More "F-ing" Words....

When I was a child, I lived two houses from the school custodian, Mr. F(f)esta. He was the grandfather of one of my classmates, and so we thought it was so cool to have a school employee live nearby. We wondered how a real custodian lived, whether the swept his own house in the evening, and what he did on weekends. But the most fascinating and apparently confusing thing to me about him was the spelling of his name, for his mailbox had "FFESTA" on it. He obviously was named Mr. Ffesta, then, right? Well, I used to go around talking about Mr. "F-festa" as if I had a bit of a stutter, and I wondered endlessly about why he spelled his name with two "f's." I had never seen a word beginning with two "f's" before. Finally I got up the courage to ask his granddaughter, my classmate, about why he spelled his name with two "f's." She simply smiled at me and said, "Oh, his first name is Frank. So FFESTA stands for 'Frank Festa.'" Wow, that blew me right out of the water. Here I was coming up with a 3rd grade theory of how a double-F at the beginning of the world might have come into our language, and it was all a mistake...

But the effect of all of this was to make me love words begining with "f." So, I continue with them here. First a quick word about flirt. I always knew of the word as a noun or verb meaning "to play at courtship; to practise coquetry." This, however, is of recent origin. Originally, flirt was one of a series of words, like flick, flip, flerk, jerk that meant "to propel or throw with a jerk or sudden movement." More specifically it meant "to propel by a blow from the finger-nail released from the thumb." So, we talk about "flicking" something on a person by this action; originally, one firted an object or substance. From 1812: "Flirting his sweet and tiny shower/ Upon a milk-white April flower." Or, from George Eliot in 1876: "'I don't care what you call it,' said Mab, flirting away her thimble." By the way, to "flerk" means "to make a jerking movement." So, as I come to think of it, we have loads of words that describing jerking movements, don't we? You would think that all men do all day is jerk....

Returning to the Other "F's"

Flinders are "fragments, pieces, splinters." This word comes from the Norwegian, and it first came into English in the 15th century. From 1550: "The bow in flenders flew." Or, from an 1847 poem, "The metal good and the walnut wood/ Did soon in flinders flee." Ezra Pound, from his post-WWII hideaway in Italy, could write: "And the Osservanza is broken/ And the best de la Robbia busted to flinders. I suppose synonyms are smithereens or, sometimes, cinders.

Then we have the term from trampolining--fliffus or fliffis. You don't know how sad I am that it can be spelled both ways, since it would be a perfect word for a spelling bee; it would trip up even some of the best spellers. It is a double sommersault with a 1/2 twist, so that the jumper ends up facing the direction from which s/he began his/her flips. The OED doesn't have the word and the Unabridged says that its origin is "unknown." I'll bet someone knows it, for it probably originated in the last 60 or so years. Perhaps it has the word "flip" in it with some other word that I can't readily identify. In any case, here is a video of someone doing a fliffus. Actually, a Google search yields 4X as many "fliffis" as "fliffus" spellings, though neither has that many....

Then, we have fletton. Capitalized, Fletton is the name of a town near Peterborough, UK where a brick is made by a semi-dry process. This brick, then, is called the fletton. The first use of the terem had "Fletton brick" together. From 1908: "The average Fletton brick, when immersed in water for 24 hours, will absorb 20 percent of its weight of water" (why is this important?), while a more recent usage just called the bricks "flettons": "Nearly half the bricks made in Britain are 'flettons' from this bed of clay, and nearly half the flettons come from the Bedfordshire brickfield."

Finishing with Flatus Vocis

It is always nice to end an essay with a Latin word/phrase. This one means "the breath of the voice," and was historically used to describe the ultra-nominalist position attributed to the 12th century philosopher Roscellinus, that universals have no substantial or conceptual existence, but consist in nothing more than the sound of their names. So, the point would be that a term beloved by a philosophical realist, such as "chair," would, in the minds of a nominalist (or a person adopting the "flatus vocis" position) point no further than the word itself; it pointed to no "real object" which was the abstracted version of the concept of chair. Actually, I would like to recast or reframe the medieval debate over universals or names only in a new way for the 21st century. My point is that only language really exists and that, if you are smart enough, you can figure out, just from the inner structure and logic of language used and texts in which the language is used, what the actual nature of reality is or should be. You don't really need to see a tree to learn all that there is about trees; you don't need to believe in the existence of biochemistry to be the most brilliant biochemist in the world. In short, if you look at intellectual systems or supposed descriptions of reality as simple or complex word games or structures of words, you can be encouraged to dive into them and show where there is a logical inconsitency or where there might be some "give" in the language that would allow further development in thought. Just knowing words, then, opens the way for all the discovery of the world you need. There is no need, then, for actual, tangible, visible things. They may bring delight and, in fact, you may learn a lot from them but, for an ultra-nominalist in our day, you really don't need the pulsating reality of things "out there" to be able to push back the boundaries of knowledge relating to these or other things.

Thus, in one area I am working on now (understanding autism), you really don't have to believe that it exists in order to make a contribution to the field. Just follow the language really closely that people use to describe it. The logical and linguistic gaps in their descriptions provide the context for the new developments in our understanding.

Words open worlds, to be sure. I hope you have enjoyed the trips today, through history, philosophy, medical equipment, blood suckers, splinters and bricks and a host of other things. The symphony of these things makes life the fascinating journey that it is...

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