the heck?

Feb 242013
 

So the other night when I was awake in the middle of the night, I started thinking about heck.

Seriously, the word “heck.” This is what goes through my head at 3:27 a.m.

I’m fascinated by the idea that heck regularly stands in for “Hell” and all the angry, even nefarious, connotations that come with that word, yet somehow manages to maintain a squeaky clean, almost wholesome image. I especially find it amusing that people think they can say “heck” instead of “hell” and somehow by changing two letters—but not the intent or meaning—it will “fool” an omnipotent, omniscient god. “Oh, I was going to smite that young fella there, but he *did* say “heck” while breaking the Fifth Commandment and trashing his parents, so I’ll let it go ….”

Or that media censors make TV shows and movies use “heck” even though EVERYONE watching knows that whoever is using the word really means “HELL. ” Do they think they’re fooling anyone, or that children haven’t heard their parents use worse language? Just ridiculous.

The late, great George Carlin has done a few bits on political correctness and how changing the word we use to describe something, or finding a new euphemism to describe it, doesn’t change the thoughts associated with it. He famously talks about how referring to someone as “differently abled” instead of “crippled” doesn’t really change the situation, and that it’s “a verbal sleight-of-hand” to make it sound like something has undergone some sort of more noble transformation, when in effect, that’s not the case.

So from what “pure” mind did “heck” even spring in the first place?

According to Urban Dictionary, it’s a fusion of the words “hell” and “fuck.”

It is used by saying “What the heck!” as a stand-in for hell or fuck but is really worse than saying “What the hell!” or “What the fuck!” You are really saying “What the hellfuck!”

“Hellfuck?” Really? That’s new to me. Let me officially call “Shenanigans!” right here and now as I sincerely doubt the veracity of that definition. Then again, who the heck am I to argue with such a learned source as Urban Dictionary? Nonetheless, I’ll be putting that in my back pocket for later; even if it’s a completely made-up answer as I suspect, it’ll still be fun to break out “Oh, HELLFUCK!” at the proper moment.

One source I found suggests that “heck” was first recorded in 1865 as a polite euphemism for hell—the Oxford English Dictionary claims its first appearance was “Well, aw’ll go to ecky, he cried,” with a clearer use in 1887: “What the heck are yŏ up to?”

Another source suggests that the word is Scottish:

hech is a Scots interjection of surprise or shock, and is ultimately the same word as hey (or heigh).

I found a little more corroboration that it might be Scottish—although that doesn’t make it all that much clearer.

Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary
  • n Heck hek (Scot.) a rack in a stable for hay, &c.: a grated contrivance for catching fish: a contrivance in a spinning-wheel, and also in a warping-mill, by which the yarn or thread is guided to the reels

And to dig even deeper, here’s a definition from the 1828 edition of Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, which might dispute the idea the word first appeared in the 1860s …

HECK, n. [See Hatch.] An engine or instrument for catching fish; as a salmon heck.

1. A rack for holding fodder for cattle.
2. A bend in a stream.
3. A hatch or latch of a door.

Sooooo …. what does all this determine? Not a heckuva lot, other than the word has a muddled past. It appears to have had a start referring to various actual objects that indicated some sort of impediment, and then seems to have evolved from there, taking on a negative connotation along the way.

Still, no matter how it got here, I still do find myself using it on occasion.

For example—the other day buddy Steve actually texts me: “Putting on my orgy shorts—where are you? I’m getting warm over here. Mask is hot.”

Now my first instinct would be to exclaim, “What. the. HELL?!” (as it might be yours), but to me, that sort of just adds another pained voice to the nightmarish chorus of horror that’s already been raised. But a measured response of “What the heck?” takes me to a different place, one sort of straddling acceptance of the disturbing and a desperately-wishing-to-be-earnest denial. Like, if I can force myself to be gee-whiz-golly wholesome, it somehow keeps me on the high road, well above the horrid mental image that has been thrown at my mind’s eye ….

Or not.

Oh, hellfuck!

 

talkin’ ’bout: g-g-ghosts!

Jun 242012
 

Okay, let’s try something a little different …

So what’s the deal with ghosts? (Hard to *not* read that in a Seinfeld voice.) Are they real? Do they exist?

As most of you know via Damned Connecticut, it’s a subject of which I have pretty good knowledge, if no personal experience. But that’s okay—as my “ghost” collaborator Steve likes to say, “Everyone has a ghost story, if not their own, then someone they know, be it a friend, family member or co-worker.”

That certainly seems to be the case, as the idea of ghosts goes all the way back to the very beginnings of human consciousness. Every race, every culture, every nation on the planet has some sort of concept of them, be it gentle souls passing over to the next plane, or tragic and confused entities trapped in a wishing well on Earth trying to find their way to whatever it is that comes “next,” or vengeful spirits hell-bent on doing harm to those left behind.

In a way, the idea that our soul somehow survives beyond the end of our physical bodies is a tantalizing one—who doesn’t want to believe that they live forever once they shuffle off this mortal coil, that they continue to exist in some other form? If we can then exist beyond the end of their bodies, it (somewhat) logically follows that there might be evidence of it, fleeting glimpses of another existence that we call ghosts.

I don’t understand why the common reaction to the idea of a ghost is fear. As far as I can tell, there’s never been any actual evidence in the history of humankind of someone actually, directly being harmed by a ghost. Now, has fear of an otherworldly entity caused injury? Yes, from serious heart attacks to inadvertent self-injury while fleeing a supposed ghost, people have been hurt. But as far as a knife-wielding specter really breaking through the spiritual plane to inflict pain or death, there’s no true documented examples. (And yes, I’m counting those stories of ghost hunters being slashed by unseen forces. I’m not saying that they haven’t sustained injuries, I just tend to think those are more physical manifestations of pyschosomatic stress, i.e. injuries—like stigmata—that spontaneously appears due to internal mental stress.)

I am also amused by the whole argument around the idea that despite the abundance of ghost-hunting TV shows, groups and other organizations, no actual evidence has been produced. Ghost believers will passionately tell you that there’s mountains of proof, from photos and videos to EVPs (electronic voice phenomena) and metered readings. Skeptics will counter with just as much zeal that all of that stuff can be (or is) faked and unreliable. Ghosts, at times, can be polarizing.

Quick: Who’s the most famous ghost?

The “Holy Ghost” of Christian fame? Jacob Marley, who marshals the spirits who torment Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol? Patrick Swayze’s disembodied, pottery-making shade from the eponymous movie? Poor, gentle Casper, who is sentenced to an eternity seeking friendship yet only finds misunderstanding and ridicule? (Although he’s on my list, it’s not the funky spirit of 1776 …) In terms of “non-fictional” ghosts, I always think of The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall; the most popular one I know of locally is The White Lady of Union Cemetery, although there are plenty of others.

That reminds me of one aspect of the whole ghost phenomena I don’t quite understand—with generally no physical evidence, and usually less than a second or so that most eyewitnesses describe during one-on-one encounters, how can anyone ever positively identify a ghost? I’m not talking about vague names like the White Lady, but when someone definitely says, “That’s the ghost of Alice Conley wandering the halls of The Yankee Pedlar Inn.” I mean, unless the ghost manifests a voice and says, “Hey everybody, it’s me, Alice,” how do you know? Wishful thinking, I suppose, more times than not.

Sometimes I wonder if there are ghosts, are they constantly around us? Do they watch us engaged in mundane tasks, eternal voyeurs longing to be among the living once again? If so, this truly bothers me—I don’t like to think that my dearly departed grandmother is watching me when I’m on the toilet; nor do I want to entertain the notion that someone like Jeffrey Dahmer is floating around in my bathroom as I take a shower.

Another thing I don’t understand about the idea of ghosts is why, if once unencumbered of a body, a spirit would choose to spend the rest of eternity hanging around one particular spot. I mean, if I was free of my body, I wouldn’t hang around some “spooky” broken-down house at the edge of town for the next few hundred years; I’d travel the entire universe, enjoying the many wonders of worlds currently unknown. Which reminds me: Do aliens have ghosts? What about supposed crashed UFOs—are there phantom grays aimlessly wandering the sands around Roswell, New Mexico, wondering what happened, or do they go back to their home planets? Talk about doubling down on your supernatural phenomena!

Also, if ghosts do exist, then they wouldn’t be “supernatural,” would they? They would be part of nature, not “above” it. Just sayin’.

Some of the more scientifically focused talk about ghosts as historical “echoes” from other times or “vibrations” of alternate dimensions that are running alongside this one. I have yet to read Mary Roach’s Spook (I know, I know!), but it doesn’t seem that accepted science is any closer to answering the question than pseudoscience is.

Ultimately, I would have to say that ghosts exist, real or not, if only because the idea of them have become so ingrained in human existence. Ghosts remind me of a mirage of water on a hot roadway or a rainbow—both are nothing more than optical illusions (light refracting off seeming invisible forces) that rely on the perspective of the viewer, but yet are certainly accepted as “genuine” phenomena even if they don’t really exist because we can “see” them in certain conditions. Could a ghost be a simple trick of the light, bouncing off of something that’s already around us? Hmm …

Maybe ghosts are something that are there just beyond our reach and understanding. Or not. Guess none of us will know for sure until we the opportunity to be one.