PROMISCUOUS, adj. I didn’t feel much like celebrating the Fourth of July this year, but I always feel like reading historical romance, so it seemed like an appropriate time to pick up Midnight by Beverly Jenkins, set during the Revolutionary War. I love reading Beverly Jenkins because she writes such big, emotional, high-stakes adventures—Midnight is about a free Black woman who spies on the British—and she’s so good at illuminating the less explored parts of American history. And, of course, because she loves words! Here’s the passage of Midnight that caught my attention, original italics preserved:
Many of the area’s free Black population were milling around the room greeting and talking to each other, and Faith was pleased by the turnout. Although women were not allowed to speak from the podium to promiscuous audiences, as mixed-gender gatherings like these were termed, the free women of Boston and its surrounding towns had shown up in great numbers.
I had never thought about the original meaning of “promiscuous” until this moment, but this makes sense. Even the word “mix” is originally from the same Latin verb, miscere. “Promiscuous” originally means a mixed group of people or things, and it doesn’t take on its contemporary meaning of “having many sexual partners” until the mid-nineteenth century, several decades after Midnight is set.
The phenomenon where a word changes its meaning is called semantic change or semantic shift in linguistics. I suspect it’s often the case that once a word’s sexual connotation becomes widely known, that meaning overtakes its original one, as in the case of “promiscuous,” which it would now be impossible to use to describe a mixed-gender gathering. (Unless that gathering was an orgy.) Another example would be “gay,” which went through a series of semantic changes to get from its original meaning of “lighthearted” to its current meaning of “homosexual.”
“Promiscuous” went through an interesting life cycle: first it meant an indiscriminate, mixed group, then it became a euphemism for someone (a woman, probably) with an indiscriminate sexual appetite, then that sexual connotation became its only meaning. Jenkins alerts readers that “promiscuous,” this word we might interpret as pejorative is, in fact, innocuous—or seemingly so. The sentence does describe how women are forbidden from public speech: “Although women were not allowed to speak from the podium…”
This first example of historical vocabulary, paired with a system of oppression that literally silences women, is followed by a second example of something unspeakable. The mixed-gender gathering in this scene is one in which the free Black population of Boston comes together at a fundraiser to help a man buy his wife out of slavery. Describing the crowd, the point-of-view character Faith notes that some have been free for generations, but others used to be “slaves, or as it was more politely termed in the northeastern colonies, servants for life.”
“Servants for life” is nonsense on its face—the people in the room are now free, so clearly their condition was not “for life.” The adverb “politely” works like a skewer, pinning down this absurdity. We use euphemisms to discuss topics that are too salacious or shameful to be spoken of directly, but what good is politeness when it comes to what the book later terms, not politely but accurately, “bondage”? Slave or servant for life, neither of these terms is innocuous—harmless—because there can’t be a harmless word for such a harmful practice. Slavery is unspeakable, but the answer is not to rename it “servitude for life.” It is not the word that is wrong, but the thing itself.
This week in small-r romance, I read
The Widow of Rose House (m/f, both cis and het, historical, paranormal) by Diana Biller. This Gilded Age ghost story has fantastic characters, and best of all, it’s “the grumpy one is soft for the sunshine one” where the woman is the grumpy one. No brooding Gothic heroes here, but instead a man who is cheerful, eccentric, and kind—even to ghosts. Lovingly described architecture and interior design, great banter, convincing chemistry, and some real spooky shit. Content warnings: abuse (both physical and emotional, described on page), institutionalization, mentions of suicide/murder/violence, sex.
Meet Cute Club (m/m, both gay and cis, contemporary) by Jack Harbon. This is very sweet, and as previous issues of this newsletter can attest, I love it when characters in a romance novel read romance novels. I also love grandmas as supporting characters, and this book has two great ones, although one of them has passed away. Content warnings: grief, death of a grandparent, mention of the deaths of parents, parental infidelity, sex.
Two books I sent back to the library without finishing, because I am allowed to do that when things aren’t working for me! And it hurts no one! What a relief. And a third romance that I did finish, but I think my feelings about it are too complicated to write the kind of breezy, positive summary I like to write in this newsletter. Not writing about a book I finished feels a little bit like breaking the rules—not in a cool, leather-jackets-and-motorcycles way, but in a very nerdy what-if-we-get-in-trouble way, which is the only way I break rules. So please don’t tell anyone.
In things that are neither romance nor Romance, I read We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby, another fantastic collection of essays, from which I have painstakingly typed out these excerpts because I could not copy and paste from my library ebook.
On moving in with her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s kids:
How can I really hide who I am from these people who only know a sanitized version of me if they are everywhere I am, all the time? I’m gonna have to start a swear jar at work in the few months before I pack my valuable belongings into one and a half trash bags and move them to a house with children running around it. No bullshit, I gotta figure out a way to stop saying “bitch” so much before one of these shorties rolls up on me while I’m cussing Helen out for being such a vile little piece of garbage and runs away screaming to tattle on me. Every morning when that naughty, uh, scamp bites me awake at five o’clock I’m really going to have to grit my teeth and say, “Good morning, cat!” instead of “I’M EUTHANIZING YOUR BITCH-ASS TODAY, YOU FUCKING BITCH” like I normally would.
On romance:
Real love feels less like a throbbing, pulsing animal begging for its freedom and beating against the inside of my chest and more like, “Hey, that place you like had fish tacos today and I got you some while I was out," as it sets a bag spotted with grease on the dining room table. It's not a game you don't understand the rules of, or a test you never got the materials to study for. It never leaves you wondering who could possibly be texting at 3:00 a.m. Or what you could possibly do to make it come home and stay there. It’s fucking boring, dude. I don’t walk around mired in uneasiness, waiting for the other shoe to drop. No parsing through spun tales about why it took her so long to come back from the store; no checking her e-mails or calling her job to make sure she’s actually there; no sitting in my car outside her house at dawn to make sure she’s alone when she leaves. This feels safe and steadfast and predictable and secure. It’s boring as shit. And it’s easily the best thing I’ve ever felt.
Isn’t she fucking great? And everything is even better in context.
I read a lot of great pieces of writing—and listened to one really good podcast—this week, so here is a brief (promiscuous/miscellaneous) list:
What Is Owed by Nikole Hannah-Jones. Reparations. It’s time. It’s long past time.
Frederick Douglass’s 5th of July speech, from 1852 but still relevant.
Juneteenth—not the Fourth of July—was the real Independence Day by Kelsey Smoot
“Hidden Language,” an article in The Guardian about how protestors in Hong Kong are using wordplay to get around laws forbidding their usual slogans
The podcast Lingthusiasm did an episode on historical linguistics and proto-languages, so naturally I was into that. The section on Proto-Algonquian is especially cool. I didn’t realize how many English words originate in Algonquian languages!
A friend sent me this article about encountering whales in the water outside Dominica (there are Moby-Dick references, of course) and whales are just so damn cool.
Wear a mask! See you next Sunday!
