Ypsilanti Man Exclaims 'Jaunty Look, Petard!' Whenever an Argument Contradicts Itself, Convinced the Phrase Is a Star Trek Reference Anyone with Taste Would Recognize
YPSILANTI, Mich. — The living room of Walter P. Stanfield’s brick-front ranch on Perrin Street, in a quiet residential stretch of Ypsilanti roughly seven miles east of Ann Arbor, is arranged in the manner of a man who believes he is a custodian of something. A glass-fronted cabinet in the corner holds, in order of release, the complete run of Star Trek: The Next Generation on VHS, then DVD, then Blu-ray, then, on the top shelf, the same episodes again on a newer Blu-ray that is, he will explain, “actually 4K upscaled, which is a different thing.” A framed autograph from Marina Sirtis hangs above the television, slightly off-center in a way that suggests it has been there long enough for the picture hook to have migrated. On the coffee table, beneath a coaster, a paperback copy of Hamlet is doing the work of leveling the near leg.
It is, by any measure, a shrine. It is also, as a practical matter, the staging ground for a rhetorical maneuver Mr. Stanfield has been executing, several times a week, for the past eleven years. When someone in his presence contradicts themselves — at the monthly meeting of the Washtenaw County Board of Zoning Appeals, in the break room at Lansing-Scarborough Plumbing & Valve Supply, where he has worked in inventory management since 1997, at Thanksgiving, or on the comment threads of a local news website he has not yet been banned from — Mr. Stanfield leans back, draws a slow breath, and, with the composure of a man delivering a coup de grâce, says: “Jaunty Look, Petard.”
He says it, his wife has noted, even when the contradiction is his own.
“It’s a Star Trek thing,” Mr. Stanfield, 58, explained on Tuesday afternoon, seated in a recliner whose upholstery had conformed, over many years, to his exact dimensions. “Captain Picard used to do Shakespeare. He did it all the time. The writers knew it, the cast knew it, Patrick Stewart obviously knew it — the man was Royal Shakespeare Company. So ‘Jaunty Look, Petard’ — that’s when the other guy’s argument blows up in his own face. It’s from Hamlet. It’s a deep cut. If you’re a real fan you recognize it immediately.”
It is not, in fact, a deep cut. It is a mondegreen — a phrase misheard and reassembled into a new one — and, on linguistic analysis, it appears to fuse two entirely distinct things: the Shakespearean idiom “hoist with his own petard,” from the third act of Hamlet, which means precisely what Mr. Stanfield believes it means, and “Jean-Luc Picard,” the fictional starship captain played by Mr. Stewart on Star Trek: The Next Generation, who did indeed quote Shakespeare on the program but never, in seven seasons, four feature films, three seasons of the subsequent series Star Trek: Picard, or any ancillary canonical material, said the words “Jaunty Look, Petard.” The two phrases have, somewhere in the twenty-year archaeology of Mr. Stanfield’s television-watching, collapsed into a single utterance, which he has deployed with confidence, at approximately weekly intervals, to the enduring puzzlement of roughly everyone who has encountered it.
Dr. Miles Westergaard, a professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan and the author of Drift: How English Words Change Meaning Whether You Like It or Not, said on Wednesday that, from the standpoint of his field, Mr. Stanfield’s construction was “nearly perfect.”
“He has taken two phrases — one Elizabethan, one late-twentieth-century American — and produced a third phrase that preserves the semantic load of the first while activating the cultural associations of the second,” Dr. Westergaard said. “The idiom still means what he wants it to mean. The actor he thinks is delivering it did, in fact, quote the original source material on the program. The only thing missing, structurally, is the original. It is a sort of Ship of Theseus mondegreen. I wish I had been the one to produce it.”
Dr. Westergaard said he had forwarded a transcript of Mr. Stanfield’s usage to a graduate student writing a dissertation on what she had provisionally titled “Semantic Shortcuts in Lay Shakespeare.” The student, he said, had replied within twenty minutes with a one-line email that read, in its entirety, “this is the whole chapter now.”
The response in Mr. Stanfield’s own household has been less generous. Marlene Stanfield, 55, a dental hygienist in Ann Arbor who has been married to Mr. Stanfield for twenty-nine years, said she had stopped attempting the correction sometime in the spring of 2019.
“I used to do it,” Mrs. Stanfield said, standing at the kitchen island as her husband, in an adjacent room, could be heard explaining to a caller from a charitable fund-raising organization that the charity’s own solicitation materials were, in several identifiable respects, rhetorically inconsistent. “I would say, ‘Walter, it’s Jean-Luc Picard, and the phrase is hoist with his own petard.’ And he would say, ‘Right, that’s what I said.’ And I would say, ‘No, you said Jaunty Look, Petard.’ And he would say, ‘Right.’ And after a few years you just — there’s a finite amount of energy in a marriage. Some of it has to go to the thermostat.”
At the Greater Washtenaw Star Trek Society, a fan club that meets every other Thursday in the basement fellowship hall of St. Jude’s Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor, Mr. Stanfield’s phrase has become what one member described as “the thing we have collectively agreed not to address.” Dennis Halvorson, 62, a retired radiology technician and the society’s longtime treasurer, said the membership had, over the course of several discreet conversations conducted between 2017 and 2019, decided that the matter was best left undisturbed.
“We are all of us, to a person, fans of the canon,” Mr. Halvorson said, adjusting the enamel lapel pin on his cardigan, which bore the insignia of the Federation Diplomatic Corps. “We have strong views on the canon. On certain points of canon we would, candidly, die. But Walter has held this particular view for long enough that at some point it acquired, in the life of the society, its own canonicity. Our canon now includes the fact that, in Walter’s canon, Picard said ‘Jaunty Look, Petard.’ To correct him at this late juncture would require us to explain why we did not correct him at the earlier juncture, which we cannot, because the honest answer is that we were hoping he would stop on his own.”
Mr. Halvorson added that the society had, in 2021, briefly considered and then abandoned a proposal to produce a supplementary viewing guide that would “gently steer” new members away from citing Mr. Stanfield as an authority on Picard’s Shakespearean dialogue. The proposal, he said, had been tabled after it was pointed out, in discussion, that no such viewing guide existed for any other member’s misremembered lines, and that singling out Mr. Stanfield would constitute what one attendee described as “a jurisdictional overreach.”
Mr. Stanfield, for his part, has remained firm. In a follow-up conversation on Thursday, asked whether he would consider revising his phrasing in light of the information that Captain Picard had never, in any produced episode, film, or associated canonical work, said the words “Jaunty Look, Petard,” Mr. Stanfield was quiet for a long moment on the other end of the line.
“Well, he said something like it,” Mr. Stanfield said finally. “He said Shakespeare all the time. People who don’t really watch the show tend to forget that. He was a real Shakespeare guy. I think it’s fair to say he probably said it at some point, and even if he technically didn’t, he would have, if the script had called for it. It’s Picard. Picard has been hoisted by a petard many, many times. Go watch the show and come back and tell me he hasn’t.”
Asked, finally, what he would say if confronted with the contradictions in his own reasoning on the matter, Mr. Stanfield paused for a moment, considered, and then said, with the composure of a man delivering a coup de grâce:
“Jaunty Look, Petard.”