Calling All Idgits

So I was searching the newspapers of genealogybank.com for the name “Hammerand” because a woman from St. Louis by the name of Emilie Hammerand was arrested in Vienna in 1934 after the Nazi assassination of Englebert Dollfuss, the Austrian prime minister. She, the wife of an Austrian who owned Vienna’s Hotel Hammerand, was charged with transporting messages between Munich Nazis and Austrian Nazis. How, I wondered, did this American woman end up assisting the Nazis?  

Unfortunately, when I searched for “Hammerand” many of the results were for “hammer and,” as in “hammer and nail.” One such result, dated December 9, 1887, was titled “Vaccinated for lefthandness,” and I couldn’t resist finding out what that was about. It turned out to be a short humorous article about a man named David Sills who was “left handed all over.”  According to the article, published in the Dallas Morning News (see below), “Not only does [Mr. Sills’s] left side boss all the balance of his anatomy, but it controls and directs his walk, his conversation and his tobacco. In fact, when he saunters down the street the most casual observer can see at a glance that his entire right side is badly henpecked, and is keeping in the procession with servile timidity.”

Mr. Sills lefthandedness interested the local doctor who, for the sake of science, questioned Sills about it. The man told the doctor that “he was not built that way at the start, or a little earlier, and that he was vaccinated when quite young with a left-handed scab, and it stuck.” Then he solemnly told the doctor, “This world has never seen a bald-headed idjit or a left-handed fool.” 

Bobby from the t.v. show Supernatural

The last sentence popped open my eyes. It has been decades since I last heard the word “idjit.” I remember saying it when I was a kid, likely in elementary school, and we called each other idjits. I thought we had made up the word ourselves, so I was amazed to find it in an article written in 1887. Clearly the word had been around a long time before we used it on the playgrounds of Jefferson Elementary School.

As I remember the word, it was slang for “idiot.” I am not sure why we needed a substitute word for idiot, but it did save a syllable and sounds fresher. Doing the inevitable Google “research,” I found these two definitions of idjit:

Idiot, a person with an intellectual barrier blocking them from obtaining average intelligence http://www.urbandictionary.com/

Derived from the Irish Slang word "Eejit", which means a person who is exceedingly  Stupid or an Idiot. It was Americanized and made "country" and slowly was changed into "Idjit" by southerners. http://onlineslangdictionary.com/ 

An academic blog entry explained the origin and use of the word in Ireland:  https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/ijit-idjit-eejit-idiot/  If I looked hard enough, I am sure I could find a doctoral dissertation written about the word.

Even though I had not heard the word in many decades, the word has continued in circulation. Among its famous uses, Yosemite Sam called Bugs Bunny an idgit in a 1960s cartoon. And in recent years, Bobby, a red-neckish baseball-hat wearing character in Supernatural, a television show, often called Sam and Dean, younger characters in the show, idjits. As a result, the word has become a minor meme among the Supernatural crowd, and it is displayed on tee shirts, baseball caps, bracelets, etc.

It was fun to rediscover this word after so many years and to learn not only that it survived a journey from Ireland but also that its longevity extends well over a century. If I were to write an updated definition of the word, I would illustrate it with a picture of Mrs. Emilie Hammerand of St. Louis, a friend of Austrian Nazis, who, most assuredly, was not left handed.

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Thomson Journal, Vaccinated for Left-Handedness

Dallas Morning News, December 9, 1887, accessed through Newspapers.com

One of the unaccountable peculiarities of our good friend, Mr. David Sills, is that he is left-handed all over. Not only does his left side boss all the balance of his anatomy, but it controls and directs his walk, his conversation and his tobacco. In fact, when he saunters down the street the most casual observer can see at a glance that his entire right side is badly henpecked, and is keeping in the procession with servile timidity. The oldest inhabitant never saw him shove a jack plane with his right hand, and when he wears a bile it is invariably located to the right of the equator of his backbone. In you mention the stock law his left eye responds with surprising vigor, and his snore is known by neighbors as a strictly one-barrel performance. Mr. Sills is a quiet, unpretentious citizen. He does not carry around an intellectual headlight to dazzle people and make horses run away. But he has a head to defy the power of his eloquent hammer. And he is left-handed from away back. Not long since Dr. Durham, in a laudable pursuit of science, questioned Mr. Sills in reference to this peculiarity. Mr. Sills replied that he was not built that way at the start, or a little earlier, and that he was vaccinated when quiet young with a left-handed scab, and it stuck. Then he solemnly informed the doctor that this world has never seen a bald-headed idjit or a left-handed fool. In this Mr. Sills is eminently correct.

Easy Peasy and Other Breezy and Cheesy Words

A couple of months ago, I heard the words “easy peasy” in a commercial warning people about identify theft. In the ad, a smarmy thief described how he had stolen the identity of an unsuspecting young woman, then he flashed his yellow front teeth at the camera and said with a sinister sneer, “easy peasy.” 

This two-word phrase sounded familiar, but I could not recall when I had heard it previously. For some reason, it wormed its way into my brain. The meaning of “easy peasy” is immediately obvious: the word “peasy” amplifies “easy,” even though the literal meaning of “peasy” is “the disagreeable taste of very fresh green peas.” The word is not used for its literal meaning, but simply because it rhymes comfortably with easy and gives it a new implied meaning. The two words together are, when first heard, a breezy (light, fresh, informal) way of saying something is more than just easy. We might say the two words together are “super duper,” a similar construction of two words.

(http://www.easypeasy.fr/uk/index.php)

Of course, when the two-word phrase wormed its way into my consciousness, I started hearing it more often. Apparently the two words have caught the attention of advertising writers. Last week when watching the Seattle-San Francisco football game, I heard the words “easy peasy” in three different commercials, including in a song sung by a postman happily delivering priority mail, which is, as we all now know, the “easy peasy” way to return gifts we do not want.

When I started looking around more carefully, I was surprised at how widespread the phrase is used commercially. There are easy peasy barbecue sauces 

(http://www.easypeasyfoods.com/ ), easy peasy shoes (http://www.easypeasy.fr/uk/index.php), and several easy peasy blogs. Also there are many easy peasy diets, including an easy peasy paleo diet (http://easypeasypaleo.net/). There is an easy peasy computer operating system (http://www.geteasypeasy.com/). And you can even buy an easy peasy pea from Burpee. 

O.K., I admit that I missed the easy peasy phenomenon until it came to television. Given the evident trend in the use of the phrase, I suspect that it will not be long before we are inundated with commercials showing attractive young people dancing frenetically as an announcer or a song repeatedly tells us how “easy peasy” a product is. At that point, if it has not already, “easy peasy” will cross from being breezy to being cheesy. It will be so trite, dull, and tired that people will cringe when they hear the phrase.

Just sayin’.

Yes, just as “just sayin’” quickly crossed from breezy to cheesy a couple of years ago, the same is happening to “easy peasy” because of its overuse.  

My experience with easy peasy reminds me that our brain’s relationship with words is a strange one. We hear and speak words in our vocabulary with great ease, rarely noticing them as individual entities. Then, we encounter a new word or phrase that surprises us or catches our imagination. We often incorporate it into our conversation, as do countless others, showing how hep or tuned in or cool we are; then the word or phrase quickly becomes cheesy through repetition. When we use it, and people hear it for the 1000^th time, we catch a scent of scorn or sympathy from them. Hey, “what happens in Easy Peasy land, stays in Easy Peasy Land”: such phrases quickly lose their freshness.

Sometime a word can do more than worm its way into our consciousness: it can scare us when it keeps popping up in unexpected places. I call this the “Olsen Effect.” You have probably experienced it.  It goes like this:  you hear a worm word or phrase – one that penetrates your consciousness – and then in a short time, you hear it, read it, and see it repeatedly, as if it were stalking you. 

My defining experience with the “Olsen Effect” came shortly after I moved to Birch Bay.  I was looking for the quickest route from Birch Bay to the town of Ferndale and soon found that it was “Olsen Road.” Right after that discovery, I and my fellow traveler, Natalia, started noticing the word “Olsen” everywhere we turned. We passed the Olsen Realty company. an Olsen yard sign was in most yards to promote a man running for a county office. A man named Olsen was heralded in the headlines in the local newspaper for his civic actions. A young Olsen hit a home run to lead his high school team to victory. On it went, day after day: Natalia and I would encounter an Olsen in the most unlikely places at the most unlikely times.

Olsens

O.K., you might say, Northwest Washington was settled by Scandinavians, and Olsen is a common Scandinavian name. So, being “Olsenized” should not have been a big surprise. True, maybe. But what about this:  in the midst of the Olsen phenomenon, Natalia and I traveled to Vienna, Austria. After a few days there, we did some shopping and she, after substantial searching, found a sweater she liked at the Steffl department store on Kärnterstrasse. Taking it to the cash register, we glanced at the label and both of us noticed at the same time that it said “Olsen.” We had to muffle our screams to avoid getting kicked out of the store.

By that time, “Olsen” had changed from a breezy word to a cheesy one. We had had enough of it.

Another, but lesser example of the Olsen Effect is a word I noticed late last year in a short story by Dorothy Thompson, the journalist who was the second most famous woman in the United States in the 1930s (behind Eleanor Roosevelt). Researching her years in Vienna from 1921 to 1925, I ran across an unpublished short story she wrote in 1922 or 1923. In it, she described a very attractive woman character as a “light-o’love.” I had never read or heard this phrase before. Consulting a dictionary, I learned that the word was first used in 1589 and was in more common use in the 19^th century. Its meaning is (1) prostitute or (2) lover, paramour. 

Viennese Light-o'-Love
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/268879040225872157/

Only a couple of days later, I encountered the phrase a second time in a book with the title, The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, Exile by Paul Hofmann. According to this book, Arthur Schnitzler was 32 years old when the Burgtheater, the most prestigious theater in Vienna, accepted for production one of his plays. Its German name was Liebelei but in English it was usually called “Light o’ Love or Game of Love.”   

Since this second meeting with this word, I have run across it three or four other times. In each case, the word was used in a discussion of Schnitzler and his plays.  I think that if I use the word in some discussion, it will still be a breezy, not a cheesy, word. It still has the power of freshness.

Another note on words, Olsens, and brains. A few months ago, I was reading Barry Schweitzer’s autobiography, Bootlegger’s Son, when I stumbled upon an intriguing, unfamiliar word. I was reading the book mainly to find out more about Switzer’s upbringing in Arkansas. He had a rough childhood in Crossett before playing for the Arkansas Razorbacks and then becoming one of the most successful, and disliked, football coaches in history.

In describing his childhood, Switzer described his father as a “rounder.”  I did not know the meaning of the word (and did not recall seeing it previously), but knew it was not a compliment. The dictionary told me that it has a very specific meaning: someone who frequents bars and is often drunk. Good word, I thought, though I do not know any rounders.

I found out a couple of days later that I did, in fact, have a rounder in my life. Trying to find a book, I searched my shelves and accidentally ran across this one:

Fortunately, I have found no other rounders around me and the word is still a fresh one in my vocabulary. I look forward to using it in a conversation some day soon.

Here is one other phrase – in this case a colorful, descriptive phase – that recently wormed its way into my brain, then started regularly appearing in the books I was reading. In an e-mail communication from a man who lived in a Vienna as a child in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he described a building as being “without eyebrows.” The phrase struck me as a vivid description of an unadorned building. In Vienna, a building “without eyebrows” would differ from the ubiquitous baroque-influenced buildings that most certainly are decorated around the windows.

House with eyebrows on Michaeler Platz

Not long after the email, I read (again in Hofmann’s The Viennese) about the famous “house without eyebrows” designed by architect Adolf Loos, who hated superfluous ornamentation of buildings. This multi-story building, was erected on Michaeler Platz, which lies at an entrance to the huge Hapsburg castle complex. When someone exited the complex into the inner city, the building was in the line of sight. 

Loos House without eyebrows. It is across a road
from the building shown above

Hofmann wrote about the building:

Erected between 1909 and 1912 for the tailoring firm Goldman & Salatsch, the building caused a sensation that we have difficulty nowadays to understand. The “Loos House,” with its plain walls and windows without any decoration, stares at the neo-Baroque façade of the Michaelertrakt of the Hofburg and its heroic statuary, put up only twenty years earlier, as if in defiance.

After reading about the “house without eyebrows” in Hofmann’s book, the term kept popping up in other books that I was reading, admittedly about fin de siècle Vienna and the Austrian First Republic. In the other books, I learned that Emperor Franz Joseph had been outraged by this building, a “modernist monstrosity.” Reportedly, the old man refused to ever use the Michaelerplatz entry gate again. 

I am not sure if the author of one book about architecture in Vienna was accurately describing the events leading up to the construction of the Loos House, but according to him, when the owner of the Goldman & Salatsch company told Loos – who had lived three years in the United States – that they wanted him to design a building that would make them famous, he replied with a breezy smile. “Easy peasy,” he said.