Puzzle

Today, my sister-in-law challenged me to do the NYT 3-D word hunt. One of my words was "tares", which reminded me of a line from a poem of homonyms: "And a rake may take a rake to tear away the tares."[FN*]  Just free associating with word games and the potential need to defend an unfashionable word such as "tares" to other players if they are not familiar with it.

Of course, no one would question the word "rake" -- it's a long-handled tool American suburbanites use to gather up fallen leaves if they do not have an electrical device to chop up the leaves or blow them onto a neighbor's lawn -- but I got to thinking about how to explain the first "rake" in the sentence quoted above. It's a word that went out of fashion long ago.

A rake is always a man, but not all men are rakes. I think it's fair to say that rakes are part of the subspecies of men known as cads. A rake is, in my understanding of the term, a charming and unfaithful seducer, a man of privilege (almost certainly, a handsome aristocrat).

So not all cads qualify as rakes, either. To the contrary, a cad need not be handsome, charming, wealthy, or well-born. The modern cad can be rather a dismal lot, from all accounts, offering none of the pleasures or accoutrements of an affair (no matter how transitory) with a rake, but only the sordid mess of involvement with an entirely unworthy male.

As for modern American rakes, I'm not sure they exist. We do have an aristocracy of sorts. Someone like Tiger Woods comes to mind: a glamour boy with wealth and fame and good looks. But it seems to me that the rake requires an element of mystery and illusion that is incompatible with text messages and other modern technologies that leave traces of banality everywhere.

FN*: I first came across this poem in a 1924 book called "English for Everybody," without attribution.  The link above is to a California newspaper in 1878 (again without attribution).  However, I've also found a copy of it published in an Australian newspaper in 1873, where it is attributed to "Wentworth."