Lots of Odds; Fewer Ends

Those of us who write for the internationally targeted Voice of America have learned to keep a few things in mind:

Not all homes in America look like this. In fact, not very many do

One is that our reality is not the reality of many places to which we communicate. We need to be sensitive when writing about American fashion or food fads, for instance. We recognize there is severe poverty and hunger in many parts of the world, and that some among our audience will know of such privations first hand. It doesn’t mean that we hide America’s good fortune. But it should not surprise us if those who hear or read our words construe a story about mouth-watering steaks, or luxury cars in a celebrity’s garage, as flaunting our society’s excesses.

This is Seattle’s skyline. That’s Mount Ranier off in the distance

Nor can we take for granted that our audience is familiar with American places. If I write about Seattle, Washington, American readers – or most of them, I fervently hope – know at a minimum that it’s “out there somewhere” in the Pacific Northwest. I wouldn’t really even need the “Washington.”

But readers in Nepal may not know Seattle or Washington state, and it’s the height of national chauvinism to expect them to. Where in Syria is Aleppo? Just a hair under 100 percent of Americans wouldn’t have a clue or know there is an Aleppo. So why should we expect a Syrian to pinpoint Seattle?

Here’s a real example: In my last posting, I mentioned the great transcontinental railroad that metaphorically and physically united the country in the mid-19th Century. From the east, that line began in Omaha, Nebraska – railroads having already reached Omaha at the Missouri River. But someone overseas, reading that the new track was “transcontinental,” might logically assume that Omaha and Nebraska lie somewhere on the East Coast.

The third lesson, on which I want to spend some time, has to do with the English language. We in VOA’s Central Features Branch write all our original stories in English, as you'd surely expect, and they are translated into 40-some foreign languages for broadcast to different parts of the world, and broadcast worldwide in English by VOA’s English Service. Our readers, listeners, and viewers understand English to varying degrees. Many tell us that they love to read it and hear it, even though it’s a challenge to keep up. They concur that American English, in particular, has become the dominant international language of youth, science, music, movies, and the Internet.

This looks like a book that could come in handy – for supposedly fluent English speakers as well as those learning the language

But save for Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble’s “Wordmaster” series, to which I link in the archived Wild Words column to the right, most of us don’t spend a lot of time writing about the English language’s nuances. Most English idiosyncrasies don’t appear in Swahili or Uzbek or Amharic, nor do peculiarities of those languages apply to English.

However, one English-language matter has, as my mother would have said, “my liver in a quiver.” If the menace that I’m about to describe spreads to other languages, the world may be doomed!

Lessons in this Saint Augustine, Texas, County school back in 1943 must have been so hard that it took two girls to figure them out!

Part of the no-big-deal, ever-more-casual nature of American popular culture is a growing disregard for rules of language (not to mention dress and decorum) that used to be drilled into us in school and at home. These days the attitude is, “Rules, schmules. Rules are for fuddy-duddies. Like, chill, you know what I mean?”

No, I don’t know what you mean. Careless and incorrect usage such as, “Things are, like, going well between you and I” make me want to bite my tongue and gnash my teeth, and tear at what’s left of my hair.

Now here’s a series of street signs that got the apostrophe right! Of course, they are in Gibralter, not the United State’s. (That one was just for fun.)

Most annoying of all to this fuddy-duddy are the deliberate attempts to eliminate the humble apostrophe, on the pretext that this tiny but noble symbol of the possessive form is a waste of time and a bother. John Kelley reports in the Washington Post that two local governments in England have given up putting apostrophes in street names and signs. I can assure him that the apostrophe is long gone from thousands of U.S. places as well. St. Ann’s Court is “St. Anns Court.” Prince George’s County – next door to us in Washington, D.C. – is “Prince Georges” on a lot of maps and signs. Everywhere you look, you see “Freds Cleaners,” “Sals Barber Shop,” and “Riccardis Liquors.”

Here’s an example of a shop sign whose designer who put in an apostrophe, all right, but where none was needed

Every other American welcome mat reads “The Smiths” or “The Landphair’s.” OK, not the latter one. Americans have become so confused, intimidated, and annoyed by the little apostrophe that we just stick it where it sort of feels right: “The dress was her’s.” Or, as I’ve said, we consider it a nuisance and skip it entirely.

John Kelley’s own, renowned newspaper has all but scrapped the apostrophe on its sports pages. Post reporters write about “Capitals owner Ted Leonsis,” the “Redskins touchdown drive,” and the “Wizards foul trouble.” Thankfully, the news section isn’t discussing “New Mexicos senior senator.”

Yet.

Oh no, where does it go?

These assaults on the possessive form are not mere peccadilloes. They would be outrageous affronts in many other languages. Greek or Persian speakers who tried to turn “the cat’s ball” into “the cats ball,” for instance, would be thought daft – illiterate for sure. They couldn’t do it, because their possessive forms require whole new word endings. It is the ball of the cat, and it takes more than a zippy little apostrophe to make it so. Disregarding the special endings and rearranging of words that make a Greek or Persian word possessive would be akin to writing “the cat ball” in English. It would be nonsense, gibberish.

Are this young texter and others like her responsible for the slow death of the apostrophe?

John Kelley notes that text messaging is a villain in this piece, as it is in so many other recent assaults on our language. Who, thumbing away on tiny buttons, can be bothered to put an apostrophe in “John Browns body”? As they would write it, “Its not needed.”

Besides, many palm-held texting devices and cell phones don’t even have the apostrophe character. Here at the office, a texter after my own heart told me that she cannot bring herself to debase a good possessive by leaving out the apostrophe. She substitutes a comma.

Bravo, but little does she realize that the language laggards may already have lined up the comma as the next “unnecessary” punctuation mark.

If I gave in to all this linguistic sloppiness, you would be reading quite a different post. Something like:

Ive been following Freddy Featherbooms travel’s in Ecuadors and Perus’ jungle’s. I know the Featherboom’s well. They live right down the street from Carol and I, near Joes Bakery. Weve been to there house many time’s.

***

Out, Out

When we send this contraption something, we're “printing it out,” like sending out our laundry

Two more language bursts:

Why, when we send a computer document to a printer, do we say that we’re “printing it out.” Aren’t we just printing it? If computers could print, would we be printing it in?

And speaking of punctuation, have you seen this brain-teaser? Lynne Truss included it in her #1 best-selling book (in Britain), Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Take the words below and, by using just two punctuation marks, change the meaning completely:

WOMAN WITHOUT HER MAN IS NOTHING.

(Answer at the end of today’s posting.)

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Where the Boys Are

With a chuckle in a recent meeting, my Voice of America colleague, the aforementioned Rosanne Skirble, noted that she gets a good deal of mail from overseas listeners, many of whom began tuning in to us on the radio long before VOA had much of a television or Internet footprint. But they had not seen the Voice of America name in written form very often.

So Rosanne reports receiving a good deal of mail addressed to:

“The Boys of America.”

***

News Woman

I don’t know if this was my cup or Dorothy’s. More likely, the latter

The Boys of America story makes me think about Dorothy Jones, who was the office manager of a large Washington, D.C., radio news operation that I directed years ago, around Marconi’s time. She was one of those refined, stern women of some years who, we all knew, ran the place even though she lacked the title to do so.

One day a job seeker sent an inquiry directly to her rather than to me. This pleased her, and she was even prouder to read the address and salutation:

Ms. Dorothy Jones
WMAL News
4400 Jenifer Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20015

Dear Ms. News:

I did not grant the careless applicant an interview, but as you can imagine, Dorothy was “Ms. News” to one and all for the remainder of her distinguished career.

If only this had happened at VOA. She would have been Ms. News at the Boys of America.

***

Death, Be Timely

If you live in New Orleans, you might want to book a spot here before you die

• The Times-Picayune, the daily paper in my old stomping grounds of New Orleans, recently published this note:

To post your death notice, please call The /Times/-/Picayune/ at 504-826-3551 or toll-free at 1-800-925-0000 or email funerals@/timespicayune/.com.

As another VOA colleague, Faith Lapidus, pointed out, “Wouldn’t it be a bit late by then?” Or putting it another way, if someone managed to post his own death notice, there’d be no need for an obituary. It would be front-page news.

Good dogs like this are getting less exercise these days in the Detroit area

• Speaking of death and timing, here’s an interesting follow-up to something I mentioned in an earlier post, that the two “daily” newspapers in the struggling automobile capital of Detroit, Michigan, are in such dire straits that, to save printing and delivery costs, they are now delivered in print form only three days a week, on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays.

Daily newspapers have been America’s traditional medium of notification when one of our neighbors dies. Families and funeral homes carefully prepare death notices and tributes. And if the person is at all famous, the paper often writes a news story as well.

But right now in Detroit, as Jeffrey Zaslow points out in the Wall Street Journal, “you won't want to die on the wrong day. People may never get word that you're gone.” If Detroiters have the nerve to die on a Sunday or Monday or Tuesday, and their funerals are set for Wednesday or Thursday, a whole lot of folks who might otherwise have made a point of attending simply won’t know about it because the next newspaper won’t arrive until Thursday morning.

That’s John Adams, middle, and Thomas Jefferson, standing, to whom Benjamin Franklin is reading a copy of the Declaration of Independence in this 1921 illustration by Jean Leon Ferris

It’s enough to make the dying hold on for a day or two, as U.S. presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are said to have done. They passed away on the same day – July 4, 1826 – not so much because they wanted to travel to heaven together, but because, it is said, that date would mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the nation’s Declaration of Independence, which Jefferson had written.

July 4, 1826 was a Tuesday. Good thing neither Adams nor Jefferson lived in Detroit.

• And one last death note: Have you heard comedian Steven Wright’s line?: “I intend to live forever. So far, so good.”

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Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez, Vicariously

On February 24th, a reader named Lindsay left a thoughtful comment about New Orleans on one of my archived postings. The 24th was “Fat Tuesday,” a rough translation from the French of “Mardi Gras” – the last Tuesday of Carnival revelry before the solemn Christian Lenten season in New Orleans; Mobile, Alabama; and smaller cities in French-speaking Acadian country of Louisiana and Texas.

This is the sort of fun I missed at Mardi Gras this year. Sigh

On the radio on that Tuesday, I heard Rex, the costumed King of Mardi Gras, make the ceremonial request of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin that serious endeavors be suspended for the day in favor of masquing, parading, fancy balls, general merriment, and a drink or two or ten. (They don’t call the club that sponsors one of the big New Orleans Carnival parades “the Krewe of Bacchus” for nothing.)

Nagin assented with a flourish. I’m sure President Obama would also suspend serious work for our financially beleaguered nation for a time if he could.

Here was Lindsay’s comment:

This is the photo of the Hibernia Tower to which Lindsay refers. It was taken from Bourbon Street in the heart of the French Quarter. Sigh, again

“I happened across this blog because I was looking for a picture of the Hibernia Tower [a venerable bank landmark in New Orleans] bathed in Mardi Gras color,” Lindsay wrote, “and your blog contains a great photograph of it [by Carol]. It's 3:45 Mardi Gras morning and I'm many miles from the Avenue where my heart longs to be - your photo let me go home for a little bit.”

I don’t know where you are, Lindsay, but I, too, pine for a whiff of sultry Louisiana air on a late winter’s morning. As I write this, I’m wearing a strand of cheap, gaudy, plastic Mardi Gras beads of the sort that Bacchus and other krewes toss by the thousands to the multitudes on Napoleon and St. Charles avenues and on Canal Street. The beads look truly dorky on me, but what can I say?

Legendary 19th- and 20th-Century photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston, who has been Carol’s beau ideal, took this moody shot in the French Quarter in the late 1930s

I'd make a Mardi Gras brandy milk punch for old times’ sake, but all we have in the office fridge is low-fat milk and no brandy.

Mardi Gras wouldn’t work in Washington anyway. There’d be 10,000 cops on the street on overtime, masks would be prohibited as a security risk, lobbyists would see to it that every parade float carried advertising, Republicans would boycott it if King Rex were a Democrat, and vice versa. Besides, the congressional commission studying the advantages and drawbacks of the event would not finish in time for the good times to roll.

***

Who Am I?

Here’s the National Museum of the American Indian in one of Carol’s photos taken before the “Indian/Not Indian” sign appeared

The Voice of America’s offices sit directly across Independence Avenue from the four-year-old Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Hanging above its entrance is a flag that intrigued me. It turns out that another of my VOA colleagues, Susan Logue Koster, wrote about the three words on that flag, but I thought I’d share a bit about them here as well.

The flag reads: “Indian/Not Indian.” I assumed, incorrectly, that this had something to do with the terms “American Indian” and “Native American,” which to the country at large mean pretty much the same thing. But inside the community whose culture the museum displays, these terms have quite different connotations. My reading of the matter is that the former, “American Indian,” has greater currency these days, “Native American” being seen as an overly inclusive bureaucratic term invented by the Bureau of

This is the kind of “noble savage” image of American Indians that Fritz Scholder detested

Indian Affairs in the 1960s. Lakota activist Russell Means has written that he “abhors” the Native American designation. “We were enslaved as American Indians, we were colonized as American Indians, and we will gain our freedom as American Indians,” he wrote.

Here’s the genesis of the “Indian/Not Indian” message:

It is the title of two retrospective exhibits – one here and one at the museum’s gallery in New York – of the work of expressionist artist Fritz Scholder, who died in 2005. As Susan wrote, Scholder (rhymes with “shoulder”) “was the most influential figure in the history of American Indian art.”

“Indian/Not Indian” was the way Scholder – who was one quarter each French, German, English, and American Indian – described himself. At first he vowed to never paint Indian figures or scenes, since he objected to the idealized, stereotyped ways in which they are often depicted. But when he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and experienced the reality of Indian life, he changed his mind. His vivid, brutally frank paintings of such images as a drunken Indian staggering down a street ignited controversies that simmer to this day.

Similar quandaries over one’s identity abound elsewhere in this multiracial country. One son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, President Barack Obama – who has lived in such culturally diverse places as Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago, Illinois – has described his own identity confusion at various points in his life. As he found out when others sought to label him during rough patches of his run for president, a flag marked “Black/Not Black” could easily have hung from his own front porch. Once he settled into identifying himself as a black man, others even began to ask if he were “black enough.”

Obama’s multiracial, multicultural life reminds us that we are a nation of many races and cultures, but Americans all. And as Russell Means would no doubt point out, American Indians were here first.

***

And the First of These is What, Again?

Finally, on what is turning into my “Mention Your Fellow Workers Day,” Faith Lapidus, of whom I spoke earlier, just told me a delightful story that I want to share.

When she identifies herself on the phone or leaves a message, she often begins, “This is Faith Lapidus at the Voice of America. Faith, like ‘faith, hope, and charity.’”

Paul, later Saint Paul, was a Jew in Jerusalem who converted to Christianity and then worked to convert many others throughout the Middle East

That makes perfect sense to those of us “of a certain age.” It traces to the Christian bible’s New Testament. Jesus’s disciple Paul is said to have preached, “Now abideth faith, hope, charity. These three, but the greatest of these is charity.”

Increasingly, Faith says, those on the other end of the phone react with a “huh?” as if she had spoken nonsense words, like, “Hi, I’m Faith Lapidus, as in Ogsfaith Prylob Znork.” More and more people have never heard “faith,” “hope,” and “charity” strung together. (Nor have they heard of Saint Paul.)

So Faith is testing other approaches. She tried “Faith, as in Faith Hill.” That draws blanks, too, from people who are not into country music.

She now reports somewhat greater success with this approach: “Faith, as in ‘You gotta have . . .’” – picking up lyrics from a 2006 George Michael song. (He being way cooler than the Apostle Paul.)

The next thing you know, Faith will be doing it like Michael does: “Hi, this is Faith Lapidus, 'cause I gotta have faith-a-faith-a-faith.”

That should take care of her first-name recognition. But no one that I know of – not George Michael, not Beyonce, not Coldplay, not even Frank Sinatra for us geezers – has put out a song with “Lapidus” in it.

***

Brain-Teaser Answer

WOMAN. WITHOUT HER, MAN IS NOTHING.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Consternation. Frustration and confusion. It’s easy to be consternated by an overly wordy and tangled explanation of something.

Dork. This is not something you want to be called. A dork is a loser, an incompetent and even stupid person. Believe it or not, the word dates to the early 20th Century.

Fuddy-Duddy. A fuddy-duddy – usually referred to as an old fuddy-duddy, is an old-fashioned, stuffy, stuck-in-the-past dullard. Nobody can quite lock onto the term’s origin, but we know that a “dud” is a dull disappointment. A fuddy-duddy’s a bit like an old fogey, and neither is a compliment.

Peccadillo. A small sin or indiscretion, not worth getting too worked up about.

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N'Awlins

It’s been 23 years since I left New Orleans, and still, to quote the Eddie De Lange and Louis Alter song of half a century ago, I know what it means to miss “New Orleens.” Oh yeah, I know.

This old postcard view captures the Pontalba Apartments, built by Baroness Michaela Pontalba, who also convinced city officials to turn Jackson Square into a European-style pleasure garden

Louis Armstrong sang it more soulfully than I can tell it:

“I know I’m not wrong... this feeling’s gettin’ stronger / The longer, I stay away.”

As have others across the generations who have dashed under the block-long balcony of the Pontalba, North America’s oldest apartment building (1850), to skirt a Jackson Square downpour, I was smitten beyond redemption by languid, decadent New Orleans. Even one-time tourists commonly fall in love with the Crescent City – so named because the Mississippi River wraps so outrageously around it that the sun actually rises on the west bank, and South Rampart Street finds itself upriver of North Rampart.

Those downpours – which can be a mere block long while the sun shines brightly down the street – have carried sorrows ever since, in a death roar, the breached levees of Hurricane Katrina drowned the city two Augusts ago.

Town of Tribulations

Strip-club lights illuminate Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. In the distance, Hibernia Bank tower lights approximate the Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold.

But sorrow was no stranger even then. New Orleans knew it well from yellow fever epidemics and Civil War occupation and mournful “jazz funeral” processions, when brass bands en route to the cemetery would play the St. James Infirmary Blues, then cut loose with joyful, high-stepping riffs on the way back home.

On the streets of the French Quarter, and in a few clubs like Preservation Hall, they still play Dixieland jazz, but, to my ear, with not quite the conviction of old. The musicians, and the wounded city, are going through the motions for the tourist trade.

Legendary Dixieland clarinetist Pete Fountain is not a national landmark, but comes close. Now 78, he still performs but no longer leads his “Half-Fast Marching Band” in parades

The St. Charles Avenue streetcar line, one of only two U.S. National Landmarks that moves – San Francisco’s cable cars are the other – is running again, and visitors mill anew among the cemetery mausoleums in the New Orleans’s creepy, above-ground “cities of the dead.” Habitués of Gallatoire’s Restaurant (founded 1897) are busy buttering crunchy French bread to dip into their sauce rémoulade over shrimp. Others agreeably wait their turn for a table at Antoine’s (1840), gaily sprinkle Tabasco sauce onto eggs à la hussarde and sip brandy milk punch during breakfast at Brennan’s (1946), guzzle sweet and potent “hurricane” drinks in plastic souvenir glasses at Pat O’Brien’s bar (1933), and warily check out gris-gris dolls on Dumaine Street at New Orleans’s Historic Voodoo Museum. (I’m not sure when that place opened; I’ll let you go in and ask.)

Cursed Katrina

This was what the floodwaters loosed by broken levees during Hurricane Katrina left behind in the Lower Ninth Ward

But sadness hovers still. A third of the people who fled in a hurry after Katrina remain elsewhere and are not likely to be back. Businesses by the hundreds, large and small, are gone as well, especially in the Lower Ninth Ward – the city’s poorest district – which Katrina floodwaters obliterated down to cinder blocks and a few staircases that lead to nowhere.

As my middle daughter, Juliette Landphair, dean of Westhampton College at the University of Richmond, wrote in an article about “the Forgotten People of New Orleans” in the December 2007 Journal of American History, “As the weeks passed and the water drained away, rotting corpses, shattered houses, and muck-caked tricycles rested in the silence.” A Tulane University graduate in history, Juliette, like the rest of the family, had lived in and loved New Orleans, which we all likened to America’s Paris, or at least Marseilles.

The Lower Ninth Ward is a wasteland still. Relief tents remain all over town, and you see kindhearted volunteers from across America still hammering and drywalling and whistling optimistic tunes. New Orleanians parade and stage festivals again, but not more of them than there are days in the year as they once did. But the City That Care Forgot may never again be the place where laissez les bon temps rouler – let the good times roll! – was a way of life. Cares blew in with Katrina and stayed.

Infiltration of Influences

Ronnie Virgets prepares to indulge in a favorite New Orleans activity – eating, in this case oysters (he pronounces it “ER-sters”) on the half shell – at Casamento’s Seafood Restaurant

Nor, any longer, does New Orleans “simmer in its isolation” as my friend, the legendary New Orleans raconteur and racetrack regular Ronnie Virgets, once put it. Ronnie lost everything in Katrina, most poignantly a lifetime of wonderful essay scripts and TV commentary tapes, and barely escaped with his life. He was among those rescued from the Interstate-10 highway overpass above the deluge.

New Orleans has been changed in other, subtle ways. The arrival of northern transplants like me, the imposition of syndicated radio formats and TV anchorpeople from Illinois and Oklahoma and the like, and the influx of contractors and aid workers – including many Latinos into a city that had known very few of them – have overwhelmed many of the city’s cherished idiosyncrasies, including these:

• Nicknames like “Moon” (Landrieu, a mayor), “Pud” (Jones a legendary jazz musician), and “Ruthie the Duck Girl,” (a French Quarter wanderer). In New Orleans, “You don’t want your friends’ children to call you by your first name, but ‘Mr. Marrero’ or “Mrs. Schexsnaidre’ seems too formal,” writes S. Frederick Starr in a book I will describe later. “So you become ‘Mr. Pud’ or ‘Mrs. Banana.’”


• Strong coffee laced with chicory – an herb so bitter that New Orleans’s brew must be served with frothy milk to be palatable.

The elegant Garden District, where many sugar plantation owners built homes in the 1800s, came through Katrina with relatively minor damage

“Yat” accents (as in “Where Y’at?) that sound more Brooklyn, New Yorky, than French or deep southern. In the blue-collar West Bank across the Mississippi from New Orleans’s elegant Garden District, people “woik” rather than work, change the “earl” in their automobiles, and “make groceries” at the Piggly Wiggly store, sometimes on the day that they pronounce as “Sundi.” They don’t call it New ORR-lee-uns, as does the Uptown crowd, or New ORR-lins the way tourists and I do, or N’Awlins, as many black folks in town prefer. In Harvey and Gretna and Marrero on the West Bank, it’s “New-WALL-yunz.” And by the way, nobody anywhere in town, save for some executive chefs and university dandies, speaks French any more. Nor is New Orleans “Cajun” French. Acadian French is spoken well to the west, cher, in the bayou country of Southwest Louisiana.

The long causeway between New Orleans and the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain used to be more of a commuter route than it is today.

Those streets that wind so crazily with the curve of the river that, try as you might, you can’t go east or south or north or west. You can get somewhere only by heading river-bound or lake-bound – the lake being Pontchartrain, a brackish body second in size among America’s saltwater lakes to Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The world’s longest causeway over water runs 38.5 kilometers from New Orleans to Pontchartrain’s woodsy North Shore, to which thousands of people from Orleans and St. Bernard parishes scrambled ahead of Katrina. Many, many stayed put, congesting highways and shopping centers and schools.

Spearmint is one of the best-selling flavors of New Orleans sno-balls, not to be confused with sno-cones. Sno-cones are made with crushed ice; special machines shave the ice for sno-ball

A cardiac disaster of a diet, including fried-oyster “po-boy” sandwiches slathered in mayonnaise; praline candy that is little more than crystallized sugar, and “sno-ball” shaved ice cones doused in sticky-sweet flavored syrups.

***

(Gastronomic aside: Elsewhere in America, people talk about the weather. In New Orleans, people talk about food. There’s an old saying in town: “When you go to breakfast, you talk about lunch and think about dinner.” Even basic peasant food like slow-cooked red beans and sausage over rice is so delectable that people travel hundreds of kilometers to taste it. I know that I do, every chance I get. Ask me about muffulettas sometime.)

***

And as long as I’m interrupting myself, I should note that that jaunty chapeaux that you see in my photo is no “cowboy hat.” Having stuck a fleur-de-lis, the lily-flower symbol of New Orleans, smack in the front of it, I prefer to think of it as my “Louisiana swamp hat.”

A Piquant Gumbo

But bruised, diminished, and dejected though it is, New Orleans is still seductive, still a mélange of international backgrounds and tastes and sounds, still a “checkerboard city” where blacks and whites and now Hispanics live cheek by jowl, often eying each other warily but mixing like long-lost relatives at a family reunion any time there’s a festival or parade.

The Queen City of the South seemed destined to be colorful. Peaceful Choctaw Indians eked out a living on the little high ground they could find above steamy, mosquito- and gator-infested swamps until the remnants of a Spanish expedition passed by in retreat from the upper Mississippi in the 1500s. More than a century later, René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, sailed the length of the river from the Great Lakes, came upon the fertile land near the Gulf of Mexico, and claimed it – and all the territory drained by the Mississippi clear to Canada – for France. He named it all “Louisiana” in honor of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Two other sieurs (sirs), Bienville and Iberville, founded and named the first settlement, La Nouvelle Orléans – New Orleans – for which they are remembered with street names in the French Quarter.

The Vibrant Vieux Carré

Fire destroyed much of the French Quarter during the 38 years of Spanish rule in the late 1700s. Rebuilding ushered in the Spanish style, including ornate wrought-iron balconies

That little quadrant of narrow streets; lacy, wrought-iron balconies; beer halls and imitation-jazz joints; fine-art galleries as well as topless/bottomless tourist traps is less French today than Spanish in architecture, owing to the days when Spain ran the town in the 1700s before turning it back to France. Then in 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte gave up on his colonial Louisiana outpost as well. For a territory that instantly doubled the size of their young country, Americans paid $11 million in U.S. bonds.

So you see, New Orleans drips with history as well as plump drops of tropical rain. And a lot has transpired since rowdy Americans moved in: the rise to prominence and wealth of mixed-race “Creoles of color” despite the thriving trade in black African slaves at Congo Square; Yankee occupation during our civil war; the growth of brazenly corrupt political machines – white and black; an oil boom more than 160 kilometers downriver, out in the Gulf of Mexico, for which Orleans and surrounding parishes supplied most of the boats and crews and gear.

Cotton was king in the Deep South in the 19th century, and New Orleans was a boom port. In the first half of that century, one of the imports was human beings during the slave trade

Eventually someone figured a way to sink pilings into the city’s soupy soil. That made possible office towers and chain hotels and the mega-enormous Superdome stadium, whose squalor as the Hurricane Katrina evacuation site in 2006 earned the city worldwide disdain.

Jazz was a back-o’-town New Orleans creation, too, though most artists had to go to New York or Chicago or Nashville to find someone with the money and studio to record it. Jazz began as music of the streets and small clubs. The first sensational personas of the sound were Buddy Bolden and his African-American ensemble in 1895. But plenty of white musicians, especially Italian and Sicilian immigrants, also played “ratty music,” “gut bucket,” and “ragtime,” as they called it, with flair and distinction.

New Orleans Dixieland-style jazz used to be a fixture in clubs through the French Quarter. But as tastes change, one can find everything from country to heavy metal there as well

This improvisational, unscripted style of music, where musicians often do not read from a sheet but memorize their parts and embellish them in wild solos, was quite different from the intricately scripted ragtime of W.C. Handy up the Mississippi. Many Dixieland-jazz musicians were and are superb readers of music, but the “faking” style became so popular that some skilled players had to “unskill” themselves and learn to improvise.

And let us not dare to omit Mardi Gras, or “Fat Tuesday,” the culmination of New Orleans’s month-long Carnival, a phantasmic celebration unmatched in North America. That Tuesday is “fat” because it’s the last day before the forty-day Christian Lent, with a thin tie to the ancient times when a fatted calf was slaughtered and everyone feasted while the feasting was good.
In New Orleans (and Mobile, Alabama, and Galveston, Texas, which stage smaller Mardi Gras fests), this thin pretext for a party morphed into amazing pageantries and spectacular overindulgences that end precisely at Mardi Gras midnight, upon which the city turns magically somber – and clean – for the Catholic Ash Wednesday holiday.

This photo gives you a good idea of the time and expense involved in preparing Mardi Gras floats and costumes. Some floats become crowd favorites and reappear almost unchanged every year

Anyone who has absorbed America’s greatest free show will describe the elaborate New Orleans Carnival parades and floats – some of them three decks high and blindingly illuminated – with fanciful themes such as “Gypsy Revelers”; masked riders throwing cheap beads and doubloons and other trifles; elegant coronation balls; several degrees of naughty and flamboyant displays of French Quarter nudity; a separate “gay Mardi Gras,” also in the French Quarter, where it’s not unusual to see such creative triumphs as a marching box of Crayola crayons; and “truck parades, where ordinary folk deck out flatbed vehicles in their neighborhoods, putter along behind the official processions, and toss out used beads and trinkets from yesteryear.

The organizations, called “krewes,” including Bacchus, Endymion, Zeus, and Orpheus, that sponsor the most lavish Carnival processions, love to flaunt Homeric symbolism. They fund every shred of their extravaganzas, down to paying the marching bands and flambeaux carriers whose torches brighten the path for the nighttime parades.

Masked riders prepare to toss trinkets to the crowd from an elaborate Carnival float. In the early days, mules pulled the floats. Now, tractors or small trucks do

My particular fascination with Mardi Gras stems from the make-believe aspect of it all – the suspension of ordinary mature reason and refinement, and the eagerness of grown adults to engage in dress-up childs’ play. Almost from the moment that next year’s Mardi Gras ends, at midnight February 24, krewes will set to planning, building and redecorating floats, and picking their fantasy kings, queens, dukes, and masked parade captains and riders for the 2010 month-long Carnival season. And every detail will be eagerly recorded in the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper and in broadcast reports. Recession? Foreign wars? Who cares?! Muses – one of the few all-female Krewes – is announcing its parade theme! (It would be hard to top “Muses Reach the Terrible Twos” from 2002).

One prominent citizen, usually a wealthy businessman, gladly slips into tights and a crown and a bejeweled jacket to ride the streets of New Orleans as Rex, King of Mardi Gras. The exact date moves around between early February – when even a rare snowflake is possible in New Orleans – and springlike early March. The fluctuation is due to the wanderings of Ash Wednesday, which falls 40 days before the ever-moving Easter Holiday.

A New Orleans business leader may be a reserved and private person. But if he’s – and it’s always a man – chosen to be Rex, King of Carnival, he leads the city in revelry for a day

“Hail, Rex!,” the masses will shout. And, more cravenly and often, “Throw me somethin’, mistuh,” with arms held high in hopes of snagging beads, doubloons, a cheap plastic cup, or a prized Krewe of Zulu painted coconut. The time-honored best strategy for bringing home booty is to plant an adorable toddler or a busty beauty on a ladder along the parade route.

If you thought you had business in New Orleans, Louisiana, next February 24th, you don’t. Half the city will be out on the streets in colorful masks and bizarre costumes, parading and picnicking and drinking – it’s allowed from plastic containers, any day of the year – and hollering for beads. The other half will be out of town, avoiding the tumult.

Mass Catharsis

“Mardi Gras is the best thing for the psyche since the long defunct but now partially resurrected local soft drink, Dr. Nut,” wrote Frederick Starr in New Orleans Unmasqued, a series of insightful vignettes that is one of my treasured possessions. Already a fine clarinetist in Cincinnati, Ohio, Starr was riding the riverboats and playing his horn at age 16, all the way down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. He ended up there and was writing New Orleans Unmasqued as a Tulane University vice president when I was there in the early 1980s.

Check out the rest of his paragraph about Mardi Gras:

“Is it not vulgar and tasteless nonetheless? Some learned professors of revelry answer yes, yes, a thousand times yes. They wallow in the sleaziness of the streets, the tawdry masques, the drunkenness. All vulgarity is not equal, they say. Mardi Gras is the genuine article, true-life vulgarity rather than the fake and sanitized version dished up to American homes by television. It’s real, and therefore good.”

Or if not good, still a useful release from the daily woe in a city that care forgot but has lately visited too often.

***

Have you seen a street spectacle comparable to Mardi Gras? Carnival in Rio, perhaps? Tell me about it.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Gris-gris. Voodoo charms or talismans. They are usually small cloth bags, sometimes made in Voodoo rituals when the bags are filled with herbs and spooky stuff like hair and bone bits. Louisiana Voodoo is a folk religion, steeped in the traditions of Africa and French Haiti, and full of mysterious rituals. Having a gris-gris handy is supposed to keep evil spirits and bad luck away. However, “putting on the gris-gris” is said to have just the opposite effect. It casts a spell on the unsuspecting.

Muffelettas. Pronounced muffa-LOTT-uhs, these are tasty, often toasted, sandwiches in rounded bread loaves. Invented by a New Orleans Sicilian grocer, they are filled with authentic Italian meats and a spicy olive salad. Note: While New Orleanians spread mayonnaise on just about every other sandwich, including roast-beef po-boys, they recoil at the thought of mayo on a muffuletta.

Parishes. The French divided Louisiana into parishes, in the fashion of the Roman Catholic Church. When Americans took over, they never bothered to change the arrangement. So Loo-see-anna is the only U.S. state without counties.

Phantasmic. Dreamlike, illusory. If you see a phantom, you’ve had a phantasmic experience.

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