They know the secrets of the sea and do not bark
LOBSTER, n. Okay, since the etymology for “butterfly” was so rewarding, I wanted to check out some other animal words. For “lobster,” Bon Appétit is on the case and I’m just gonna share a chunk of their article because it’s wonderful:
…the Ancient Romans went for concision: their word for lobster, locusta, was the same as their word for locusts. Even though “locust” is the more obvious descendent of the Latin word, the OED posits that the word applied to lobsters first, and then, by extension, to the “lobsters of the land.” That Latin confusion has persisted into modern Spanish, where both lobsters and locusts se llama langosta, and for a while in the Middle Ages, the French called both langouste (whence langoustine).
In situations like this, the most sensible thing for an English speaker to do would be to cherry-pick Germanic and Latinate words to tell the two animals apart. But, for once, the French beat us to it, taking the Old Norse humarr and turning it into their word for lobsters, homard. We could have easily done the same. But, ever the rebel, English went down a weirder path.
“Lobster” does, still, come from the Latin locusta, but its first appearance in English was as a “lopystre” or “loppestre,” with the Latin C changed to a P. The best guess as to how the sound change happened is that locusta half-merged with the Old English word for a spider, loppe (which is pretty much the same word as the modern “lobe,” like earlobe: think dangly), thanks to the lobster's creepy legginess. The R at the end, along similar lines, worked its way in there for the simple reason that no normal English words end in “sta,” while a lot end in “ster.” There never was, unfortunately, a lobster who lobsted. Then the P in “loppester,” jammed between two vowels, gave into peer pressure and became the voiced B by the late 1500s.
So, yes, the lobster ended up a “lobster” (and not a locust) because Medieval Brits thought it looked kind of like a spider.
Locusts and spiders! Honestly, lobsters might be scarier than both of those things. They are weird as hell, and I’m so glad the word we have for them reflects that.
Willem Kalf, Still Life with Drinking-Horn, 1653, National Gallery, London (link to a better image)
So why were lobsters on my mind? Because the only thing I read in French this week was this article about the history of eating lobster, which doesn’t really qualify as capital-R Romance, but it does have a cameo appearance by the writer Gérard de Nerval (discussed previously in this newsletter, and also chapter four of my dissertation, lol gross):
Some time in the middle of the 19th century, Gérard de Nerval was, in fact, caught walking a lobster on the steps of the Palais Royal. The poet’s response to the stupefied onlookers? “How is a lobster more ridiculous than a dog, a cat, a gazelle, a lion or any other animal on a leash? I prefer lobsters, which are calm, serious, know the secrets of the sea, and don’t bark.” (Translation is my own.)
This reading was meant as research for the piece of fiction I am writing—I had to be sure that my bourgeois nineteenth-century Parisian protagonists would have access to lobster before I could mention it in a metaphor, so I read the article.
It was very informative. Did you know lobster wasn’t considered a luxury in the US until the late nineteenth century? It was cheap and abundant and considered poor-people food before then. The linked article says people used to call it the “cockroach of the sea.” And that’s in addition to its etymological links to spiders and locusts. Isn’t it funny how now that lobster is fancy rich-people food, we don’t talk about it like this anymore? Hmm.
Anyway, ultimately my scene went in a different direction and I no longer had any cause to be talking about lobsters in my draft. That’s writing for you.
But the etymology and the Gérard de Nerval anecdote are priceless to me. They know the secrets of the sea and do not bark.
Also, did you know that we still aren’t quite sure if lobsters die by anything other than predation? If you don’t fish them out of the sea and make lobster rolls out of them, maybe they just… live forever? No wonder they know the secrets of the sea.
This recommendation has nothing to do with lobsters or romance novels, but it’s very important to me that you all know Hustlers is everything I have ever wanted in a film. Jennifer Lopez is a genius and looks better at 50 than most of us will ever look in our entire lives. She pole-dances to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” while Constance Wu watches in gay awe and envy (#relatable). After her dance, J-Lo smokes a cigarette on a New York rooftop in her pole-dancing outfit and a massive fur coat, and when Constance Wu follows her onto the roof with no coat, Jennifer Lopez says “Get in my fur.”
Also, Lizzo plays the flute into another woman’s tits. That’s not a spoiler; it’s not possible to spoil perfection.
There are no important male characters in this movie. Men appear and disappear on the periphery of these women’s lives, as bosses or exes or marks. No time is spent on their feelings. Most of them barely have names. I cannot think of another movie like this. (Ocean’s 8 comes close, but still has more men in it than Hustlers.)
This movie makes you love these women and their complicated friendship-turned-criminal-partnership, tinged with sex and romance and maternal caretaking, but it never lets you forget the harm they do. Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez are captivating. Hustlers is smart and emotional and I cannot stop thinking about it. Mostly I’m wondering when I can go see it again.
