A Poison Pen for Dear Miss Wren

This is a poison pen note, in a way, to a dear person named Miss Wren, or Miss Sparrow or Miss Bullfinch or possibly just plain Miss Byrd, who taught fifth grade at the Edward C. Delano Elementary School in Chicago more years ago than it is healthy to think about.

I'm sorry I'm a bit foggy about your name, Miss Wren, but you mustn't take it personally because I'm a bad one for names and you must accept my word for it that I remember you, in all respects save your nomenclature, with clarity and even love. You parted your hair in the middle and wore pince-nez, but otherwise I liked you fine. The poison pen note is because you had one failing that irritates me to this day.

I would stand up to deliver an address (at which time all the books would slide out of my open-front desk and thunder to the floor, but that's beside the point) and I would, on occasion and if the topic required it, make use of the word sweat, which was your cue to point out that I didn't really mean sweat, I meant perspire or perspiration. "Horses sweat," you would say, "gentlemen perspire, and ladies glow." I was easily manipulated in those days.

But, Miss Wren, you were wrong. I meant sweat. I found out I meant sweat years later when I became acquainted with the "taint of gentility" Fowler abhorred and began to read Jespersen, Skeat and other etymologists, all of whom assured me that sweat is a thoroughbred. It traces its lineage all the way back to the Sanskrit sveda, I learned with reverence. As long as I have the books open, I may as well also mention the Middle English sweten, from the Anglo-Saxon swætan, which is akin to the Old Frisian and Old Saxon swet, the Dutch zweet, the Old High German sweiz, the German schweiss, the Old Norse sveiti, the Swedish svett, the Danish sveda and the Latin sudor, although I doubt if any of these, singly or in concert, would cut much ice with you. When you were a little girl – with your hair parted in the middle even then, probably, but without, I hope, pince-nez – that five-letter word was a four-letter word, too down-to-earth for your mother's drawing room: if inadvertently spoken, I imagine gentlemen frowned and ladies blushed. What did horses do?

You know what is kind of funny, Miss Wren? What's funny is that you not infrequently wore sweaters. You wore loose sweaters, with buttons, and pockets at the sides stuffed with handkerchiefs and a pitch pipe, and the really funny part was that you called your sweaters sweaters. "Ray," you would say, "it's getting a little chilly in here; will you please fetch me my sweater from my chair like a good boy?" Without batting an eye you'd say that.

Why didn't you call it a perspirer? Or a woolly, which Fowler tells us is a British genteelism? Or just a jersey? Could it be that you knew, and honored, sweater's lengthy tenure? Were you aware that it was first used as a name for a woolen vest in 1882 by Flover in Unexplored Baluchistan? Is it possible you were cognizant of its appearance, over half a century prior to that, in connection with the very beast you used as a negative example ("a ... strong horse going along with his sweat, loaded with sweaters" – Sporting Magazine, 1828)? Is that why sweater was OK with you, even though sweat was not? It's possible, I guess, but it doesn't seem very likely, that you knew about these remote tidbits, when you apparently didn't even know what a much more popular writer and a deity of yours, Shakespeare, thought of sweat and perspire. Or maybe you did and just didn't give a rap.

Shakespeare used sweat as a noun sixteen times, as a verb twenty-three times, sweating nine times, sweats five times, sweaty two times, and sweaten and sweatest one time each, a total of fifty-seven sweat references, by actual count, which is an awfully big bucket of sweat. He never once used perspire or perspiration.

Miss Wren, I must admire your courage in bucking such a formidable authority as Shakespeare. Schoolteachers usually err on the side of Bardolatry, but not you, eh? No, ma'am. You would have told him, "Willy, you don't really mean that. What you really mean is 'Who would fardels bear to grunt and perspire under a weary life.'" And you would have chided the author of Genesis, too, and coerced him, in your gentle way, into writing "In the perspiration of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." Sir Winston Churchill would have glowered at you in Karshian rage and chewed his panatela, but he would have backed down, finally, and changed the title of that book of his to Blood, Perspiration and Tears. The only one who might have given you a little trouble would have been Longfellow: after all,

His brow is wetWith honest perspirationdoesn't even rhyme. I guess, though, that you would have sweet-talked him into changing it to

Wet as a sun-splashed limbo-dancing Haitian

Is his brow with honest perspiration and, as a matter of fact, that mightn't have been a bad idea.

But, bad idea or good idea, I suppose I ought to come right out and say it was punk of you, Miss Wren, to pass on to impressionable minds the limp euphemisms of your own Victorian upbringing. How many of my little colleagues, I ought to rhetorically ask you, colleagues more trusting and less ornery than I, have gone on to man-and-womanhood with those wisps of lacklustre language clinging to them like old frayed doilies?

I ought to, but I have a hunch I won't, not in so many words. Because, for one thing, I liked you very much, Miss Wren. For another thing, I'm afraid I'd be flogging a dead – how about that? horses again! – and there are plenty of live horses I could flog to more profit, probably.

What I mean is, the old battle between sweat and perspire is over, and sweat has won. And now that it's won, I'm not so sure that I'm precisely drunk with victory. Characters sweat in just about every modern novel I pick up – sweat trickles down the smalls of their backs and beads their upper lips and sometimes it's cold sweat and sometimes it's hot sweat but either way it's sweat, not perspiration. I should be thankful, but I don't know. Sweat is approved for use in movies and television, too – I understand it comes out of a spray gun – and not only do the characters sweat profusely, glistening in the klieg lights, but they also talk about it, at least on shows like Playhouse 90 (which gets away with hell and damn, too, because it's so emancipated and bold and unafraid). The old "taint of gentility" has been banished, all right, and I suppose that's fine; what has banished it, though, may be nothing more than another taint ...

But what kind of reactionary flapdoodle is this I'm uttering? And what ever happened to that poison pen note? Miss Wren, though it is only a memory of you that hovers over my desk at this moment, I note that I can still be easily manipulated by a charming and persuasive lady.

Especially a lady who glows.