Medii

This word might flip you off

Today’s New York Times Spelling Bee letters:

D, E, M, N, O, Z, and center I (all words must include I)

Merriam-Webster says…

Silly little dictionary! Don’t you know that medii can’t possibly be a word if The New York Times says it ain’t?

For a complete list of rejected words, check out the Spelling Bee Master.

What’s your favorite dord* from today’s puzzle?

My Two Cents

Do you like urban legends? I find them fascinating, both for their literal and symbolic content. Most of the ones I remember as a kid were told to me around camp fires and at sleepovers. But there were a few that popped up seemingly as a reaction to whatever scary current event was happening at the time.

In particular, I remember the “Welcome to the world of AIDS” urban legend that I first heard in the late 1980s. The story usually involved a suave guy known for ability to seduce women. Sometimes the main character would be the exact opposite: a young man who had never had a one-night stand in his life. In any case, it was almost always a dude. The gist of the tale was that, upon waking up alone in bed the “morning after”, the guy went to the pee and saw this written in red lipstick on the bathroom mirror: WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF AIDS!

I grew up in Venezuela and heard this urban legend as a localized version. In other words, it was “my cousin heard this from a friend whose dad told him a coworker’s buddy knew this guy who…”. In addition, the one-night stand had happened after drinks at a well-known nightclub in Caracas. I, in my naive teenager years, was shocked to such a paranoia that I seriously considered being celibate for the rest of my life.

Snopes has a detailed explanation about the origins of this story and its variants (someone goes around pricking people with a needle and yelling the punchline) in this article. Also, apparently there have been a few real-life cases very similar to the actual legend ––including one woman who was arrested and sentenced to more than 25 years in prison. Was it a case of life imitating art, though?

As their About Us page explains, the Snopes website was born “in 1994, investigating urban legends, hoaxes, and folklore. Founder David Mikkelson, later joined by his wife, was publishing online before most people were connected to the internet.” Today they spend most of their time trying to debunk conspiracy theories and fake news… which I guess one could call the urban legends of the internet era.

Why am I talking about urban legends, anyway? Read on to find out!

Middling in the life of others

Do you know what a medius is? No? Well, then the dictionary’s definition of medii as “plural of medius” is not very helpful, is it. But here at Sill Little Dictionary we’ve got your back.

And our friends at Merriam-Webster aren’t too wordy when it comes to it’s origin: “New Latin, from Latin, adjective, middle”. Wiktionary adds “From Proto-Italic *meðjos, from Proto-Indo-European *médʰyos (“between”). Cognate with Ancient Greek μέσος (mésos), Sanskrit मध्य (mádhya)… Old Armenian մէջ (mēǰ), Persian میان‎ (miān).”

And wordnik provides two additional definitions:

• In music: In Gregorian music, an inflection, modulation, or deviation from monotone, used to mark a partial break in the text, as at the end of a clause. It consists of a downward step of a minor third. See accent, 8.
• A tenor or alto voice or voice-part; a mean.

(By “mean” I don’t think they’re implying the tenor is bullying the other singers.)

Now, our thumb is famous for being opposable, the index finger is useful for pointing (and being told by our parents not to do so), the ring finger is used for, well, wearing rings, and the pinkie can signal your hoity-toity status when you raise it while sipping champagne at a fancy party in the Hamptons.

The middle finger is infamous for its main purpose: being given.

Raising the middle digit at someone is also known as “flipping the bird”, “flicking off”, “flipping off”, and “giving the one-finger salute”. But how did this gesture come about? Well, there’s a well-known urban legend that explains it, one that perhaps you first read about back when social media consisted of having an email account and forwarding chain letters.

So how did sticking up the middle finger become an insult? Well, the exact origins are hard to pinpoint, but it appears the Greeks and Romans may have been doing it long before the Battle of Agincourt. As Reuters explains:

In Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome, Anthony Corbeill, Professor of Classics at the University of Kansas wrote:

“The most familiar example of the coexistence of a human and transhuman element is the extended middle finger. Originally representing the erect phallus, the gesture conveys simultaneously a sexual threat to the person to whom it is directed and apotropaic means of warding off unwanted elements of the more-than-human.”

In the book, Corbeill points to Priapus, a minor deity he dates to 400 BC, which later also appears in Rome as the guardian of gardens, according to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Greece and Rome… The decorative use of the image of Priapus matched the Roman use of images of male genitalia for warding off evil. The Roman gesture “made by extending the third finger from a closed fist”, thus made the same threat, by forming a similarly phallic shape.

A BBC News Magazine report similarly traces the gesture back to Ancient Greek philosophers.

(Note to my beloved British readers: Yes, I know that many of you “give the fingers” by showing a backwards victory sign instead of just using your medii. Thank you for bearing with my non-British bias regarding this matter, so far. And now I will address your urban legend whose background is the same 1415 battle.)

In a book on the battle of Agincourt, Anne Curry, Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the University of Southampton, addressed a similar claim prescribed to the “V-sign”, also considered an offensive gesture:

“No chronicle or sixteenth-century history says that English archers made any gesture to the French after the battle in order to show they still had their fingers. There is no evidence that, when captured in any scenario, archers had their finger cut off by the enemy”.

Okey-dokey. If you still want to read more, I recommend the debunking Snopes did in 1999.

Free bird

Here’s another story for ya. Some years ago, a woman was stopped by a cop for speeding in her car. The officer was kind enough to downgrade the ticket to a “non-moving violation”, which carries a lesser fine. After the incident, as the woman drove away she gave the finger to the policeman. Upset at her thanklessness, he stopped her again and this time issued the speeding ticket. She sued his ass for violating her civil rights… and won!

Sounds very much like an urban legend, right? But it’s a true case that lasted from 2017 to 2019 and went all the way to the Supreme Court. You didn’t hear about it because the Supreme Court refused to hear the case (something they are allowed to do).

The woman (plaintiff) is Debra Cruise-Gulyas, the policeman (defendant) is Matthew Minard, and the events happened in Detroit, Michigan. As a Columbia University article details:

The plaintiff sued the defendant arguing that there was no probable cause for the second stop which was a violation of her Fourth Amendment rights, the retaliation for her gesture was a violation of her First Amendment rights and that the episode violated her liberty in violation of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. The defendant argued that the second stop was merely a continuation of the first one and hence the ticket was raised for the initial speeding itself. Further, he raised the defence of qualified immunity which protects police officers from any “personal liability unless they violate a person’s clearly established constitutional or statutory rights”. The District Court denied the defendant’s Civil Rule 12(c) motion for judgment on pleadings and ruled in favour of the plaintiff. The defendant then appealed the case to the circuit court.

The above District Court decision was appealed by the cop, who then lost in Circuit Court 0–3. (You can read more details in the Decision Overview section here.) Then he filed a petition for the Supreme Court to, well, give him his day in court. It was summarily denied.

If you think this is terrible, you’re right. Terrible for government overreach and for those who enjoy sliding down the slippery slope of limiting basic freedoms. I now live in Spain; in Europe freedom of expression is, unfortunately, more constrained in certain aspects than it is in the U.S.A. And I’ve heard of the very misunderstood “yelling fire in a crowded theater” exception to the First Amendment of the Constitution. Still, I think the more freedom we have when it comes to expressing our thoughts, the better. Even if those thoughts are nasty.

Speaking of thoughts… my take on hate crimes is probably in the controversial minority ––and I say this as a Jew who is very aware that Jewish people are constant victims of hate crimes across the world. However, my view is that hate crime legislation punishes people for their prejudiced and racist thoughts. Which is scary when you realize that, as a precedent, it could one day be extended to other thoughts deemed hateful by people in power.

Obviously I am against anyone being assaulted, beaten up, tortured, or killed because they are Black, Muslim, or gay (just to name a few categories of victims of hate crimes). I think anyone who does that should be arrested and prosecuted for their actions. However, by introducing an additional legal measure against the hateful beliefs that led to those actions, lawmakers are essentially implying thoughts can be criminalized.

Now, it’s extremely rude and ungracious and provocative to flip your medii to a police officer who just let you off the hook for a moving violation, which among other things can damage your reputation with insurance companies. Still, cops need to understand that these types of reactions from people are an unwritten part of their job description. By stopping Cruise-Gulyas, officer Minard helped further the cause of civil rights across the U.S.

Maybe we should all thank him for that.

Now you know. Next time you piss someone off so much that they flip you not one, but both fingers, you can respond by yelling “Your medii are really gnarled and ugly!” That will thoroughly leave them confused, of course…because the editors of the Spelling Bee decided that medii is a dord*.

You can check out my previous entry on another dord* here:

*What the heck is a dord, you ask? Here’s the answer: