Do Elephants Jump? (13 page)

We suggest loons hire a new P.R. agency. While they sport a name synonymous with lunacy, they have much to crow about. For one, loons are the oldest living birds. We can trace their ancestry back about 70 million years, and there are loon fossils that date from 20 million years ago. Loons are among the most expert swimmers and divers in the avian world. They can dive down as low as 250 feet from the surface to catch their prey.

But despite their prowess in the water, loons tend to act strangely to our eyes on land. At least four typical behaviors of loons could be called “loony”:

Loons are exceedingly awkward on land
. Their legs are positioned far back on their bodies, which helps propel them when swimming and diving in the water, but makes it difficult for them to stand up. With their body weight saddled on legs designed for swimming, they fall forward when trying to walk. To move on land, they must crawl for short distances by pushing their legs and sliding on their breasts. Loons’ nests are always at water’s edge because of this lack of mobility on land.

Loons are awkward getting airborne from land or water.
There are five different species of loons, and the heavier ones, such as the common loon, cannot alight vertically from a standstill on the water. To become airborne, they flap their wings rapidly while “running” or “patting” on the water to gain speed, not unlike an airplane taking off on a long runway. It is this patting, replete with noisy and manic flapping of wings, that if not “loony,” is at least amusing to humans. Loons typically nest near large lakes to assure a long takeoff path. If a loon accidentally lands on solid ground, it’s likely a goner.

Loons act funny.
What’s sexy to a loon isn’t a turn-on to humans. To attract mates or fend off intruders, loons present several funny-looking courtship and territorial displays. For example, to fend off intruders, male loons rear up in the water, totally vertical, flapping their wings, while moving horizontally in this position.

Loons sound funny
. The loon call is one of the most famous sounds of nature. Loons make at least five different kinds of calls, with names like “yodel,” “wail,” and “tremolo.” In the literature about loons, you often hear sentiments like, “Once you hear it, you’ll never forget it.” Why are they so memorable? All three of these calls have been described as maniacal or eerie. The tremolo, usually employed to signal alarm, is sometimes called the laugh of a crazy person. The wail, used in social interactions, sounds eerily like a wolf’s howl. The male uses a wild and manic yodel to scare off predators.

The bird experts we spoke to agree with Allison Wells, communications director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, that

Of course, the weirdness of a sound is all in the beholder. To JoAnne C. Williams, state coordinator of the Michigan Loon Preservation Society, loon calls are music to her ears:

But if we conclude that “loony” is a reference to the strange calls of the bird, then etymologists might have a bone to pick with us. Check out a dictionary and you will see that most authorities agree that our name for the bird was derived from the Scandinavian word
lom,
meaning “clumsy,” almost certainly a reference to loons’ awkwardness on land. It’s not hard to imagine Scandinavians, who emigrated en masse to the northern lake country of the United States, taking their name for the bird with them, as the loons they saw in the United States were exactly the same species of birds they saw in their home countries.

But how did a word for awkwardness get mixed up with
lunatic,
a word designating mental aberration? As it turns out, the derivations of the two words are not related at all!
Lunatic
comes from
luna,
the Latin word for “moon.” Ancient people, through the time of the Romans, believed that overexposure to the light of the moon caused madness, or “lunacy.” The word
lunatic
dates back to at least the thirteenth century.

To complicate matters even more, there is a Middle English word,
loun,
that means “madman” or “clown,” that was the antecedent to the Scottish word
loon,
which refers to a simpleton or crazy person. Shakespeare used
loon
in
Macbeth
(“The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!”), and Coleridge followed 200 years later in
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
(Hold off! Unhand me, grey-bear loon.”). But there is no evidence that this word had anything to do with either “lunatic” or the bird. The British (and most other non-North Americans) call the bird “divers” rather than “loons.”

“Loon” as the name of the bird stems from around the early 1600s, and the expression “crazy as a loon” developed among European settlers in North America.
Loony
wasn’t coined until the late nineteenth century, and was slang for “lunatic.” Most etymologists believe it was spelled “loony” rather than
luny
because of the already-established name for the bird and the expression, “crazy as a loon.” Even though the derivations weren’t the same, somehow the melding of moon madness, awkward birds on land, and eerie avian vocalizations melded into etymological confusion, if not lunacy.

When you conjure up an image of bruising football players, the French don’t immediately spring to mind. But Notre Dame was indeed founded by a French Catholic, Father Edward Frederick Sorin, in 1842. Sorin had been a member of a religious order in France, Holy Cross Motherhouse of Notre Dame de Ste. Croix. This order specialized in missionary work and Sorin was chosen to lead a group of seven brothers to establish a center for Catholic education and missionary work in Indiana. Northern Indiana already had a strong French presence, as many of the first white men in the territory were French explorers, missionaries, and fur trappers of French-Canadian descent.

Sorin named his new school the University of Notre Dame du Lac, a tribute to his seminary back in France; “du Lac” was a nod to the two lakes on the forest land that Sorin had chosen to situate the university. While the university’s original goal was to produce clergy, it soon welcomed non-Catholics and those interested in non-religious studies.

In the huge wave of immigration to the United States in the nineteenth century, many Irish Catholics settled in the Midwest; indeed, many Americans equated “Catholic” with “Irish.” When Notre Dame started competing in intercollegiate athletics, many newspapers referred to its teams as the “Catholics,” even though the school had no official nickname. In press accounts, many schools are referred to by their religious affiliation (yes, “the Catholics” battled “the Methodists” and “the Baptists” at football).

But where did “Fighting Irish” come from? What’s a nice school established to train seminarians doing with a warlike nickname? Autumn Gill, a public relations representative from Notre Dame, told
Imponderables
that although no one knows for sure, there are two main theories (documented in a book Gill recommended, Murray Sperber’s
Shake Down the Thunder
). The first theory is that “fighting Irish” was an epithet hurled
at
the Notre Dame team by fans of its opponent, Northwestern, in 1889. The Wildcat fans, who were behind in the game, yelled: “Kill the Fighting Irish, kill the Fighting Irish.” The other story is that the term came from the lips of Notre Dame halfback, Pete Vaughn, who in a 1909 game against Michigan, tried to motivate his teammates (who were mostly Irish-American) when they were behind by yelling: “What’s the matter with you guys? You’re all Irish and you’re not fighting.” When the press heard about Vaughn’s outburst, especially since Notre Dame went on to win the game, reporters dubbed the team the “Fighting Irish.”

But the nickname didn’t stick until the 1920s. In the first part of the twentieth century, Indiana press referred to the team as the “Catholics” or less flattering variations, such as the “Papists,” “Horrible Hibernians,” and even “Dirty Irish” or “Dumb Micks.” Campus publications avoided the pejorative terms, and often referred to the teams by the school colors, “the Gold and Blue,” and occasionally as “the Irish.” Obviously, the campus administration wasn’t wild about slurs against Catholics or ethnic groups, but the students embraced the “Irish” name and liked “Fighting” for its emphasis on spirit and playfulness. In campus publications, students insisted that “you don’t have to be from Ireland to be Irish” and that naysayers should “cultivate some of that fighting Irish spirit.” A late 1910 visit from Eamon De Valera, who was soon to be president of the Irish Republic, solidified the students’ embrace of “Fighting Irish.”

Three men popularized the nickname outside of South Bend. Knute Rockne, the legendary football coach, turned the Notre Dame team into a powerhouse. Rockne hired student press agents and encouraged them to use “Fighting Irish” in their dispatches. One of those press agents, Francis Wallace, moved to New York and became a successful sportswriter. He disliked the then-prevalent nicknames for Notre Dame, such as “Rambling Irish,” “Rockne’s Rovers,” and “Wandering Irish,” as all implied that the team’s players traveled at the expense of their studies. Wallace’s writings were picked up by the wire services, and he insisted on using “Fighting Irish.” In 1927, President Matthew Walsh made it official, adopting “Fighting Irish” as the school’s permanent nickname.

Of course, Catholics are more likely to root for Notre Dame than other religious groups, but Catholics from all over Europe and South America have emigrated to the United States, and yet seem loyal to a team named after one ethnic group. There were plenty of non-Irish members of Rockne’s powerhouses, as the press loved to point out to him. But he always retorted:

Conjure up an image of a saloon in the Old West, and chances are you’ll envision swinging doors leading to a long oak bar, liquor bottles on display, ornery hombres sidling up to the bartender, and sawdust on the floor. The sawdust wasn’t there for visual effect, but for its functional utility. Christopher Halleron, bartender and beer columnist, explains:

One of those other “foul substances” that the old saloons contended with was human saliva, according to an authority on all things liquor, author Gary Regan (http://www.ardentspirits.com):

In the Old West, one liquid that often was in short supply was water. Sawdust proved to be a remarkably useful substitute as a cleaning agent, as bartender Dan Morrison explains:

Dan himself has swept a mess or two away on a sawdust-laden surface and “marveled” at how easy it was sweeping up sawdust compared to scrubbing a solid surface.

“Baudtender,” one of our online bartender correspondents, notes that sawdust was prevalent at an earlier time, and not just in commercial establishments:

We remember fish stores and butcher shops spreading sawdust on their floors in the past, but why have they, along with bars, stopped the practice? The downscale image of sawdust-laden bars was a turnoff to many owners who didn’t want to appear to be running establishments where patrons routinely tossed their cookies. (Ironically, sawdust was sometimes used to provide a certain “coolness quotient” to faux-downscale theme taverns later in the twentieth century.) Some bars served peanuts in the shells and encouraged patrons to toss the shells on the floor. The shells proved to be almost as absorbent as sawdust, albeit crunchier and more expensive.

Eventually, sawdust proved not to be an option even for bars that wanted to use it. Regulators honed in on food and drink establishments. Fire departments didn’t like its flammability, especially when smoking was legal virtually everywhere. Health departments were testy about the notion that bacteria and insects were trapped in the sawdust along with booze and whatever spare bodily fluids that inebriated customers provided.

Today, where it is legal, a few bars provide sawdust floors for “atmosphere,” and some mechanics’ garages use synthetic sawdust to soak up grease and oil spills. Alas, bars contend with puke and spit with low-tech mops.