Dear, dear

 

 

My last essay had to do with attempts to coerce language to conform to social and political ideas of our fancy.  This one begins with a meditation on language that has become so formulaic that we seldom think about it at all.  In the household doldrums of Covid-world we have tried, probably unconsciously,  to make something out of very little by anticipating the daily arrival of the mail.  Since the invention of email real letters are virtually unheard of,* but if you are desperate, you may actually cast an eye over the abundant junk mail, and if really desperate you may even be likely to open it.  For the past couple of years I have received, maybe once or twice a month, a letter from a land company offering to buy from me some acres I own in the Ozarks.  I deduce there are land agents all over the country sifting through tax records in county court houses.  But not a chance!  My grandchildren will decide how this little bit of gorgeous wilderness will be shared with the world in its natural state and quite without the help of a “developer” whose return address is a post office box in Sparks, Nevada.

 

I opened a letter that began…Dear John…I felt annoyed and aggrieved, irrationally, and for more than one reason.  The man signing the letter, Wilbur Somebody, didn’t know me from Aristotle, but presumes to address me by my first name in the hopes of bulldozing cedar trees and putting up a ticky-tacky split level.  Furthermore, that name itself, John, is regularly used to denote such things as a prostitute’s client or a toilet.  Furthermore yet, a “dear John” is a specialized form of an unwanted missive that revived unhappy adolescent memories.  These associations are not Wilbur’s fault, exactly, but Wilbur was what I had at hand to be annoyed by.  It was the word dear that I focused upon.  Everybody who writes to anybody calls that person dear.  But surely they don’t really mean it.  They cannot possibly even think about it.  Dear means esteemed, held in affection, beloved.  As an epistolary salutation, dear is a meaningless convention.  Yet I use it all the time and shall presumably continue to do so for the remainder of my days.  Why?  Will “Dear” just lie there in the linguistic pool, soggy and motionless forever?

 

Dear is another one of those good old Germanic words that were part of the vocabulary of early speakers of the English language.  It was destined to be the homonym—homonyms being words with the same pronunciation but differing meanings—of the generic quarry of game-seeking hunters, the deer.  I’ll come to that in a minute.  The other, related meaning of dear had to do with commerce.  Dear means costly, expensive.  Though now rarely used in that sense in American English, it is still alive and well in many other places in the English-speaking world.  Any port in a storm.  That little chain of associations was useful as it transported my mind from Wilbur’s insolence and his road-graders to something more interesting, namely the commercial binary of dear (expensive) and cheap.

 

Now, this is really interesting.  Upscale goods proved in time to be too good for a four-letter Anglo-Saxon adjective.  They deserved something Latinish, something Frenchy.  Expenditure invokes the heaviness of precious metal bearing down on a hanging (dependere) scale.  The focus of the word was originally on the purchasing power of the buyer rather than on the quality of the goods.  Expensive is, so to speak, an expensive word.  Dear was a cheap one.  But, we notice, there is no expensive word for cheap, just cheap cheap on its own.  The root meaning of cheap was “market”.  The social and economic importance of markets in earlier European societies could easily be supposed even without the abundant linguistic evidence of place names in many European languages.  English Cheap Sides, East Cheaps, Chipping Nortons and a hundred other ch-p variants are scattered across the Ordinance Survey maps of Great Britain to this very day.  Descendants of the Latin mercatus (market) became more common after the Norman Invasion, so that we still speak of “market towns” and find numerous place-names like Downham Market.

 

Le Bon Marché, Paris

 

I don’t know whether free-market economists like Milton Friedman have sufficiently exploited the etymological encouragement for their theories possible to be found in historical dictionaries.  But ceap, market, is a word consumers usually like.  In French the Latin-based marché shows the same tendencies. The French version of “cheap” is à bon marché—at a good market price, I suppose.  One of the classic large Parisian department stores was called Le Bon Marché.  No American retailer of class would put “Cheap” in the name of a store today.  But French bon marché has not yet been wholly degraded.  It’s more like “great bargain.”  But the distinction between “great bargain” and “cheap and nasty” is on a sliding scale.  The mountains of synthetic junk that now clutter flea-markets and yard sales in my part of the world are evidence enough of that.  It well may be that the excellent English adjective tawdry derives from the name of a Dollar Store medieval market called the Fair of St. Audrey (‘Taudrey”), Audrey being the popular name of a royal Anglo-Saxon saint, Etheldrida!  Classy name, but crumby stuff.

 

So were I to respond to the unsolicited letter from my Nevada land speculator, the proper salutation should probably be…Cheap Wilbur…cheap in the American sense, of course.

 

The homophonic pairing of dear/deer, though irrelevant to most of what I have said so far, does illustrate another interesting linguistic phenomenon, the oscillation between generic and specific.  The modern German adjective for what I shall call economic dear is teuer.  The modern German word for “animal” is Tier.  It is obvious that English deer came to refer to a specific group of large animals frequently hunted by our ancestors.  In English, but not in German, the two words came to have the same pronunciation.  Something rather similar manifests itself in what you eat after you have killed the deer, namely meat.  But in early English meat was the generic word for all sorts of food.  There are a few residual memories of this: sweetmeats, the meat of a walnut.  But your average hairy-chested Old English huntsman was no Vegan.  He wanted his meat to bleed.  Your hairy-chested Anglo-Norman huntsman, on the other hand, was likely to be an aristocrat as interested in the chase as in the game—both words that suggest that the business had as much to do with sport as with alimentation.  But he too ate what he killed—venison, from venatio (hunting.)

 

 

 

 

*No sooner had I written this than we got a real letter from our dear granddaughter Ruby at summer camp!

Dead Deer

 

My daily walk, which actually does happen on some days, has a variable route along a wooded lakeside and old tow paths along the Princeton stretch of the Delaware and Raritan Canal.   It generally begins and ends by going through the woods, field, and lakeside path between my back yard and the northern abutments of the bridge that carries County Route 629 (Harrison Street) over Lake Carnegie.  Once across, there are inviting walking paths going in both directions and on both sides of the canal, which at this point runs parallel to the lake.  The very beginning of the walk (or the very end, if on the return)—that is, the four hundred yards or so between my yard and the lake—offers two possibilities.  There is an “official” path used by most strollers and wide enough for the groundsmen to use now and again when  bringing in their large mowers to trim the fields.  Fifty yards or so to the west and more or less parallel to the official path is a long, thin glade where the trees are sparse enough that one can easily make one’s way around and through them on the grass.  These are alternative pleasant routes to the lakeside, and the only motive to choose one over the other is a desire for variety.

 

            About a week ago, having exited by the glade, I elected to return by the “official” path.  This was after about three miles in hot and humid weather.  That is a little beyond the comfort zone of my enfeebled condition.  I was perspiring copiously and looking forward to a sit-down followed by a shower.  Three hundred yards short of my house I came upon a downed animal flailing in the middle of the path.  It was a pretty large doe, probably near her full growth.  There was no blood, and I could see no evidence of a wound or a broken limb.  It apparently had been on the ground for some time, and in its thrashings it had scraped away patches of hair right down to the raw skin.  Though obviously in bad shape, it was still vigorously kicking its legs, its sharp hooves clattering.  I was not going to mess with this beast.  Years ago back on the farm I had seen large downed animals, domestic as well as wild, recoup their strength, rise, and totter on.  I convinced myself that this was at least a theoretical possibility in this instance; so I simply kept my distance from the flailing flesh and continued the short distance home.  The experience was of course disconcerting, a discordant end to a wholesome walk, undertaken in the pursuit of good health, through rain-fresh woods.  However, I was able to put it mostly out of mind.

 

            I did not return to that spot until two days later.  It was under the same circumstances of returning from a walk, and by the same route.  This route was downwind from the spot at which I had encountered the stricken deer, and the sickly odor of death reached me well before I could see the remains in the path.   Anyone who has done much hiking in real woods knows the unwelcome smell of decomposing animal flesh.  Even small critters, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, can cast off quite a stench.  When I got in sight of these large remains, the color of the russet-brown beast seemed to have been transformed into something paler, a kind of light beige.  It appeared as though someone had placed a tight-fitting cloth over the carcass.  The garment was knitted or woven.  You could see the individuated short segments of knitting stiches.  Except that the segments were undulating, many of them rolling down the curvatures of the beast’s back and belly.  What I was actually seeing was a seething mass of fat, moist,  maggots feasting on a rapidly diminishing deer cadaver.   The realization struck me suddenly with equal forces of shock and disgust—and disgust in its fullest old Latin sense, which goes beyond the mere recognition of a repellent yuckiness to suspect a kind of cosmic faux pas.

            There is a large deer population in our part of the state, as there is through much of East Coast suburbia.   It is in fact an over-population, encouraged by an abundance of food and a protection from certain difficulties and dangers of true wilderness.  The animals’ greatest enemy here is not the gun but the motor vehicle.  It is very common to see dead animals on the roads and highways.  The phenomenon is national, and the danger does not reside with the deer alone.  About two hundred people die each year in this country in accidents involving them.  Municipalities have to contract with animal control experts, or at least with some strong guy with a full-bed pickup truck, to remove the roadkill.  An infrequently used footpath through semi-private woods is not the same thing as a state highway.  So I was surprised a few days later, when I next passed, expecting to see a pile of polished bones, to find only tiny trace elements remaining.  There had been a clean-up.  I presume a neighbor living much closer to the scene had called the municipality.  But removing some animal remains could not resolve the disquiet which the episode had left me.

 

            The problem of reconciling belief in a just God (or even the operations of a godless but benign material universe) with the fortuities of observation and lived experience has a fancy name: theodicy.  Its classical literary expression in our western literature is the Book of Job, which, though a beautiful poem, is for most modern readers even less consoling than the Consolation of Philosophy.  Whether you regard the problem as philosophical or theological, it’s a big one that has disquieted thinking people for eons.  Goethe was only six years old when reports of the Lisbon earthquake upended his infant confidence in a providential universe.  That even now in legal language “natural disasters” are often called “acts of God”—events in which individual human agency plays no role, at least so far as the insurance company is concerned—is possibly disquieting.  From the point of view of the dead deer, was not its grotesque fate as much a natural disaster, and therefore “act of God,” as a great wind or a floodtide?  The subject of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” is the premature death of promising youth, one of the classic topics in discussions of theodicy.  “Are God and Nature then at strife?”—asks the poet, before anticipating in the poem’s most famous phrase the grim doctrine so many would find in Darwin’s yet unpublished theory of natural selection: Nature red in tooth and claw.

 

            I recognize that I am saddled with various old-fashioned ideas that strike most of my younger contemporaries as quaint at best or at worst, worse; but I hoped that I had progressed beyond the early Victorian period.  I walk for healthy recreation, and because I enjoy the freshness of nature even in its carefully contrived suburban preserves.  Must I adjudicate the ghastly maggot feast on which I stumbled in terms of a problem in nineteenth-century moral philosophy?  Are my interpretive options limited to “Nature red in tooth and claw” and a striking demonstration of providential order through the food chain and a recycling program vastly superior to anything on offer from the Waste Management Corporation?