This is especially interesting because of its implication,
which can be variously interpreted as short being better than long or vice
versa. It always reminded me, appropriately or not, of one of my youthful
idols, the charming French actress in both Paris and Hollywood, my namesake
Simone Simon, whose nose was perfectly snub. As the film scholar David Thomson
puts it, “It was a small, pretty face, a little pinched around the nose and
slanted in the eyes.” Pinched around the nose, strikes me as nonsense; it was
the small, upturned nose itself that could perhaps be called pinched, but what
it would have done to Caesar and Anthony remains unclear.
Anthony reminds me of Anthony Weiner, who has a long, thin,
downward-pointing, really scimitar-shaped nose. It may have been part of what appealed to Huma Amedin, his
wife. If I may be allowed “a technical term no longer in use” (as my dictionary
tells me), there is such a thing as the Hamitic or (still in use) Semitic nose, which latter caused both Barbra Streisand and Barry
Manilow to be nicknamed The Nose.
No less characteristic is its opposite, the Roman nose, the
kind that is straight, with an outline that continues without indentation the
downward thrust of the brow. Though reputedly Roman, it’s a shape I have not
encountered on any Roman bust I have seen in museums. Could it be that the
sculptors eschewed and, as they thought, improved on it?
The second-most mythical one is the Pope’s nose, which,
according to Brewer, is also called the Parson’s nose, and refers to “the rump
of a fowl . . . said to have originated during the years following James II’s
reign (1685-1688), when anti-Catholic feeling was high.”
The third-most famous, or notorious, nose is that of Cyrano
de Bergerac, in Edmond Rostand popular play about him. The protagonist has an
immense nose, about which he is very sensitive, and has him woo his beloved
Roxane not for himself, but for his friend, the handsome but ineloquent
Christian. With tragic irony, years later, the widowed Roxane lets him know
that she could have loved him anyway--rather too late, what with her now a nun,
and him dying.
The nose is both famous and infamous as asserted in phrases
and references. In my personal experience, the actress Patti LuPone stated that
she did not know that her nose was big until she read it in a review by me,
this intended by her not as a compliment, I being neither Caesar nor Mark
Anthony.
Which brings me to what may be the fourth-most famous nose,
that of the great Roman poet Ovid, more fully Publius Ovidius Naso, suggested
by his cognomen
Naso, most likely incorrectly, as large. The Naso probably
came from his family name, and not from his “nasus” or its declension as
“naso.”
Among the lesser writings of this famed love poet—trice
married, the third time happily—is a poem in elegiacs, of which only the
tiniest fragment has survived. It was called “Medicamina faciei femineae,” and
was, according to “The Oxford Classical Dictionary,” a “handbook of cosmetics
for the female toilet.” I would like to think that it contained something about
women’s noses.
Latin poetry had much to do with noses, as in the term
“nasutus,” which meant large-nosed in Horace, but acute or satirical and even
sagacious in Martial. The word for nose itself has echoes in sundry languages,
thus “nez” in French, “Nase” in German, “nos” in Serbian, “naso” in Italian,
and so on. Spanish even has “narizon” for large-nosed (forgive my keyboard’s
lack of accents) and “narizota” for a large, ugly schnoz, the latter Yiddish.
It must all derive, I imagine, from Indo-European roots.
For the basic meanings of nose, my Heritage Dictionary has
several, including the sense of smell in a dog with a good nose, also the
ability to detect things as if by smell, the characteristic smell of a wine, a
symbol for prying as also in the adjective nosy or nosey, and for a very short
distance by which a horse often wins a race.
Oddly enough, it took Cicero to state the obvious but
relevant. He wrote, and I translate, of the nose as “so located as to be viewed
as a wall interposed between the eyes.” It would clearly not do to fail to keep
the eyes apart. And what Cicero does not, indeed cannot, mention, the nose is
what helps keep your spectacles on your face.
Let us now examine some of the chief phrases as yet
unmentioned in which the nose figures. They are: on the nose (of a bull’s eye),
led by the nose, to bite someone’s nose off, to count noses , to cut off your
nose to spite your face, to follow one’s nose, to pay through the nose, to keep
one’s nose to the grindstone, to look down one’s nose, to poke one’s nose in,
to put one’s nose out of joint, to turn up your nose, under one’s very nose.
And then there are the figures in history known as nosy, not
for their curiosity but for their large noses. Thus Wellington was nicknamed
Nosy by his troops, with the same moniker bestowed also on Oliver Cromwell. But
where does the expression for an inquisitive type, Nosy Parker, come from? Who was
this Parker? A pen?
Lastly, if there is a lastly, the words that merely sound as
if they had to do with noses, such as “nosology,” which is the classification
of diseases, but which I always wanted to mean the science and study of noses.
My
not quite last edition of “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” lists 22 items under
“nose,” of which I’ll adduce two. One is from a poem by Thomas Ravenscroft (17th
Century), entitled “Deuteromelia,” and runs: “Nose, nose, nose, nose!/ And who
gave thee this jolly red nose?/ Nutmeg and ginger, cinnamon and cloves,/ And
they gave me this jolly red nose.”
The other is a line from “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the Brian
Hooker translation: “A great nose indicates a great man,” When I was in the
army, I heard it differently: “Great nose, great cock.” This, I suspect, would
not stand up under investigation, but it made some of the shorter soldiers with
large noses feel bigger and better.
As for me, a beautiful girlfriend from the distant past,
looking at me in the nude, remarked, “It’s just the right size for me.” Was it
really? And what is the right size anyway? Who knows?
