I have never seen the Johnny Depp movie “The Libertine”, nor have I eaten at a restaurant named “The Libertine” (real), or had drinks at a bar (real) or pub (real) named “Libertine”, or enjoyed the taste of a “Libertine Ale” (real), or, to the best of my knowledge, inhaled the fragrance of White Musk Libertine (real) perfume.

But I do remember, when first stumbling across the word in my late teens, having an idea for a man who during the day pretended to be a conservative but at night donned a mask and costume to become “The Libertine”, scourge of the straight-laced.

Libertine

lib·er·tine

ˈlibərˌtēn/

noun

1. a person, especially a man, who behaves without moral principles or a sense of responsibility, especially in sexual matters.
2. philanderer, playboy, rake, roué, Don Juan, Lothario, Casanova,Romeo;
3. a person who rejects accepted opinions in matters of religion; a freethinker.
4. characterized by a disregard of morality, especially in sexual matters.
5. “his more libertine impulses”
6. freethinking in matters of religion.

Language is so wonderful! Even as you think you have a pretty wide-reaching vocabulary, someone, usually a writer, but in this case a very intelligent and well-read justice of the Supreme Court, will introduce you to a new word or phrase that you had never heard before.

This past week Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a scathing dissent of his co-supremes majority decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act against a court challenge by accusing his assenting colleagues of “interpretive jiggery-pokery”, which sent me scurrying to my dictionary to identify this phrase I had never heard before.

I’m sure more than a few people (OK, maybe it was just me) thought that the Supreme Court Justice was making up a word, since he had stated that, “Words no longer have meaning…” and suspected he was illustrating that point with the seemingly nonsensical phrase, Jiggery-pokery. However, it turns out he was using an English term that dates back to the late 1800’s meaning, “deceitful or dishonest behavior”, but it’s even a little more descriptive than that. In popular usage, it meant what we mean when we say “baloney”, “rubbish” or “hogwash” to indicate what has been stated holds very little or no truth.

Editors over at the Oxford English Dictionary traced the phrase back to a Scottish word, “Jouk”, which meant to skillfully twist one’s body as to avoid a blow. It seems pretty obvious that Scalia was writing that the majority justices had twisted their views or bent themselves in order to make words seem what they did not clearly (in his opinion) mean.

But it’s even a little more descriptive than that.

The word, “Jouk”, led to Scots using the word or its variable of “joukery” to describe trickery, or even worse, dealing in an underhanded way. Another Scottish word, “Pawk”, meant a trick. The words were eventually combined into the phrase “joukery–pawkery”, or what is referred to as rhyming reduplication. It eventually morphed into the English phrase “jiggery-pokery” that Justice Scalia employed. A real word/phrase with a real defamatory meaning.

It seems clear that Scalia was attempting to paint his colleagues as people who were willing to bend and twist themselves to perpetuate a trick or in a tricky fashion to arrive at the basis for their decision. Quite the insult, I would think, to his colleagues. He’s clearly not trying to win friends and influence people.

But he did broaden our vocabulary.