Macron, he-vage, Donne and merkins

Recently, President Macron was photographed in a pose that in more innocent times would have embarrassed even a cash-strapped gigolo. But such is the deadly grind of modern media, when the presidency is in your sights, it seems anything is allowed – short of displaying your masculine appendage. (For copyright reasons, I can’t reproduce the picture, but I gift you a hyperlink here.)

On display was Monsieur le Président’s thicket, scrub or savannah of chest hair in what seemed like a throwback to the gold-medallioned hirsuteness of the 1980s. Naff, cheesy or subtly erotic? Who can say? One way or the other, it is a Marmite pose. In fact, such was the lavishness of the fur on show some might suspect a chest wig.

Whatever your view of this sort of sub- or post-Putinesque display – mine was pretty ‘blech’ – it calls for discussion of a wonderful coinage that the more sober-suited dictionaries do not yet record: he-vage, the male equivalent of cleavage. As the Urban Dictionary puts it: ‘often seen when a button-down shirt is unbuttoned to an extreme. Generally viewed in nightclubs or on CSI’.1 

That definition is dated 2007 so he-vage has been around at least that long. However, the word is a bit problematic from a formal point of view. If written without its hyphen, out of context how would anyone have any idea what hevage means and how to pronounce it? It’s a ‘knowing’ sort of word, in the sense that a knowing look involves a conspiracy between the deliverer and the receiver of the message.

He-vage and cleavage

It is of course a pun on cleavage. Which in turn is a euphemism, and a rather more recent one than I would have guessed. I was asking myself what people would have called cleavage before, and the answer is helpfully supplied by the Oxford English Dictionary definition: ‘The cleft between a woman’s breasts as revealed by a low-cut décolletage.’ I suppose in the past one would have talked less specifically of décolletage (pronounced day-coll-uh-tarzh). The OED labels cleavage ‘colloquial’, but I think that’s a rather old-fashioned caveat. Here’s the earliest example cited:

Low-cut Restoration costumes…display too much ‘cleavage’ (Johnston Office trade term for the shadowed depression dividing an actress’ bosom into two distinct sections).

1946   Time 5 Aug. 98

The next OED citation, from 1956, also put scare quotes round the word, indicating its then still slightly louche status.

What captivates me about the word is how English can almost willy-nilly borrow an element from one word that has no obvious meaning and then graft it on to other elements that thereby supercharge it with meaning.

A classic example is the –athon of marathon. On its own it is meaningless, and it is not a Classical Greek suffix. That hasn’t stopped it giving rise to walkathon, talkathon, swimathon and a host of others.

But –vage? That’s a harder one to graft on, especially as the suffix –age is well established, polysemous (the OED assigns it four meanings) and productive: think signage, roughage, appendage, and even cleavage itself, when it refers to the act of cleaving.

And do you pronounce it like wage, or like vague or just /ɪdʒ/ as in bondage?

And talking of cleaving, it is one of those rare words that is sometimes talked about as if it were a contronym, that is, a word having two opposing meanings. The first meaning is ‘to divide or split’ and the second is ‘to adhere or to stick to’ as in these examples from the Oxford Online Dictionary

They watched a coot cleave the smooth water.

And

Rose’s mouth was dry, her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth.

Go and catch a falling star

The first has had a bewildering variety of forms down the ages. If one were to use it now, the past tense could be cleaved, clove or cleft and the participle can be cleft or cloven, as in finding oneself in a cleft stick or the devil’s cloven hoof. If I had to write the past tense, I would swither.

The past tense cleft, being such a rarely used inflection these days, put me in mind of the opening of Donne’s ‘Song’:

Go and catch a falling star,

    Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me where all past years are,

    Or who cleft the devil’s foot,

Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

Or to keep off envy’s stinging,

            And find

            What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.

And somehow the combination of Donne and chest hair led me to a word that caused no little puzzlement and much hilarity among our group when first encountered at university: merkin, a pubic wig. The OED provides it with several citations, including this jolly doggerel from 1962 by the American critic Edmund Wilson:

 Said Philip Sydney, buttoning his jerkin ‘Allow me, darling: you have dropped your merkin.’
 

Night Thoughts

I hereby apologise if the title of my post clickbaited you.

1 CSI refers to an American crime series, Crime Scene Investigation.