of African words that have been accepted into the official Francophone Scrabble dictionary. The most recent edition has at least 20 African words, most in Wolof, Senegal’s main dialect. They include ‘yet,’ a kind of shellfish found off Senegal’s coast and ‘mbalax,’ the style of music made famous by Grammy winner Youssou N’Dour, Senegal’s most famous singer.

I imagine that this has members of the Académie Française popping forehead veins all over Paris.

A couple of side notes:

• Riveting highlights of Francophone World Scrabble Championship action!
• My own little commentary on how “Scrabble is not playing fair,” an excerpt from Everything You Know About English Is Wrong

Which is fine, because I am myself fuel for those cliches. One of my passions is barbecue, and sometimes barbeque. In my book The Grill of Victory, I talk about such spelling variations:

The word barbecue itself is an orthographic challenge. On the back of the Gwatney Championship Barbecue team rig [the cooking gear of one of the competing teams] are painted the words “Bar be cue Made Simple.” The food may be made simple, but the spelling isn’t. There’s no way to misspell the word barbecue unless maybe you throw a Z or an ampersand into it. So many ways to spell the word that started out as barbacoa [from Spanish in the Caribbean]. There’s barbecue, barbeque, bar b q, bar b cue, bubbacue (actually a team name), BBQ, B B Q, barbicu (in pre-Revolutionary War writings), barbacue (same). Oftentimes today, the cooking is called Que for short, and Q for shorter. And the shortest version of the word, the letter Q, is visually appropriate. In your mind, rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise and see the fat little piggy and its tail.

I’m not the first to have visualized li’l perky-tail piggy. A few years ago, a famous word-watcher noted that, in fact, the letter Q derived its name from “tail” as a loan word:

Q..The name of the letter is cue, from queue, French, tail; its form being that of an O with a tail.

OK, it was a few centuries ago. That’s Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language. Don’t believe it, even if you see it on the internet. Good guess, Doc Sam, but wrong. As wrong, by the way, as the false etymology of barbecue itself, which itself has some French misconceptions quite in line with the good Dr. Johnson’s. A little more self-serving self-quoting, this time from Everything You Know About English Is Wrong, dispelling the word’s supposed French origins:

Barbe means “beard,” and queue means “tail.” When one cooks a hog whole on a spit, you cook it from “beard to tail,” from barbe a queue. Barbequeue. Granted, there are dishes that are named according to how they’re prepared, such as pot roast, though to follow the pattern of barbe a queue, we’d have to call it something like compléterpourbaserdansunvraifourchaud (from the French meaning “top to bottom in a real hot oven”). But even if we would give such a word creation mechanism any credence, consider two things: 1) Wouldn’t mouseau-a-queue (“snout to tail”) have been a more logical way of expressing the cooking method? 2) Have you ever seen a pig with a beard? Even a French pig? Little goatee, curling handlebar mustache? Soo-oui-oui!?

The very existence of English spelling bees is often employed as ammunition for spelling reform proponents. English exhibits and accepts incredible variation, and I needn’t give any other examples than this very paragraph, in which, for instance, English and variation employ a two-consonant combination and a consonant-vowel combination to communicate the sh sound. And the spelling of vary can very (or vice versa . . .).

The negatives of spelling reform are:

1) First, first, first and first–it won’t happen. I attribute the impossibility of sweeping change to such factors as pure inertia (witness the success of the U.S. trying to dictate a change to the metric system in the last millennium). Add disagreement over the best reform system–do we accept Ben Franklin’s view that we actually eliminate C, J, Q, W, X and Y from the alphabet? Or do we keep C and adopt the list of 300 respellings dictated by Teddy Roosevelt (who couldn’t even spell his own name phonetically), including, within the context of this discussion, the deliciously appropriate accurst and clipt.

What’s more, even the most successful revamp of spelling–Noah Webster’s work to make the States as linguistically independent from from the Mother Isle as we were politically–gave us little more than fewer instances of U (of which I am in favour), jail instead of gaol (wow! momentous, that, or should I say momentos), and the somewhat less logickal departure of the letter k from words like musick and magick.

2) Successful total spelling reform would render English texts–perhaps even any written today–virtually unreadable within a few generations. The difficulty in reading Chaucer in the original, for instance, lies almost as much in spelling changes as it does in changed meanings and obsolete vocabulary. That’s re-formation, not reformation.

3) Spelling reform would wash the language’s inherent recognition of its linguistic diversity. Change technique to tekneek and the French influence fades from view, to be replaced by a some Nordic cast (or Nordik kast, if you must). To reinforce the point, consider the Scandinavian word skosh–which, because everything we know about English is wrong–is not Scandinavian at all. It’s Japanese. And we see other such fading. How many of us see the Arabic lineage in that pesky high school mathematical study, al-jabr, spelled algebra in English?

Factor 3 is one reason I’m intrigued that 2008 Bee winner Sameer Mishra is aspiring (at 13 years old, yet) to become a neurosurgeon. With his impressive mastery of English spelling, he is already performing a figurative surgery–dissecting and reconstructing the very DNA of this language, vastly rich in origin, nuance and texture.

And, oh yeah, a fourth reason sweeping spelling change won’t happen:

4) Spelling reform would eliminate the televised broadcast of the National Spelling Bee, with its low production costs and high ad revenue. Leave it to a network labeled ABC to continue to govern how we manage our A-B-C’s.