Today’s word of the day, thanks to the On This Day website, is waltz. The word is used as a noun meaning “a ballroom dance, in moderately fast triple meter, in which the dancers revolve in perpetual circles, taking one step to each beat” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/waltz) as well as a piece of music written for such a dance. In the USA, it can also mean “an easy victory or accomplishment.” The word can also be used as an adjective, as in “a waltz tune,” or it can be used as a verb, either a transitive verb or an intransitive one. And as a verb, it can be used with the formal definition (e.g., “He asked her to waltz”) or with the informal definition (e.g., “She waltzed through the interview”).

Etymonline.com says that waltz refers to a “round dance performed by couples to music in triple time, extraordinarily popular as a fashionable dance from late 18c. to late 19c. (the dance itself probably of Bohemian origin), 1779, walse, in a translation of ‘Die Leiden des jungen Werthers’ from a French translation, which has walse; from German Waltzer, from walzen ‘to roll, dance,’ from Old High German walzan ‘to turn, roll.’

“This is from Proto-Germanic *walt- (cognate with Old Norse velta), from PIE root *wel- (3) ‘to turn, revolve.’ Related verbs include Middle English walt (v.) “to turn over, be overturned; surge, well up” (c. 1200)” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=waltz).

The Society of Folk Dance Historians has a webpage devoted to the history of the waltz. According to the SFDH, the waltz is “the oldest of the ballroom dances, dating from the middle of the 8th century. The German Ländler, a folk dance, is supposed to be the forerunner of the waltz. During this time period, a dance developed that was called the Walzer, a word owing its origin to the Latin word volvere, which indicates a rotating motion” (https://sfdh.us/encyclopedia/history_of_the_waltz.html).

The dance has not always been popular with everyone: “The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote of a dance he saw in 1580 in Augsburg, where the dancers held each other so closely that their faces touched. Kunz Haas (of approximately the same period) wrote, ‘Now they are dancing the godless Weller or Spinner’” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz). The wiki goes on, “Around 1750, the lower classes in the regions of Bavaria, Tyrol, and Styria began dancing a couples dance called Walzer. The Ländler, … a country dance in 3/4 time, was popular in Bohemia, Austria, and Bavaria, and spread from the countryside to the suburbs of the city. While the eighteenth-century upper classes continued to dance the minuets (such as those by Mozart, Haydn and Handel), bored noblemen slipped away to the balls of their servants.” It seems as if the usual direction of cultural movement is from the upper classes to the lower classes, but it may often be the opposite, and when it is, one frequently finds criticism from those in the upper classes.

So, “In the 1771 German novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim [The Story of Miss von Sternhaim] by Sophie von La Roche [the first financially successful female writer in Deutschland who wrote novels intended to be instructive to Deutschland’s young women], a high-minded character complains about the newly introduced waltz among aristocrats thus: “But when he put his arm around her, pressed her to his breast, cavorted with her in the shameless, indecent whirling-dance of the Germans and engaged in a familiarity that broke all the bounds of good breeding—then my silent misery turned into burning rage” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz).

And later, “The music struck up a beautiful air, and the dancers advanced a few steps, when suddenly, to my no small horror and amazement, the gentlemen seized the ladies round the waist, and all, as if dancing round a statue of the jolly god. ‘A waltz!’ exclaimed I, inexpressibly shocked, ‘have I lived to see Scotch women waltz?’ [The Edinburgh Magazine, April 1820]” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=waltz).

And the reason I chose waltz for today’s word of the day is that, according to the On This Date website, “The Waltz is introduced into English ballrooms; some observers consider it disgusting and immoral” (https://www.onthisday.com/events/may/11). One can only imagine what the critics of the waltz would think of the kind of dancing, and the kind of music, that is popular among young people today.

Oh, and regarding the ellipsis in the quotation above. What I left out was this: “The Ländler, also known as the Schleifer…” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz). I had no idea that there was a dance named after my family. But it turns out that Schleifer is also a musical term, signifying a slide, a musical ornamentation that “instructs the performer to begin two or three scale steps below the marked note and ‘slide’ upward” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_(musical_ornament)). Schleifer also refers to a dialect that is “a transitional dialect of the Upper and Lower Sorbian languages spoken in the Schleife region” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleifer_dialect). And Schleife “is a municipality of 3,000 in northern Görlitz district, northeast Saxony, Germany. It is the seat of the Verwaltungsgemeinschaft [‘administrative community’] Schleife (about 5,000 inhabitants)” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleife).

Then again, one of the translations of the Deutsch word Schleifer is “grinder,” and what does that say about a dance that was once called the Schleifer?

Today’s image is from The Sound of Music (movie) (https://soundcloud.com/tim-laskey/leandler-waltz-from-sound-of-music-138-waltz). Growing up, I had always just assumed that the dance in this movie was a waltz, but apparently it was a Ländler.