Discussion Groups / British English / May 2007

Balderdash and Piffle, BBC2 14 MAY 2007 23:20-23:50

A co-presentation by popular poker pixie Victoria Coren
featuring special-interest guest researcher Jo Brand who
worked as a psychiatric nurse prior to tackling the rather
less stressful environment of live stand-up comedy, the
show sets itself the challenge of demonstrating holes in
the etymologies provided by the Oxford University Press
in the various editions of its Oxford English Dictionaries.

Tonight's travels through the world of dogmatic faux-amis
and pre-computer-era resourced research results took in
terms such as "moron", "cretin"*, "bonkers", "durbrain",
and finally "bananas".

The panel of austere-looking experts in smart-casual
clothing accepted some of the predated usages but
still seemed set in a bubble of Albionic altruism where
the question of usgaes having crept in from overseas
was concerned--the most notable example of which
was their etymology of "bananas".

The official line cited from Ivory Towers, when presented
with a Gershwin number from 1938 which made use of
the word as the second couplet for a rhyme was drearily
sequential in its analysis and made no allowance for the
time-honoured poetic poser of "but nothing rhymes with
oranges!"

Oranges are known to grow quite nicely on the Eastern
seabord' of North America and, indeed, the area's age-
old Spanish cultures as evident in names such as "Los
Angeles", "San Francisco", and "San Andreas" suggests
that oranges would been one fruit they've been growing
there for years.

How is this relevant? Well, a quick consultation of any
reliable English-Spanish lexitome shows that to this
day the Spanish word for "oranges" remains "naranjas".
And, in all fairness, naranjas does kind of rhyme with
bananas, albeit in a firmly Anglophone manner.

As such I move that their off-the-cuff and we-know-best
account of the inclusion of the word "bananas" in the
song at all - namely that it was chosen simply because
it rhymes with "Polyannas" - is rather putting the cart
before the horse and, indeed, the reverse is true.

Obviously this does not mean that they were "wrong"
in the sense that "Gershwin chose it simply to fit a
sense of meaning 'nonsense'", but nor is it suggestive
they should give the matter no further consideration.

Sources to check would include Gershwin's diaries,
and also traditional Carribean Krio/Patois usages as
well as Merriam Webster and the contemporary music
press--particularly given the archipelago's proximity
to orange-growing regions and its traditional association
with banana plantations in the age of the steamship.

As we now have "Polyanna" as the word which was
chosen to fit the rhyme we can forget the plummy and
rather twee values in the film of the same name and
look for cues in contemporary American culture as
to whether this was an established usage already.

As the song is a song about the states of mind which
orbit love, "Polyannas" is used in a semi-derogative
sense to imply naifete, and the states akin to madness
associated with "love" were already well-documented,
it suggests that they, perhaps, should feel free to be
as dismissive as they like--at their peril.

G DAEB

* - entirely possibly literally what James Joyce meant.

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