Fress

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Dr. Goodword
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Fress

Postby Dr. Goodword » Thu Apr 27, 2023 6:14 pm

• fress •


Pronunciation: fres • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Verb

Meaning: Gobble, gorge, devour, pig out, eat gluttonously.

Notes: I've lived in the northeastern, southeastern, and Midwest US, and spent a lot of time out west in Colorado, but this word I've never heard or seen in print; yet, there it is in 17 of the OneLook dictionaries. I've also lived a half century among the Pennsylvania "Dutch" (Germans), which should contain it.

In Play: Hunger is what calls out fressing more often: "The soccer team celebrated their victory by quickly fressing the supper the coach's wife had prepared for them." Desire is the second most frequent motivation: "Manly Guy fressed away his spinach like it was his favorite food that he would never see again."

Word History: Today's Good Word was copied from Yiddish fresn or German fressen "to devour, gobble, eat like an animal", from Middle High German vrezzen, from Proto-Germanic fraetana "to eat up". This word was originally composed of fra- "for" or an intensive prefix + etana "to eat". It is cousin to Old English fretan "to devour; fret". Today in German, fressen "to eat" and saufen "to drink" are used when talking about animals. With subjects referring to humans, they mean "to eat and drink slovenly, like animals". It is a noun in Icelandic: fress "tomcat". Proto-Germanic etan was the result of PIE ed- "eat", origin also of English eat, German essen, Latin edere, Greek edein, Lithuanian ėsti, Armenian utem, and Irish ith. Sanskrit adman "dish, food" and Russian edim "we eat" fall among these examples, too. (Now it's time to thank wordmaster George Kovac for not only his substantial contributions to the Agora, but for finding this lexical outlier and pulling it back into our collective memory.)
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bnjtokyo
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Re: Fress

Postby bnjtokyo » Thu Apr 27, 2023 6:40 pm

I learned this verb from the landlord/owner of the hotel where I worked in Bavaria one summer while in university. The set up is a sergeant orders the private to do something, but the private demurs saying "Ich speise" (I dine). The sergeant shouts "Der Kaiser speist, Ich esse und du frisst. Now get going"

George Kovac
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Re: Fress

Postby George Kovac » Sat Apr 29, 2023 11:49 pm

Fair warning: This is a long post about the use and abuse of vocabulary, and you may prefer to resume doom-scrolling on Facebook.

The Agora lets us explore the power and dynamics of vocabulary.

Unusual words are special cases. Sometimes those words are mere bijoux—delightful, interesting, historical, specialized—but of limited utility. That’s OK: there is a place for delight in discovering such oddities. Sometimes rare words can be far more valuable, if thoughtfully deployed. “Fress” is one of the latter. Bear with me as I defend my argument.

Using a fancy vocabulary is tricky business. Precocious high school students will sprinkle a few high-flautin words in their essays. The result is often funny or pretentious. Yet we should encourage this experimentation. It is how an inexperienced writer learns their powers and limits, and ultimately develops their craft and their voice. Yeah, it can result in some awkward teenage prose, but what part of adolescence doesn’t involve some productive awkwardness?

With grown-ups, the judgments get harsher. There is a political columnist I read who, when at a loss for convincing arguments, will use words like “risible” or “condign” as lame pejoratives because such words deliver a punch and a veneer of erudition lacking in the exact synonyms “laughable” and “well-deserved.” William Buckley could be like that, too, in his day. I recently finished a short novel by a local writer (I try to read local authors and first-time writers) with a plodding style abruptly punctuated every third page with a distractingly showy word. For example, that author used “penumbra” promiscuously (five times by my count), slightly inappropriately each time.

At the other end of the spectrum are accomplished writers who deploy unusual words where near-synonyms lack the appropriate nuance or impact. It is a technique that arrests the reader’s attention to highlight a point in the narrative or thesis. John Updike was a master wordsmith and practitioner of this technique (even though his imagination as a storyteller was not always a match for the quality of his prose, but that’s a digression.) For example, in “The Centaur” Updike used the word “coruscating.” No near synonym would have been as good in the context. Updike used the word twice—separated by over 200 pages—so that a careful reader might link the two scenes in which this word appeared.

Which brings me back to “fress,” a word even the worldly Dr GoodWord found elusive. I have encountered the word only once myself, in a New Yorker article from 2010, in a review of several recent books about the historical Jesus. The word is not theological. The reviewer summarized the thesis of one of the books as follows: Jesus was radical in that he ate ravenously and chose to dine with people of all social classes, contrary to the norms of the times; this one trait of Jesus was the fulcrum which supported all of Jesus’ larger moral teachings. It is an interesting thesis. But the reviewer’s use of the rare word “fress” brilliantly commands the reader’s attention, and—like a pithy bumper sticker—makes the reader remember the issue.

The review (and the author’s thesis) would have been far less memorable had “eating” been substituted for “fressing”. Well if you’ve read this far, judge for yourself: I have pasted the relevant excerpt from the New Yorker article below. BON APPÉTIT!

<<What Did Jesus Do?
Reading and unreading the Gospels.

By Adam Gopnik
May 17, 2010

The table is his altar in every sense. Crossan, the co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, makes a persuasive case that Jesus’ fressing was perhaps the most radical element in his life—that his table manners pointed the way to his heavenly morals. Crossan sees Jesus living within a Mediterranean Jewish peasant culture, a culture of clan and cohort, in which who eats with whom defines who stands where and why. So the way Jesus repeatedly violates the rules on eating, on “commensality,” would have shocked his contemporaries. He dines with people of a different social rank, which would have shocked most Romans, and with people of different tribal allegiance, which would have shocked most Jews. The most forceful of his sayings, still shocking to any pious Jew or Muslim, is “What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean.” Jesus isn’t a hedonist or an epicurean, but he clearly isn’t an ascetic, either: he feeds the multitudes rather than instructing them how to go without. He’s interested in saving people living normal lives, buying and selling what they can, rather than in retreating into the company of those who have already arrived at a moral conclusion about themselves.>>
"Every battle of ideas is fought on the terrain of language." Zia Haider Rahman, New York Times 4/8/2016

David Myer
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Re: Fress

Postby David Myer » Sun Apr 30, 2023 8:36 am

Interesting stuff, George. Thanks for the thoughts.

I think you are right that, just sometimes, it is appropriate to use the unlikely or more arcane word. It can certainly serve to make the reader sit up and take notice.

Not sure though, about Adam Gopnik's comment on Jesus feeding the multitudes. I think it is a long bow indeed to conclude from that that he isn't an ascetic. An empathetic person (as Jesus reportedly was) might recognise that mere mortals get hungry. And he or she might wish to satisfy those people - especially if their hunger was interfering with their attention to the lecture. His or her own pangs may or may not require the same satisfaction.

Incidentally, my Mother's cynicism on miracles always struck me as sensibly pragmatic. She said of the sermon on the mount and the feeding of, was it, 5000, with a few loaves and fishes, that what actually would have happened was that Jesus would have called for people to bring up their food that it may be shared, and the perhaps foolish people in the front row came forth with their packed lunches. The more astute behind them would have kept their own sandwiches quietly to themselves. And lo, when the loaves and fishes are distributed, they seem to go round niceley because most people don't need them having brought their own.

George Kovac
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Re: Fress

Postby George Kovac » Sun Apr 30, 2023 10:20 am

David, your mother’s cynicism about the food served at the sermon on the mount is matched by the Monty Python writers’ wicked version of that event in the movie “The Life of Brian.” The folks at the edge of the crowd can barely hear Jesus. Everyone is hungry. Imagine the actors using thick cockney accents as they speak these lines:

“What did He say?”
“I think He said ‘Blessed are the cheese-makers.’”
"Every battle of ideas is fought on the terrain of language." Zia Haider Rahman, New York Times 4/8/2016

David Myer
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Re: Fress

Postby David Myer » Mon May 01, 2023 8:53 am

Yes, great show.

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Re: Fress

Postby Dr. Goodword » Mon May 01, 2023 6:23 pm

I have always felt kindred spirit in George Kovac (as with all Agorans); this essay expresses it very elgantly; it expresses my attitude exactly.

That is why I take the history of each word so far back, so that we can get a sense of all the changes it has incurred across all its cultures over the past 3000 or so years and use our imaginations to fill in the blanks.

Yes, I include a few historically bizarre words to encourage readers to think about the times when they weren't bizarre. Funny dialectal words to nudge them into figuring out why the referent could have been thought amusing in that dialect region. And so on and so forth . . . .
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