Funk and Wagnall Get Their Hackles Up

At work we have a phone system that none of us can figure out. The phones are so complicated we can barely answer them, much less program them.

I’m the oldest one in the office, and I rely on the young whippersnappers to figure this stuff out. However, they’re pretty happy to ignore the phones altogether and plead ignorance.

I rooted around in the file cabinet until I found a folder labeled, “Phones,” hoping I could read up on the instructions. The manual is bigger than a Funk and Wagnall dictionary. Not really, I just wanted to say the words Funk and Wagnall.

Can you imagine what it would be like to go through life with a name like Funk? When we were kids my dad wouldn’t let us say the word. He thought it was nasty. “I don’t want to hear you saying that nasty word again,” he’d say.

So if my best friend were the daughter of Mr. Funk, I couldn’t introduce her to my dad without getting my mouth washed out with soap.

“Dad, this is my friend, Stacey Funk.”

“I told you NOT to say that word, and now I’m getting the soap. Will you excuse us a minute, Stacey?”

This would have been very awkward. Sure, my dad was quirky, but there were probably other dads around the country who found that word offensive. What would that have been like to have a name that raised dads’ hackles?

BTW, what is a hackle? Spell check must know because it did not underline it. I’m going to ask Funk and Wagnall.

Well, they don’t know because they’re deceased and their progeny sold the encyclopedia and it went out of print in 1997 according to Wikipedia. I did find out that back in the day people used “Funk and Wagnall” to get laughs on such TV shows as Laugh In (“look that up in your Funk and Wagnall”) and Johnny Carson, (Johnny Carson, when he was playing Carnac the Magnificent on The Tonight Show frequently said the answers he was reading with his mind through a sealed envelope had been "hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar under Funk & Wagnalls' porch since noon today.")

As interesting as that is, it still doesn’t answer the pressing question: What is a hackle? I’ll have to ask Google again since Funk and Wagnall can’t respond from the grave.

Oh my gosh, you want to hear something nasty, look at these definitions I swiped directly and intact from The Phrase Finder when I looked up hackles: NOUN: 1. Any of the long, slender, often glossy feathers on the neck of a bird, especially a male domestic fowl. 2. hackles The erectile hairs along the back of the neck of an animal, especially of a dog. 3a. A tuft of cock feathers trimming an artificial fishing fly. b. A hackle fly.

Boy, you never know what you’ll find on the internet. A seemingly innocent word being defined with words such as erectile and cock. It’s shocking. What is this world coming to?

Funk and Wagnall are probably rolling over in their graves. And my dad, his hackles would definitely be in an erectile position and he’d be taking soap and washing Google’s mouth out with it.

And still, after all that, I don’t know any more about answering the phones at work than I knew an hour ago when I started this. Why do they build all those features into things if they make the manuals too big to lift out of a file cabinet? The whole thing is one big Funked up mess if you ask me, and I think Wagnall would agree, and so would my dad.