FACTS, FICTIONS, AND OTHER BUBBE MAISAS

by Steven Steinbock

Spring is nearly upon us. Where I live, that means that I can see my driveway and the rooftop of my house, but my lawn is still enshrouded in a cocoon of snow.

I’ve kept myself in a similar cocoon these last few months. Fortunately there are a lot of books here. Much of the last few months has been spent reading, and with my new responsibilities as critic for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, it’s been quite a bit.

(I don’t know how Jon did it. He managed to cover a dozen titles in every issue of EQMM for the thirty years he wrote the “Jury Box” column. For a good portion of his tenure, that was thirteen issues per year. I take my hat off to you, Jon. I’ll try to measure up. Meanwhile, Jon, what are you reading now?)

Something I like to do during winter is bake bread. It’s a wonderful distraction when there are more important tasks to be done. Kneading dough is very therapeutic. It also had the added benefit of exercising the digits, countering the damage I do to them by typing so many hours a day. The only major downside to baking bread is that when I’m finished, I feel compelled to eat it. Hence, the extra few pounds of fat during hibernation season.

Maybe in some future column I’ll wax on about breadmaking as a metaphor for the creative work of writing. But not today. Bread, however – and more precisely, dough – has important relevance to the subjects of fact and fiction. The line between them is as fine as the silk of my winter cocoon. As fine, in fact, as a single string of protein molecule forming the gluten that holds bread together.

The things we call facts today often become the fictions of tomorrow. Up to the mid-nineteenth century, scientists had identified eleven planets. By 1930, the scientific establishment had declassified four of those, and added one more, bringing the total to eight. Then, for most of my life there were nine. Now there are eight again, unless you count the newly classified dwarf planets. Which fact is actually factual?

Vitamin C can shorten the duration of colds. Vitamin C has no affect on colds. Which is true? Just wait a week, and the facts will change again.

Remember in Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” when he wakes up 200 years in the future, and a doctor offers him a cigarette? “It’s one of the healthiest things for your body,” the doctor tells him. Don’t even get me started on global warming.

In junior high, I was taught that the human tongue was capable of distinguishing three different tastes: sweet, sour, and bitter. My science teacher even had us do experiments to map where those taste-receptors were on the tongue. Current research by agronomists, nutritionists, and neurobiologists suggest that there are at least five distinct tastes, and possibly eight additional sensations that the tongue can perceive.

And what about the tongue-mapping we did in junior high? Turns out it was bunk. Placebo and the power of suggestion. Even the New York Times said it was false. The whole thing was a bubbe meiseh.

It even turns out that “bubbe meiseh” is a bubbe meiseh. For the ethnically disadvantaged among you, the Yiddish term bubbe meiseh (I won’t even try to explain how it’s pronounced) essentially means “old wives’ tale.” A “bubbe” is a grandmother, and “meiseh,” from the Hebrew “ma’aseh,” has come to mean “story.” Then I come to read in Michael Wex’s funny and informative book Born to Kvetch that the term originated as Bove Mayse, from the name of a hero of a collection of adventure tales that was translated from Italian into Yiddish and published in 1541. (Wex describes the story of Bove as “basically Hamlet meets Mickey Spillane – on a horse”).

Nothing – not even the bubbe meiseh – is sacred.

Getting back to dough. . . this is something (I dare not call it a fact) that I find really cool. If you trace the words Fact and Fiction back to their origins, it turns out they may have a common pedigree. The Proto-Indo-European ancestor of Fact – and quite possibly of Fiction – is, according to Robert Claiborne1, DHE-, which comes to us through the Germanic lineage as the verb “do” (as well as the suffix “-dom”) and somehow through Latin as facere, meaning “to do or make”2 which gives us such words as “facile,” “facility,” “manufacture,” “proficient,” “factory,” “facade,” “counterfeit,” and of course, “fact.”

The Proto-Indo-European source of fiction, according to Claiborne, is DHE(I)- or DHEIGH-, meaning “formed” and provides us with the Germanic “dough” (as in the stuff we knead to make bread) and the Romance words “feign” and “fiction.”

I set before you the evidence: We have the homophonous “do” and “dough,” the similar-sounding “fact” and “fiction,” and their proto-meanings of “done” and “formed.” It doesn’t seem to be too much of a stretch (no pun intended) that “fact” and “fiction” aren’t quite as opposite as they seem.

This column was a bit of a mind-stretcher. Let’s make some bread.

1. In The Roots of English, 1989, which is a nifty book, but of dubious scholarly merit. Claiborne was a folksinger before he was a linguist. (Not, of course, that being a folksinger precludes being a scholar, as Robert Lopresti so ably demonstrates). [↩]
2. “To do or make,” incidentally, is the meaning of the Hebrew word that is the root of ma’aseh and the Yiddish maiseh [↩]