I used “soap opera” in my last post, and this has prompted me to recall how soap operas are so called because the original radio serials in this genre were sponsored by soap companies. Of course, only the etymologically inclined know this, but everyone knows what a soap opera is. We even use “soapy” to mean “soap-opera like”.
Words and phrases can be sticky for all sorts of reasons, but I think that “soap opera” has long outlived the memory of its origins because it has appropriate resonances that have nothing to do with those original sponsors. The oxymoronic combination of the sudsy banality of “soap” and the grandeur of “opera” somehow does justice to this peculiar form of drama, its blend of the grand hysteria of opera with the thick, pulpy domesticity of soap.
Words and phrases can be sticky for all sorts of reasons.
Something similar is happening with, for instance, “carbon copy” and “fast forward”. Both expressions refer to outdated technologies: no one has made a carbon copy since photocopiers became omnipresent, and no one has fast forwarded a tape or videotape since we stopped using them. But both expressions, aided by their alliteration, are sharply evocative. The mineral note of “carbon copy” suggests something of the inertness of derivative work. “Fast forward” evokes the queasy sense of speed involved in having one’s mind jump from one point in time to another, skipping what comes between.
Likewise “blank check” may not survive the disappearance of the last generation to write checks. But it may. Its users will then no longer quite know what a check is (as many, surely, already don’t), but the phrase will still seem apposite, because “blank”, connoting a fragile nullity, calls up the relevant notion of a dangerous form of generosity.
“Blank”, connoting a fragile nullity, calls up the relevant notion of a dangerous form of generosity.
The political use of the “-gate” suffix is different, because Watergate is still remembered. But “-gate” words keep getting coined (Monicagate, Pizzagate, Russiagate) less because Watergate remains a potent memory, than because “gate” conveys something of the liminality of the sort of crisis to which it is applied: it is a threshold through which the politician at the center of the crisis must pass, and from which there is no turning back. The “-gate” suffix sticks best when a crisis takes on this nature.
Related are sports expressions that are not dead at all, but are also current metaphors employed by many with little or no knowledge of their sporting use. Many such phrases in English come from horse-racing and boxing, but “make the cut” is a fine example from golf. The cut is “the elimination of half the players before the last two rounds of a four-round golf tournament”, and to make the cut is to avoid that elimination. But I can’t be the only one to have used the expression for many years without knowing any of that. Its power, for the golf-ignorant, comes from its staccato cadence, from the flexible toughness of the verb “make”, and from the harsh, cruel images summoned up by “cut”.
Contamination is perhaps essential to all of language.
In a beautiful little essay on Dante’s last sight of Beatrice in the Paradiso, Borges discusses the following lines, where Beatrice has left Dante to ascend to the heavenly Rose of the souls of the just:
Così orai; e quella, sì lontana
come parea, sorrise e riguardommi;
poi si tornò all’etterna fontana.
Robert Durling (2011) translates, most accurately: Thus I prayed, and she, distant as she seemed, smiled and gazed at me; then she turned back to the eternal Fountain.
But in 1867 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had translated:
Thus I implored; and she, so far away,
Smiled, as it seemed, and looked once more at me;
Then unto the eternal fountain turned.
Borges points out that Longfellow has transposed come parea (“as she seemed” / “as it seemed”) from Beatrice’s apparent distance to her (now) apparent smile. He suggests that Longfellow has brought out a “contamination” in the lines, and that there is another such contamination between si tornò (“she turned”) and etterna (“eternal”). Word for word, Dante is saying only that Beatrice seemed faraway, and that she would gaze forever on God. But the contamination speaks of something else, of Dante’s unending heartbreak at Beatrice’s death, of the terror that he will never see her—that she will never see him—again (Longfellow, too, had a lost a woman—his beloved wife—a few years before he published his Dante).
The contamination of which Borges writes is, albeit in a far lower register, what gives their lasting force to “soap opera” or “make the cut”. Indeed this contamination is perhaps essential to all of language, where every word means far more than any dictionary list, is redolent of known and forgotten history, is also both image and music.
