A lot of things have harshed my mellow this holiday season, including a bronchial flu whose tenacity makes me question the purpose of the flu shot I submitted to last month, a demanding workload during the so-called “quiet week” between Christmas and New Year’s, and the fact that the youngest member of my department, a colleague I’ll call Maria, maintains a serene ignorance of the phrase “harsh my mellow.”

“Dude, you are harshing my mellow,” I emailed an associate who had sent me a last-minute, complicated rush request late in the afternoon. I cc’d Maria, who called me.

“What does that mean?” Maria asked.

“This will take hours!”

“No, what’s `harsh mellow’? Is it like `marshmallow’?”

“No,” I said.

“Is it like `man, you’re killing my buzz’?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Old people are so funny,” she laughed and hung up.

Adorable.

I am accustomed to making no sense to Maria; it’s a generational thing and a cultural thing, and by “cultural” I don’t mean that I spout poetry or cite the Triumvirate of Ancient Rome as a viable management stop-gap compromise (although I have done these things) but that I was raised in the suburban (but so recently rural) Midwest by bookish parents who were both only children, and Maria is the product of a thriving ex-pat Cuban community in New Jersey, with dozens of attendant cousins and uncles and aunts, none of whom, apparently, ever declared that it was advisable to “make hay while the sun shines,” recommended that “many hands make light work,” or praised something by saying “you can’t beat that with a stick.” Proclamations such as these tend to cause Maria to tilt her head quizzically, sending her hair into the kind of wavy raven cascade that romance novel cover illustrators can only dream of.

I don’t mean to stereotype, but I have never personally met a Cuban who was not out-of-the-ordinary attractive. Maria is more than that; she has the kind of velvety allure that inspires men from every strata of the law firm caste system to invent reasons to drift by her well-hidden desk. She does not encourage this and would frown at my mentioning it (if she knew that I had a website, which ha! she does not) and has in fact navigated her brief professional life with such aplomb that I soon left off condescending to her for her unfamiliarity with my obscure sayings, in favor of seeking her approval of them. She has become a kind of litmus test. If she doesn't get it, it's probably not easily gotten. While I don’t mind being regarded as an eccentric – I have earned that – I do dislike being thought a freak. Thus, Maria is my freak-o-meter.

But, “dude, you’re harshing my mellow”? Why would she not know that and yet know “man, you’re killing my buzz”?

The latter is a 70's era piece of Cheech-and-Chong nonsense. The former, however, entered our lexicon in Shakespeare’s time, specifically in Act V of Hamlet when Ophelia declares, “Noble prince, whose thunderous countenance/Hath harshed the mellow of so many days.”

Okay, so. Dude, that's not true. I made that up. It's a lie. A complete and utter lie, albeit one in iambic pentameter (for which, yay!) Ophelia is already dead by Act V, as I’m sure you know.

According to Urban Dictionary, to “harsh a mellow” means “to be a killjoy. to ruin someone's happiness, whether they are drunk, or just really happy, with sad news or drama.” The delightful example they use is:

“Dude. Your house is on fire.”
“Damn. You totally harsh my mellow.”

According to World Wide Words, “It’s a development of US campus slang, in which in the 1980s harsh became a verb in the sense of “to mistreat”, “to be very unfair to”.

I think that’s what I like about it; that use of the word harsh, which is very Shakespearean, in that Shakespeare would so often take an adjective and make it a verb. (I would provide examples, but that would mark me as freakish.) Also, mellow is so much milder than buzz. To “kill” someone’s “buzz” is to point out that they have broken all the crockery and blinded the dog, or that their cool new free room and board situation is also known as "jail" or that the beat they're grooving to is the sound of the sheriff pounding a foreclosure notice on the front door.

To harsh someone’s mellow, on the other hand, connotes an unnecessarily brutal intrusion into a mildly productive and soothing activity, like abruptly calling into active military service someone who is peeling vegetables for a stew, or demanding emergency and exacting veterinarian services from someone serenely brushing a cat. Or ordering an up-to-the-minute “client alert” at 5 o’clock during a “quiet week.”

posted by Elizabeth at 5:13 PM