(And if you are already inclined to
titter, that proves my point.)
Frequently to be met with, in these
troublous times, is this quote from Thomas Jefferson (1787 -- thus, somewhat before the French revolution -- they
took him at his word):
The tree of liberty must
be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
We shall not comment on the current use
of this phrase to justify some rather ill-advised assassinations, for our point
here is purely linguistic.
What you will seldom meet, is the co-text. The very next sentence reads:
It is its natural manure.
In this case, the quoters may be fully excused
for omitting that continuation.
Jefferson was writing for a highly
educated and restricted 18th-century audience (indeed, the quotation
in question stems from a private
letter). He was not addressing the
latter-day louts and yahoos raised on “Animal House” and cable TV, for whom ‘manure’
means neither more nor less than excrement (and more likely to be flung, than
planted).
 |
| An honorable man of metaphor; no scatologist, he |
What, then, is the linguistic landscape here? Any
well-read person of our own day, knows that the word manure is often used
specifically for said substance as used for botanical fertilizer. Jefferson was obviously alluding to this
latter use. But was he thereby
averting his gaze (and trusting that his readers would likewise avert theirs)
from a concrete central meaning -- the way, if we metaphorically refer to a
statesman as an “eagle”, say, we wish purely to point to a kind of soaring
nobility, and nowise to suggest that the fellow moults or eats mice? To imagine that, is to get the
semantic evolution exactly
backwards.
It is not the case that Jefferson was
here bracketing an original defectatory sense for the benefit of a metaphorical extension, the way (in the
hippie era) “get your shit together” came to mean “get your act together (get
your ducks in a row)” with no real excretory reference. Rather, the excremental sense of
the word manure is itself purely
secondary -- indeed tertiary.
In origin, the word has nothing to do with that, indeed not even
immediately to do with fertilizer of
any variety. (Compare, mutatis mutandis, German Jauche.) The word is
cognate with our word manouevre
(borrowed from French; a term in no wise redolent of the outhouse), and in terms
of its Latin etymology means ‘handiwork’ (cf. manual, operate).
~
So, semantically, what has come to pass?
In the blandest, most schematic sense, we
have here a case of specialization, followed by a familiar variety of metonymy
(concrete for abstract [**]); but
that is of little interest. What we wish to emphasize is that the evolution here is
not a case of either euphemism or
dysphemism, as you might imagine if you were under the misimpression that the
cloacal sense was original. Any taboo designatum will,
predictably, launch a euphemistic replacement-term -- indeed, an
ever-obsolescing, self-abolishing series of same, since the stain of the
referent is not thereby abolished.
Thus, words denoting ‘excrement’,
‘genitals’, ‘prostitute’ and (interestingly) ‘stupid’, form a never-ending
series of neologisms attempting to
escape from what they mean.
Here, rather, we are confronted with a situation almost exactly
opposite. Rather than a word
denoting something taboo, we have a completely innocent and uncontroversial expression
(here, denoting a manual process of any kind, and later the fructification of
agriculture), which, by historical accident, eventually became associated in particular with a proscribed referent. After the reference of the word manure became, in some
contexts, identifiable merely with (horresco referens) poo-poo, the word became unusable in contexts like
Jefferson’s. In much the
same manner, the blameless designation of the male of the genus Gallus, namely
the cock (saving your presence): so
soon as this became a metaphor for the membrum
virilis, it ceased to be salonfähig
(at least in sensitive America) and was replaced by the improbable deverbal
term rooster.
Note that, in this last case, the sense of
taboo was related purely to the word
itself in its new application, rather than to anything specially concerning
the he-hen (that proverbial rooftop alarm-clock), who is not inherently particularly phallic. Other zoological comparisons suggest themselves at
least as prominently: the rhino comes prominently (upstandingly) to
mind, a fact not lost upon the aphrodisiac-seeking Asians who are largely
responsible for the slaughter of rhinos and elephants.
To see what’s going on, consider the Engish word face. It was borrowed from the French word of the same spelling,
and continues to serve us unobtrusively in that capacity down to the present
day. And yet, as a term of
human anatomy, it has quite dropped out of modern French, yielding to the
neologism visage. What is going on? Is there something obscene about
the human face?
Not at all. What happened is, in French and not in English, the word face fell into bad company, specifically
in the metaphor (much savored by the misnamed Enlightenment) la face du grand turc -- meaning, the
buttocks. That was enough to doom
the innocent original.
In essence, this whole process isn’t even
especially semantic, and tells you less about the linguistically skittish
society that gave rise to it, than do such truly meaning-based evolutions such as the words (in Europe and in
America) for someone who is dumb as dirt.
Look up the etymology of cretin
(from Christian-- and no, this was
not a Dawkinsian-Hitchensian slur against the smarts of evangelicals, it was
meant as a gentle euphemism), and the whole train of words whose origin was euphemistic
(imbecile, idiot, moron, …) which yet
can no longer even be used in polite society, in their original objective sense (though they survive as loose insults for bosses and bad drivers). The process that affected French face or English manure rather involves, neither euphemism nor
dysphemism at its core, but something which we might dub infection: a perfectly
innocent word with an innocent meaning, by happenstance acquires a new
association (perhaps in a single day, as when some wag coined the phrase about
the big Turk’s bottom, which went viral), which dooms it. In an extreme case, the infection may
contain no semantic component whatsoever, but be strictly accidental and
phonetic. Thus, an old word
for ‘stingy’, niggardly, which has no
ethnic reference whatsoever, in contemporary jittery America has become taboo’d,
owing to its merely phonetic resemblance to an unrelated word which I dare not
even name. (Lexical change in
taboo-ridden tribal societies provide thousands of examples of such
things.) Or, to take an example entirely removed from any semantic
taint at any point: reflexes
of the Latin hodie ‘today’, which
survives in Spanish hoy and Italian oggi, in phonetically slipshod French
became so debased that it had to be replaced by a circumlocution, in which the
original etymon survives almost imperceptibly: (au jour d’)aujourd’hui. Or again, the reflexes of Latin apis ‘bee’ became so worn-down and homophonous in the daughter
languages, that the originally diminutive apiculus had to plug the gap: Spanish abeja, French abeille.
[** Footnote: Example of concretum
pro abstracto: Originally,
both bureau and toilette referred (in French) to a piece of cloth. Their separate, contingent
evolutions then led to abstract
senses, ‘bureaucratic organization’ and ‘mode of dressing for the day’,
respectively.]
~
For a languages-in-contact look at twee
euphemisms for “Number 1” in French and German (aller au pipi-room; die Pipi-Pause), try this:
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