Ferpitzt.
Yiddish for well-dressed. Turned out. Dolled up. Suited up. Dressed to the nines.
In modern American culture, for much of the time, many of us dress down. The frayed T-shirt and crumpled baseball cap are so often the male uniform of choice. We drag this garb into stores, restaurants, family gatherings and even church. On the female side, it’s more complex, with a wider range of options, but still a far cry from my youth, in which my Mom and Aunt Roz bemoaned the fact that a woman they knew wasn’t wearing gloves and a hat when she entered a house of worship.
Does it matter?
Well, I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that a rant from me is unlikely to change an opinion in you. Stories, though–stories embody far more potential for change than do rants. Part of the reason I wrote The Man Who Wore Mismatched Socks is that it dawned on me that I could get my ideas across in fiction far more effectively than in presenting facts in logical arguments. I seem singularly ineffective in effecting change via logical arguments, actually. This probably has to do with exploring ideas that are just a bit too far out of the mainstream. One example will suffice: performing dental treatments via a Surgical Operating Microscope, with six levels of magnification and bright LED light that rivals the Sahara at noontime–this is the most revolutionary innovation out of all the many innovations that I’ve adopted in my dental practice. The operator’s posture and ergonomic comfort is dramatically improved, as well! When I treat upper second molars, I’m leanin’ back in my chair. And yet I’ve never been able to convince even one colleague to stop by and experience the delights of the Microscope.
So yeah, I don’t win logical arguments very often.
Any event, to the story. Let us allow Avshalom Budenkrantz–the Gantseh Macher, the “oiler of wheels”–to teach us the advantages of ferpitzt.
From the novel:
And so here stood the well-postured Avshalom Budenkrantz in front of his perfectly plumbed dressing mirror. Starched white shirt. Mirror-polished shoes. Boot-creamed spats. Silk suit, black tie, black-and-white checkerboard pocket square. Gold-plated tie bar, matching gold-plated cufflinks, all three said accent pieces emblazoned with a bold black question mark in sans-serif font. Elgin pocket watch set to precisely the right time, not a fingerprint on it. Diamond ring. Top hat. Lignum Vitae buttons all around, from shirt to suit to top coat.
And why?
Because the world was a crazy, inside-out, random and exceedingly dangerous place. And what Avshalom Budenkrantz had noticed during his fifty-odd years living in it was that a person who dressed well was attacked, be it verbally or physically, an awful lot less than a person who went around like a schlump. The anthropologists would no doubt mutter something about plumage, or visual clues to socioeconomic status within the tribe, or mating rituals even. All those labyrinthine academic theories may well have merit, but to Avshalom Budenkrantz, it was a whole lot simpler than all that.
Fools thought armor was metal. Fools thought armor was shield and chain mail; plackart and spaulder; cervelliere, bevor and rerebrace. Brodie helmets and picklehaubes. One of those newfangled tanks. The fortress at Verdun and a dreadnought battleship, for that matter. But Budenkrantz knew better.
Real armor was a sharp-dressed man.