How Hard Can It Be?

Dear Cory:

I was chatting on the phone the other day and the word "stevedore" came up. Is this different from a longshoreman? Does anyone (other than my friend) use this term anymore?

Ahab


Dear Ahab:

First, the things you haven’t asked. Your namesake Ahab was married to Jezebel, a Phoenician. That’s always trouble, so stay out of Arizona. Or perhaps you are named for that other Ahab, who is famous for stalking and having a violent affair with an oily, obese albino. Ropes were involved; it did not end well. Cory cannot in good conscience recommend this course either, not that you asked. (The precious few readers Cory has managed to dragoon onto this leaky literary vessel are irreplaceable: thus his tendency to advise about personal and romantic safety).

Cory is inclined to read between the lines of his inquisitors. Does he detect just the faintest scent of sadness: a wistful awareness that lovely words are slipping away from us -- indeed lovely things in general?

The evocative word “stevedore”, which you rightly sense is falling into disuse, save in the antipodes and Britain, is being replaced by the drearily literal and pedestrian “longshoreman” (from “along the shore man”). They are the same job. The former is from the Spanish “man who stows” – estibador. How rich a word it is, redolent of foreign ports, hemp, sandalwood and sweat. Its homonym “Steve adore” is associated with homoerotica because most Steves are gay, and “adore” is one of the gayer words in Christendom.

If, in any blue-collar fantasies, you think that the world’s ports are still attended by burly rogues of savage passions who have a fondness for whisky and indiscriminate behaviour, you are apt to be disappointed at the docks. Containerization (another horrible word) means ports are now attended by pudgy computer geeks and unmuscled crane operators of impeccable sobriety who delicately maneuver unromantic orange boxes into stacks and onto trains. He of an esthetic sensibility, such as you surely are, must hanker for barrels, dunnage, spillage, mysterious crates and the smell of creosote-saturated wharves.

How encouraging it is that you think about these things!