So I was wondering about words for tipping in different languages (that is, for the act of giving a present of money in recognition of a service or to obtain an extra service). Many languages seem to go with the idea of a tip being drinking money (pourboire, propina, Trinkgeld, etc.), and the drink is by implication alcoholic, except in the case of the Hindi language, where the money is specifically for tea. For some reason that display of temperance does not surprise me, but the Russians, of all people, also call it ‘tea-money’! The Italian is slightly different: ‘mancia’, as fearful_syzygy informed me some time ago, derives from a medieval Latin word for ‘glove’, ‘manicia’ (and so isn’t, as I would have guessed, anything to do with the Spanish ‘mancha’, as if being given a tip leaves a stain on one’s character that can only be cleansed by reciprocating the gift with improved services). So it seems – and here I quote the learned f_s: ‘leaving a tip in Italy is tantamount to throwing down the gauntlet.’
There might even be an element of truth in that witticism, because tips, being a sort of social obligation – or in origin, probably something like the ‘gifts’ exchanged in patron-client relationships – are not really ‘gratuities’ at all. That English word is not only the least evocative, it’s also plain misleading.
In early modern France, tipping was much more closely associated with the drinking of wine, and tips might be paid in actual wine rather than money. In her book on The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, Natalie Zemon Davis informs us that there were different words for a tip given to a man (‘le vin des garçons’, ‘le vin des serviteurs’) and one given to a woman (‘les épeigles’ [épingles] – pin-money, a term we still use today). Cotgrave has also ‘vin de clers’, and ‘vin des valets’: ‘spending pence, extraordinarie vayles or gifts; odde money bestowed on a mans ordinarie servants, over and above the summe due, or agreed on.’
On a side-note, under ‘vin de porceau’, Cotgrave has ‘[wine] which makes the drunkard to sleepe, vomit, and tumble him in his vomit.’ It’s good that they had a specific term for that. In fact, there are a whole range of different inflections and nuances of meaning in the ‘vin’ entry: ‘vin de regnard’ is ‘The wine that sharpens, or sets an edge on, the drunkards spirit, making him more subtill, or cunning, then he is, at any time, sober’. ‘Vin de singe’ is ‘Wine which makes the drinker (or drunkard) pleasant, wanton, or toyish’. As a typology of drunkenness, this is all very useful. I love the way the attributes of the boozer are metonymically transferred onto the booze itself. ‘Last night I passed out, threw up, and tumbled me in my own sick. Must have accidentally had a glass of that damned pig-wine in with the seven bottles of fox-wine I polished off.’
For philological purposes it is also worth noting Cotgrave’s explanation of the expression ‘Elles ont eu leur vin’: ‘Those wenches have had it to a haire; viz. a full tast of the sap which they most hold savorie; (for the bestowing of wine being a principall coutesie in intertainments betweene man and man, is fittest to expresse the other liquor which in courtesie a man giveth a woman.)’ Does that mean what I think it means? Er…OK. And there was me thinking the wenches only liked hairpins.
The English word ‘tip’ (the verb meaning ‘to give’) comes from Rogues' Cant, and is ‘of obscure origin’, earliest attestation by the OED is 1610, in a slangy work on thievery by Samuel Rowlands. In that work the verb is used transitively, taking the money given as direct object, but the intransitive usage (to give a gratuity [to somebody]) and the noun (a gratuity) are not recorded until the eighteenth century. On the subject of cant, cf. ‘Villon’s Straight Tip to all Cross Coves’, which I first came across a few years ago when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s brilliantly entertaining, if flawed, book on translation Le Ton beau de Marot. The OED suggests that a ‘tip’ in the sense of a piece of advice or insider information is much later than the ‘gratuity’ sense (it is no earlier than the nineteenth century).
While googling for the Straight Tip I came across this posting from 2002 of ‘a mixylinguistic staggerpoem’, by a certain John Cowan, who I suspect might be none other than the same jessamy cove who occasionally posts comments here.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say on the matter. Bene Darkmans, ye haberdashers of pronouns, bene feakers of gybes, ye quidnuncs with your quirks and quillets, ye goosebury-eyed gluepots that grabble the bit, conycatchers all.
December 08, 2006
December 05, 2006
On the Divinity of the Lie
Over at Varieties of Unreligious Experience, Conrad H. Roth has written a short series of posts—well worth reading, if for some reason you haven't already—on the subject of 'The Unknown Object', in the third of which, among other things, he discusses Plato's Theaetetus, mentions Odysseus panourgos, and laments that ‘the world has grown increasingly unknown, hazier and hazier behind a gauze of language.’ This post is not exactly a response to that, more of a congeries of disorderly thoughts on the subject of lying that I had floating around various notepad files on my computer, which I decided to cut&paste together, paper over the gaps, think up a suitably Nietzschean-sounding title for, and then write this introductory paragraph in the hope that it would conjure the illusion of dialogue and engagement, and thus confer some sense of intellectual legitimacy upon the whole sorry business.
The other week I was reading George Steiner’s wonderful paean to lying in the third chapter of After Babel (‘Word Against Object’), and it struck me that many of the ideas I have touched upon in previous posts here had already been articulated with much greater clarity and scrutinized with a much more penetrating gaze in that book. Steiner adjusts Aristotle’s definition of man to the ‘mammal who can bear false witness’; ‘Falsity’ he insists, ‘is not…a mere miscorrespondence with a fact. It is itself an active, creative agent.’ (Incidentally, Harold Bloom’s ‘misprision’ as the act of literary creation, is something like a lie.) ‘It may be that ‘truth’ is the more limited, the more special of the two conditions [that is, of truth and falsity].’ ‘Hypotheticals, ‘imaginaries’, conditionals, the syntax of counter-factuality and contingency may well be the generative centres of human speech.’ ‘Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.’ ‘Natural selection, as it were, favoured the subjunctive.’
The conceptual terrain mapped by lies and truth has shifted its boundaries at different cultural moments, and what ψεῦδος meant to an archaic Greek mind won’t be the same as what a ‘mendacium’ conjured to a medieval scholastic theologian, which in turn won’t correspond exactly to what a ‘mensonge’ was to the seventeenth-century précieux; and none of those folks would be likely to understand exactly what we mean when we speak about ‘lies’—and nor do we among ourselves, exactly, since the truth/lies axis, set awobble by the ‘language turn’, continues to oscillate alarmingly.
But as usual I won’t let any of that stop me riding roughshod over such irrelevant niceties as historical accuracy, philosophical rigour and respect for cultural context.
The Muses at the start Hesiod’s Theogony don’t only lie, they tell the truth too: ‘we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things’. But the Platonic concept that poets only lie and their speech is never true, just true-seeming, suited Christian-era thinkers just fine. ‘non verum, sed verisimile’: if not exactly true, then at least very similar (sorry). This notion of truthiness developed more subtle tones as literary theory began to elaborate its own justifications. To Abelard’s ‘non verum, sed verisimile’ (says François Rigolot) the Renaissance humanists added their own ‘non credendum, sed mirandum’; Rigolot quotes Jean Bouchet: ‘les poëtes chantent choses de admiration, mais non pas à croire’. There are distinctions to be drawn between different kind of lies, and different kinds of truth. The poets sing lies, because they sing of things that never really happened; but they sing truth, because they inspire wonder. This is poetic truth as gnosis, something akin to the revealed truth of mystics.
But Plato did not grant that poets’ lies could attain unto that truth: only a philosopher’s lies could do that. Plato is generally thought not to have been too keen on lying, but Louise H. Pratt, in her excellent book on Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar (from which I pinched the Hesiod reference), reminds us of the often-overlooked fact that Plato ‘attacks the poets not for lying, for poetic fictionality, but for not knowing how to lie, for not lying well’.
There is, of course, a difference between lying and not telling the truth: if the other person knows you are not telling the truth, and you know they know, or if you are doing it unintentionally, then you are not really lying, and so not blameworthy…are you? Well, in one early dialogue, the Hippias minor, Plato seems to—seems to—have Socrates argue that lying with the full intention of deceiving the other person is morally better than lying involuntarily. The Hippias minor begins with the question of whether the Iliad is better than the Odyssey. In much the same way that people will argue over whether The Terminator is better than Terminator 2, the question hinges on the nature of the main character, and how believable we find him. (In the Renaissance, incidentally, this was a no-brainer for humanists: the Iliad was definitely better. Their opinions on the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, alas, have not survived.) Aristotle didn’t think much of Plato's conclusion that not only is lying a lot of fun, it’s morally good too:
Oscar Wilde in his own Platonic dialogue pastiche, ‘The Decay of Lying’, seems to agree—unwittingly?—on many points with the Socrates of the Hippias minor, although he feels a lot less uneasy about his conclusions than Socrates had felt about his: ‘The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already pointed out, Lying in Art. […] Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art’.
‘The Hippias minor’, writes R. E. Allen, in his introduction in vol. 3 of The Dialogues of Plato, ‘because it is an informal reductio ad absurdum, requires a taste for validity as distinct from truth.’ I am no logician, but I like to think I have a taste for ‘validity as distinct from truth’, if not quite on the level of Oscar Wilde. Art is lying, true, but it is lying with consent.
A different claim—or is it a different version of the same claim?—would be that all of language is indeed a lie, and one that nobody consented to. All writing, and all language, is mendacious, because it falsifies particularity for the sake of generality. But, as Terry Eagleton pointed out in an amusing review in the LRB last week, ‘the generic nature of language is no more a deficiency than buttonholes are a flaw in a jacket.’ We do consent to this falsification, because it is useful.
But, again: if we admit (with Rousseau!) that all language is at origin metaphorical, if the tropical sense precedes the proper, and the figurative the literal, then we might be forced to concede that all human language is indeed based on a lie (the gauze of language conceals nothing) and we might find ourselves agreeing with Nietzsche when he writes:
The other week I was reading George Steiner’s wonderful paean to lying in the third chapter of After Babel (‘Word Against Object’), and it struck me that many of the ideas I have touched upon in previous posts here had already been articulated with much greater clarity and scrutinized with a much more penetrating gaze in that book. Steiner adjusts Aristotle’s definition of man to the ‘mammal who can bear false witness’; ‘Falsity’ he insists, ‘is not…a mere miscorrespondence with a fact. It is itself an active, creative agent.’ (Incidentally, Harold Bloom’s ‘misprision’ as the act of literary creation, is something like a lie.) ‘It may be that ‘truth’ is the more limited, the more special of the two conditions [that is, of truth and falsity].’ ‘Hypotheticals, ‘imaginaries’, conditionals, the syntax of counter-factuality and contingency may well be the generative centres of human speech.’ ‘Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.’ ‘Natural selection, as it were, favoured the subjunctive.’
The conceptual terrain mapped by lies and truth has shifted its boundaries at different cultural moments, and what ψεῦδος meant to an archaic Greek mind won’t be the same as what a ‘mendacium’ conjured to a medieval scholastic theologian, which in turn won’t correspond exactly to what a ‘mensonge’ was to the seventeenth-century précieux; and none of those folks would be likely to understand exactly what we mean when we speak about ‘lies’—and nor do we among ourselves, exactly, since the truth/lies axis, set awobble by the ‘language turn’, continues to oscillate alarmingly.
But as usual I won’t let any of that stop me riding roughshod over such irrelevant niceties as historical accuracy, philosophical rigour and respect for cultural context.
The Muses at the start Hesiod’s Theogony don’t only lie, they tell the truth too: ‘we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things’. But the Platonic concept that poets only lie and their speech is never true, just true-seeming, suited Christian-era thinkers just fine. ‘non verum, sed verisimile’: if not exactly true, then at least very similar (sorry). This notion of truthiness developed more subtle tones as literary theory began to elaborate its own justifications. To Abelard’s ‘non verum, sed verisimile’ (says François Rigolot) the Renaissance humanists added their own ‘non credendum, sed mirandum’; Rigolot quotes Jean Bouchet: ‘les poëtes chantent choses de admiration, mais non pas à croire’. There are distinctions to be drawn between different kind of lies, and different kinds of truth. The poets sing lies, because they sing of things that never really happened; but they sing truth, because they inspire wonder. This is poetic truth as gnosis, something akin to the revealed truth of mystics.
But Plato did not grant that poets’ lies could attain unto that truth: only a philosopher’s lies could do that. Plato is generally thought not to have been too keen on lying, but Louise H. Pratt, in her excellent book on Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar (from which I pinched the Hesiod reference), reminds us of the often-overlooked fact that Plato ‘attacks the poets not for lying, for poetic fictionality, but for not knowing how to lie, for not lying well’.
There is, of course, a difference between lying and not telling the truth: if the other person knows you are not telling the truth, and you know they know, or if you are doing it unintentionally, then you are not really lying, and so not blameworthy…are you? Well, in one early dialogue, the Hippias minor, Plato seems to—seems to—have Socrates argue that lying with the full intention of deceiving the other person is morally better than lying involuntarily. The Hippias minor begins with the question of whether the Iliad is better than the Odyssey. In much the same way that people will argue over whether The Terminator is better than Terminator 2, the question hinges on the nature of the main character, and how believable we find him. (In the Renaissance, incidentally, this was a no-brainer for humanists: the Iliad was definitely better. Their opinions on the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, alas, have not survived.) Aristotle didn’t think much of Plato's conclusion that not only is lying a lot of fun, it’s morally good too:
A false account is the account of non-existent objects, in so far as it is false. Hence every account is false when applied to something other than that of which it is true [No shit! Aristotle, eh? Sorry to interrupt, please, continue.] A false man is one who is ready at and fond of such accounts, not for any other reason but for their own sake, and one who is good at impressing such accounts on other people, just as we say things are which produce a false appearance. This is why the proof in the Hippias that the same man is false and true is misleading. For it assumes that he is false who can deceive (i.e. the man who knows and is wise); and further that he who is willingly bad is better. This is a false result of induction-for a man who limps willingly is better than one who does so unwillingly-by 'limping' Plato means 'mimicking a limp', for if the man were lame willingly, he would presumably be worse in this case as in the corresponding case of moral character.A false man tells lies ‘not for any other reason but for their own sake’ – what better description for the writer of imaginative literature? (for this unremittingly formalist-aesthetic conception of what literature is and is for, I make no apology). But then Aristotle, if I have correctly understood the ‘limping’ analogy, is also drawing a distinction between intentionally lying, and intentionally pretending to lie: a baffling distinction, if not an entirely meaningless one. I can think of no better example of a person pretending to lie (and not for any reason but for its own sake) than the writer of literature. Aristotle surely did not mean this, but it is a conclusion I like: and it fits in with those familiar justificatory topoi that fill so many prefaces to literary works: what I have written is all lies, but it is true nonetheless, because I am not lying, I am only pretending to lie in order to tell the truth—which is also the justificatory basis for irony, a trope Socrates himself was quite keen on. Maybe that’s why, at the end of the dialogue, when Hippias flat out refuses to be led by the nose in the usual Socratic way, saying: ‘I simply cannot agree with you in this’. Socrates replies: ‘Nor even I with myself, Hippias.’
(Aristotle, Metaphysics IV, trans. Ross)
Oscar Wilde in his own Platonic dialogue pastiche, ‘The Decay of Lying’, seems to agree—unwittingly?—on many points with the Socrates of the Hippias minor, although he feels a lot less uneasy about his conclusions than Socrates had felt about his: ‘The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already pointed out, Lying in Art. […] Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art’.
‘The Hippias minor’, writes R. E. Allen, in his introduction in vol. 3 of The Dialogues of Plato, ‘because it is an informal reductio ad absurdum, requires a taste for validity as distinct from truth.’ I am no logician, but I like to think I have a taste for ‘validity as distinct from truth’, if not quite on the level of Oscar Wilde. Art is lying, true, but it is lying with consent.
A different claim—or is it a different version of the same claim?—would be that all of language is indeed a lie, and one that nobody consented to. All writing, and all language, is mendacious, because it falsifies particularity for the sake of generality. But, as Terry Eagleton pointed out in an amusing review in the LRB last week, ‘the generic nature of language is no more a deficiency than buttonholes are a flaw in a jacket.’ We do consent to this falsification, because it is useful.
But, again: if we admit (with Rousseau!) that all language is at origin metaphorical, if the tropical sense precedes the proper, and the figurative the literal, then we might be forced to concede that all human language is indeed based on a lie (the gauze of language conceals nothing) and we might find ourselves agreeing with Nietzsche when he writes:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.Or, better:
We have need of lies in order to conquer this reality, this ‘truth’, that is, in order to live—That lies are necessary in order to live is itself part of the terrifying and questionable character of existence…To solve it, man must be a liar by nature, he must be above all an artist…In those moments in which man was deceived, in which he duped himself, in which he believes in life: oh how enraptured he feels! What delight! What a feeling of power! How much artists triumph in the feeling of power!—Man has once again become master of material—master of truth!—And whenever man rejoices, he is always the same in his rejoicing: he rejoices as an artist, he enjoys himself as power, he enjoys the lie as his form of power…But truth does not count as the supreme value, even less as the supreme power. The will to appearance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming and change (to objectified deception) here counts as more profound, primeval, ‘metaphysical’ than the will to truth, to reality…that if there is anything that is to be worshipped it is appearance that must be worshipped, that the lie—and not the truth—is divine!’
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