I am pleased to report that I actually learned something today, before 8 a.m., even. Humbly, I had to acknowledge that the word "bunghole" is not a dirty word at all, at least not originally, but in fact refers to something to do with a cask of ale.
How I passed three decades thinking otherwise frightens me a little. (The word "bung," according to Dictionary.com, derives from Middle English bunge, from Middle Dutch bonge, from Late Latin puncta, hole, from Latin, feminine past participle of pungere, to prick. Which still sounds a little dirty to me, sorry.) During our morning repartee, my erudite, sophisticated boyfriend and I got on the subject of kegs (don't ask). He made one of his trademark sophisticated, erudite jokes, somehow involving the use of the term "bunghole," and I chided him for being crass. "I beg your pardon," he said, "'bunghole' is a perfectly respectable word!" He went on to remind me that just last night we heard my quite respectable literary heroine Lydia Davis utter that very word at a reading in a stuffy room in a building on NYU's Washington Mews.
The word appears in a story from her Samuel Johnson Is Indignant collection -- I believe the story is "Special Chair," but don't hold me to that -- in which the narrator describes being appointed the caretaker of a friend's big, heavy chair which is somehow crafted out of an ale or wine cask. "What must you have been thinking when you heard Lydia Davis use the word 'bunghole' in that story?" my learned boyfriend asked.
Come to think of it, I said, it had struck me as somewhat out of character for her at the time, but everything else about that reading was sort of odd, so I wrote it off. It was odd, for example, to go to a free reading we saw advertised in Time Out and be greeted with a full spread of chafing dishes featuring a series of hot hors d'oeuvres, our choice of white or red wine, beer, chilled water and sodas. It also was odd to sit in a distinguished room lined with the classic works of Irish literature, in a building apparently devoted to all things Irish, waiting for an event we were pretty sure was supposed to feature a writer not particularly known for her Irishness, surrounded by people who all appeared to be more grad studenty than the types one typically sees at these types of readings in NYC, with notebooks and pens on their laps. And it was odd to wait a half hour past the starting time of the reading, squirming in our seats, wondering (as more and more grad students filed in, purposefully clutching not only their notebooks but passing around what appeared to be syllabuses of some sort, and worksheets) if we were in the right place. It all was cleared up eventually, but we had an entertaining time speculating about what kind of awful lecture or exam we may have mistakenly stumbled into, and how we would excuse ourselves from the packed room once we were discovered to be interlopers.
Lydia herself wasn't odd, of course, or maybe a little but only in her own delightful way. She's done with the translating for now and her next collection is out next spring; it seems that it will feature a lot of her shorter (as in sentence or two) pieces. Then again, she may just not enjoy reading longer ones; she seemed a bit apologetic each time she looked up after reading anything longer than a page. But I think once one has been deemed a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France, one no longer needs to apologize for anything, ever.
Comments