Wednesday, June 22, 2011

where jazz came from

( A version of this article appeared in the June 22, 2011 National Post)


All that jazz about the origin of the word jazz





by





Howard Richler





Jazz will endure, just as long as people heat it through their feet instead of their brains.

(John Phillip Sousa)





In the years since its debut in 1980, the Montreal Jazz Festival has featured such legendary figures such as Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, B.B. King, Ray Charles, Stan Getz and Ella Fitzgerald.





Therefore it is only appropriate that the origin of the word “jazz” is shrouded in legend. One theory states that the word derives from a slave named Jasper who lived in a plantation near New Orleans in 1825. Another hypothesis claims that the progenitor of the word is Jasbo Brown, an itinerant black musician, who played along Mississippi River towns and later in Chicago cabarets at the turn of the 20th century. An etymology that gained widespread currency among musicians credited Chaz Washington, a ragtime drummer from Vicksburg, Mississippi circa 1904 as the word’s founder. In his book So This is Jazz, Henry Osgood states that “Chaz had the gift for faking and a marvellous sense of syncopated rhythm.” Geneva Smitherman, professor of English at Michigan State University, speculates that the term may ultimately come out of Africa from the Mandingo word jasi “to act out of the ordinary.” Still another supposition holds that the word derives from the French verb jaser “to chatter.” This may not be such a far-fetched idea. After all, French was spoken in New Orleans either in the form of Creole or the Acadien of the early settlers transported from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.





Whatever its origin, the word “jazz” first appears in the lyrics of a 1909 song called “Uncle Josh in Society”: “One lady asked me if I danced the jazz.” Here, the word refers to a ragtime dance and its use to denote the music that accompanied such a dance, and, more generally, to a type of improvised syncopated music is not recorded until 1913. On March 6, 1913, the San Francisco Bulletin reported that “the team which speeded into town .. comes .. close to representing the pick of the army. Its members have trained on ragtime and ‘jazz’.”



The original jazz band, according to Herbert Asbury’s 1938 book The Latin Quarter was the “Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band,” comprised of seven lads, aged 12 to 15, who first surface in New Orleans in 1895. Five years later another New Orleans group tried to usurp this name at a gig and the original Spasm septet protested by throwing rocks at performers and dancers at the Haymarket dance hall. This tactic proved effective as the owner of the dance hall repainted advertising placards to read “Razzy Dazzy Jazzy Band.” Another legend avers that in 1916, Johnny Stein’s band was playing at Schiller’s Café it Chicago when an inebriated retired vaudeville entertainer exhorted the band “jass it up, boys.” According to this piece of apocrypha, the term caught on and Stein’s ensemble was re-christened the “Original Dixieland Jass Band.”



The word “jazz” had been used as a verb meaning “to speed things up” for at least forty years by blacks living in New Orleans before it attained lexicographic recognition. The first OED citation of the word as a verb is from the New York Sun in 1913 and it reinforces the energizing sense of the word: “In the old plantation days when the slaves were having one of their rare holidays and the fun languished some West Coast African would cry out, ‘Jaz her up’, and this would be the cue for fast and furious fun.” This sense of excitation quickly moved from a sense of exercise to one of sexercise and by the 1890s the word was used as a synonym for the ultimate four-letter word. Hence, Clay Smith stated in his 1924 book Étude, “if the truth were known about the origin of the word.{jazz} it would never be mentioned in polite society.”



In any case whether you are a member of polite society, or a rowdy like me, enjoy this year's Montreal jazzfest that runs between June 25th and July 4th.






check out some other fascinating etymologies in my latest book Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words.



Saturday, June 18, 2011

fathers day reflections

A version of this article appeared in the Globe & Mail on June 17,2011



Lexical Father’s Day reflections

by

Howard Richler







When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.

But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Mark Twain







Let’s face it, fellow dads: Father’s Day does not have the profile of Mother’s Day. Even on the eve of Our Day, Mom’s day outgoogles Dad’s day 200 million to 151 million and according to commercial calculations, Mother’s Day, generates almost 50% more in sales than its xy partner in conception. On the other hand, lads, let’s keep our peckers up and refrain from diluting our brew with maudlin tears, because there are some lexical advantages to being male.



Most importantly, there is no term in English that recognizes the right of a woman to kill her husband. We have the word “uxoricide,” which entered our lexicon in the mid 19th century to refer to the murder of a wife by her husband but (so far-phew!) no word to describe the legitimate or illegitimate murder of a husband is recorded in any non-feminist dictionary. So ladies, remember that from a lexical perspective while the English language will countenance you killing your mother (matricide), your sister (sororicide), your brother (fratricide) , your kids (filicide), your father, (patricide), and even your boar, oxen and cook (apricide, bovicide & coquicide), that offing your husband is verboten.



Aside from not possessing a word that legitimizes “husband-whacking,” there are several other lexical advantages to being male. To extend Simon & Garfunkle’s schema, I’d rather be a hammer, major, and governor than a nail, majorette and governess. Also, as a male, I can be described as avuncular, which means resembling an uncle, with connotations of being friendly, helpful and good-humoured, whereas a woman can only be so described by the inferior-sounding “aunt-like.” “Avuncular” derives from the Latin avunculus maternal uncle,” and there is no equivalent word whose etymology derives from a paternal aunt.



Notwithstanding that maternity is a matter of fact and paternity often a matter of opinion, men easily outdistance woman in their ability to pass on surnames based on their chromosomal arrangement. The term patronymic” receives 2,810,00 Google hits; whereas matronymic receives a measly 59,700. Patronymics, names derived from a male’s ancestors, such as Robertson. Hansen, Ivanov, Mackenzie, and O’Connor are very common. On the other hand, whereas matronymics such as Beaton, Dworkin (named after Devorah) or Rifkin (named after Rivka) are quite rare.



Conspiracy theorists would have us believe that Father’s Day was established as a result of effective lobbying by the Hallmark Corporation just as Halloween was created from pressure extracted by dentists. In fact, when the holiday was proposed, there was no such thing as a Father's Day card. American Louise Sonora Smart Dodd first proposed the idea of a father's day in 1909. Mrs. Dodd wanted a special day to honour her father, William Smart, who became widowed when his wife (Mrs. Dodd's mother) died in childbirth with their sixth child. He raised the newborn and his other five children by himself on a rural farm in eastern Washington state. It was after Mrs. Dodd became an adult that she realized the strength and selflessness her father had displayed in rearing his children as a single parent.



The first Father's Day was observed on June 19, 1910 in Spokane, Washington. At about the same time in various cities across America, other people were beginning to celebrate a father's day. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge supported the idea of a national Father's Day. Finally, in 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the third Sunday of June as Father's Day.



Father’s Day, however, was not widely celebrated in the US until the mid 1930s and was not recorded in print before 1943. In Canada, the holiday gained status in the late ‘40s and took hold by the early ‘50s.





Enjoy your customized beer mug, guy.





hrichler@gmail.com

My latest book is Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

semantic skirmishes

The following article appeared in the June edition of the Senior Times.


Hoi polloi rules, semantic anarchists be damned


June 2011
Presently. This might seem like a non-contentious word, but Senior Times editor Barbara Moser related to me that her friend became apoplectic (and shunned her for months) because Barbara had the effrontery to use presently to mean “shortly” (first used in this manner in 1443) rather than its original sense of “immediately,” (first used in 1385).
Lest you have the impression that Ms. Moser represents some type of semantic anarchist, she told me that she instructs her students not to use “presently” to mean “currently,” but truth be known this is the way the word is most often used. In fact, if you do a Google search on the use of the word “presently,” you will find that the word is used to mean “currently” more than 90 per cent of the time.
This raises the question (I can’t bring myself to say “begs the question”) whether the use of “presently” to mean “currently” is wrong?
The OED allows the secondary meaning of presently to mean “at the present time,” but adds this caveat: “Apparently avoided in literary use between the 17th and 20th centuries, but in regular use in most English dialects; revived in the 20th cent. In the U.S., subsequently in Britain and elsewhere. Regarded by some usage writers, esp. after the mid-20th cent., as erroneous or ambiguous.”
If you believe that Barbara’s usage brouhaha represents an isolated incident, you’d be wrong. Many people become rather exercised over what they consider to be the misuse of a word. Exhibit 2. When Simon Winchester wrote The Professor and the Madman in 1999 describing how “madman” Dr. William Chester Minor contributed to the making of the OED under the auspices of “Professor” James Augustus Henry Murray, he received fulsome praise from all for his splendid book.
Well, not quite. Winchester was deluged by angry letters from readers of the book because in Chapter 9, he used “fulsom” as a synonym for “extravagant” or “over the top,” upsetting a certain segment of his audience.
Many readers felt that this usage was erroneous because the original meaning of the word was “offensively excessive” and Winchester says that detractors expressed alarm “that an authority on the language would make that mistake and that my use of fulsome eroded the credibility of the book as a whole.” Winchester told me that when he wrote his subsequent book, The Meaning of Everything, which accounts in greater detail how the OED was compiled, he used “fulsome” in a similar fashion “to annoy the pedants who excoriated me for using it in the first.” This also asks the question, How long do we insist that older meanings should prevail?
Truth be told, there is no simple answer, because there is no definitive arbiter on what qualifies as proper English. According to Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and other American dictionaries, many new meanings are acceptable. For example, “peruse” can mean not only to “examine carefully” but to “read over in a casual manner”; “disinterested” can mean “not interested” as well as “impartial”; and “enormity” can mean the same as “enormousness.” On the other hand, some dictionaries and many learned usage commentators regard these positions as linguistic heresy.
I don’t mean to imply (infer?) that I am a totally laissez-faire language libertarian. My bête noire is the misuse of “beg the question” to mean “ask the question, instead of using the term to refer to the point at issue, the thing that one is trying to prove. An argument that “begs the question” is circular, as it is based on its own conclusion.
I fear that an important linguistic concept is being lost when people use “beg the question” to mean “ask the question.” But when I hear the vast majority of journalists, even those of the BBC, regularly use it in this manner, I fear that the battle may have been lost.
Language commentator William Safire started out as a rigid prescriptivist, but even he acknowledged in his book In Love With Norma Loquendi that the masses represent the final arbiter of language: “The rules laid down by elites are to be respected … but in the end democracy, which goes by the name of common usage, will work its will … When the population challenges the order over a period of time, Norma Loquendi – the everyday voice of the native speaker – is the heroine who changes the order and raises a new standard.”
hrichler@gmail.com
Richler’s latest book is Strange Bedfellows : The Private Lives of Words (Ronsdale Press).

Thursday, June 9, 2011

ONE WORD SPORTS ANAGRAMS



ALKALINE SPORTS ANAGRAMS



Most names can be rearranged to give us some phrase. My own name Howard Richler can be scrambled to give us “hardcore whirl” just as Clint Eastwood can be rearranged to provide “old west action” and former Vice-President Spiro Agnew turns into “grow a penis.”



Not many names, however can be rearranged to give us individual words found in the dictionary. Now, while you don’t have to scramble the letters of former Detroit Tigers baseball player Al Kaline’s name to arrive at “alkaline,” for other celebrities, this process is mandatory if you want to arrive at another word. For example, if you scramble the letters of “endears” you get Ed Asner. See how many of these f words you can unscramble to uncover some famous sport names. As an added hint, the answers w ill appear in alphabetical order of surnames and I will provide some details relative to the celebrity's fame. The answer to the first question “diasable” is former hockey great Sid Abel.



1)disable (NHL MVP-1949)

2)ablutions (track star)

3)canceration (soccer player)

4)tragedy (50s Tigers pitcher)

5)mordantly (football coach)

6)Norseland (Yankees perfect Series pitcher)

7)versatile (baseball player ‘98-‘06)

8)Laetrile (90s pitcher for Blue Jays)

9)anil (tennis)

10)Bombay (golf)

11)toted (70s Pirates player)

12)mottle (former Giants slugger)

13)nickered (football)

14)loaners (50s baseball player)

15)soldiering (70s Leafs defenceman)

16)blanketers (former quarterback)

17)tinwares (former Leafs/Oilers center)











































































 
ALKALINE SPORTS ANAGRAMS

Most names can be rearranged to give us some phrase. My own name Howard Richler can be scrambled to give us “hardcore whirl” just as Clint Eastwood can be rearranged to provide “old west action” and former Vice-President Spiro Agnew turns into “grow a penis.”

Not many names, however can be rearranged to give us individual words found in the dictionary. Now, while you don’t have to scramble the letters of former Detroit Tigers baseball player Al Kaline’s name to arrive at “alkaline,” for other celebrities, this process is mandatory if you want to arrive at another word. For example, if you scramble the letters of “endears” you get Ed Asner. See how many of these f words you can unscramble to uncover some famous sport names. As an added hint, the answers w ill appear in alphabetical order of surnames and I will provide some details relative to the celebrity's fame. The answer to the first question “diasable” is former hockey great Sid Abel.

1)disable (NHL MVP-1949)
2)ablutions (track star)
3)canceration (soccer player)
4)tragedy (50s Tigers pitcher)
5)mordantly (football coach)
6)Norseland (Yankees perfect Series pitcher)
7)versatile (baseball player ‘98-‘06)
8)Laetrile (90s pitcher for Blue Jays)
9)anil (tennis)
10)Bombay (golf)
11)toted (70s Pirates player)
12)mottle (former Giants slugger)
13)nickered (football)
14)loaners (50s baseball player)
15)soldiering (70s Leafs defenceman)
16)blanketers (former quarterback)
17)tinwares (former Leafs/Oilers center)
















































ALKALINE SPORTS ANAGRAMS

Most names can be rearranged to give us some phrase. My own name Howard Richler can be scrambled to give us “hardcore whirl” just as Clint Eastwood can be rearranged to provide “old west action” and former Vice-President Spiro Agnew turns into “grow a penis.”

Not many names, however can be rearranged to give us individual words found in the dictionary. Now, while you don’t have to scramble the letters of former Detroit Tigers baseball player Al Kaline’s name to arrive at “alkaline,” for other celebrities, this process is mandatory if you want to arrive at another word. For example, if you scramble the letters of “endears” you get Ed Asner. See how many of these f words you can unscramble to uncover some famous sport names. As an added hint, the answers w ill appear in alphabetical order of surnames and I will provide some details relative to the celebrity's fame. The answer to the first question “diasable” is former hockey great Sid Abel.

1)disable (NHL MVP-1949)
2)ablutions (track star)
3)canceration (soccer player)
4)tragedy (50s Tigers pitcher)
5)mordantly (football coach)
6)Norseland (Yankees perfect Series pitcher)
7)versatile (baseball player ‘98-‘06)
8)Laetrile (90s pitcher for Blue Jays)
9)anil (tennis)
10)Bombay (golf)
11)toted (70s Pirates player)
12)mottle (former Giants slugger)
13)nickered (football)
14)loaners (50s baseball player)
15)soldiering (70s Leafs defenceman)
16)blanketers (former quarterback)
17)tinwares (former Leafs/Oilers center)






























ALKALINE SPORTS ANAGRAMS

Most names can be rearranged to give us some phrase. My own name Howard Richler can be scrambled to give us “hardcore whirl” just as Clint Eastwood can be rearranged to provide “old west action” and former Vice-President Spiro Agnew turns into “grow a penis.”

Not many names, however can be rearranged to give us individual words found in the dictionary. Now, while you don’t have to scramble the letters of former Detroit Tigers baseball player Al Kaline’s name to arrive at “alkaline,” for other celebrities, this process is mandatory if you want to arrive at another word. For example, if you scramble the letters of “endears” you get Ed Asner. See how many of these f words you can unscramble to uncover some famous sport names. As an added hint, the answers w ill appear in alphabetical order of surnames and I will provide some details relative to the celebrity's fame. The answer to the first question “diasable” is former hockey great Sid Abel.

1)disable (NHL MVP-1949)
2)ablutions (track star)
3)canceration (soccer player)
4)tragedy (50s Tigers pitcher)
5)mordantly (football coach)
6)Norseland (Yankees perfect Series pitcher)
7)versatile (baseball player ‘98-‘06)
8)Laetrile (90s pitcher for Blue Jays)
9)anil (tennis)
10)Bombay (golf)
11)toted (70s Pirates player)
12)mottle (former Giants slugger)
13)nickered (football)
14)loaners (50s baseball player)
15)soldiering (70s Leafs defenceman)
16)blanketers (former quarterback)
17)tinwares (former Leafs/Oilers center)



































ALKALINE SPORTS ANAGRAMS

Most names can be rearranged to give us some phrase. My own name Howard Richler can be scrambled to give us “hardcore whirl” just as Clint Eastwood can be rearranged to provide “old west action” and former Vice-President Spiro Agnew turns into “grow a penis.”

Not many names, however can be rearranged to give us individual words found in the dictionary. Now, while you don’t have to scramble the letters of former Detroit Tigers baseball player Al Kaline’s name to arrive at “alkaline,” for other celebrities, this process is mandatory if you want to arrive at another word. For example, if you scramble the letters of “endears” you get Ed Asner. See how many of these f words you can unscramble to uncover some famous sport names. As an added hint, the answers w ill appear in alphabetical order of surnames and I will provide some details relative to the celebrity's fame. The answer to the first question “diasable” is former hockey great Sid Abel.

1)disable (NHL MVP-1949)
2)ablutions (track star)
3)canceration (soccer player)
4)tragedy (50s Tigers pitcher)
5)mordantly (football coach)
6)Norseland (Yankees perfect Series pitcher)
7)versatile (baseball player ‘98-‘06)
8)Laetrile (90s pitcher for Blue Jays)
9)anil (tennis)
10)Bombay (golf)
11)toted (70s Pirates player)
12)mottle (former Giants slugger)
13)nickered (football)
14)loaners (50s baseball player)
15)soldiering (70s Leafs defenceman)
16)blanketers (former quarterback)
17)tinwares (former Leafs/Oilers center)