Radio Script #16
Little Talks On Common Things
February 27, 1949
Have you read anything today — a newspaper, a magazine, part of a book? Most of us do read something every day. Did it ever occur to you that, when you read, you are doing something difficult, something that seems like a kind of magic to those who cannot read? You had to be taught to do it, and perhaps many teachers struggled with you before you could read and understand what you read. For the art of reading is the art of getting meaning from the printed page. We read not merely words made up of symbols called letters. The words must convey a meaning’ and not the words alone, but the way they are put together. We have to learn to read what is called the context — the whole meaning of a whole passage.
That we have learned to do this at all, poorly as some of us have mastered the art, we owe to our teachers. All around us, wherever we live, are other teachers trying to teach this art to the children of today. Some of those teachers are tired, discouraged people. Some of them will leave teaching this year, just as others left it last year, to take jobs that are decently paid, that offer a better standing in the community and a more normal private life. The teachers from whom we learned to read gave us a priceless key to freedom.
We have been hearing a lot about the four freedoms — freedom of religion, freedom of speech and press, freedom from want, freedom from fear. But there is a fifth freedom, more important because it is more fundamental. It is freedom from ignorance. The ignorant man is the easiest victim to want and fear. Freedom of religion means little to him and a free press means nothing at all. For the ignorant man, even if technically he can read, cannot understand what he reads, and for that very reason he is a danger to himself and to his country. In a very real sense our teachers mold the nation’s future. Give them your support.
Next week I promise you a pleasant surprise. It will be a last word on narrow gauge railroads, and it won’t be opinions of mine or my correspondents. I think you will like it and will, as I do, regard it as a genuine surprise. I won’t even give you a hint tonight about what it is. Weill just save it until next week.
We have let several weeks elapse without mentioning our favorite topic of words. We are brought back to it by a letter from Gertrude Taylor of North Vassalboro, who wants to know the origin of the expression “Black Republican”. The phrase “Black Republican”, most often used in derision and contempt, referred to the Republican Party I s defense and use of the negro. The term was occasionally used before the Civil War — as, for instance, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 — and then referred simply to the Republicans I friendliness toward the abolitionists, those who wanted to free the slaves by the quickest and harshest means. But what gave the term its most uncomplimentary meaning was the policy of Republicans after the war, when the Republican-controlled government went beyond its commendable plan to free the negro slaves, and ‘launched upon a pernicious use of the freed negroes to control the South. In those days Black Republican referred at first to the ignorant, suddenly freed negroes who were put into the state legislatures of the South by carpet-bagger influence. Later the name was plastered on all Republicans who upheld the Reconstruction policy.
That period after the Civil War is one of the most shameful in our nation’s history. Abraham Lincoln had died only a few short weeks after he had said, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, let us bind up the nation’s wounds.” But the new leaders of the party he had led so well were determined on vengeance, and by their evil tactics they not only got the name Black Republicans, but they made it impossible for their party to make any political impression upon the South even to this day.
A neighbor, whom I have promised not to name, has just told me about one of the best of the old expressions that has ever come to my attention I wonder how many of you ever heard it. Here it is: “I don It feel very bitish”. If you never heard it, you may have to think twice before you see what it means. Well, try it out the next time you lose your appetite and nothing tastes good to you. Just say, “I don’t feel very bitish”.
We were speaking a few weeks ago about the old-time tanneries. Mrs. Josie Claflin of Fairfield reminds me that there was once an old tannery near her girlhood home in China Village. It was located on the west shore near the head of the lake, not far from where the Baptist parsonage is now located. To show the spot, Mrs. Claflin sends me an old picture card postmarked 1922. It shows, in a clump of trees on the lake shore, J. A. Woodsum’s cottage, and in the upper left corner rises the spire of the Baptist Church. Mrs. Claflin says she learned to skate on the shallow spots that froze over where water flowed into the tan vats, when she was too young to be allowed out on the lake.
Mrs. Claflin mentions another old time thing — how hornets made paper from cedar fence rails. As the outer surface of the rails began to shred away, hornets would pullout the fibers, mix them with moisture from their own bodies, and the chemical result was very much like paper. Does anyone else recall that kind of insect activity?
Mrs. Claflin also refers to a cemetery in China called Sugar Loaf. Is that name still used? By the way, perhaps we shall have to devote a few minutes some evening to old cemeteries. Would anyone be interested?
HARD RULE
We queer folk who play around with the study of words are intrigued by a process which the scholars call folk-etymology. What does the term folk-etymology mean? It is a popular, natural manner of speech by which we fit an unfamiliar foreign word or expression into the mold of our common .native language. In my boyhood I had no idea there was such an expression as contre-dance, because we called it country dance. Long before I ever saw in print the word cutlass — the buccaneer’s good weapon — I had heard it habitually pronounced “cutlash”. In the First World War our American soldiers had a lot of fun with French words. Quite naturally au revoir became olive oil, bon jour was barn door, tres bien was trays beans, camouflage was camel flags, and the good British motor lorrie became motor Laura.
But I have always thought the classic example was the American doughboy’s description of the Hindenburg Line. You veterans of World War I will remember that those fortified German entrenchments stretched from Touls to Ypres. So the doughboys said, “The Hindenburg Line hangs from Towels to Wipers.”
This process of folk-etymology causes many natural, but erroneous, associations between words and things. For instance, the pantry is not the place where the pans are kept, but where pain (the French bread) is kept. The buttery is not the place for butter, but rather the boteillerie, the place of the bottles or liquor. cutlet has nothing to do with cutting, but is the little rib. The woodchuck has no relation to wood; the titmouse is not a mouse; the primrose and the rosemary are not roses. Mohair is not hair, and the hollyhock (a combination of holly and oak) is neither holly nor oak. All of these names come from foreign words that our English ancestors could not pronounce so that they put them into English words that they could pronounce. They even did it with proper names. You have doubtless known families by the name of Darling. It is a well known name in the Blue Hill region of Maine. Where did it originate? How did any family come to have a surname that people use as a term of endearment? The answer is that when Englishmen encountered people from the French town of Orleans, made so famous by Joan of Arc that She was called the Maid of Orleans, they had difficulty getting the word Orleans around their tongues. A fellow might show up in Dover or Bristol calling himself Raoul d’Orleans. That was too much of a mouthful for a channel Englishman. The stranger very soon became known as Ralph Darling, and Darlings his descendants were ever after.
Waterville people have sometimes wondered why many of our fine citizens of French-Canadian descent have the name Simpson, one of the oldest surnames in old England and as stoutly British as roast beef. Dr. Julian Taylor, who taught 68 consecutive years at Colby College, once told me he felt sure that this phenomenon was the result of folk-etymology, that the name in French was Sans Souci. Because the English name that sounded most like it was Simpson, in an EngliSh speaking country Simpson it became.
I have also been told that half a century ago there were three French-Canadian brothers here in Waterville, full-blood brothers, with three different surnames. Whether true or not, it makes a good story. The French name was apparently Roi. One brother called himself Roy, which is what the name looked like in English writing. Another was King, the translation of the name into English. The third was Ware, the English name nearest the sound of the French name. Three brothers all with different last names: Roy, King and Ware.
Probably we’ve talked too long already on this subject, but we cannot forego one final word. A lot of good Englishmen would like to believe that the word sirloin originated because some ancient king of Britain once knighted a loin of beef, recognizing the national dish by saying, “Rise, Sir Loin”. The student of language knows better. The sirloin is simply the under or lower loin and all we can say about it today is that deflation, disinflation, or What have you, it still costs too much.
Year: 1949