If we collected all the wax shed from all the candles used in SA during load-shedding, we could start our own Madame Tussauds. Not everyone would condone this, of course. Those who find wax models of people creepy and those who are afraid of candles would be vocal anti-waxers.
Wax is a contested substance. My mother was an extremely hygienic person yet she eschewed the use of earbuds to remove earwax, perhaps because she’d been warned that these flimsy devices could be swallowed by the ear canal and damage the brain.
One of her many mystifying instructions, issued repeatedly to any child within earshot, was: “Never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear.” I spent many hours as a child trying to get my elbow into my ear, but short of dislocating one’s shoulder, this is physically impossible.
Her caution might have been intensified by the oft-told family legend about the time my father blew a granadilla pip at my mother through a straw, and it lodged in her ear. After it was medically removed, my father swore blind that the doctor found it in the other ear.
Whatever the reasons, earbuds were not involved in our ablutions as children. You could say my mother too was an anti-waxer.
There are more anti-waxers in our midst than you might suspect, and they don’t confine themselves to protests against candles or the excavation of earwax.
While spending Burkina Faso’s gross national product on a tank of fuel for my car the other day, I overheard a customer at the adjoining car wash giving loud instructions that wax polish should not be applied to his car after it was cleaned, because wax was bad for the vehicle.
Having adjusted during lockdown to the pleasant feeling of a cool breeze soughing through the long-grassed meadow on one’s legs, many of us have now declared ourselves anti-waxers.
I’d not heard this before, so I searched for evidence to support this anti-waxer’s claim. I could find none, though there were some warnings. Sunrise Industrial, a manufacturer of cosmetic products for motor vehicles, was emphatic that cars should be waxed but also provided a list of “five common car waxing mistakes you should avoid”.
These included not waxing in direct sunlight, not applying wax to a wet surface, not using a dirty applicator and not applying wax too thickly. No mention was made of the hand movements that are most efficacious for good waxing, but anyone who has seen the Karate Kid’s wax-on-wax-off technique knows how that is done.
Incidentally, I have often wished my name was Wayne, because then I would be able to open a car wash (for motor vehicle owners who are not anti-waxers) called “Wax and Wayne”.
Some are under the impression that the word “wax”, as applied to the cycle of the moon, is used because, when it is not waning, the moon grows bigger, like a pool of wax dripped from a candle.
This is sadly untrue. The noun wax comes from the Old English weax, meaning the substance made by bees. The verb wax comes from weaxan in the same old tongue, which looks similar but has no links to hives. Weaxan meant simply to grow or increase, which is what the moon does when it waxes. Werewolves, by the way, are also anti-waxers.
In the 14th century, wax also came to mean the act of coating or covering something with wax. This was sometimes done to seal or preserve items; nowadays it is mostly in preparation for a painful pulling off of the cooled wax with tufts of bodily hair attached.
Having adjusted during lockdown to the pleasant feeling of a cool breeze soughing through the long-grassed meadow on one’s legs, many of us have now declared ourselves anti-waxers.
There are some interesting waxy sayings. “To wax lyrical” or “wax poetic” means to speak eloquently, or sometimes just speak a lot. This phrase comes from the old verb form of wax (to increase), which makes sense when someone is spouting a ballooning tide of words. Mind you, the other wax verb could also apply here: if one’s tongue were coated in molten wax, hot air would surely come out of one’s mouth.
Those who find it difficult to sit through the speeches and debates at annual general meetings and political rallies can also be called anti-waxers.
An obscure point in closing. When gramophone records were first invented, the grooves were etched on a wax disc which was then reinforced with metal to make a master copy. Later we got vinyl records, but before the 1940s, “wax” was American slang for a record. Therefore, anyone who objected to the mass marketing of music was an anti-waxer.
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