A whirligig is
a class of child’s toy that include tops. It dates from the mid-fifteenth
century. Whirl means pretty what we would expect and a gig, besides
being a job for a jazz musician, is a whipping top, the sort that’s wrapped
with a string and thrown, according to the OED. I remember my
step-grandfather, who grew up in Harrisburg, Pa., recounting how he made money as
a kid “gigging” eels in the Susquehanna River and selling them. In this context
a gig is “a kind of fish-spear” (OED).
The Dictionary
cites Shakespeare’s use of whirligig as part of a complicated set of
metaphorical usages: “(a) Something that is continually whirling, or in
constant movement or activity of any kind; (b) a fantastic notion, a crotchet;
(c) circling course, revolution (of time or events); (d) a lively or irregular proceeding, an
antic; (e) a circling movement, or
condition figured as such, a whirl.” All but (b) seem to apply to Feste’s use.
There’s a suggestion that time “toys” with us, that nothing remains in place,
that life is perpetual motion. Anthony Hecht adopts the expression in his
adaptation of Horace’s Ode 1:25 as “The
Whirligig of Time” (Flight Among the Tombs, 1996):
“They are
fewer these days, those supple, suntanned boys
Whose
pebbles tapped at your window, and your door
Swings less
and less on its obliging hinges
For wildly
importunate suitors. Fewer the cries
Of ‘Lydia,
how can you sleep when I’ve got the hots?
I won’t last
out the night; let me get my rocks off.’
Things have
moved right along, and behold, it’s you
Who quails,
like a shriveled whore, as they scorn and dodge you,
And the wind
shrieks like a sex-starved thing in heat
As the moon
goes dark and the mouth of your old dry vulva
Rages and
hungers, and your worst, most ulcerous pain
Is knowing
those sleek-limbed boys prefer the myrtle,
The darling
buds of May, leaving dried leaves
To cluster
in unswept corners, fouling doorways.”
Cruel,
hardly kind, but a memorable accounting of vanity, especially of the sexual variety.
1 comment:
I imagine Shakespeare also had in mind the whirligig beetle (a water beetle that swims in crazy circles when agitated) – he would have known it well from his boyhood.
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