Playing the Angles

Introduction to Lexicon Valley

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Host Introduction

0:30From Washington, D.C., this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Volo, and today we will be casting about for angles and appellations. Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bobby. How you doing? Splendid. Thank you. And your own self? I'm above ground. Thank you. Oh, you've diverted from the boilerplate great-great.

1:00Yeah, just this once.

Birthday Conversation

1:02So, first of all, congratulations. I know you had a birthday recently. It was a big one, if I'm not mistaken. And I wanted to acknowledge that you managed to prove all of the Vegas betting pools wrong by making it this far. Yeah, you're kind to remember. By the way, it was in June. Oh, well, I guess I missed the invitation. Was it a big blowout? No, it was low-key. Friends took my wife and me to a lovely restaurant on the banks of the Potomac River here in Washington, D.C.

1:34The restaurant is The Old Angler's Inn, and it's very nice. I've been there. It's a great place. I can certainly vouch that you're now officially old. Do you also happen to be an angler? I am a lifelong, supremely bad angler. Now, my wife, who hails from a strange and distant land, did not appreciate the irony of her restaurant choice. And she said, what does it mean, angler?

2:04Well, I happen to know that it means fisherman. Fisherman, fisherwoman, fisherperson, I guess. I'm a lifelong pescatarian. Ah, beautiful and peaceful faith. It is, yeah. That's someone who eats fish, if you don't know, but typically not other animals. But I'm only a very occasional angler. I assume that you told your wife what an angler was. Yeah, I did. I told her it's a fisherman.

2:35Which surprised her. She said, and I quote, I had no idea. Why? Why is the word angler mean a fisherman? That seems like a fair question. Oh, absolutely. And to quote Mark Twain, I was delighted to be able to answer promptly. I said, I don't know.

2:55I always like being able to say, I don't know. I find it liberating. It lets you off the hook, so to speak. Yes. A little bit of foreshadowing there. Yeah, off the hook.

Origin of Angler

3:04But did you have any inkling, any guesses about what the origin of angler might be? I gave it a shot. You know, it wasn't scholarship. Do you want to know the whole process of what I'm thinking? Yeah, of course. Well, it's pretty convoluted. Why should this day be different from any other day, Bob?

3:23Amanishtana halalahazeh. Yeah, that's from Passover. Anyway, I associate the word angler with England, where I have this sense that it's used much more commonly. And I picture some Englishman on the banks of some stream wearing a heavy tweed suit and a necktie for a day of fishing. Is he also wearing one of those deerstalker caps and smoking a pipe? Of course he is. Then I think about where do English appellations come from?

3:54Well, they come from applying an activity to the person who engages in it. Right. That's where so many common English surnames come from. The trade of the paterfamilias. If he fermented mead, his surname is Brewer. If he ran a grain mill, Miller. Yeah, in fact, my grandmother's maiden name was Miller. Someone who made barrels was a cooper. If you made lumber out of felled trees, you were called Sawyer. Same with Tinker and Singer, I believe.

4:28Archer. My own last name, Vuolo, is Southern Italian after the word for flight. And it's thought that people with that name may have had either occupations related to birds or they were a superhero who could fly. Okay, I'll opt for A. Garfield is from the Yiddish Garfinkel, which means don't be fooled. This family is Jewish. He's a crypto Jew. Exactly.

4:58But even if it were a surname, that still doesn't explain how angling came to mean fishing with a rod to begin with. Well, like I said, I gave it my best shot. But you're like the lawyers who never ask a question if they don't already know the answer. What is the answer? Was it about the angle of a fishing rod over water or what? You're actually not that far off. I mentioned the name archer earlier. That was related to an occupation.

5:29And it derives from what the bow does when the bow string is drawn back. You can imagine, right? You're arching the piece of yew wood that's typically used to make a bow. Angler, too, derives from, you could say, the shape of the tool. And it's actually really simple. From the very first time that that word shows up in English, and this would be a little more than 1,000 years ago, 1,200, 1,300 years ago, it was just a fishing hook.

6:03That's what it was. Wait, what? Yeah. The word angle from the very beginning just meant a fishing hook. But why was angle a fishing hook? Hold a second. Let me ask the question here. Mike, why is an angle a fishing hook? Okay, so angle, or ongle, as I would imagine it was probably pronounced back then, it comes from an old root that goes way back, back before English was a thing. And that root meant crooked or curved.

6:36So it makes perfect sense that the word for a hook would evolve from a root that meant curved. Yeah, and, you know, ultimately, because you cannot catch a fish with a dangling line, there's got to be a business end that does the snagging. Yeah, and that business end was a curved piece of metal called an angle. So, as I mentioned, angle first shows up in English around 7, 8, 900 A.D., and a bunch of those early examples are in translations of the Bible.

7:14There's a lot of fishing going on in the Bible. There's a lot of fishing metaphors in Christianity in general, which, again, makes perfect sense because Peter was a fisherman. His brother, Andrew, James was a fisherman, his brother, John, they all fished. But these weren't wealthy guys with big boats and nets. These were poor Jews with a stick and some worms and a few hooks. As my grandmother might have said, what does a Jew know from a boat? Who knows from boats? What are you, big macher now, Peter?

7:45You have a boat? That's me channeling Rachla Miller, who I name-checked before. She's, oh, God, do I miss her. You know, actually, all four of my grandparents came to this country on a boat, and I would guess that the day they arrived at Ellis Island was the last time that any of them were ever on a boat. Expedia and Visit Scotland invite you to come step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Now, I was unaware, except for the movie The Shoes of the Fisherman, that the disciples as a group were anglers.

8:42Is there a scriptural quote that jumps out at you? Yeah, yeah, there's a bunch. So let's just choose one concrete example. In the Gospel of Matthew, Peter tells Jesus, you know, we got to pay a tax to the Romans. It's two drachma each, but we got to do it. Jesus says, okay, we don't want to offend them. This is now from the English Standard Version of the Bible. Go to the sea and cast a hook and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth, you will find a shekel.

9:17Take that and give it to them for me and for yourself. You might remember, Bob, that a shekel was worth four drachma. Duh. Now, in a translation of Matthew from the 900s, they don't use the word hook, they use angle, because that's what you call the fishing hook in Old English. What's interesting is that people started using angle to mean not just the hook, but the whole thing, the rod, the line, you know, in the same way that you might call a car your wheels.

9:50Synecdoche, the White House for official Washington, the port for the Ottoman empires, the Vatican for Christianity. Yeah, so here's an example of that from Shakespeare. Cleopatra says to a servant, give me mine angle. Give me mine angle. We're to the river. There, my music playing far off, I will betray tawny-thinned fishes. My bended hook shall pierce their slimy jaws.

10:21And as I draw them up, I'll think them every one an Antony and say, aha, you're caught. My bended hook shall pierce their slimy jaws. So she uses both the word angle and the word hook, because she was using angle to mean everything, the whole gear, and hook to mean just the hook. All right, now we started this whole conversation because I ate at the Old Angler's Inn. When did we get to that appellation for someone who uses a fish hook?

10:54Now listen to me, young lady. I know a first-class angler when I see one. Of course, every angler has caught at least one old boot. I care for trout. Mr. Allenberry, the one thing in the world that I care for is trout in any shape or form, but especially on the end of a line. Oh, you're an angler. I feel like every now and then somebody writes a best-selling book about the virtues of fishing, right? How it's not only good for your body and soul, but it'll make you a better person.

11:25It'll lead to a long life. Yeah, the most famous of which was Isaac Walton, who I think maybe was a 17th century Englishman. Yeah, right. He wrote The Complete Angler. I'm not sure I get the allure, so to speak. Yeah, you keep doing that. It's sort of like birdwatching for me. It's like I kind of get it in that it brings you outdoors, which is always great. But the activity itself, I'm not sure it quite resonates with me. Well, I can answer the question. It's quite serene during the waiting portion of it, and there is always that frisson of expectation and the unknown outcome and the possibility for adventure.

12:11So it's paradoxically both serene and exciting at the same time. I have spent countless hours with my feet in the surf of the Atlantic Ocean with actually very little chance of catching any meaningful number or size of fish, but it's the possibility that gets me there, and it's a really quite beautiful thing. That's helpful. I think I get my intermittently serene and exciting fix from baseball, probably.

12:43But I could see how people would like fishing for that reason. Yeah, and by the way, hunters say the same thing. They're quite similar in that respect. There's always the man versus, you know, savage nature aspect of it, which I think maybe affects us on some primal level. Right. A bad day of fishing, as they say, is better than a good day doing anything else. Well, a woman named Juliana Berners felt the same way. She lived in the mid-1400s, and she wrote one of the first such books along those lines.

13:18This was a kind of a glorification, a celebration of fishing, and it was in that book that we see the word angler used for the first time. First of all, she prefaces it by saying that all other manner of fishing, you know, not doing it with a line and a hook, is laborious and grievous, often making folks full, wet, and cold, which many times hath been cause of great infirmities. But the angler, she says, and so she uses the word angler specifically, the angler won't get cold, won't get angry, because the most you can lose is your line and your hook, and I'll teach you how to make plenty of those, she says, so no worries.

14:02I'm going to assume you're paraphrasing there. Yes, I'm paraphrasing. If the angler, if he catches a fish, now here I'm not paraphrasing, this is an exact quote, there is no man merrier than he is in his spirit. So catching a fish, it's the merriest thing you can do, Bob. Yeah, well, that's exactly what I was trying to express a moment ago. Yeah. But the anticipation of such merriment keeps you there with your feet in the cold water or whatever.

14:32Yeah. All right. Now, there was something I wondered about the word angle. In current parlance, it can be used for someone who has a scheme, something nefarious going on, or some fairly oblique attempt to, let's say, take advantage of someone by playing an angle. Like an ulterior motive, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right from the start, I knew that man was an angler, a promoter, a leech. What? You ever known as worth not to be working an angle?

15:04It's my nature, Tom. I can't help it. Somebody hits me an angle. I play it. I don't deserve to die for that. Do you think I do? Well, not necessarily nefarious, though. I mean, you can be angling for a promotion by, you know, kissing the ass of your supervisor or something. Does that figure in here? Yes, absolutely. So it was around this time, the 1400s to the 1600s, that angle started being used more figuratively, you might say, to mean a person or thing that catches or ensnares like a hook.

15:40And again, this shows up in translations of the Bible into English. So here's a passage from an early 16th century translation of Ecclesiastes, chapter 7. And I found that a woman is more bitter than death, for she is a very angle. Her heart is a net, and her hands are chains. It's arguably not the most enlightened interpretation of womankind. I believe Ecclesiastes was written by King Solomon, not his wisest moment, you might say.

16:16Yeah, you might indeed. Seems a little bit on the misogynist side. A few years later, another biblical scholar wrote that the Antichrist will hide the angle of his poisoned heresy under a bait of true doctrine. So again, we see here that angle is used a little more poetically. It's a metaphor for the fishing hook. An angler is a thief who, quote, with a stick having a hook at the end, steals goods out of shop windows.

16:50That's what Bill the Butcher meant when he used the word angler in the movie The Gangs of New York. Now everything you see belongs to me, to one degree or another. The beggars and newsboys and quick thieves here in paradise, the sailor dives and gym mills and blind tigers on the waterfront, the anglers and amusers, the she-he's and the chinks. Everybody owes, everybody pays, because that's how you stand up against the rising of the tide. This is also the time period when anglerfish gets its name.

17:22It's that ghastly deep-sea creature, right, that has what looks like a fishing line coming off of the top of its body. I think it's a weirdly evolved dorsal fin. This is also the time, the 1400s, when the geometry term angle is first used for that point where two lines intersect. Now, of course, the concept of an angle far predates that, right, with Euclid and others. But we first see that word being applied to that particular mathematical concept in the 1400s.

17:55So, in, let's say, 300 BC, Euclid and, you know, I don't know who else, wrote about geometry, which obviously involved angles. They just didn't, they weren't writing in English, they were writing in ancient Greek, and they didn't use the word angle. Exactly. So, all of these different uses of the word angle trace back to that original root, meaning curved or crooked, and they all begin with angle, meaning simply a fishing hook.

18:28Well, well, well. So, turns out there is one more thing I have to mention here, Bob. This started with you supposing that angler might be a British surname. Well, there is this one guy. Uh-huh. You know how the English have these registers or roles, names of people that go back centuries and centuries? Yeah. People who were conducting some sort of official business, buying or selling property, taking someone to court, I don't know, applying for a driver's license?

18:59A drover's license. Yes, exactly. Well, in one of these roles, from 1306, there's this guy named Bart. Bart. His first name is actually Bartholomew or Bartholomew. I don't know what he went by, but let's just call him Bart. Bart Angler was his name. Yeah. Now, remember, the word angler doesn't show up until around 1450 in that treatise by Juliana Berners to fishing and how wonderful it is.

19:31But this guy, Bart Angler, was obviously born sometime in the 1200s. And the question is, was he an angler and is that how he got his name? The Oxford English Dictionary says, quote, I don't know. Well, basically, what you said earlier, what they actually say is, it is not clear. So, Bob, you might have been on to something. All right. I will, of course, pass that on to my wife.

Fish Story and Conclusion

20:00But listen, speaking of the sporting life, I want to end with a fish story of my own. I was a few years back on a fishing trip with my two brothers and my two nephews, Sam and Bo, and Bo landed a mackerel. And when he reeled it in, it was flopping wildly on the deck, making a nuisance of itself. So, the mate kneels down, a beefy young guy, kneels down and punches the mackerel unconscious, like Mike Tyson.

20:39And it was a bloody mess. And my nephew, Sam, happened to catch this spectacle on video, and he posted it on YouTube. Wait, wait. First of all, gross. Second of all, a while back, I don't think it still exists, but there was a website called Zero Views that featured YouTube videos that had literally zero views. Like, the person who made it hadn't viewed it. Their mother hadn't viewed it. So, has anyone actually viewed this video?

21:12This was not one of those videos. This had many views, and it drew many comments. Most of them, and this is going to shock you, quite negative. Oh, I would imagine. But I mentioned this story because one guy wrote in, complained, and I quote, you people give angling a bad name. And Sam, my nephew, immediately replied to the guy with what might be the greatest retort in human history.

21:43He wrote back, angling already has a bad name. Angling. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram, who is not much of an angler, but she did once find a shekel in some whitefish salad. But, someday on this show, I'll tell a joke about whitefish.

22:14Mike, what did the snapper say when he ate the clownfish? I don't know. What? Tastes a little funny. Please visit us at booksmartstudios.com to leave a comment and to become a paid subscriber. Holy carp, that would be exquidit. Say hello on X, Facebook, Blue Sky. We are at Lexicon Valley everywhere. All right, Mikey. We finished here? I said finished.

22:45I said finished. Yeah. Yeah. We are done. Later, Bader. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.

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