‘Up the yin yang’ not heaven-sent
Heaven used to have a physical location. First it was a word for the sky — that’s how it appears in Beowulf, an epic poem composed in Old English more than a 1,000 years ago. Then it came to mean God’s throne and home, and heaven was generally assumed to be in the upper atmosphere. After the resurrection, Jesus ascended to a place where, as a popular hymn puts it, “Now above the sky he’s king.” Or perhaps there were seven heavens, as the Kabbalistic tradition in Judaism states, each with its own presiding angel. Islam, too, developed a faith in seven heavens, the highest being the one where the palaces are made of solid gold.
Today not many people — at least in the West — hold to the old belief in heaven as a physical place. I suspect that most Christians, if they have a faith in heaven, imagine it in spiritual terms, not as somewhere they expect to enter when St. Peter grabs his key and unlocks a pearly gate. Even so, the ancient doctrines have left an indelible imprint on our language. Occasionally, the pearly gates open, and what falls down are pennies from heaven. If we’re utterly determined to do something, we’ll move heaven and earth; when we succeed, we’re in seventh heaven. But if we meet a skunk along the way, we might stink to high heaven.
Those last words are now a lot more common than their opposite, “praise to high heaven,” which I can remember my mother happily saying. That phrase has an old-fashioned quality, like corsets and crinoline. So this year, when an anonymous writer for the Montreal arts website The Rover wanted to alert readers to an edgy new book of stories titled Gay Dwarves in America, he or she didn’t mention heaven. The audience for The Rover is more likely to explore Oriental mysticism than Christian theology, and the writer posed the question: “Why are some books lauded up the yin yang while others, like this one, in spite of their brilliance, are more or less left alone?”
Lauded up the yin yang? I’m not entirely sure how a concept in Chinese thought turned into a slang term for high praise. Yang and yin arrived in English as immigrants in the 1890s, yang being the active and bright male force of the universe, yin the dark and passive female force. (Before anyone complains about those adjectives, I hasten to say I’m merely quoting dictionaries, not asserting my own beliefs.) Harmony requires both yin and yang, not an unbalanced devotion to a sin- gle side or principle. Yet meanings can turn somersaults over time. The irony is that “up the yin yang” lately seems to have become a casual way of saying “to an extreme,” maybe because of a sexual association I won’t go into here. All in all, I’d prefer my books to be praised to high heaven. I want to salute The Gazette’s website for clarity and consistency. On the morning of the disastrous railway accident in Lac-Mégantic, it ran the headline: “Train carrying crude oil derails, explodes.” The report also used the phrase “crude oil,” leaving readers in no doubt as to what had spilled and burned. But other websites were, so to speak, all over the map. The headline on CNN spoke of “flammable liquid”; The Globe and Mail opted for “oil”; the BBC had “fuel” in its headline, and both “petrochemicals” and “petroleum products” in its story. Most in- consistent of all was the CBC’s website. After a headline that referred to “petroleum,” the article and captions used “crude oil,” “crude” and even “gas.” It was deeply misleading to run a caption with the words: “A train carrying gas derailed overnight.”
I’ve written about this issue before, with reference to the heavy sands near Fort McMurray in Alberta. The substance they contain is not strictly tar, although it has the consistency of tar; neither is it oil, although oil is what will eventually be refined from it.
The lack of a clearly defined vocabulary for some of the most important products in our society never ceases to amaze me, starting with the bizarre fact that most drivers in North America use “gas” to mean a substance that is not a gas.