Canthook

Sometimes, I run across gobstoppers - facts that are so, uh, well, I guess I don't know what to call it. English is a language that steals from every other language. I suspect other languages do as well, but I don't know. But in many cases, we have two words for the same thing that are almost the same, but not perzackly identical. Typically, one word will have come down to us from the Greek, and one from the Latin, but there are a lot of other word origins as well.

There are well over half a million words in the English language, and chances are, you've heard most of them, and figured out what the speaker was saying by context, but unless you've heard similar words used in various contexts, you don't really grasp the full wealth of the word's value. But I haven't the word for what a gobstopper does.

Leo Morris pointed out the other day that "effete" means - in his words - "worn out, used up, exhausted of energy, perhaps even a little decadent or degenerate." I'd never looked up the word, never seen it any context other than derivatives of Spiro Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism" rant, so I assumed, by context, that it meant "effeminate".

You know, if you want to get someone riled up or hurt, you use the words that they find offensive or hurtful, not words that necessarily are true. If your wife points her bottom at you and says, "Do these pants make my butt look big?" you dare not say, "Yes, delightfully so!" because she thinks that's a bad thing. Instead, you say, "Honey, those pants don't make you look great, so much as you make the pants look great!" and she beams.

So when someone like Agnew thinks of gays as repulsive, he thinks everyone does, and he uses that as an insult. Knowing that, most people thought effete was another word for the mannerisms associated with faggotry.

You know what a faggot is? It's a bundle of sticks or twigs. From there, it became slang for a cigarette. And someone who metaphorically draws on a cigarette becomes a faggot. It's become one of the less offensive terms used for gays these days, not because the meaning has changed, but because oral sex has become more acceptable, and because the gay-bashers have come up with lovely new ways to sound like the jerks they are. If you're comfortable with your gay and lesbian friends - and you probably have some, even if you don't know it - then you find it perfectly OK to be here and queer, and you don't consider being called a queer or a faggot or any of the other insults to be particularly insulting.

In the newest issue of Esquire, there's a one-page piece on Gore Vidal. Actually, I thought him dead, since I hadn't heard from him lately. He mentions Howard - presumably Howard Austen, his companion since 1950.

I lived with Howard for fifty years, but what we had was certainly not romantic love, not passionate love. And it certainly was nonsexual. Try and explain that to the fags.

A man would be a damnable fool to claim he understands his own marriage. He would be even more foolish to claim he understands others. On the other hand, Vidal's quote was a gobstopper for me. I had to think about my present marriage, my marriage with my late first wife, and the various relationships I've had when I was single. No, I don't know what he had with Howard - but I suspect every truly great marriage has a bit of what this wonderful wordsmith is unable to express directly.

On my desktop lately, the wallpaper has been the image of Bill Clinton, pictured here. It was a news photo from a couple of weeks ago, when Hillary tied Barack in Indiana and was sorely trounced in North Carolina. I don't know what's going through his mind, but I'd like to think I understand Bill a lot better.

We talk a lot about marriage being a partnership of equals. It's not. It's like parents proclaiming that they love their children the same. They don't. They love each child differently, because every child is different. You intensely love one because she's the spittin' image of the woman you married. You are incredibly annoyed at another, because he has all the faults you find most annoying in yourself. You are confused by a third child, who seems to be off in space somewhere, aloof, daring anyone to come near and form an emotional attachment. You may love them all, but the love is different.

Similarly, John carries out the garbage, and Mary cooks the pasta. Or maybe vice-versa. Separate is never equal. I come from a farm background, where typically she does the stuff in the farmhouse, and he does the fieldwork - but Mom always milked the cows, because she was gentle, and they liked that, and Dad lacked the patience. Mom usually wrote the checks, but I eventually learned that he made the final decisions on finances - and in a family that has its own business, such as a farm, there are a lot of decisions to be made.

I see Bill, holding his face in his hands. He's exhausted, physically, and probably mentally, as well. I suspect he's exhausted emotionally. He's been lying to himself all along, but on that night, he finally is forced to admit the truth: it's over. Short of an assassination, there is no way Hillary is going to win the nomination. If Barry wins, and is popular, she won't have another shot at the nomination for 8 years. If Barry wins and is unpopular, no democrat will win the White House in 4 years, so again, it's another 8 years. And in 8 more years, she'll be too old, too much water will have passed under the bridge. It's over.

And I can't imagine that he hasn't promised her that she'd be president some day. On this night, he knows he will never make that come true. And that's gotta hurt far more than getting caught playing around with a silly little girl. I need to change that wallpaper. It's getting too hard to look at Bill, looking so depleted, so worn out, so defeated, so effete in the sense that Leo Morris points out is the original meaning.

When a guy marries, he promises to love, honor, and protect. My wife says that until the Monica thing came up, she didn't consider fellatio to be sex, so maybe Bill felt the same way. As Gore and Howard illustrate, love has many meanings, and it need not be carnal in nature. The honor is pretty self-explanatory, but protect is the big one for guys.

Bill's been doing a lot of "protect" on the campaign trail, and this week, Barack Obama has been doing some, too, with his assertion that the GOP should lay off his wife.

I made one of those vows, too. And when my first wife developed SLE, I tried. Oh, Lord, how I tried. And she died anyway, damn it. Protect?

'Til death do us part isn't talking about premature death from an incurable disease. It means sticking around for three-score-and-ten, or maybe even twenty years past that.

Committing suicide isn't fair play, nor is abandoning your husband by failing to draw a breath, lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by doctors working in a frenzy, either. If you leave him for another man, a guy can understand that. If you leave him for another woman, a guy can understand that, too. But dying is the ultimate rejection.

By the time you're 65, you have an 80% chance of having a significant medical disorder. You have a 50% chance of having two or more of them. Another recent gobstopper.

Nobody gets through this life unscathed. And maybe that's a good thing. If they don't kill us, our wounds make us stronger at the broken places.

If they don't kill us. I can't see Senator McCain surviving four years in the White House. It ages people, ages them tremendously, and he's already got a lot of miles on his chassis, not just from his time as a prison of war, but from his multiple bouts with cancer. He may be dead in two years, even if he loses.

And that skinny kid with the big ears and the funny name? I have to hope that he was sufficiently wounded by life, growing up mulatto, being raised by his grandmother because his mother died. We're all going to be terribly disappointed if he doesn't do well.

Other Bloggers On These Subjects:
Spiro Agnew - assassination - Barack Obama - gay+bashing - cancer - Bill Clinton - effete - Monica - Gore Vidal