Once upon a time, in a faraway land called France, there was a horse named Fauvel, and he was a horse who was going places. Live in a stable? Not Fauvel! He got himself set up in the royal court. And “all around Fauvel, such a big crowd gathered, people from every nation and all stations of life — why, it was a marvelous thing to see! And every single one of them wanted nothing more than to curry Fauvel.” Kings and counts, knights of high degree and low, viscounts, stewards, middle-class merchants from the towns, even peasants from the countryside, they all wanted to give Fauvel a good rub-down:
And when the Pope saw that fine beast,
He knew they’d gathered for a feast,
And how they all took care, he spied,
To scrape the thistles from his hide.”
That’s from the Roman de Fauvel, a rollicking satire on foolery and jobbery and ambition and graft, written in the 1310’s in medieval France — and that’s my impromptu translation, too. It’s not that Fauvel is just a dumb animal. His name tells us who he is. This is medieval literature, recall, and that means that you can’t overlook the little things, just as in medieval architecture you’ve got surprises in the smallest sculpted capitals or in the simplest fronds of a rose window.
Anyway, he’s fau(x) vel, the false veil, and the poet — we don’t know who he was — says that his letters stand for Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Varieté, Envie, and Lascheté — that’s Flattery, Avarice, Villainy, Fickelness, Envy, and Laxity. And everybody wants to “curry Fauvel,” and make his coat all shiny, and give him that good warm feeling you get when you know everybody’s your friend.
How about that! Our Word of the Week is favor, and the most common figure of speech in English that uses that word is “to curry favor,” and it didn’t come from the word favor at all, but from a horse in a satirical poem in Old French! But here’s where misunderstandings sometimes get right to the heart of something. If I said, “He just wants to curry Fauvel,” which is what the phrase was in Middle English, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. Most of the old beast-names in the fables are unfamiliar to us now: maybe we’d recognize Chanticleer, Chaucer’s rooster who has bad dreams, and Reynard the Fox; and closer to our own time we’ve got Rudolph with his nose so bright, and a couple of others. So people heard “curry Fauvel” as “curry FAVOR,” and really, that’s the same kind of action, though maybe not quite as absurd or sneaky. You’re flattering somebody, or playing up to somebody, to get something out of him: to get favor.
The actual word, favor, comes into English also from the French, in the Middle Ages. Its meaning covered an interesting range of desirable qualities, from beauty and charm, to a kindly predisposition or partiality, to an act of kindness, as in our phrase “to do a favor.” From that partiality — to favor one side over another, as my favorite baseball team is the Cardinals, so that I pull for them to beat whomever they’re playing — comes the old-fashioned sense of resemblance. “He favors his mother’s side,” we might say, not talking about his attitude toward that side of the family, but about his having their eyes (perhaps fortunately) or their nose (perhaps unfortunately). Of course, strict justice in the courtroom is not supposed to favor one side or another. But culture and personal feelings are a different matter. When I was a boy playing Little League Baseball, sometimes we didn’t have an umpire, so we’d dragoon one of the fathers in the seats to do the job. We took for granted that he would not favor his own son’s team. It was usually the reverse: Dads would bend quite a bit in the other direction. But if Dad is in the stands, of course he’s going to be cheering his boy!
It’s the same for me, being an Italian-American. It pleases me to think of all the Italian singers we once had — Frank Sinatra was the greatest of them, but Bobby Darin was immensely talented, and then you had the effortless Perry Como, and Dean Martin, Jerry Vale, Louie Prima, Mario Lanza, Dion, Fabian, Vic Damone — so many! And the All-Spaghetti Baseball Team is pretty stacked, too, with guys like Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, and Mike Mussina.
I have a hunch that the ideas and feelings behind our word favor are to be found in similar words in other languages. In Hebrew, the word is chen, and it could mean that you are pleasant to look at, or that your movements are gracious, or that people regard you in a kindly way — and not just people, but God: “And Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”
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