When I use a word...: Fillers
Authors: J. Aronson
Journal: BMJ (1998)

The editor thinks that the word “fillers” somewhat demeans these short pieces that sit at the bottoms of pages occupying what would otherwise be empty spaces. They used to be given the generic heading “Materia non Medica,” but Latin, he says, puts people off, and in any case the materia that they contain is often very medica indeed. So what to call them? 

Well, the Greek word for a filler was πληρμα (pleroma), a word that was later used by the Gnostics to mean the divine being; so, a good word, but not a familiar one, and the ban on bald Latin militates against unmodified Greek. 

Now journalists have a word for material that they keep in a box to use in order to avoid blank spaces, as much abhorred by the Fourth Estate as a vacuum is by Nature: they call it Balaam. But the word is pejorative. Eric Partridge, in his Dictionary of Historical Slang (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973) defined it as “journalistic padding” and wrote that it was “a strange perversion of the Biblical Balaam and his ass” (referring to Numbers 22:30). Perhaps it is because the material it contains is asinine. J G Lockhart, in his Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1839), wrote that “Balaam is the cant name for asinine paragraphs about monstrous productions of nature and the like,” and Brewer wrote in his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Cassell, 1870) that pieces of Balaam were “generally refuse bits—the words of an oaf who talks like ‘Balaam’s ass.’” In his Name into Word (Secker & Warburg, 1949) Partridge gave a different explanation: “Balaam [is] stop-gap matter for slack days or seasons. Disappointing stuff; but then Balaam is occasionally used for a disappointing prophet.” So perhaps a more enlightening prophet, Elijah, would lend his name to a higher class of filler? 

But I prefer to look for a word that implies entertainment, for that, not prophecy, is the chief purpose of the BMJ’s fillers. The dictionaries contain at least 40 words for different forms of entertainment, including burlesque, carnival, circus, confection, divertissement, olio, sketch, and variety. None of these is quite right; a sketch, for instance, is a different type of piece and a confection is too frothy. But there is one that takes my fancy for the purpose—intermezzo. 

An intermezzo (which literally means “between”) was originally, according to Denis Arnold’s New Oxford Companion to Music (OUP, 1983) “a short light musical entertainment interpolated between sections of more serious fare.” Perfect—just omit the word “musical.” And the word even has sexual connotations, which is always good for business. 

Richard Strauss wrote an amusing two act opera called Intermezzo (1924), based on a marital misunderstanding of his own, and there is a film of the same name, directed in 1939 by Gregory Ratoff, in which a love affair, albeit adulterous, between Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman (in her first English speaking film) is delicately portrayed. Its sentimentality has not pleased the hard headed critics (“this drippy thing”—Pauline Kael; “the ultimate in coffee table weepies”—Tom Milne), but Leslie Halliwell wrote that it was “quite perfect, in its brief sentimental way,” underlining the fact that the film is short enough for its syrupy qualities not to obtrude. Its theme tune (“slurpy” Kael called it), written by Robert Henning and Heinz Provost, would readily woo listeners to Classic FM. 

So, “We welcome intermezzi of up to 600 words...”?