Today in Persia (modern Iran) when you wear a belt around the waist, you are wearing a kamarband. Kamarband derives from the Persian words kamar (waist) and band (closed). You have closed your pants with a kamarband.

In the early 1600’s, the British military officers in India began to wear lighter kamarbands for waist sashes in place of the heavier and hotter waistcoats brought from the cooler British Isles. When those officers returned home and attended formal functions in their dress uniforms, they wore their cool Indian kamarbands, which they renamed cumberbunds. The cumberbund was an earned badge of Colonial service.

The English formal elite was quite taken with this new dress idea and designed their own cumberbunds to wear with tuxedos to black-tie events.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, as eveningwear the cumberbunds of the nobility were designed with the pleats facing up to stow and show the best tickets to the evening’s play.

It was all a bit of show and nonsense. Good clean fun. Tending somewhat to the funny and unusual in appearance and nomenclature. Even today, at formal festivities, the men in black are often held in place by cumberbunds. “Quite odd,” you might say with a chuckle, “what men do wear and name their clothes.”

There was another British fellow who was himself quite famous for fun and nonsense naming.

Edward Lear is the father of literary nonsense. He had a knack for mis-applying and even inventing words, especially words with a funny sound or unusual form of their own. Perhaps his most famous nonsense poem is the “The Owl and the Pussycat,” which contains these memorable lines of an avian sage and fanciful feline at their wedding reception:

 

So they . . . were married the next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

 

“Runcible” has itself become one of the most loved non-words in the history of rhyme. While, the dancing phrase “ by the light of the moon” has come to embody an affable, fanciful and dear-hearted play at words and life.

After they fell into the sliding-roofed gymnasium pool in 1946 at the start of Frank Capra’s film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” James Stewart and Donna Reed wander home hand in hand in borrowed clothes and wrapped towels singing loudly this song to their sleeping neighbors:

 

Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight?

Come out tonight, Come out tonight?

Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight?

And dance by the light of the moon.

 

It’s that owl and the pussy cat again. Pure unrestrained nonsense. No fear here.

Lest you be overly consoled, there can be in nonsense verse a worrisomeness around the strange words that there do appear. You thought the cumberbund a belt of lowly origin and haughty status. Could it be something else entirely unimagined?

When Edward Lear visited India, he saw in his own words what was really that fearsome sash squeezing so tightly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drawing a deep breath and exhaling quickly, the author on June 22, 1874 published in The Times of India (Bombay edition) his truer understanding of the clamping cumberbund in “The Cummerbund – An Indian Poem.” Here is a selected sampling of the lines, followed in turn by a curious reading of its own:

 

She sat upon her Dobie,

To watch the evening star,

* * *

Below her home the river rolled

With soft meloobious sound,

* * *

And all night long the Mussak moan’d

Its melancholy tone.

* * *

When all at one a cry arose, —

“The Cummerbund is come!”

In vain she fled: — with open jaws

The angry monster followed,

And so, (before assistance came,)

That Lady Fair was swallowed.

 

Oh owl, cat and buffalo gals, run, run, run!!!!

For by the light of the moon, the Cummerbund is come.

 

[embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47u5HOwQr1A[/embedyt]

 

Grandpa Jim