Carnival

When I was a boy, we were always eager to see “the carnival” come to town, as it did every summer, making its way down our valley from one place to the next. There were some rides, like the Spider and the Scrambler for the bigger kids, and little trains and such for the smaller kids, and plenty of arcade games with prizes — you’d throw a dart at a wall full of balloons, or you’d try to spin a wooden ring around the top of a jug, or you’d shoot a B-B gun at a row of metal ducks passing by. There were a few games of chance, too, with the odds heavily stacked in favor of the carnival owners. And of course there were snacks: candy, slices of pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, hot pretzels, and, if you went a little further south into the more German areas of Pennsylvania, “funnel cakes,” fried dough with powdered sugar. Of course we all loved it. And because in those days you didn’t have to be afraid for the welfare of your child, since every family knew many dozens of other families, we usually went there by ourselves, tagging along after our older cousins, while our parents enjoyed an evening of peace and quiet. On the last day of all, there would be fireworks, which I’d watch from my bedroom window or the street outside.

“Scène de carnaval, ou Le Menuet,” Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Public Domain. 

It was an innocent thing, with all its noise and with the plenty of cleanup the carnival owners had to do afterwards. I don’t think there’s been any such in my hometown for at least thirty years; those seem to have gone the same way as most other outdoor celebrations that brought people together casually, as a matter of course. It had to be held in the summer, naturally, because otherwise the nights would be chilly and you wouldn’t be able to make enough money to offset your expenses. But the original CARNIVAL wasn’t a summer thing. It was what you had on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday: the ancestor of what the people in New Orleans still celebrate as Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday,” for stuffing yourself with meat and drink as a fit preparation for the season of fast and abstinence. Well, it doesn’t sound like such a fit preparation when I put it that way, and I don’t suppose that it is. But the tradition goes back to the Middle Ages: I mean the tradition of some kind of celebration and, if you could afford it, eating flesh rather than fish. In fact, there was what we call a “folk etymology” for the word CARNIVAL, in a kind of mangled Latin: “CARNE, VALE!” — meaning, “Flesh, farewell!” That’s because you weren’t permitted to eat meat during the entire season of Lent, except for Sundays, which technically were not counted among the forty days, which would end on the Saturday before Easter.

If you think about it, though, this custom of saying to meat “Farewell for a while!” was a way in which the rich man would share in the life of the poor man, who hardly could afford to eat meat more than occasionally in any case. And it was a public thing, too, not just some personal resolution you’d make. Everybody was in the same kitchen, so to speak. And in fact the word CARNIVAL does have to do with CARNE, the Italian for flesh, meat: it was CARNELEVARE, meaning to lift away the flesh, to relieve your diet of it. Sure, that meant that people did a little celebrating beforehand, and as long as it didn’t involve gluttony, drunkenness, or lust, it could be a healthy custom. Imagine, though, organizing your everyday life and the course of the seasons according to the story of your Lord, the Savior of the world.

The first part of CARNIVAL comes from the Latin CARNIS, meaning flesh: that’s the genitive (possessive) case I’ve given, since Italian derived its nouns not from the Latin nominative but from the other cases. And that word has descendants and cousins everywhere. It’s not just words like CARNAL, that we English speakers borrow straight from Italian or Latin. The ancient root had to do with slicing something off, as you’d cut a hunk of meat into slices to serve at table. So we get Latin CURTUS, meaning SHORT, as if you’d cut twelve inches off an ordinary person and you get Mickey Rooney, and English SHORT, from the same root, meaning the same thing. You cut a piece of cloth with SHEARS, and you carve up the good earth into furrows with a PLOWSHARE. Why, crooks carving up their take will give each person his SHARE, and the robe that’s cut so it doesn’t go down to your knees is a SHIRT, and the SCRUB tree that looks like a stumpy dwarf is a SHRUB, and so on. And where am I going with all this? How about to the SHORT meal in the midday, the Latin CENA? That gives us the name of the upper room where Jesus and his disciples ate the Passover meal: the CENACLE. And then it was lamb, not fish, as befitted the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, even those we commit when our CARNIVALS get out of hand.