Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Rocket Man vs. Dotard


When President Donald Trump referred to North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jung-un as “Rocket Man,” later amplified to “Little Rocket Man,” it got Kim’s dander up. His snappy comeback was, “I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U. S. dotard with fire.”

“Rocket Man” was presumably a reference to the Elton John-Bernie Taupin song of that name, which ends with the lyric, “Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone.”

“Dotard,” on the other hand, is a once popular term that has fallen into disuse. Pronounced DOE-terd, it’s defined as a “person who is senile and has lost mental alertness.”

“Dotard” has a sterling literary history. Chaucer in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales refers to an “olde dotard shrew.”  Shakespeare uses the word several times, notably in The Taming of the Shrew when Baptista says of Vincentio, “Away with the dotard!” In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Denethor tells Gandalf, “I will not step down to be the dotard chamberlain of an upstart.” Union General George McClellan said of his predecessor, Gen. Winfield Scott, “I don’t know whether he is a dotard or a traitor.”

But the word now is admittedly old-fashioned.

According to the Associated Press, what Kim actually called Trump was a “neukdari,” a derogatory Korean word for an “old person.” The North Koreans are known to use outdated Korean-English dictioinaries, so when the Korean news agency translated Kim’s remarks, “dotard” popped up as a synonym for “neukdari.”

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has been in his dotage for many years. He’d like to remain there for some while, since there’s only one alternative. 

            You “Rocket Man,” said Mr. Trump,
            With a nod to to Elton John.
            He thought that it would make Kim jump
            And feel most put upon.

            But Kim was not to be outdone,
            And to a bookshop motored
            To seek a word with which to stun—
            And he discovered “dotard”!

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