largely composed behinde

CALLIPYGIAN, adj. I was reading The Proposition by Judith Ivory (AKA Judy Cuevas), a 1999 romance inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912, and subsequent Broadway and film adaptation My Fair Lady, 1956 and 1964 respectively), in which the heroine is the linguist and the hero is the lower-class person whose speech will be changed, and I came across this:

“Callipygian.”
She blinked. He couldn’t possibly know the word’s meaning.
But he did: “Having well-shaped buttocks.”

The word is originally Greek (kallos "beauty,” pyge "rump, buttocks") and referred to a statue of Aphrodite at Syracuse. We don’t have the Greek statue anymore, but we do have a Roman copy, pictured above.

The Online Etymology Dictionary has some really excellent citations for this word:

…which Beekes calls "A slang word, completely avoided in epic poetry and higher literature (Wackernagel 1916: 225f.). It has no convincing etymology." Thomas Browne (1646) refers to "Callipygæ and women largely composed behinde."

In case you are wondering, as I was, if the “pyg” in callipygian is at all related to the “pyg” in “Pygmalion,” I’m sorry to disappoint, but history and language have nothing to say about Pygmalion’s backside. He was, per the OED, the king of Cyprus—this is not in Ovid, as far as I can tell, so I don’t know where they got it—and per the Online Etymology Dictionary, his name “might be a Greek folk-etymology adaptation of a foreign word, perhaps from Phoenician.”

In the myth in Ovid (translated by A. S. Kline), Pygmalion saw the Propoetides—Cyprian sex workers who denied Venus’s divinity and got turned to “hard flints” for it—and he became disgusted by actual human women. But he carved a statue of a perfect woman, fell in love with her, and wished she was real. Venus answered his prayer and brought the statue to life when he kissed it.

Bonus etymology: “Cyprian” meant “sex worker” in 18th- and 19th-century English. The island was believed to be the birthplace of Aphrodite/Venus and there was perhaps some form of sacred erotic ritual practiced there, though honestly my foray into reading about it left me feeling out of my depth.

And one more bonus etymology for “pygmalion,” courtesy Wikipedia:

When [Eliza] is leaving, he asks her if she is going to walk across the park, to which she replies, "Walk? Not bloody likely!" (This is the most famous line from the [George Bernard Shaw] play and, for many years after the play's debut, use of the word 'bloody' was known as a pygmalion; Mrs Campbell was considered to have risked her career by speaking the line on stage.)

Anyway, a lot of people have riffed on Pygmalion in all different directions (including my boy Honoré de Balzac, discussed in this newsletter from 2020, though he really got into it in “Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan,” a novella which has yet to be in this newsletter). Today I am following the thread from the myth to George Bernard Shaw to Lerner & Loewe to Judith Ivory’s small-r romance The Proposition (m/f, both cis and uncomfortably het, historical), which is less about magic statues or art coming to life and more about class and what if you could customize your lover.

It’s lush, and fun as hell, which is my priority when reading romance. I had a great time. The prose is extravagant and so is the action. Judith Ivory knows how to write a memorable scene: Mick, the hero, is a ratcatcher, and an early sequence in the book involves him getting chased into a elegant tea salon and vaulting over tables. He’s shirtless, naturally; a romance novel is a beautiful Rube Goldberg machine for getting fictional characters into unexpected states of undress. In the tea salon, shy linguist Winnie, who has never seen a real live man without a shirt, is shocked and intrigued by his chest hair. She reflects that he doesn’t look anything like a statue. Hey! A Pygmalion reference!

Mick and Winnie get forced into proximity by—what else?—accepting a convoluted bet that she, tutor in elocution, can get him to sound like a duke. And then they spend a lot of time alone and unsupervised, and it’s marvelously horny. There’s a certain refreshing shamelessness to older historicals. This one has this classic dynamic of a sexually experienced man and a sexually inexperienced woman. It’s hard to summarize what transpires between them without making it sound like he pressures her, which would be terrible and isn’t at all true, but what’s actually in the book is written with so much delicacy and complexity, and feels a lot more honest about human emotion. Winnie feels doubt and shame and fear about sex, but also desire and curiosity. She recognizes that Mick is offering her something she wants, but it takes her some time to accept it. That she is allowed to feel all of those things leaves her room to change, to move away from shame and fear and toward desire. I think sometimes we don’t allow characters that space, and then they have nowhere to go. It’s really great to see Winnie go from thinking this:

His palm took possession of her naked pudendum.
She jumped then grew utterly still. Shame. That was what the word meant. Pudendus, the Latin for worthy of shame. And she felt it.

(bonus: previous Word Suitcase on “pudendum”)

to this:

Oh, did she revel in the secrecy of lovers. In Mick’s dirty words and sweet words. In their private conversations that, murmured elsewhere, would have been horrid, beyond the pale. Yet between them in the kitchen, or the music room or in the pitch dark of night, they were just right—because they spoke with different meanings to the words, meanings and sly degrees of meanings that they invented together, in a language that was just for the two of them.

You can see in both of these passages that Winnie loves words, and of course so does Judith Ivory, and so do I. While we’re on this topic (are we ever not on this topic?), here are two more fun examples.

First, Mick refers to his penis as a “widge,” apparently late nineteenth-century British slang, but it’s not in Green’s Dictionary of Slang or my other usual dictionaries. If anyone knows more, please tell me.

Second, after a few searches, I’m pretty sure that Judith Ivory straight-up invented this next one, and that is brazen and I love her for it:

When her fists couldn’t hold any more, she pressed the scroopy stiffness of her skirts back against her knickers, hiking, pushing skirts up under her forearms.

Scroopy! Obviously that’s how you describe the feel of your 1890s dress when you’re gathering it up because you made a bargain with the man you’re tutoring that involves showing him your bare legs.

UPDATE: This newsletter has the best readers in the world. Lexicographer Erin McKean and material culture scholar Cassidy Percoco got in touch to tell me that "scroop" means the rustling sound of silk, which is wonderful. So Ivory is making an adjective out of it, but not inventing it whole-cloth. Sorry for missing this, but delighted to have learned about "scroop."

I hope it’s clear how much fun I had reading this, since we are now entering the section where I discuss my Qualms.

I never quite forgave the hero (or the book) for his homophobic “can’t stand for another man to touch me” moment early on when the heroine has ordered a servant to help him bathe. Like, yeah, okay, the 1990s (the book’s publication date) were a homophobic time, and so were the 1890s (the book’s setting), but at no point in history has responding to another man’s harmless touch with immediate homophobic violence been a heroic quality. The funny thing is that if Mick had just dunked the servant in the bath without making it homophobic—if his motivation was solely “you can’t make me”—then I wouldn’t have cared. He didn’t do permanent damage. But the insidious association of Being A Real Man with refusing to let another man touch you? That’s done plenty of permanent damage.

Lastly, the final reveal that the working-class hero is, in fact, the long-lost heir to a dukedom, which, by implication, is what makes him so good at speaking upper-class English and acting like a lord, also profoundly disappointed me. I wanted to see him trick some aristocratic assholes, not get told that some people are innately destined to be rich! (After listening to the Fated Mates discussion of this book, I have slightly more sympathy for this over-the-top fairytale ending and the market conditions that likely influenced it, but I still feel disappointed.)

Anyway, the characters are vivid and there’s lots of real, quivering tension in this, plus a genuine love of words. I have a couple more Judith Ivory/Judy Cuevas paperbacks on my shelf that I still plan to read, never fear. (This one was a library loan in print, but the others I picked up secondhand.)

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