Valentines-Falling in Love

 

                     The rise and fall of love

 

                                         by

 

                                 Howard Richler

 

                                 Wise men say

                                 only fools rush in

                                 but I can’t help

                                 falling in love with you

(Lyrics from Can’t Help Falling in Love written by Weiss, Peretti and Creatore)

 

 

Falling in Love, Falling in Love Again, Why Do Fools Fall in Love, When I Fall in Love, ‘Til I Fell in Love with You,…. The song titles featuring  the act of ‘falling in love” are seemingly endless. But hold on a second, lovers. Isn’t  “falling” a bad thing to do?”

 

My friend David posed  this dilemma to me   recently and  he inquired whence came  the expression “falling in love.”

 

So I checked the OED to see if it could provide an  adequate lexicographic answer to David’s query.  The phrase “falling  in love” is first cited in 1423 .  At first, though,  one didn’t merely  tumble “in love” but rather into “love’s dance.”  The citation comes from James 1-The King’s Quire and states, “So fare I falling into love’s dance.” It took  at least one hundred more years for the phrase to be shortened to “”falling in love.” This phrase has endured ever since as the quintessential  expression  of the dizzy loss of control of the lovestruck.

 

The OED has many definitions of the word “fall”, but two in particular are instructive of the sense implied in “falling in love.”  Fall(noun) is defined as “a succumbing to temptation, a lapse into sin or folly. It is first used in this sense in 1225.  Fall (verb) is defined as “to yield to temptation, to sin.”

 

By the way, the  concept of a fall into love is hardly restricted to English. In French  and many other languages  love causes a fall  and in the case of Icelandic it captures you.

 

Legend has it that  the romance associated with Valentine’s  Day  descends  from a custom in ancient Rome. On the eve of the Feast of Lupercalia,  which began on February 15^th,  the names of maidens were written on pieces of paper and placed in  a jar. These slips were then plucked by  young men who would partner with their selection for the duration of the festival.  Valentine’s Day owes its name to Saint Valentine who was beheaded  in the  second century A.D for marrying couples counter to the orders of Emperor Claudius 11.

 

Etymologically speaking  when a young lover is imbued with romance, the debt isn’t to love, but to Rome. The word “romance” comes from the Old French term Romans, a derivation of Romanus, “Roman.” The term was used to refer to the local dialects of Latin(which  later became the Romance languages) and was used to differentiate them from official Latin. The practice arose in France of writing  entertaining stories in the more popular spoken language and the term romans was used to refer to these adventurous tales.  It was in this sense that the word was borrowed into Middle  English. Because  many of these stories in  both English and French dealt with courtly love, ”romance” came to mean simply a “love story” and eventually developed the sense of a ‘love affair.”

 

Seeing that William Shakespeare  is the greatest word progenitor in the history of the English language, it is not surprising that several love words are associated with the Bard.  Shakespeare seems to have coined the term  “love affair” in Three Gentlemen of Verona in 1591 where Valentine  says “I part with thee, confer at large of all that may concern thy love affairs.”  There is an obscure reference  to “love letters” in the OED in 1240 but Shakespeare  popularized the term in Merry Wives of Windsor when Mrs. Page asks “I ‘scaped love-letters in the holiday-time of  my beauty, and  am I now a subject for them?”

 

Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe is credited with the first usage of “love at first sight” In Hero and Leander in 1593: “ Where both deliberate the love is slight; who ever loved,  that loved not at  first sight?”

 

The 16^th and 17^th centuries featured some  language of love that has vanished from our lexicon. The word muskin  was a term of endearment for a woman,  to halch was to clasp in ones arms, and  an amoret was a term that could refer to a sweetheart, a love sonnet or a love glance .The 17^th century was not noted as an age of gender neutralization as seen in the term mistress-piece which denoted a “masterpiece of female beauty.” A synonym for kiss was the term smick as is noted in the Bagford Ballad of 1685:  You smack, you smick, you wash, you lick, you smirk, you swear, you grin.”

 

And whence comes the word “kiss?”  “Kiss” is  a widespread Germanic  word, represented by the German  küssen, Dutch kussen, Swedish kyssa, and Danish kysse. It probably goes back to some prehistoric syllable that imitated the sound or action of kissing. There is not sufficient linguistic evidence to state whether our ancient Indo-European ancestors expressed affection to each other through the action of kissing.

 

Happy, Valentine’s Day, everybody.  Enjoy the dance.

 

Valentines-Kiss

 

            A kiss is not always just a kiss

 

                               by

             

                             Howard Richler

 

 

            Kissing and bussing differ both in this

We busse our wantons, but our wives we kisse.

(Robert Herrick in his 1648 collection of poetry Hesperides)

 

 

Lest you be misguided into thinking from the above ditty that it was 17^th century Englishmen who established the pedigree of kisses, be informed that the ancient Romans had formulated a hierarchy millennia before.

 

At the less lascivious end of the spectrum we find the osculum, (literally, little mouth) which rererred to an affectionate peck on the cheek.  Romantic kissing, however, fell into two categories. The basium was the direct lip-to-lip kiss between lovers and this Latin word is the source of the cognate words in most European languages –  bacio, (Italian); buss, (English); beso, (Spanish) and baiser, (French). The basium was the discussable[User1]  kiss [User2] and the one memorialized in the polite poetry of the time. The other kiss, the suavium, although often literally translated as "little kiss," was really the more passionate labio-lingual kiss that the French inherited from the Romans and that we, therefore, call the French kiss. It was always a prelude and an invitation to further interaction among intimates.

 

The word “kiss” dates from around the year 1000 and comes from the Old English cyssan which does not appear to have cognates in any other language.  By the time of Chaucer, one could also “ba” as seen  in Canterbury Tales (1386),  “Come ner, my spouse; let me ba thy cheke.”  Both “smack” and “buss” are first recorded in 1570, “smick” in 1572 and the Latinate duo of “suaviate” and “osculate” surface in 1643 and 1656 respectively.

 

“Smooch” as a noun and as a verb is only recorded in the 20^th century; however, in 1611 in his French/English Dictionary, Randle Cotgrave defines a baiseur as “a kisser, smoutcher, smacker.”

 

In The Lover’s Tongue, Mark Morton informs us that hugging often accompanies kissing, “but hugging was not possible until the mid-16^th century, when hug emerged in the English language. Prior to that lovers could only clip, halse {or halch}, lap or embrace.”  The oldest of these “hug” verbs is “clip” and one was able to “clip” at least fifty years before “kiss” entered the language. The word also surfaces in Canterbury Tales: “He kisseth hire and clyipeth hire ful ofte.” Morton could have included “cuddling” as one of the pre-hugging possibilities, as the verb “cuddle” arrives in the language around 1520. The OED describes “cuddle” as “a dialectical or nursery word of uncertain derivation.” Only towards the end of the 17^th century could the English “caress,” “snuggle” and “fondle”; the last two of these being adaptations of the adjectives “snug” and “fond.”

 

 Given that the ineffable f-word [User3] has been taboo for most of its 500-year history, you might wonder how gentrified folk referred to this activity without resorting to protracted euphemistic phraseology such as “go to bed with.”   Surprisingly, the word “conversation” referred to sexual activity in the early part of the 16^th century and only took on the sense of “chatting” towards the end of the century. At this juncture, one had to specify “conjugal conversation” if  either hanky or panky  [User4] was occurring.  Conversely, “intercourse” originally referred to communication and commerce in the 15^th century and is only used to mean sexual activity from 1798.

 

There were, however, many terms that preceded the f-word. The oldest of these are “sard”[User5]  and “wifthing” recorded around the year 1000. “Wifthing” is actually a compound of “wife” and “thing” but don’t be deluded into thinking that it is only sanctioning marital relations as the sense at the time of “wife” was merely “woman.”  The 14^th century sees two new additional terms to express full carnal embrace – “jape” in 1362 and “swive.” oft employed in Canterbury Tales two decades later. For example, in The Reeve’s Tale, a student crows, “As I have thries {thrice} in this shorte nyght swyved the milleres doghter bolt upright.” The verb “occupy” was also used  to imply sexual activity in the late 15^th century and the term was only purged of any carnal sense towards the end of the 19^th century.

 

One manner that the English language employs to euphemize bawdy terms is to Latinize them.  Hence the early 14^th century is graced by the term “fornication” which is derived from the noun fornix, “arch, vaulted chamber” because Roman brothels were often established in vaults. Surprisingly, it took until the middle of the 16^th century for the verb “fornicate” to develop from the noun “fornication.” “Copulation” is first recorded toward the end of the 15^th century and the verb “copulate” only follows more than a century later.

 

Despite a long and varied  history of etymological development, may all lovers be well occupied in deep, romantic conversation this Valentine’s Day.

 

---

 [User1] Not sure what you mean, here.

 [User2] Suggest « the kiss that could be spoken »

 [User3] Sudden change in topic – create a link.

 [User4] Which « former sense??? »

 [User5] You don’t explain this word.

BLACK ENGLISH

 

                                   Celebrating Black English

                                                         by

                                               Howard Richler

Every February,  in the United States and Canada, we  celebrate Black History Month to honour the achievements of black men and women throughout history. As such, in this month's column, I reflect on the speech patterns of blacks.

 

Throughout America history, the language used by blacks has been regarded as second-rate by many observers. For example, H.L. Mencken in his opus The American Language wrote in the 1920s, “The Negro dialect, as we know it today, seems to have been formulated by the song-writers for the minstrel shows; it did not appear in literature until the time of the Civil War…it was a vague and artificial lingo which had little relation to the actual speech of Southern blacks.” In the 1980s, pop grammarian John Simon ordained that “the constructions of black English are the product not of a language with roots in tradition but of ignorance of how language works.”  More recently, political commentator Tucker Carlson said that Black English is “a language where nobody knows how to conjugate verbs.” These opinions  are consistent with what is often called the linguistic inferiority principle  which posits  that the speech patterns of a socially subordinate group will always be interpreted as improper when compared with the socially dominant group.

 

However, it is now recognized by linguists that Black English is not inferior but merely another of the multitudinous flavours of English available on our planet. In fact, Black English contains some useful refinements not available in standard English. In an article some years ago in the magazine Discover, linguist John B. Rickford outlined some of the versatility of Black English in the verb “to run.”

1)He runnin. (“He is running.”)

2)He be runnin. (“He is usually running.”)

3)He be steady runnin. (“He is usually running in an intensive, sustained manner.”)

4)He bin runnin. (“He has been running.”)

5)He BIN runnin. (“He has been running for a long time and still is.”)

 

Linguist John McWhorter in his book Talking Back Talking Black  explains that a construction such as “She be passin’ by”  contains “much more than an unconjugated verb” and that the insertion of “be” is “very specific; it means that something happens on a regular basis, rather than something going on right now.”

 

Mc Whorter points out that arguably Black English is more complex than standard English. For example, in Black English the word “up” plays a special role when paired with a location. So  in  the Black English sentence  “We was sittin’ up at Tony,” we know that Tony is a friend as the usage of “up” is  a marker of intimacy. just as adding ed to a verb is a marker of past action.  Still another nuance of Black English exposed by McWhorter  is the way the word done is used to mark counter-expectation: “Whether it’s used in a sentence about 1973 or last week, a sentence with done is always about something the speaker finds somewhat surprising, contrary to what is expected.”

         

Most linguists believe that Black English has its roots in the creole language developed as a result of contact between West Coast Africans and European traders. Robert McCrum and Robert MacNeil In The Story of English relate that  “The African element in the English spoken by slaves on the plantation-known as Plantation Creole-was sustained for some time… On each plantation, there would be some esteemed slaves who spoke African languages.”

 

Not surprisingly, an African heritage resonates through Black English speech patterns. For example, many West African languages don't possess the problematic English “th” sound. The lack of this consonantal combo may thus lead to “them” being rendered as “dem” and “desk” as “des.”

 

It was once felt that as more blacks entered the mainstream that the dialect would greatly fade. According to linguists, however, the current generation of inner-city youth employs the black vernacular more than ever. The persistence of the dialect reflects an attitude that prizes cultural distinction. Black English endures because it fulfils a cultural need by enhancing black solidarity. On the other hand, the inability of a black person to speak and write in standard English can seriously impede his or her social and economic prospects.

 

School teachers used to devote themselves to correcting Black English usage under the impression that they were thus imparting proper grammar to the black student. Things are improving somewhat but have a long way to go. The Oxford Companion to the English Language states that “because Black English is devalued…many teachers with excellent intentions continue to denigrate it in favour of standard English. Few such educators…have learned about the history and nature of Afro-American English, and fail to appreciate its diversity and logical integrity as a long-established variety of the language.”

 

I believe that Black English should not be taught as a distinct language but rather should be used as a tool to improve the student's mastery of standard English.

 

Richler’s latest book is Wordplay: Arranged and Deranged Wit