SCOFFLAW, n. This week my local paper had a headline that said “Workers can report virus scofflaw bosses,” and I thought, “Scofflaw? Is that word just… exactly what it looks like?” (Okay, full disclosure, the first thing I thought was “Bob Loblaw’s Law Blog” because my brain is a database of Arrested Development lines.) But anyway, yes, “scofflaw” is exactly what it looks like: a person who scoffs at, or flouts, the law.
I’ve said before in this newsletter that words are most often Artist Unknown, since language is our collective work, but that’s not the case of “scofflaw.” And since the very best thing about my current, temporary employment with an academic institution is paid access to the Oxford English Dictionary online (also, like, my salary and the joys of teaching, but mostly the OED), here’s what the OED cites about this word, from the Boston Herald on January 16, 1924:
Delcevare King of Quincy last night announced that ‘scofflaw’ is the winning word in the contest for the $200 he offered for a word, to characterize the ‘lawless drinker’ of illegally made or illegally obtained liquor. ‘Scofflaw’ was chosen from more than 25,000 words, submitted from all the states and from several foreign countries. The word was sent by two contestants, so the prize will be equally divided between Henry Irving Dale..and Miss Kate L. Butler.
Two people made up this Prohibition-era word at the same time. And it’s not only American, but particularly New England. And doesn’t it sound like it? Don’t you hear “scofflaw” in your head in a Boston accent?
It strikes me as unusual that an invented, contest-winning word would spread so quickly and widely that it could stand the test of time, which makes me wonder if “scofflaw” wasn’t already in use before 1924. Maybe Henry Irving Dale and Miss Kate L. Butler were picking up on the zeitgeist. But I can’t do a 1923 twitter search, so we’ll give Henry and Kate the credit (in addition to the hundred dollars they each won).
“Scofflaw” pretty quickly came to mean not just a person who scoffed at the laws of Prohibition, but a person who scoffed at any law, which is how we arrived at the 2020 usage “virus scofflaw bosses.”
In Capital-R Romance, I read an intermediate French textbook. Writing a syllabus right now feels a lot like writing a sci-fi novel: in the world that I made up, we are all going to be regularly meeting for (online) class from August through December, and not so stressed out that we have no mental energy left to devote to learning. We’ll spend our time writing French compositions instead of raging and despairing about the fate of the world. Is this an unrealistic vision of the future? Stay tuned.
In small-r romance, I didn’t actually finish any books this week.
I am in the middle of A Touch of Stone and Snow (m/f, both cis and het?, fantasy) by Milla Vane and Heart of Obsidian (m/f, both cis and het, sci-fi) by Nalini Singh, and both books are making me think about the role of violence in romance worldbuilding. (I wrote about Milla Vane’s first full-length novel, A Heart of Blood and Ashes, back in March.) The worlds of these romances are brutal and oppressive, full of murder and torture and pain, and the main characters are immersed in it. But if you amp up the bad, you can amp up the good, too. Both of these books are resolute in their message: even here, in this awful world, healing is possible. Trust is possible. Love is possible.
Our world makes it hard to believe that, sometimes. On that subject, here’s the text of Alyssa Cole’s Spring Fling 2020 keynote, in which she spoke about accountability in romance and the real world:
The reason we tolerate bad behavior or missteps in these beloved books is because we know that eventually, there’s gonna be a grovel. The person who committed the error will eventually understand what they did wrong and they will do anything and everything they can to fix it. Because romance teaches us that love is more than words, it’s showing contrition and growth through actions. The appeal of many romances is that someone can be wronged and someone can do wrong, and it’s not on the shoulders of the wronged party to just accept this and pretend everything is fine.
[…]
A happily ever after is an emotional reckoning, and the fantasy that one can be had in a world that often makes us do without.
Even here, in this awful world, wrongs can be righted.
This conversation dovetails with another one that happened on twitter this week, about het romances where a big, strong man with problematic or chauvinistic attitudes toward women learns to do better (I’m paraphrasing Cat Sebastian’s original tweet). This trope, as Sebastian points out, is “a fantasy of patriarchy being cured on an individual level.” You, one lone woman, can be smart/kind/hot/loving enough to fix an asshole man. He might do you wrong, but eventually he’ll apologize, make amends, and change forever.
(I’m talking about “men” and “women” here because this trope is particularly cis and heterosexual, though an exploration of its iterations and subversions in queer and trans romance would be fascinating.)
The trope is divisive—some readers love it, others avoid it—and its appeal is complex. How much bad behavior are you, the reader, willing to tolerate? How much do you believe a growly, possessive, angry man could change? And, perhaps most importantly, do you find these qualities (growling, etc) appealing, as long as they’re moderated with newfound respect for the heroine?
Depictions of masculine power—whether it manifests as anger or protectiveness or control or violence toward anyone who dares approach the heroine—function a little bit like the threatening, unjust settings of Milla Vane and Nalini Singh’s imagined worlds. (And, of course, these dramatic, violent worlds tend to produce justifiably dramatic, violent heroes.) Masculine power is a force in need of repair or reshaping or redemption, but not removal. The ultimate goal is not that the powerful hero becomes powerless—his allure is inextricable from his power—but that he offers his power to the heroine, the only woman capable of taming him. Power is tempered with tenderness. It can be channeled—fruitfully, happily, thrillingly—into love and sex.
Like the world, men are dangerous and flawed and frequently pretty fucking awful, but they too can be made good.
Also on the subject of romance and repair, two links I read this week:
This article about some men forming a book club to read romances. Obviously I support anybody reading romance, and I love an article that extols the genre’s qualities, but I’m especially touched by the idea of these books giving men ways to express their insecurities and vulnerabilities and affections, because our society doesn’t have enough of that. Let men have feelings other than rage!
A great article on Finding Black Joy in romance, with a list of recommendations.
And in things that are neither Romance nor romance, this article from NPR’s Code Switch about the origins of the phrase “gung ho” came across my twitter timeline, and it’s great.
A friend sent me this article called The Secret Yiddish History of Scotland, and it’s delightful. (There are a lot of Scots in romance novels, but I’ve never seen one speak Yiddish, and now I’m going to dream of that.)
Also, an essay by Jeb Lund about living in Florida during this pandemic (the rest of Luke O’Neil’s newsletter is also good, especially his response to the disgusting “why aren’t people talking about Chicago” posts of Facebook racists; the Jeb Lund essay is about halfway down). It’s a powerful piece of writing, but will make you feel bad (worse). So you may not want to read it. But if you need to feel volcanic rage alongside someone else (someone else who is a very good writer), then go for it:
Sooner or later, every day, I think of the threats arrayed against me and my family. Each day, I see the most recent thing said by my governor, Ronald Fuckface DeSantis, in which he explicitly endorses and declares his intent to pursue actions that all available data say will kill Floridians by the thousands. Each day, I think about how, if I do so much as suggest fostering a free exchange of ideas about the proportional value of using every means to stop him, I will be arrested.
And you’ve probably already read Rebecca Traister on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s speech in the House this week and men being awful (irredeemably so, as we’re far from romance novel territory here), but if you haven’t, it’s a good one.
Lastly, the brilliant wordplay of this Venn diagram:
See you next week! Cover your cough and report your scofflaw boss if you need to.
