Literal and figurative toasts

TOAST, n., v., adj. My child recently asked, at dinner, why we were talking about “toast” when we raised our glasses, and was disappointed to learn that no grilled bread was immediately available. So of course I had to look it up: is there any connection between toast (grilled bread) and toast (to raise a glass or drink in someone or something’s honor or success)?

Yes! And it’s old!

The “grilled bread” usage dates to sometime around 1430. A necessary piece of context for the next linguistic development is that English speakers used to put literal toast in their drinks. Spiced toasts, apparently. None of my usual dictionaries wanted to get into the spice thing, but a 1709 issue of Richard Steele’s The Tatler specifies that it was nutmeg and sugar. A tasty mixture, though I’m not sure I want to dunk it in beer? Anyway, if you were ordering ale at a tavern in the 1600s, it would customarily come with a piece of toast in the mug.

Steele offers this explanation for the transition from literal to figurative toast:

It happened that on a public day a celebrated beauty of those times was in the Cross Bath, and one of the crowd of her admirers took a glass of the water in which the fair one stood, and drank her health to the company. There was in the place a gay fellow half fuddled, who offered to jump in, and swore, though he liked not the liquor, he would have the toast. He was opposed in his resolution; yet this whim gave foundation to the present honour which is done to the lady we mention in our liquors, who has ever since been called a toast.

Honestly not sure how the lady in question would feel about this story, which seems to be about a drunk guy ogling her and threatening to assault her, and then ever after she gets called “a toast” like we’re all merrily remembering the catcalling. But the good news is this might not even be true. The OED doesn’t credit Steele’s story. The Online Etymology Dictionary quotes it, and it does add a certain amount of texture—as well as explain the spread of this particular usage—but who’s to say if it happened?

Anyway, at first “a toast” is a beautiful woman whose health you might drink to, “the name of a lady being supposed to flavour a bumper like a spiced toast in the drink” (that’s the OED; “bumper” is UK English for an alcoholic drink, a usage I learned three seconds before typing this). Then, by extension, drinking to someone’s health is making a toast, or toasting, and now we can do it without any grilled bread or long-suffering beautiful women.

As for the adjectival use, as in “he’s toast” (he’s done for, a goner, etc.), the OED cites Bill Murray saying “This chick is toast” in Ghostbusters (1985) as the usage that popularized it. An earlier 1983 draft of the script had “I’m gonna turn this guy into toast,” but Murray ad-libbed the line. Per the OED, “this is probably the origin of the proleptic construction which has gained particular currency.”

Love to describe lines from Ghostbusters as “proleptic” (bringing the future into the present; anticipatory). No need to bother saying “turn her into toast.” It’s already happening.

Let’s raise a glass to these small-r romance novels:

A Novel Arrangement (bi m/bi m/het f, all cis, historical, fantasy) by Arden Powell. I love this series of novels set in a magical version of the 1920s; they’re like candy. This one is about seamstress and secret romance novelist Elizabeth marrying her truth love Arthur, and then working out that Arthur and his former roommate Jules seem very attached. She fully intends to do something about that, but then someone tries to blackmail her about her publishing career, which is distracting. She enlists help from both Jules and Arthur, and along the way they come to an arrangement. Indie published; purchased from Amazon in a previous year.

Femme Like Her (lesbian f/bi f, both cis, contemporary) by Fiona Zedde. This is spectacularly sexy. Nailah has some baggage from a past relationship and she’s decided she doesn’t date other femmes, but then Scottie comes into her life like a force of nature, sweeping aside everything else. I loved them both and rooted for them and they go on so many enviable fancy dates around Atlanta, which was fun to read. Nailah’s family is great and I appreciated the discussion of Jamaican attitudes toward queer people and what it was like for her to come out to them. Lastly, this is a little bit of a spoiler, but I kind of wish I’d had the warning: one character’s backstory includes an abusively coerced pregnancy. Indie published; library ebook.

In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I finished Ben Macintyre’s 2018 biography of Oleg Gordievsky, The Spy and the Traitor, and it was brilliant and gut-wrenching and quite literally made my heart pound.

I knew about Gordievsky from Calder Walton’s magisterial Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, an overview of the Cold War from the 1920s to the 2020s. (If you said “but those aren’t the right dates for the Cold War,” well, Walton will convince you otherwise.) Walton’s book is great, but it covers too much territory to really get into the lives of the spies, which is what I’m reading for. Still, even the brief glimpse of Gordievsky was enough to make me love him and seek out more, which is why I picked up the biography.

If you, unlike me, have not recently become obsessed with this topic, perhaps you will not know Oleg Gordievsky’s name. But he was the greatest spy of the Cold War, and it’s not close. (Get fucked, Kim Philby.) A KGB officer who betrayed the USSR to pass intelligence to MI6, Gordievsky was mind-bogglingly fearless, competent, clever, hardworking, and devoted to democracy. In particular, he enjoyed the freedom to listen to Western classical music. It’s not that much of a stretch to say he risked his life for love of Bach.

Among his many accomplishments are passing reams and reams of sensitive documents and memorized information to MI6; catching numerous Soviet spies; facilitating a good relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev by secretly briefing both of them during their first meetings; evading discovery by the KGB for years and years; and, oh yes, singlehandedly stopping a nuclear escalation in 1983.

This newsletter being what it is, an anecdote I relished was that when he first arrived in Copenhagen in 1973—posted at the Soviet embassy, where 14 of the 20 employees were KGB—he went to a sex shop and bought some gay porn. Gordievsky wasn’t gay, but he had never seen gay porn before, and purchasing it legally felt like the most daring use of his newfound freedom. He took it home and displayed it on his mantel. Of course, as a suspected (and real) KGB officer, he was tailed to the sex shop by Danish intelligence, who assumed he was gay when they saw him buy gay porn. Homosexuality was illegal in the USSR, so the Danes thought his sexuality might make him sympathetic to the West. They tried to entice him to their side by sending a beautiful young man well-versed in classical music to chat with him all evening at a diplomatic party and then invite him out for a drink. As Gordievsky wasn’t gay, he didn’t realize he was being flirted with—though ironically he was very much hoping for Danish intelligence to try to recruit him as a spy. The attempt failed. Fortunately for the continued existence of the world, a later attempt by MI6 was successful.

His escape from Moscow in 1985 is so jaw-dropping that it must be read to be believed (and even then…) In case you want to read it for yourself, all I will say is that he got out alive. This is miraculous given his particular circumstances—he had been recalled to Moscow because they suspected he was a double agent—and all the preceding decades of the Cold War, in which almost every Soviet citizen who spied for the West was caught, tortured, and executed. (Most of the Westerners caught spying for the USSR lived to tell the tale. Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer who sold Gordievsky out, is alive today. He’s in prison in Indiana.)

Oleg Gordievsky escaped to England, where he lived under protection and an assumed name. The story is not without its tragedies: his relationship with his wife and two daughters never recovered, since they were trapped in the USSR and suffered for his betrayal, though they did eventually join him in the UK. All of them paid a high price for his devotion to his cause.

In one last victory over the KGB, he died peacefully at home in March of this year. He was 86.

That's all for this time. I'll be back in your inbox on September 14 to talk about one or two historical romances from Judy Cuevas/Judith Ivory.