The Origin and Characteristics of the Friggindork Family in Britain and the United States
by Wesli Court
The Friggendork family (or “Friggindork,” as it is usually spelled in North America) is of ancient lineage. It may be the only tribe that is associated with a particular day of the week, Friday or “Frigedaeg,” “day of the Goddess Frig” which is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “A common West German translation of the late Latin "dies Veneris," day of (the planet) Venus. The Old English name Frig corresponds to Old Norse Frigg, wife of [the god] Odin (not to Freyja) and is the feminine of the Old Teutonic adjective frijo- 'beloved, loving'....”
The establishment of the duchy of Dork dates probably from the reign of King Alfred, though its exact founding is lost in the shadows of ancient history. The fiefdom lasted until 1179 (Julian calendar) when the Normans abolished it upon the death of Bertrand, thirteenth Duke of Dork, who is known to history as Dork-O'Mundy, the Great Dork (or “Dork of the World” in Middle English). The disestablishment of the Duchy of Dork took place at Dorking Castle (Dorcaster) on Friday - of all days! - the thirteenth day of July of that year, a date fraught with ominous portent, ever since which all Friggendorks have feared and abominated the number thirteen.
According to Jeffrey Kacirk in his "Forgotten English" desk calendar (Friday the fifth of April) 2002, “For many years Scottish witches have held their annual convention on the first Friday in April. Friday was undoubtedly chosen because in pagan Nordic cultures, the ancient fertility goddess Frigga was, with the advent of Christianity, branded a witch and removed from local pantheons. In revenge, it was believed, she conjured up bad luck for mortals on Fridays, the day named for her.”
Reminders of the fiefdom lie only in the name of a section of London, the place names Upper Dorking and Lower Dorking - seats of the Friggendorks - and in the word "dorking" which signifies, according to the O. E. D., the “Name of a breed of poultry of a long square form, and possessing five toes.” Some scholars maintain that the word actually refers to Bertrand himself, the overlord of Dork or the “Dork king” who was “chicken” to stand up for the rights of his subject Dorklings and as a result lost everything to his posterity.
Since this disaster occurred it appears that most of the direct descendents through the male line have died out. According to a correspondent, John Carter of Keswick, Cumbria, “Certainly, there are members of the clan here in UK, but obviously descended through the distaff side as that surname is not known here. One branch has an aristocratic double barrelled surname, the Fir-Kintwats, based in the county of Essex; and a local branch are the Bleedin-Marrers.” Although the Friggendorks have become nothing much more than a historical memory in England, Prof. Herbert Coursen of Brunswick, Maine, points out that a literary monument remains in Thomas Hardy's poem “The Dorkling Thrush” which has somehow come down to us in a corrupt version as “The Darkling Thrush.”
The founder of the American branch of the Friggindork family was Hugh Friggindork who arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony about 1635 aboard the Juneflower. He had been born in Leeks Piddlington, not far from the peak called the Bishop of Barf, around 1614; he was therefore twenty-one years of age and already married to Ima Friggindork, nèe Simprin, who had borne him his first child in 1633, a son named Uriah. Within a few decades there were many Friggindorks spread throughout the British colonies of North America.
The Friggindorks as a clan have certain characteristics and may be identified by their actions. Indeed, these characteristics being evidently genetic in nature, some anthropologists have hypothesized that the Friggindorks are not so much a sept or clan as perhaps a subspecies of homo sapiens sapiens which they have designated dimbulbius Americanis. A salient trait is the unerring ability to get into the wrong line. A Friggindork with a full shopping cart will without fail enter the “twenty items or fewer” line at the supermarket, or the “cash only” slot at the toll station when what is wanted is the “change and receipts” gate.
If one is seated at the wheel of an automobile standing second-in-line in a left-turn lane, for instance, when the arrow turns green and the first car doesn't move because the driver wishes to be in the lane going straight, no amount of horn-blowing will cause him or her to move until the arrow turns red, the light turns green, and the straight-ahead line of cars proceeds. If one had entertained any doubt, one may be certain that the driver of the first car in the left-turn lane is a Friggindork when, in attempting to enter the moving line of cars he either hits one of them, causing a huge tie-up of the intersection, or is too tentative (usually a woman in this case) and manages to remain in the left-turn lane for another cycle or two of light changing. According to Sarah Cecil of Maine, Friggindorks also tend to wait for supermarket parking spaces to free up - blocking others, but sparing themselves from having to walk an extra twenty feet.
Another automobile maneuver made by such drivers is the premature pull-out: If one car is traveling along a road with no one behind it and another is waiting to pull out of a road or driveway and join the traffic, invariably it will do so in front of the car with the right-of-way which will have to slow down suddenly in order to avoid a rear-ender. The car that has entered traffic will subsequently travel at a speed five to ten miles per hour under the limit in an area that does not permit passing. Frequently the car pulling out will do so too late to avoid a deadly accident, but it is never the Friggindork who dies or is injured, it is always the innocent driver.
However, there are two sides to every story, and no Friggindork will ever admit culpability. In her correspondence D*****a G******i of New Jersey has written, “Oh dear, I may have some Friggindork blood in me. I've been known to get in the wrong lane by accident when I want to turn. But, knock on wood, I've never been in an accident or caused one, yet, and I'm 61 in Feb. So maybe I'm only one quarter Friggindork, for your research purposes.
“I am, however, one of those middle aged, overly cautious female drivers who get the lowest insurance rates. Everyone beeps at me for going too slow, even if I stay in the slow lane. I tend never to exceed 60 miles per hour, as I feel no one can stop in time in an emergency at a higher speed, and I ALWAYS leave plenty of car lengths ahead for stopping response time.
“Also, I will sometimes go to the 10 item check out with 12 items, if the line is empty there and full everywhere else. Because, the Friggindork working at the 10 items lane is busy doing nothing while the other lanes are full.
“[But] I'm only partly Friggindork. The biggest Friggindorks are the young male drivers who follow you aggressively an inch from your rear end - coming up behind you and trying to 'goose you' with their bumpers - flashing lights in your rear view mirror so that they can make you go faster, instead of just going around. I always yell, 'Go ahead, kill yourself if you want to! But stop trying to make me speed like a maniac on my way to hell, too!' Those dern Friggindorks cause the most accidents of all and die more in crashes than the rest of us sedate drivers!”
One doubts that such aggressive drivers are, in fact, Friggindorks. Clearly, they are sociopaths wielding deadly weapons in traffic. On the other hand, Ms. G******I's communication is written in very nearly pure Friggindork style. According to Mr. Gene Turco of Bristol, Connecticut, “Most of the Friggindorks in my [Lutheran] church are women, and they have formed a club, the Dorcas Society.”
Another characteristic of a Friggindork is his or her penchant for passing inappropriate or useless information on to unwitting bystanders or chance acquaintances. This includes people - all of whom, apparently, are women - who at Xmas send out long form letter reproductions detailing the activities of their families over the past year. Often such Friggindorks will send newspaper clippings of an irrelevant nature to casual correspondents who have no interest whatever in the subjects of the articles in question.
A true Friggindork will persist in this habit even when the correspondent has requested that the clipper cease and desist from sending, for instance, articles of a religious nature because the recipient is not a member of that religion, nor an acquaintance of the person or people named in the articles, nor even, to be sure, interested in the opinions of the clipper. “When it comes to matters of social conscience or advertising poetry contests and poetry books,” Ms. G******i writes, “I sometimes send to e-mail lists [that have] people on them who might rather not be on them, so do let me know if you don't want any e-mail on ... any very amazing sociopolitical articles on the US implication in Bioterrorism and the Bush business dealings with Osama bin Laden, or such.”
As happened in the U. K., because of intermarriage with other families, it is perhaps needless to say that not all members of the Friggindork family are named “Friggindork.” Nevertheless, true members may be identified quite often because of their inability to pronounce correctly their unfamiliar last names. For instance, the late poet John Tagliabue is NOT a member of the clan because he pronounces his surname “Ta-lyah-boo-eh,” the “g” preceding the “l” being silent according to principles of Italian pronunciation. However, Paul Tagliabue, the commissioner of the National Football League, who has the same last name, is a true Friggindork because he pronounces his name, or allows his name to be pronounced, “TAG-lee-ah-BOO-ee.” Some experts have testified that this pronunciation was initiated by the young Paul's playing a form of tag on Hallowe'en.
Many other members of the NFL are clearly Friggindorks as well. The last name of the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers is of French derivation, Brett Favre, to be correctly pronounced “Fahve.” Unfortunately, his Friggendork background leads him to pronounce it “Farve,” which is ridiculous on its face without even the saving grace of ignorance, as in the case of Paul Tagliabue. However, Prof. R. S. Gwynn of Beaumont, Texas, remarks, “I think Brett Favre is a Cajun. You can't be a Friggindork and a Cajun at the same time.”
Another case in point is Laveranues Coles of the New York Jets. Apparently he is a Jr., his father bearing the same name, so his connection with the Friggindork family goes back at least two generations, to his grandparents, because Coles insists that his first name be pronounced “Laverneus,” a male name derived from the female name “Laverne” by adding the masculine ending “us.”
No example of Friggindork behavior could be more paradigmatic than that of yet another player with a coined female name, Ladainian Tomlinson of the San Diego Chargers. As reported by Michael Silver of SI (Jan 22, 2007, p. 43), “Emotions ran high after the final gun, when several [New England] Patriots ran to midfield to mock the Lights Out sack dance of San Diego linebacker Shawne Merriman. That enraged the normally unflappable Tomlinson, who tried to charge the pack of New England players before being restrained by teammates.” Clearly, Tomlinson had no notion of satire when later, on television, he complained that what annoyed him most was the Patriots' disrespect for Merriman's dance of mockery that the Patriots were mocking. “They have no class,” said Ladainian. Further, he had no sense of irony when he implied that Merriman's dance was “classy,” unlike the Patriots' coach Bill Belichick from whom Tomlinson said the Patriots got their lack of classiness.
Although the Patriots won the game that knocked the Chargers out of the race to the Super Bowl, which they had expected to win all season long, “'The Patriots know we're better than them' (sic), Chargers linebacker Stephen Cooper said as he walked through the Qualcomm parking lot after the game,'” Silver continued. “'We stopped their running game, and we had three interceptions - and it could've been five or six. But we let them hang around.'” And win.
As might be implied by the Bret Favre, Paul Tagliabue and Laveranues Coles instances, the so-called “professional sports” are rife with Friggindorks, in particular football. The “professions” were once reckoned to be the law, academics, medicine, and religion. Imagine the first and second chairs in a legal suit winning their case then rising in court, jumping up and, in mid-air, bopping chests; imagine a professor having an article accepted for publication, then high-fiving the chairman of his department at a department meeting and low-fiving the rest of his colleagues as he runs around the room; imagine a doctor successfully removing an appendix, then spiking his bloody gloves on the operating room floor and his nurses jumping on him and knocking him to the ground in fervent congratulation; imagine a preacher or a priest delivering one hell of a sermon, then descending from the pulpit and stalking up the aisle posing like a successful gorilla.
Matt Zidle, the meteorologist for WGME-TV, Channel 13 in the state of Maine, pronounces his name “Zy-dell.” According to the rules of pronunciation, the name is merely “eye-dl” (as in the word “idle”) preceded by a zee, but if one were to follow the idiosyncratic rules of pronunciation of the Zidle family (or at least this member of it), one would let his car idel while he attempted to sidel into a stall to put a bridel on a horse.
Before we leave WGME perhaps we ought to point out that the anonymous ad-man responsible for the “Giving Maine Promise” campaign of this channel is clearly a member of the Friggindork tribe and deserving of the prize for the invention of meaningless slogans. To “give promise” is to promise something specific, as for instance, “The skies give promise of fair weather,” or “His performance gave promise of future success.” It is not possible simply to “give promise” without an object. Thus, “Giving Maine Promise” is giving Maine nothing except the slogan itself; it is equivalent to saying, “Giving Maine Promise of Promiseness.”
One sept of the Friggindorks, mentioned in passing above, has given America two Great Leaders of the Western World, father and son. The father's defining moment came when, on camera at a convocation of world leaders, he leaned over and vomited in the lap of the Prime Minister of Japan who was seated next to him.
The son outdid the father because he had at least two defining moments. The first occurred when, also on camera, he was seen sitting in a grammar school classroom for a rather long while after he had been told of the disasters of 9/11. The second was when he was ferried by jet to the deck of an aircraft carrier which carried a huge banner that read, “Mission Accomplished!” Since then the war he began with intelligence he knew was false but fed to the nation anyhow in order to justify his invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, has lasted longer for Americans than did World War II.
COMMENTS:
“That was friggin' funny, Lew.” Russ T.
“I just saw the new post. You need to write things shorter, so I have time to read them. Think 'potato chips.'” Paul A.
Read them at home, Paul, not at work. L.
“Well, you've identified the American branch of this old family, all right!” Rhina E.
“You've done us all a great service!” Bob M.
“You, like a single malt scotch, get better with age.” Tony A.
“Lew, It is infuriating that you have chosen to expropriate my family history in this manner! Lawyers' letters are being prepared. Expect to see pickets outside your kitchen window!” David A.
That would be on my deck. Not much room out there, David, and it's friggin' cold today. Good luck to them. L.
“Dear Lew, This friggen chronicle is a fargin hoot! Rodney Buckthorne III.” (Don K.)
All rights reserved 2007.
