THE TYING OF THE BUN

by Robert Lopresti

Back in November I found myself (Hey! There I am!) in the Los Angeles Public Library. The guidebook I bought called the Central Library “the hippest building in town.” I didn’t see enough of the city to make a fair comparison, but I liked it better than the flashier but less usable Seattle Public Library.

I needed the history books which were on the lowest floor of the Tom Bradley wing, six flights below the street. As I was gliding down the long escalators below the glass atrium, my mind naturally turned to the word “bun.”

Possibly you don’t see the connection. Be patient; we’ll get there.

Cue the etymologist

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word “bun” showed up a thousand years ago, meaning a hollow reed. That, interestingly enough, has nothing to do with our story. So jump ahead to the year 1371, by which point a bun was a sort of cake, usually round, and small enough to hold while you eat it. Now we have a bun we can recognize.

The anatomical meanings of bun – hairdo and buttock – both come from the round shape, of course. And by the 1870s “take the bun” meant the same as “take the cake.”

But around 1900 another meaning appeared. Bun suddenly took on the meaning of a state of drunkenness. The wise old people at the OED have no idea why or how this happened, but suddenly get a bun, tie on a bun, have a bun on meant the same as going on a bender — which had already been around for 30 years before bun got boozy.

Cue the cockroach
.
The first time I ever encountered this meaning of bun was in archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis. If you don’t know this wonderful book, treat yourself. Marquis was a newspaper columnist and many of his columns were written by Archy, a cockroach who had been a free verse poet in a previous life. Archy had, not surprisingly, a unique view on the human condition. In one piece he wrote about slander, complaining that someone was telling people they had seen him “on a bun.” This was true, Archy admitted, but it had been the kind of bun you eat, and he had been eating it. (Oddly enough, the recently published Annotated Archy and Mehitabel, which thinks it necessary to explain the word “speakeasy,” doesn’t bother to explain “bun,” as near as I can tell.)

In another poem Archy sees a man who was apparently in the habit of getting drunk and falling down the stairs, but it happened that on this evening he had fallen down an up escalator, and couldn’t tumble faster than it lifted him. With Marquis’s tongue firmly in cheek Archy sees this as a classic battle of man versus unfeeling machine: the traditionalist battling against progress. And he ends with the following magnificent quatrain:

the buns by great men
reached and kept
are not achieved
by sudden flight but they
while their companions slept
were falling upwards
through the night

For those of you who don’t have the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on your night table I should explain that this is a parody of a verse from his “Ladder of Saint Augistine.” Marquis simply replaced “heights” with “buns” and “toiling” with “falling.”

And that was the deep thought I had deep inside the library.

Cue the drunkard

But while we are on the subject of alcohol, I heard somewhere that there are more synonyms for “drunkeness” than for any word in the English language with the exceptions of “sexual intercourse,” “death,”and possibly “love.”

So I took a look at the Random House Thesaurus, Roget’s International Thesaurus, Roget’s Super Thesaurus, and Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus. (Obviously Mr. Roget lost control of his title some time ago, just like Nathaniel Webster.) Here are some of my favorites. It isn’t a complete list, by any means.

Buzzed, boozed up, bashed, befuddled, flushed, flying, glazed, groggy, high, polluted, plastered, potted, seeing double, sloshed, smashed, zonked, zapped, lit up like a Christmas tree, inebriated, feeling no pain, tiddly, tipsy, totaled, tight, tanked, juiced, stewed, pickled, anesthetized, crocked, soused, laced, liquored up, muddled, stiff, besotted, bibulous, crapulous, under the influence, wasted, three sheets to the wind, pot-valiant. (Let’s see… when was the last time someone accused me of pot-valiance?) And let’s not forget: on a bender, a toot, a bat, or a bun.

All of which is my way of saying that, no matter much or little you drank on New Year’s Eve, I hope that right now you are feeling no pain. And I mean that medicinally, not bun-wise.

And whatever you do, PLEASE don’t drink and escalate.