Gymetiquette, an etymological journey (with bonus fries)

In Texas, we have a particular way of speaking. We tend to draaaaaaw out some sounds, while shortn’n others. How much we draw or clip depends on our proximity to pump jacks, combines, and the Louisiana border. Dialectical nuances are created by the winds sweeping across the great South Plains. Some drawls are tuned to be heard over the lowing of cattle or the crashing of waves. Cities are too fast these days, of course, so the urban drawl is about twice the speed of rural cousins.

I mention the peculiar vocal intonation of Texans because that informs the inflection of phraseology sometimes, and can therefore help you understand the etymology of a word I seek to define.

Some (existing) background definitions (a pastiche of my Oxford American Dictionary on the Mac, my trusty red Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., and the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, where you can hear audio clips of the words in question, minus the Texas drawl):

Gymnasium n 1. a : a large room used for various indoor sports (as basketball or boxing) and usually equipped with gymnastic apparatus b : a building (as on a college campus) containing space and equipment for various indoor sports activities and usually including spectator accommodations, locker and shower rooms, offices, classrooms, and a swimming pool c : a place where people exercise 

Gym n 1 : See Gymnasium

Etiquette n (fr etiquette, lit., ticket —> fr MF etiquet, estiquette note attached to something indicating its contents, fr. MF estiquier to attach, fr. MD steken to stick; akin to OHG sticken to prick) the conduct or procedure required by good breeding or prescribed by authority to be observed in social or official life.

Gym derives from gymnasium. Gym plus etiquette equals gym etiquette. This phrase is not defined by M-W, but Bodybuilding.com has a host of articles to teach gym-goers about exercise etiquette. We can extrapolate from the above definitions the sense that gym etiquette is ethical or socially appropriate conduct, procedure, or decorum in the gym or exercise setting. Related term: sweatiquette.

Now imagine taking that phrase, gym etiquette, and applying a little Texas Panhandle to it, eliding the y, and shifting the stress of the contracted word to the initial e. Some possible spellings of the new word: gymetiquette, gemetiquet, gemetiket, jemetiquet, jemetiquette, j’metiquet, j’metiquette.

My expert witness source recommends the spelling, gymetiquette. I like the vague (false) Frenchness of j’metiquette. This new word is a noun. It’s most frequent application is in the phrase, “Well, that’s not good j’metiquette,” as a statement that identifies a behavior so obviously OUTSIDE the standard of decorum as to be deemed ludicrously offensive, and perhaps hilarious.

For instance, when the egomaniacal bodybuilder who never re-racks the weights correctly is caught fondling his girlfriend’s thong while they admire some nuance of their musculature in the gym mirrors as if no one else is in the room.

While its origin relates to appropriate behavior in the exercise setting, the application of our new word extends beyond exercise to denote any behavior that not only violates contextual standards of decorum, but does so in a manner that is absurd and frequently hilarious (at least to observers).

Examples: 1. When taking the cute boy who works at the bank out for a first date, if you order mountain oysters from the menu, he might suggest that “Calf fries on a first date are NOT good j’metiquette” before deleting your number from his cell phone. 2. If a person sits in the front row of an LSAT wearing nothing over his nether bits but a loose-fitting pair of cut-offs, the proctor might scribble “Gymetiquette fail” on the top of his exam. 3. When settling in for a friendly game of poker, if one of the players insists on licking every card, the other players might mutter, “that’s NOT proper gymetiquette,” before throwing pork rinds at the card-licker. 

Witnessed poor j’metiquette recently? Share your shock and head shakes in the comments. 

Update on Friday, April 29, 2011 at 4:03PM by Eglentyne

Thanks to @bego and @somnicide for their informative anecdotes. xo

ABAW: The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen

The Bird Sisters: A Novel by Rebecca Rasmussen

Crown Publishers 2011 (library copy)

How do we go on after a tragedy? What if we walked willingly into the tragedy with our eyes open?

Milly and Twiss are The Bird Sisters, a pair of aging women who live on what’s left of their family farm. They’re called The Bird Sisters because they have a reputation in the town for fixing up broken birds, and the hearts of the people who find them. One day they are confronted with one last bird, and a family that reminds them of the hearts they were unable to fix.

Scenes of Milly’s day, minding the house, and Twiss’s day, roaming the barn and the field, are intercut with scenes of a fateful summer of their youth. A summer when many things changed.

The story is populated with an array of memorable characters. The broken father, desperate to overcome his poor background with his prodigal golf swing, who’s non-fatal accident sets the story in motion. The disappointed mother, who gave up her privileged background for love, but was unable to inspire a similar level of care and sacrifice. The priest, who declares his broken faith in dramatic fashion, and inadvertently supports Twiss as he stumbles back toward redemption. The minor characters who each have something to teach and give to the girls. The young girls, Milly, Twiss and their cousin Bett, spending a summer together, laughing and breaking each other’s hearts. Those three remind me of girls I have known. Their cajoling and loving and challenging of each other is depicted with such depth in just a few phrases.

I was stunned by several scenes in this book, such as when Milly and Twiss meet Bett for the first time and Bett fearlessly puts her hands into a beehive and becomes covered with bees. Rasmussen’s foreshadowing is brilliant in that it helps us see the marching inevitability of what is to come while still managing to surprise us.

Rasmussen shows how people can go on living, even when they are tangled up in a single moment of their lives. They live and breathe, and yet they are stuck wanting something they cannot have or something they have lost. She also shows us the power of the love of two sisters, and the way their dedication to each other can mend some of the gaps left by their losses. This story is filled with rich details and vivid characters, quietly woven together into a heartbreaking and inspiring story. Rasmussen’s beautiful words created images in my mind that were both modern and sepia-toned, making the noisy quiet of the hazy meadow fill my ears.

This is Rebecca Rasmussen’s first novel, though I hope it’s not the last. For more information about the author and her work you can follow @thebirdsisters on Twitter or become a fan of “The Bird Sisters” on Facebook.

10 Things: POKE

Need a little writing inspiration? How about a writing kick in the pants? 

Join me for a game of 10 THINGS-INGS-ings-ings.

Need a little refresher? Me too. I’m going to shout out a word and you’re going to use the writing instrument of your choice to scribble or type out the first 10 THINGS you think of. Ready? (I’ll meet you down at the bottom of the page.)

10 Things: POKE

Go!

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Here are my ten things for POKE!

1. Facebook. Poke. 

2. Poke in the ribs. A cousin of the nudge. 

3. Cowpoke.

4. The Pokey Little Puppy. Who didn’t actually do any poking or nudging.

5. I need that like I need a poke in the eye. Or the ribs. 

6. Pokemon. Pikachu. How is that even spelled?

7. Poker - Texas Hold ‘Em and the Corb Lund song, “All I wanna do is play cards.” (On the album Hair in my Eyes Like a Highland Steer. I’d link it, but it doesn’t seem to have an official video. You’ll find it.)

8. A fireplace poker out in my back yard, in the rain, oxidizing. Waiting to be picked up by a maniac, or perhaps by me, in self-defense, while gardening, to ward off the suburban lawn demons. 

9. Is it dead? Poke it and see if it moves.

10. Poke. “Ow, quit it.” Poke. “Ow, quit it.” You know, it’s a scene from The Simpsons. Poking Bart.

11. (Who says I have to stop? POKE ON!) poke poke poke poke poke poke poke poke poke poke poke poke poke poke poke poke (whatever you do, do NOT google ‘poke’ and then look at the images. No, stop!)

12. Poke -> Polk. You know, Polk, Andrew Polk? Can anyone name me anything about this president? Is anyone even reading this?

13. Poke the yolk and let it run onto your toast. (Do with this one what you will, but as I’ve gone through to link these, I’ve learned that ‘Poka Yoke’ is a Japanese term for fail-safing a system. Um, yeah.)

14. Some people don’t let children have knives, pencils, forks, or other pointy implements (pokers?) for fear that the kids’ll poke or stab each other or themselves. Or. We could teach the children HOW TO USE these COMMON and USEFUL tools. Ahem.

15. Poke and provoke sound a lot alike and are sometimes synonymous. Sort of like provoking me about prolonging children’s ignorance and then using the outcome to justify prolonging the ignorance. (Why do I want to put a ‘u’ in prolonging???)

Poke me with a comment and let me know what tumbled out for you. 

I did not write this for you

Gratuitous Boob Shot

I like you, of course. Maybe. Sometimes. Usually.

I love it when I can prompt you to comment. Commentary is quite addictive, actually. I have to resist the temptation to write things purely for the hope of comments. 

My aim on these pages it to please myself.

Verbal masturbation you might call it.

A vent to release the mental steam.

A space to mark a sort of intellectual/political/cultural/trivial passage through my thoughts.

To walk through the world with blue feet.

A Box of Paper

I am not shy about taking useful objects out of other people’s trash. I am most likely to rescue such unfortunates if I can use them myself, but I have also been known to snatch items from the trash and take them to local charities. 

Once, when our communal trash spot was an alley, we saved an end table, which we painted bright blue and put in the corner of our living room. Other times we have taken lumber or other raw materials to be used in household projects. 

I lamented an inability to save a large dog house that was being pitched. I don’t have a dog or need a dog house, but it seemed a shame for such a large thing with so much more good use in it to end up in a landfill. Too late it occurred to me that I could have called one of the many charities with trucks to come haul it away.

Trash-rescue is a family trait. One relative saved a lovely sheet set and comforter from a dumpster near her house, laundering the soft jersey back into life. She gave us the mismatched comforter that was in the bag. We dyed the comforter purple and still use it in the summertime, some ten years after the fact. 

About five years ago, a neighbor put out a box with her trash bags. 

I must have walked by it twice before I realized that it was a box of paper. Thankfully there had been no rain that day. I didn’t have the sort of printer that accepted continuous-feed paper (you know, the kind with the strips of holes down both sides?), but I did have three scribbly Sonars. The first time I went to salvage the box, I had the smallest Sonar on my hip, but couldn’t manage him and the box at the same time. I returned a little bit later, surprised to find that the box was more than three-fourths full of crisp, white, unblemished paper. 

In the past five years that paper has been torn off in single sheets, or long strips. It has been folded into countless airplanes, cranes, frogs, boxes, and other origami-joy, as well as wadded into balls of frustration. It has been colored on, penciled on, painted on, cut out, torn up, and traced into dabbles of Sonar imagination. I have written lists, planned stories, and folded envelopes for bits of mail that didn’t seem to fit into anything else suitable for the U.S. Postal Service. The thin, hole-y edge strips have been rolled and twisted into whimsical scrolls, and taped together into tails and ribbons. I frequently find them, forgotten after some frenzy of creation, under the couch. 

I went to get a few sheets of paper the other day, surprised to find that after five years of weekly, if not daily use, the box is still more than one-fourth full. What dreams will yet unfold from those leaves?