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“The figure of red-nosed Slavic Farnos astride a piggywig was adopted by 17th- and 18th-century luboks from the popular French and Italian commedia dell’arte broadsides of Jacques Callot. Farnos was the prototype of the Russian folk theater’s Petrushka, a source of inspiration for the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.
The lubok – originally meaning “birch bark”, the medium on which the earliest examples were drawn (?) – was the Russian equivalent of the Western European Renaissance and Baroque broadside or popular print with woodcut illustrations. It is true that this genre arrived in Russia some two centuries later than in Europe, towards the end of the 17th century. But due to this phase shift, while from the 18th century in the West the newspapers had gradually replaced the broadside and transformed their illustrations into political cartoons, in Russia the printed lubok even in the 19th and 20th centuries continued to inform large masses about the most important events like the anti-Napoleonic Patriotic War of 1812, the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904-1905 or WWI.”
This study of the roots of the word farce began as part of a chapter in a book that was never completed. But I found it interesting and I hope any visitor who enjoys word roots will too.
Farc-, farct-, fars- a root that means 'to stuff '
The compound Indo-European root * bhareku is made from two simpler roots:
* bheu swell + * reg stretch, bind = * bhareku
This double meaning of 'swelling and binding or stretching out' suggests that even in Proto-Indo-European, the verb concerned stuffing fowl and other meats, and making sausages.
one of the authoritative modern sausage manuals
When IE roots begin in bh-, they often enter Latin as f. Thus bhareku appears in Latin as the stem farc- in the verb farcire 'to stuff.'
The principal parts of Latin verbs are often listed like this:
farcio, farcire, farsi, fartum (farctum, farsum, farsitum)
to facilitate the learning of Latin verb forms. But the parts list also shows some of the different forms borrowed by later languages like French and English.
Farcire in Classical Latin meant 'to stuff, cram, fill full.'
For example, Pliny, writer of Rome's first encyclopedia, wrote of a mason who set out
medios parietes farcire fractis caementis
'to fill the interior of the walls with crushed stone.'You can see the ancestor of our English word cement in the Latin caementis.
The passive form of the verb farcire was used to describe gagging as part of torture:
in os farciri pannos imperavit
'he ordered rags to be stuffed in the person's mouth.'
In Latin, the verb was associated with food too, as it could be used to mean 'to fatten an animal':
gallinas et anseres sic farcito
'therefore let him fatten chicken and geese!' (for a future feast).A related noun, farcimen, meant 'sausage, something stuffed.' And
a fartor was a poulterer, one who fattened fowls as an occupation, while the adjective fartilis meant 'able to be stuffed' when applied to fowls being prepared for a meal.
An asterisk placed before a word or root means it is a supposed form, a hypothetical form, not backed up by printed evidence, but thought by linguists to have been a spoken form based on the printed evidence of a later word seemingly derived from such a hypothetical form.
In Vulgar Latin or perhaps later in early and medieval Church Latin, forms like farsa, *farsia, and farsura existed. For we have in early French farsse (1447) and in early English farse (1530) with a liturgical meaning.
A farse was a word or phrase inserted or stuffed into the ordained words of prayers and of the Roman Catholic Mass. From the 9th to the 12th centuries, tropes (extra phrases) began to be added to the music and the texts of the Latin liturgy.
For example, there is a short prayer called the kyrie eleison, which is Greek for 'Lord, have mercy.' The syllables of these two words are stretched over many notes of music in plainsong and its later form, Gregorian chant. The choirs chanting these beautiful prayers sometimes improvised, as all true artists are compelled to do. One common farse in the kyrie consisted of inserting one of the Ten Commandments between each kyrie and eleison. The words of the commandment were often in the vernacular or native language of the singer. Another form of farse recorded in marginalia on a medieval manuscript of prayers has the farses written in thus:
kyrie genitor ingenite, vera essentia, eleison'O Lord, unbegotten begetter, true being in all things, have mercy.'
The 'unbegotten begetter' referred to Christ's birth of the Virgin Mary.
In the upper part of this woodcut under the banner is a raised platform on which later mystery plays were performed, an early outdoor "stage."
Medieval Mystery Plays & the Birth of Theatrical FarceFarses spoken or sung in vernaculars like Early French also served as a gloss on the Latin of the Mass, of prayers, and of epistles and readings, to make the congregation, who knew little or no Latin, aware of the meaning of the texts. Lessons and Epistles so altered were called in early French épitres farcies, used especially at important times in the church calendar, such as Christmas Day, to ensure the laity understood the story of the birth of Christ.
The next development in the meaning of farse saw the word applied to parts of mystery plays. Also called miracle plays, these religious dramas arose during the 13th century, when French trade guilds put on plays based on Biblical stories. At first performed inside churches, these early medieval religious dramas soon became more secular. Horrified church officials quickly forced the plays to be performed outside the church, often on stages built on wagons, so the players could move from town to town. The most famous mystery play in English is Everyman.
Once outside, players felt freer to include more outrageous and audience-pleasing theatrical devices: devils emerging from fiery hells to round up the damned with pitchforks, acrobats, indecent clowning with groping, stuffed codpieces, and gigantic dildos, plus satire of local authorities and bits of more innocent tomfoolery. These gags inserted or stuffed into a Biblical play, as one might stuff ground meat into a sausage, were called farce in Old French by 1420 when, in a manuscript of miracle play texts, we find "Miracles de plusiers malades/ En farses pour être mains fades."
In 16th century Italy, these farse formed the basis for commedia dell'arte with stock characters like Arlecchino, Punchinello, Colombina, and Pantalone who influenced comedies by Ben Jonson and Molière, and gave rise to characters like Harlequin and Mr. Punch of Punch and Judy shows.
Colombina, one of the stock characters in commedia dell'arte
Eventually, some of the plays lost all their Biblical content. By the 15th century in France, by the early 17th century in England, such plays 'stuffed' full of buffoonery were called farces, their sole and noble purpose being to make the audience laugh. But laughter may induce free thoughts about a status quo. In 1447, at Dijon in France, a lawsuit was brought against the performers of a miracle play called Mystère de St Eloi. Royal prosecutors alleged that a farce had been inserted into the play to excite political ridicule of the king of France and his religious bumboy, the Dauphin.The Vatican has never been amused by farces lampooning clergy with sex jokes. Given the huge number of Roman Catholic priests busily buggering little children all over the world, one can perhaps understand if not sympathize with their collective Holinesses deep concern about truth-revealing humour.
Then too, church officials of course cast a cold eye on ordinary people having fun. Jesus wept, but—if we are to believe Holy Writ—he never laughed. Ha!
In any case, with vulgar farces lampooning church officials in scurrilous and sexually suggestive language, the Vatican had many hissy-fits. In 1570, Pope Pius V banned farce, but not sodomy. Nice try, you pious old hypocrite!
In the middle of the 17th century, a sour Puritan grump named Oliver Cromwell, after beheading King Charles I, likewise tried to destroy English theater, an action as futile as Pius V's ban.
These funny romps were not called farces in England until after the Reformation. Before that, knockabout comedies were stage-jigs or drolls.
Farce grew in popularity during the later 16th century in England and France, and never looked back, as it sailed through British music halls, vaudeville, and into early silent films as pie-throwing slapstick. It is with us still in timid, debased, politically-correct television sitcoms and in the much more robust and uproarious genius of modern playwrights like Joe Orton, whose splendid farces include Loot, What the Butler Saw, and an unjustly neglected British television farce, The Erpingham Camp. Beside Joe Orton in my personal list of farce favourites I would put John Cleese in the exquisite BBC hotel comedy series Fawlty Towers.
Joe Orton 1933-1967, farceur extraordinaire
Farce that sausage, but beware of myocardial infarction.
The culinary meaning in French of farcir and English to farce, to stuff foods, continued parallel to the religious and theatrical uses of the verbs and nouns derived from Latin farcire.
A vowel gradation in English gave the noun forcemeat 'meat, vegetables, etc. chopped and spiced and used to stuff fowls and sausages.'
In France, a veterinary noun arose to name a disease of horses called farcin, a chronic form of glanders, with inflammation of a horse's lymph vessels. Farcin derived from a Late Latin name for the disease, farsiminum.
Farcin entered English unchanged, and then was shortened to farcy, in terms like button farcy and cattle farcy. In button farcy, small tubercular nodes called buds form in the skin of a horse's legs, thorax, and abdomen.
Further French elaborations of farce gave farceur and farceuse, the former borrowed into English to denote an actor skilled in low comedy and slapstick. In Old French farceur also meant 'sausage-maker' or patissier who made paté and fancy stuffings. From this occupation, several French surnames were formed: Farce, Farcé, Farcis, and Farçat.
The intensive Latin verb infarcire is the root of a contemporary medical term. Most medical nouns in English stem from classical Greek and Latin words. For example, myocardial:
mys, myos Greek, muscle + kardia Greek, heart
Thus, myocardium is heart muscle, cardiac muscle that surrounds the heart in a tough, thick layer.
So follows our etymology of the medical phrase: myocardial infarction.
The grey area is the infarcted tissue.
myocardialis Scientific Latin, of the heart muscle + infarctio, infarctionis Latin, stuffing a sausage until it is full
A myocardial infarction is a heart attack due to the closing off of a coronary artery that causes an infarct of the heart muscle.
In an infarct, part of the heart muscle dies from lack of oxygen because blood supply via the coronary artery has been interrupted. The artery may be said to have been occluded, obstructed or stuffed by a thrombus, that is, a blood clot.
Infarction is a 17th-century coinage belonging to the discredited theory of humours, and so the word is not truly appropriate to modern cardiology. But some old words die slowly. Originally, infarction referred to a 'stuffing together' of bodily humours.
I hope you enjoyed this little excursus. Let's wrap up with a pun from the Star Wars movies:
May the farce be with you! May the infarct not be!
© 2012 William Gordon Casselman
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