Speaking of weirdos.

Dear Word Detective:  This afternoon, while a couple of my friends and I were waiting around before a choir rehearsal, trying to remember the steps to a Baroque dance we had learned this summer, somebody sat down at the piano and started playing a piece by Kabalevsky which we supposed was a gymnopedie.  We began speculating on the origins of “gymnopedie,” which seemed like a funny thing to call a quiet piece of music.  The best we could guess was that it had something to do with “gymnos,” which is Greek for “unclothed,” but we couldn’t imagine what.  Please enlighten some etymologically puzzled musicians.– Elizabeth  Lightwood.

Good question, and thanks for the opportunity to add “gymnopedie” to my spell checker’s dictionary.  And “Kabalevsky,” of course, which for some reason it wants to change to my choice of “Lobachevsky” or “Dostoevsky.”  Typical.  I notice it’s not throwing a fit over “Madonna” or  “The Beatles.”  I guess I should give it credit for recognizing Lobachevsky, but that’s probably just because it was programmed by math weirdos.  Huh.  It seems to like “weirdo.”  I rest my case.

Speaking of omissions, I was mildly surprised that you asked a question about “gymnopedie” and didn’t mention the French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925).  As musicians, you and your friends are doubtlessly acquainted with Satie’s three “Gymnopedies,” quiet and impressionistic solo piano pieces published beginning in 1888 and probably Satie’s best-known works.  What I guess is less well-known is that Satie seems to have invented the term “gymnopedie” himself.  But it’s not entirely clear what he meant by it.  There have been, in fact, scholarly papers written debating exactly how Satie came up with the word.

Satie was, by all accounts, a strange but clever duck.  A famous anecdote, probably at least partly apocryphal, recounts the aspiring composer’s first visit, in 1887, to Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat) nightclub, at that time the epicenter of the Paris musical scene.  According to the story, Satie, lacking any artistic reputation at that point, arranged for his arrival to be announced by a friend with the words “Erik Satie, gymnopediste.”  Rodolphe Salis, Le Chat Noir’s formidable proprietor, is said to have been temporarily taken aback, finally responding, “That’s quite an occupation.”

Satie’s purported occupation was indeed impressive.  The “Gymnopaedia” were dances performed at festivals in Ancient Greece by young men bereft, for the occasion, of clothing (“gymnos,” naked, plus “pais,” youth).  That’s the same “gymnos,” by the way, that gave us “gymnasium,” after the Ancient Greek habit of exercising in the buff.

Satie picked the word to impress the crowd, which it certainly did, but what, if anything, he meant by it is a mystery.  Satie’s friend Contamine de Latour had recently used the term “Gymnopaedia” in a poem Satie would likely have read, and any musical scholar would have been familiar with the ancient dances.  Most likely, Satie simply chose the term for its absurdity and risque overtones.

Taken with his own invention, and perhaps pushing the shtick a bit, the following year Satie published the first of his three “Gymnopedies,” the piano pieces which brought him the fame he craved and remain immensely popular today.  Incidentally, a nice video from ABC Classics which uses Gymnopedie No. 1 as its score can be found by searching YouTube for “The Colours of Autumn – Gymnopedie No.1″ or just click here

The ring of hooey.

Dear Word Detective:  Why is something bogus referred to as being “phony”?  I hope this  has a more fascinating history than being the mispronunciation of an old Gaelic malt beverage or something.  Is it hilarious? — Brian Hennessey.

Hilarious?  No, but parts of it are amusing.  By the way, and this is on an entirely unrelated topic, something dawned on me last week.  There is a persistent etymological legend that the word “posh” (meaning “fancy and expensive”) was originally an acronym for “Port Out, Starboard Home,” supposedly specifying which side of the steamship had the shadier, cooler and thus preferred (and pricier) cabins on the voyage between England and India in the 1800s.  The story is bunk, and “posh” actually derives from a Romany (Gypsy) word for “money.”  But I suddenly remembered that when I was studying seamanship in my youth, we learned the phrase “Red, Right, Return” as a reminder to keep the red channel markers on your starboard (right) side when entering a harbor (and of course, the green on your left, or port side).  I suspect that the “Port Out, Starboard Home” business started as a similar mnemonic reminder to keep the red channel markers on your left (port) side leaving the harbor, and on your starboard coming home.  At some point, someone noticed that the resulting acronym “posh” also meant “ritzy,” and dreamed up a story to explain that coincidence.  I think this is almost certainly the “missing link” between “posh” meaning “fancy” and the whole topic of ocean travel.  After all, if you were sitting at your desk trying to concoct a faux etymology for “posh” meaning “fancy,” steamships would probably not be your first choice of subject.  It’s more likely you’d choose something like “Persons Owed Subservience and Humility.”

Onward.  There are a number of similarly silly stories floating around purporting to explain “phony” (or, as the Brits prefer, “phoney”) meaning, since the mid-19th century, “fake, sham, counterfeit” or “insincere” (“They had this headmaster, Mr. Haas, that was the phoniest bastard I ever met in my life,” J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, 1951).  My favorite is the theory that it originally referred to a widespread fear in the 1880s that the newly invented telephone would be used to deceive people.  Conversations over the new-fangled gadget were, in this tale, considered automatically untrustworthy and disparaged as “phony,” which was later applied to  anything not real or sincere.  This theory would be, perhaps, a bit more believable if “phony” had not appeared in print more than ten years before the first telephone was patented by Alexander Graham Bell and decades before the infernal device became common in homes.

To cut to the chase, most authorities now agree that the source of “phony” is the old English slang word “fawney,” drawn from the Irish word “fainne,” meaning “ring.”  In the 19th century, English “fawney men” (con artists) practiced a scam called the “fawney rig” (“rig” being slang for “trick”).  The trickster would make a great show of  “finding” a gold ring on the street and then agreeing to sell it to a passerby for a fraction of its worth. The ring was actually worthless brass, of course, and had been dropped on the street by the “finder” himself.  When this racket inevitably migrated to the US, “fawney” became “phony,” and we gained a very useful synonym for “fake or false.”