A. It’s not rocket science. Basically, two guys with Ph.D.s, one Swiss and one from some other country—they don’t have to speak the same language or even get along—stand in this really long tunnel near Geneva and fire protons at each other. When the little bell on top of the Large Hadron Collider goes ding-a-ling, presto, there’s your Higgs boson in the in-box. But then you need this totally ginormous magnifying glass to find the little bugger. Anyway, they did. Finally.
Q. Why is it so expensive?
A. The bell is handmade. And the magnifying glass must be made out of melted diamonds or something. They nearly fainted when they got the bill for that. Then there’s the tunnel, which wasn’t cheap. Then there’s the tanning salon bills for the Ph.D.s, who have to spend their lives in tunnels, like moles. Then there was this huge kerfuffle a few years ago, with these whack-job groups suing CERN, saying it was going to create a black hole that would suck the entire solar system into it. Endo-finito, human life, as we know it. (What jerks.) So CERN had to go to court to get that thrown out, and if you think lawyers in the United States are expensive, try Swiss particle-physics lawyers. Talk about black holes. So it all adds up, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
Q. According to the news reports, all the scientists involved were drinking champagne when the Higgs boson particle was found, leading to jokes that it should be called the “Hic boson.” Does drinking help in particle physics?
A. Up to a point. CERN was embarrassed a while back by news reports that the two Ph.D. dudes were firing champagne corks at each other instead of protons. Some scientists defended the practice, saying that champagne corks are a lot more practical—and more fun—to shoot than protons. But who knows? Who cares? Bottom line—they found the sucker. Everyone’s happy.
Q. Will there be “spin-offs” from the discovery, as there were with the space program?
A. CERN will soon announce a Higgs boson–flavored powdered breakfast drink. But historically, the Food and Drug Administration has been wary of drinks derived from the debris of primordial fireballs left after proton collisions, so don’t expect it at a supermarket near you anytime soon.
Q. Will the discovery affect everyday life?
A. Well, duh.
Q. Hey, I’m not a science-y person, okay?
A. Sorry. The answer is absolutely. Sort of. Well, yes and no.
Q. Can you be like a little more specific?
A. For starters, you’re going to be hearing the phrase “Higgs boson” about 800 trillion times. You’ll be at a cocktail party talking about the Kardashians and someone will say, “OMG, Higgs boson!” and you’ll go, “No, no, no—please no more with the Higgs boson.” So there’s that. Plus this Halloween, every other trick-or-treater is going to be dressed as—guess what? So yes, it’s going to affect your everyday life. My advice? Deal with it.
—The New York Times, July 2012
Essays
* * *
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
—ROBERT BENCHLEY
HOOF IN MOUTH
“Good to see you again,” I greeted the gentleman, a family friend, important businessman and former cabinet secretary. “How’s Carol?” The friendly grin remained, but I caught the suppressed wince.
“She died three years ago,” he said.
Where does one go from there? “Gosh, well . . . seen any good movies, lately?” I made my way to the men’s room to bash my head against the wall in private. The Japanese are so much more efficient about this: you chop off the little finger and present it neatly wrapped in a pocket handkerchief to the offended party. If you really screw up, use a bigger knife and disembowel yourself. You have to admire a culture that has ritualized shame into performance art.
Our own phrase for these horrible moments is faux pas, “the false step,” from the French, language of courtiers, diplomats, and arbiters of elegance par excellence. The phrase first turns up in English literature in 1676, in Wycherley’s satirical Restoration play The Plain-Dealer. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a slip, a trip; an act which compromises one’s reputation, esp. a woman’s lapse from virtue.”
It’s not a phrase one hears much anymore, and the more’s the pity. “I made a faux pas” sounds better than “Man, did I just step in it.”
The word gaffe gets a pretty good workout. The OED cites modern French—une gaffe, “a remark by which one ‘puts one’s foot into it.’ ” (In screwup etymology, the French seem to rule.) But “gaffe” covers only the spoken word; and who’s to say what constitutes a gaffe, in our mendacious age? Pundit Michael Kinsley’s lapidary definition of a gaffe is “when a politician accidentally speaks the truth.”
During Watergate, the president’s men were constantly having to announce that he had “misspoke himself,” an odd neologism that somehow made it sound as though Nixon had wet his pants. Just once it would be nice to hear a White House press secretary say, “The president made a faux pas.”
There’s Dr. Freud’s eponymous “slip of the tongue,” that awkward moment when the id crawls up your esophagus, grabs you by the uvula, and shouts your secret out your mouth and onto the dinner table. When this happens all the time, it’s called Tourette’s syndrome. I have a mild case of Tourette’s that causes me to blink; on more than one occasion this has been embarrassingly misinterpreted by various women as making a pass.
American presidents have kept us entertained with tongue slips. Jimmy Carter perhaps set the standard at the 1980 Democratic Convention when he extolled the former vice president as “Hubert Horatio Hornblower.” Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey made a beaut of a slip himself when he remarked, “No sane person in the country likes the war in Vietnam, and neither does President Johnson.” Ronald Reagan said in a speech, “Facts are stupid things.” (He meant “stubborn.”)
My favorite Freudian slip story is the man telling his friend about what happened when he went to the train station to buy two tickets to Pittsburgh.
“The ticket agent,” he says, “was a woman with an amazing figure and when I got to the counter, I asked her for two pickets to Tittsburgh.”
“That’s nothing,” his friend replies. “I took my mother out to dinner last night and told her, ‘You’ve ruined my life, you hideous bitch.’ It just slipped out.”
But gaffes, misspeakings, and Freudian slips are fairly low on the scale compared with true faux pas. Arthur Caldwell, an Australian member of parliament, memorably said, apropos an immigration issue involving Asians, “Two Wongs don’t make a white.” (His remark doesn’t technically qualify as a faux pas, because it was intentional. A faux pas by definition is accidental.)
Faux pas perform a valuable, indeed essential service. Ontologically speaking, they keep us in our place by reminding us that however much the human race may dress itself up, you still cannot take it out. The French philosopher Henri Bergson defined laughter as the self-assuring response of the herd to the behavior of nonconforming members. Faux pas thus provide amusement of the most primal kind. What could be more satisfying than the high and mighty brought low by acts of inadvertent self-immolation? Such at any rate was the balm I applied after my own disaster, as I set out to collect faux pas.
They abound. Not for nothing did Aquinas call man “the risible animal.” The moment homo became erectus he started stepping in it and has been at it ever since. In the old days, putting your foot wrong often meant forfeiting another extremity, like your head. But with the general decline of manners, faux pas became less important. Still, we know that as recently as the seventeenth century it was considered rude to break wind loudly in the presence of the English monarch. Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford (believed by some insistent folks to have been the real author of Shakespeare’s plays), once embarrassed himself in this way in front of Queen Elizabeth I. He blushingly retreated to his estate for several years. When he finally presented himself in court again, the queen greeted him with “My lord, we had forgot the fart.”
The current Queen Elizabeth has in her day had to put up with more than mere colonic trumpet involuntaries. Last year, she was forced to endure some well-phrased abuse in the form of a eulogy by the brother of her former daughter-in-law. Though Earl “Champagne Charlie” Spencer was instantly hailed as the new Mark Antony, his speech qualified as lèse-majesté, a faux pas of the highest sort. Whatever one’s views on the monarchy, is it appropriate to dis the queen in her own church in the middle of a funeral? But then the occasion was itself a national gathering to canonize a woman whose entire life had been a series of faux pas—marching up the wedding aisle with the wrong man, throwing herself down those stairs, giving all those self-pitying interviews, getting into bed with a treacherous lover, and finally getting in that car outside the Ritz in Paris—so it was perhaps fitting that she should be laid to rest with one.
On a lighter note, one of the queen’s subjects recently made screaming tabloid headlines by not curtsying to her. The offender was one of the Spice Girls, Ginger, to be precise. But she had a reason. Ginger is—like the aforementioned railroad ticket agent—amply endowed. On this occasion, she was also scantily clad, and afraid that genuflection before Her Majesty might cause a truly eye-popping faux pas. This was not the first Spice faux pas. Previously, another grabbed the bottom of the Prince of Wales, causing him to blush. This is what happens when you do away with beheading. The people get ideas.
Prince Charles is himself capable of faux pas. A friend of mine was at a wedding lunch at Hampton House outside London for Prince Pavlos of Greece and Marie-Chantal. Prince Charles approached my friend, who was standing next to his wife, whom the prince had not met.
“I hear you’re a very good friend of ________,” said HRH, referring to a female cousin of my friend’s wife. Wink wink, nudge nudge, continued his Royal Highness. “Yes, I hear you’re having a very good time together.”
All my friend could do was croak, “Sir, may I present my wife to you?”
“Oh my God,” said Prince Charles, “I’ve really put my foot in it again.”
I’m struck by that “again.” Does Prince Charles do this all the time? Public service alert to all adulterous acquaintances of Prince Charles: think twice before presenting your wife to him at Royal Ascot.
The queen herself is known to be tolerant of faux pas. When the Polish leader Lech Walesa visited Buckingham Palace, he was served artichokes. Never having encountered one, he began to eat the spiny leaves. Her Majesty deftly stepped in and said, “Why don’t you eat the bottom part? It takes so long to eat the leaves.” That’s noblesse oblige.
During the Edwardian era, the shah of Persia visited London. At dinner he was served asparagus, a legume unknown to the occupant of the Peacock Throne. After eating the tip of each spear, he tossed the stalk over his shoulder onto the floor. Consternation ensued. Finally everyone else began tossing their stalks onto the floor. That’s diplomacy.
Buckingham Palace is the scene of my all-time favorite mispronunciation faux pas. President and Madame De Gaulle came to lunch. It was near the end of his term. Her Majesty asked Madame De Gaulle what she was most looking forward to in retirement. Madame De Gaulle’s English was thickly accented. Her answer sounded like, “A penis.” Her husband leapt to clarify. “Yes, we are looking forward to happiness.” One hopes Madame got her wish.
Runner-up in the Department of Unfortunate Mispronunciations goes to Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, who was attending a fancy dress ball in Newport. At the door, she whispered to the embayeur—the guy with the pole who bangs it on the floor and shouts out your name—the theme of her costume: “A Norman peasant.” The majordomo banged his stick and thundered aloud to all assembled: “Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. An enormous pheasant.”
Uniforms can lead to confusion. Robert Benchley, bibulously leaving the “21” Club one night, saw a man adorned with gold braid, assumed he was the doorman, and instructed him to call a cab. The man replied somewhat starchily, “I am an admiral.”
“In that case,” said Benchley, “call me a battleship.”
Some years ago in London at a white-tie ball, Claus von Bulow good-naturedly teased a fellow guest who was dressed in black tie. The man shot back, “At least I didn’t kill my wife.”
The British foreign minister George Brown attended a state dinner in Vienna in 1966. He had enjoyed his wine, and upon hearing the orchestra strike up a tune, turned to an exquisite creature in violet beside him and said, “Madame, you look ravishing. May we dance?”
The exquisite creature in violet said to him, “No, Mr. Brown, for three reasons. First, this is a state dinner, not a ball. Second, that is the Austrian state anthem, not a waltz. And third, I am the cardinal archbishop of Vienna.”
How appearances deceive. In the 1930s a woman was seated at a banquet next to Wellington Koo, Chiang Kai-shek’s foreign minister. Koo was a superbly erudite man who spoke many languages. The woman began the conversation with, “Chin-ee man, you come far on boat-ee?” Koo nodded politely. She went on like this all evening. Finally it was time for the speeches. Koo rose and gave a stunningly brilliant speech on the larger questions of the day. He sat down and said to the woman, “You lik-ee speech-ee?”
State protocol is to faux pas what a highwire is to a misplaced foot—spectacularly noticeable. Prime Minister Harold Wilson visited Washington in the 1960s, at a time when it looked as though the sun really was starting to set on the British Empire: post-Suez, colonies everywhere clamoring for independence, labor strikes, a free-falling pound. On arriving at the White House for the formal welcoming ceremonies, Wilson pointed out to the U.S. chief of protocol, James Symington, that two of the Union Jacks were flying upside down, the international sign of distress. Next day The Washington Post ran a huge picture of the flags over the caption “Oops!”
Symington’s phone rang at six a.m.: an unhappy Lyndon Johnson. A formidable thing at any hour. Symington did what he could to assuage LBJ (whose own history of faux pas would fill several volumes), only to arrive at the White House that night for the state dinner to find the following three songs listed on the postdinner musical entertainment program: “I’ve Got Plenty of Nothing,” “On the Road to Mandalay” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” It was, Mr. Symington remembers vividly, that kind of day.
In 1981 his successor in the post, Leonore Annenberg, wife of the publishing giant Walter Annenberg, created a sensation with a literal faux pas—she curtsied to Prince Charles while welcoming him to the United States at Andrews Air Force Base. Mrs. Annenberg, a gracious woman and admired hostess, was only trying to be courteous. The problem was that America had fought a war two hundred years earlier for the republican privilege of not bowing or scraping before royalty. In a way, every American’s proudest birthright. Mrs. Annenberg returned to private life shortly after.
Americans and royalty don’t necessarily agree on what constitutes a faux pas. Alfonso XIII of Spain, grandfather to the current king, Juan Carlos, visited Hollywood in 1926, where he was accorded a royal welcome. After a while he declared, “I have not met my hero, Fatty Arbuckle.”
Embarrassed looks were exchanged between his hosts.
“Well, Your Most Catholic Majesty,” one ventured, “Fatty Arbuckle is not really ‘seen around’ much in Hollywood these days.”
“Why ever not?”
“Well, Your Most Catholic Majesty, there was a, um, party.”
“Yes?”
“And there was a young woman.”
“Yes?”
“And she was, um, penetrated by a jeroboam of champagne. And died. Of peritonitis.”
“And?”
“And you see, Your Majesty, after that, he is not received.”
“Are you telling me,” said Alfonso XIII, growing angry and red-faced, “that this great artist is not received? Why, it could have happened to any of us!”
Perhaps the most visual international faux pas occurred in 1992 when President George H. W. Bush experienced sudden, violent gastric distress duri
ng a state dinner in Tokyo and vomited “copiously”—as the news report insisted—onto the lap of Prime Minister Miyazawa. Mr. Bush is a model of gentlemanliness, manners, and Episcopalian propriety, a true Yankee aristo. His mortification the next day on reading the newspapers can only be imagined.
But he is not the only president to cover himself—and his dinner partner—in fluid glory. José Mara Velasco Ibarra was five times president of Ecuador. He was constantly being deposed. On one occasion, he turned up at an embassy reception. Accounts vary. He either urinated in the punch bowl or upchucked onto the West German ambassador. (According to one version, he managed to accomplish both feats.) The army immediately deposed him for having compromised the dignity of the republic.
Should this happen to you, consider the presence of mind evinced by Herman Mankiewicz, author and screenwriter (Citizen Kane), who once threw up at a dinner party. “It’s all right, Arthur,” he said to his host, “the white wine came up with the fish.”
Can a newspaper typo be considered a faux pas? You decide: In 1915, The Washington Post ran an item about President Woodrow Wilson escorting his fiancée, Edith Galt, to the theater. Wilson was so attentive to her that he barely paid any attention to the play. The reporter from the Post noted the president’s attentiveness to Mrs. Galt, but a typesetting error resulted in people reading the next morning that the president had “spent most of his time entering Mrs. Galt.” Could a typo this exquisite really be accidental? Shortly after she became queen, Elizabeth II made a royal tour of London. One of the newspapers reported that at one vista, she got out of her car and “peed down upon her city.”
One of the more impressive faux pas of the Gilded Age was committed by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the very wealthy newspaper magnate. He got gloriously drunk on New Year’s Day 1877 and climbed in through the window of his fiancée’s Fifth Avenue mansion. Here he became a bit confused and, mistaking the fireplace for a toilet, emptied his bladder into it in full view of his prospective in-laws. The marriage did not go forward. Bennett went off to live in Paris for a while. What a shame Edith Wharton never included this incident in any of her novels. Madame Olenska exiled herself to Paris for less.
But Enough About You: Essays Page 38
