Fritinancy

Word of the week: Boogaloo

Why is this man wearing an aloha shirt—in Nebraska, in February—while toting a big ol’ weapon inside a government building? And what does all of that have to do with the word of the week, boogaloo?

Brett Hendrix of Omaha with an AR-15 in the #Nebraska Capitol. Hendrix said he brought the gun to demonstrate the right to keep and bear arms. He opposes a gun bill that will be heard this afternoon in the #NELeg Judiciary Committee, viewable here: https://t.co/3k43sJrjfC pic.twitter.com/834lwqOK5Z

— Fred Knapp (@fredmknapp) February 21, 2020

 

Get ready for an only-in-America explanation.

Word of the week: Hustle

In early 2016, when Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign was looking for a way to connect with supporters and recruit volunteers, it turned to Hustle, a mass texting platform that had been created barely 18 months earlier. Sanders eventually lost the Democratic nomination, but San Francisco-based Hustle hustles on, shifting its efforts toward the anti-Trump resistance. Hustle’s goals may be more overtly political than those of other technology startups, but the company’s name perfectly encapsulates an entire industry’s ethos: move fast, be aggressive, shake things up.

Hustle is far from a new word or concept; it’s been in the English lexicon for nearly 350 years. It comes from Dutch husselen, which means “to shake,” but it quickly developed additional senses in English, including “to crowd or push roughly,” “to obtain by fraud or deception,” “to steal,” “to beg,” and – by the 1920s – “to swindle.” (The noun form followed the same semantic route.) As early as 1825, a “hustler” was a thief; a century later, it could refer to a prostitute. Writing in the 1890s about his travels through “Our Great West,” Julian Ralph observed that “The key-note and countersign of life in these cities [of the U.S. West] is the word ‘hustle.’ We have caught it in the East. but we use it humorously, just as we once used the Southern word ‘skedaddle,’ but out West the word hustle is not only a serious term, it is the most serious in the language.”

Word of the week: Pantsula

Pantsula: A street dance that originated in the black townships of apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. The dance has been described by one writer as “a cross between hyped-up hip-hip and Irish line dancing.” In the Zulu language, pantsula means “to waddle like a duck.”

Word of the Week: Hokey

Hokey: Characterized by hokum; sentimental; mawkish; overly contrived, especially to win popular opinion or support; phony. In early citations, sometimes spelled hoky or hokie.

'Hokey" is now a positive political standard: D and R operatives thought HRC's rollout was clever for being hokey. http://t.co/RSVwE6isOc

— Elizabeth Drew (@ElizabethDrewOH) April 15, 2015

The Politico story that Drew—a veteran political journalist and contributor to the New York Review of Books—links to does not contain a single mention of hokey. It does, however, quote a number of “GOP insiders” who called Hillary Clinton’s campaign-announcement video “contrived” and “phony”—and also “savvy” and “effective.”

 

Drew’s tweet wasn’t the first linkage of hokey with Hillary Rodham Clinton. In 1995, during Bill Clinton’s first term, Washington Post reporter David Maraniss—who would go on to publish biographies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—wrote about Ms. Clinton’s “contradictory personality.” Her “predominantly female” staffers “adore” her, he wrote:

The notion that she is cold and self-righteous, they say, is utterly foreign to their experience with her. When she does something to raise their eyebrows, it is more likely with her hokey form of humor, often expressed in simple rhyming schemes that Maggie Williams, her chief of staff, says come from "another era, if not another century." It is not unusual for Hillary Clinton to end a conversation with a staff member by uttering, "Okey-dokey, artichokey." To her scheduler, Patty Solis, she has been heard to say, "Miss Patty, you're as cute as a bug in a rug today."

Word of the Week: Claque

Claque: A group of people hired to applaud at a performance. Pronunced clack. Borrowed from French; from claquer, an onomatopoetic word meaning “to clap.”

The claque originally surfaced in ancient Rome and became an institution in 17th-century France. By 1820, according to a Wikipedia entry, an agency opened in Paris to manage and supply claqueurs. (They didn’t just applaud: pleureuses—they were mostly women—were paid to weep at appropriate moments, rieurs laughed uproariously, bisseurs shouted “Bis! Bis!—“Encore! Encore!”—and so on.)

The most famous claque took shape in the 1830s, when Louis Véron became director of the Paris Opera. As Jennifer Homans writes in her superb history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, Véron, a medical doctor by profession, had a genius for marketing. He recruited Auguste Levasseur (“and paid him splendidly”) “to form and lead what became known as ‘the claque’.” Homans explains:

Levasseur consulted closely with Véron, attended rehearsals, and studied the score for a given production—but he also took bribes from artists and their supporters. On the night of a performance, he marked himself by sporting brightly colored clothing and strategically placed his men throughout the audience. (Véron and the artists provided the tickets, gratuit.) Levasseur carried a cane, which he tapped at the appropriate moment, unleashing a round of applause, bravos, and stomping by his men designed to carry the public in its enthusiasm. This was not resented; to the contrary, Véron’s claim that the claque was a moderating force that “put an end to all quarrels” and stopped “unjust coalitions” of fans from disrupting performances appears to have been widely accepted.

Claque is not to be confused with a similar and more widely used French word, clique: a small, exclusive group of friends.

Aside from the Homans book, I’ve encountered claque only rarely, so I was pleased to see it used effectively last week by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in his blog, Conscience of a Liberal. The setup: Krugman told his readers that he’d been getting mail accusing him of “consorting with Nazis.” He traced the accusations to his public support of the Occupy Wall Street movement; the right wing, he wrote, “is mounting a full court press to portray Occupy Wall Street as an anti-Semitic movement, based, as far as I can tell, on one guy with a sign.”

Krugman continued:

At the same time, the claque is claiming that OWS is responsible for a crime wave. To believe this, you have to believe not only that a few thousand non-violent protestors are deeply straining a police force with 35,000 officers, but that all the rapists and murderers in the outer boroughs are saying, “Hey, the police are busy chasing hippies! Let’s party!” Oh, well.

Christmas at the Movies

As is the custom of my people, I’ll be spending part of today in a movie theater. But you don’t have to be Jewish to play along. Here are some great videos to fill the intervals between gift-unwrapping, eating, caroling, and other festivities.

 

The Christmas Can-Can, by Straight No Chaser

Love these guys! (Hat tip: Bobbie Altman.)

 

Hip-Hop Meets Swing

That’s not generic swing but Lindy Hop. I used to do a bit of Lindy myself, but not like this. Alas. (Hat tip: Manolo the Shoeblogger.)

 

Filmography 2010

The year’s movies—270 of them—expertly edited into what the creator calls “one giant-ass video.” (Hat tip: Russell Meyer.)

 

But wait, there’s more! Embedding has been disabled for this Dancing at the Movies video, but I urge you to click through and watch it. Again, the editing is breathtakingly good. (Hat tip: MJF.)

Merry Christmas!