When school busing to achieve racial balance was a big issue in 1985, John Roberts, arguing for judicial restraint, wrote to a fellow Reagan White House aide, "It strikes me as more than passing strange for us to tell Congress it cannot pass a law preventing courts from ordering busing when our own Justice Department invariably urges this policy on the courts."
This summer, defending the Bush White House from criticism of its prewar intelligence evaluation, Missouri Republican Senator Kit Bond told the Senate, "It is more than passing strange that our colleagues on the other side of the aisle would bring out Joe Wilson as some kind of credible witness for their cause."
Passing, in these usages, is an archaism -- one of those delicious old adverbs preserved in the amber of our tongue -- with its meaning flickering confusingly in modern discourse. Its original meaning was "exceedingly," and the novelist Henry Fielding, in his 1749 Tom Jones, narrated that a character swore "'twas strange, 'twas passing strange," a wonderment taken verbatim from Shakespeare's Othello. John Milton in his 1671 Paradise Regained used the adverb "passing" to intensify the adjective for brightness: "passing fair/As the noon Sky." Applied to women, passing fair became a poetic expression of admiration for a damsel's beauty. Along the way, formal writers gave the plain passing a prefix of sur- and the adverbial ending of -ly to fashion surpassingly, but the root word with that meaning held its own.
Then, in the 20th century, something strange and unfair happened to passing. It lost a lot of its power, as evidenced by its need for an intensifying crutch: The phrase "more than passing strange" implies that passing alone is less than "exceedingly" strange and needs the boost of "more than." Perhaps because of its confusion with passing's use as an adjective in the transient "passing fancy," or with the mediocre nature of a "passing grade," the original passing lost its intensifying power. The poet and essayist Dorothy Parker helped undermine the original meaning in a 1925 poem about a pretty and virtuous girl that focused on that phrase, concluding: "Alas, no lover ever stops to see;/The best that she is offered is the air./Yet -- if the passing mark is minus D -- /She's passing fair."
When the young Elizabeth Taylor was asked about her beauty, her friend Roddy McDowall reported that she modestly replied: "Oh, I don't think I'm beautiful. I'm passing fair." Taylor's idea of beauty, according to McDowall, was Ava Gardner.
Fifty years or so ago, as a corporal in the Armed Forces Radio Network, I interviewed both actresses. Taylor was a genuine beauty; Gardner was excitingly attractive and really knocked me out. Believe me, both Liz and Ava were far more than what we would now call passing fair, which -- in the emerging meaning -- would be derogating with faint praise. And writing this paragraph, with delectable memories bestirred, has been a kick.
The lexicographer Barbara Ann Kipfer thinks "that is the way of English -- to recycle words and phrases to fit into new contexts, like picking up `passing strange' and using it in a new way." The adverbial passing is an archaism whose lofty meaning is in transition, being morphed by today's newsmakers to fit the modern language. Strange, isn't it?
A CIVIL BREAKUP
Dec. 5 will be a kind of Sadie Hawkins Day for the British government. In Al Capp's long-ago comic strip, Lil Abner, that was the day designated for less-than-comely unmarried women to race after terrified bachelors. In this our time, it will be the day that the words spinster and bachelor are to be officially stricken from the certificates issued by Britain's Registrar General's Office.
Spinster came into the printed language in 1362 as the occupation of a worker, almost always a woman, who spun wool into yarn at a spinning wheel. Men in occupations like weaving and brewing were called websters and brewsters, and proudly took the words as proper names, but the spinster's work was lonely and not socially elevating; by the 17th century, English law made the word the legal designation of an unmarried woman. Spinster carried less of a stigma than "old maid" or "maiden lady" -- with "maid" connoting virginity -- but not much.
The origin of bachelor -- first used in 1297 by Robert of Gloucester in Metrical Chronicle -- is a mystery. The far-fetched speculation is that it described a knight not old enough to display his own banner, called in French a bas chevalier. In the academy, a Bachelor of Arts was regarded as a university's lowest degree, conferred on a graduate who had not yet achieved the rank of Master of the Arts. Today, in general use, bachelor, once wedded to the modifier confirmed, is frequently defined as "a male of marriageable age unwilling or unable to make a commitment."
Why are the Brits officially tossing the two words in the ashcan? And with what will they replace these banished archaisms? The Civil Partnership Act, passed last year to take effect on Dec. 5, does not use the term "gay marriage," but permits gay men and lesbians to sign an official document in front of a registrar and two witnesses.
"Instead of using the words bachelor or spinster," the Registrar General's spokesman said, "the word single will be used to mean a couple who have never been through a marriage or a civil partnership." He didn't get the definition quite right: single, a resolutely neutral word with no connotation of pride or shame, means "each member of" such a couple.
Arm in arm, the long-abused spinster and bachelor will soon be marching out of British officialdom's dictionary down the linguistic aisle into wedded, or partnered, bliss. Is this the end of spinster? Perhaps not. With its familiar -ster suffix, the word could be reborn as the fully Americanized version of spinmeister, meaning "one who shades meanings to manipulate opinion."
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