The origin of evil genius

I guess I always assumed that the term "evil genius" was a Batman or James Bond kind of term, a reflection of the deranged excesses of 20th Century greed and technology.  Perhaps in the cartoon usage it is.  But I ran across a much older use of this phrase.

I am currently reading (make that slogging through) Camilla by Fanny Burney.  In it, the sweet young heroine, Camilla, in love with the wealthy, but apparently indifferent Edgar Mandelbert, is trying to fend off the advances of the wealthy and somewhat annoying Sir Sedley Clarendel, who is being egged on in his suit by their mutual friend Mrs. Arlbery.

'O, Mrs. Arlbery!' she cried, 'lend me, I beseech you, some aid, and spare me, in pity, your raillery! Sir Sedley, I fear, greatly mistakes me; set him right, I conjure you....' 

'Me, my dear? and do you think if some happy fatality is at work at this moment to force you to your good, I will come forth, like your evil genius, to counteract its operations?'

Wiktionary provides this sense as its first definition of evil genius: The spirit each person is believed to have in attendance, according to certain religious or mythological traditions, which tries to negatively influence him, and is opposed by one's good genius; loosely, someone who is a bad influence.

The first person to march to a different drummer

I've always been a fan of Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken."  It suggests an approach to life that I aspire to:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

A traveler down that road would undoubtedly be marching to her own drumbeat.  And as I recently discovered, that image comes to us, courtesy of the Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.  I'm no authority on Thoreau, but from what I know of him, I'd have to guess that this quote from Walden probably expresses his quintessence:

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

So Sidharta!  I like an extended version of that passage, as well:

"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute?"

Food for thought in our Race to Nowhere culture.

Inquiring minds want to know

So don't ask me why...really don't...I have no idea...but I was struck this morning by the similarity between the words "require" and "quiero" (Spanish for "I want"). Perhaps I've been working on requirements too much lately. In any case, what is a requirement, after all, but something I want?

In such intriguing cases, I generally resort to my handy dandy Random House College Dictionary (acquired when I was in Grad School) which often provides helpful etymological information. Paydirt!

Unsurprisingly, Require, Acquire, Inquire, Query, Quest, Question all originate from the Latin quaerere, to seek, ask.

That's as distinguished from Quarry, which, according to Merriam Webster Online (now that I've put away my dictionary) is derived from the French cuir (skin, hide), which, itself, is derived from the Latin corium (which also gives us Excoriate). Which is weird because if you'd asked me, I'd have said that a lot of hunters seek quarry. In fact one of the definitions that Merriam Webster offers for quarry is "one that is sought or pursued." And then there's the stone quarry, which is totally unrelated and comes from the Latin quadrus meaning square (as in a square block of stone).

Who gets to decide the official etymology, anyway?

Like a Bat Out of Hell

No, I am not a Meat Loaf fan. To tell the truth (shhh...don't tell anyone)...I don't think I've ever heard anything by Meat Loaf. Well, I take it back...I did watch Rocky Horror Picture Show...once...many years ago...many, many years ago. Maybe I would be a Meat Loaf fan if I tried.

But I digress.

I had always assumed that the expression " bat out of hell" originated with Meat Loaf's song of the same name. I was, therefore, surprised to run across it in one of Dorothy Parker's short stories from a 1932 edition of Harper's Bazaar, "Dusk Before Fireworks". In it, a young woman, jealous of another woman, says to her putative boyfriend, "She'll shoot out of Greenwich like a bat out of hell, if she thinks there's a chance of seeing you."

The Word Detective tells us that this expression first appeared in print in 1921, but does not provide a source.  Wordwizard says it was used in the novel The Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos, and supposedly it started up in WW I.  The Wiki page on Meat Loaf's song mentions a reference to a bat coming out of hell in Aristophanes' The Birds, so that takes it back a little further.  Kind of like that Homer reference to biting dust.

Just thought you ought to know.

Better than Mansfield Park

I just finished watching the 1999 version of Mansfield Park. (I started watching it on Netflix and then they did a weird bait and switch on me, and decided it was no longer available as a Watch Now option. But the movie was so intriguing that I had to get it out of the library.)

Now, I think I've mentioned previously, that I kind of hate Mansfield Park. I'm very sorry to say such a thing about an Austen piece, but so it is. What I hate most about it is that Fanny is such a prissy, passive, mousy, helpless thing, unlike most of her other heroines. So I was roped in by the movie on seeing an utterly different sort of creature, a girl with imagination, wit, and spirit.

Unfortunately, despite the inspiring take on Fanny and fabulous acting by all, I found the movie a little annoying. It took huge liberties with the plot and characterizations, which would have been fine, had the script been stronger. Since I kept comparing it to the book, it's a little hard for me to say, but I think the plot would not quite stand on its own.

I found it particularly hilarious that on the DVD cover, it says, "For everyone who loved 'Emma' and 'Sense & Sensibility' comes the story Jane Austen loved best." I am 99.9% certain that Jane would have disapproved of this movie.

Inspired by the film, I'm re-reading the book, and I still dislike it. However, I did notice that it used the phrase "life of the party," which I would have guessed to be of much more recent origin.

So regardless of its faults, on balance, I still think I like the movie better than the book. Which is something I can rarely say.

Zigzag

I just found a reference to the word "zigzag" in Emma (published 1815.) It shows up just as Emma discovers (after a lot of zigzagging around in her matchmaking) that Mr. Elton is actually after her, rather than her friend Harriet.

"If there had not been so much anger, there would have been desperate awkwardness; but their straightforward emotions left no room for the little zigzags of embarrassment."

I don't know when I thought it was from, but it struck me as odd in the middle of an Austen piece.

Surprisingly, The Word Detective does not seem to have an entry on the term. However, I did find some history here. It seems that Jonathan Swift (who was also an early adopter of "bamboozle") used the word as early as 1728.

Some words from the Tropic of Capricorn

Ok...yes...I know...it's weird...Dawn is listening to Tropic of Capricorn...when did that ever stop me? Lovely prose...bit too male-existential-crisis/stream of consciousness for my taste, though he expresses many thoughts that I can relate to. Likewise Babbitt (minus the stream of consciousness) which I listened to immediately before this. What can I say? I'm having an accidental run of early 20th century men's midlife crisis books...I didn't know what I was getting into. But that's not what I want to talk about.

No...I bring this up because I was struck by some cultural aspects of these two books. Namely, that though they both describe events that took place nearly 100 years ago (1920s), they nevertheless describe lifestyles and technologies that are remarkably recognizable in modern terms. I get the sense that if you dropped me in the middle of those novels, I'd be able to function pretty well (except for the internet part). Unlike, for example, dropping me into a Jane Austen book, where I suspect that I wouldn't know how to use the bathroom. (Sorry...couldn't resist...too much Tropic of Capricorn, I guess.)

These novels also used a number of terms that I would have expected to be more modern, such as in Babbitt "boneheaded", and in Tropic of Capricorn "bimbo" and "daffy". According to the Word Detective, bimbo (derived from Italian bambino) first showed up in English around the 1920s, and didn't come to mean a ditzy female until somewhat later than that, so that this reference in Tropic of Capricorn (published 1938) would have been one of the relatively early uses, I guess. "Daffy", on the other hand, from "daff" (meaning fool) apparently showed up around 1400. Word Detective has references to "bonehead", but does not actually comment on it, so I don't know when it arose, but it would never have occurred to me that it was as old as 1920s.

Another one: "bites the dust"

Yes, I am a fan of Queen.

However, what this is really about is the origin of the phrase "bite the dust". I ran into what may have been one of the fairly early uses of this phrase, reading Samuel Butler's comparatively painless prose translation of The Odyssey.

According to The Phrase Finder, the phrase "bite the dust" was used in 1750 by Tobias Smollet. However, they also note that Butler uses it in his 1898 translation of the Iliad, and I myself found it in his 1900 translation of the Odyssey (book XXII). Lang, et. al. translate the same phrase as "bite the earth" in the Iliad.

So as I figure it, the image of "bite the dust" to refer to a violent death goes back as far as Homer.

Who knew?

Word/Phrase History -- Pimping

I found a use of the word "pimping" in Shamela (published 1741):

In the Character of Mrs. Jewkes Vice is rewarded; whence every Housekeeper may learn the Usefulness of pimping and bawding for her Master.

Did they do stuff like that in 1741? :-)

Pimp doesn't seem to be listed on Word Detective, so I can't compare notes that way.

Word/Phrase History -- Bamboozle

Every so often I see a word or phrase in a fairly old text (say 2 or 3 hundred years old), and I think "That's odd...I would have thought that was a modern sort of word!" I've been planning for some time to keep a list of such words, and this is as good a place as any to put it.

So today's word is "bamboozle". Now, had I thought about it (which I admit I hadn't), I would have guessed that bamboozle was a '70's sort of word. Or maybe Roaring 20's. However, I ran across it last year while reading Cecilia (published in 1782), and more recently while recording a chapter of it for Librivox. In Volume Two, Chapter III, wealthy Cecilia's batty, miserly guardian, dressed up as a chimney sweep at a costume party is worried about her trying to run off with a gold digger:

" 'Ah ha!' cried the chimney-sweeper, significantly nodding his head,'smell a rat! a sweetheart in disguise. No bamboozling! it won't do; a'n't so soon put upon.' "

My Random House College Dictionary has this definition of bamboozle: "1. to deceive or get the better of (someone) by trickery, flattery or the like; humbug; hoodwink. 2. to perplex or mystify." It offers no etymology for the word. In such situations, I generally turn to one of my favorite references, namely The Word Detective by Evan Morris. He's got an excellent list of words and their etymologies, histories, etc. each described quite wittily. He finds that bamboozle was used as early as 1710 by Jonathan Swift, though the origins of the word are in dispute.