August 14, 2007
That Which We Call a Fred/ By Any Other Name Would Be Less Sweet Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:00 AM EST When I was growing up in the 1970s, my father, Harold, used to complain that any man named Harold in an advertisement was invariably a drip. He was right, and the sentiment was not confined to Madison Avenue. In The Sweet Science, a book about boxing, A. J. Liebling writes of a 1952 bout between Archie Moore and Harold Johnson (won by Moore): “On the margin of my card I find a note, ‘imp. of H. fierce,’ which I take to mean the impossibility of Harold’s getting that way, or maybe the impossibility of any Harold’s getting that way; if the leaders had switched names, the Saxons might have won the Battle of Hastings.” (Not that “Archie” sounds all that macho either.) These days the name Harold is so uncommon that it’s never used in advertisements. Instead, the role of an all-purpose loser has been taken over by Fred: He’s the chump with a bowtie that a woman had a boring date with before she met the exciting guy, who has tousled hair and a manly pullover sweater and brings a six-pack of Heineken (or whatever is being advertised) to her apartment. Every Fred in an advertisement is that exact same guy. And, as Mr. Smoler points out, the same is true in books: Freds in literature tend to be dopey and “sweet,” which is girl talk for pleasant but dull. One example that Mr. Smoler left out is Freddie Eynsford-Hill in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, literature’s most famous stalker (though this case is not clear-cut—the original play ends with him apparently marrying Eliza Doolittle, but the 1938 movie (with screenplay by Shaw) and My Fair Lady end with Eliza seeming to favor Professor Higgins). I’ve never seen The Pirates of Penzance, but I get the impression that Frederic in that operetta is kind of a dufus. When I was a child, my parents used to get their way by threatening to sing “I’m in Love With a Girl Named Fred,” from Once Upon a Mattress; it made a much more effective threat than spanking. And the pinnacle of mid-1960s British Invasion nerdiness was Freddie Garrity of Freddie and the Dreamers, whose hit “Do the Freddie” required him to jump in the air, spread his arms and legs, and nod his head from side to side. It’s amazing what you could get away with in 1965 if you had an English accent. That’s why my favorite Jane Austen novel is Persuasion. It contains many subtle and perceptive observations*, but so do the others; the reason I like Persuasion best is that the character named Frederick gets the girl. In pop music, meanwhile, counterbalancing Freddie and the Dreamers is the uncharacteristically tender Patti Smith song “Frederick,” written in 1979 for her husband (now deceased), Fred “Sonic” Smith, formerly of the MC5. (Smith is her maiden name, by the way; that’s the answer to the frequently asked question, “What do Patti Smith and Eleanor Roosevelt have in common?”) But if you really want an example of an alpha Fred, first look at Fred Thompson and then look at his wife. It just goes to show: There’s nothing more irresistible to women than a Fred with lots of money. And finally, on the subject of John vs. Fred, I recall a pertinent footnote in H. L. Mencken’s The American Language. I would give it to you exactly if our books weren’t in storage, but the gist is that after discussing the use of “john” as a euphemism for a bathroom, Mencken reports someone’s recollection that in the 1920s, at a women’s college in the Northeast (Vassar, I think), the bathroom was referred to as “the Fred.” Agreed, that’s hardly a compliment, but I like to think this usage came about because some poor Vassar girl had her heart broken by a man named Fred. We do tend to have that effect. _______________ * Persuasion is the book where Jane does her best job of portraying the exaggerated ups and downs of a love affair—how we amplify every little thing, turning good or neutral developments into bad ones when we’re feeling pessimistic, and doing just the opposite when our mood swings the other way. After Captain (Frederick) Wentworth sees Anne, his old flame, for the first time in eight years, a friend tells Anne that Wentworth said she was “so altered that he should not have known her again.” As you’d imagine, Anne is rather put out about this. Then at the end of the book, when they’re reunited and it feels so good, Wentworth tells her—just a bit too honestly, like a true Fred—that his brother “enquired after you very particularly; asked even if you were personally altered, little suspecting that to my eye you could never alter.” And of course Anne, flush with love, turns this clumsy remark into a compliment: “Anne smiled, and let it pass. It was too pleasing a blunder for a reproach . . . the value of such homage was inexpressibly increased to Anne, by comparing it with former words, and feeling it to be the result, not the cause of a revival in his warm attachment.” In other words: I know he really thinks I’m hideous, but isn’t it sweet that he loves me anyway, and cares enough to lie about it? (By the way, at the time all this takes place, Anne is 27 years old.)
|
