Ban the dick-tionary? (Oops! Make that the richard-snary)

Today, while subbing at Guilderland High School, I came across a booklet of banned books for 2009 – 2010, sponsored by various bookseller and library organizations.  The list includes some of the usual suspects:  Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; and The Diary of Anne Frank.  It includes some books which I have not noticed previously on banned book lists but which did not surprise me:  Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian; Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors; and Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle: A Memoir.  However, some books on the list did surprise me:  Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

One listing, however, utterly stunned me:  The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (10^th ed).  The explanatory blurb reads:  “Pulled from the Menifee, Calif. Union School District (2010) because a parent complained when a child came across the term ‘oral sex.’  Officials said the district is forming a committee to consider a permanent classroom ban of the dictionary.”

A Google search indicates that the Menifee Union School District pulled said dictionary from all district schools after a student at Oak Meadows Elementary School found the offending term in mid-January, 2010.  On 27 January 2010, the district reversed its decision.  To compensate, it put in to effect a system of permission slips by which parents can either allow their students to continue to access the dictionary in question or opt to access other dictionaries.  Supposedly, the district chose the collegiate level dictionary in the first place to encourage students to acquire higher-level skills.

Back in my days of teaching freshman composition, for a multi-week Word of the Week assignment, a male student chose the word “cunnilingus.”  I denied permission for him to use this word, noting that the dictionary houses many words that we would not necessarily use in front of our parents.  I did not take away his dictionary.  I simply required him to choose a word more appropriate to the context.  (The problem resolved itself when soon thereafter the student abruptly left the college under a cloud of scandal associated with inappropriate behavior in the dorm.)

Human civilization is made up of words.  Just as our bodies are what we eat, our essential selves are our words—what we say, what we think, what we read, what we write.

Think of George Orwell’s 1984, another usual suspect on the banned book list.  Big Brother controls most of the citizens of Oceania through many methods, including Newspeak.  Newspeak consists of language comprised of (and compromised by) restricted vocabulary and adjectives and abbreviated words, thus restricting citizens’ speech and thoughts to government approved orthodoxy.

For those of you who have studied a foreign language, what are the first words you want to learn?  The dirty words!  When you get a new dictionary, what are the first words you look up?  THE DIRTY WORDS!  Since kids are going to learn DIRTY WORDS anyway, it is best that they learn them from a reputable source—THE DICTIONARY!  (By the way, I am not saying which word I first looked up in my OED.)

Take away my potatoes.  Even take away my Complete Works of Shakespeare.  But do NOT take away my dictionary!

(Now go look up a dirty word and giggle!)

Do you have smart pants?

Recently, while bantering in the kitchen with my husband, he took the opportunity to refer to me as a “smarty-pants.”  Admittedly, I deserved the appellation.  However, I had to wonder what quality of “pants” might make them “smart.”  “Smart pants” could mean pants that are fashionable, but I know his intention was not to compliment my attire.  I had to wonder, though, what qualities associate pants with smart-alecks?

I consulted my Chambers Slang Dictionary to find that “smarty-pants,” meaning  a term of light-hearted abuse, has a number of equally informal synonyms:  smarty-boots, smarty-drawers, and smarty-britches.  Chambers also links the nickname to Cyril Connolly, a Brit known mainly for his criticism but also for his essays.  I googled Cyril Connolly to find out what he might have done to have his name linked with this nickname.  He lived from 1903 to 1974.  He was quite the wit, evidently, and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Eric Blair, aka George Orwell.  Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford are specifically noted as having given their friend the nickname “smarty-pants” or “smarty-boots.”

These investigations, however, did not reveal how pants might be smart of how pants came to be associated with smart-alecks.  I can only imagine that “smarty-pants” might have something informally to do with the body part—the bohunkus—which fills the pants.  Think of the term “smart arse,” to use the British version.  After all, smarty-pantses can be quite cheeky!

Be clement or make like a tree!

In a mixture of silliness and usage of a word rarely seen, I have just stated a popular admonition, “Be nice or leave!”

My investigation of the word “clement” began back in February when some inclement weather in the form of a snowstorm canceled a trip to a restaurant to celebrate some birthdays.  In discussing the situation, the question came up if weather could be “clement,” as well.  Indeed, the word “clement” exists in modern standard usage meaning “mild” when referring to the weather.  As it turns out, today the weather is clement, so Richard and I are fixing to plant our garden.  Stick the negative prefix “in-” in front of “clement,” and you get the word most of us know and use for bad weather.

So what does the weather have to do with being nice?  Is it easier to be clement or show clemency in clement weather?  The word “clement” also means “inclined to be lenient or merciful,” referring to my new American Heritage Dictionary, 5^th edition.  While most of us have probably never used the word “clement” to describe nice people, judges exercise “clemency” in dealing with offenders.  Teachers sometimes show clemency to wayward students, as parents might show clemency to wayward children.  In these cases, the judge, teacher, parent, or other person exercising clemency is being clement, or nice. Clemency also refers to “mildness, especially of weather.” 

What happens when we add the suffix “-ine,” meaning “of or relating to” to the word “clement”?  Of course, we get the word “clementine,” which we can assume would mean “of or relating to mercy.” When we are nice, are we “clementine”?  Can we act clementinely?  Sadly, in real usage, the word “clementine” means either “a deep red-orange, often seedless, mandarin orange,” as a noun, or as an adjective it refers to the two Popes Clement.  (By the way, Pope Clement VII is the Pope who refused to grant Henry VIII his divorce, thus contributing to the Protestant Reformation, not an act of clemency according to Henry.)

We can buy clementines at the store, but we cannot in accepted usage act in a clementine manner.  Perhaps we can start a movement to introduce “clementine” into modern usage as an adjective meaning “of or relating to niceness.”

Go forth in clementineness and have a clement day!

Carrying my bohunkus to Baton Rouge

My husband and I are fixing to carry our bohunkuses down by Baton Rouge to celebrate my father’s 80^th birthday.  Readers familiar with dialect of South Louisiana understand what that statement says.  Others may get the gist generally.  Translated into Standard English I have stated that my husband and I are getting ready to take our butts down to Baton Rouge to celebrate my father’s 80^th birthday.

While “fixing to” is a quirky phrase in Southern dialect, bohunkus is the focus of this blog.  “Bohunkus”  does not appear at all in my new American Heritage Dictionary, 5^th ed.  Nor does it appear in my Chambers Slang Dictionary.  It does appear, however, in my Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. 

Growing up, we used bohunkus as a fun way to say “butt.”  It was never in my experience an inappropriate usage.  “Bohunkus” is a combination of “bohunk,” referring to a contemptuous usage of the word “bohemian” or person from Central or Eastern Europe, and “hunk” or “haunches.”  The RHHDAS cites usages in literature by Eudora Welty in 1941 and Lewis Grizzard in 1980 and a usage in popular culture on the situation comedy, “Golden Girls” in 1989.

Even as a word of Southern slang, “bohunkus” seems to have fallen from popular (or unpopular) usage.  However unwieldy, it is a fun word which I am doing my part to keep alive.  Now I am going to take my bohunkus outside and enjoy this beautiful spring weather!