slapstick

Personally, I’m not a fan of slapstick comedy. That whole brand of wackiness just doesn’t really do it for me. But, I have always wondered why it’s called that. Thank god for the internet.

Harlequin – that’s a natty outfit

To find the answer, we have to travel to 16th-century Italy, and the commedia dell’arte (which literally translates as ‘comedy of the profession’ – sounds hilarious, right?), an early form of improvised bawdy theatre performed by a troupe of professional actors, often in marketplaces and town squares. Commedia dell’arte uses stock characters, or ‘masks’, each of which always wear the same costumes and make-up, and use the same physical gestures. The most recognisable of these to you and me is probably Harlequin (also known as the scheming servant Arlecchino), who was accompanied by Scaramouche (still don’t know if he can do the fandango), Pierrot (a sad clown), and star-crossed lovers Isabella and Flavio (who I think are on Strictly Come Dancing), among others. The plays themselves were largely improvised, with the actors using their knowledge of these stock characters and their relationships with each another to create comedic situations and dialogue.

There was often lots of physical comedy in the commedia dell’arte, which is where our slapstick comes in. Actors used a club-like object made of two pieces of wood to produce a loud smacking noise. Originally called a ‘batacchio’ or ‘bataccio’, the Italian word for a knocker on a door, the English gave it the rather more obvious name of ‘slapstick’. Due to the fact that you could hit people with it very gently and still make a loud comedy noise that sounds like you’ve proper walloped them, it was actually one of the earliest theatrical special effects. It wasn’t long before the slapstick became a symbol of any type of highly physical comedy, and the word was then used to refer to that type of comedy itself.

The OG slapstick (still looks quite painful to me)

While you aren’t likely to see anyone perfoming commedia dell’arte in your local market square these days, it’s had a significant influence on the development of modern theatre. Lots of the stock characters and comedic situations continue to be adapted and reused in TV, film and literature. Most recently Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith used it in the Inside No. 9 episode ‘Wuthering Heist’ (with added Tarantino).

Slapsticks themselves aren’t all that common anymore either, except in (super-sinister) Punch and Judy shows – the thing Punch uses to hit everyone (including some casual wife-beating) is a slapstick. And percussionists use them to imitate the sound of slaps, whip cracks, gunshots and so on, too.

Krampus

This one’s a bit of a cheat, because it’s a proper noun (but still a word). As it’s nearly Christmas, I’m hoping you’ll let me get away with it. Because tis the season for nightmarish shadowy figures who’ll, at best, whip you with a birch rod, and at worst, drag you to hell. Merry Christmas!

Krampus in action – LOOK AT HIS TONGUE (source)

In central and eastern Europe, Krampus is a horned hairy figure, usually brown or black, with cloven hoofs and a lolling tongue. He’s basically Santa Claus’s evil twin – the anti-Santa. According to myth, Krampus accompanies Old Saint Nick to doll out punishment to kiddies who’ve found themselves in the naughty section of that checked-it-twice list. He does that by whipping them with a bunch of birch rods, presumably on the bum, or some rusty chains. Ouch. Some stories say he then pops them in a basket, and drags the naughty children to hell.

Krampus’s name either comes from the Bavarian word ‘krampn’ meaning ‘dead’ or ‘rotten’, or from the German words ‘kramp’ or ‘krampen’ meaning ‘claw’. His origins are a bit murky, although he’s thought to have appeared around the 6th or 7th century CE – some clever anthropology bods think he actually pre-dates Christianity. He’s even got his own feast day, on 5 December, called Krampusnacht, which is the day before St Nicholas’ Day. People dress up as Krampus, drink too much, then run about trying to scare each other in something called the ‘Krampuslauf’ or ‘Krampus Run’. These events still go on annually in a lot of Alpine towns, and have even made their way to some American towns and cities, including Portland and San Francisco. There are also Christmas cards with him on, called Krampuskarten, which is fun to say out loud.

A genuinely scary Krampusnacht costume (source)

Krampus has recently made his way into popular culture, particularly in North American horror films. One of my favourites is, well, ‘Krampus’ starring Toni Collette and Adam Scott, which involves some excellent killer toys (including a particularly nasty child-eating clown) alongside some anti-commercialism messaging. And if you’re a fan of Inside No. 9 (which you absolutely should be), you’ll remember him from the exceedingly disturbing Christmas special ‘The Devil of Christmas’ (still available on BBC iplayer). Honourable mention also goes to the anthology horror film ‘A Christmas Horror Story’ where (a surprisingly ripped) Krampus has a full-on fight with Santa Claus himself. It also stars William Shatner – what more could you ask for?

All that’s left for me to say is ‘Grüß Vom Krampus’… or Greetings from Krampus. See you in 2023 for lots more word-related shenanigans.

mountweazel

If you watched this week’s Inside No. 9 on the BBC (and if you didn’t, go and do that immediately), you will have heard this term, along with its definition. A mountweazel is a bit of fake information deliberately added to a reference work like a map or dictionary to root out anyone who’s illegally copying them. I used to work in directory publishing (which is as boring as it sounds), and we included made-up companies based at our home addresses to make sure people weren’t stealing data from our directories. So if I got a bit of marketing bumpf delivered at home from a company we knew hadn’t bought a list of addresses from us, then we knew they’d just copied it from the publication.

Here are some more fun examples.

Photo by REVOLT on Unsplash.

• The New Oxford American Dictionary added the made-up word ‘esquivalience’ in 2005 which they defined as ‘the wilful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities’ (geddit?).

• The fictional town of Agloe in New York was added to maps as a ‘trap street’ to catch any would-be copyright infringers. Agloe ended up becoming a real landmark for a brief time after a shop opened on the spot named ‘Agloe General Store’, after the name on the maps. Unfortunately it later went bust and Agloe is no more. (Trap streets are quite common in cartography – so much so that they were a major plot point in an episode of Doctor Who called ‘Face the Raven’. It featured a hidden street where aliens could seek asylum, which people dismissed as a trap street when they saw it on maps.)

So, why are these called ‘mountweazels’? Well, it’s after one Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fake entry added to the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. It read as follows:

‘Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia, 1942–1973, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio. Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972). Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.’

Mountweazels are also known as ‘nihilartikels’ which means ‘nothing article’ in Latin and German.

Sometimes words get added to reference works by accident (or crappy proofreading), in which case they’re called ‘ghost words’. The most famous example of a ghost word is ‘dord’ which appeared in the 1934 second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, and was defined as meaning ‘density’. This was in fact a proofreading error (the original entry said ‘D or d, cont/ density’ and was referring to the abbreviation ‘d’). It took five years for an eagle-eyed editor to spot it, and another eight years before it was removed from the dictionary.