Getting utterly lost in Sardonia

I wouldn’t recognise a sardonic smile if it bit me in my humerus. Illustration by C Y Gopinath using Midjourney

I'd like to live to be 100," said the drunk man with an ironic smile.

My student, an 18-year-old lad called Justin, looked at me hopefully. "Is that any good?"

His exercise had been to make a sentence using the word ironic.

Being half-Cambodian and the rest British, his English was in tatters. His Gloucestershire father, who dropped final consonants exactly as Thais do, brought him to me in desperation. Justin was polite, hard-working and full of endless hope.

"I'm not sure a smile can be ironic," I told him. "Statements can be ironic when they imply things that are the opposite of what is expected. Like an Eskimo complaining that it's hot in his igloo."

"A drunk wanting a long life - wouldn't that be pretty ironic?"

"Yes, but his smile could not be ironic. It could be something else. Like sarcastic."

He mulled this. "That's not how I meant it though," he said.

"What about sardonic?" I asked.

"What does that mean?"

And there he had me. Sardonic is one of the few words, along with ersatz, bespoke and zeitgeist, whose meanings refuse to stay in my head even after I study them. I wouldn't recognise a sardonic smile if it bit me in my humerus.

"Why don't we Google it?" I replied brightly.

I had no idea we were diving into a rabbit hole where one thing would lead to another which in turn would lead to something entirely different until finally we would emerge triumphantly lost.

"Looks pretty straightforward," said Justin. "The Online Etymologic Dictionary says sardonic describes laughter that doesn't really come from being happy. "

"Exactly," I agreed, reading from another dictionary. "It's mocking, sneering, derisive and cynical laughter. It comes from either the French word sardonique or the Greek word sardonios, meaning ‘of Sardinia'."

"I like sardines!" said the boy. (This is how children of Gen Z speak, tangentially, so please do not be alarmed.) "Are sardines from Sardinia?"

Are they?

History has it that these small oily fish were once abundant around the Italian island of Sardinia and were therefore called sardines. But millennia before the fish, the people who came to live on this sunny island of Sardo (meaning "the whole garden") were also called Sardines. The island got named Sardinia.

The Sardines, it goes without saying, ate a lot of sardines. One might stretch the painful humour further, saying that today the sardines have mostly been overfished but the Sardines live on in Sardinia.

This is when things begin to get grisly. A certain Vladimir Propp, writing about folklore, notes: "Among the very ancient people of Sardinia, it was customary to kill old people. While killing their old people, the Sardinians laughed loudly. This is the origin of notorious sardonic laughter."

What on earth did Sardinians find funny about killing their old and feeble? I dug further and stumbled upon a certain herb, found in Sardinia, that produces facial convulsions in people who eat it.

"They die not long afterward, giving the impression of laughing because of the convulsion, and this laughter they call "sardonic" from the name of that place."
Did the herb have a name?

In 2009, scientists at the University of Eastern Piedmont suggested that the hemlock water dropwort, with a deadly neurotoxin, was probably the plant responsible for producing the sardonic grin. In pre-Roman Sardinia, it would be ritually fed to senior citizens who couldn't support themselves, before they were dropped from a high rock or beaten to death.

The Sardinians were beginning to sound like a cheerful lot, dropping grandfathers from clifftops.

This was roughly when everything took an unexpected turn. Sardinia and its sardonic smiles began to turn into a place I seriously began to consider adding to my bucket list.

Old Sardinians, it appears, routinely live well beyond 100. Sardinia was the world's first Blue Zone.

The term Blue Zone was coined by researchers who had been checking out the centenarians of Sardinia and had marked in blue an area in central Sardinia where an unusual number of centenarians lived.

This picturesque island where everyone grins sardonically is officially recognised now as home to the world's oldest living humans. In the tiny village of Perdasdefogu, with a population of just 1,765 people, there are 10 active, vibrant centenarians.

The Blue Zones project, originally founded as a non-profit by Dan Buettner, a National Geographic Fellow, has flagged five places - dubbed blue zones - where people live really long, and stay really healthy: Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece, and Loma Linda, California.

Regrettably, the project is now a commercial juggernaut. Their website offers recipes, T-shirts and longevity drinks.

I want to visit Sardinia, not to meet its centenarians but for something far more grounding: Sardinians routinely leave their keys outside their doors; anyone may enter. In a world where families splinter and individuals die in loneliness, Sardinians still live seamless lives without boundaries, in each other's warmth.

Oh, and they don't throw old people off cliffs anymore in Sardinia. Or should that be Sardonia?

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper