A Detour Into the Etymology of the Youths
...and brief notes on evolution and art.
This will be a bonsai “news”letter of sorts. This author published no new op-eds this week, which means that some — three, precisely — particularly exciting pieces are nearing publication. Next week’s edition of The Thoughtful Spot will, as they say, slap.
To compensate for this week’s dearth of substantive content, a quick note on the origins of slap, a colloquial adjective common to millennials and Gen Z-ers that means “to be excellent or amazing.” It often appears in the context of music, which suggests a relation to the slap-bass technique (which does, indeed, slap). Prominent bass lines could have factored into the phrase’s etymology, although slang.com — an eminent arbiter of truth — tells another story: “The term comes from the feeling of receiving an open hand slap, which is startling and grabs your attention, but in this context, it is startling in a positive way.”
Dictionary.com’s account goes back still further:
As for slap itself, the association of the word slap with great qualities isn’t brand spanking new, exactly. It was an adjective for “first-rate” in the mid-1800s and an adverb, meaning “excellently,” even earlier, in the mid-1700s.
Slap appears to start getting applied to music, specifically, by at least the early 2000s. Now, the origin of slang, especially successful and widespread slang terms like slap, are indeed hard to pin down, but the musical slap is often credited to Bay Area hip-hop slang.
(With The Thoughtful Spot’s entrée into etymology, Kevin Williamson’s recurring “Words About Words” segment had better start looking over its shoulder.)
Some Wisdom
From Friedrich Hayek’s The Fatal Concept:
My views, some of which have been sketched earlier, can be summarised simply. Learning how to behave is more the source than the result of insight, reason, and understanding.
Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to become so. It is not our intellect that created our morals; rather, human interactions governed by our morals make possible the growth of reason and those capabilities associated with it. Man became intelligent because there was tradition — that which lies between instinct and reason — for him to learn. This tradition, in turn, originated not from a capacity rationally to interpret observed facts but from habits of responding. It told man primarily what he ought or ought not to do under certain conditions rather than what he must expect to happen.
Thus I confess that I always have to smile when books on evolution, even ones written by great scientists, end, as they often do, with exhortations which, while conceding that everything has hitherto developed by a process of spontaneous order, call on human reason — now that things have become so complex — to seize the reins and control future development.
As he is currently reading Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, this author takes special note of this final paragraph. Evolution, in Darwin’s telling, is pointedly Hayekian: Over the course of all time, living things naturally develop — i.e., discover — traits that benefit them; the process occurs without central — or, really, any — planning. And it has culminated in the wondrous complexity and utility of floral and faunal biology. Darwin, comparing man’s efforts at selective breeding to nature’s, wrote, “Natural Selection…is a power incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.”
Some Beauty
A young musician, Oliver Anthony, has gone viral on right-wing/conservative Twitter (what’s an “X”?). By Sunday morning, three of his songs reached Apple Music’s Top 10 songs, of which two sat in first and second place.
His voice is immaculate, like a storm raging at sea. His performance is deeply personal, powerful, and flawlessly imperfect. The lyrical content has divided listeners, however, eliciting both plaudits and criticism. The reader should listen and form an original opinion, but this author would argue that some of it — not all — is a bit dodgy or at the least stems from corrosive ideological soil.
But questionable lyrics ought not to prevent anyone from enjoying great music — e.g., this song — that reflects something more fundamental about the human condition than any language can satisfactorily express. This author’s favorite musicians include a number of radicals — punk rockers Rise Against and Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, for instance. The reader can surely think of many more without difficulty.
As this author argued recently at Ordinary Times, “Truly great art — which often emanates from non-traditional, not-so-balanced folks — is not only, well, great, but elemental to the human experience.” Perhaps society should consult somebody other than musicians on economic policy.
Some Levity
Baseball is the American national pastime, and as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, Americans are violent folk. Anyhow, they don’t make ‘em like they used to.
Sundry Links, &c.
Jose Ramirez has, in addition a mean right hook, an outstanding eye at the plate.