My siblings and I, all nine of us, have been reminiscing on the family chat lately about our upbringing in rural New Zealand during the 50s, 60s and 70s.
A memory that one of my sisters brought up, somewhat treacherously I might add, was of the time I got into an argument with my father about his totally unfair demand that I scrub down the cowshed wall after milking. Rather than bend to his will on the matter, the 12-year-old me stormed off down the road in a huff, determined to finally run away from home.
As I’m sure you know, this requires energy. So rather than set off immediately for the certain promise of a brighter future, I found a thicket of blackberry bushes laden with ripe fruit on the side of the road about a mile away and began carbo-loading before carbo-loading was a thing. Between face stuffings, the nearby undergrowth doubled as a hiding spot from the frantic search parties my parents would no doubt be organising, and protection against the early autumn sun. Thus it was I passed the day.
The plan, brilliant though it was, had one fatal flaw. That night, Muhammad Ali was scheduled to fight Joe Frazier for the world heavyweight boxing title, an event that would be screened live around the world and which I’d been looking forward to for months, certain that Ali, the greatest human being ever, would finally reclaim the crown that had been cruelly snatched from him when he refused to fight in the Vietnam War.
I searched for ways to resolve this knotty problem. Could I stand firm and defiant, as Ali had for three long years, knowing it would cost me that which I held most dear?
Nope, turns out I couldn’t.
What about creeping up to the house in the dark and watching the fight through the lounge window?
No again. The humiliation if I was discovered would be too great.
So, around dusk I slunk back home like a whipped third-rate boxer.
When I put my face through the door, the old man expressed his surprise and unfettered joy that I had made it back in time to watch the fight. In fact, he kindly pointed out, I actually had time - should I wish - to get up to the cowshed and scrub the wall that he had thoughtfully left as it was, and still return to the house before the opening bell.
You can guess the rest.
This whole pathetic saga (and thanks again for the reminder, Marie) got me thinking about the little word box. Which, as it turns out, is really two words.
First, there’s that rectangular thing in which your new smartphone was packaged and into which we’ll all get bundled when the final bell rings.
It’s a word that has survived unchanged from Old English, which took it from the Latin buxis. If you’re thinking that looks eerily similar to buxus, the botanical name for that inordinately popular dwarf hedging plant (also called boxwood), take a bow. That’s no coincidence: in Old English, a box was, literally, a receptacle made of boxwood.
Now you might be wondering who would think of making anything but matchboxes from a plant that small. Except it’s not that small in the wild, where Buxus sempervirens (its full name) can grow to an impressive nine metres. It’s also very slow growing, which not only makes it a well-behaved hedging choice, but also renders its wood exceptionally hard and ideal for working. In fact, archaeologists have uncovered 170,000-year-old boxwood digging sticks in Italy, fashioned by Neanderthals.
Then there’s box in the pugilistic sense. Unlike the other box, this box - which showed up in English around 1300 - is of uncertain origin. It may be related to Middle Dutch boke, Middle High German buc, and Danish bask, all of which mean “a blow”, but the evidence for this is skimpy.
Box began life as a noun and was being used as a verb by the late 1300s, when it meant to beat with the fist or hands. It wasn’t until the 1560s that its more specific sense - that is, to go to it Ali/Frazier-like in an actual fistfight - climbed into the ring.
You hardly need me to tell you that boxing is a brutal sport. After the third and final Ali-Frazier fight in 1975, dubbed The Thrilla in Manila, Ali reputedly said it was the closest he’d ever come to dying. Imagine how much more brutal the sport must have been before the 20th century, when bare-knuckle fighting was the norm. In fact, until some time in the 1700s, boxing had no written rules, meaning a man could continue taking a beating long after he was no longer able to defend himself.
For boxing fans, it also hardly needs stating that the sport’s brutality is part of what makes it so compelling. I understand why many people will never bring themselves to watch a fight; even why many would like to see boxing banned. As for me, I’m among those who can’t look away. There’s something deeply primal in a sport that’s designed to decide who, of two opponents, can both dish up and take the greatest beating without actually killing each other.
As for Ali, he proved to be human on that night in 1971, falling to his first professional defeat. It was to be Frazier’s only win against Ali, who won their next two fights and went on to regain his world crown against George Foreman in 1974 in eight unforgettable rounds.
I learned two important lessons the night of the first Ali-Frazier fight. The first was that even the greatest heroes sometimes stumble. For a 12-year-old, that was a seismic shock, a rite of passage from childhood innocence into a world of cold reality and broken illusions.
The second? If you’re 12 years old, don’t go toe to toe with your dad. Like a wily old boxer, he’ll outsmart and outlast you, and you’ll find yourself up at the cowshed all alone in the dark of night, scrubbing caked cowshit off the wall, wondering how you wound up there.
Bits and specious
Last week I asked if you could name the world’s fifth most spoken language after Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English and Hindi. The answer: Arabic.
As for the only word in English that has a silent j, the potheads among my readers will have had an advantage here. The word is marijuana. Well done, dudes. Nice Try Award to Tony Brenton-Rule, who offered javelina (pronounced hav-a-leena), another name for the pig-like peccary. But an aspirated j isn’t a silent j, so no cigar, Tony.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, no word beginning with j is of Old English derivation.
About 60% of words in English have a silent letter in them, according to Ursula Dubosarsky, author of The Word Snoop.
V is the only letter of the alphabet that is never silent, covfefe notwithstanding.
I’ve been binge watching The Sopranos after viewing it the old-fashioned way - week by week, for you zoomers - back in the day. One thing that’s struck me this time around is that every character, almost without exception, is a complete and utter ass****. No wonder I love it.
Quote of the week
I love kick boxing. It's a lot of fun. It gives you a lot of confidence when you can kick somebody in the head.
Alicia Keys