SHAMBLES, n. Building on my last newsletter’s look at “fiasco,” let’s stick with that theme and keep looking at words for big messes. The etymology for this one is, accordingly, very messy—but in the best possible way.
“Shambles” originally comes from Latin “scamellum,” meaning a little bench or a footstool (a regular-sized bench is “scamnum” in Latin), and that is the Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition for this word. The OED says usage is often figurative. I’m just gonna have to trust them because for the most part these citations, dating from c825 to 1483, are too old for me to read, though I’m pretty sure one of them is a translation of Psalm 99, which does indeed have a footstool in it. (As an aside, did you know some languages haven’t changed as much as English in the past thousand-or-so years? Icelandic is an example where it’s not that hard for contemporary speakers to read eddas.) Anyway, as we can tell from the most recent citation being 1483, English moved on from shamble-as-foot-stool.
This word’s next semantic stop in Old English was a table in a market stall for showing off your wares, and then specifically a table or a stall for selling meat, and then, in the plural but also sometimes even in the singular, a meat market. Once this word comes to mean “meat market,” things get figurative again—honestly I can’t even write “meat market” without thinking of all the potential figurative uses. People treated “shambles” the same way.
From “meat market,” speakers transferred “shambles” to the new meaning of “slaughterhouse,” and then we get metaphorical yet again, and people start referring to battlefields and scenes of carnage as “shambles.” After that, it’s no great leap to use “shambles” for any kind of ruin or mess.
I originally looked this up because I wanted to write “shambles” in my draft and I needed to know if “in shambles” or “in a shambles” was correct (answer: both acceptable), but world events are such now that this word feels timely. So here is a special mention of “omnishambles,” coined by the marvelous, exuberantly coarse British political comedy The Thick of It in 2009, which now has its own OED entry: “Chiefly in political contexts: a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, or is characterized by a series of blunders and miscalculations. Also (and in earliest use): a person or group held to be responsible for such a situation.”
My reading was not at all in shambles these past two weeks.
In Capital-R Romance, I read Robert B. Douglas’s translation of “The Husband as Doctor” (a tale from the 15th-century collection Cent Nouvelles nouvelles) in The Penguin Book of French Short Stories, Volume One, edited by Patrick McGuinness. Full disclosure: one of my translations, done under my legal name, is included in this book, so I was sent an advance copy. I make zero dollars from book sales.
One of the things that feels most topsy-turvy about reading obscene, comic short stories from centuries ago is that in medieval France—okay, Cent Nouvelles nouvelles is technically Renaissance, but this particular tale reworks medieval fabliaux—the stereotype was that men didn’t want sex and women were uncontrollably horny. “The Husband as Doctor” is about a wife who schemes to get her dumb, chaste husband to fuck her by pretending that she’ll die if he doesn’t. The stereotypes might be different, but this has a punchline worthy of an email forward my grandfather would have sent me in 2003. Dirty jokes are timeless.
I’m looking forward to reading my way through the rest of this volume, which has many texts I know and love but have never read in translation, and some that are entirely new to me. And one that I spent a lot of time with, Rachilde’s “The Panther.”
And here are the small-r romance books I loved.
The Tenant (het m/bi f, both cis, paranormal) by Katrina Jackson. Autumn is the perfect season for ghost stories, but I would read this at any time of year. Noel, a sweet young Black man with no money and no direction in life, inherits a haunted former plantation house in Louisiana when his beloved great-aunt passes. The mystery of how the house came to belong to Noel’s great-aunt, and why she left it to him, is slowly revealed in historical chapters that tell the story of Ruby, currently a furious ghost, formerly the furious, bold woman who cleverly took possession of the house built by her Black family members and owned by her white ones. There is pain in this, and violence, but the characters are warmhearted and funny and—because it’s Katrina Jackson—the romance is very, very sexy. I loved Noel and Ruby’s alternating points of view and all the supporting characters in both the past and present storylines about the town. Content warnings from the author: mentions of slavery, mentions of physical abuse, mentions of rape, drowning murder, gunplay, use of a racial slur.
Check Your Work (m/f, both cis and bi, contemporary) by Skye Kilaen. Computer programmer Octavia describes herself as “petty and conniving,” which is just the kind of woman I like. She also works hard to make the world a more just place, but, you know, on the sly. Even better. Octavia and young, kindhearted math teacher Oliver hatch a scheme to irritate Octavia’s work nemesis by pretending to be in a relationship. Unfortunately for their pretend plans, Oliver’s had a crush on her forever, and she’s beginning to realize she likes him back. This whole series is so welcoming, and it’s grounded by details about the city of Austin that make everything feel real. Content warnings from the author. Disclosure: I have an advanced review copy and the author and I are friends.
A Thief in the Night (m/m, both cis and gay, historical, novella) by KJ Charles. Love a romance that starts with one of them robbing the other, and love even more when they plot their next crime together. One of the protagonists, Miles, parted badly from his father and returns home from the war to find that his father has passed after spending his last few years suffering from severe mental illness, so he’s feeling a very complicated kind of grief. The other protagonist, Toby, treats him with such kindness (well, after the robbery). This has the perfect amount of plot for such a short work, and a couple of those wonderful moments where everything comes together and you think “oh, of course, that’s how this gets solved.” Content warnings from the author.
