wassail is a xmas song but also a drinking song
I. Podcast
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West was the latest Big Read for my podcast with my friend Bill. It's my favorite podcast we've done so far, and a great way to engage the book's content without having to read 500,000 words (although, yes, I recommend the book as highly as possible!). I think the podcast deserves a listen only because the book deserves a hearing, and you might not have time to spend the next five months reading a history/philosophy/travelogue centered on the countries of Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Macedonia (plus a few more).
II. Best Quote
There are too many good quotes from Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - many of them profound and enlightening - and while we open the podcast with one of my favorite serious quotes, I laughed out loud when Rebecca West summarized the rise of Gabriele D'Annunzio's fascist ideas in Italy:
I will believe that the battle for feminism is over, and that the female has reached a position of equality with the male, when I hear that a country has allowed itself to be turned upside-down and led to the brink of war by its passion for a totally bald woman writer.
III. XMAS is an Acceptable Spelling, Dummies
Not my words:
We sticklers are in fine fettle (cliché!) this holiday season. One guy hates “’Tis the season,” and he’s right: ’tis overused. I get pedantic about the placement of the vocative comma in “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” The song is not a suggestion to “merry gentlemen” to rest but an imperative to gentlemen to “rest merry.” Someone on Twitter admonishes those who claim that the spelling “Xmas” takes the Christ out of Christmas: X is not just a soulless abbreviation (say, for Xanax) or the unknown quantity in an algebraic formula (Let x equal what you will) but the Greek letter chi, which looks like X, which is rendered in English as “Ch,” which is the first letter of the Greek spelling of “Christ” and therefore Christ’s initial—Christ is the X in Xmas. So shut up.
This the most fun essay I've read all week, and it just gets better after the above start (below emphasis mine):
Carols offer prime examples of what linguists call mondegreens: misheard words. In “Silent Night,” Round John Virgin is the classic lurker at the Nativity. Listen closely to the children as they invoke another beloved character in “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” inviting “O Gumby, O Gumby” to Bethlehem. [...]
I never had a clear idea of what a wassail was. Sounds like something you wave when you’re happy, as a dog its tail, and that’s about right: “wassail” is from an Old English expression meaning “be thou well,” uttered while holding aloft a cup of mulled wine (or ale or punch). The word came to refer to the drink itself, and then became a verb: to go a-wassailing is to go from house to house wishing the occupants good health and collecting a little cash on the side, perhaps to spend on . . . wassail. It’s a Christmas carol that doubles as a drinking song.
IV. Opinion
Rebecca West > Hannah Arendt > Aldous Huxley > George Orwell. Huxley doesn't really belong in this group, except that Brave New World > 1984 to such a degree it felt wrong not to include him. I'm doing wrong by Orwell, a little, but among the prognosticators of 20th-century woes, his star is brighter than his ideas. Please read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon if you're even a little inclined; I initially filled this newsletter with so many words about the book I decided I'd better just write an essay and save you all the frustration.
Happy holidays! May your winter be white, and if not, may you BBQ with gleeful impunity.