âHow was your evening out on The Esplanade yesterday?â I asked Maury. I was sitting with him and Jess in Domus Logogustationis, and he was looking like heâd seen and done things heâd rather not have.
âRebarbative,â Maury said.
âOh dear,â I said.
âWait,â Jess said. âI thought you went to see Hello, Dolly?â
âI had thought I was going to see Salvador DalĂ!â Maury said. âBut hello! And hell no!â
âWell, you said you were going to The Esplanade,â I said. âI could have told you that Dollyâs is the new cowgirl-themed bar where the Bier Markt used to be.â
âYou could have,â Maury said. âYou didnât, but you certainly could have.â
âI thought you knew.â
âI do now.â
âSo you didnât enjoy it?â Jess said, innocently.
Maury gave her a brief Kubrick stare. Then he inhaled and said, âLine dancing is⌠not my line of dancing. We each had a sixteen-dollar cocktail and I watched the whirl of activity and longed for less acute hearing. Narcissa had a thing called a Porn Star Martini. I was expecting local hummingbirds to seek it out. I had something made with whiskey, charred oak, sarsaparilla, and bitters, specifically because it was named Desperado, and I was desperate.â
âYou didnât stay long, did you?â I said.
âWell, no, only as long as it took to get the drink, plus several seconds to swallow it. And then Narcissa asked if I would like to go instead to a barbecue. Or I thought thatâs what she said.â
âOh dear,â I said. I knew what was coming, as I live at the other end of the block from the location in question.
âWas it not a barbecue?â Jess said.
âIt was⌠a Barbie queue. A queue for the Malibu Barbie CafĂŠ pop-up event, next door to Dollyâs.â
âAnd she already had tickets?â I said. I knew it was a forty-buck entrance, though I had not gone to it myself.
âYes, it was a set-up.â
âMalibu. Barbie. CafĂŠ,â Jess said.
âIt looks like a Malibu Barbie playhouse,â Maury said. âAlso, it looks exactly like several nightmares I have had.â
âA lot of pink,â I said.
âAnd I then realized why Narcissa was dressed all in pink. She had also brought a pink bowtie for me. Fortunately it was at least a real one, not a clip-on.â
âAnd how did you get through that experience?â Jess said.
âWith the aid of prosecco and mojitos. At least there wasnât any country music.â
Jess leaned forward, teasingly. âDid you get any souvenirs?â
âAs a matter of factâŚâ Maury said, and reached into his pocket. âI at some point said to Narcissa that what I could really use was a phenobarbital.â
He paused for effect. Then he said, âBehold.â And from his pocket he produced a flannel Barbie doll.
It goes without saying that as the evening progressed further we went without etymologically dissecting or otherwise tasting any of the words. But now weâre here, on my blog, and Iâd like to.
First: Barbie. Obviously a short form for Barbara. The dolls were named after Barbara Handler, the daughter of Ruth Handler, who invented them in the late 1950s. The name Barbara in its various forms has caught on, rather like a barb, but itâs not related to barb as in on a fish hook; that barb comes by way of Old French from Latin barba, âbeardâ. Instead, Barbara is Latin for âforeign womanâ (âforeign manâ is barbarus); the vector for its use as a name is Saint Barbara â who also, of course, gave her name to Santa Barbara, which is just a bit more than seventy miles up the California coast from Malibu.
Foreign woman? Yes, a barbarian, literally. Some people have at some times thought that barbarian came from the same word for âbeardâ, distinguishing foreigners as bearded people. But it does not. Latin got it from Greek βΏĎβιĎÎżĎ barbaros, and (a) ancient Greek men commonly had beards, so a beard was not a mark of a foreigner, and (b) the Ancient Greek word for âbeardâ was ÎłÎνξΚον geneion. Instead, it is commonly accepted that βΏĎβιĎÎżĎ was just imitative of the speech of the foreigners. It was like calling them âblah-blahs.â
On the other hand, the rather barbed word rebarbative, which means ârepellentâ, does come from barba â by way of Middle French rebarber, âopposeâ, as in stand beard-to-beard against. (As to barbecue, although it has sometimes been attributed to a Bar-B-Q Ranch, itâs from Taino barbakoa, the name of a frame of wooden sticks that was used for cooking or curing meat or fish. And queue comes from Latin cauda, âtailâ.)Â
Now, having talked about Barbie, we come around to dolls, or, more to the point, to Dolly. Classically, Dolly has been a pet name for Dorothy or, later, for Dolores; Dorothy comes from Dorothea, âgift from Godâ, the same roots as Theodore, while Dolores is from Spanish for âsorrowsâ, and became a womanâs name from MarĂa de los Dolores, Mary of the Sorrows â one of the presentations of the Virgin Mary. But the most famous Dolly of our times, Dolly Parton, was christened Dolly Rebecca Parton â not short for anything (rather like being named Jack or Cindy from birth: why not just go with the version everyone will use anyway?). And in that sense, Dolly is, well, like a doll.Â
And where does doll as in a stuffed or carved or moulded homunculus come from? Heh heh, from Dorothy. Yes, thatâs right, a doll is a doll because a typical name was Doll, and dolls could have as easily been called molls or kates or barbies or any other common name for a girl.
And all of the above means that Barbie doll, etymologically, is âforeign woman, gift from Godâ, but specifically in a cute, affectionate way.
Oh, and phenobarbital? Itâs from pheno- from Greek ĎÎąÎŻÎ˝Ď phainĹ âcome to light, manifestâ (as seen in epiphany and also, lightly changed, in Tiffany, which has exactly the same roots as theophany âmanifestation of a deityâ), plus barbital, which is from barbiturate, from German Barbiturat, which probably comes from the name Barbara plus the root we see in uric and urine. Yes: phenobarbital could be said to mean âa vision of Barbieâs pissâ. Maury should feel grateful he just got the doll.
