REVERIES. Ever have ’em? That in between, or liminal space, of consciousness where you are coming out of sleep but not yet awake? This word & phrase occurred to me this morning in such a state: “The tortured logic of PETTIFOGGERS.” On waking, or maybe just before, I realized this phrase made pertain to SCOTUS (the Supreme Court). Shit, I hadn’t seen or used that word, pettifog or its variants, in a long time, so looked it up & found:
verb (used without object)
1. to bicker or quibble over trifles or unimportant matters.
2. to carry on a petty, shifty, or unethical law business.
3. to practice chicanery of any sort.
In other and more familiar words, a pettifogger is a shyster, a word my lawyer father knew & was keen to hurl at ambulance chasers and other quasi-legal lawyers of that ilk.
Standing from left are Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Credit: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
I would like to see just how, if at all, logically, by the light of day (if not at dawn’s early light), it might apply to the justices of the current Supreme Court.
But before such a rigorous exam, how about citing this delicious titbit from an NPR subsidiary:
According to etymologist Anatoly Liberman, a professor at the University of Minnesota, there’s a reason pettifogging sounds so much like “petty f***ing.”
Pettifoggers, shysters, and all kinds of hagglers have humble antecedents and usually live up to their names,” Liberman wrote in the Oxford University Press blog OUPblog.com back in 2010.
Liberman traced fogger’s Dutch/German roots:
The early Modern Dutch form focker was Latinized as foggerus, with -gg- in the middle. German has Focker, Fogger, and Fucker, none having any currency outside dialects. The OED cites them from the Grimms’ multivolume dictionary. (As is known, the OED had to bow to the morals of its time and excluded “unprintable” words, but in the entries where no one would look for them, offensive forms appeared: such is a mention of German fucker, with lower-case f, under fogger, and of windfucker “kestrel.”)
As for poetry, I don’t know I should ever like to attempt a poem about our pettifogging Supreme Court and the tortured logic of the conservatives on the court, as applied to the powers of the scoundrel Trump especially, but I like the idea of kestrel as windfucker.
If Gerard Manley Hopkins lived today … and loosened and vulgarized his clerico-poetic vocabulary just a bit, we might have a poem not about Jesus, but SCOTUS and POTUS, called not “The Windhover” but “The Windfucker.”