Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Kisses & Kissing")

July 13-19, 2023 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: “Kisses & Kissing”

A Reprise Issue

The word reprise (pronunciation guide here) means “to repeat or resume something.” In a note on the history of the word, the editors of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary wrote:

“Reprise comes from an Anglo-French word meaning ‘seizure, repossession, or expense.’ Eventually, reprise came to refer to any action that was repeated or resumed. A later sense, borrowed from modern French, applies to specific types of repetition in musical compositions. That sense was eventually generalized to describe any subsequent and identical performance. It’s possible, for example, to have a reprise of a television program or a book.”

And, I would add, it’s possible to reprise one of my previous newsletters. This past week, I ran into several unexpected problems—all relatively minor, thank goodness—that made it impossible for me to finish the “Discontent” issue I’d originally planned. This week, I’ll be reprising an issue that was first published in August of 2023.

Opening Line of the Week

After coming upon this opening paragraph for the first time, I actually stopped reading for a moment to make sure I was reading a Sara Paretsky detective mystery and not some soft-core romance novel that had somehow made it into my hands. 

Sure enough, I was reading Paretsky’s Guardian Angel (1992), the twelfth in a series of twenty-one books featuring V. I. Warshawski, a hardboiled female private investigator she introduced to the literary world a decade earlier. 

Despite my slight confusion, the novel’s opening paragraph clearly got my attention—and as Warshawski continued in the second paragraph, she cleared everything up nicely by revealing that her affectionate companion was, in fact, her cat.

In the late 1960s, Paretsky was an aspiring writer who became so disgusted with the misogynistic depiction of women in crime fiction that she vowed to “write a crime novel...that would turn the tables.”  She succeeded, and she did so admirably.  In a 2020 New York Times piece, Marilyn Stasio wrote that Warshawski had become “a proper hero for these times.” 

Paretsky has also become a proper hero for her sister writers.  In 1987, a year after founding Sisters in Crime, an international advocacy group for female crime writers, she received Ms. Magazine’s Woman of the Year award.  Here she is at a St. Louis County Library Book Fair in 2010.

If you’re a fan of crime/detective/mystery novels, you will find over 400 famous first words from that genre alone in GreatOpeningLines.com.

This Week’s Puzzler

On August 6, 1809, this man was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. The fourth of twelve children born to the wife of an English clergyman, he was a precocious child who was bitten early by the poetry bug. Well before his teenage years, he was writing poems that emulated the styles of Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott, and John Milton.

After an unhappy adolescence in which he was subjected to the bullying that is often handed out to bookish young men with an interest in poetry, he attended Trinity College, Cambridge. His college experiences were far more satisfying, in large part because of his membership in a secret society of young intellectuals who called themselves “The Cambridge Apostles.”

He went on to become the most famous poet of his era, the author of such classic poems as “The Lady of Shalott,” “Crossing the Bar,” “Locksley Hall,” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”  In 1850, at age forty, he was appointed by Queen Victoria to succeed William Wordsworth as poet laureate of England. He went on to serve in that position for forty-two years (the longest tenure of any English poet), until his death at age 83 in 1892. 

Today, he is usually presented as a dour-looking older man with tousled hair and a bushy beard (as in the image above), but at age forty he was quite the dashing figure.

In the hands of a gifted writer, language can be used to describe any topic or capture the essence of any experience. And that is certainly the case when the title character of the poem “Fatima” (1833) is taken into the arms of her lover and given a hot, lingering kiss. She described it in one of the most powerful metaphors I’ve ever seen.

When I came across the passage for the first time , I was so taken with the striking phrasing that it immediately got me thinking about other soulful kisses in history. The first one that came to mind, of course, was Rodin’s immortal sculpture “The Kiss.” And the second was the most famous screen kiss in cinematic history, which, as you see above, I was happy to pair with Fatima’s unforgettable words.

Who is this week’s author? (Answer below)

What Role Have Kissing & Kisses Played in Your Life?

As I was reflecting on this week’s Puzzler quotation, I found myself thinking back to my first kiss. I was in the eighth grade, and the object of my affection was a beautiful young Native American girl who was also a classmate at my elementary school.

The Memorable Moment occurred on a Saturday afternoon in a darkened Kota theater. About ten minutes into the film, I summoned all the courage I could muster and oh-so-casually lifted my right arm, slowly maneuvered it across the back of her theater seat, and gently placed my hand on her shoulder.

To my delight—and great relief—she snuggled in beside me. Emboldened by the success of my first move, I leaned over and gave her a gentle kiss on the lips. It lasted less than five seconds, but I felt an almost indescribable thrill when my first romantic overture was not only welcomed, but, I believe, even enjoyed by the recipient. At age thirteen, it would still be three years before I would experience the kind of passionate kisses captured by the quotation in this week’s Puzzler. But, after that first experience, my interest in the subject of kisses and kissing has never waned.

Over the years, my personal interest deepened into an intellectual one as well as I began to discover what some of history’s great writers and wordsmiths had to say on the subject. For example, in Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, the protagonist famously described a kiss this way:

“A secret told to the mouth instead of to the ear.”

In a 1962 interview, Robert Frost said, “An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor,” and the notion of a secret told to the mouth is most certainly an inspired creation. Here’s the fuller passage in which the line appeared.

Decades ago, as I began to delve deeper into the subject, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there is a formal term for the scientific study of kissing: philematology (fill-uh-muh-TAHL-oh-gee). The term was first introduced by the Danish philologist Christopher Nyrop in his 1897 book The Kiss and Its History, and is now primarily used by social scientists and researchers who’ve chosen this intriguing specialty. And it is because of philematologists that we know such interesting fact as these:

(1) in addition to providing a feeling of pleasure, kissing reduces stress and helps strengthen our immune system;

(2) during a kiss, over thirty face muscles are activated and over one-hundred in the entire body;

(3) during normal kissing, people burn two or three calories per minute, but that number can shoot up dramatically during intensely passionate kissing;

(4) the exchange of saliva during so-called “French” kissing can result in the transfer of up to 80 million germs, and;

(5) kissing is partly instinctual and partly learned, with roots that go back to pre-human history.

Regarding those evolutionary roots, F. Scott Fitzgerald cleverly spoofed the entire matter in “Notebook E” of The Crack-Up (1945), edited by Edmund Wilson.

This week, take a moment to reflect on your first kiss, or, if not your first, the first one that moved the heavens and the earth for you. If you’d also like to help some other people in your life take a pleasant trip down Memory Lane, go ahead and ask them the same question. As they reply, just listen, and make sure to pay close attention to their body language as they describe the experience. As usual, though, don’t do anything before perusing this week's compilation of quotations on this fascinating topic: 

• A kiss is like singing into someone’s mouth. — Diane Ackerman

• Never let a fool kiss you or a kiss fool you. — Joey Adams

QUOTE NOTE: In 1999, I selected this clever line as the title for my first “word & language” book—a celebration of the literary device known as chiasmus. Adams, who offered the thought in The Joey Adams Encyclopedia of Humor (1968), was not the original author of the sentiment, though. That credit goes to the talented E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, who unveiled it in a poem more than a quarter-century earlier.

• For ’twas not into my ear you whispered but into my heart./’Twas not my lips you kissed, but my soul. — Judy Garland

• The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities. — Germaine Greer

• A kiss may not be the truth, but it is what we wish were true. — Steve Martin

• A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. That’s basic spelling that every woman ought to know. — Mistinguett

• Lips that taste of tears, they say/Are the best for kissing. — Dorothy Parker

• Kissing is our greatest invention. On the list of great inventions, it ranks higher than the Thermos bottle and the Airstream trailer; higher, even, than room service. — Tom Robbins

• A man’s kiss is his signature. — Mae West

• A kiss may ruin a human life. — Oscar Wilde

For source information on these quotations, and others on the subject, check out the KISSES & KISSING section of my DMDMQ.

Cartoon of the Week

Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92)

Tennyson wrote many beautiful poems in his life, and “The Lady of Shalott” was one of his best.  Written in 1832 but published ten years later, the poem was based on the Arthurian legend of Elaine of Astolat, whose unrequited love for Sir Lancelot ultimately resulted in a broken heart—and a tragic death.  An 1888 painting by John William Waterhouse, captured the distraught maiden’s final moments.

For her 1991 album “The List,” the Canadian singer-songwriter Loreena McKennitt took the poem and, with a slight revision here and there, turned it into a hauntingly beautiful piece of music.  You can savor the entire eleven-and-a-half minute song for yourself—with the lyrics provided—by clicking the link below. It might be the longest song you’ll listen to this year, but prepare to be enchanted.

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week

Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “In Praise of Discontent.”

Mardy