WTN: rude, crude
James Harbeck
rude, crude
Obviously, you’d have to be a stupid a**h*** not to know these words.
Was that rude and crude enough for you?
Is there a way to be “rude” that’s not bad? How about “crude”? Is there any way for the rude and the crude not to be unrefined?
What, incidentally, is the difference between rude and crude? Do they overlap? What do they and don’t they even mean?
Let’s start with whether “rude and crude” is redundant. Can you be rude without being crude? Of course you can. “Good day, John. Tell me: Has your sense of taste entirely deserted you? That is an exceptionally ugly shirt; I would be ashamed to be seen in public wearing such a thing.” One could hardly call that crude, but, in most contexts, one could hardly not call it rude. How about the converse? “Hey, John! That is a beautiful f***ing shirt – I look like complete s*** next to it! Where in hell did you get it?” Undoubtedly crude, but entirely complimentary; in most contexts, at least if it’s not spoken sarcastically, it wouldn’t be at all rude.
This also highlights how we tend to use these words. Rude typically means ‘brutishly impolite’, ‘deliberately inconsiderate’, that kind of thing. Crude typically means ‘vulgar’, or at the very least ‘unrefined’ – and also literally ‘unrefined’, as in crude oil. Indeed, we might say that raw could be a sometime synonym for crude, as hinted at by crudités, which are raw vegetables often found at polite and refined occasions.
And that leads us right to its origin: Latin crudus, ‘raw, uncooked’ – which is related, via Proto-Indo-European *krewh₂-, to English raw. It showed up in English in the later 1300s meaning ‘raw, unrefined’ in literal senses, and, by the early 1600s, had spread to “products of the mind,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it: “Not matured, not completely thought out or worked up; ill-digested.” If we look to poetry, we can see it covering that range of sense, literal and figurative:
You are content to keep that mighty love
In its first steps forever; the crude care
Of animals for mate and young and homes
—“To the Indifferent Women,” Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman
Expectation, like a cuckoo
taking shelter in the crudely scratched out nest.
—“Lapwing,” Hannah Copley
I do not think we are deceived to grow,
But that the crudest fancy, slightest show,
Covers some separate truth that we may know.
—“The One in All,” Margaret Fuller
Raw, roughly formed, artless – but not always bad in itself: “the crudely scratched out nest” and “the crudest fancy” could be better than they are, but they’re better than nothing.
But still, with all its developed nuances – its refinement of sense conveying a sense of a lack of refinement – “crude” is generally not good:
And what kind of a man is so crude that he hasn’t held a little something back from You,
Hasn’t in his free time fashioned something special for You
—“The Day of Gifts,” Paul Claudel, translated by Jonathan Monroe Geltner
You know sleep will dart beyond your grasp. Its edges
crude and merciless.
—“The Night After You Lose Your Job,” Deborah Kuan
Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forc’d fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
—“Lycidas,” John Milton
And that last one brings us to rude. Rude appears as an unfinished crude, one lacking the crisp beginning, that grasping and gripping c that differentiates crack from rack, crust from rust, cripple from ripple, crank from rank, crave from rave. But really it’s a different class of thing.
Well, it’s a strongly classist word from the very beginning in English. Since we first had it in the language in the 1300s, it’s conveyed ‘unintelligent, uncultured, uncivilized, uneducated, ill-mannered, ill-bred, low-class’. It came to us, via French, from Latin rudis ‘rough, raw, wild’. It traces back to Proto-Indo-European *Hrew- (‘tear up, dig up’), which has English descendants in rid and ridden and, possibly, redden. But there’s no evidence of any etymological relation to crude.
But when we look at poetry, it’s interesting to see how often the use leans toward a more neutral or almost endearing sense of ‘primitive’ or ‘low-class’ – a valorization of the rustic and unrefined – rather than the pointed ‘ill-mannered’:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
—“Concord Hymn,” Ralph Waldo Emerson
I wondered, over trees and ponds,
At the sorry, rude walls
And the white windows of the apartments.
—“Birdcage Walk,” Thomas Merton
The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn,
And in the east one giant window shows
The roseate coldness of an Alp at dawn.
—“Chartres,” Edith Wharton
“Speak! speak! thou fearful guest!
Who, with thy hollow breast
Still in rude armor drest,
Comest to daunt me!”
—“The Skeleton in Armor,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
We can’t easily imagine bridges, walls, and lawns interrupting someone or hurling insults. The armor might be a little impertinent, I suppose.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
—“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Thomas Gray
Our hut is small, and rude our cheer,
But love has spread the banquet here;
And childhood springs to be caress’d
By our beloved and welcome guest.
—“The Sleigh-Bells,” Susanna Moodie
The forefathers might have put their elbows on the table, but we don’t expect that they were actually bumptious – and Moodie’s rude cheer was more likely humble joy than, say, something a legion of English football fans might shout.
The poor have their virtues rude,—
Meekness and gratitude,
Endurance, and respect
For us, the world’s elect;
Economy, self-denial,
Patience in every trial,
Self-sacrifice, self-restraint,—
Virtues enough for a saint!
—“Christian Virtues,” Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman
Gilman’s whole poem is a mordantly sarcastic take on the self-important pieties of the moneyed set who self-aggrandize through benefaction. But this “rude,” while clearly conveying low class and a simplicity of mind and value, definitely does not connote impertinence.
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph
—Richard III, William Shakespeare
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.
—“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” John Keats
Still not to our usual sense, but getting perhaps impolite.
The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done—
“It’s very rude of him,” she said,
“To come and spoil the fun.”
—“The Walrus and the Carpenter,” Lewis Carroll
Ah, well, there we are. That thoughtless, pushy, self-important sun – manifesting a kind of rudeness that, we may note, is just as available to those of high social station.
And so we see that the words rude and crude have a kind of refinement of development, depth, and nuance, notwithstanding their senses, or their status as blunt and basic vocabulary items. Oh, they’re unpleasant words, in their way; in some contexts, they’re better avoided (in favour of, say, impolite and unrefined). But one can’t have a fully mature and well-developed language without such words.
Please send comments, replies, and suggestions for words to taste to me to ja...@harbeck.ca.
Feel free to pass this on to friends. If you've received it as a forward, feel free to join the Word Tasting Notes email list at http://groups.google.ca/group/word-tasting-notes .
Visit my blog at http://sesquiotic.wordpress.com .