Beguine and Flabbergasted

Two for the price of one

Cole Porter. Credit CBS /Landov.

Beguine

Some years ago I wrote a newsletter titled The Beguilingly Aromatic Edition, prompting a flurry of activity – my term for one email – in which reader Chris Romley asked if I was now planning to begin the beguine.

Readers of a certain age will get the reference; it’s the title of a Cole Porter song written in the 1930s. It’s become both a pop and a jazz standard covered by artists as diverse as Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Liberace, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones and Pete Townshend, to name a few.

I’ve been vaguely interested in Begin the Beguine ever since R.E.M. released a song punningly titled Begin the Begin. It led me to wonder what the beguine actually is, but not enough to take the trouble of finding out.

Turns out the beguine is a slow and close Caribbean dance that involves quite a bit of hip swaying – the kind that led George Bernard Shaw to once describe dancing as “the vertical expression of a horizontal desire”.

The word is from the Latin beguina, a member of a women’s spiritual order professing poverty and self-denial. The order likely took its name from Lambert le Bègue (Lambert the Stammerer). At some point, béguin became colloquial French for the subject of an infatuation, male or female. The beguine originated in Guadeloupe and Martinique, where the local Antillean Creole language had beke or begue for a white man and beguine for the female form.

But back to Cole Porter. The man was a genius who, more than 60 years after his death, is still regarded as one of the most significant songwriters of the 20th century. Besides having a gift for tunes that people loved, he was also a brilliant, witty lyricist. Check out this extract from Don’t Fence Me In (another Porter song that’s been covered by nearly everyone):

Just turn me loose, let me straddle my old saddle
Underneath the western skies
On my cayuse, let me wander over yonder
Till I see the mountains rise
I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences
Don’t fence me in

Born in 1892, Porter was homosexual in an age that didn’t tolerate homosexuality. The closest that the Associated Press came to acknowledging this fact was in his obituary when it described him and his wife, Linda Lee Thomas, as “active in a gay international set”. This was in 1964 when gay still meant happy and cheerful – but also carried sufficient overtones of its current, dominant meaning to allow people to read between the lines. Porter’s marriage was not simply one of convenience, however. He and Linda Lee Thomas were together for 34 years and Porter was devastated when she died in 1954.

In 1990, the Red Hot Organization chose Porter as the public face of the fight against AIDS, releasing a compilation album, Red Hot + Blue, that saw major artists (and a few minor ones) covering 20 of his most popular songs. It’s a goodie. David Byrne’s cover of Don’t Fence Me In features the world’s funkiest drums, and the Pogues and Kirsty McColl perform wonders with Miss Otis Regrets/Just One of Those Things.

By the way, if you’re wondering what a cayuse is, it’s a wild horse. He knew a lot of words, did Cole Porter, and he wasn’t afraid to use them.

Flabbergasted

Marguerite Durling was curious about the origins of this word, and even more curious to know “where exactly is my flabber and what does it do when it's aghast?”

After extensive research into your question Marguerite, I’m left flummoxed, bamboozled, confusticated, absquatulated, spifflicated and somewhat discombobulated - but barely any the wiser.

What I can say with some confidence is that flabbergasted dates from at least 1772 and may have originated in Sussex, England. And that’s about it. The Century Dictionary, in the po-faced tone that dictionaries specialise in, states: “Like many other popular words expressing intensity of action, [it is] not separable into definite elements or traceable to a definite origin.”

That's not so surprising. Nonsense words, like flabbergasted and the others in the second paragraph above, have a habit of appearing out of seemingly nowhere, and attempts to unpack them generally end in tears. Your flabber, Marguerite, is an elusive entity of unknown location whose name may or may not have something to do with flabby or flappy. What it does when it’s aghast is equally unknown. Sorry.

I do note, however, that flabbergasted has no a before the g, and no h either, so maybe the question is “what does my flabber do when it’s gast?” The answer is “probably the same as when it’s aghast”. Gast is an archaic spelling, probably drawn from ghost (as is aghast). Shakespeare used it in King Lear when he had Edmund say - somewhat boastfully it might be said - of an attacker:

But when he saw my best alarum’d spirits,
Bold in the quarrel’s right, roused to the encounter,
Or whether gasted by the noise I made,
Full suddenly he fled.

One of the likely keys to inventing a successful nonsense word is to at least give it the appearance of originating from an actual word, Latin being a good choice. Confusticated, absquatulated and discombobulated all fall into that category.

Then there are words like bunkum, which look totally made up but aren't exactly. Bunkum is a phonetic spelling of Buncombe, a county in North Carolina, USA. In 1820, Buncombe Congressman Felix Walker launched into a long, dull speech for the sole purpose of ensuring his words would be reported in the local press, and inadvertently gave us a word that not only describes most parliamentary speeches ever since, but ninety per cent of what appears in social media today as well.

One of my favourite recent discoveries is kakistocracy, a term for government by the worst people. Tweeted recently by former CIA director John Brennan to describe you-know-who's administration, it dates back to 1829 when author Thomas Love Peacock coined it as an antonym for aristocracy. It comes from the Greek kakistos - worst - which may have its origins in the Proto-Indo-European kakka, to defecate. Go, Mr Brennan!

By the way, if you're after a good read, grab Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey or Crotchet Castle, two hilarious gothic novels that take the piss out of the then burgeoning Romantic movement and still hold up beautifully nearly 200 years after publication. If you’re after an extensive list of nonsense words, on the other hand, check out this web page.