Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

a · A · a

abacus

accentuation

accompaniment

acnestis

ad hominy

adulation

adverb

aid, marital

airplane

and

arbitrary

architect (the verb)

awesome

b · B · b

back in the day

bean

bearless

beauty, depth of

belch

bigth

blab, blabber

bless

blob

bloggerheads, at

blurt

body

boo

books, randomly readable

boy

bubble

buckra

bum

but

c · C · c

celebrity

ch

chimera

Chinese sense of time

Chinese, would-be purification of

clever

clown

consonant

coot

cotton

cough

crawfish, crayfish

crustaceous

d · D · d

Daddy

dangling modifier

decapitate

device, narrative, what would you call this one

device, similar, but not quite the same

Dionysian, Apollonian, blended, briefly

discalced

distance, the verb

dubbed

dwell

e · E · e

e, short, the new

each other

ear, writing for the

-ed, -èd

eel

elephant

enough

errata

ew

expertise

f · F · f

fancy

feted

fewer/less

first sentence

flies

flulike

foil

fond

fool, e.g., Will Somers (or Sommers)

form

fox

free speech

frequent

Frisian

frog

fudge

full disclosure

fuss

future, the, caught for the moment

fuzz

g · G · g

gag

garden path phenomenon

gender neutrality, absurd

ghostwriting

gikl

gillie, girl

glass

Gmail?

gnat

Godwottery

going global

golf

gollywaddles

Google-logisms

grammar/glamour

granular

growsome

h · H · h

Haskell, Eddie

head

headlines

hiccup

hippopotamus

hopefully

humble

hunch

hyphen

i · I · i

ingenuity

“Is the pope fallible?,” alternatives to

itch

j · J · j

Jack

jejune

joke, linguists’, which I don’t get either

juice

jump

k · K · k

kick

kiss

kludge

knee

knickers

knickknack

l · L · l

laughing, in letters

laughs, textual

lawyer joke, earliest

ling, lit, don’t invite ’em

looks, poetic

lunge

-ly

m · M · m

mediablur

me-fear

memory, institutional

metanarrative, pig and possum throwing

me-time

mimi

mixed metaphor

modernism/postmodernism

mouse

music

n · N · n

name, fictional, too often taken for granted

names, common but relationship straining (I would imagine)

names, funny

names, good ones

names, not so good

names, unexpected

negative, double

nice

nitty-gritty

o · O · o

oaf

OED and me

off-off rhymes

Ojibwa/Chippewa/Anishanabe

omen

onesies

ooze

ouistiti

outdo

ox

p · P · p

pachyderm/pachysandra

page turning

pang

peeve

pet, peevish

ping-pong

plank

poop-noddy, noddypoop

portmanteau

preemptive

prescient

prick

prior to

proposal, wording of, proper

pshaw

pu-

puffery

pun

punctilious

puppy

purl

q · Q · q

Q-tip

questions not to ask an author, with answers

quip

r · R · r

racism

rank

recursion, excessive

redundancy

rhythm

robinhood

rumpsprung

s · S · s

-sh, sh-

shrapnel

sic

sigh

since

slave

slaver/slobber

slip

slush

smithereens

snazzy

sneeze

so

sonicky

spelling

splotch

sports talk

sportswriting

squelch

sting

strumpet

subjunctive

succinct

such

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

syllabus

synesthesia

t · T · t

ta

T and A

tare

tenrec

their, them, they, the singular

there

thigh

thong

though, the lazy

tight like that

tit

toadless

touchy

translation, of Mark Twain, into English

tsk-tsk

tut-tut

tutu’s, the two

Twain, Mark, little bits he never used

typos, going with them

u · U · u

ukulelelike

undertaker yarns, lost

undulation

upaya

urge

v · V · v

vim

vowel

w · W · w

wasp

wavelet

Weekley, Ernest

well

,well,

well-intentioned

wheatear

whistle

whiz

who, whom, tsk, tsk

Wikipedia

wisdom

wise, -wise

wobble

woe

woomph

writer’s block

x · X · x

Xanadu

Xit

X-ray

xylophone

y · Y · y

y’all

yare, yar

ylid

yo

you

you-all

z · Z · z

zeroth

zest, zester

zizz

zolotnik

zwischenzug

Zydeco

zythum

Also by

Acknowledgments

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Copyright Page

2JGw/OX

ELSIE: What’s that, Daddy?

FATHER: A cow.

ELSIE: Why?

—from a 1906 issue of Punch, quoted by Ernest Weekley as an epigraph to his book An Etymology of Modern English

When we reflect that “sentence” means, literally, “a way of thinking” (Latin: sententia) and that it comes from the Latin sentire, to feel, we realize that the concepts of sentence and sentence structure are not merely grammatical or merely academic—not negligible in any sense. A sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, a feelable thought, a thought that impresses its sense not just on our understanding, but on our hearing, our sense of rhythm and proportion. It is a pattern of felt sense.

—Wendell Berry, “Standing by Words”

Captain Smith … , happening to be taken Prisoner among the Indians, had leave granted him to send a Message to the Governor of the English Fort in James Town, about his Ransome; the Messenger being an Indian, was surpriz’d, when he came to the Governor, … for that the Governor could tell him all his Errand before he spoke one Word of it to him, and that he only had given him a piece of Paper: After which, when they let him know that the Paper which he had given the Governor had told him all the Business, then … Capt. Smith was a Deity and to be Worshipp’d, for that he had Power to make the Paper Speak.

—Daniel Defoe, An Essay on the Original of Literature, 1726

Introduction

This book includes two disastrous wedding nights, several touches of romance (aside from the long-deferred union of scratch and itch), and lots of animal life (eels, crabs, elephants, flies), but it all springs from things going on among letters on a printed page.

Where almost anything can happen. I’m reading a fascinating piece by Oliver Sacks in The New Yorker about a novelist who woke up one morning and couldn’t read, couldn’t recognize letters (see O), which makes my blood run cold to begin with, and I’m reading that people with certain ocular disorders “may be prone to visual hallucinations, and Dominic ffytche et al. estimate …”

Oh my God, I’m having one. What the hell kind of phantasm is “ffytche et al.”?

Then I go back, reread, and settle down. Some medical researcher’s name is Dominic ffytche. I’ve heard of such names. But I want to say to this man, “Dom. Please. I have name issues myself—Blount pronunced [sic] Blunt. That is no doubt one reason I’m so hipped on phonetics, that my own name is blatantly not spelled the way it’s pronounced, so I have to spend a great deal of my time arguing with people about how to pronounce my own damn name, which is a centuries-old English pronunciation and I am not about to change it. And I wouldn’t try to tell you, sir, that you should turn your y into an i and lose your e. All I ask of you is this: find it in your heart to capitalize one, at least, of your f’s. You don’t know what a start you gave me.”

What do we have, if we don’t have letters? The police chief on The Simpsons advised people to “follow the Four A’s: Always Act According to the ABC’s.” There is more to life than that, but it’s a good start. This book, like its only slightly worse predecessor, Alphabet Juice, is not, except in irritable moments, a book of advice. It does urge you to dwell upon the literality and the physicality of language.

Wait! Hold on a minute!

Almost lost you, didn’t I? I had the TV reference nailed down. (Quick, here’s another one: remember in The Simpsons when the local library had a big neon sign outside that said, “We Have Books by People on TV”?)

But then I drifted off into -ity words. Not nitty-gritty -ity words, like pity or Fitty (there, you young folks, there’s a hip-hop reference, and see blob), but longish … Excuse me, this damn phone …

Ah, well. Where were we? These days, with so many demands on our—what?—our attention, it may seem hard to bring words into close focus. Hard and also retro. But, to paraphrase Gerard Manley Hopkins (see foil), there is a freshness deep down in words, and you never know when it’s going to flash out. Here’s a little teaser from this book’s entry on garden path phenomenon:

… a review, by Janet Maslin in The New York Times, of a memoir by Barbara Walters:

Ms. Walters … will acknowledge this much: She’s old enough to have had the daughter of one of the Three Stooges …

WHAT? WHAT? Which one? Surely not Curly! …

Yet another TV reference. And for you sports fans, how about the pleasures of the narrow-box-score phenomenon: Zmmn. DvMrp. (See vowel.)

It’s a shame, isn’t it?, that people who use words in public don’t pay more granular attention to the words they use. On public radio I hear a concerned interviewee: “We—including the president—are not doing nearly enough to ensure that our children eat healthy food.”

Hmm. We, including the president. Why not throw in Young Jeezy, the World Trade Organization, Stephen Hawking, the Phoenix Suns, Calista Flockhart, and the supermodel Gisele Bundchen? Don’t tell me any of them are doing enough. When something is not being done enough—and when isn’t something not?—it brings so many people together, conceptually. I’m thinking maybe this book could use an entry on the interviewee we. But then the interviewer says: “Do you think it’s because the president doesn’t want to open up that whole can of worms?”

Here we go! Talking about children, right? And eating, right? Can of worms? Huh? My guess is, the interviewee will respond to that figure of speech in one of three perfectly natural ways:

1. “Funny you should mention that. Studies show that a can of earthworms contains more nutrients, without the trans fat, than three cans of SpaghettiOs.”

2. “Hmm. You may have hit on something. If someone would market high-fiber, sugar-free, organic school-lunch snacks convincingly resembling earthworms, it might go a long way toward solving this problem—anyway for boys.”

3. “Ew.” (See succinct.)

In fact the interviewee responds in none of those ways. She plows on ahead with her message. She doesn’t even chuckle, nor does the interviewer.

People! We’re using figures of speech here! Figures of speech have specific words in them, and words have specific sounds in them, and attention must be paid. I don’t mean pissy, constrictive attention, I mean lip-smacking attention. But not sloppy lip smacking. That spoils it for others. (See Dionysian, Apollonian, blended, briefly.)

There is a widespread tendency today, even on the part of people who write about English usage, to eschew finickiness. I’m sorry, but when it comes to wording, I intend to finick till the day I die. Because there’s kicks in it, as Louis Armstrong used to say. You can even enjoy slovenly syntax (see first sentence) if it conjures up an image. When the sign at a temporary warning light says, “Be Prepared to Stop When Flashing,” you can picture someone throwing open his or her raincoat while poised to desist. When you read in an obituary, “At the age of seven, his grandfather died,” you can imagine three extraordinarily compressed generations.

In a Whole Foods store, I am waiting as my eat-it-there pizza slice is warmed. The pizza will disappoint (there is no more excuse for floppy, doughy pizza than there is for floppy, doughy sentences), but I don’t know that yet. My heart has been warmed, and lifted, by the sign next to where my slice is warming:

HAVE IT WARMED IN OUR HEARTHOVEN

Heart-hoven! A Gerard Manley Hopkins word (hoven as an archaic past participle of heave), surely:

Soul-flung, rump-sprung, heart-hoven I rise …

Then I come back to earth. I lack the chops to fake even one line of Hopkins ( see foil). And what that Whole Foods sign means is hearth oven. But thanks to close reading, I have had a moment there, one that “saved some part of a day I had rued,” as Robert Frost wrote of snow shaken down on him by a crow.

Recently I read a book that stated flatly, “Language is intrinsically neutral.” That is doctrine, I think, passed down to linguistics majors (I am a proud English major) so that they can look beyond words, which resist abstraction, toward notions of universal grammar, which thrive on abstraction. To me, calling language neutral is like (no, worse than) saying “Pizza’s pizza. Depends on who’s eating it and where and when, what it’s eaten with, how it’s marketed …” Okay, pizza does depend, to some extent, on such considerations. I’m not an absolutist. But there is such a thing as pizza that hits the spot. Such a thing as pizza that’s unusually interesting, on purpose. Such a thing as pizza that makes you say, “Now that’s pizza.” There is also such a thing as sorry-ass pizza. And to an undismissible extent, those such-a-things depend upon the pizza’s ingredients and how they’ve been assembled, baked, and slid from the oven. Pizza essences. Alphabet juice.

Anatoly Liberman is a leading scholar of English etymology. “The more expressive human speech is,” he writes in Word Origins, and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone, “the more ‘echoic’ words it contains.” He adds:

The criteria for calling a word echoic are not clearly defined. Grunt is an onomatopoeia. A grumpy person may be prone to growling and grousing, though even without gr- in his or her name such an individual would be equally obnoxious. Consider hump, which rhymes with grump and means “a fit of ill temper,” its soft sound texture notwithstanding. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology suggests that this sense of hump is rooted in the idea of humping the back in sulkiness. Whether such a conjecture deserves credence is a matter of opinion. Kipling had a similar explanation of the origin of the camel’s humps; his camel was irascible and spiteful.

Fine. That’s all I ask from linguisticians: the hump (and the gr-) under the tent. Once hump, the noun, is in play, so is hump, the verb, in various meanings—and how about jump and slump. And humph. I rode a camel for four days in Kenya, and I can tell you that a camel has its humph’s, to put it mildly. Have you ever heard a camel being awakened at dawn, cinched up, and introduced, as if for the first time, to the notion that camels are beasts of burden? The camel’s response begins way up high like a teakettle at just-boil and works its way down through the expostulation of an archbishop being contradicted, the gurgle of ancient plumbing, the cry of an emeritus member of the Explorers Club (see device, narrative, what would you call this one) being violated in his leather chair, and on down down down into some deep body cavity unknown to man.

“The consonants and vowels of human speech,” writes Liberman, “cannot do justice to animal cries.” Agreed. Those letters can, however (see intro to Alphabet Juice), try. An attempt I have made to spell the plaint of the camel is this: Eeeeurghgr’gl’gl’gblglglglghg’blegh. Another is eeeurngh’gla blalala’bleagh’l’leh. Neither is exact. The protest of the camel is richer; it’s more crowded in there, more b’s, maybe—b’s and g’s and l’s on top of one another.

I know of no single English word that violates neutrality quite that expressively. But we all know many words that significantly engage the senses. Consider the political writer Paul Berman’s grounds for preferring fascist over totalitarian: “totalitarian, being abstract, is odorless. Fascist is pungent. To hear that emphatic f-sound and those double different s’s is to flare your nostrils.” (See ouistiti.)

Sonicky, the term I devised for Alphabet Juice, works better for me than echoic, or imitative, because it seeks to combine sonic (evocative of sound) and kinesthetic (evocative of body movement). The most expressive English words, hump among them, engage the ear, the vocal apparatus, and by implication other parts of the body: call me suggestible, but I can feel hump, which first appeared in English as part of humpback, in my upper back and shoulders. In the current dark economy of virtual, ephemeral assets—in which people receive enormous compensation for borrowing thirtyfold against other people’s money, causing it all to go away—shall we not honor intrinsic value where we can? I speak of the juice inherent in letters and their combinations. See, for instance, blurt, and bubble, and hunch. And how about this one: draw means to pull along, drag to pull along against resistance. Resistance resides in that hard g.

“Most etymologists are very reluctant to admit echoism,” writes Otto Jespersen in his 1922 book, Language. Under sound symbolism, the Oxford English Dictionary quotes Jespersen, from that same book, as follows: “The idea that there is a natural correspondence between sound and sense, and that words acquire their contents and value through a certain sound symbolism, has at all times been a favourite one with linguistic dilettanti.”

But that is only the first sentence of the sixteen-page chapter that Jespersen devotes to that idea. “Of course it would be absurd,” he says,

to maintain that all words at all times in all languages had signification corresponding exactly to their sounds, each sound having a definite meaning once for all. But is there really much more logic in the opposite extreme, which denies any kind of sound symbolism (apart from the small class of evident … “onomatopoeia”) and sees in our words only a collection of wholly accidental and irrational associations of sound and meaning?

For a century or so, that opposite extreme has been a linguistic tenet, even though Jespersen demolished it in 1922 by pointing out various forms of what I would call the sonicky element in language. Everyone, Jespersen notes, “must feel that the word roll, rouler, rulle, rollen is more adequate than the corresponding Russian word katat’, katit’.” He speaks of the fluidity of so many words with l’s in them. He sees “a natural connexion between action and sound in the word tickle” and its German (kitzeln), Old Norse (kitla), Danish (kilde), Nubian (killi-killi), and Latin (titillare) equivalents. He observes that “expressions for an uncertain walk,” like totter, dodder, and teeter, “may come to be felt as symbolic of the movement as such.” Not imagined, felt.

My impression, in fact, is that contemporary etymology is rewarming to the connection of sensory perceptions and sense. OED used to say pebble came from Latin papula and pretty much leave it at that. Now a March 2010 online revision concedes that “the first element of pebble stone may be imitative in origin (compare later popple), arising either from the sound pebbles make when walked upon or from the association of pebbles with flowing water. Perhaps compare Frisian babbel-stientsjes to little round stones washed up at the beach.”

Thank you. But I want to go farther. I am quick to agree with Otto Jespersen that if any word is echoic (but see discussion in Alphabet Juice) it is piss, but I want you to notice, as well, that piss is sip backward. OED defines fluff as “Light, feathery, flocculent stuff.” Fine. But OED’s etymology says fluff is “app[arently] connected with flue; perh[aps] an onomatopoeic modification of that word, imitating the action of puffing away some light substance.” Oh, please, with the app and the perh. Can’t we give fluff fully unhedged credit for sounding precisely like fluff? Fluff is head and shoulders better than flocculent stuff, because it eliminates everything (the -occulent st-) in flocculent stuff that doesn’t sound fluffy.

And let’s branch out from there. Does OED recognize the porn-industry word fluffer? (Yes, as of June 2010.) With “head and shoulders,” I have unintentionally evoked dandruff—how did the uff get in there? According to all rigorous sources, dandruff (or dandriff) is an etymological mystery. My hat is off to rigor, but I love to speculate. Can’t we start with dander and then, just to see what happens, fit it out with drift, fluff, even ruff ?

Let me quote (courtesy of Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English) Francis Bacon. Though he was rightly skeptical about alchemy (and would be equally skeptical today about the notion that he wrote Shakespeare), Bacon found a “silver lining” in it:

Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons of gold buried somewhere in his vineyard, where they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mould about the roots of their vines procured a plentiful vintage. So the search and endeavors to make gold have brought many useful inventions and instructive experiments to light.

To be clear, I don’t believe in pseudoscience. I don’t aspire to turn base metals into gold. I want to rummage around in base metals and see what I can put together. I’m a writer. I like to handle words and pass them on by hand. The letters of the alphabet are my stuff.

In response to an article titled “It’s Not Dry Yet,” about a resurgence of actual painting in contemporary art, Shane Neufeld of Brooklyn wrote this to The New York Times: “Paint has awakened from a coma in which the medium’s intrinsic, exuberant and uniquely liquid qualities were held at bay for the sake of purely intellectual and ideological concerns. It’s lovely to think that painting has the chance to regain its cultural power in a visually virtuosic medium.” My wife, Joan Griswold, is a painter, an expressively brushy one, who represents (lets there be) the play of light. I doubt I could love an artist of any other stripe. Abstract could work, if sensuous enough. The acrylic-layering abstractionist Robert Natkin said, “You need to look at a painting with the tongue of your eye.” Once, when guards at the Frick Collection weren’t looking, Natkin licked a Vermeer.

Literally licking written letters is not called for. Letters come from the tongue. But give me writing that reeks of sound and motion. Which is not to say sloppy writing. Sneer (and what a sonicky word that is) if you will, but I even believe in making every diligent effort to spell words correctly. Or incorrectly on purpose, as in, “I like it when a whole lot of butter is melting down in my hot baked sweeptater.” To my way of thinking, the following passage from a customer review (headed “Interesting, but not practical”) on amazon.com would be more telling if the last two words were spelled right: “I will not use most of the words discussed [in Alphabet Juice] in day-to-day proffesional writting.”

“Various media labs are now testing algorithms that assemble facts into narratives that deliver information,” writes David Carr in The New York Times, “no writers required. The results would not be mistaken for literary journalism, but on the Web, pretty good—or even not terrible—is often good enough.”

Not for my purposes. There’s something to be said for terrible writing, or for little bits of bad writing by someone you don’t approve of (did I mention first sentence before?), but not-terrible writing? I don’t even have any patience for not-terrible guacamole. (The chunkier the better. See Winona LaDuke at fox.)

The Web is a wondrous thing, Google wot (see Godwottery), but so many people who publish things on it seem not to be aware of that heretofore traditional stage of composition that involves reading over what you have written before you present it to the world. That’s one of the key advantages of writing as opposed to chatting: you can look at what you wrote and see whether it makes sense to, for starters, yourself, in which case it might make sense to somebody else.

It’s hard for me to believe that any algorithm can feel the wondrousness entailed in carefully, hopefully, fitting bits of alphabet together. And the feeling is crucial. Calvin Tomkins writes in The New Yorker, “I have a theory that the beauty of tennis, like the beauty of dance, is kinesthetic, in that we respond to certain shots as though we had made them ourselves.” Yes, and that’s how we may feel when we read something well written by hand.

I don’t believe in magic. (I do in prestidigitation, I’ve seen it done—has to be precise, I believe.) Nonetheless I am moved to make a connection between spelling, as in c-a-t, and a magic spell. The former spell seems to have come to us from the Latin and the latter from Germanic tongues, but both *spell-’s surely derive from the PIE root *spel-, “to say aloud, recite.” And c-a-t is as marvelous an incantation, if you think about it, as abracadabra (see Alphabet Juice)—more marvelous, because it works. Daniel Defoe, 1726:

The writing Words, in all Languages, agreeable to the Idiom of every respective Tongue, joining them in Monosyllables, joining the Monosyllables again into compounded Words, and giving every Letter its right Place, with its Accent or Emphasis, is a surprising Thing in the Nature of it, and if fully and seriously considered, carries us beyond Nature it self, ending only in Astonishment and an unresolv’d Wonder.

Note: As in Alphabet Juice, when a word or phrase appears in boldface, it is the subject of a separate alphabetical entry. In boldface italic, it is under consideration qua word or phrase as opposed to topic.

Abbreviations of reference books frequently cited:

AHD: American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

Chambers: Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (I realize this was originally Barnhardt, but the current, in-print edition is Chambers.)

OAD: New Oxford American Dictionary

OED: Oxford English Dictionary (online)

RHU: Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary

WIII: Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged

PIE stands for Proto-Indo-European. See Alphabet Juice. Sometimes, because I don’t want to have to explain what Proto-Germanic or Proto-Teutonic means (because I’m not sure myself), I use PIE somewhat loosely. So let’s just say PIE stands for Pre-historic, Id Est (That Is).

a · A · a

Can you tell whether a newborn is male or female from his or her first cry? Certainly, according to Richard Rolle of Hampole, in his poem “The Pricke of Conscience,” circa 1340. A boy baby first cries “a. a.”

Why? Because a is the first letter of Adam, “our forme-fader,” or forefather.

And, according to Rolle, a girl baby first cries “e. e.”

Why? Because e is the first letter of Eve, who “bygan our dede,” that is, who began our death, by allowing the serpent to inveigle her into biting the apple, so that humankind no longer dwells eternally in paradise.

Pricke! I know. In any contemporary context, “prick of conscience” would seem oxymoronic, and that is something, believe me, I am not even raising an eyebrow in protest of. But Rolle, at least consciously, meant prick in the sense of pang.

Here’s why I bring Rolle up: six hundred and seventy-one years after “The Pricke of Conscience,” we are more enlightened about sex-linked characteristics. But we still don’t know how to spell the sounds of the letter A.

You think capturing sound in letters is simple? Take a look at WIII’s take on eh:

eh \ ’(h) (n), ’(h) ai (n), ’(h) e (e) (n) (?), ’(h) a (a) (n) (?), ’(h) (n) (?), all with interrogatory intonation \ interj [ME ey]—used to invite confirmation or to express inquiry or slight surprise.

All those letters and marks, and those parenthetical h’s (whose relevance eludes me) and tiny n’s (for whiffs of nasality) are attempts to render various pronunciations of what Ernest Weekley calls a “natural exclamation.” Canadians, at least stereotypically, say “eh?” a lot to mean something in the range of “right?,” “n’est ce pas?,” and yo. But English speakers in general say “eh?” often enough that you’d think we would have figured out a better way to spell it. The sound is ay! After all, eh without the question mark spells a dismissive sound rhyming with feh, meh, yeh, and heh-heh.

Eh? can’t be spelled a, because a is a word, usually pronounced uh. Way long ago, a commonly used word was ay (or aye) pronounced ay (in Middle English, though, oo) and meaning “ever.” At that time, then, ay? might have looked like it meant “ever?”

Might we spell eh? by borrowing eigh from weigh and sleigh? Too heavy. Perhaps when the Normans took over Britain they experimented with the et from beret or the é from touché, but they must have shrugged, enh, and moved on to more pressing issues such as trying to replace will with testament and lawyer with attorney.

I say we should have stuck with the Middle English spelling of eh?, i.e., ey. As in obey and they. Too late now, though, eh?

See aid, marital and I.

abacus

This most basic of calculating machines started out—at least as far back as the fourteenth century—as a board or tray sprinkled with fine sand in which lines could be drawn: figures and geometrical diagrams. Maybe abacus only happens to begin with the first letters of the alphabet—from a Greek root spelled alpha beta alpha (not gamma, though—the English hard c derives from either a xi or a kappa). The Greek word may have come, says Chambers (OED declines to speculate), from Hebrew ‘bhq, dust.

See granular.

accentuation

Merritt Moseley, professor and scholar of literature and language at the the University of North Carolina at Asheville, writes me: “When people try to write Southern dialogue, they routinely have people saying anythin’. Or everythin’. Now I’m a Southerner and know a lot of them and I don’t think people say that. We say nothin’ and somethin’ (or sumpthin’), but anything and everything. So … is it the trisyllabic thing that makes us give the full ng on some words but not on others? Another funny place to get the anythin’ or everythin’ pronunciation is with British rockers trying to sing like Mississippi bluesmen, but I don’t think anybody says it naturally.”

I agree, and I guess the number of syllables is a factor. We can’t say Southern speech abhors a dactyl (dum-da-da), because we turn umbrella into one: um-brel-la instead of um-brel-la. (Insurance, though a comparable case, comes out more like two syllables: in-shunce, or even inshawnce.) I must say, I am always startled when people pronounce alphabet as alph-a-bit. That’s how OED pronounces it, but I want some stress on that -bet, and American dictionaries bear me out.

OED puts all the stress on the first syllable of anything, too. At its thickest, a Southern accent may reduce something to sum’m, but it tends to relish an emphatic -ng, as in thang, dang, whang, chicken wang, and weddin’ rang. In nothin’ there’s something to chew on, but anythin’ is just a string of little mincy-ninny noises, hardly consonant with folk music, much less the blues.

See you-all.

accompaniment

Louis Armstrong: “I work with two bands, the one on stage and the one in my head. If they sound good on stage, okay, I’ll play with them. If not, I just turn up the volume of the band in my head.”

When one is writing, does one have an ear tuned to some kind of readerly play-along? I don’t want to think about it. At any rate, one has got to trust the backup within.

acnestis

Given a cat’s suppleness and scratchy tongue, there is no such place as this on a cat, which is why a cat can be so smug. As for humans, there would be far more hermits if it weren’t for this, the only part of the body that gets larger, more active, and more conducive to maintenance of an intimate relationship as we get older. It is the spot, back between your shoulder blades, that you can’t reach, yourself, to scratch.

Which is so often—and don’t tell me it just seems that way—the place that itches. There must, for that place, be a more sonicky word, which I can’t quite put my finger on.

WIII doesn’t extend itself to acnestis, but it’s a venerable term—OED traces it back to 1743—and not without currency, perhaps because it appears in Ammon Shea’s 2008 book about reading the entire OED in one year. Wordsmith.org cites, from a Malaysian newspaper in 2008, “the last five months have felt like an acnestis upon our collective soul,” and various online book purveyors offer a British-published paperback titled Acnestis in Elysium. (Even in paradise, there’s always something.)

Acnestis derives from ancient Greek, either from the word for spine or cheese grater, or from a- meaning un- (more or less) and knestos, meaning scratched.

ad hominy

The fallacy of asserting or assuming that a statement is invalid—or, okay, that it is valid—because it was made by someone from the South.

adulation

Why is this pronounced with a j sound where the d is? Same in education, gradual, modular, schedule. And in idgit for idiot, Injun for Indian, didja and wouldja for did ya and would ya. Instead of tripping from the hard-palate d to the soft-palate yoo, the tongue wants to compromise on j. Somehow we manage to say adyoo for adieu, though, maybe because it’s French.

The key syllable in adulation, pronunciation aside, is ul, from the Latin word for tail. To adulate is to fawn, to flatter, to approach someone with tail wagging.

adverb

Adverbs get a bad rap. To be sure they can be (intentionally or unintentionally) flaccid. In 2006, a group appointed by Congress presented President Bush with a report outlining new approaches to the invasionary quagmire in Iraq. The president’s response to the report was that it had “some really very interesting ideas.”

But consider the adverb in this passage from a poem by Sarah Lindsay, “An Old Joke,” in which she imagines an ancient girl’s succumbing to a horrible gut-spilling disease:

They buried the husk of her

in the front room,

tiredly crying.

Not a common word, tiredly, and not euphonious—wearily would be more conventionally poetic. But tiredly is inspired, somehow. I wonder if Lindsay remembered it from the short story “The Best of Everything” by Richard Yates. At the story’s beginning, a woman named Grace recalls that after her first date with a man named Ralph, her roommate, Martha, was scornful of him: “Isn’t he funny? He says ‘terlet.’ I didn’t know people really said ‘terlet.’” Martha prefers men who use “words like ‘amusing’ all the time.”

Well, Martha is a college graduate, lah-di-dah. Now it’s the night before Grace will marry Ralph. To give the two of them some privacy for a change, so they can consummate their love a night ahead of time, Martha is graciously spending the night elsewhere. When Grace hopefully presents herself to Ralph in her new negligee, however, Ralph says he has to rejoin the boys, who are throwing him a party. But first, “I’m fulla beer. Mind if I use ya terlet?”

Let’s turn our eyes from jerky Ralph and poor Grace for just a moment to ask, what is a sufficiently polite yet straightforward term for the john? Toilet, euphemistic as its derivation may be (originally, from toile, a cloth), has itself a coarse ring in English. I guess bathroom will have to serve, but inasmuch as a half bath has no bathing facilities—oh, never mind.

It’s not terlet in itself that brings home to Grace and us how dismal her marriage is likely to be, but the word door does resonate, as they say.

And Ralph is on his way out on the town, after showing his thoughtfulness by reminding Grace to show up for the wedding.

“She smiled tiredly and opened the door for him. ‘Don’t worry, Ralph,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there.’”

aid, marital

The rock my marriage is founded on is one simple four-letter word:

Hunh?

I (the party of the first part, let us say, only for the sake of convenience not priority) may sometimes speak in what I might stipulate to be a perceived mumble. And the Mrs. has suffered a spot or two of OMOY (Overloud Music of Yore)–related hearing loss. And vice versa. And at least one of us—who, arguably, could on occasion be me, though not necessarily usually, from my point of view—has a tendency, yes, okay, a perceived tendency, to address the other in a normal (not to say murmuring) tone of voice from a room or two or three away. AS IF I HAVE NOTHING MORE TO DO WITH MY LIFE THAN HOVER CONSTANTLY IN CONVERSATIONAL-TONE RANGE!

So we frequently do not hear each other distinctly the first time. And there’s always the possibility that a given statement is something that she or I, as the case may be, will want to hear—or at least something the not-hearing of which will leave himself or, indeed, herself open to the charge of:

Not listening.

Here is what I have learned: that a person is more likely to listen to something that he or she has asked to hear repeated. Well, not fully repeated. It is acknowledged, I believe, on the part of both parties, that the addressed party should, ideally, say Hunh? before the other party finishes making the statement in question, so that he or she—the original speaking person—will not have to say the whole thing over again, FOR GOD’S SAKE.

Often, it is even a good idea to ask a spouse to repeat a statement that one thinks one has heard distinctly. Once I told the Mrs. that she looked “perfect.” As indeed she did.

“Hunh?” she said, which was fortunate because she thought I had said she looked “puffy.”

I realize now that eh? would be nicer.

See A.

airplane

It was aeroplane before such a thing existed, and still was aeroplane to the Wright brothers in 1905 and as late as 1934, and still is aeroplane in British English, though according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, that spelling is acknowledged even in the UK to have “a distinctly old-fashioned air.” Let’s not get off into that other meaning of air. Let us ask, why -plane?

From Latin planus, flat, we get plane geometry, a higher plane, the Great Plains, and the verb plane as in when your motorboat gets down onto an even keel. When people dreamed of an aeroplane, it was because they had given up on mechanical wings that flapped. Eventually aeronautic research established that fixed wings had to be rounded and pitched.

So planes take us up, now, but the miracle of human flight has become, if I may speak for humanity, a downer. In my occupation as a loosely based wordsmith, I have flown many, many times. Most recently from Chicago to New York. The day before, I had flown vice versa. During that night’s taping of the radio show Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, I had somehow not managed to come up with many—with any—scintillating remarks in time to get them in edgewise, and on the following morn I had awakened earlier than necessary and had lain there heavy-headed with worse than usual sinus congestion. Is there anything more boring than the symptoms of chronic sinusitis? I arose and dragged myself to O’Hare airport, where I have spent far too many involuntary hours to ever feel in any way pleased to be there yet again. And I had been booked into a window seat.

I don’t care what the Wright brothers, if they have some way of reading down upon this, think. I have looked out of all the airplane windows I ever need to look out of. To be sure, a middle seat is worse; I don’t even want to talk about being in a middle seat. But in a window seat you are crammed up against a wall—the wall between you and cloudland, I know, but a wall. A plastic wall. A wall that makes me want to be somewhere, with somebody, not here in jam-packed limbo cheek by jowl with people I only hope will not try to engage me in conversation.

I tried to change to an aisle seat, but no dice. By virtue of the many miles I have flown, I possess credits exchangeable for upgrades to first class, which I define as a part of the airplane where there are padded, uncontested places to put your elbows. I wait-listed myself. I was fourth in line. The three ahead of me got the only slots. As so often happens.

So there I sat by the window. Praying that the other two seats would not be filled by extra-large, hairy, leg-jiggling people dressed for the gym. Then here those seat fillers came. Nice-looking people. But large. Not fat, but long limbed, expansive, and the worse of it: ebullient. From the Latin for boiling, that is to say, bubbling over.

He bubbled into the middle seat, she into the aisle. An African-American woman in her late thirties, I would say, with her adolescent son—they looked alike in a fresh-faced way, and he called her Mom. Both of them were beaming.

“It’s his first flight!” she said.

Ah.

“And his sixteenth birthday!” she said.

Ah.

“Could I look out the window?” he asked, craning around me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t take the middle—” And then it hit me. First, that he was asking only that I pull up the window shade. Second …

“Would both of you like to move down, and I’ll take the aisle seat?”

“Would you?” she said. “So nice of you.”

I took the aisle. Which was better. But I was still on an airplane, and my head all clogged up with snot.

As we took off, the youth’s face was pressed against the window, and the rest of him was bouncing in his seat. “We’re going to hit a bus!” he cried, delighted. “Highways! We’re flying over cars!”

She was trying to peer out over his shoulder. She turned to me and said, “It’s just my second flight,” she said.

Ah. I was trying to read about Afghanistan.

They rejoiced between themselves for a while, and then for an hour or so, they slept. Both of them. Strangely chummy, this teenager and mom. Did I ever fly with my poor mother? If I did, it wasn’t like this.

They awoke, smiled, stretched. He had his face in the window again. She smiled at me and confided: “I arranged something special for him.”

“Mom,” he said kiddingly (I can remember saying that to mine, only desperately), “don’t talk to strangers.”

“Oh, I’m not a stranger,” I said, not being a terrible person, “I’m your row mate.” But I was still down.

She looked expectant. And then, the announcement:

“We have a special passenger on board. This is his sixteenth birthday. And this is his first flight, ever. Let’s have a big hand for … Roy!”

General applause. Air passengers are easily led. But “No!” Mom said—“LaRon!” Then she looked at where LaRon was sitting, and back over at me.

“Are you Roy?” she said.

I said I was.

“Yo, Roy!” said LaRon. “Now we’re both Roy!” We shook hands across Mom’s lap, and he turned, bouncing again, to watch us land. “Ohhhh me. Ohhhh-oh. We’re coming down over a bridge! Ohhhh! Oh!”

On the ground I took their picture on their phone. Then I took it again on mine. I show it to people. LaRon is holding up the certificate the flight attendant had given him, fortunately (though I don’t think he would have minded) without filling in his name.

and

Perhaps by way of twitting the sort of English teacher who insists that one must never, ever, begin a sentence with and, Garrison Keillor begins each installment of his daily literary-history spot on public radio as follows: “And here’s the Writer’s Almanac for July 10, 2010,” or whatever. It’s as if the listener were arriving in the midst of an extended conversation, which after all is what public radio is. We may think of Wally Ballou, the nasaltoned roving reporter played by Bob Elliott and created by him and Ray Goulding, the great Bob and Ray. Wally would always come bouncing in on the second beat of his self-introduction: “-ly Ballou here!”

And leans forward, provides action for a spring ahead. But, on the other hand, brings the reader/listener to a halt, a pre-turnaround snag. Consider the following statement:

“You gotta do what you gotta do and sometimes you do it with tears in your eyes.”

That is what reputed Genovese capo Thomas Ricciardi testified that mob hit man Michael “Mikey Cigars” Coppola told him, and other pals, with regard to his, Coppola’s, whacking of their associate John “Johnny Coca-Cola” Lardiere.

To recap: according to Ricciardi, Coppola admitted to Ricciardi and others that he, Coppola, had whacked Lardiere. And this, Ricciardi alleged, was Coppola’s philosophical gloss on the thing:

“You gotta do what you gotta do and sometimes you do it with tears in your eyes.”

This new dimension to an old cliché befits a time when wiseguys are reduced to being named after soft drinks. But who would have expected the sentiment to be so nicely metrical? It flows as if inevitable, as if it comes from an age-old ballad:

Let’s say some day I gotta shoot you,

Or you, or you, or all of you guys.

You gotta do what you gotta do

And sometimes you do it with tears in your eyes.

On occasion—you know this is true—

You off your old lady. Everyone dies.

You gotta do what you gotta do

And sometimes you do it with tears in your eyes.

What I find most striking about Coppola’s homily, however, is that he didn’t say but sometimes you do it—shoot a friend and colleague to death in cold blood—with tears in your eyes. That would have suggested a qualm, a touch of regret.

He said and. As in, “I did what I had to, and I did it even though it made me feel a little blue.” Or, “I did it, and I did it in the right spirit, too.” With but, there’s an element of grimness. With and, the whacker’s tears make his response to duty’s call even finer. Who says hit men don’t need to feel good about themselves?

But not everyone has a hit man’s moral agility. The other day in the grocery store I heard a small child mutter to an adult, “I’m sorry.”

“And … ?” said the adult.

“An’ won’t do it again,” the child said quickly.

“But …”

“But … I ‘said that last time’? And … but—okay okay what what?” said the child.

arbitrary

The notion that the connection between words and their meaning is arbitrary, for crying out loud, is generally credited to Ferdinand de Saussure. What made Saussure so sure? Well, he had special insights into letters and their connections. He said he experienced the French letter-sound a, for instance, as

off-white, approaching yellow; in its consistency, it is something solid, but thin, that cracks easily if struck, for example a sheet of paper (yellowed with age) drawn tight in a frame, a flimsy door (in unvarnished wood left white) that you feel would shatter at the slightest blow, an already broken eggshell that you can keep cracking by pressing on it with your fingers. Better still: the shell of a raw egg is a (whether in colour or in the consistency of the object), but the shell of a hard-boiled egg is not a, because of the feeling you have that the object is compact and resistant. A yellowed pane of glass is a; a pane of ordinary colour, offering blueish reflections, is the very opposite of a, because of its colour, and despite its consistency being just right.

The phenomenon of synesthesia—one aspect of which is associating letters with colors—is discussed in Alphabet Juice. I’m always interested in connections between letters and the senses. But in my opinion, the concept of sonicky helps us appreciate the nature of, say, blob a lot more than all that eggshell shit helps us appreciate the nature of French a.

Okay, now, this just in. Here’s a more serious rejoinder to the notion that words are arbitrary: not even letters are. In his New Yorker piece about a writer who was deprived, by a stroke, of the ability to read, Oliver Sacks quotes the French neurologist Jules Dejerine, who had studied the brain of a man who suffered the same loss. Dejerine concluded that “letter shape is not an arbitrary cultural choice. The brain constrains the design of an efficient writing system so severely that there is little room for cultural relativism. Our primate brain only accepts a limited set of written shapes.”

See O.

architect (the verb)

On Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! a caller said his work was “architecting software.” Peter Sagal, our host, asked him whether that was the same as “designing software.”

Caller: Designing is a more user-friendly term.

Peter: And architecting is what you say when you want to sound snazzy.

Caller: Exactly.

awesome

Sadly diminished by overuse. Time magazine should not be reduced to describing an Olympic boxer’s victories as “jaw-droppingly awesome.”

b · B · b

Bee, the insect, perhaps goes back to PIE root *bhi-, to fear, or more specifically to quiver, and by extension to buzz. (The word bees sounds like a buzz.) Be, the verb, in its many forms (am, are, is, was, were) is, to quote Etymonline.com, “the most irregular verb … and the most common” verb in Modern English. Ernest Weekley called it “an accidental conglomeration” of Old English dialects. The b parts go back to PIE base *bheu-, grow or become.

A bee, we may assume, never brings up to itself the question, “to bee, or not to bee.” It’s too busy. It just be’s that way.

back in the day

No one under fifty (and that’s being generous) should be allowed to get away with saying “back in the day.”

bean

Nobody knows the source of this ancient English word. Baked and canned in England, beans are close to the staff of life, but—you know critics are forever trying to work out what manner of person Shakespeare was? I’ll tell you one thing: he didn’t like beans. In his whole corpus, beans come up only twice, in both cases they’re food for horses, and in one of those they are “as dank … as a dog” and will make a horse sick.

Bean meaning head we may associate with P. G. Wodehouse’s utterly unaggressive Bertie Wooster: “I’m a bit short on brain myself; the old bean would appear to have been constructed more for ornament than for use, don’t you know.” (Remarkable that the same actor, Hugh Laurie, has por trayed both the blithe British nincompoop Bertie and the acerbic American wizard Dr. House so well on TV.)

But bean meaning head is primarily an American word, and a violent one. It first crops up in baseball slang, in connection with attempts to hit people in the head with a pitch. In 1905 a sportswriter wrote that the distinguished Native American pitcher Charles Albert “Chief” Bender “places much reliance on the bean ball.”

This was back before batters wore any sort of head protection. Not until 1971 did the major leagues make hard plastic batting helmets mandatory, and even when you’re wearing one of those, having a hardball thrown at your head is a lot like being shot at. One major leaguer and several minor leaguers have been killed by beanballs, and quite a few prominent players have suffered brain damage. Part of the game. Christy Mathewson was not only one of the greatest pitchers but also an esteemed Christian gentleman (never played on Sunday) and high-minded straight arrow. In 1912 there was published under his name a book, which conceivably—he was class president at Bucknell—he wrote. According to that book, Pitching in a Pinch: or, Baseball from the Inside, when a rookie came to bat, the catcher would warn him against the pitcher’s “mean ‘bean’ ball … . There’s a poor ‘boob’ in the hospital now that stopped one with his head.” Then the catcher would call for the beanball, and if it drove the rookie away from the plate, “Bing! Up comes another ‘beaner.’” If the rookie showed fear again, the catcher would conclude, “He won’t do. He’s yellow.”

I’ll bet it’s that Bing, more than the shape of a bean, that gave rise to heads being called beans. Bam. Bong. Boink. OED cites six examples of bean meaning head, 1905–1924, and every one entails violent cranial contact—even one from Wodehouse: “Have I got to clump you one on the side of the bean?”

Christy Mathewson describes a battle of wits between Bender and the Giants’ Freddie Snodgrass. Snodgrass had managed to reach base twice by getting hit harmlessly. When he came to bat next, “the Indian showed his even teeth in the chronic grin” and told Snodgrass to look out.

“Then Bender wound up and with all his speed drove the ball straight at Snodgrass’s head.”

Didn’t hit him that time. Got him out on the next couple of pitches, though.

Ty Cobb, who was vicious but shrewd, called Bender the most intelligent pitcher he ever faced, and Mathewson praises Chief Bender as “brainy.” (Wouldn’t you think we’d know where the word brain came from? OED tells us brawn was “originally a part suitable for roasting,” and therefore from an old Germanic word meaning to roast; but brain we are able only tentatively to associate, maybe, with a Greek word for forehead.)

According to Bender’s biographer, Tom Swift, he was paid less than half what other star pitchers on his own team made, and he endured a lot of bigoted razzing—derisive war whoops, that sort of thing. I checked his record for hitting batters. In the 1903 season, as a rookie, he hit one (not necessarily in the head, of course) roughly every 10 2/3 innings. I’d say he was establishing a reputation, like in prison. If he had kept up that pace, he would have set the all-time record for hit batsmen, and maybe killed one of them. But over the other fifteen years of his career, he hit only one batter every 35^2/3 innings. The great paleface pitcher Walter Johnson, who was said to be at pains to avoid hitting batters for fear he would kill them, hit one every twenty-nine innings, which is slightly more often than Bender’s lifetime average even including his formidable rookie year.

Getting back to the comestible bean, you might like to know that an old cowboy term for beans is “prairie strawberries.”

bearless

Doesn’t mean without bears. Doesn’t mean anything now, but before becoming obsolete it meant, according to OED, barren, not bearing anything.

Compare toadless.

beauty, depth of

What a poor tragic sap was Sir Thomas Overbury, the first person known to have written that beauty is only skin deep. It’s in his poem, first published in 1614, “The Wife”:

And all the carnall beauty of my wife

Is but skin-deep, but to two senses known;

Short even of pictures, shorter liv’d then life,

And yet the love survives, that’s build thereon:

For our imagination is too high,

For bodies when they meet, to satisfie.

Pretty much as a result of that poem, Overbury was murdered—poisoned bit by bit, like Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, only terminally. In Overbury’s notorious story, the closest equivalent to the Cary Grant character was in on the poisoning. To top it all off, Overbury seldom gets credit for his skin-deep line. Anne Somerset never mentions it in her absorbing 524-page book about the case, Unnatural Murder: Poison at the Court of James I. What is worse, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations credits the image not to Overbury but to John Davies of Hereford, who borrowed it for a heavy-handed spoof of Overbury’s poem, “A Select Second Husband for Sir Thomas Overburie’s Wife”:

Beauty’s but skin-deepe; nay it is not so:

It floates but on the skin beneath the skin,

That (like pure Aire) scarse hides her fullest flow:

It is so subtill, vading, fragile, and thin:

Were she skin-deepe, she could not be so shallow

To win but fooles her puritie to hallow.

That came out in 1616, by which time Overbury was dead. He had attained great influence in King James’s profoundly corrupt court and had shared that influence with a flaxen-haired young man named Robert Carr, who, if you don’t mind a weak chin, was quite pretty. Then Carr fell for a woman, Lady Frances Howard, countess of Somerset. Her portrait sustains her reputation as one of the most beautiful women in the court.

When Carr met her she was already married, but to a man who—there were two sides to the story. According to Frances’s friends, her husband on their first night together “laboured a quarter of an hour to know her,” then said, “Frankie, it will not be,” and bade her good night. According to his friends, as soon as the couple were alone, Frances “reviled him … terming him cow, coward and beast … which things so cooled his courage that he was far from knowing, or endeavoring to know her.”

That marriage annulled, she was dead set on capturing Carr. Overbury hadn’t minded Carr’s dalliance with Frances—in fact he had ghostwritten Carr’s love letters to her—but he didn’t want Carr to marry this “base woman,” and so he wrote “The Wife” and presented Carr with a copy. Overbury had never had a wife himself, nor been linked to any woman, but his poem undertakes to describe the subcutaneous virtues a proper wife would have. In the course of forty-six stanzas it takes some unexpected turns. The skin-deep image is all very well; more striking is the dismissal of a woman’s shapely body as nothing “but well-digested food.” There is gender-bending:

At first, both sexes were in man combinde,

Man a she-man did in his body breed;

Adam was Eve’s, Eve mother of mankinde,

Eve from live-flesh, man did from dust proceed.

One, thus made two, mariage doth re-unite,

And makes them both but one hermaphrodite.

Or rather let me love, then be in love,

So let me chuse, as wife and friend to find,

Let me forget her sex, when I approve:

Beasts likenesse lies in shape, but ours in mind:

Our soules no sexes have, their love is cleane,

No sex, both in the better part are men.

Carr and Frances were creeped out by “The Wife,” and so was the king. James liked the cut of Carr’s jib himself, but he had found a new young man, George Villiers, who, judging from his portrait, was more beautiful, if you don’t mind really skinny legs and a blank expression, than Frances and Carr put together. Frances and Carr had the king’s blessing. Overbury lost favor and found himself in the Tower.

He appealed to his friend Carr, who he assumed would be able to bring James back around. The response, through nefarious intermediaries, was judiciously poisoned jellies and tarts. Overbury grew sicker and sicker, thanks not only to the steady flow of tainted treats but also to the attentions of fashionable physicians. One of these, Dr. Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, was the author of a book recommending, for internal application, “a syrup made with the flesh of tortoises, snails, the lungs of animals, frogs and crawfish, all boiled in scabrous and coltsfoot water, adding at the last sugar candy” and, for external application, a dressing called “balsam of bats,” which contained “three of the greater sort of serpents or snakes cut into pieces, their skins being first stripped off; twelve bats; two very fat sucking puppies; one pound of earthworms washed in white wine; common oil; malago sack; sage, marjoram and bay leaves,” to be boiled and then supplemented with two pounds of hog’s lard, “the marrow of a stag, an ox’s legs, liquid amber, butter and nutmegs.”

Overbury hung on for months. Finally he lost faith in Carr and succumbed. In his day he had been described, by James’s wife, the long-suffering Queen Anne, as “a pretty young fellow,” but in death his skin was covered with pustules and grievous ulcers. Frances and Carr had a gala wedding. John Donne, hoping for an income from Carr (who never delivered, so Donne had to take holy vows for a living), wrote a poem for the occasion, including these lines:

For every part to dance and revel goes,

They tread the air, and fall not where they rose

which may have come back to disturb Frances and Carr a couple of years later when they were sentenced to hang.

Rumors had gone around. Public sentiment had been aroused. And Carr had developed an ill-advisedly outspoken case of jealousy toward Villiers, whom James never ceased to dote on, even after a friend of Carr’s who had an epicene son “took great pains in tricking and pranking him up,” improving the youth’s complexion by “washing his face every day with posset curd,” and parading him before the king.

Frances and Carr were imprisoned, tried, and convicted. Eventually the king pardoned them—too pretty for the rope—but the trial and incarceration had been an ordeal, and sources close to the couple said that although they lived under the same castle roof, their love had not survived. There they were, stuck with each beautiful other, each proof to the other that beauty can in fact run deep-trouble deep.

belch

OED traces this robust word back to Old English bealcian, which meant the same thing; compares it to Dutch balken, to bray, shout; and leaves its etymology at that. Chambers breaks down and admits that belch is “almost certainly imitative in origin,” which is surely so. But an audible eructation of gas from the stomach doesn’t make the sound belch. Eructation is closer, or urp, or burp if one prefers, but even though I have known some highly creative eructators, I have never heard anyone put a b sound into a belch. Nor, for that matter, a ch. Not onomatopoeic, then, but sonicky. Belch looks like it ought to sound like a belch. Maybe because we so often labor to squelch a belch.

See blurt.

bigth

Neither WIII nor OED recognizes bigth, even as an obsolete word, but it used to be used. According to Alice Morse Earle in Customs and Fashions in Old New England, early apothecaries “did not measure the drugs with precision … . The asbestos stomachs and colossal minds of our forefathers were much above such petty minuteness; nor did they administer the doses with exactness. ‘The bigth of a walnut,’ … ‘as bigg as a haslenut, ’ … ‘the bigth of a Turkeys Egg.’”

Why did bigth die out? Breadth, depth, length, width, and even strength have the advantage of being more specific and measurable; but bigness is in OED and still has some currency. The problem with bigth is that it’s ugly to look at, confusable with bight, and a pain to pronounce. Shifting from a hard g to th is a jolt. Big thing, or big thighs, gives the tongue time to make the transition. Length ends in gth, but the n softens the g so it flows into the th.

blab, blabber

OED:

Words of similar form appear in other Teut. langs.: cf. ON. blabbra … Da. blabbre to babble, gabble, Sw. dial. blaffra to prattle, G. blappern, … plappern to blab, babble, prate. But the evidence is not sufficient to show whether any of these were actually connected with the English word, or whether they agree only in being natural expressions of the action involved, which seems to be essentially that of producing a confused repetition or combination of labial (b) and lingual (l, r) sounds.

That is to say, words about loose lips and a flapping tongue, formed by loose lips and a flapping tongue.

bless

This word is peculiarly English, with no kin in other languages. OED traces bless back to Old English blóedsian, whose “etymological meaning was … ‘to mark (or affect in some way) with blood (or sacrifice); to consecrate.’” For instance, to splash sacrificial blood on doorways to keep out the Destroying Angel.

When the Bible was translated from Hebrew into Latin, scholars needed a word for the Hebrew brk, which meant, according to OED, “primarily ‘to bend,’ hence ‘to bend the knee, worship, praise, bless God.’” They came up with benedicere, literally to speak well of. By the time the Bible was translated from Latin into English, blóedsian had softened, in form, to bless, which was chosen as the equivalent of benedicere. That selection, OED suggests, is how bless gained unbloody connotations—sort of like the way people hoped your aunt Peaches would be influenced by being chosen to play Mary in the Christmas pageant.

But wait a minute. Where did that soft ss ending come from? If blóedsian had held on to more of itself, Elvis in “All Shook Up” would have sung something like “Blodze my soul, what’s wrong with me?” The s sound in bless didn’t come from benedicere, because the Latin c had a k sound. (Cicero, the great Roman orator, to whom we owe “While there’s life, there’s hope,” would turn over in his sarcophagus if he heard us praise an eloquent speaker as ciceronian, pronounced sissy-ronian. In Cicero’s place and time he was kicker-o.)

In OED we find bloedsade circa 950, bletsode circa 1000, bletcaed in 1154, and Blettcedd circa 1200. A softer-sounding verb was needed for gentler rituals. When blessed turns up at last in 1377, it is with regard to the breaking and blessing of bread.

“At a very early date,” says OED, “the popular etymological consciousness …”

Love that notion, “the popular etymological consciousness.” I didn’t even know we had such a thing going on, but I like to think about us all floating in a rootsy ken, without quite realizing it. Maybe popular etymological subconscious would be more accurate, but who am I to quibble with OED?

“ … the popular etymological consciousness began to associate” the verb bless with the originally unrelated noun bliss, whose roots, neither bloody nor sacramental, are akin to those of blithe. In haphazard Middle English, bliss was often spelled bless and vice versa (or either of them, blyss). “Hence,” says OED, “the gradual tendency to withdraw bliss from earthly ‘blitheness’ to the beatitude of the blessed in heaven, or that which is likened to it.”

In Old English, bliss was already lispingly close to itself: bliths. As early as the year 971, it was already blisse. OED suggests that bliss and bless influenced each other as to meaning. I’m thinking form, too. I’m thinking bliss got sanctified by sharing its s’s with bless.

See -ed.

blob

Appears first in the fifteenth century as a verb meaning to make a bubble and in the sixteenth as a noun meaning bubble, in either case, by common acknowledgment, sonicky: “expressing the action of the lips in producing a bubble,” according to OED, which says the same about bleb, a small blister or bubble. “In relation to blob, bleb expresses a smaller swelling; cf. top, tip, etc.,” adds OED—eh and ih are shorter sounds than ah. That’s why we say tip-top and hip-hop: top-tip would be top-heavy, hop-hip a stumble. Compare topspin, which orally enacts its meaning twice: pushing forward to p then cutting back to sizzle a bit at s, then forward again to p and back again to nail it with an n. That psp juncture, in particular, packs lots of representative action. The only words I can think of where that sequence appears are made-up inversions, lipspread, upsprung—no, wait, there’s rumpsprung, in which the neighboring m and r spread the pressure out.

See bubble.

bloggerheads, at

The situation of people calling each other names, anonymously, on the Internet.

blurt

OED’s first definition of this word is not current except in dialect, but you have to like the smack of it: “To emit the breath eruptively from the mouth; to snort in sleep.” Presumably OED lists that definition first—although its first citation in print dates from 1611—because it is more closely linked to the body than the current, more abstract definition, “To utter abruptly … , to burst out with,” which is supported by an earlier (1573) citation in print. If a word has ever had a bodily meaning, that is presumably the one that it started with.

So what’s the etymology? OED says “app[arently] a modern onomatopoeia, expressive of a discharge of breath or fluid from the mouth after an effort to retain it; with the bl- element, cf. blow, blast, blash, etc.; with the rest cf. spurt, spirt, squirt, etc.: see also BLIRT.”

When we do see blirt, which means to burst into tears, the OED gives us more on the nature of -urt and -irt words: “expressing the forcible emission of liquid.” I would say the ur or ir part is what does that (as also in burst, gurgle, burble, splurge, purge, hurl—the uh sound without the r gives us gush, flush, upchuck), and the t evokes termination. I know that when I blurt something out, I often bring it to an abrupt halt and hope I can pass it off as a snort.

I love it when the highest lexicographical authority acknowledges that many words are intrinsically, nonarbitrarily expressive of their meaning. But was even the original snort-in-the-night blurt onomatopoeic in the usual sense? OED defines onomatopoeia two ways. First: “The formation of a word from a sound associated with the thing or action being named; the formation of words imitative of sounds.” Second: “The use of echoic or suggestive language, esp [ecially] onomatopes, for rhetorical effect.” In the second definition, it’s hard to see why onomatopes adds anything, since OED defines onomatope as “a word formed by onomatopoeia.” The definitive example of onomatope that OED cites is Noah Webster’s in 1828: “a figure in which words are formed to resemble the sound made by the thing signified; as, to buzz, as bees … A word whose sound corresponds to the sound of the thing signified.”

Because onomatopoeia is narrowly associated with imitative sound, it can’t do justice to blurt, or spurt, much less, say, finagle. Perhaps my grandchildren will see the day when OED acknowledges the kinephonic concept of sonicky.

body

No other language has a word like this one. Old High German botah and potah had the same meaning, but etymology cannot link that word to our body, and it died out of German many centuries ago. In English, as OED puts it, “body remains as a great and important word.”

It would be interesting to make a study of all the English words, like body, that go back to earliest print and seem to come from nowhere. Others include curse, guilt, and dog. The groundbreaking nineteenth-century etymologist Walter W. Skeat compared body to a Sanskrit word and said the original, Old English sense related to bondage—the body “considered as confining the soul.” Etymologists don’t believe that anymore.

Is it just me, or does body sound more emotive, and fleshier, than any of the various forms of the Latin corpus in Romance languages and German? More emotive, fleshier, and also more embracing: “the whole material organism viewed as an organic entity” (OED). The physical self rolled into a ball.

See bubble and beauty, depth of.

boo

In the sixties it was a term for marijuana. Maybe from taboo, suggested an article in High Times. Now it means boyfriend or girlfriend. Perhaps an alteration of beau, suggests OED. Old Slavic for loved one was l’ubu, if that’s any help.

To scare someone, people used to go bo. A “combination of consonant and vowel especially fitted to produce a loud and startling sound,” says OED.

Now people go boo. (Ghosts put more o’s into it, more syllables, even.)

People used to go boo to sound like cows. Which is why audiences started going boo to express disapproval of a performance. Boo birds—people who get off on expressing disapproval—may also hoot like owls or hiss like geese or snakes, or they may utter catcalls (OED: “From the nocturnal cry, or ‘waul’ of the cat”) , which were originally produced in English theaters by means of a special squeaking instrument.

Or they may jeer. Nobody knows where jeer comes from. Weekley hazards a perhaps: corruption of the Dutch den gek scheeren, to make a fool of someone, gek meaning fool.

OED says bah! was probably picked up from modern French. Not from sheep, then.

To sound like cows these days, people generally go moo (or in German, muh; French, meuh; Spanish, mu; Russian, mu; Lithuanian, m; Latvian, mau).

Back to hiss. Charles Lamb, the illustrious nineteenth-century British essayist, wrote a play, a farce, which he titled Mr. H. “How simple! how taking!” he wrote to a friend before opening night: “A great H sprawling over the play-bill, and attracting eyes at every corner.” Mr. H. was hissed off the stage. Lamb wrote to another friend:

Mercy on us, that God should give his favorite children … mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely, to sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with, and that they should turn them into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyaenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labors of their fellow-creatures who are desirous to please them! Heaven be pleased to make the teeth rot out of them all, therefore!

Lamb had thought it would go over so cool, how subtly he had set up the disclosure (the reveal, a screenwriter would say) that the H of Mr. H. stood for Hogsflesh.

books, randomly readable

“I won’t begin in any particular spot,” said Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, to kick off a press conference about having got himself into a spot by going to Argentina to see “the woman who I’ve been unfaithful to my wife with.”

Would whom have been too punctilious there? Perhaps. I just thought Sanford’s opening would be a good way to start an appreciation of the sort of book that you can open up at any page and plunge into. One of these is Lo! by the collector (and perhaps example) of unexplained phenomena Charles Fort. Here is what I have just turned to in Lo!:

Louth, Lincolnshire, England, May 29, 1920—the River Lud, which is only a brook, and is known as “Tennyson’s Brook,” was babbling, or maybe it was purling—

Out of its play, this little thing humped itself twenty feet high. A ferocious transformation of a brook sprang upon the houses of Louth, and mangled fifty of them. Later in the day, between banks upon which were piled the remains of houses, in which were lying twenty-two bodies, and from which hundreds of the inhabitants had been driven homeless, the little brook was babbling, or purling.

See purl.

boy

According to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, the latest etymological theory connects this word to the Old French embuier, fetter. In English, boy originally meant male servant or churl. Anatoly Liberman in An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, however, says the Modern English boy is a “blend of an onomatopoeic word for an evil spirit … and a baby word for ‘brother.’” (Sounds about right.) For many years, especially in the segregated South, white people invidiously called black men “boy.” But by the fifteenth century, boy had come primarily to mean a young male, unpejoratively, and if there weren’t something engaging about the sound of the word, a rapper would never refer to his entourage as “my boys” and people of both genders would never exclaim “Oh boyoboyoboy!”

In his book Try and Stop Me, Bennett Cerf told a story about Herbert Bayard Swope, who in the twenties, thirties, and forties was an enormously self-important and yet widely enjoyed newspaper editor and man of affairs:

One night a Broadway friend and his blue-eyed babe taxied Herbert Swope home from a theatrical party. Swope, as usual, carried the conversational ball. “The era of the economic royalists and predatory robber barons went out with the Hoover administration,” he boomed. “I have told Franklin and I have told Wendell—I’m sure you agree with me—that if they ignore the portents and pussy-foot back to the tenets of the McKinley era, I will not be responsible for anything that happens to them.” The little lady sitting next to him gazed at him in wide-eyed wonder and said softly, “Hey, hey, Big Boy.”

See gillie, girl.

bubble

No evidence has been found, we are told, to link bubble etymologically to any of the words for bubble, similar as they are, in other languages: Latin bulla, Swedish bubble, Dutch bobbel, Danish boble, German dialect bobbel. “As likely as not,” says John Ayto, “the whole family of bubble words represents ultimately an attempt to lexicalize the sound of bubbling, by blowing through nearly closed lips.”

Hmm. I have been sitting here for twenty minutes trying and failing to make anything like the sound bubble by blowing through nearly closed lips, with spit or without.

OED is much closer to the mark, saying of all these versions of bubble, “it is not clear how far they are related to each other, or are merely parallel imitative words, suggested either by the sound of bubbles forming and bursting, or by the action of the lips in making a bubble.”

But why “merely”? What is so mere about a series of letters managing to convey an evanescent material object? It’s wonderful. It’s damn near too marvelous for words.

And when words across several languages are so similarly sonicky, why can’t they be called “related”? They may have cropped up unaware of one another, but they all go way back, they all may be seen to evince the lips of the same species, and as soon as they encountered one another, they knew.

And can’t we readily imagine that bulb and boil and ball and bowl and bob and buoyant and belly and bulge (and maybe, just maybe, body) are all to some extent rooted in the oral evocation of roundness? I don’t know. I’m just asking.

See blob; bum.

buckra

In every source I’ve found, this old derogatory African-American term for white people is said to be from an African word, bakra or mbakara, meaning white man, European, or master. From a verb, kara, meaning to encompass or master. I wonder whether buckra was influenced, at least, by a word that goes back to the thirteenth century in English and appears right after buckra in most dictionaries: buckram, as in (AHD) “a coarse cotton fabric heavily sized with glue, used for stiffening garments and in bookbinding” and “resembling or suggesting buckram, as in stiffness or formality.” (Some say probably from Bukhara, Uzbekistan, whence the fabric was imported, but OED says that won’t wash.)

bum

Let’s concede this one to the UK: bum is a better, plumper, more affectionate term for the human posterior than American butt, which is too hard sounding, like what a goat does, or ass, which sounds inherently crass—a quality which, to be sure, improves the following anecdote that I remember from the autobiography of Lauren Bacall:

At a big reception somewhere, the shah of Iran danced with her. Was smitten by her. Told her, “You dance divinely, Miss Bacall.”

She responded, “You bet your ass, Shah.”

But there’s something grating about ass. Even when bum has negative connotations, as in expressions like bum leg and bummer, it has a down-home warmth (can this be related to the M’s in me and mom and yum and hum and home?) that comes through in the old antisalvationist hobo song, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.”

OED calls bum “probably onomatopoeic, to be compared with other words of similar sound and with the general sense of ‘protuberance, swelling.’” (Or as some might say, it’s sonicky. See blurt and bubble.)

In Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,” a smarty-pants student sticks his bare bottom out the window so that a dumb cluck, mistaking it (again) for the face of the lady with whom the student is dallying, will kiss it. But the cluck has got wise. He pokes the student with a hot iron. Here’s how the story ends in the original:

And Nicholas is scalded in the towte.

This tale is doon, and God save al the rowte!

Towte is a long-obsolete term for the buttocks; rowte, for an assemblage of people. (From the latter we get rout meaning an army’s disorderly flight, and by extension an overwhelming defeat in sports.) The best modern translation I have seen of those two lines is Nevill Coghill’s:

And Nicholas is branded on the bum

And God bring all of us to Kingdom Come.

How would we do that in American?

And Nicholas is branded on the ass.

Such things God knows do sometimes come to pass.

And Nicholas is blistered on the butt.

Good Lord! Next time he’ll keep the window shut.

Why do Brits say arse and Americans ass? Well, for one thing, Brits don’t say arse, they say something more like ahss, which strikes me as a bit haughty—a quality that, to be sure, adds something to the expression “disappear up one’s own arse,” meaning, according to OED, “to become excessively self-involved, pretentious, or conceited.” OED provides this nice example, from a novel by Peter Marshall (I might mention, though, that when I clicked on P. MARSHALL on OED.com—which incidentally I love—I was transported to a bibliography that did not include Peter Marshall, so I had to do quite a bit of surfing before I ran him to ground): “You see, logic cannot stand the application of logic. Under such an application, logic will disappear up its own arse.”

In ass for arse there must be a parallel in American cuss for curse, bust for burst, and hoss for horse: if the English don’t pronounce r’s, why should we spell ’em?

In the late sixties when I was covering baseball for Sports Illustrated I heard a story that comes to mind here. When Masanori Murakami joined the San Francisco Giants in 1964, becoming the first Japanese-born player in the American major leagues, his English and his acquaintance with American baseball rituals were limited. Two veteran Giants, Bobby Bonds and Jim Ray Hart, fun-loving African Americans, took him aside and gave him a helpful tip about how to show respect. So the first time Murakami came to bat, he bowed to the plate umpire and said ceremoniously, “You can kiss my big black ass.”

Fanny for bottom is American. In British English, fanny means, as OED puts it, “the female genitals.” Origin unknown, though OED is willing to suggest, tentatively, that the British fanny meaning “a tin for holding anything to be drunk” might come from “the female name,” and AHD is willing to hazard a speculation that the American fanny comes from that same name, a nickname for Frances.

Another nice word is rump, but it also has derogatory applications, as in rump parliament. Tush, like the Yiddish tuchus from which it springs, has a friendly sound.

Fundament isn’t bad—a bit formal, but that quality lends something to Mark Twain’s observation that “by consent of the whole company, when only males are present, it is still permissible, in good society, to remove the embargo on the fundamental sigh.”

Buns, from the shape, I guess, seems apt. Nates is, like so many words from the Latin, boring. The German Arsch is almost unpronounceably harsh. Keister, which originally meant suitcase and whose origin is unknown, is too cold for me, and so is can, and so is prat, from which we get pratfall. The origin of this prat is unknown, but it goes back at least to the sixteenth century, and I’m wondering, just on my own cognizance, whether this prat can have sprung from a sardonic allusion to the Old English adjective prat meaning “cunning, astute,” related to pretty. Derrière is perky French from the Latin de retro meaning “from the back.” Once on The Wire, Herc, the dumb cop, was wearing a T-shirt that said, over an outline map of Wisconsin, “Smell That Dairy Air.”

See tutu’s, the two.

but

In the forties movie Blue Skies, Joan Caulfield prods Bing Crosby into admitting he’s in love with her.

“Yes,” Bing intones (croons, almost), while holding the lovely Joan close, “I guess I am. But—”

“But. What an unpleasant word,” says Joan.

“You know me, I’m just not the marrying type,” says Bing.

Maybe that exasperating little exchange provides context for all the aunts and English teachers who have adjured young people (or so a number of them, now grown, have informed me) to avoid the word but because “it’s a defensive word.” Poppycock. It’s a useful word, a word that sounds like what it means. I see a lot of but-avoidance in the press. Why would AP write this, about the usually affectless Phillies pitcher Roy Halladay’s having smiled and high-fived after pitching a perfect game: “Ordinary stuff for most people, although for Halladay, such signs of emotion may have as well been considered a wild party”?

Forget the bizarre lameness of “may have as well been.” Why although? Surely that sentence calls for a simple but.

I also see a lot of yet’s that ought to be but’s. Yet shouldn’t be brought out until you need something stronger than but. It means nevertheless. If you say, “I called you, yet you didn’t call back,” then what have you got left for, “You told me you had called me three times last night, yet somehow, my phone didn’t ring”? Yet may be the new but, because yet slides off the tongue, whereas but may strike an idiot as bumptious, or something.

Yet but can even be a romantic word, as in “I’ll be loving you” (and here I paraphrase lest I wind up owing an arm and a leg to the estate of Irving Berlin), not for just a season, not for just a reason …

But always.

The word but was formed, we are told, as early as the eighth century, by combination of be meaning “by” and ut meaning “out.” Originally, it was only a preposition, as in “I need nothing in my system but roughage and love,” or an adverb, as in “Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Father Coughlin, and Tokyo Rose, to name but a few.” Not until 1000 was but used as a conjunction, as in

She’s got freckles on her

But she’s pretty.

By scholarly consensus, but is etymologically unrelated to the butt that means thick end or human posterior. What’s more, that butt is unrelated to butt as in the butt of a joke (which however may be related to butte). And none of these are related to the verb meaning to bump with the head. But however but and the several butt’s differ in provenance, they take after one another at some level. “Only in rock-solid marriages,” writes Richard Ford in Independence Day, “can you hope to hear that you’re a sweet man without a ‘but’ following along afterward like a displeasing goat.”

See and and though, the lazy.

c · C · c

From Sesame Street, we know that a C is a cookie from which the Cookie Monster has taken a large bite. A cookie-cutter shark, according to OED, is a small one that “takes distinctive, non-lethal bites from large prey.” Cookie derives not from cook but from Dutch koekje, little cake. An attractive woman said “See ya, Cookie” to me once, and it felt like a nibble, but I was in a relationship, as they say, with another, who never called me “Cookie.” That’s the way it crumbles.

Kooky, meaning eccentric to the point of craziness, is possibly from cuckoo, meaning a bird that goes coo-coo, just that, over and over and over again, coo-coo, coo-coo, which is possibly why cuckoo means crazy. Cootch is a catchy—if in most contexts too familiar—word for what I would have to say is the most extraordinary, if you think about it, part of a woman. Maybe extraordinary is not the word, but you know what I mean. You know what I mean? To babies we say, “Coochy-coo.”

See ch.

celebrity

Originally, in the fourteenth century, a celebrity was something less common: a solemn ceremony or celebration. More recently I saw a TV commercial in which someone unrecognizable popped up to say, “Hello, I’m Fitness Celebrity …” and her name. Can you truly call yourself a celebrity if you have to introduce yourself as one?

ch

You can’t tell me there is nothing inherently catchy in the tch or hard-ch sound of English, especially American English, as in catchy. Or clutch, or cinch, or notch, or niche, or chink, or …

Dontcha just know it? You betcha. Gotcha. Natch. Cha-cha, choo-choo, chowchow, got a hunch, comin atcha, ka-ching, chill, thanks much, chop-chop, chinchin, cheers, ciao, cheerio, check, watch yerself, oo-chi-wa-wa, charmed, buenas noches, right back atchu.

“The Man Right Chea.” “I Wanna Get Wit Chu.” “Rock Witchu.” Da Brat and Tyrese favoring us with “What ’Chu Like.”

Scratch, itch, chafe, coochy-coo, hoochie-coochie, nautch dancer, crotch, hunch, punch.

Pitch. Chuck. John Clare, in the mid-nineteenth century, referred to throwing a ball back and forth as “chuck ball and catch it.”

Chuckle. Chatter. Chugalug. Hooch. Crunch. Munch. Lunch. Choppers. Chomp. Champ. Chew. Manolha Dargis in The New York Times, on Jack Black’s accent in Nacho Libre: “You hear the quotation marks in the delivery and the thought that goes into every phrasing. That gives the lines chew.”

Chicken. Cheese. Charley. Macho. Honcho. Mensch. Butch. Britches. Bitch.

Tchotchke.

Chockablock. Chocolate chip. Woodchuck chuck. Chain chain chain …

English has two affricates, j and ch. (See adulation.) An affricate, according to AHD, is “a complex speech sound consisting of a stop consonant followed by a fricative.” A fricative (also AHD) is “a consonant … produced by the the forcing of breath through a constricted passage.” From the Latin “to rub against.” The sound of ch is that of j without vocal-cord vibration.

People—even those who see no charm in driving a car in such a way as to “scratch off”—like to say ch. It’s a catch. It sets up a release.

Ahhh-choo.

See sneeze.

chimera

When my daughter, Ennis, was a moppet, we had a talk about what words not to use in the hearing of her grandparents. She assured me that, for example, “I never say fart to anybody until I’ve heard them say it first.” I hope I followed that policy for most of my life with the word chimera, because I knew it meant a wild fantasy, but I pronounced it, in my head, shimer -ra, because I associated it with shimmer, as in a mirage. Then I heard somebody pronounce it correctly, kie-mir-a. I hastened to the dictionaries, which trace it back to a mythical Greek monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. Or, sometimes, a lion’s body and head with a second head, that of a goat. A wildly improbable combination of things, then. The rabbitfish, which has rabbitlike teeth, is of the family Chimaeridae.

Chinese sense of time

A man I met said he’d been involved in negotiating a big-money agreement with a Chinese company. The Chinese balked at the term “in perpetuity.” What would they agree to instead? “Fifty thousand years.”

Chinese, would-be purification of

According to the Far Eastern Economic Review, when the Red Guards were intent upon forcibly regrooving all of Chinese culture along Maoist lines, they tried to eradicate English-tainted foodstuff terms by instructing the state-operated provision store in Shanghai to start referring to cocoa (ke ke) as hong se fen (red-colored powder); coffee beans (ka fei dou) as huang la fen (yellow bitter powder); chocolate bars (chia ke li) as hsiang tsao kuan (fragrant grass—or vanilla—bar); and beer (bi jiu) as mi mai chi jiu (rice and wheat gaseous wine). These changes failed to catch on.

clever

Middle English was cliver, nimble handed, from clivers, meaning, as OED puts it, “claws, talons, clutches,” connecting with “the use of the hands, a notion which [redundancy alert] still remains in the general sense of adroit, dexterous, having ‘the brain in the hand.’” Chambers tentatively relates to Old English clifian, meaning cleave, as in adhere. Not the other cleave, as in split. The two cleaves find a certain extra-etymological, and extra-grammatical, unity in the hymnal lyric, “Rock of Ages [or, as Kris Kristofferson sang it, “Rita Coolidge”] , cleft for me.”

clown

Want to hear a sad clown story? No, of course you don’t, but this one relates to the war on terror. In 2006, after a slow day of painting faces and twisting balloons for tips in a Manhattan park, a Russian immigrant named Alexander Alhovsky, forty, stopped at Starbucks for a coffee. When he left, his battery-powered balloon pump was still on the counter.

Police were called. They x-rayed the pump and determined it was not a bomb, but they could not eliminate the possibility that Alhovsky was a terrorist leaving a fake bomb as a test. Surveillance was set up.

When Alhovsky returned, by his account, police officers knocked him off his bike, kicked him in the kidneys, stepped on his face, held a gun to his head, and dragged him so that his pants and underwear came to his knees in front of neighborhood children.

Alhovsky sued, claiming post-traumatic stress disorder. He wore his clown outfit to court, but the judge made him change. One of the arresting officers was quoted by the New York Post as saying the pump looked like a bomb to him, adding that the clown “kept saying, ‘I’m just a clown!’ That didn’t mean anything to me.”

The jury ruled that the police did not use excessive force.

A term for “morbid fear of clowns” often advanced earnestly on the Web is coulrophobia. Neither OED nor WIII recognizes it, and Etymonline.com says it “looks suspiciously like the sort of thing idle pseudo-intellectuals invent on the Internet and which every smarty-pants takes up thereafter; perhaps it is a mangling of Modern Gk. klooun ‘clown.’”

On YouTube you can find an affecting clip of a woman being treated for her terror of clowns. Elsewhere online you can buy, in several different designs, T-shirts saying CAN’T SLEEP, CLOWNS WILL EAT ME, which is the name of an Alice Cooper song inspired by a line spoken by Bart on The Simpsons—Homer had built him a bed that looked like an evil clown.

Here and there online you can find several terms for “fear of police.” The dumbest is policophobia. The most psychiatric sounding is astynomiaphobia , from the Greek for police. The catchiest is popophobia. The cleverest is “common sense.” Of these terms OED acknowledges only the last, which it defines as “the plain wisdom which is everyone’s inheritance,” or, more affirmatively, “general sagacity.”

consonant

A poem by my friend Jon Swan:

THE CREATION OF WORDS

Hay in the loft. Barn doors

Open wide as the vowels of Iowa

through which swallows slip,

in and out, whispering consonants.

coot

There’s something down-home engaging about the sound of this word, isn’t there? Rhymes with Scoot (“Scoot over there, Sugar, and make room for me”), shoot (as in “Aw, shoot”), root, boot, poot, toot, and hoot.

According to Bill Cotterell of the Tallahassee Democrat, the colorful former Alabama governor Big Jim (or Kissin’ Jim) Folsom in his postgubernatorial years “enjoyed being an old coot, I think. He used to call the UPI bureau in Birmingham three or four times a week when I worked there in 1969, to tell us what he thought about George Wallace. Usually after the cocktail hour, I suspect. He was only 60 at the time but I thought he was much older because when I’d say, ‘How are you, governor?’ he would invariably reply, ‘Well, the business takes care of itself, I got most of my vision in my good eye and the wife’s not pregnant, so I guess ah’m doin OK.’”

OED defines the noun coot as a bird or a simpleton. But in the United States a coot is a male senior citizen (perhaps owing to the phrase “bald as a coot,” the bird’s white forehead giving it a baldish appearance). Generally he is an eccentric, entertaining old guy who enjoys messing with people, whether or not they enjoy it all that much.

The OED does not consider the noun’s possible relation to the obsolete verb coot, which means, as the OED puts it forthrightly, “Of tortoises: To copulate.” (“The Tortoises … coot for fourteen daies together,” 1667.)

OED does recognize cooter, “a popular name in the Southern United States of two tortoises.” A good deal more than two, I would say, if they coot that much. What other animal can claim to derive its name from its stamina in the hay?

And yet the phrase cooter along or cooter around is defined in the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English as “To idle, loaf, go around aimlessly.” If you cooted two weeks straight, you’d rest up too.

AHD defines cooter as “an edible freshwater turtle.” If animals could look themselves up! How would you like the second word in your definition to be edible?

cotton

We get this word from Old French coton, from Arabic (al) qutn. (Europe first had cotton fabrics from Arab merchants, around A. D. 800.) Spanish renders al qutn as algodón. German goes its own way, with Baumwolle (tree wool), which reflects the widespread early European belief articulated in 1350 by the unreliable travel writer known as John Mandeville: that in India there grew “a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the endes of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed.”

Mandeville also reported seeing, in lands that he perhaps imagined, “white hens without feathers, but they have white wool on them,” and cursed folk with no heads (eyes on their shoulders), and “in another isle be folk of foul fashion and shape that have the lip above the mouth so great, that when they sleep in the sun they cover all the face with that lip,” and “in another isle be folk that have great ears and long, that hang down to their knees.”

The scientific name for the cotton plant, generically, is Gossypium, from something Pliny called it for some reason. He used the phrase “gossippii bombyx,” which would be fun to translate literally as “silk of gossip,” butgossip derives from Anglo-Saxon originally meaning “godparent,” later “close friend”—a person with whom one is likely to exchange loose talk. These days, however, the Internet suits rumormongering better. If your godparent is drooling and going heee … heee … heee, it may affect your desire to chew the fat. On the Web, some of the people you are sharing with may have just washed their hands from dismembering their godparents, but you needn’t be aware of that.

Now let us consider coton in Louisiana French. According to Amanda LaFleur in Tonnerre mes chiens! A Glossary of Louisiana French Figures of Speech, this is an unflattering description of two people who are always together: comme cul et coton de maïs, whose “literal translation” would be “like ass and corncob.” But not so literal at that. In the French of France, coton is still cotton, and corncob is épi de maïs. More precisely, épi means ear (of corn or other grain). The relation to épine, thorn or prickle, may be less relevant than the equation with cob as employed in Louisiana outhouses back before toilet paper became a staple would suggest. Still, within the jocular expression LaFleur cites, another one must be nestled: corncob as corn cotton (poor man’s Cottonelle, country two-ply).

The verb cotton means “to be drawn to, to get along with,” as in “Somehow, although my father was a butthead and my husband is a dweeb, I just don’t cotton to Hannity or Colmes.” According to Etymonline.com, this usage is “perhaps from Welsh cytuno ‘consent, agree.’ But perhaps also a metaphor from cloth finishing.” I would have thought it was a straightforward reference to how cotton fibers cling to each other and to other fuzzy surfaces.

Sonicky note: cotton to (like lean-to) stresses the firm tongue-to-palate connection of n-t (for the opposite effect, compare slough off); cling to holds that connection slightly apart, ng, before snapping it together, t. The oo sound of the o in to allows us to move on.

See buckra.

cough

The gh here is Old English’s attempt to capture the Proto-Germanic kh, which was like the ch in Scottish loch or German ach. Good cough sound. But there was something catchy about the tikky cough of the old comic-strip character Major Hoople: kaf, kaf, or sometimes hak kaff. The major was a hot-air-spewing stuffed shirt with a huge bulbous nose who wore a ratty-looking fez, smoked stinky cigars, and also emitted noises like HRUMPH, EGAD, DRAT, AWPF, HMP, PSHAW, and, when insulted, SPUTT-TT.

The surely too polite Latin word for a cough was tussis. Hence Robitussin.

See hiccup.

crawfish, crayfish

What is the difference?

OED says crawfish is “now used chiefly in U.S.”

AHD says “chiefly Southern and Midland U.S.”

OAD muddles the issue by defining crawfish as “a freshwater crayfish” or “another term for spiny lobster” and crayfish (or freshwater crayfish) as “a nocturnal freshwater crustacean that resembles a small lobster and inhabits streams and rivers.”

I believe some people do refer to small lobsters, such as the French call langouste, or spiny lobsters, such as people around Panacea, Florida, call bulldozers, as crawfish/crayfish, but that’s just crazy.

We are talking about mudbugs, crawdads. They look like wee lobsters, three or four or five inches long, and if you wade close to them in the daytime (at night they sleep), they will nip slightly.

Crayfish and crawfish both go way back to fifteenth-century Anglo-French enunciatory variations that emerged from the Old French form crevice, accent on the second syllable. Crevice, morphing into crevise and other variations, probably derived from Old High German krebiz, meaning “edible crustacean” and coming from the PIE root gerbh-, to scratch, from which we also get crab, carve, crawl, scrawl, glamour, grammar, graffito, diagram , epigram, and paragraph.

Neither crawfish nor crayfish is a fish, duh. The fish element crept in from people’s pronunciations of -vice or -vise.

Okay. The difference. I have never heard anybody who enjoyed crawfish thoroughly, to the point of sucking the juice out of their heads, pronounce it crayfish. However, I had to admit that you can get even more intimate with a crayfish, in a sense, after I read in The New York Review of Books a review by Sue Halpern of In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, by Eric R. Kandel: “It is the pursuit of pure science that animates him—hearing for the first time the pop-pop as a neuron fires in the brain of a crayfish …”

Wow.

Halpern goes on: “ … finding his ‘voice’ as a scientist, solving the biggest of puzzles with the smallest pieces (cells, molecules, genes).” (See granular.)

But that pop-pop is what got me. It made me wonder whether I have been callous toward crawfish. When I was a boy in middle Georgia, we would get a long metal tube from somewhere, whittle a cork so it fit fairly tightly into the tube, stick the point of a dart into the cork, and then we’d have a blowgun to take to the creek and shoot crawfish with. We didn’t eat them, the way I have learned to do from people in the coastal South; we just wanted to shoot them. It never occurred to us that anybody would ever hear one think.

What, besides the juices of a crawfish boil (salt, lemon, onion, garlic, cayenne pepper, other spices) goes through a crawfish’s head?

You can find anything on the Web, right? I Googled “crawfish brain.”

Four different sites offered “wholesale crawfish brain,” “cooked crawfish brain,” “fresh crawfish brain Products,” and “frozen crawfish brain Products.”

Clicking on each of these produced the same result: a photo of a package of whole crawfish laid in close like sardines, with the headline “Crawfish Brain in Dill,” but then, in smaller type, “crawfish brine in dill.” Available from “Hubei Shenlu Aquatic Product & Foodstuff Co., Ltd.”

That wasn’t what I was looking for. At mobilebay.com, I found a chatty posting by Thomas Zew that included this:

One other part of the crawfish you might want to venture is the crawfish brain. It’s located in the deepest part of the head right behind the crawfish’s eyes. The brain is dark seaweed-green in color with a wet sandy texture. Once you isolate the brain from the rest of the cavities, suck the pouch encasing the brain. The taste of the brain can be described as bitter mustard like. It’s a nice contrast of flavor. I use it to clean my palette [sic] of the salt and spices so that I can eat more of these addictive crustaceans.

That was more to the point, but we still weren’t getting anything from the crawfish’s perspective. So I broke down and Googled “crayfish brain.”

I can now say I have watched video of a crayfish’s brain being removed surgically, with tiny magnified snippers. The brain wasn’t dark green, but then it hadn’t been boiled in condiments. I surfed on along to Answers.com. An anonymous, teacherish question:

What is the function of the brain in a crayfish?

Only one answer, entirely unpunctuated:

cause then it can think think stuff AND CAUSE GOD SAID SO YOU DUMB

This answer was also anonymous. It may have come from a crayfish. After DUMB, the crayfish may have crawfished: backed away from its position.

See crustaceous.

crustaceous

The first recorded use of this word in English, according to OED, was by my ancestor Thomas Blount in the 1656 edition of his Glossographia. I concede, however, that Henry More used it more provocatively three years later in The Immortality of the Soul. More maintained that wasps and hornets “will fly about, and use their wings, a good part of an houre after they have lost their Heads: which is to be imputed to the residence of their Soul in them still, and the intireness of the Animal Spirits, not easily evaporating through their crustaceous Bodies.”

A wasp or a hornet has a soul? Come on. We just went through something like this with crawfish and crayfish, which is still nagging at me.

I wouldn’t seek out a wasp or a hornet to kill it, and even as a boy I wasn’t cold-blooded enough to decapitate one to see whether it could still fly, but I have set fire to many a wasp or hornet nest, and I don’t care where the wasps that perished, or the ones that escaped, went. What’s more, I enjoyed it.

I’ll tell you something else. Once I subjected myself to considerable hazard in order to get up on a roof and spray, at an awkward angle, a requisite chemical at a hornet nest and then with hornets all around me whap at what was left of the nest with my hat till it came loose and then scramble down a ladder and then spray the damn nest and surrounding area more and more until the hornets were all dead, dead, dead; and do you know how my life partner at the time, a wonderful person, reacted? She felt sorry for the hornets.

I didn’t. I am sorry that when I was a boy I wantonly killed crawfish, because they weren’t bothering me and I wasn’t going to eat them. If I had been planning to eat them, I would feel okay about it. These are my justifications for ingesting crustaceans:

I. DON’T RECOIL FROM BLUE CRABS, BOILED

True,

Crabs do

Have far too many

Tiny mouthparts and antennae

And eyes at the end of movable stalks.

And as to the manner in which a crab walks,

Or skitters or whatever—how a crab goes—

It doesn’t make you want to holler, “I’ll have one of those!”

Crabs do arise from murky places,

And the looks crabs get on what pass for their faces …

Few expressions are foreigner.

And to take a crab apart requires the sangfroid of a coroner,

And after eating several, you may smell like one for days,

But don’t avert your gaze.

All these drawbacks don’t amount to

Much against what crabs boil down to:

Flecks and tidbits, dribs and drabs—

The meat that one with effort nabs

From crabs

Is abs-

Olutely dreamy.

That’s why, sweet dining partner, you may see me

Pinch myself, or feel me pinching you.

It’s no more than the crab would do.

II. LOBSTERS HAVE IT COMING

A school of thought that I’ve heard tell of

Holds it’s not at all irrelev-

Ant that lobster

Rhymes with mobster.

But, you say, the way we cook …

I say, Look,

Is that lobster up to any good?

Are most prima facie hood-

Lums half as swarthy

As that lobster? Are they?

That no-neck body, heavy, dense:

Preponderance of evidence

He’d just as soon kill us as not.

Toss that character into the pot:

Hey, very

Savory.

Way too delicious

To sleep with the fishes.

And as for

The notion he’ll scream, he won’t. Or,

If he does, it isn’t going

To be a poign-

Ant little “eek! oh!”

It’ll be “Mother of mercy; is this the end of Rico?”

III. ENVOI

He’s withdrawn, standoffish—

Why sympathize with a crawfish?

He has a brain? Encephalographable

Doesn’t equate to affable.

And don’t call him crayfish.

It sounds so treyf-ish.

d · D · d

Will books ever go 3-D? I was talking with a Google visionary about the imminent future’s digital books. They could discreetly feature advertising, he mentioned. I must have looked stricken, because he was quick to reassure me: “You won’t turn a page and a dancing monkey pops up.”

I was reassured, for a moment. And then it hit me: I can do a number of things with words, if I do say so, but I can’t make a monkey dance. I can’t even kill the dancing silhouette-man who insists upon advertising something right there on the online page I’M TRYING TO READ! I HATE THAT MAN! Where will he pop up next? On my dinner plate as I go to take a bite? On my wife’s glasses as I bend to kiss her? If that man were a monkey, he would be even less resistible.

Won’t readers of the future (which by now is undoubtedly yesterday) expect dancing monkeys? Are we hearing the death knell of the art form I love most? Will words on a page, unassisted by animated graphics, go the way of silent movies, splendid oratory, and Congressional responsibility?

Not if this book can help it. This book is dedicated to the proposition that twenty-six letters (forming forty-five phonemes) can make a monkey dance, or an emperor cringe, if enough writers and readers continue to appreciate the possibilities. William Faulkner made a buzzard hop down the hallway of a house and take off, slowly. William Butler Yeats made an unnamed mythical beast slouch toward Bethlehem. William Blake (in a famous passage I recently heard a TV sports announcer attribute to Robert Blake) made a tiger burn. Emily Dickinson did a snake in the grass (“wrinkled, and was gone”) and a spanking-new butterfly: “So from Cocoon / Many a Worm / Leap so Highland gay.” Mark Twain rendered a coyote so palpably that Chuck Jones was inspired to create an epical series of Roadrunner-v.-Coyote cartoons that nearly do justice to those few strokes of Twain’s pen.

Granted, the meepmeep call (if “call” is the word) of the roadrunner is the cartoonist’s vocal contribution. Meepmeep is a meme. It has caught on—in part (and this goes, too, for the Aflac duck) because you can spell it, you can write it out. You know where the words “animated graphics” come from don’t you? Respectively, from the Latin for “soul” and the Greek for “writing.” The soul of writing is in the bzzt bzzt of the letters and their arrangement: syntax sizzle, alphabet juice.

Daddy

One of the things about growing up Southern is that you tend to refer to your father as your daddy. It sounds right in conversation (partly because the y is pronounced ih not ee), as when a grown man is saying, “My daddy was always one to tell somebody exactly what was what.” But it looks funny in print. Andy Warhol and Truman Capote at the zoo, in Rolling Stone, 1973:

Andy: Hello, girls … . You’re going to the gorilla? Oh, we’re going to the deer.

Truman: The yak’s right along in here—somewhere …

Andy: The hippie look is really gone. Everybody’s gone back to beautiful clothes. Isn’t it great? … Did you ever want someone to call you “Daddy”?

Truman: Call me Daddy?

Andy: Yes.

Truman: No. Nor the other way around, either.

Andy: You mean you don’t want to call somebody Daddy.

Truman: Oh, no.

Andy: But isn’t “Daddy” nice? “Daddy” … “Dad” … It sounds so nice … .

Truman: I’ve always been … strictly on my own.

dangling modifier

You’d think that if anyone would take care not to let anything dangle, it would be someone advertising a treatment for erectile dysfunction. But no. A newspaper ad hails “The Boston Method” as “An Option When Viagra and Cialis Fail,” and then, in the second line: “Once Seen as Miracle Pills, Many Now Scramble for Other Options.”

This says that pills are now scrambling for other options. Hard to picture. Perhaps they will find work as bracelet beads.

decapitate

The New York Times reported in late 2009 that a Mexican drug lord “had been carrying out brutal retaliatory attacks against rivals, dumping decapitated heads and tortured bodies …” Well, to decapitate is to behead, to deprive of a head. (Head in Latin is caput, whence capital.) So you can’t rightly decapitate a head, any more than you can defang fangs or defat fat. Surely the Times has someone like the mellow-stickler copy editor at The Wire’s version of The Baltimore Sun, who when a reporter refers to people who have been evacuated, points out that to evacuate is to remove the contents of, so in emergencies you evacuate buildings; a person who evacuates is one who discharges waste. (AHD’s definitions of evacuate are all in keeping with this distinction, but then AHD turns around and defines evacuee as “a person evacuated from a dangerous area.” There’s call for a usage note there.)

What term should the Times have used? Severed.

Behead, by the way, is an unusual word, in that be- as the prefix of a verb (bewail, besmear, bedazzle, bejewel, befoul) is almost always intensive or at least connotes application, not disconnection. A new and lovely word for me along these lines is befrumple, which OED says means “to crease into frumples or clumsy folds.”

However, says OED, “an ancient application” of be- “was to express the sense of ‘bereave of.’” The two examples OED cites are behead and belimb. (The -reave in bereave is from a PIE root meaning “to snatch.” The title of William Faulkner’s comic novel The Reivers uses a related old Scottish term for robbers.)

device, narrative, what would you call this one

Geezer in the Explorers Club recounting, to a rapt listener, a narrow big-game-hunting escape:

“As the lion came closer, closer, straight on at me, I took careful aim … closer, closer, about to spring—I pulled the trigger. And my rifle jammed! Pulled it again, wouldn’t fire. And the lion sprang, Raaarrrrghhh … .”

A pause.

“Yes? Yes? What happened then?”

Puzzled, rather sheepish tone: “I soiled my trousers.”

“Well, that’s understandable. With a lion upon you like that, anyone—”

“No. I mean just now, when I went, Raaarrrrghhh.”

device, similar, but not quite the same

Katharine Hepburn in Stage Door, playing an aristocratic character who is striving gamely to fit in with the other girls in a residence for aspiring actresses:

“I’m doing my best to pick up their slang, though I’m not so hot—how is that, ‘not so hot’?”

Dionysian, Apollonian, blended, briefly

Satchel Paige is said to have advised, “Work like you don’t need to get paid. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s looking.” Point taken. You do need to get paid, though, and if you’ve never been hurt you don’t know what love is, and you can’t help noticing if your dancing makes other people cringe and look away. The other morning I woke up composing this:

You can write too juicily, just

As you can too choosily. Lust

And fussiness are faults, whereas

Taste, desire, and all that jazz

Make language swing. So what’s preferred’s

The juicidicious use of words.

A blend of juicy and judicious, don’t you know. (Peter Viereck once expressed the matter negatively: “aesthetic form is equally betrayed by the anarchic formlessness of the barbaric yawpers and the dead formalism of the elegant wincers.”) Fully awake, I realized two things: that “what’s preferred’s” had no more juice in it than a pile of rocks, and that I was too judicious to use juicidicious (except like this, with apologies) ever again.

See juice.

discalced

This is my idea of a bad word. Means shoeless, barefoot. From Latin dis- and calcere, to fit with shoes. Hardly anyone will recognize it, and it fails to evoke feet.

distance, the verb

I don’t know that this is a bad word. But it’s odd. “The candidate has distanced himself from his father, who has blogged of his love for an enormous stuffed bunny.” You wouldn’t say “The candidate has nearnessed himself to the book of Revelation.”

dubbed

Some words get my nose out of joint. Pooch (except as a verb, “he pooched his lips out”), critter, osculate, and this one. On February 9, 1997, the New York Daily News carried this much, and no more, of an Associated Press dispatch:

Jackson, Mich.—A rooster that lost its legs to frostbite will be strutting again soon with a pair of artificial limbs.

Veterinarian Timothy England has adopted the bird, whom he dubbed Mr. Chicken, and is footing the bill for the prosthetic feet, which he hopes could become a prototype for injured birds.

The staff also has ordered 14 chicks for Mr. Chicken to enjoy the outdoors with this spring.

Questions:

1. The staff of what?

2. Why is it that people in the news are forever “dubbing” chickens something? Whereby is a veterinarian invested with the authority to dub a living being anything? He gives the rooster feet, and now he is the rooster’s father? Would it not be more fitting to say that this Dr. England called the rooster Mr. Chicken?

And does the rooster come when so called? His eyes damp with gratitude? Does he tell the other chickens, “Mister Chicken to you. ’Cause that’s what ol’ Doc England been an’ dub me, when he gimme these feet. The man gimme these feet. Y’all be lucky if anybody, let alone anybody with a doctoral degree, will stoop so low as to eat y’all’s feet. Step aside for Mister Chicken, with the pros-thetic, not the pa-thetic feet. A-doodle-doo.”

Let us be fair. Dr. England may be as put off as we are by that dubbed. The word may not have been his; may not have entered into the interview conversation, even; may have been introduced by a whimsical editor. That sort of thing happens.

3. Why is it that news items with dubbed in them tend also to feature coy double entendres? Whether, in this case, “14 chicks” means “14 baby chickens,” “14 hens,” or “14 swinging women,” an implication of female company hovers. And according to a publication titled The Body Connection, put out by a chiropractic establishment and found by me underfoot on West Ninety-third Street in Manhattan, “Women have about four times as many foot problems as men.”

If you are a man, and you are involved with a woman, and you have one foot problem (one foot in the grave, one foot several sizes larger than the other, one foot in a bucket), then she, statistically, has four. How can you take any pursuable counsel from the old saying, “Never go to bed with anyone whose foot problems are more numerous than your own”?

Does the four-to-one ratio apply to chickens? If so, how staggering must be the foot problems of those “14 chicks.”

4. Did you think I would even deign to notice “footing … feet”?

See peeve.

dwell

I hadn’t given this word much thought until I set it down in the introduction, above. The more I looked at it, the more I wanted to look it up. Very few dw- words in English, and all the others are pejorative: dwalm (to fall in a faint), dwarf (see Xit), dweeb, dwindle.

In dwell as in dwell upon, the d adds a bearing-down heaviness to well, as in to well up. But there’s no etymological connection. It turns out dwell has arisen, or rather resettled, from a negative background. Old English dwellan meant to confuse, to lead or to be led astray, as dwola meant error and Gothic dwals meant foolish. Over time dwell’s meaning strayed from “go astray” into “hinder or tarry,” which in turn, in the thirteenth century, turned into “remain, stay,” and then into “make a home somewhere.” Somewhat upbeat story, then, but also a bit of a downer. We go astray (that word is related to street) and then find ourselves abiding there.

I guess nobody says dwelt anymore, maybe no one ever did outside of poetry—“She dwelt among the untrodden ways”—but I like it, it’s springier than dwelled. (You wouldn’t be charmed by anyone who dwelled among trodden ways.) Then too I am fond of the British smelt. And not just in “He who smelt it, dealt it.”

e · E · e

Would you like a fresh perspective on the long e-sound? Go to YouTube, “Video Stroboscopy of the Vocal Cords.” Let me caution you that comments made by previous viewers include: “oh god that was discusting,” “that is weard but funny!,” and “omg now im scared of wates inside me.” But what do they know—they have set down remarks that may last on the Web till the end of time, or at least till the end of the Web, and they couldn’t find the time to check their spelling. Most of the literate commenters find the video as interesting as I hope you will.

A fiber-optic camera inserted through the unprotesting patient’s nose travels down to larynxland, and as mood music plays softly in the background she is asked to “perform a glide.” She gives us a long, calm eeeeeeeeee , and some more eee’s, and we see how the gap between the delicate membranous cords narrows to make the high-pitched sound.

Bit of a Rorschach. Eventually, after “the stroboscopy light” was turned on and we got really close—and once I stopped thinking how this might almost do to be projected onto a screen during a performance of The Vagina Monotones—I was reminded, visually, of Munch’s The Scream. But not at all an anguished scream. See if you don’t see a vertical mouth (this would be the space between the true vocal cords) pressed nearly shut by a pair of hands (these would be the arytenoid cartilages); and then when the patient takes a break from eeeeee, the hands pull aside and the mouth widens into a big sloppy grin that says, in expectation of a compliment, “How was that?”

e, short, the new

The other day I overheard a college-age woman say on the radio, “People don’t know what to say when I tell them I fance.”

“Well of course they don’t,” I shouted, “because there is no such word!”

To be precise, she didn’t say fance exactly, she said something between fance and fence, so that it rhymed with neither France nor tense. When she went on to talk about being on her school’s fencing team, she pronounced fencing accurately, to rhyme simply with sensing, and she also got fence right when it was in the middle of a sentence. But something about “I fence”—her self-defining activity, hung out to dry—had drawn from her a fish-nor-fowl vowel sound that I frequently hear from people of her generation or slightly older. When Paris Hilton pronounces bed so that it sounds halfway like bad, it may seem right for her, but I don’t like hearing young people pronounce dead so that it sounds so close to dad. (Not that my children resort to such a vowel, but I feel for all fathers.) I think that unnatural vowel is a way to distance the speaker from the depressing eh sound—not the eh? sound (see A), but the eh that rhymes with feh—the eh that recently appeared as definition 20 of eh on Urbandictionary.com:

adj. Used to describe something or someone uninteresting, boring, or unexceptional.

“We used to be really tight friends … now we’re just eh.”

“That movie was kinda eh.”

“She used to be cool, but now she’s kinda eh.”

The verb fence comes from defense. Perhaps that a/e vowel is a defense mechanism. It sounds affa/ected.

each other

Can be tricky. From The New York Times: “At one point, the goalie for each team wrestled each other to the turf.” That can’t be right. Sounds like they took turns.

The teams’ goalies wrestled each other …

Each team’s goalie wrestled the other …

The teams’ goalies wrestled together to the turf. Maybe.

ear, writing for the

William Butler Yeats: “‘Write for the ear,’ I thought ‘so that you may be instantly understood as when an actor or folk singer stands before an audience.’” The poet David Waggoner: “Yeats always sounds like what he means.”

-ed, -èd

As a Methodist boy I sang “Blessèd Assurance,” bless-ed, and heard other people, with more assurance, sing “This Is My Belovèd,” be-luv-ed. But now I hear people saying “blessed event,” pronounced blest—which all that does is just throw off the rhythm of the Beatitudes—and “a beloved figure,” be-luvd, which spoils “Believe it, Beloved.”

Originally the past-tense -ed was always pronounced as a separate syllable, which is why meter-conscious poets resorted to inflam’d, fram’d. Newspapers should have used that apostrophe (media’d) when they quoted Tiger Woods’s caddy as saying Tiger wasn’t doing interviews because “he’s all media-ed out.” (Newspapers should also desist from spelling the past tense of medevac as medevaced. That makes the c soft, as in defaced. It should be medevacked, by the same logic as panicked, picnicked, and politicked.)

So far the adjectives aged and learned have held on to both their syllables, perhaps because trendsetters have no use for them.

eel

The ultimate origin of this word is unknown. But don’t we think (that is to say, don’t we feel) that it goes back to people’s first reaction to the animal? An extra e or two would not be overkill. Compare eeeek. I would not fault ee-ew-eel.

OED recognizes eelhood: “The rank or condition of a full-grown eel.” (See robinhood.) And eely: “Resembling an eel in movement; wriggling, writhing.” And eeler: “The artful eeler … lets down a hank some cubits long of the intestines of a sheep.” And to go eeling, and eelery: “We must not suppose there are no valuable eeleries in the British Isles.”

An eelpout is not a facial expression available to the eel. It is a fish, with (AHD) “an elongated body and large head.” We are told that eelpouts often “lie under stones or buried in mud.” Perhaps this is where the pout comes from; or maybe the fact that they have fish lips rather than eel lips gives them, relatively speaking, a pouty look.

According to New York Waters by Ben Gibberd, “the last two full-time eel fishermen in New York City” are Larry Seaman and his son Larry Jr. They put traps out in Jamaica Bay. Their bait is chunks of horseshoe crab. In winter, when the eels go to mud, they have to rake them out. They sell the smaller ones to charter boats for bait, and larger ones, up to two and a half feet long, to restaurants that serve them smoked.

With great effort the Seamans haul up a five-hundred-pound bin swarming with eels. “They don’t say ‘slippery as an eel’ for nothing,” says Seaman Sr. “Go on, stick your hand in.” Gibberd’s reaction:

Unlike snakes, eels are covered in slime, though the real unpleasantness in holding them lies less in their texture than in their primeval otherness—the sense that they don’t belong to the world of living things we are familiar with.

I’ve always had the same feeling about horseshoe crabs, but at least they don’t continue to squirm for a while after they’re dead and skinned. Eels do, due to muscle contractions. Even after they’re sliced up, they can be activated. When Seaman Sr.’s late wife’s back was turned, he would sprinkle salt on the slices and send them into frantic wriggling. “Oh God! It used to absolutely freak her out!” he recalls fondly.

Post-9/11, the Seamans are frequently stopped by patrol boats for having “breached a security zone,” and although the Seamans say eels and horseshoe crabs are plentiful in Jamaica Bay, conservationists have declared both populations to be threatened. Like so many cool, hands-on trades, including mine, professional eeling is itself threatened, at least in the United States, but Seaman Jr. says, “I’ll eel till they put me in jail.”

elephant

“Of the ultimate etymology,” sighs OED, “nothing is really known.” Other sources suggest the word referred first not to the animal but to the ivory taken from it. When an early form of the word made its way into various early-European languages, early Europeans took it to mean “camel.” In English, once the language got the animal straight, early spellings were olifaun , olyfont, elifan, and olifuntz, or olifauntz (plural): “Of the forme warde [from forward] he herd grete cry, for they were assailed of olifauntz.”

In the movie Larger Than Life, for which I received sole screenplay credit, the actress playing the elephant (which Bill Murray’s character, who has inherited her, must transport cross-country by various means) was named Tai. She was a lovely animal (see, if you feel like it, my memoir, Be Sweet). In downtown Los Angeles, during a break in filming (actually, the occasional bit of filming is a break in the not-filming), I got to ride on Tai. Sat in front of the hump, over her shoulders. Moving her slow thighs, she imparted the sensation that her great forelegs were mine.

In Kenya, I had ridden a camel, which I liked, but an elephant is better. Grander, anyway. For living large I’ll take either camelback or elephant-back over horseback, as long as there is someone on hand to keep the camel or elephant from shaking me off like a fly. “The Elephant hath joynts, but none for curtesie,” wrote Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, but people train them to kneel so that you can get up on them. “Th’ unwieldy Elephant To make them Mirth … wreath’d His Lithe Proboscis,” wrote Milton in Paradise Lost. (I lift these examples from OED, which I guess is not entirely unlike exploiting an elephant.)

The expression “white elephant,” meaning an undesired and burdensome gift, comes from the story that kings of Siam would bankrupt a disfavored courtier by presenting him with a rare albino elephant, which was regarded with such veneration that its upkeep was ruinous. People assume that regular elephants are grey, like battleships, but Tai, if you looked closely (see granular) was pink and mauve, as was Murray’s wardrobe accordingly.

The two of them genuinely bonded, I believe. They swam together, at some risk to Murray, in the movie’s best scene, and when they walked side by side she would reach over with her trunk and touch his shoulder. She had been trained, and her trainer was nigh. For company she also had a sidekick and stand-in, whose name I have forgotten.

In the nineteenth century, “to see the elephant” was a slang term meaning to get out and see some real rough life. During the Mexican War and the Civil War, it meant to see action. A. B. Longstreet, in 1835, wrote this: “That’s sufficient, as Tom Haynes said when he saw the elephant.” When I told Pauline Kael they were going to call the movie Larger Than Life (I preferred She Followed Me Home, or failing that, Large as Life), she sighed, as only she (or perhaps OED) could sigh. “It’s the Life that deadens it,” she said.

enough

Mrs. Gradgrind, weakly smiling, and giving no other sign of vitality,

looked (as she always did) like an indifferently executed

transparency of a small female figure, without enough light behind it.

—Charles Dickens, Hard Times

That “without enough light” is sheer authoriality. Not “with only a thirty-watt bulb behind it,” as a writing-class instructor might insist upon, but “without enough.” Who is to say it is not enough light? The author. It’s an intimacy with the reader, an assumption that the reader will accept “not enough” as enough. The reader goes along with the deal, because Dickens is behind it. Writer and reader strain together for a moment to see Mrs. Gradgrind forever.

Incidentally, the treasures included in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature include Dickens’s letter opener, whose handle is the actual foreleg of a cat. The blade is inscribed, “In Memory of Bob.” Bob was Dickens’s cat.

errata

In this book, as usual, there are some. Strain our every fiber as we may, we do not achieve stark perfection. The British columnist Beachcomber (J. B. Morton) put it best, I think: “Erratum: In my article on the Price of Milk, Horses should have read Cows throughout.”

ew

A man with the almost biblical name (but never mind that) of Christian Rudder, who founded an online dating service called OkCupid, has told The New York Times that messages with words like fascinating and cool are more likely to attract positive responses from potential mates than messages with beautiful or cutie. “As we all know,” Mr. Rudder was quoted by the Times as saying, “people normally like compliments, but when they’re used as pickup lines, before you’ve even met the person, they inevitably feel … ew.”

One thing that strikes me is that beautiful and cutie both include the sound ew. And yet ew is a universal—anyway, a broadly recognizable—sound of disgust, not only alone but as part of pee-yeww.

Another thing that strikes me is—what is ew backward? It’s we. Could ew be a rejection of intimacy? When somebody starts pulling you into a we you don’t want to be in, one response is, “Who you calling we? You got a mouse in your pocket?” Another response might be, ew.

Then too, when someone has somehow evinced boastfulness or even boastworthiness, don’t people who know that person sometimes go, “eeewww”? Or more like, “Look at yewwwww, aren’t you something”?

See pu-.

expertise

In January 2008, The New York Times reported that “three body-language analysts who watched Roger Clemens over the past two days” said he “was holding something back.” However, Joe Navarro, “a retired F.B.I. agent who trains intelligence officers and employees for banks and insurance companies” and “has also written a book about how to tell whether someone is bluffing in poker … , warned against concluding that Clemens was lying. Even the most skilled body-language experts are right in only about half of all cases, he said.”

When it comes to lying or not, withholding or not, this seems a low success rate. A coin toss. If I were an expert on experts, I would recommend hiring a less skilled body-language expert—one who is right only 30 percent of the time, say—and going with the opposite of his conclusions. That way you’re right 70 percent of the time.

f · F · f

When you read online, according to Jakob Nielsen, author of books about people’s interaction with technology, “You’re just surfing the information. It’s not a deep learning.” I learned this while skimming Time magazine, which goes on to report: “By tracking people’s eye movements, Nielsen figured out that our focus moves around the screen in an F pattern. We start scanning horizontally, but pretty soon we’re dropping down to see what else is there. By the time we’re halfway down a Web page, we’re tuning out.”

So, I’m just curious, how are you reading this? E pattern? Z pattern?

Huh? Are you with me? Aw, you didn’t miss elephant, did you?

See aid, marital.

fancy

The British say, “Do you fancy her?” It comes from fantasy. A more holistic question would be, “Do you realize her?”

feted

I don’t know why anyone uses this word. Depending on the pronunciation (rhyming with either [a] baited or [b] vetted is acceptable), “The emperor was feted at the cheese festival” sounds like (a), he found his destiny there or (b), he smelled bad there.

fewer/less

To some people—many people—it evidently does not ring wrong to say, “My Chihuahau has less fleas than yours does.” Those people may not realize, or even care, how much effort it requires for me to restrain from responding, “fewer fleas, fewer fleas!” So let those people go ahead and say it. I can’t stop them.

It is good practice, however, to use fewer with regard to number of items: “Ever since that whole thing with Wallace Tidwell’s thong, we’re having fewer casual Fridays.”

And to use less with regard to extent: “Ever since that whole thing with Wallace Tidwell’s thong, our Fridays have been less casual.”

Ignoring this simple distinction may create misunderstanding. If you say “We will do what we must to ensure that there are less ferocious maniacs roaming the streets,” your listeners may justifiably understand you to mean not that you intend to reduce the number of ferocious maniacs roaming the streets but that you intend to temper the current maniacs’ ferocity or to replace those maniacs with others who are somewhat less ferocious.

Is that what you want?

See peeve.

first sentence

Generally an author takes great pains with the first sentence of his or her book. I know I have never been quite satisfied with any of mine. But then I’ve never had all the ranks of assistance available to Karl Rove, author of Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. Rove acknowledges an editor; a “close friend and trusted former colleague” who “also helped craft every chapter and episode”; a line editor; a researcher; seven research assistants under the “expert guidance” of yet another person, his chief of staff; twenty-two people who read important parts of the manuscript; and ten more people who “devoured and improved major swatches of this manuscript.”

An interesting process, devouring and improving, maybe something like free-range chickens turning bugs and scraps into high-quality manure. But never mind that. Here is the opening sentence produced by Rove and his team:

“On September 11, 2001, I was the first person to tell President George W. Bush that a plane had slammed into an office tower in New York City and was aboard Air Force One as it crisscrossed the country in the hours that followed.”

The second sentence is nothing to write home about, either. But at least it doesn’t place an office-tower-hitting plane aboard Air Force One. The president really would have been slow on the uptake if his trusted aide had informed him that such a plane was crisscrossing the country aboard the president’s own plane. I hear people saying, “Oh, you know what he meant.” I’m sorry, but that don’t get it in Sentence Writing 101. Much less First-Sentence Writing 101. I have to call him out here: Hey, Karl Rove, you’re a writer? Ain’t you got no pride? (See humble.) When you think of the people who have sweated blood to write good English sentences, you can feel all right to write a sorry-ass first sentence like that?

flies

Is there any way we can relate positively to Musca domestica, the common housefly? No doubt it cannot help that a fly has no sense of personal space, that it keeps insisting, and insisting, “Hey, hey, hold still! So I can get into your nose!”

Traditionally it is ants that ruin a picnic, but ants are linear, and are usually on a surface against which they can be squashed. Flies are at one with the atmosphere. The sight of a fly on a beautiful deviled egg encapsulates so much of the human condition: goody cut with dammit.

Not that flies give a rip for the human condition. Everything else being equal, they would no doubt prefer some good stationary manure to us, but manure doesn’t grow on trees these days, and manure is low on sugar. That, science tells us, is why flies find us so attractive: even when we don’t have watermelon juice on our hands, forearms, face, and neck, we are sweet, willy-nilly, to flies. Like your old aunt Mae bearing down on your underchin when you were a tot, flies are saying, in the only language they know, “Gimme some sugar.”

Flies are excellent at reproducing. How they go about it is something not to be gone into. As to how they eat—they taste things with the hairs of their legs, okay? Then it gets worse. And they feel fully entitled to do this to our baked beans, while we are trying to eat them—our baked beans— ourselves. I bit down on a fly once, at a picnic. I can still taste it. A little like motor oil, or axle grease, only very slightly crunchy.

But what I was going to ask was, can we find a way to keep flies from getting on our nerves? Maybe, just maybe, we need to consider what we and flies have in common:

1. Reproduction

2. Love of potato salad

3.

Okay, let’s do this. Let’s give flies credit for having just about the most fundamental name in creation. What other animal is called so simply what it does? (Bee doesn’t count.) But come to think of it, that is irritating too. Why should flies get such a cool name? Why wouldn’t a pretty bird be called a fly, and a fly be called something worse, a pester, or something that might derive from the Latin for “tastes your food with its leg hairs”? That is just like flies, to get away with being called flies.

When I was a boy, people put cotton on their screen doors to keep flies away. I could never understand that, until I learned that the original idea, since forgotten, was to soak the cotton in DDT. These days, restaurants with outdoor dining areas often half fill plastic sandwich bags with water and staple them up where flies would bother diners. Supposedly, a fly’s multifaceted eyes are disoriented by reflections from the water. I have yet to see flies frantically backpedaling away from any of these water bags, but I haven’t seen any flies perched on them, either.

In fact, I don’t think there are as many flies around as there were years ago. Back in the sixties, a friend of mine went to a Coca-Cola bottling plant on business. The receptionist met him at the door. “You’ll need this,” she said and handed him a flyswatter. The manager who showed him around carried one too. I doubt that Cokes are bottled amid so many flies anymore.

Air-conditioning is hard on flies, for flies like heat. When the temperature drops, they drop, like flies. These days people stay closed up inside their houses, instead of letting fly-bearing zephyrs in through open windows. But let’s not delude ourselves that flies are an endangered species. The only way, other than swatting, to get the better of flies …

Well, going back to my boyhood again, there were some boys, cruel boys, who would pull the wings off flies, and mock them, saying, “What do you call a fly with no wings? A walk.” I didn’t do that. For one thing, my motor skills weren’t that fine. For that reason, I probably would not be able to do what a college friend of my wife’s did with a fly and a strand of her hair, which enabled him to tell a fly, in effect, “Okay, Mr. Essence of flying, fly for me.”

When my wife was in college, her hair was fine and straight and long enough for her to sit on. This nimble-fingered friend of hers relieved her of a single strand and tied a loop in one end of it. He caught a fly. He attached the hair to the fly. Then he had a fly on a leash. Eventually he set his pet free, but it flew off trailing the long drifty hair, which must have caused this one fly to provide people—look at the tail on that fly—with a little wonderment for a change.

flulike

We so often read in the sports pages that D’queem Pong-Roscoe, or whoever, “sat out the first three games with flulike symptoms.” Why do we need a word like flulike? Why not “flu symptoms,” or “symptoms of the flu”? Is the newspaper worried that it will get sued if the sickness turns out to be something other than the flu? It could turn out to be something resembling flu, maybe something much worse than flu. But if symptoms indicate possible flu, they are flu symptoms. The symptoms, themselves, aren’t like the flu. You wouldn’t say something has “a chickenlike taste.” Oh, I suppose you could. I still don’t like flulike.

You wouldn’t say “a recoverylike sign.” “A doomlike omen.” “A disasterlike prediction.” “A warlike portent.” “Thunderlike clouds.”

See peeve.

foil

Are you ready for some serious alphabet juice? You don’t have to be religious. Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877, “God’s Grandeur”:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed.

That’s what I’m talking about. Go, thou, and look up the whole damn poem, an astonishing gush (not the right word, but if it weren’t pejorative, it would be)—an astonishing eruption (not the right word either) of vision, movement, sound, and, too, sentiment that in any other setting would be too sweet:

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

Setting means a lot. In a toilet stall in a men’s room of a highly respectable university’s student center many years ago, amid all manner of scurvy allegations, gross insults and counterinsults, directions on how to defecate well and truly (“If you would shit with force and ease / Put your elbows on your knees, / With your hands, grasp your chin / And move your asshole out and in”), talk of rim jobs and ruder-than-necessary drawings of cocks, I discovered this, in a small and not too graceful hand, off to one side: “You know that you are in love when another person’s needs become more important than your own.” Below this, and connected to it by an arrow, someone had written: “True.”

Speaking of Hopkins, check out his “The Windhover,” for instance its use of the word gash (there, in context, is a right word for you); and note, incidentally, that its connecting plod to shining almost contradicts the opposition of trod to shining in “God’s Grandeur.”

But I want to focus on one word in that poem. “English,” writes John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “has three separate words foil.” The oldest, meaning to thwart, as in “Curses, foiled again,” originally meant to trample. It probably derives from the same Latin source as the verb full, meaning (AHD) “To increase the weight or bulk of (cloth) by shrinking and beating or pressing.” (Compare felt and its kinship to the second syllable of anvil.) Originally a fuller (whence the surname of Buckminster Fuller) fulled cloth by treading on it.

Another foil, meaning a light sword with a blunted point used in fencing, which OED first locates in 1594, may in fact be akin, by virtue of the puncture-preventing tip, to the first meaning, but there is no etymological evidence for that, nor for Ayto’s on-the-contrary suggestion that this foil may have evolved from the meaning of foil that we are coming to, as a sword’s blade evolved from a leaf’s.

It is from Latin folium, leaf, that we get the meaning of foil (and of folio and foliage) that Hopkins had in mind: metal compressed into a paper-thin (page-thin, as long as pages are paper) sheet, or leaf. This foil shines. Once crumpled and smoothed, it glimmers and glints multifariously. The sense of foil as someone who by contrast sets off the qualities of another—as the unprepossessing, five-foot-two, excitable, agonizing, gloom-prone Hopkins set off the Rock of Ages—comes from the practice of enhancing a jewel’s brilliance by backing it with foil. We don’t ordinarily think of shaking foil blazingly out, but a marvelous hand could do it with a big enough sheet, or poetry can in a few words.

For one thing, shook foil shakes it in a way that shaken foil would not. “Sprung rhythm” is what Hopkins called the way he would jam two stressed syllables together (or three unstressed ones as in “gathers to a greatness”) to generate more torque, more explosiveness, than regular meter could muster. Hopkins, himself, was wound tight. He became a Jesuit priest and lifetime celibate after the shock of finding himself infatuated with a young man named Digby. He was so retiring and his poems so strange that none of them were published until after his death. In his journals and letters he wrote about the “inscape” and the “instress” of things. By inscape he meant something like the complex of characteristics that give a being its individual nature. By instress, a kind of inner force field that holds the inscape together and projects it through the poem to the reader.

The image “flame out, like shining from shook foil” is transcendentally visual, but it wouldn’t be without alphabet juice. Consider the inscape and instress potential in the word foil: the puff of f and the flow of l surrounding the bouncy oi sound shared by sproing, boing, oil, boil, coil, loin, joint, joy, ahoy. (No, not so much by Roy. I wish.)

Those three meanings, those three word histories, of foil are separate. But we know them all, at once. Unless we have looked up the etymologies, we don’t connect the treading of cloth into a dense thinness with metal flattened into a reflective sheet—but why did full and folium both turn into foil?

Full came to mean “spoil a scent or trace by trampling over it.” I’m not saying foil in the sense of thwart is a mash up of full and spoil, but I am saying that trading uh (as in, uh) for oi (as in, from the foiler’s perspective, oboyoboy and, from the foilee’s, oy) makes a more than casual difference.

Latin folium became English foil (at first meaning simply leaf) by way of French foille, leaf (which evolved into modern French feuille, from which we get feuilleton, a light essay). French has a sound like Latin o, but to the French a leaf called for a more bendable sound.

As for the fencing foil, it’s metal. It’s flexible. Its use entails a lot of thwarting. This is not true etymology, any more than cockroach is what you get when you cross a rooster and an insect. But the springiness of Hopkins’s image partakes of all the associations that foil evokes. Not only the metallic paper but also the sword and the thwarting are foils to the inscape of glory divine.

See upaya.

fond

The verb fon originally meant to lose savor, as in salt that was fonned. Later, to fon—also, to fun—meant to cheat, to fool, to make fun of someone. So someone who was fonned or fond was fooled, or infatuated (from the Latin fatuus, foolish).

Later fond softened, somewhat, into foolishly affectionate. (“Why so pale and wan, fond lover?”—Sir John Suckling, seventeenth century.)

Now, to be fond of someone is a good thing. And fun is, too, but a wisp of caution hovers—“no more fun and games.” And to fondle is still to fool around.

fool, e.g., Will Somers (or Sommers)

After I gave a speech somewhere outside the South and mentioned some of the glories of Southern humor, someone in the audience asked:

“How much of Southern humor is intentional?”

“More than you realize,” is what I might well have said. But my instinct, perhaps in part Southern, is that to return a fool’s unconscious insult with a conscious one is less telling than to return it in a way that pretends it warrants graciousness. So I said, “Some of it. A good deal of it. But no doubt, not all. To be a good fool you have to know first that you are one.” Something to that effect.

The word fool comes from Latin follem, meaning bellows (surely the f is not arbitrary) or, by extension, windbag or empty-head. In the old days a great household would enjoy the antics of a “harmless lunatic,” as OED puts it, but the best fools were in on the joke. Those jokes have generally not aged very well, as such, even when told by Shakespeare. But here, according to A Nest of Ninnies by Robert Armin (1608), is a bit of jesting from Will Somers (or Sommers), royal fool to Henry VIII. The king needs cheering up. Will comes through:

“Now tell me,” says Will, “if you can, what it is, that being born without life, head, lip or eye, yet doth run roaring through the world till it dies?”

“This is a wonder,” quod the king, “and no question. I know it not.”

“Why,” quod Will, “it is a fart.”

At this the king laughed heartily and was exceeding merry; and bids Will ask any reasonable thing, and he would grant it.

“Thanks, Harry,” says he. “Now … I need nothing, but one day I shall. For every man sees his latter end, but knows not his beginning.” The king understood his meaning, and so pleasantly departed for that season. And Will laid him down amongst the spaniels to sleep.

Will remained royal jester to Henry’s successors well on into the reign of Elizabeth I. It’s a wise fool, I’ll warrant, who’ll call the king Harry and then, for warmth, will sleep with the dogs. Humility, and not just tactical.

See Xit.

form

When you say the word form, slowly and reflectively, don’t you feel your vocal apparatus—bear with me—forming something? Something sort of ovoid? Starting with a breath-of-life lip puff, f-, then making a tour, -or-, of the whole oral chamber (wrapping an orb of void), and then coming back around to the lips, together, satisfied, -m? You don’t get those particular sensations from saying, say, scratch, or gobble, or deflate, do you? I’m just asking. I don’t want to weird you out.

So let’s get scientific, etymological. Where do we get form from? We don’t know, for sure. But form may have been formed from a morphing (more precisely a metathesis, switching of consonant sounds) of the Greek morphe, which means form or shape.

No authority seems to want to entertain, even, the notion that form comes from from. Soundwise, morph is from backward. And John Ayto says frame comes from from, and furthermore that furnish , first , for , fore , foremost , former, and before all come from pr-, the same PIE root (Chambers calls it promo-) from which from sprang forth.

Ayto says former means, etymologically, “more most before.” Chambers makes this clearer: former was formerly the comparative of forme, meaning first, so that at first it meant, in effect, “more first”—but it was “patterned on formest, ‘foremost,’” which came before, and that the residual element of most comes from “the m … , a superlative element as old as Indo-European.”

Weee-oooo.

fox

“The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible,” was Oscar Wilde’s definition of foxhunting. Who says you can’t eat fox? In the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English entry on tasted of, we find: “He said he tasted of everything he ever killed, every varmint, even a buzzard.” I talked to a man once who said he ate bear bacon. You know what the old boy said when asked how crow tasted: “About like owl.” I used to think “You can kill us but you can’t eat us” would be a good slogan for the Florida Marlins baseball team, but I came to find out you can eat marlin.

Fox after a foxhunt is treyf. “You shall not eat any flesh that is torn by beasts,” it says in Exodus 22:31. This in fact was the original meaning—eventually extended to all nonkosher food—of treyf. “The biblical equivalent of ‘roadkill,’” as Michael Wex puts it in Born to Kvetch. But if you’re gentile, or secular, and careful (Oscar Wilde was two out of three), you can eat roadkill.

Foxes may have a gland that causes their meat to become foul, but so do deer and raccoons, you just have to avoid piercing it.

Fox too smart to eat? Foxes are regarded as not just clever but cunning, which suggests uncanny shiftiness. Foxfire is an eery luminescence that emanates from decaying wood, but the fox part may derive from faux. On the other hand the fox in foxglove, the flower, may derive from folk’s.

Too pretty to eat? A deer is pretty, people eat deer.

People eat snails (though my friend Jan Constantine says she never ate another escargot after seeing one “walking down the street” in Paris), turtle, snake, armadillo, shark, possum, squirrel. I have eaten all those, and ants and fried worms. Never ate fox, never had the opportunity. Not sure how I would react if I did have it.

Too much like dog? People in many cultures eat dog and other animals that Westerners think of as pets. Every year Peruvians consume an estimated sixty-five million guinea pigs—an animal so entrenched in the culture that one famous painting of the Last Supper in the main cathedral in Cuzco, Peru, shows Christ and the twelve disciples dining on guinea pig. Today guinea pig meat is exported to the United States and Japan.

Foxy wine is musky smelling. Maybe foxes stink. It’s not what they’re known for. And musky isn’t necessarily off-putting. In 1640 an Englishman wrote that “the Foxe Grape … smelleth and tasteth like unto a Foxe.” Sounds bad, but descendants of the fox grape include the Concord grape and the scuppernong, both of which are richly tasty.

Fox’s root may be puk-, bushy haired. Sanskrit for tail was puccha-s, “possibly involving some taboo,” says Chambers. Foxy means sexy. As far back as 1877 it was American slang for amorous.

Maybe just English people don’t eat fox. I’ll bet Chinese people have eaten fox, if there have ever been any foxes in China. In a market in Beijing I saw a man making snake tartare by gradually lowering a whole live snake, tail first, into a meat grinder.

Isaiah Berlin quoted the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin sided with the fox, who stands for pluralism, the notion that there are many different, not necessarily compatible but equally valid ways of living. The hedgehog knows to roll up into a spiny ball, and that’s about it. The fact that both strategies work, at least for the animals in question, is itself a point for pluralism.

There are foxes, and foxes. In African-American folktales, Br’er Fox’s elaborate predatory schemes are always outsmarted by the superior, heartier, freedom-loving trickster, Br’er Rabbit. However he strains, Br’er Fox is a conventional thinker. Br’er Rabbit is spontaneous, inspired, and at home in the maze of the briar patch. He always outfoxes the fox.

In cartoons, it’s Coyote vis-à-vis Roadrunner. In the American Revolution, it was regimented redcoats versus wily, light-traveling, indigenous bluecoats. In Vietnam, it was Agent Orange versus black pajamas.

And downhill since then.

It used to be a truism that Americans root for the underdog. Assuming the underdog is no fool. In foxhunting, that would be the fox. If I see a little red free-range canine running for dear life from a pack of baying hounds followed by horsey swells in uniform fancy dress, I am thinking “Go, fox”—not Br’er Fox but, say, the Swamp Fox, Colonel Francis Marion, who outslicked superior British forces in South Carolina with guerrilla tactics and intimate local knowledge of swamps through which to retreat. The world’s superpower, on other people’s territory, can’t very well embody that spirit.

Might eating fox help? Diligent Googling turns up this recipe, from one Ed in Australia:

First lock away the dogs, those sensitive creatures. Skin the body (of the fox) and soak the carcase in running water for three days. Gut the beast, clean it and cut into joints. Heat olive oil in a large enamel pan. Brown.

Fox meat can be bitter and acrid and the secret to overcoming this is to wait for the juices to be released and reabsorbed. Then add some mashed garlic cloves. Add thyme, tarragon and fennel fronds plus salt—my current fave being the eco-sound Murray River Salt.

When browned add a glug or two of decent full-bodied red wine, tinned tomatoes (this is really a winter recipe), two bay leaves and some home made beef stock.

Cook in the oven with the lid on at 150C until the flesh melts.

This recipe also works well with goat and badger. We don’t have badger here, but I plan to give this a go with wombat.

Tallyho!

“Until the flesh melts”? Is Ed making a sly allusion to Hamlet’s immortal “O that this too too sullied [or sallied, or solid] flesh would melt”? Or to “the melting pot”? “The Melting Pot” was a 1908 play by Israel Zangwill, an Englishman, who wrote, “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming.” I once interviewed Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwa activist who said of America, “I don’t want it to be a puree. I want it to be a stew,” an amalgam of complementary but identifiable ingredients. That is what the American English language still is, if we appreciate its particulars.

free speech

According to The New York Times, a documentary titled Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech includes an interview with the professor Ward Churchill, who lost his faculty position for making an absurdly callous statement about people killed on 9/11. “In a film in which the phrase ‘free speech’ is heard a lot,” reports the Times, “Mr. Churchill gives the best assessment of it: ‘If it comes at a price, it’s not free.’”

Oh, yeah? Everything that has any impact comes at a price. If speaking freely didn’t cost anything, everybody would do it—I mean, even nonanonymously, even elsewhere than the Web. You know what Mark Twain said: “It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.” There is even a certain justice, and a certain tempering (in the sense of toughening) in the fact that to get away with anything really telling in the way of free speech, even in the United States, you had best be clever.

frequent

The adjective, as in “frequent-flier” (poor devil), came first. Odd for it to become (with the stress switching from the first to the second syllable) a verb. You wouldn’t say to someone you have met in a bar or some other place of assembly, “Do you often here?” Some New York newspaper or good-government group might, however, have editorialized as follows:

Let us be clear: we do not frequent prostitutes ourselves. We do not even seldom them. But we believe that Eliot Spitzer should have been retained as governor even if, for all we care, he had continued to occasional one or two.

Frisian

I’m reading a Harvard Magazine article about recent genetic research indicating that the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain displaced not only Roman-Celtic civilization but also, as a result of widespread ravishment, all Roman-Celtic Y chromosomes (except, for some reason, in Wales). And I come upon a remarkable statement.

According to this article, one of the lands that the Anglo-Saxons embarked from on their way to Britain was “Friesland … and the language spoken there is the closest living relative to English.” Interesting. But here’s the remarkable bit, from Mark Thomas of University College, London: “Listening to a Frisian speak is like listening to somebody speak English with a frog in their mouth.”

Whoa! I would prefer “with a mouthful of frog,” or some other way of avoiding (ugh) “their mouth,” but here is a more pressing issue: What does English with a mouthful of frog sound like?

“Hello ribbit I’m Frisian”?

“Hel-ribbit-lo I’m Fris-ribbit-ian”?

Or am I on the wrong track here and Frisian sounds like English spoken in such a way as to avoid disturbing, or tasting, a springy green amphibian?

“H’o I’uh Frih’n”?

I think we can set aside the possibility that by “frog,” Professor Thomas means “French.” So is he alluding to a figure of speech, so to speak? In London, can a fetching-faced person who speaks with cold-blooded tongue be accused of coming on “with a faceful of bunny and a mouthful of frog”?

Frogs, in their natural state, are far from frizzly. Yet both WIII and Etymonline.com connect frizz and frizzle to an Old Frisian word, frisle, meaning “curly hair.” OED deems this etymology groundless: “the interpretation of the ethnic name of the Frisians as ‘curly-haired’ being a mere assumption.” OED does give us a nice example of frizz: “Dr. Parr’s wig … swells out into boundless convexity of frizz”—Sydney Smith.

Chromosomes aside, here are some words that came into English from Frisian, according to Etymonline.com: yet, tusk, hoop, moor, rip, wall, and slobber. That last one might have a frog-in-mouth connection. OED quotes Jonathan Swift:

But, why would he, unless he slobbered,

Offend our patriot, great Sir Robert.

(Some texts make that slobber’t.) Sir Robert Walpole, chief minister of the British state (whose son coined serendipity, see Google-logisms), honored Swift with a dinner and took him aside to talk of Ireland. Swift believed Sir Robert to be no friend of Ireland and told him so. Sir Robert never had Swift over again. In the same poem, “On the Death of Dr. Swift,” Swift quotes a criticism of Swift: “He never thought an honour done him / Because a duke was proud to own him.” Swift, he went on to say of himself, “Would rather slip aside and chuse / To talk with wits in dirty shoes.” Good for Swift.

What were we talking about? Oh:

frog

An excellent word, up to a point. The fro- evokes propulsive force, but that hard –g ending leaves the frog gathered up unto itself—not so much “solid as a gob of mud,” as in Mark Twain’s description of the famous Calaveras County frog’s postlanding posture, but rather all prepared to spring and yet unsprung. The Old English frogga was better: it let the frog go on and jump.

As John Ayto puts it, frogga “probably started life as a playful alternative to the more serious frosc or forsc.” Playful, shmayful—if we can’t have -ga, we need, for sufficiently serious purposes of representation, that g, at least. German never put it in and is stuck now with Frosch. Spanish and Italian for frog, rana, is even worse. The French isn’t bad, grenouille—it captures the leap, but maybe the suggestion of wheee (or ouiiii) in there is a bit much. Something to be said, hopwise, for the Indonesian, katak, which however is too brittle. Slovenian Zaba, Lithuanian varle, and even Hungarian béka leave me cold.

Did you know there was such a word as froghood? Not that there’s any reason there shouldn’t be. OED quotes Christopher Smart, 1770: “Too hard for any frog’s digestion, / To have his froghood call’d in question.” It’s from a fable mocking duelists—a mouse calls a frog a coward. They go at each other with swords. And a vulture,

Quick to decide this point of honour,

And, lawyer like, to make an end on’t,

Devour’d both plaintiff and defendant.

Not the earliest lawyer joke.

fudge

Origin obscure, but the sound is rich. OED’s first citation is from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766): “The very impolite behaviour of Mr. Burchell, who … at the conclusion of every sentence would cry out Fudge!”

This usage, OED goes on, “seems from the context merely to represent an inarticulate expression of indignant disgust.”

What’s “inarticulate” about it?

full disclosure

I kept seeing in newspaper and magazine articles—in which the writer felt obliged to divulge any possible sources of personal bias—sudden parenthetical confessions like “McQuorquedale’s exquisite tact (full disclosure: her mother and mine share a nutritionist whose daughter and mine are in a playgroup … ).”

So I wrote the following, which appeared in The New Yorker as “The Media Beat Goes On”:

As if “occupation, diarist” weren’t cushy enough for tax purposes (theoretically you can write off everything)—and as if he had not already made an absolute enlighten-mint from his blockbuster hey-why-not-a-spiritual-memoir Shoulda Woulda Buddha—the hydratalkingheaded Kirbo Flange … who not so many years ago was regularly captivating some .5 percent of the adult Saturday-morning crowd with his mock-ironic (I guess) interactive audio art-talk series, Like Watching a Kandinsky Dry … now proposes to take his on-line journals public.

Let’s face it, our old friend Flange (full discolosure: Before surviving—by the skin of his botched-bleach-job teeth—the “Content Blab” fiasco, before belatedly bagging the whole concept of telemarketainment, before embarking on his short-lived cable show Behind the Insights, which every week spotlighted a different pundit’s assistant … on which I was to be showcased the week Hofstra-StrideRite pulled the plug, I being in those days a dewy-eyed layer of pipe for the Zeitmeister, oh yes, Warren DeCoverley With the Views … and long before anyone knew him as pay-per-view’s Indecent Docent, Flange and my third ex-stepfather’s sometime goodgal Fortuna Ruh … who may be recalled, through gauze, as Simplicity on Simplicity Herself, from which desultory natter-com I was once literally bumped by a literal dog-and-pony act, the pony, Toby, having made a name for himself on the Barnyard Channel, and there I am trying to establish myself as Mr. Mitch the Multimedia Maven when I am literally bumped out of the frame by this foreshortened horse, with a tiny vicious dog on its back, and the crew all guffawing because I wasn’t union then and I suppose the pony was, people don’t know what it was like on some of those bandwidths in those days … anyhoo, that dynamic duo co-scripted an odd sort of ink-sniffing old-media column in Shafts, a semimonthly, marginally postcoherent schlub-pub in large part underwritten by the As If Foundation, whose director, Simon Cork, was subsequently “deposed,” as conspiracy buffs would have it, “in a palace [some palace] coup” which I—so I am told to my secret amusement—am widely suspected of having been a party to … this when yours truly was a downy-cheeked, very unpaid As If intern relegated to logging drafts of workshopped poop sheets, mind you … but even had I plausibly been involved—which is ludicrous on the face of it to anyone who has felt the chill of my absolute indifference toward persons who occupy what they themselves may consider to be positions of, how you say, clout—my views can hardly be regarded as compromised by any however-juicy rumors of my involvement given the fact that Alysse Letts, the Corkster’s shall-we-say squeeze emeritus … whose own vaunted scruples did not prevent her, in one of her patented clit-lit-crit snits over Cork’s supposed disrespect for Modern Bride Studies, from erasing his entire collection of bootleg Deborah Norville blooper tapes … is after all the very person who, in her self-appointed capacity as the picture-your-ad-here conscience of the World Wide Web, and in the festering heat of her increasingly exaggerated recollection of a certain “incident” … let’s just leave it that quite late one evening in my more flaneurial days I inflicted upon her frequent screening companion Mr. Hervé God-Forbid-Anybody-Should-Pronounce-It-Harvey DeLaBarbara what I have been advised by counsel to stipulate as “perceived physical discomfort” by dint of a simple whap on the upper arm that any halfway robust schoolchild would scarcely have registered let alone greeted with soap-operatic DeLaBarbarian howls of transparent anguish and much sloshing of Cosmopolitans and, I seem to recall, vintage back-issues of Cosmopolitan, which he was wont to carry around with him from boîte to boîte for reasons best kept to himself and a few faux-bosomy hangers-on of otherwise indeterminate nature … yes, she has taken it heavy-handedly upon her curiously assymetrical shoulders to pillory my offhand contribution to the Zeitmeister Festschrift e-conference as both “cankered” and “soft,” although I might mention I have never been physically intimate with Ms. Letts ((not)) or any member of her rather glaringly permeable circle … which if I had been—under the transient sway of God can only imagine what sort of cheap subveterinary stimulants—and immediately and vocally regretted it, might not only explain my disinclination to bob and weave to the tune of her gala-hopping air kisses—she who is forever unpacking one’s gender with the use of her cunning little satirical hand puppet Tex Tosterone, oh I’m so unmasked—but also just might account for the lady’s need-driven characterization of my well-advised reserve toward her person as some sort of inverse acknowledgment of her being in a position to impact upon my critical reputation, when, sorry, Homey don’t play that, as everyone who has really known me since I was knee-high to, I don’t know, something very small with knees, must realize … especially in light of my recent demonstrable determination to hold to an unbending standard the increasingly reedy pronunciamentos of that watcher of watchdogs, my old mentor manqué, the aforementioned Zeitmeister, Swami-meme, who himself to his credit has always tended—with, as he would and indeed frequently does put it, “due reservations”—to acknowledge my own views with as much enthusiasm as anyone can expect the never-less-than-thoughtful, never-more-than-that-either masscommeister to muster these days in light of his actual age, his regime of questionably prescribed medications, his letter-from-Dad compositional style, and his tenuous pension-track niche in the dank, miasmal duodenum of the YahooSmithBarney media mini-Leviathan—itself a virtually owned subsidiary, not so incidentally, of Marco’s Macrosystem Group, whose flagship yogurt-chain giveaway organ listed my Tuesday evening one-man pick’n’pan-slam in its “Hap’nin’” section for twelve straight weeks, even after the show folded in large part owing to the perpetually overstretched Marco’s evident inability to correct one crucial typo without making several others … and yet it was Marco, ham-fisted typeface comic though he may be, who perhaps said it best—if only he knew!—late one Sunday-closing predawn when I logged on to vent and surf for context: “Ve are too soon oldt undt too late schmardt”) has lost his edge.

That exercise seems to have purged me of motivation to write a certain sort of thing.

fuss

Perhaps, says John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “simply onomatopoeic, imitating the sound of someone puffing and blowing and making a fuss.”

OED: perhaps “echoic of the sound of something sputtering or bubbling, or expressive of the action of ‘puffing and blowing.’”

Etymonline.com: “perhaps an alteration of force, or imitative of bubbling or sputtering sounds, or from Dan. fjas ‘foolery, nonsense.’”

We’re talking sonicky. But people who are particular about how words are used are often dismissed as fussy. As in (OED), “habitually busy about trifles.” Hey, sometimes it takes fussiness in that sense to cleanup, tighten up, a mess of wordage, to render it relatively see-through and slick as a whistle.

OED quotes Leslie Stephen: “The butterfly … is much too fussy an insect to enjoy himself properly.” That’s very British, isn’t it, “enjoy himself properly.”

See Dionysian, Apollonian, blended, briefly.

future, the, caught for the moment

David Carr, in The New York Times, on the introduction of the iPad: “‘Isn’t this awesome?’ Mr. Jobs says. It is, but everything looks good on stage. Nothing ages faster than the future when you get it in your hands.”

fuzz

OED: perhaps “imitative of the action of blowing away light particles.” No one knows how, or whether, that sense is connected to the slang word for police (which goes back, in print, to 1929) , but if fuss may be an alteration of force, why not fuzz? It’s usually “the fuzz,” as in “the (police) force.”

g · G · g

Etymologically, G-string, a narrow nethergarment, leaves more than you might think to the imagination. We do know that the term goes back farther than the striptease, for “the strip and tease” has not shown up in print before 1930, and a writer referred to the string holding up an American Indian breechcloth as a gee-string in 1878. In 1885, gee-string was used for the string and cloth together, and in 1891 we read “Some of the boys wore only ‘G-strings’ (as, for some reason, the breech-clout is commonly called on the prairie).” The first recorded reference to a stripper’s last vestige of modesty is John Dos Passos’s gee-string in 1936. G-string took over after that.

So, G for a fiddle string tuned to G? Could be, but nothing about that string makes it more evocative of the loins than any other instrument string.

G for groin? In case ladies were listening? Originally, the English word for the area covered by a breechcloth was spelled grinde (not derived from grind as in the bump and grind, or as in all those songs about something the matter with the mill so I can’t get no grindin’). Groin may have evolved under the influence of loin. Why not L-string, for loin, or B-string, for breech?

G for the exclamation gee? That euphemism for Jesus! or Jerusalem! has not been found in print earlier than 1895. But variations of Geewhillikens! go back to 1851; and Jehoshaphat!, sometimes spelled Geehosofat!, to 1857. The historical Jehoshaphat seems to have been a pretty good king of Judah, on the whole, except when he formed an alliance of necessity with Ahab, a wicked Baal-worshipping king of Israel. There is no reason for Jehoshaphat to be an expletive except for the sounds in his name. Many exclamations in English begin with the j sound: jumping jiminy, jeepers, by jingo, by George, Judas Priest, Geronimo, by Jove. At least some of these are thanks to Jesus and Jehovah, but there was no j sound, in words, in Jesus’s day. His name in Hebrew was probably Yoshua. Romans called him Yay-sus. (The j sound came into English—from French, which later softened it into something like the s in English exposure—several centuries after Christ. The Old English word for Jesus was healend, one who heals, or the Savior. Jesus came in from French Jesu or Iesu … the j sound in itself has jiggy, jazzy jabber juice. See ch and jump.

Maybe a Native American was asked what he called the string that held up his cache-sexe and he replied, “Gee …” With “I don’t know, what’s it to you?” implied. Bottom line, we just don’t know.

A more explicable term is C-string, as defined on Wikipedia: “As narrow as a g-string but without the band around the waist, leaving just a C-shaped piece between the legs held in place firmly by a flexible internal frame. Since there is no material around the waist, the C-string completely eliminates the panty lines which thongs and other underwear create. C-strings are also designed for use as beachwear, which reduces the tan lines that would have been left by the side straps of even a g-string.”

What’s next? The iString?

gag

My old friend Robert Creamer, standard biographer of Babe Ruth and Casey Stengel, writes me of a wannabe gagster he knew when he worked in an ad agency right after World War II:

He was a tall young New York Irishman about my age who was in charge of the steno pool. His stock-in-trade was a harassed look and a faint frown. What he wanted to be was a gag writer for comedians, and he would stop by my cubicle each morning to try his latest crop on me—without altering his harassed look and faint frown. He’d read one after the other of the four or five he had each day and would look up when he finished and say, “No good?” The gags were about as good as the stuff the current comedians were using, but I remember only two. One was, “I wear striped socks to make my feet look tall.” The other was based on a New York City crackdown on subway mashers in which cops disguised as young women would mingle with the crowds on subway trains. Jerry’s gag was, “Don’t cop a feel on the subway, you might be feeling a cop.”

Even OED ventures that gag’s original meaning, to choke, would appear to be “imitative of the sound made in choking.” So how did gag become associated with comedy? Before it meant a professional jokester’s one-liner, it meant a hoax, a trick, a lie, a tall tale. Makers of silent films referred to their carefully constructed stunts and illusions as gags; these became known as sight gags when movies added sound.

The connection that leaps to mind, and that OED allows to be possible, is that the trickster’s gag is related “to the notion of thrusting something down the throat of a credulous person, or testing his powers of ‘swallowing.’” (“Sayyy, is this some kind of gag?”)

“On the other hand,” OED goes on to suggest, gag “may be of onomatopoeic origin (cf. GAGGLE) with the original sense of ‘unmeaning chatter.’” Onomatopoeic in either case. And why on the one hand or the other? Both connections might apply. Another word for empty talk is guff, and people say “I’m not taking any more of your guff.” Everyone seems to accept that the word guffaw is an attempt to capture the sound of a belly laugh; maybe it also captures an ejection—phaugh!—of someone else’s guff.

Then there’s the spit take, and people who speak of something so hilarious it made them laugh till water (or worse) came out of their noses. Yuk meaning laugh is also yuck the sound of disgust (or vice versa). Chuckle comes from Middle English chukken, to make a clucking noise, but it’s close to upchuck. Cackle, though also chicken-imitative, resembles kaka. Giggle, which the OED calls echoic, doesn’t really sound like giggling, which is more hee-hee-hee, but it brings us back around to gaggle, which is imitative of geese, who are famous for their excretory powers. Maybe laughter is the propulsive release of something stuck in one’s craw—craw meaning the crop of a bird, or by humorous or derisive transference (OED), the stomach of a person. I’m forcing some of these connections, but give me credit for not trying to squeeze in foie gras.

The striped socks gag just made me smile, but I liked it. Wonder what happened to Jerry.

garden path phenomenon

An example: “The young man the boats.”

You’re going along for a moment there thinking you’re reading about a young man, and then you realize: no. You’re reading that the boats are manned by the young.

Here is a much juicier example, from a review, by Janet Maslin in The New York Times, of a memoir by Barbara Walters:

Ms. Walters is not specific about her age (or about the youth-preserving surgery of anyone other than Roy Cohn, the young Ms. Walters’s weirdest suitor), but she will acknowledge this much: She’s old enough to have had the daughter of one of the Three Stooges …

WHAT? WHAT? Which one? Surely not Curly! Good God, how can such things be? And … well, you could say Roy Cohn was weirder than, okay, Moe, but …

But you read on, and you discover that Barbara Walters is “old enough to have had the daughter of one of the Three Stooges as a childhood friend.”

Oh. Here’s another one, Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Review of Books:

To watch a boxer seriously training (as I once watched the twenty-year-old heavyweight contender Mike Tyson at his Catskill camp preparatory to his defeat of Trevor Berbick in November, 1986) is to realize firsthand how contrary to nature boxing actually is, how one might argue that when practiced on the highest levels, the discipline of boxing bears …

Whoa! Mike Tyson got in shape by boxing bears? That is unnatural. Kangaroos are one thing, but …

But you read on, and you realize that Oates is saying “boxing bears more relationship to a shrewdly cerebral contest like chess than to anything like streetfighting.”

Oh. But you have had (and you’ll have it forever) the image of Barbara Walters bonking heads with, say, Shemp, and somehow from that union …

And you have the image of Tyson biting Smoky’s ear. I don’t say you want those images. I do say no one can take them away from you.

The garden path is not confined to print. On NPR I hear a biologist say, “It travels on fishermen’s feet,” and I snap to attention. A mythical beast of some kind, it must be, that travels on fishermen’s feet, looks out at the world through the eyes of a Indian scout, and its hands are those of an obstetrician.

But no. In a twinkling, because I have snapped to attention, I realize that what the biologist is discussing is just terrible algae, popularly known as “rock snot,” which is being spread among the nation’s trout streams by the feet of anglers. I’m not dismissing rock snot as a problem. I’m just saying it’s not what I thought it was there for a moment.

See typos, going with them and page turning.

gender neutrality, absurd

When you’re referring to a dog, whose sex (you don’t have to say gender when talking about dogs) you do not know, I can see why you (I wouldn’t) might refer to him or her as it. But surely the couple in this item from the Rocky Mountain News deserved a his and a she:

A male chow mix laid [yes, should be lay, but never mind that] down in the middle of a busy street this morning to keep watch over its companion, a female German shepherd mix, after it was hit and killed by a car on Chambers Road near East 52nd Avenue.

It? You’re going to call each of those dogs it? And thereby not only render them underromantic but also leave some confusion as to which one was hit and killed? What kind of person are you?

ghostwriting

Why do people resist the notion that the author of something wrote it? In The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, Robert Hendrickson baldly asserts that “Mark Twain wrote most of Ulysses S. Grant’s autobiography.” That’s a shame, because Grant was a heroic hands-on writer.

Twain published and promoted Grant’s memoirs—so generously and well that the royalties enabled Grant’s widow to live comfortably the rest of her days—but Grant wrote the book himself, while mortally suffering from cancer eating away his mouth, tongue, and neck.

In Grant and Twain, Mark Perry writes that Grant’s military aide, General Adam Badeau, and Grant’s son Fred, both of whom were authors themselves, provided Grant with considerable research assistance, and at the end of a long writing day they would discuss with him what he had written. Badeau had been reluctant to get involved in the project, having already produced his own account of Grant’s campaigns, using Grant’s records. “I had looked forward to going into history as his mouthpiece and spokesman,” Badeau wrote, “and, of course, if he wrote a new work himself my special authority would be superseded.”

The New York World reported that Badeau was ghostwriting Grant’s book. Grant and Twain were convinced that Badeau had planted that rumor, to which Grant issued a point-by-point denial. Badeau wrote to Grant offering to ghostwrite the rest of the book, for more money than he had been getting. Grant fired him: “You and I must give up all association so far as the preparation of any literary work goes which bears my signature.” Badeau wrote back: “I have no desire, intention or right to claim authorship to your book. The composition is entirely your own. What assistance I have been able to render has been in suggestion, revision or verification.”

“That seemed to end the matter,” writes Perry, except that “while Twain could never prove it, Badeau was probably the person responsible for the rumors that soon began circulating … that in fact it was not Grant, or even Badeau, who wrote Grant’s memoirs—but Mark Twain.”

The truth is that Twain, who had invested most of his own fortune in the printing, marketing, and distribution of the book, was impatient for Grant to turn in the manuscript of volume two, but Grant kept fussing with it. As publisher, Twain sighed. As writer, he knew how Grant felt—except for the cancer—at this stage of a book. “He is going to stick in here and there no end of little plums and spices,” Twain wrote approvingly to William Dean Howells.

Four days before he died, Grant dictated, in a whisper, his last revisions. After looking them over as transcribed to paper, and touching them up here and there, he put down his pencil, satisfied. Then he wrote a note to his doctor. Knowing he was incurable, he said, “I first wanted so many days to work on my book so the authorship would be clearly mine … There is nothing more I should do to it now, and therefore I am not likely to be more ready to go than at this moment.”

Twain was fixated on Grant. He imagined having met Grant in battle, sort of, and he boasted of having cracked Grant up with a joke at Grant’s expense, in a speech honoring Grant. If Twain had contrived to write most of Grant’s book, in Grant’s clean, relentless style, he would have left behind some hint of having done so.

In Twain’s last book, Is Shakespeare Dead?, he argued that someone else, Sir Francis Bacon, wrote Shakespeare’s plays, since Shakespeare himself lacked formal education and was not a celebrity in his own hometown. Twain derided the “thugs”—that is, the scholars—who continued to believe that Shakespeare did write his own plays. In Is Shakespeare Dead? Twain pointed out that Samuel Clemens, too, lacked schooling, but he was celebrated in his hometown. So, bottom line, Samuel Clemens did write Mark Twain.

If there is an Elysium, Twain and Shakespeare by now may have tried to write a play together, and fallen out over it. And Francis Bacon may be constantly having to tell people, even in the VIP area, “Listen, I never claimed I wrote Shakespeare. Why does no one ever ask me about what I did write?”

Then again, I hear of scholars today claiming authorship of their graduate students’ work. Some medical professors even sign their names to scientific papers written by ghostwriters paid by pharmaceutical firms. According to The New York Times, the drug company Wyeth engaged the ghostwriting company DesignWrite to produce medical-journal articles favoring Wyeth’s drugs. Then those articles were run past doctors who agreed to be purported to be the authors of them. One gynecologist—whose actual work, I stipulate, is far more valuable to society than mine—could see nothing wrong with this practice. She had read the paper, after all, and agreed with it, and therefore was able to say with a clear conscience, “This is my work, this is what I believe, this is reflective of my view.”

No. You may believe it, it may reflect your view, but it’s not your work unless you wrought it. For his part, the president of DesignWrite wrote, or at least signed off on, the statement that DesignWrite “has not, and will not, participate in the publication of any material in which it does not have complete confidence in the scientific validity of the content, based upon the best available data.”

That’s some piece of wordsmithing right there. Doesn’t “has not … participate” make you cringe? Would you write, “I have not, and will not, tell a lie”? Or, alternatively, “I have not told, and will not, a lie”? When you could write, “I have not told a lie, and will not tell one”?

And what’s up with those three in’s? It’s not a matter of simple overindulgence in in. Sometimes people liberally sprinkle several short words into a sentence, in hopes that one of them will fall into the right slot. A case in point is the excess of is’s in the following statement by the fine young Red Sox pitcher Jonathan Papelbon, as quoted by the Associated Press, with regard to the 2009 pennant race: “That’s what is the hard part about it is to realize that early on in the spring is not what it’s all about.”

He’s a ballplayer, and he’s talking. Someday, when he’s ready to tell his life story in, say, Coming Out of the Pen (the bullpen, that is), he will hire a ghostwriter to sort out his is’s. But a writing company, presumably by design, wrote, of itself, that it “has not, and will not, participate in the publication of any material in which it does not have complete confidence in the scientific validity of the content.” If I were a company’s president, I think I would refer to the company as we, but never mind that. A company might straightforwardly write of itself that it “has not participated, and will not participate, in the publication of any material in whose scientific validity it does not have complete confidence.” But when a company writes that it “has not, and will not, participate in the publication of any material in which it does not have complete confidence in the scientific validity of the content,” forget about ghosts. That company has stirred form and content into a whirl of syntactical dust. No wonder so many people doubt authorship today.

gikl

When a toddler I knew many years ago saw a shining light, he would point to it, beam at it, and say in a definitive tone, “Gikl.” An instinctive portmanteau of glitter and sparkle? Or had he precociously got hold of some ancient linguistic root? The original pronunciation of English light was more like the German Licht, and lots of gl- words relate to shining—gleam, glow, gloss, glare, glisten, and glow, which OED connects to the Teutonic root glô-. OED also includes the obsolete word blik, to shine, which goes back to Old Teutonic and has cognates in many languages, including the Dutch blikken, to twinkle.

OED recognizes no gikkle or gickle or indeed any word beginning in gikor gic-, but Urbandictionary.com has a gikkle entry, attributed to someone going by “Theeph.” The definition is icky and unrelated to gikl, but the whole entry is worth quoting, I believe, for the sake of its remarkable narrative twists:

GIKKLE

A much cuter way of giggling. The kk must be whispered in the back of your throat for ultimate effect. Takes practice.

Angry mob: We gonna mess jOO!

John: Is’t possible?!

Stu: We are lost!

*John and Stu exchange conspirital grins*

John and Stu: gikkle!!

Angry mob: Awwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!

*Angry mob turns on itself*

gillie, girl

When I went to Iceland in the summer of 1972 (to cover the Fischer-Spassky chess match, which is another story), I had heard about the salmon and I had heard about the women. I was thirty and effectively single for the first time since college. The salmon were said to be plentiful, the women active.

I liked Icelanders in general: open, unfancy people, two or three of whom paid me the compliment of addressing me in Icelandic, thinking I was one of them. Then when they found I was American they went on amicably in English as if I were one of them anyway.

I particularly liked a wistful-looking, bright-lipped young divorcée in a low-cut fiftiesish party dress I met at a Saturday night dance at the Saga Hotel. I escorted her home and traced a finger across her low-cut line, and she looked detachedly down at her bosom and said the neighbors would be watching to see when I left. I persuaded her to look out the window with me and see that no lights were on up and down the street.

“But mine,” she said.

She looked me in the eye with feeling that was stronger than mine, and wasn’t for me.

There, I bet any neighbor who may in fact have been watching would have observed, goes a wistful-looking guy.

Let me remind you that I was in Iceland as a journalist. In one aspect of that capacity, three other journalists and I met three Brennivín-drinking women (Brennivín is a kind of schnapps) and accompanied them to the apartment where they lived. With one of them, I wandered out back. We lay down in a little pup tent, which seemed odd. She said she didn’t approve of capitalism. I said I didn’t either, all that much. She said she was a Stalinist. That stumped me. Leninism, I might have been able to embrace for the evening, but—and then she asserted without changing tone that she was pregnant. We were lying side by side, looking up. “Why … ,” I said, “do you have this tent?”

Silence. No spark. We went back inside, where two of the other three correspondents were visibly fading, and the third, who was British, was gamely singing a song involving knickers. The other two women were expressionless. The pregnant Stalinist surveyed the company dourly and said, “You don’t know what to do with girls like us.”

I know, now, that girl is an etymological mystery. Not to mention a Rorschach test. John Minsheu in 1617 derived girl from the Latin garrula, garrulous, on the notion that young females talked so much; or alternatively from girella, a word for weather vane, on the notion that young females changed as the wind blew. Neither of those derivations has stood the test of time. Anatoly Liberman concludes that girl may well have arisen from among a number of Germanic roots that began with hard g or k, ended in r, often took a diminutive suffix l or le, and “denoted young animals, children, and all kinds of creatures considered immature, worthless, or past their prime.”

At any rate, girl originally meant a child of either sex. No one knows why it became female. Not until the sixteenth century does OED find men using the word to wax eloquent over female charms. In about 1520:

For by god it is a prety gyrle

It is a worlde to se her whyrle

Daunsynge in a rounde.

In 1593: “I saw one Lasse farre comelier than the rest, / A peerlesse peece, an heart-delighting gyrle.”

Sounds great in poetry, but we hardened journalists returned to the Saga Hotel unlucky. The question that sticks with me is this: Was that pregnant Stalinist looking (in or out of that tent) for a deeper commitment? Or, maybe, a shallower one? In the latter case, I’m kicking myself—except how superficially can you respond to someone, Stalinist or not, who is in the family way?

The next morning I went salmon fishing, on the Grimsá River north of Reykjavik, and met another girl.

With the light tackle we were using, you can’t horse a salmon in. It can break your hook, your leader, your line, or your rod if you ever once say, “Now listen, stop that foolishness, come on here to me.” You must pay long, scientific court, working the fish against the current, gradually cadging line bit by bit. When a salmon first takes the hook, it is likely to lie there in the water, waiting for you to do something wrong. You may have to throw rocks at the fish with your free hand before it will deign to move. To a fish like that an old worm fisherman like me is inclined to say, “Well, if you don’t want to do this, let’s forget about it. Go jump a falls, and I’ll sit here and watch.”

Which is what I spent a lot of time doing. I had often heard about salmon fighting their way upstream, but I’d never realized what a feat it was. They don’t usually make it up an eight-foot waterfall in one leap. Sometimes they get halfway up and hang there in the torrent, fighting against the water and the rocks with a flippety-flip sound that is clearly audible above the rush—then somehow they double-clutch and nose ahead into a route that carries them higher, and then they meet more resistance and are borne precipitously down and maybe back over a couple of smaller falls they’ve already negotiated. Reminded me of writing. Battling your way up one sentence, and another one, and another one, and losing that one and finding another way up so that reading it all can be like going with the flow.

Salmon is probably from salire, to leap. As salmon beat on against the current, they are preyed upon by seabirds that follow them in from the ocean. A local man told of seeing a bird dive, sink its talons into a salmon’s back and then, unable to carry the fish away, tow it with great effort to the bank. That sounded more natural to me than flailing around with a tiny fake insect bearing some grandiose name—a Blue Charm, a Black Doctor, a Hairy Mary, a Thunder and Lightning—at the end of lots and lots of line.

But there was no saying that around the star of our party, an internationally renowned angler. He showed me his six-and-a-half-foot, four-ounce rod, his number six fly line, and his six-pound test leader, with which he was resolved to catch twenty- and thirty-pound salmon. That struck me as no more feasible than trying to pick up Princess Di on a bicycle, but I didn’t say anything. He pointed out that the rod was impregnated with Bakelite resins. The reel, he said, had been handmade of missile alloys by a jeweler on Long Island.

“Did you soak it in formaldehyde to get it into the country?” I asked. My understanding was that in order to keep salmon disease out of Iceland, all foreign fishing gear had to be thus sterilized before customs would let it in. I meant my question to be deflating.

“No,” he said, “I had a surgeon friend put it in his autoclave.” He winked at our gillie and she smiled.

Gillie is an old Gaelic word. Originally it meant a lad, or an attendant upon a Highland chief. In the nineteenth century it began to mean a sort of caddie for hunters or fishers. For a gillie to be female is unusual. Gunna was nineteen, a sturdy blond farm girl who trained Icelandic ponies. When a twelve-pound salmon got off the hook of a woman in our party and started flopping around in an inch or two of water, Gunna came running through the shallows and dived on the fish as if it were a loose ball.

I liked her a lot. She reminded me of girls I used to run around with when I was nine, but I noticed her soft green eyes more than I noticed theirs then. She had them only for the MF, as I will call the master fisherman.

I stood out in the icy river in borrowed hip boots for a while, casting badly yet hooking several salmon, which, since I would lose patience, would unhook themselves. I caught a pound-and-a-half sea trout, a lively but relatively simple soul that reminded me of many other nice fish I had met. And then I stood high on a riverside bluff, looking out at lava slopes the color and texture of old elephant skin, surrounded by various shades of aquamarine sky, grass, river, spray, and light rain, watching the MF do his stuff.

He played one eighteen-pounder for an hour. “You must keep the balance nearly equal,” the MF announced as he did so, “or the partnership will be dissolved.” He tried to keep the fish in the middle of the river, but it worked its way into the shallows, where it got more oxygen and became exhilarated, took off again, jumped and twisted in the air, and the MF kept with it.

“Edge pressure,” he called out in a professional tone. He was maintaining traction on the corner of the salmon’s mouth, keeping the fish off balance, its head against the current. Finally MF was within ten feet of his opponent. He got down on his knees and crept in, gaining line, trying to remain low because if the fish saw him, he said in his running commentary, it would be exhilarated again.

I doubted this. But sure enough, the salmon stuck its head out of the water, evidently got a look at the MF, and took off across the surface like a speedboat. A wonderful move, to which the MF was equal. He stood and gave just the right amount, held, and began to close in again. Disdaining gaff or net, he got the fish to where he could see it swimming near his feet, then crouched for several minutes, holding his rod high with one hand and extending the other hand over the water.

Then he made his grab, stood up straight, and presented something long, still, and whitish that extended from his waist to his ankle. Holding the salmon up by the tail stretched out its spinal column so that the fish couldn’t move at all, while the MF rapped it behind the head—on the brain—with a rock.

I went down and saw the fish lying on the shore, looking like a single, stout, silver-and-grey muscle with a tail, an eye, and a strong, underslung jaw. Silver scales lay around loose, scattered by the coup de grâce. The main thing that occurred to me about this salmon, however well caught, was that it was dead.

But hey, that was what we were there for, and Gunna regarded the MF with admiration. That night in the lodge, the MF favored her casually with his attention, and she smiled.

The guy—believe me when I say this—was not right for her. Okay, he could fish. Would you want your daughter or your little sister or just a young woman who was a friend of yours to tumble for a guy—one more than twice her age—because he could fish? After dinner I stayed up until it was just the three of us. Until three a.m. Finally Gunna gave me a put-out look and went to bed. Then after a while the MF, looking almost ruffled, went up to his room. I waited another half hour, and then I went up to mine.

The next morning, back out on the river, the MF ignored Gunna. “Let’s go over there,” I said to her. “It’s the best place to watch ’em jump.”

Well, the MF had no need for a gillie—in the daylight—and I was a member of the party. Coolly, Gunna climbed with me to a fifteen-foot cliff overlooking a deep pool above sheer, narrow eight-foot falls and below that, in sequence, a shallow pool, a wider, six-foot falls, another deep pool, and a broad stretch of rapids.

On the lower levels, the fish were visible only when they jumped or tore across the top of the water. At the big falls and in the pool beneath it, you could see one jumping and hitting midway up the falls and scrambling against the water and the rocks at once. You could see one hitting just short of the top, being flung back end over end and falling with a smack like a person doing a belly flopper. You could see one shooting up in a greyish streak, losing his keel and sliding back down on his silver side; and then see black flashes of him boiling around in the crush at the bottom. Away from the foam, in the quieter parts of the middle pool, you could see lots of them waiting, looking much softer–a pale catfish grey with pastel splotches. Fins trembling.

“I’ve never seen so many salmons!” Gunna exclaimed. “Salmons with salmons!” And then she gave me a nudge with her elbow, pointed to the uppermost pool, and whispered, “There is a big one.”

An evocative cry. It took me back beyond all fishing to the girls I used to catch bumblebees with, out of honeysuckle bushes. “There’s a big one!” they would say, and I would calmly screw open my mason jar, at the ready. But this was more exciting. I tried to make corner-of-the-eye contact with Gunna.

Then, oddly enough, the big one took my fly.

I had cast my Thunder and Lightning and let it drift just below the surface of the pool. What the heck. Now a salmon had it, a much bigger one than any the MF had caught, and we weren’t going to have to throw rocks at it to get it moving. It was tearing around the pool; I set my hook just by jumping in surprise; the fish was heading downstream with it.

And Gunna and I were standing fifteen feet above, on a tricky lava cliff, with our hip boots on. We were going to have to work our way down and around the rocks and into the pool and who knew where after that. It was like a dream in which you try to run under a perfectly thrown pass and find yourself standing in a canoe drifting rapidly the opposite way. The fish was determined, it was clear, to shoot the rapids back down, all the way to the ocean if necessary, and there I was trying to catch up with it, tentatively holding some wild notion of its life in my hand.

I once rode an amusement-park ride that revolved, rotated, dipped, rose, and oscillated along seven different vectors simultaneously. I once untangled a six-month-old boy from an earphone cord while trying to keep his left hand out of the pudding and his mashed-potato-coated right hand off my suit on a dinner flight in heavy turbulence while fending off his almost equally food-covered two-year-old sister from the other side. But I have never been involved in such a multifariously lively operation as the one that took place that day on the Grimsá among me, Gunna, the cliffs, the falls, and that salmon.

Gunna kept trying to grab the rod. I wouldn’t let her. We clambered over the lava, nearly pitching ourselves right down in there among the salmon several times. We scrabbled along ledges—she guiding my steps and crying out advice, I striving to play the great fish neither too tight nor too loose—for four or five full-to-overflowing minutes. As we scrambled we watched our fish sprawl down the upper falls and disappear into the pool below and then reappear in a flash over the next falls and into the next pool and then into the rough water at the lowest level.

Where it got off. Suddenly. I had ceased to flow, had become too literal, too direct or maybe too abstract—had thought, “Now, surely, even though I seem to be dancing, which seems to be good, I should be pulling in”—and the salmon got a fix on my Thunder and Lightning and spit it out. I had a loose line.

I assume the salmon was relieved. Though now he had to work his way back up the falls.

I was exhilarated. Towed by the fish into richer air.

Gunna didn’t say anything when I beamed at her.

I didn’t know what to say. We climbed back up to the lip, to the ledge right next to the top of the highest falls. I reeled in my Thunder and Lightning, which looked ravished. We were close enough to kneel and reach in and feel the cold water surging down, so I did.

And just then another big salmon plopped right up onto the ledge beside me. I swear. It had misjudged its bias and precipitated itself out of the water.

It flopped around, not much better at walking than I was at fly casting. I gave the silver-scaled meaty flash a little grab or nudge with the first two fingers of my right hand—it was something like standing on a football sideline and “catching” a player who has burst out of bounds and is braking, spinning his wheels, trying to reverse so as to get back into the thick of things. I could, physically, have seized the salmon and flipped it up farther ashore the way a bear fishes, but I didn’t. Neither did Gunna. We watched it flounder—no, not flounder, watched it salmon—on the rocks between us. On its fourth flip, the salmon seized itself by its bootstraps, heaved itself sideways, landed in the corner of the falls, and astoundingly slid up and over the lip, upriver and out of sight. Off to spawn. Imagine a poured-out goldfish slipping back into the tank along the stream, against the flow, of the pouring water.

I gave Gunna an elbow nudge.

“What would we have said we caught him on?” I asked.

“A Hairy Mary,” she said, giving me a smile, finally.

glass

George Orwell, a great prose stylist, is often quoted as having said “Good prose is clear as a pane of glass.” In fact, in “Why I Write” (which the excellent, highly readable linguist Geoffrey Nunberg calls the most widely cited of all twentieth-century essays on English), Orwell wrote: “Good prose is like a window pane.”

Orwell was certainly speaking in favor of clarity, and against worn-out phrases “tacked together like sections of a prefabricated hen-house” (hear, hear!), but he was too judicious to present a pane as purely transparent. The earliest panes of glass, prized today if you can find them, were by no means invisible. And even today, to try getting a windowpane utterly clean is to court despair—go for that last little streak on the inside and you realize it’s on the outside, and when you go out and get it, you see a fingerprint on the inside. There’s a reader-writer metaphor in there somewhere; I’m not going to try to buff it up any further.

The word glass derives from the same root as gold, arsenic, melancholy, gall, Hare Krishna, glimpse, glide, zloty, glare, gloss, gloaming, glitch, and glib. If you’re glassy-eyed, your soul is not exactly visible, is it? In “through a glass, darkly,” glass means a mirror. I heard once of a man who was killed when the mirror over his bed fell on him. Imagine a last moment of seeing yourself descending, in great alarm, upon you.

See puppy.

Gmail?

No. Should be G-mail. As in G-man, G-spot (Gspot? Come on), and G-string, not as in Gstaad. Gmail looks like someone sat on Warren Harding’s middle name.

gnat

Chambers says this is ultimately related to gnaw.

A gnatling is a small gnat.

At Answers.com, we are told that “a gnat usually reaches a length of 4 cm (2.114 in.) and a wingspan of approximately 6.23 cm (3.415 in.).” Call that the average gnat? That is a huge gnat. Information drawn from a pest-management company. Scare tactics, if you ask me.

Godwottery

“An affected or over-elaborate style of gardening or attitude towards gardens,” says OED. From “My Garden” by T. E. Brown: “A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!” (Wot an archaic word meaning knows. OED, however, seems to say proper present third-person singular would have been wots or wotteth.)

going global

Alan Furst, a highly regarded novelist of international intrigue, was quoted in The New York Times as saying that his books “should read like books in translation—it’s translator’s English.” That remark brought me down. Global markets driving out local flavor. I prefer what I. B. Singer told The Paris Review, that the modern Yiddish writer “was brought up with the idea that one should get out of Jewishness and become universal. And because he tried so hard to become universal, he became very provincial.” My ambition is to write American English like a native.

golf

The brassie, the spoon, the mashie, the niblick, the cleek. All gone! You can hear all those old clubs rattling about in the golf bag of history. According to The Historical Dictionary of Golfing Terms by Peter Davies, cleek is an old Scots word for “crook, walking stick with a hook.” The light narrow-bladed iron in question “was sometimes also spelled click, and so associated with the sound of the impact of club on ball.” Niblick—referring to the original stubby-headed wooden version of this club—probably meant “short-nose” (nib being an old Scots word for “beak”). With a niblick you could root a ball out of a bad lie like a pig snouting up truffles, and put a solid lick on it.

Those clubs’ modern equivalents are just woods (made of steel or titanium) and irons, with numbers. Where’s the romance there? Where’s the onomatopoeia?

Did you know that the real name of actor Jeremy Irons is Stephen F. Randall III—that he took his stage name from a golfing friend of his father’s who wouldn’t use woods? If you did know it, forget it, it isn’t true. It’s a bit of misinformation I gleaned from Lycos.com, a self-described “information fusion machine” that I found by Googling “Jeremy Irons golf.” My thinking was, there must be a joke there somewhere. And ironically enough, there was: Lycos cites as its source a website that turns out to be entirely tongue in cleek. I mean cheek. In fact, the actor was born Jeremy John Irons.

His sister, according to nndb.com, is Felicity Irons. If you were writing a golf novel, that would be a good name for a golfer with perfect pitch and chip. But who would believe it? Robert Frost wrote of his fellow poet Edward Arlington Robinson, “His life was a revel in the felicities of language.” Has anyone ever reveled in the felicities of, say, the sand wedge? At any rate, Jeremy’s sister, according to nndb, is not a golf pro but a “rush weaver.” Weaves rushes. Jeremy’s father’s name, though, is Ping.

No, I made that up, the father’s name. I’m reaching, I’m pressing. I’m trying to revel in golf language, and all I am doing is foozling.

To foozle, of course, is to bungle a shot. The Historical Dictionary of Golfing Terms leaves the etymology of foozle at “origin unknown,” but WIII raises the possibility that foozle may come from the German dialect verb fuseln, “to work hurriedly or poorly.”

Which is what I’m doing. Pressing. Getting frantic. Jeremy Irons jokes!

So. Let me do a little waggle here. (Waggle, referring to a preliminary flourishing of the club before grounding it, goes back at least as far as 1890. Before that, did people not waggle? Did they call waggling something else? We don’t know.)

To sclaff is to unintentionally hit the ground before the ball. The very sound of it jangles my wrists.

Divot is just an old Scottish term for a chunk of turf. Roofs used to be made of them. Taking a divot, however, does not imply that you can carry it home with you, to start a new lawn with, or a roof garden.

A chili-dip is a mishit somehow evocative of the fact that when you try to dip up a lot of chili with a taco chip, you don’t get a lot of chili. On your taco chip. Should’ve gone with the 5-iron.

Start over. Shift weight back and forth. But no happy feet. Let the club swing itself. Yeah, right.

I won’t try to tell you that just as baseball is a four-pointed pastoral journey from home back on around to home again, golf is a reenactment of the eternal quest for beachfront property. What with the sand and all. No. My game is not philosophy. It is words.

Take golf. You may have assumed that the the word was flog backward, as in self-flagellation. Or a compression of “Gosh all Friday” or some stronger oath. But no, the Scots probably borrowed the word from the Dutch, who played some comparable game (only without that essential Scottish contribution, the hole) that involved hitting a ball with a colf, or kolf: Dutch for “club.” Kolf sounds like hitting, all right, but it’s too close to sclaff for my comfort. Then too, golf introduces a strong hint of gulp. Not to mention the vast gulf between that pretty green up ahead and where you are standing.

After a number of strokes (defined by OAD as “a sudden disabling attack or loss of consciousness caused by an interruption in the flow of blood to the brain”), we have reached that green. And must putt. Which is not, ideally, the same as punt. The roots of putt are the same as those of put, as in “Just put that down anywhere.” Chambers says the golf term was probably associated, back around the fourteenth century, “with earlier putting, now known as shot putting.” And indeed it may be as hard to get a golf ball into a four-and-a-quarter-inch hole as to fit a sixteen-pound ball of lead into it. But of course putt rhymes not with foot (as does put) but with but. As in, “I had the break figured perfectly, but …”

Speaking of putts, and the anxiety of confronting a necessary short one, the nervous condition known as yips is “probably imitative of jerky motions caused by tension,” says AHD. Tommy Armour is sometimes credited with coining the term. “Once you’ve had ’em, you’ve got ’em,” he said. Yep.

Bogey is a word that managed to turn a relatively easygoing concept into a demon. In the late 1800s, holes and courses, began to have target scores by which a player could be judged. Par, deriving probably from the financial term par value, was pretty much perfect. An unofficial, less demanding standard, which a good amateur should be able to equal, came to be called bogey: the bogeyman of should-be-able was breathing down the amateur’s neck.

Birdie probably came from “a bird of a shot,” bird meaning something like hell. An eagle (unless it is breathing down your neck) is better than a birdie. A double eagle, three under par, is called an albatross, which may seem odd, since shooting that bird at sea is regarded as disastrous luck. Shooting one on a golf course just makes everyone else hate you.

The origin of tee is a mystery. It doesn’t have to do with the little wooden deal’s shape, because the original tees were small mounds of sand. Dust to dust, tee to trap.The man for whom the mulligan was named is identified in various stories, but none is confirmable—perhaps because, although many a duffer (origin also obscure) would be happy to claim the indulgence, no one ever wanted to claim the honor. It would be like saying, “You’ll concede me that eight-footer, I assume, for I am the eponymous James Elmore Gimme.”

When Mary Queen of Scots, who had grown to womanhood in France, returned to Scotland and hit the links (from the Scottish for “ridges, hummocks”), she called the boy who carried her clubs a cadet, rhyming with pâté. Her countrymen heard it as caddie. The derogatory term cad seems to have come from caddie, possibly owing to the snobbish assumption that anyone who schleps is low and ill-mannered.

It isn’t usually a caddie, however, who resorts to the use of a foot wedge: a stealthy lie-improving kick.

Time to move on. Fore! (Which means “look out ahead.” More helpful, from the standpoint of those being shouted at, would be Aft!, meaning “watch your back.”) Let us thrash forward wielding our blasters and baffies.

Damn. Those, too, are obsolete words for approach-shot implements. Wielding irons, then. So cold, so clinical. As if you knew precisely what will become of the ball after you hit it with a given iron, even if you hit it right. According to WIII, the word iron is etymologically akin to the Sanskrit for “he sets in motion, swings” and the Latin for “wrath.” There should be a club called the wrathie, especially designed for wrapping around a tree.

gollywaddles

Sometimes one is tempted to despair of the level of reasoning on the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2008 The New York Times reported on the Court’s discussion of whether “fleeting expletives” could legally be televised:

“Why do you think the F-word has shocking value or emphasis or force?” Chief Justice Roberts asked Carter G. Phillips, a lawyer for Fox Television Stations, which had broadcast some of the offending language. The chief justice answered his own question: “Because it is associated with sexual or excretory activity. That’s what gives it its force.”

Justice Antonin Scalia added that this was the reason people “don’t use gollywaddles instead of the F-word.”

Poppycock. Any number of terms associated with sexual or—and I love this expression—“excretory activity” are quite inoffensively speakable, not only on TV but in a Supreme Court session. For instance, pregnancy and restroom , or for that matter sexual and excretory. What gives fuck its force is the combination of its meaning and its kinephonic value. Probably the word is used more often (“Where the fuck has Grandma’s strudel recipe gone?”) with no connection to sex. But the f-word in any context evokes naked flesh smacking together. Its rude, explosive soft-f-to-hard-k sound—soft f, uh as in thrust, and k (see K)—and the way in which it surges through the oral apparatus make it a gratifying epithet to utter and often a frightening one to hear. It may not require any imagination, but it means business. Who would exclaim, “My gollywaddling printer is out of gollywaddling ink again!”? Perhaps Ned Flanders, the Simpsons’ irrepressibly euphemistic next-door neighbor.

Google-logisms

Marty Mazzone, in a query to Harvard Magazine’s “Chapter & Verse” department, writes: “My mother used to say, as fast as she could, ‘The high uffum buffum and the compound presser and squeezer and the beefer dog trim.’ At least, that’s what we think she used to say. She would never repeat it for us on the spot. Can anyone identify the origin of this very strange, unGoogleable phrase?”

Shouldn’t that be unGooglable? As in unbunglable: “The gang thought their caper was unbunglable, but …” Maybe not. “The average person will find watermelons unjugglable.” Doesn’t look right, does it? “Eventually, over the years, one’s hips become, to all intents and purposes, unwigglable.” Ugh. “Nothing befuddles her. She is unbefuddlable.” No. English is not primarily what is known as an agglutinative language, in which words are strings of distinct elements that naturally hook together, like Lego blocks. English does have agglutinated words, for instance dog-catch-er, but the elements of English are so diverse that its bits don’t necessarily groove on one another.

A little Googling establishes that Googleable is most common on the Web. OED, as of this writing, does not recognize any Google-based word except the verb Google, first noted (in the participular form googling, with quote marks around it and a question mark after it) online on August 1, 1999, three years after Google began as a Stanford University research project called BackRub.

Mazzone’s mom’s “phrase” (a sequence of phrases, actually) is Googleable now, of course, because Googling uffum buffum, or beefer dog trim, brings up Mazzone’s query. To call something unGoogleable in print is self-refuting.

Googling uffum buffum brings up something else: the sad story of Robert Buffum, who in 1863 was presented with one of the first Congressional Medals of Honor, and congratulated in person by President Abraham Lincoln, for his part in the hijacking of a Confederate locomotive, the exploit that inspired Buster Keaton’s great movie The General and the Disney version, The Great Locomotive Chase. Eight years later, Buffum ended his life by cutting his own throat, in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Fellow soldiers said Buffum was a “small, bony” man, “argumentative and stubborn,” “morose and downright garrulous,” with “quick moving arms,” “little bony arms, which were more like hand-spikes than arms.” According to the Googleable book Here Rests In Honored Glory by Andrew J. DeKever, Buffum was “a family man and a committed abolitionist but also a whiskey-drinker … An avid fan of Shakespeare, he was known not only for praying and swearing at the same time, but also for engaging his comrades in ‘absurd, pointless arguments,’ such as when he tried to convince friends of his that a black hat was actually white.”

Before they could get the captured locomotive into Union territory, Buffum and his comrades were captured and crammed into various fetid holes so stifling they could scarcely draw breath. Expecting to be hanged, Buffum prayed characteristically: “Lord, we are taught to pray for our enemies, therefore we pray Thee to have mercy on those god damned rebel sons of bitches, for they know not what they do.”

After escaping once but being caught (he was said to be nimble and nervy, but not a good runner), Buffum was released in a prisoner exchange. He returned north a hero, which meant that people kept buying him a drink; and psychologically unfit for regular duty. He went AWOL. His new commander said, “His character is that of a jayhawker [see J], filibuster, and guerilla with a slight sprinkle of the horse thief.” (Filibuster in those days meant a freebooting soldier who engaged in unauthorized warfare, bordering on piracy, against another state.)

Mustered out of the army, Buffum shot a man for saying Lincoln should be hanged. That man survived and didn’t press charges, but Buffum spent time in an asylum in Worcester, Massachusetts, where conditions may not have been much more humane than the Confederate lockups. He got out, made enough money to buy a house for his family by helping to promote a comrade’s book about the locomotive heist, and then shot another man to death, which is why he was in the asylum where he killed himself.

Had it not been for Mazzone’s query, and my dissatisfaction with the word unGoogleable, I doubt I would ever have stumbled upon Buffum. There should be a word for … Wait a minute, let me check …

There is, in the chatosphere, such a word: Googledipity.

In English (“humble.life” quoting “gord,” December 2005): “Found this as a result of ‘Googledipity’ while looking for something entirely different.”

And in German (“Daggio” to “Brianna,” December 2007): “Also bisher fand ich Sie besser, aber wenn Sie schon bei so einfachen Begriffen wie ‘Lost’ versagt, dann gehe ich lieber zu Googledipity.”

Which may be translated as “So far I’ve found you better, but if you’ve already failed with simple terms such as ‘Lost,’ then I’d rather go to Googledipity.”

Brianna’s response to this is: “:rofl: Googledipity! :biggrin:”

Which of course means, in any language, “Rolling on the floor laughing. Googledipity! There is a big grin on my face.” (The grin might also be represented by :D—tip it to the right and the colon forms eyes, the D a lopsided grin—which has been voted the most hated emoticon.)

Brianna goes on to wonder, “Habt ihr mal Googledipity bei Google eingeben? :biggrin:”

Which means, “Have you suggested ‘Googledipity’ to Google yet?”

Daggio does not respond to this question, perhaps taking it as rhetorical.

Serendipity was coined, in 1754, by Horace Walpole, the essayist and historian whom Lord Byron in the following century called greater than any living writer, “be he who he may.” Walpole said he was inspired by a fairy tale about three princes from Serendip (a former name for Sri Lanka) who “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” As far as Googling can tell us, Googledipity was coined by “gord.” But thanks to Mama Mazzone, I was first to define it on Urbandictionary.com. Example: “I Googled ‘Lincoln’ to find out about Town Cars, and found out we had a president by that name. Sheer Googledipity.”

My mother sang “Chickery chick, cha-la, cha-la” around the house. Never knew where it came from. Just now Googled it. Novelty song, Sammy Kaye, three weeks at number one, Billboard, 1945.

See Gmail?

grammar/glamour

The next time someone tries to tell you that grammar isn’t glamorous, you can point out that glamour is a corrupt form of grammar. In the Middle Ages, grammar tended to mean learning in general, which to unlearned folk included the occult. By way of Scottish, the supposed magic-spell aspect of scholarship became glamour, as in “cast the glamour over her.” Robert Burns in 1789 wrote of

Ye gipsy-gang that deal in glamor,

And you, deep-read in hell’s black grammar,

Warlocks and witches …

I’m always surprised when regular people think of glamour as reputable, rather than chi-chi. Of course I’m from Georgia, come from Methodist parents, and appear on National Public Radio, so I wouldn’t know glamour if I stepped in it, but if glamour insists on ending in -our, it ought to go ahead and turn French and rhyme with amour. Note that it can’t hold on to that u adjectivally: glamorous.

granular

Jean Strouse on granularity: “I like this relatively recent addition to our vocab (the word isn’t new, just the use, as in getting down to a granular level of detail). I said to a friend yesterday that the guy we were discussing doesn’t ‘get granular’ about his work.”

I concur—I mean, about the word, I don’t know who the guy was, except that his name is legion. Granular, evoking both granules and grain as in the grain of wood or stone or skin …

You want to read a great quote? James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, on coal oil:

This “oil” is not at all oleaginous, but thin, brittle, rusty feeling, and sharp; taken and rubbed between forefinger and thumb, it so cleanses their grain that it sharpens their mutual touch to a new coin edge, or the russet nipple of a breast erected in cold.

Granular in itself is a granular word, which sounds like it ought to sound. Gl- words are glib, glossy, glitz, glop, and, yes, well, okay, glory.

Gr- words get us down to hard texture, the nitty-gritty.

In Word Origins, and How We Know Them, Anatoly Liberman writes that gr- has tended, in fact, to appear “in numerous words whose meaning can be understood as ‘(to produce) a nonsonorous sound (of discontent).’ An association between kr-, khr-, and gr- with a growl or low roar is universal.” Citing the terrible man who shouts “Goroo, goroo” at David Copperfield, Ayto goes on to say that “Gr- made people cower in the nineteenth century, as it did in the days of Grendel and the ‘grinning’ warriors of old.” (To grin was originally to show pain or anger by baring the teeth.) A more directly relevant value of gr- to granular is, as Ayto points out, the sound of a grinding wheel.

Nobody ever said getting granular was a day at the beach—oh, wait a minute.

“A friend of mine,” adds Jean Strouse, “now talks about manularity, as in doing the dishes by hand.” I’ll say this: writing is manual work. Maxim Gorky wrote of Leo Tolstoy, “Sometimes, when talking, he would move his fingers, and gradually close them into a fist, and then, suddenly opening them, utter a good full-weight word.”

growsome

There’s a likable old word, meaning apt to grow or conducive to growth. OED cites an 1863 Staffordshire source, “Our pig is such a growsome little thing; it will eat anything”; and an 1877 Lincolnshire one, “It’s growsome weather noo.”

h · H · h

If letters were people, I could see bony H hanging out with round O. Oh. Ho. Hohoho. H_2O. H as bred-to-be-upright Prince Hal. O as eternally globular old Falstaff.

How fitting, then, that someone designing a new typeface will customarily begin with capital H and capital O. Designer Tobias Frere-Jones in The New Yorker:

Just drawing the H, there are a number of choices to make. How substantial? How wide? Are there serifs, and, if so, how broad, how thick? When you get to the O, you have to decide how heavy the heaviest part of the letter should be. There are reasons it can’t be the same as the H. If the heaviest part of the O is the same as the heaviest part of the H, the O will look too thin, because the O reaches its heaviest weight only for a moment, whereas the H gets to hold that maximum weight all the way to the top. Also, if you draw the capital H and O at the same height, that O will look too short, so the base of the O has to fall a bit lower than the H, and the top has to rise a bit higher for them to seem compatible.

Haskell, Eddie

American television has produced many indelible characters—Urkel, Paulie Walnuts, Roseanne Roseannadanna, Dan Rather, Bubbles on The Wire—but only one stone archetype. Eddie.

head

Originally, in Old English, this word was héafod, pronounced more or less heh-uh-vud. Perhaps we have all known mornings when that felt about right. Even the modern head, pronounced hed, is heavy compared to French tête, Italian testa, Spanish cabeza, or Latin caput (which by the way is not related to kaput meaning finished but does happen to be Tupac backward). Even German Kopf has more bounce than head. Why does such a potentially uplifting part of the body rhyme with dead and lead and dread? It is no inducement to thinking. “Why don’t you use your head?” parents say.

“Don’t want to. Want to use my hips,” b’dumpadump.

Head does, however, have gravitas. That’s why it’s hard to hold up.

Why do we say that someone fell “head over heels,” when that is the upright order of things? Ernest Weekley called the phrase “a curious perversion” of the Middle English “heels over head.”

While “head over heels” may be illogical, it has the right rhythm. Let us ask ourselves why.

We say tip-top—see blob—instead of top-tip because top has a broader, heavier sound: top-tip is top-heavy, about to topple, and we don’t want that in tip-top. We do want it in head over heels, and head is heavier than heels.

Here’s a consideration: “I’m head over heels in love” connotes falling forward, headlong. “I’m heels over head in love” suggests feet slipping out from under, causing a person to fall backward. Doesn’t it?

I know this: “head over” is faster to say, more sudden, less deliberate, than “heels over.” “Let’s not have Amy and Ed over” tumbles out. “Let’s not have the McNeils over” requires careful articulation.

Eelzover is an interesting sound—“I’ll have two eels over easy,” “This dream feels overdetermined”—but it doesn’t turn over readily, like eddover , like an easy-cranking car. “Now the back wheel’s over my leg”—the tongue must pick its way through. Compare: “Let’s move your bed over next to mine.” “The trail led over the hill.”

At the phrase’s end, on the other hand, heels works well. The long vowel (wheee, eeek), the liquid l, the buzz at the end—it sprawls. Well, it doesn’t exactly sprawl, because nothing sprawls like sprawl, but head at the end would jam on the brakes; heels evokes extended loss of control. Head over heels is fun to say.

The tongue hath its reasons that reason doth not necessarily know, until reason takes into account the physicality of the tongue, without which, where would reason be? Oral gratification trumps logic. That’s one reason our heads feel like héafods some mornings.

headlines

There is something about a good newspaper headline that I fear will not be perpetuated online. Here is a great headline from the nonvirtual New York Times:

GERMANY, FORCED

TO BUOY GREECE,

RUES EURO SHIFT

What that is, is a triumph of compression. But headlines can be more alluring than that. In the paper-and-ink Berkshire Eagle I read:

COCONUT-CARRYING OCTOPUS FOUND

And I do want to know about the octopus (which, Current Biology reports, has been filmed collecting coconut shells for shelter—“the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal”), but I also love the headline itself, which fits its four-column space, to a T, and is metrically gratifying. Let’s see if we can’t incorporate that headline into a verse form discussed in Alphabet Juice, the double dactyl:

Higgledy-piggledy,

Current Biology

Now is reporting, to

Plaudits all round,

Divers have proof of in-

Vertebrate tool-use: a

Coconut-carrying

Octopus found.

And how about the poetry (without going into the meter, which is essentially iambic, with a variant first line) of this headline from The New York Times (over a story suggesting that it is too soon—as always—for New York’s National League baseball team to feel good about itself):

METS, MISSING LEADERSHIP,

ARE WISE TO TEMPER JOY

“Are wise to temper joy.” Where are you going to find language that poetic anymore (not in contemporary poetry, surely) except in headlines? Yet headlines tend to be stereotyped as superficial hypery!

So often, a headline is anything but sensational. This was the lead headline in The Berkshire Eagle one day in 2010:

COUNTY

WELLNESS

LAGGING

hiccup

OAD’s definition seems fine, if a bit over the top, until the last word: “an involuntary spasm of the diaphragm and respiratory organs, with a sudden closure of the glottis and a characteristic sound like that of a cough.” A cough? To me a hiccup sounds more like a reaction to being clothes-lined (to use the felicitous football term for running into a forearm with your Adam’s apple), only somewhat more upbeat. AHD’s definition is better: “A spasm of the diaphragm resulting in a rapid, involuntary inhalation that is stopped by the sudden closure of the glottis and accompanied by a sharp, distinctive sound.”

Sometimes hiccup, pronounced the same way, is spelled hiccough. If the gh were intended to be pronounced as in ugh, there would be some sonicky justification for this, but anything that looks like it ought to be pronounced hih-coff is a denial of basic onomatopoeia. I don’t think anybody quite articulates a p in hiccupping (the French go hoquet, Danes hikke, Walloons hikéte, Swedes hicka, the Dutch just hik), but the lips do come together at the end, as if preparing to form a p. There is something to be said for up in that a hiccup makes your torso bounce.

Walter W. Skeat in his discussion of this “spasmodic inspiration” alludes to the expression “a hacking cough” (also to hitch—a hiccup is a hitch in one’s oral getalong) but as to the spelling hiccough he is firm: “seems to be due to a popular etymology from cough, certainly wrong; no one ever so pronounces the word.”

Some hiccups might have more of a higg sound to them. Skeat points out that the Welsh have a word ig meaning sob.

Why not hickup? Too quick. We are familiar with pickup, stickup, lick up, brick up, trick up, prick up, but I don’t think there’s another word in English with -iccu- in it. (A mysterious tenth-century sticcum crops up in OED’s entry on ice, but it warrants neither its own entry nor credit as an ancestor of the American colloquial stickum, which OED first finds in print in 1909.)

Note that when two hard c’s come together in a two-word phrase—public cup, say, or static cling—they don’t run together. Each is sounded separately. So -iccu- educes a mental hic’cup. Previous attempts to get hiccup right were hickock and hicket, both of which Skeat thinks were “better forms” than hiccup. But there’s no glottal hitch in those ck’s. And hiccet would look like it should be pronounced hik-set, maybe, and hiccock—well, that might not be bad. Etymonline.com says all of these forms replaced Old English “aelfsogoða, so called because hiccups were thought to be caused by elves.” We know today, of course, that they are caused by Wiccans.

Just kidding! If Wicca were a corporation, we might suspect it of spelling itself funny to attract attention. But Wicca the neopaganistic sect, also known as the Old Religion, comes by its name traditionally, wicca being Old English for wizard. Male wizard, actually. The female was wicce, which in modern English would not look like anything.

hippopotamus

From the Latin for horse and river, but you don’t have to know that to enjoy saying the word while thinking of or looking at the animal in question. Hippopotamus sounds appropriately ponderous, not to mention hippy and bottomous. French hippopotame is too perky, if you ask me.

hopefully

One can see why a public official would like to say, “Hopefully, the ecosystem will not collapse” instead of “I hope the ecosystem will not collapse.” The latter is more straightforward. It is more nearly responsible. Yet it sounds relatively wishy-washy. In the Idaho State Journal of August 20, 2009, an Idaho Fish and Game official, when asked whether hunters would be able to track down wolves by tapping into the frequencies of their radio collars, responded as follows: “I don’t think so. I hope not. I don’t know if that would be considered fair chase. I’m pretty sure that would be against the law.”

For his own job-covering sake (and maybe even, who knows?, the wolves’) he would have been better off saying, “Thinkfully, no. Hopefully not. Nonknowfully, that would be considered fair chase. Pretty be-fully sure, that would be against the law.”

So, go ahead, make your peace with hopefully, but don’t come complaining to me when a publisher sends you this rejection:

“Regretfully, our dog ate your manuscript. Mournfully, your manuscript killed him. Doubtfully, you can write anything now we will read with pleasure.”

humble

Almost inevitably, a person who has just been given grounds for feeling high pride, in public will instead profess to be humbled. “Thank you, Mr. President,” said Sonia Sotomayor when nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court, “for the most humbling honor of my life.” Jerry Lewis, in his acceptance of a lifetime-achievement Oscar, went, not surprisingly, farther: “My humility in this moment is staggering.” There may be cases, then, where it is humility that goeth before a fall. But I am content to believe that the average person cannot possibly comprehend the titanic humility a Jerry Lewis can feel.

About humble there is something aw-shucks and down-to-earth. Like humus , earth, humble comes from Latin humilis, lowly. But no one is likely to say, when honored, “I have never been so humiliated.” Humble has a homey sound—hum, bumble. The bumblebee was originally called a humblebee.

But David Simon, auteur of the great TV series The Wire, says that “to give a humble,” in Baltimore law-enforcement parlance, is to arrest someone—whose offense had otherwise been too routine to warrant his being charged—because the perp presumed to give the officer a dirty look: “He eye-fucked me so I gave him a humble.”

hunch

A fine example of a sonicky word, and there are scientific grounds for saying so. IN BATTLE, HUNCHES PROVE TO BE VALUABLE ASSETS was the headline of a story in which The New York Times reported, unsurprisingly, that in combat you often don’t have time to think; you have to react to subtle cues. “As the brain tallies cues,” the Times reported, “it may send out an alarm before a person fully understands why.”

And how do hunches manifest themselves in the body? That question was addressed by a 1997 experiment in which people chose cards based purely on hunches. When a hunch was coming on, “their bodies usually tensed up—subtly, but significantly.” Subtle tensing was quantified, in this case, by “careful measures of sweat,” but I can recall, from tense situations, the physical tensing, or coiling, that comes with the flash of how to react.

The noun hunch, meaning a premonition or an unreasoned basis for action, derives from the verb to hunch, which means, according to AHD, to “bend or draw up,” to “assume a crouched or cramped position.” Pronouncing the word hunch tenses up the whole vocal apparatus.

hyphen

Far too much hyphenation goes on in popular media today. On The Huffington Post we read of a senator “worried about the supposedly-lax” language in a bill, and another who “would support a less-restrictive proposal.” Huffpo, again: “The president’s actions in the wake of the BP disaster has been a case-in-point.” (Subject-verb disagreement there, too.)

The New York Times: “220,000 voters the G.O.P. can ill-afford to lose” and “to venture into even-deeper waters.”

A post on the Romenesko news-of-the-media site: “I was pretty-much broke at the time.”

Andrew Sullivan’s website quoted Barack Obama: “I believe that change comes not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up.”

AP photo caption: “California quarterback Kevin Riley hands-off to tailback Jahvid Best.”

I despise every one of those hyphens (except mine in news-of-the-media). They form clumps. It’s as if perfectly functional individual words can’t be trusted to stay on track unless they are forced to hold hands.

I can’t believe that any stylebook sanctions those hyphens. It is standard practice, however, to underhyphenate when an expression of more than one word is joined to another word. For instance, in Ron Powers’s estimable biography of Mark Twain, someone is referred to as “a little main chance-struck.” Surely that needs to be “main-chance-struck.” In Paste magazine, we find a “Jack Kerouac-by-way-of-Tom Waits tune.” That looks like someone named Jack Waits whose middle name is Kerouac-by-way-of-Tom. And how about this, from the Times: “ … plans to open seven gyms in the area for high school-aged basketball players.” School-aged players who are high? (This was the Times’s attempt to improve upon LeBron James, who had announced on Nike’s website his plans to open such gyms for “high-school aged” players. LeBron’s version is better, but it suggests players who have become aged in high school. Why not “high-school-aged players”? Or, better, “high-school-age.”)

Somewhere online I came upon this dictum from a New York University editing workshop: “The hyphen has no analogue in speech; it is punctuation created purely by the needs of print.” That makes no sense. All punctuation was created “by the needs of print.” And a hyphen is, or should be, audibly significant, nearly as vocal as a comma. Surely NYU can hear the difference between the stuck-up in “You’re a stuck-up little snob” and the stuck up in “You’re stuck up,” or “You stuck up a bank?” In stuck-up, there is more stress on stuck, a bit of a push, so that it catches onto up. In stuck up, the stress is equal between stuck and up, so the two are distinct. In its original Greek form, the hyphen was probably an indication (Chambers) “that two notes were to be held or blended together in music.” In print today, the hyphen betokens a quickening that pointedly connects two words into one.

A hyphen is something you need to get a feel for. The great radio comedian Fred Allen, whose voice was notably nasal, once wrote to Groucho Marx that he was “taking a refresher course” in “nose oratory.” Eschewing capital letters, as he was wont to do in correspondence, Allen went on: a “problem that confronts the man who talks through his nose is the hyphenated word. saying the word quickly, one part can come down each nostril. the catch is how to handle the hyphen. it takes quick thinking to … decide instantly which way you will tip the hyphen to have it tumble out of the nostril you have chosen.”

i · I · i

In electronics (iPhone, iMac, iPod, iPad), little-letter i has come to loom larger than any capital I. The New York Times quotes David Sloan, producer of a TV program called i-Caught, which exploits video clips sent in by viewers: “the ‘i’ is emblematic. It stands for information and the Internet. It also stands for the first person, … active, user-generated content that’s catching something of the moment. Who’d have thought one little skinny lowercase letter could mean so much?”

“The small -‘i’ trend,” says the Times, “seems to have begun in earnest with the arrivals in 1995 of iVillage.com, a Web site aimed at women, and in 1996 of the iMac computer from Apple. ‘I guess I could say, “Ay, ay, ay,” but flattery is a beautiful thing,’ said Deborah I. [note middle initial] Fine, president at iVillage Properties in New York.”

This, on the Times’s part, is a terrible lapse in phonetic spelling. Obviously what Ms. Fine said was “i-yi-yi.”

The reporter (or copy desk) may have been thinking of aye, which Etymonline.com calls “perhaps a variant of I, meaning ‘I assent,’” or of the Middle English yai, meaning “yes”; or that aye may derive from the other aye, which means “always, ever.” Both those aye’s are pronounced like eye, as in “Aye, aye, sir.” But “Ay, ay, ay” is A, A, A.

See A.

ingenuity

Etymologically, ingenuity ought to mean ingenuousness: candor, artlessness. Instead, it means ingeniousness: cleverness, imaginative skill, which is pretty much the opposite.

Before we dare to imagine how such a thing can have happened in an upstanding language such as English, let’s look at the core that ingenious and ingenuous share. Many English words incorporate this gen, whose roots relate to birth—generate, congenital, genesis—and by extension to kind or nature—genus, gentry, gene. According to Etymonline.com, the early meaning of ingenuous evolved from “with the virtues of freeborn people” into “honorably straightforward.” (More recently, perhaps owing to a rise in cynicism, or to the dramatic influence of ingenue, we are likely to think of ingenuous as meaning about the same as naïve—which also derives from gen via Latin words meaning innate, natural.)

Ingenious, on the other hand, comes from the Latin for “gifted, with inborn talent.”

But people have for centuries confused ingenuous with ingenious. As a result, ingenuity long ago came to mean ingeniousness. And however ingenious we may be, there’s nothing we can do about that now.

We can, however, slip into our loose-speculation shoes and try to figure out what caused the confusion. To the eye, ingenious and ingenuous look a lot alike, but to the ear, i/u isn’t the only difference. The e in ingenious is long, forceful, as in genial, genius, genie, gee! (The i, which sounds like a long e itself, seems to bring out the beast, so to speak, in the preceding e.) The e in ingenuous is short—soft, we might call it, as in gentle, or reassuring, as in genuine, or anyway impartial, as in general, gender. This difference between the e’s is appropriate to the different meanings.

But then when you try to turn ingenious into an -ity noun you get ingenity. Now the i following the e is pronounced ih, not ee, and ingenity wants to rhyme with serenity, amenity, lenity. The e that was ee becomes eh.

On the other hand, when you turn ingenuous into an -ity noun, you get ingenuity. The stress shifts from the soft e to the oomphy u. “Ooo! What ingenuity!” sounds in accord with “Gee! That’s ingenious!” The ingenuity of the ingenious tongue and ear defy etymological consistency.

(If ingenious had been ingeneous, the noun could have been ingeneity, as in homogeneous and homogeneity. But ingeneous might have been reduced to ingenous—as homogeneous has largely been replaced, in popular usage, by homogenous. The influence of homogenize has probably had a lot to do with the latter shift, and there’s no such word as ingenize. Visually, though, ingeneous might have been too close to igneous, which has to do with fire.)

“Is the pope fallible?,” alternatives to

Has a cat got a climbing gear?

Does a fat dog fart?

Would a fifty-pound bag of flour make a big biscuit? (No good anymore, been co-opted by TV commercial.)

Does the pope wear a funny hat?

See zythum.

itch

This seems such a natural word, you’d think it occurred early on to Adam. But at one point in Middle English it was yekth, and an old Scots form was yuke or yeuk (“When I get that dry yeukin’ in my thrapple”). OED’s first citation of the intransitive verb itch as we spell it today is from Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida: “I would thou didst itch from head to foot, and I had the scratching of thee.” Quite possibly a romantic sentiment, between the two lovers. But no, it’s Thersites—“I would make thee the loathsomest scab in Greece,” he continues—exchanging insults with Ajax.

Here’s a poignant note: in one form or another, according to OED, itch goes back to circa 1000, but scratch didn’t arise until the sixteenth century! Sure, before scratch there were scrat and cratch, both of which carried the meaning of scratch—but the violent, aggressive meaning. Not until the sixteenth century does OED find an example of scrat meaning to scratch for pleasure, “To rub lightly with the finger-nails, etc., to relieve itching or the like.” By that time, scratch was taking over. OED says scratch was probably a “confusion” of scrat and cratch. Okay, I’m going to get romantic again: Don’t you think maybe the s- from scrat softened cratch, and the -ch from cratch connected scrat to itch? The language itched, and itched, and finally found its scratch.

Oh, thrapple is throat.

j · J · j

On the face of it, “naked as a jaybird” is a mystery. Some of our pinker feathered friends might evoke human nudity, but you’d have to really want them to, and surely you don’t. “Barefooted as a yard dog” speaks for itself, but a jaybird looks overdressed if anything.

First of all, why jaybird? A jay is already a bird. Is there a parallel in tuna fish? No, tuna fish applies specifically, as AHD puts it, to “the edible flesh of tuna, often canned or processed.” I don’t know what other processed form of tuna there is, than canned. Liquified and bottled? But never mind that. Is tuna fish some kind of crazy euphemism, so we don’t have to say “tunaflesh sandwich”? No. We don’t say “salmonflesh croquettes.” (Germans do however call pork Schweinefleisch.)

You know how I think tuna fish arose? I can’t prove it, but see if this doesn’t make sense: a parent opens a can of tuna. A child looks inside and says, “What is that?”

Parent: “Tuna.”

Child (backing away): “What … is … tuna?”

Parent: “It’s fish! Don’t worry about it!”

But we’re talking primarily about jaybird, here, and I don’t know anyone who has eaten, or been served, jaybird in any form.

So. Where does jay come from? AHD and many other sources (OED, though, says origin obscure) assert, or suggest, that (like martin and robin, from those English personal names), it’s from the Latin personal name Gaius. Even if this is so, nobody calls a robin a robinbird. Nor is jaybird like johnboat or tomcat, because john doesn’t stand alone as a boat, nor does tom (quite) stand alone as a cat. Jay does stand alone as a bird, without the -bird.

As to the derivation of jay, I don’t see how etymologists can ignore the fact that the blue jay’s most common cry, according to the Sibley Guide to Birds, is “a shrill, harsh, descending scream jaaaay.” Granted, a blue jay by the same authority can go toolili on occasion, and shkrrr when attacking a raptor.

And a Steller’s jay most commonly emits “a harsh, unmusical, descending shaaaar” and sometimes “a rapid, popping shek shek shek shek” and “a clear whidoo.”

And a western scrub jay “a harsh, rising shreeeenk” and a wenk wenk wenk or kkew kkew kkew, also “a harsh, pounding sheeyuk sheejuk” and “a low chuckling chudduk.”

And a Florida scrub jay “a distinctly lower, harsher, flatter, less rising kreesh” and “a low, husky kereep.”

And a Mexican jay “a rather soft, musical, rising zhenk or wink.”

And a green jay “a harsh, electric jeek jeek jeek jeek” and “a high, mechanical slikslikslikslik” and “a nasal been” and “a high, nasal unneeek-neek or grreen-rren” and a “drawn-out clicking ree urrrrrrrr it.”

And a brown jay “an intense, clear bugling keerg or paow.”

And a pinyon jay delivers “a soft, conversational series hoi hoi hoi … or single hoya” and “a series of harsher rising notes kwee kwee kwee … and loud, clear, nasal waoow.”

And a grey jay “generally soft, whistled or husky notes … from clear weeoo and weef weef weef weef to musical, husky chuf-chuf-weef and very rough, dry kreh kreh kreh” (also “a screeching jaaay reminiscent of,” and in fact perhaps imitative of, a blue jay).

So, what, it’s a coincidence that blue jays go jaaaay? They found out they were called jays, so they started calling jaaaay?

I don’t know. I do know that, based on years of observing blue jays whether I wanted to be observing them or not, that if a jaybird were naked, it would strut around ostentatiously representing nudism. Telling all the other birds—squirrels, even—they should only look so good so naked. A jaybird is naked as in the expressions “naked aggression,” “naked power,” “naked censorship” (as opposed to subtle governmental pressure on the media), “naked avarice.” Expressions that, come to think of it, we don’t hear much anymore, perhaps because people are jaded.

Does jay have intrinstic value? It has the abruptness of Hey! or Say! It’s at home in hip-hop culture: Dee Jay, Jay-Z, Jay Smooth, Dr. Jay’s, triple j, Jay Rock, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and so on. Then, until he died of “cocaine toxicity with alcohol as a contributing factor,” there was punk rocker Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr., who performed as Jay Reatard.

A jay is a joint, and vajayjay is slang for vagina. A popinjay—the English adaptation of, ultimately, Arabic babgha, which was probably imitative of the bird’s call—is a parrot and by extension a vain, gaudy person. A jayhawker was a guerrilla/pillager in Bloody Kansas before, during, and after the Civil War; presumably the free-state cutthroats in question came on as bold as jays and as deadly as hawks. (Today, they might drink Jägermeister.) Before it managed to wedge its way into the English alphabet, the very letter J, which was often represented as an I but with the soft-g sound, was regarded as a crass interloper. OED quotes this sixteenth-century huff: “Now as concerning I consonant, which oftentimes vniustly vsurpeth the sound and place of G: me thinke it hath small reason: or rather I may say it is verie absurd, and much against both Art and reason.”

Probably owing to jaybirds’ uncool image, in the United States beginning in the nineteenth century, jay meant hayseedy, hicky, bumpkinish, ill adapted to urban ways—as in the Irving Berlin song, sung by Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, “Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway”: “Oh what a fine bunch of rubens, / Oh what a jay atmosphere.” Hence jaywalker, a person who has no more sense than to walk out into traffic. Today in Manhattan, hip pedestrians jaywalk advisedly, going not by lights but by their feel for street flow, but try that in Dallas and you’ll get a ticket. (God knows Dallas is jay.)

Jack

The quintessential English male nickname. On both sides of the pond we use it generically, as in I’m All Right, Jack, “Hit the Road, Jack,” jumping jack, every man jack, lumberjack, steeplejack, you don’t know jack, jack-of-all-trades, Jack Frost, jack-o’-lantern, Jack the Ripper, Jack and Jill.

Jack is the common man, and by extension a nonroyal face card, or a mechanical fellow laborer: a jackknife, a jackhammer, or just a jack. Here’s a democratic tip of the hat to a nation that calls its flag the Union Jack.

How Jack arose as a diminutive of John is not clear. It may have been influenced by Jacques, which however is the French equivalent of James (from which we get jimmy, as to jimmy a lock). It is clear that jack has a snappy charge to it, from the energizing j through the fast bright a to the quick stop of ck.

Money is jack, and in baseball a home run is a jack, from the verb to jack, as in “jack it out.”

I hope some of you out there are old enough to remember Jack Benny. On radio and TV, he portrayed himself as a skinflint. He once asked his factotum, Rochester, who is sharpening a pencil, “Roch, would you mind sharpening that in the fireplace?” Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky. He was still unestablished in show business, and was calling himself Ben K. Benny, when he joined the navy during World War I. In those days, all sailors called each other “Jack.” That’s how he came up with his stage name. Jack Benny. It’s as bouncy as Bob (born Leslie) Hope, Bing (born Harry) Crosby, or Jim Dandy.

jejune

An inapt-sounding word, since it means barren (or as OED puts it expansively, “Unsatisfying to the mind or soul; dull, flat, insipid, bald, dry, uninteresting; meagre, scanty, thin, poor; wanting in substance or solidity”) and has june in it. Jejunity may, regrettably, be bustin’ out all over, but you don’t want to think about a jejune bride.

Well, jejune was borrowed from Latin ieiunus. Latin had no j. Latin’s i was originally a y sound. Yeyune sounds more like jejune ought to.

The pronunciation of jejune given in Chambers, jijün, is a rare occurrence of five dots in a row.

joke, linguists’, which I don’t get either

From Geoffrey K. Pullum at Language Log, the linguistics blog:

Q: Two linguists were walking down the street. Which one was the specialist in contextually indicated deixis and anaphoric reference resolution strategies?

A: The other one.

juice

The word juicy would be juicier—over-the-top juicy, too literally mouth-watering—if it were jucious, as in luscious, delicious, scrumptious, lubricious, squishy, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Early English spellings of juice (when i could stand for a j sound) include iuyshe, iwisch, iuwys, and iwse. All were attempts to adapt French jus.

Jus just wouldn’t work in English, because of children.

“Drink your orange jus.”

“Yuck. Rhymes with—”

“Don’t say it!”

Hence the -uice, which looks odd the more you stare at it, but it’s like the -uit in fruit, the -uise in bruise. We must concede to French jus a juicier j. But juice will do, by golly, juice will do. Sometimes I squeeze a little more out of it by saying “j (y)oose,” to rhyme with deuce.

See Dionysian, Apollonian, blended, briefly and -sh, sh-.

jump

Good basic English word. How would you define it? And can’t use your feet. OED is on it:

To make a spring from the ground or other base by flexion and sudden muscular extension of the legs (or, in the case of some animals, as fish, of the tail, or other part); to throw oneself upward, forward, backward or downward, from the ground or point of support; to leap, spring, bound …

You think that’s that? No, OED knows there’s a distinction to be made:

… to leap with the feet together, as opposed to hopping on one leg.

Okay. But was jump with us from jump, or the jump, or jump street, that is to say from the jumping-off point, the get-go, the beginning? No. There was leap, there was spring, but there was no jump until the sixteenth century. And no one knows where it jumped in from. John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins says “etymologists fall back [so to speak] on the notion that it may originally have been intended to suggest the sound of jumping feet hitting the ground (the similar sounding bump and thump are used to support this theory).” The ump part, yeah, but how about the j? Maybe intended to suggest the kind of kinetic energy that gets words like jab and Jack and jig and jerk and juke under way?

And leap, somehow, is relatively high-flown. Would leap ball or leap blues or leap cut or leap shot or leap start have the requisite charge? Spring is tight, all right, and yet it borders on the lah-di-dah. Feeling springy and feeling jumpy are different things. We needed jump. So we summoned it from our vocal apparatus.

k · K · k

When, ironically enough, people are treating fuck as ineffable, they speak of “the f-word,” of “effing.” But a great deal of the word’s kick is in its final letter. Try saying, “What the fub?” or “Let’s go somewhere and fud” or “I will fuff you up” or “We fummed ourselves silly” or “Fur ’em if they can’t take a joke” or “When desperate housewives fuv around, they don’t fuv around.”

And in West Side Story, the delinquents did not sing, “Officer Frupfe, frupf you.”

kick

John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins calls this “one of the mystery words of English. It first appears towards the end of the 14th century, but no one knows where it came from, and it has no relatives in the other Indo-European languages.”

Well, it sounds right. Its first uses in English are attributed to the dissident Catholic theologian and translator John Wycliffe, or people associated with him (called Lollards). In a tract published around 1380, the author tells “secular lords” they should get right with Jesus, because (my modernized paraphrase) “It is too hard to kick against the spur—you should know that this harms you. For it takes away soul-help from you and your people.” Around 1382, Wycliffe and his circle produced the first English translation of the Bible. In the ninth chapter of Acts, Saul is on his way to Damascus, bent upon arresting any Christians he can find there, when a blinding flash of light brings him to his knees, and a voice asks, “Why persecutest thou me?”

“Who that?” asks Saul.

“I am Jesus whom thou persecutest; it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” By “hard for thee” is meant “hard on thee.” In other words, when you kick back against the prick of a spur or a goad—as is the natural reaction of a horse or an ox—you just make it worse for yourself than if you go along with the divine guidance that the prick represents. Christ has been prodding Saul into becoming a Christian himself, and to fight back is folly. Saul converts on the spot and goes on to become the Apostle Paul.

Did Jesus use words like kick and prick? Maybe not. The foregoing direct quotations are from the King James Version, which retained the Wycliffian “kick against the pricks” expression. The Wycliffe version was a translation of the Latin Vulgate version, durum est tibi contra stimulum calcitrare, the antepenultimate word meaning a cattle prod, sometimes used against slaves, and calcitrare (from which English gets recalcitrant) meaning, according to Cassell’s Latin Dictionary, “to strike with the heel, kick” or “to resist obstinately” or “to writhe the feet about, at death.” Heel in Latin was calx, spur was calcar, so calcitrare derives from the way animals, not humans, kick, except when humans are riding an animal and wearing spurs.

The Vulgate version, in turn, was a translation of Erasmus’s version of the original Greek, where the word for “pricks” is a word usually translated as “goads.” But in earlier Greek manuscripts, the expression “kick against the pricks” does not occur at that point. It does occur in chapter 26, verse 14, where Paul, in chains, is describing to the Roman governor Agrippa his conversion, and he says that Jesus spoke to him in Hebrew. Since versions of “kick against the pricks” had popped up in classical literature since well before the birth of Christ, Paul may have been departing from direct literal quotation to use an expression that Agrippa would understand.

Within a few years after the Wycliffe Bible, a very different character from St. Paul, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, asserted on the road to Canterbury that it is wise to flatter a woman, not reprove her, because anyone, if scratched on his or her sore spot, will kick. The first use of kick as a noun was “Kicke of an horse.”

So kicking begins as knee-jerk bucking or payback, instinctive, quick: kick. Over centuries the concept has expanded—to kick the bucket, to kick someone in the pants, to kick a ball, kick as the recoil of a rifle, kick as a jerk or jolt, and kick as (OED) “a strong or sharp stimulant effect, … a thrill, excitement, pleasure.”

Louis Armstrong, when Murray Kempton told him how much he liked his record of “When You’re Smilin’,” replied, “I was working the house band at the Paramount when I was young. And the lead trumpet stood up and played that song, and I just copied what he did note for note. I never found out his name but there was kicks in him. There’s kicks everywhere.”

kiss

William Makepeace Thackeray, in Pendennis, pointed out that this word, used to represent both “the salute which you perform on your grandmother’s forehead, and that which you bestow on the sacred cheek of your mistress,” is of four letters, “not one of them a labial.” A labial is a letter whose utterance requires complete or partial closure (and generally some pooching) of the lips: p, b (buss, baiser), m, w (note the air-kiss sound, mwah), f, v, and the rounded vowels, basically o and oo. That’s why smooch (compare German schmusen) is better. Even for your grandmother, though for her you might want to cut it off at smoo.

See ch.

kludge

Here’s a word that gets computer people’s juices flowing. Though kludge may date farther back in oral culture (see online discussion at Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words), OED calls it “J. W. Granholm’s jocular invention.” In a 1962 article, “How to Design a Kludge,” in the computer magazine Datamation, Granholm defined kludge as “an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole.” Granholm said it “derived from the same root as the German Kluge … , originally meaning ‘smart’ or ‘witty,’” and “eventually came to mean ‘not so smart’ or ‘pretty ridiculous.’” Granholm added that “the building of a Kludge … is not work for amateurs. There is a certain, indefinable, masochistic finesse that must go into true Kludge building.”

According to Quinion, kludge “is used in computing and electronics … for a hastily improvised solution to some fault or bug, but doesn’t seem to have moved much outside those fields, if at all.”

It should do. Whether pronounced klooj, as dictionaries have it (roughly following the German), or to rhyme with fudge, it’s sonicky enough, and it certainly applies to a great many things besides computers. Granholm, known outside the OED as Jackson Granholm, had a long career in aerospace and electronic physics. On the side he wrote frequently about “things that were basically silly in the computing world,” as he put it in an interview. He would “take a five-page IBM press release and edit it for content and end up [with] two lines.”

The “many idiocies welded into” computer programs that Granholm pointed out in that interview included the weird-looking numbers at the bottom of a bank check:

I reach in my checkbook and take out a check and it’s got magnetic character recognition on the bottom … And every bank in the world has that, and they have that because Bank of America footed the bill to do it, really, and then sold the project to General Electric. So the whole world uses magnetic ink. Optical recognition was just as well-developed, in fact came along before magnetic ink character recognition was done. And if that were used, we could use an ordinary typographer’s font … readable by any human being as well as any machine, and we would have eliminated the cost of magnetic ink, special type fonts, and revision of printing technology in order to have checks processed by a machine. It didn’t happen that way. And it’s never going to go back. The stupidity is wired in now.

Granholm, who grew up in Puyallup, Washington, was an Army Air Force officer in World War II, therefore familiar with a wide range of kludges. In 2000 he published, in the UK for some reason, a lively memoir, The Day We Bombed Switzerland: Flying with the US Eighth Army Air Force in World War II. He was appointed defense counsel in the court-martialing of two young pilots who happened, by mistake, to bomb Zurich. A remarkable aspect of the trial is that the presiding judge was Colonel James Stewart, who behaved in that real-life situation as you would expect one of the characters he played in the movies to do. He was fair minded, unpretentious, and smooth. When the corporal charged with recording the complex testimony began to sob softly, Stewart said, “Just a doggone minute here! Let’s just hold it up here a bit. This poor lady is snowed with all this big technical talk. Yeah, yeah, that’s all right dear. Just take your time.”

knee

From a PIE root *g(e)neu-, whence French genou, Italian ginocchio, and, in English, genuflect. John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins adds genuine, from the ancient custom of a father’s acknowledging a newborn as his own by placing the infant on his knee. But now I see that OED and Chambers both throw cold water on this notion, which was the only reason I got into knee in the first place.

Seems like it should be an interesting word. Popular song from 1918: “Would You Rather Be a Colonel with an Eagle on Your Shoulder (Or a Private with a Chicken on Your Knee)?” In England at about the same time, the song “Knees Up, Mother Brown!” urged the lady in question to cheer up and dance, giving rise to the term knees-up, meaning a party.

To “give a knee” to a boxer, in England in the nineteenth century, was to serve as his second—the boxer would sit on second’s knee between rounds. When an American football quarterback “takes a knee,” he is semi-kneeling immediately upon receiving the ball from his center, downing the ball because his team is ahead with seconds to play and the clock will continue to tick.

Eh.

Knee and gnu? No. Gnu is probably from the Hottentot. But then Hottentot is considered (OED) “both archaic and offensive; the word Khoekhoe … is now usually used in its place.” Hottentot may have come from a Dutch word meaning stammerer, stutterer—typical imperialistic insensitivity. To be fair, that can work both ways. According to Dennis Tedlock, editor of 2000 Years of Mayan Literature, the name Yucatán came about when a Spanish explorer asked some locals what the name of that area was, and he misheard what he took to be their reply. “What they actually said was k’iut’an, which means, ‘The way he talks is funny.’”

According to OED, to kneeify meant “to make a knee of,” that is, “to attach (the toe of a shoe) to the knee by a chain, as was the fashion” in the fourteenth century. From The Tragedy of Richard II: “This chayne doth (as it were) soe tooefy the knee, and so kneefye the tooe, that …” Oh, never mind.

There is no English word for the back of the knee. How about eenk?

knickers

Short for knickerbockers, trousers gathered at the knee, named for the knee pants in George Cruikshank’s illustrations of Washington Irving’s satirical History of New York, … by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), which proved so popular with New Yorkers of Dutch descent that they began to call themselves Knickerbockers, which is why New York City’s pro basketball team is the Knicks.

Irving got the name from his friend Herman Knickerbocker. Dutch knikkerbakker means “marble baker.” As a young girl, my friend Marianne Swan, born and reared in Holland, played with marbles made of clay. The kn in knikkerbakker, I am advised by her husband, Jon, “would not be an n sound that smothers the k. The k would be present and accounted for. Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker loses that sound, as does knickers, which in Dutch slang are called turd catchers. Our Icelander friend told me of how that language, basically Old Norse, preserves the k sound in its knee and knife words, but you combine the k and the n in your nose, like a controlled sneeze.”

In England, of course, knickers are panties. Dating back to when they were knee length. Now try not to think of naughty and nookie.

knickknack

Often spelled knicknack, occasionally even nicnac, but I’m for preserving the four k’s. Nicnac would suffice to fix the pronunciation, but I like to sense unvoiced k sounds in the background. The echoic word knack, as in (sixteenth century) “make a fillip or knack with the fingers,” betokened a sharp rapping noise. (The onomatopoeic fillip, first cousin to flip, is when you bend a fingertip back with your thumb, generate tension, and release, to flick a booger or some other tiny object at someone or to tap smartly against someone or something: “Hee … gives the cup a phillip to make it cry Twango,” 1619.) We might imagine Fred Astaire dancing and singing “Knack knack knack on wood.”

That knack may have been the precursor of knack meaning trick, trinket, or delicacy and, as we use the word today (OED): “A ‘trick’ of action, speech, etc.; a personal habit of acting or speaking in a particular way.”

Knickknack is a reduplication with a quicker vowel in the first part, for rhythm’s sake, as in click-clack, and “This old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on my drum.” You know that clickety instrument “the bones”? It has been called “a pair of Knick-knacks.”

The knickknack we know today is a gimmick, trinket, kickshaw. Note all the k’s. Knickknacks tend to be clicky little things on the shelf.

l · L · l

This letter ought not to be so angular; the l sound goes with long, slow, flowing, relaxed, langourous lolling. Certainly there was nothing cut-and-dried about the old unit of measure, the ell. The foot, the yard, the inch, the cubit varied, but the ell was all over the place. Originally it represented an arm. Or just a forearm. The English ell was 45 inches, the Scots one 37.2, the Flemish one 27, we are told by OED, which then cites a period authority as saying that in Scotland an ell was either 42 or 38, and another that 50 English ells were equal to 102 Danish. I don’t think we can find in those numbers the answer to whether the Danes or the Scots had shorter arms. Than each other. Or than the English.

Why should we care about the ell? Well, it’s related to our elbow, isn’t it? The el- means arm, the -bow means bend. Or if you go back farther, according to John Ayto, the el- comes from a PIE root (which also gave us ulna, the longer forearm bone) meaning bend, so an elbow is a bend-bend proposition (unless you happen to catch one in the head), which fits right in with this little festival of flexibility.

laughing, in letters

Her laugh is a raucous Ha!, as if an H and an A had collided in midair.

—Tad Friend in The New Yorker, on Phyllis Diller

laughs, textual

I have watched humorous authors, in performances geared to the selling of their books, getting laughs by batting their eyes, mugging, hopping like kangaroos. If the material is good enough, none of that is needed. And it’s false marketing: those laughs are not going to be there in the text some few kind souls in the audience (maybe) will shell out their hard-earned dollars for. At any rate, selling the material in this way offends against a long tradition of authorial straightface. Which can be effective. Mark Twain’s casual-seeming pretense was to address an audience in utter earnestness, even solemnity. With friends, he went perhaps farther. “He always appeared to be pained in a gentle lovable way if his listeners smiled,” said J. M. Barrie, “and it almost broke him up [today we would say “broke him down”] if we laughed.”

lawyer joke, earliest

OED cites this proverb from 1553: “The lawyer never dieth a beggar. The lawyer can never want a livyng until the yearth want men.” But maybe that’s a joke on men. Saint Ives, or Yves, who devoted his life to representing the poor and is sometimes called the patron saint of lawyers, died in 1303. The following is said to have been inscribed on his tomb: Sanctus Ivo erat Breto, Advocatus et non latro, Res mirando populo. “Saint Ives was a Breton, an attorney, but not a bandit—a thing astonishing to the people.”

Or we could go with this improved version (if I do say so myself) of the looser, rhyming translation by E. Cobham Brewer in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

Ives, from the land of beef,

A lawyer and not a thief!

Beyond most folks’ belief.

Maybe in part a Breton joke. I don’t know enough about early fourteenth-century Breton stereotypes—beefeaters?—to be sure. I can pass on to you a contemporary Cape Breton joke. Cape Breton is a Nova Scotian island. Apparently Cape Breton jokes are popular in Canada.

In an art gallery in Toronto, an obvious out-of-towner is looking at a portrait of three naked men side by side. They’re black all over except the middle man’s penis is pink. The gallery owner assumes that the visitor is baffled by the painting, so he goes over and kindly fills him in:

“You see, this is a depiction of the sexual emasculation of African Americans in a white-dominated society.”

“Nope.”

“Ah … . Or, it might also be seen to reflect the objectification of gay men in society today, because of course—”

“Nope.”

“Excuse me?”

“No African American, nor gay man either.”

“I see. Perhaps you could tell me how you can be so sure of that.”

“Watched it being painted, back in Cape Breton. Those are three Cape Breton coal miners, picking up extra money posin’. And the one in the middle went home for lunch.”

ling, lit, don’t invite ’em

In a 1971 New Yorker profile of Noam Chomsky, Ved Mehta asked Chomsky why linguists write so awkwardly. He replied:

“The ability to use language well is very different from the ability to study it. Once, the Slavic Department at Harvard was thinking of offering Vladimir Nabokov an appointment. Roman Jakobson, the linguist, who was in the department then, said that he didn’t have anything against elephants but he wouldn’t appoint one a professor of zoology.”

See upaya.

looks, poetic

“The first words Dylan Thomas said to me,” the poet David Waggoner said to me, “were ‘I’m only a poet when I’m writing poetry. The rest of the time—Christ, look at me.’”

lunge

From French allonger, to lengthen. First taken into English as the fencing term allong, which English improved upon—lunge is more sudden, more thrusty. The l is good, the -ge is good. Lose the al and change the on to uhn. Voilà.

-ly

My friend the biographer Jean Strouse has a problem with leisurely used as an adverb, as in “He walked leisurely down the street,” which, she says, “makes you want to say ‘He walked leisurely-ly down the street.’ So I use it only as an adjective (‘He walked in a leisurely way down the street’).”

I know what she means. But I have come around to liking “walked leisurely down the street,” maybe because thinking about it—taking on board a sort of adjectival-adverbial wobble—slows me down, appropriately. To me the adverbial leisurely is akin to the lively in “Step lively” or “Look lively.” You could say that the latter lively is an adjective, as in “Here come the media—put on your wig and look lovely. And try to make Daddy look lifelike, at least.” But when you tell someone to look lively you are telling him or her to get cracking, not just to appear a certain way.

At any rate, I concur in Jean’s recoil from leisurely-ly, or even leisurelily. Chambers says forms such as earlily and lovelily “are still found in the 1600s … , but are now considered ungraceful, except for an occasional use of friendlily.” I don’t feel friendly toward friendlily, even. For one thing it looks like “my friend Lily,” and the only Lily I know, I don’t see often.

Ghostlily, motherlily, manlily, beastlily are all dictionary-approved but prohibitively awkward, as is, in another way, lily-liveredly. Lilylikely, though …

“She lay palely, lilylikely, upon her laid-out lover’s breast.” Not bad.

For that matter, awkward can be infectious:

“Bah,” he said woollily.

Must you murder people so grislily?

“Coochy-coo,” he said touchy-feelily.

He proceeded wobblily along.

In American English, at least, there seems to be no way to say something along these lines: “For the nine months I carried you, growing inside me, no charge,” Tammy Wynette sang motherlily.

WIII has no space for either motherlily or fatherlily and brands adverbial motherly archaic and adverbial fatherly obsolete.

OED calls adverbial motherly “now rare,” but cites an example as recently as 1997: “touched her lightly, motherly, as she passed through.” Aww. For adverbial fatherly, OED has noted nothing since 1853: “The sky … That great smooth Hand of God stretched out / On all his children fatherly.”

Willy-nilly (from “will he, nill he” or “will ye, nill ye,” meaning whether he or you intend to or not) is already an adverb, as in “The earth is drifting willy-nilly toward shriveling up like a roasted peach,” so let’s not even consider willy-nillily.

But a band whose lead vocalists are actors lip-synching to recordings made by real vocalists might be said, suggests Jean Strouse, to perform Milli-Vanillily.

m · M · m

It’s the first letter that Helen Keller, who was struck permanently deaf and blind at the age of nineteen months, learned to pronounce. She was ten years old and had been mute. Her principal teacher and eventual life’s companion, Annie Sullivan, had connected her to language and the world by spelling things out in her palm with fingertips three years before, but Helen remained incapable of oral speech until another teacher, Sarah Fuller, “passed my hand lightly over her face,” as Keller would recall in The Story of My Life, “and let me feel the position of her tongue and lips when she made a sound. I was eager to imitate every motion, and in an hour I had learned six elements of speech: M, P, A, S, T, I.”

Four years later, when she was fourteen, she and Mark Twain began a long and highly conversant friendship. “He made me laugh and feel thoroughly happy,” she wrote, “by telling some good stories, which I read from his lips.” She would put her forefinger to his lips, her thumb to his throat, and her middle finger to his nose. “His voice was truly wonderful. To my touch, it was deep, resonant. He had the power of modulating it so as to suggest the most delicate shades of meaning, and he spoke so deliberately that I could get almost every word with my fingers.” In all she wrote twelve books. Twain called her and Napoleon the two most remarkable people of the nineteenth century. “I suppose there is nothing like [our friendship] in heaven,” he wrote to her, “and not likely to be, until we get there and show off. I often think of it with longing, and how they’ll say, ‘there they come—sit down in front.’ I am practicing with a tin halo. You do the same.”

mediablur

It is summer of 2008 and I am in an airport, trying to read a story in—I mean on, on my laptop—the online New York Times about the rare white Chinese river dolphin. It has finally been driven “functionally extinct” after surviving for twenty million years. I would like to feel outraged about this. But I can’t focus, for all of the other …

I can almost make out what CNN is murmuring, the Arctic or maybe Iraq will melt by 2040 …

… almost make out what a teenager is whining through studded lips into her cell phone—something involving the term shazbot, which according to Urbandictionary.com (I looked it up) is “an exclamation of displeasement” coined by Robin Williams on Mork and Mindy …

… almost make out the announcement of what is causing the latest extension of our flight delay (either “weather” or “whatever”).

And look! The people in—I mean on—the news and the people surrounding me are running together!

That shifty-eyed man over there may be a defector oozing polonium, that glazed-looking youth may be on the verge of keeling over from taco-related E. coli, that haunted-looking woman may be the notorious one, poor anonymous soul, who was reportedly kicked off her flight early in the week for lighting matches to cover her toxic farts. I feel for her. Shouldn’t planes have a farting section?

And shouldn’t airports have a reading section? In the midst of this low-decibel bedlam, how can anyone concentrate long enough to read anything?

Maybe, up there on the TV screen, I can keep up with the crawl. Got … to … focus … on … the … crawl …

The crawl says: 60 percent of Americans polled would be “enthusiastic or comfortable” with a presidential candidate who is female or black.

That’s good. We should not rule out candidates categorically. Ah, but someone has popped onto the screen who is wearing a Cautionary Look.

Wait a minute! Is that not the same bland necktie … the same bland jacket … the same bland face of the man who was trying surreptitiously, just moments ago, to blow his nose into USA Today over there by the recycle receptacle? Now he’s on TV? My bearings all shot, I lurch over closer to the screen. There must be a message in this. Maybe this man is cautioning me not to get on this plane.

No. He’s cautioning us all—all of us worldwide—to be skeptical of poll results: “People tend to tell pollsters what they think they want to hear.”

I recoil from the screen, from the notion that a scientific sampling of the American people, too, can lie.

Maybe it’s not true. How, after all, can we know for sure? From polls?

What if a pollster were to ask me, “Do you think people tell pollsters what they want to hear?” Having heard the news, I would have to say yes. Which would not be what the pollster would want to hear.

A conundrum. But what is this on the screen? It’s a dolphin. A dolphin in China. Evidently, one as-yet-unextinct dolphin remains. But—this dolphin has an enormous human arm thrust down its throat! It’s not enough that they’re overfishing dolphins to extinction, they’re torturing the last survivor? Is there at long last no decency …

When I lurch back toward where I can make out what CNN is saying, CNN has broken for commercial. Shazbot!

Wait. I have brought up CNN online. It’s all right, this dolphin story. It’s good news. The dolphin I saw was one of two blue dolphins who were choking on plastic they ate off the side of their aquarium pool. No medical instrument known to man could access the blockage. So, for a change, something sensible was done. A media figure was summoned:

The world’s tallest man. All seven foot nine of him. And he came, from the flock (of what, yaks?) he was herding in Inner Mongolia. The great long fingers of the great long hand at the end of his great long arm reached in beyond the dolphin’s gag reflex, seized the bit of plastic, and brought it out!

Consider the uncheesiness of the world’s tallest man. He could be abiding here in this airport flock, in the course of touring as a paragon, being herded hither and yon across waves of indistinct communications. But no, there he was in Mongolia, sticking to his herding, the work he knows best (must be yaks, sheep would not be enough of a challenge for him).

My laptop interrupts—urgent, battery running low! On-screen CNN is putting forward a product that will give me a hand—no, go away, don’t need it—with my erection. The previously dysfunctional man’s newly rosy wife there, didn’t I sit next to her between here and Cincinatti? She wasn’t rosy then; our eyes never met; nor do I want them to now.

Another announcement: my flight is delayed again, this time, as best I can make out, “for equipment.” The man who just sat jiggily down next to me, plugged into his iPhone, doesn’t realize—I assume he doesn’t realize—surely he doesn’t realize—that he is humming.

Come get me, world’s tallest man.

me-fear

Charles Hoyt is the author of Witchcraft (Southern Illinois University Press) and “a descendant of Susanna Martin who was hanged as a witch for walking through a Salem rain without getting her feet wet.” He played piano with Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, and Eddie Conlon. He has this interesting theory about what he calls (and I concur) “the vile misuse of I,” as in “They took my wife and I to the movies”:

This, I believe, is not only false gentility, but an example of me-fear; me is the badge of early childhood, and like other childish things, it becomes embarrassing. I recall vividly the fate of a colleague of mine, in 6th grade: having muttered something like “Me ’n’ Jim went down to the store,” he was immediately crushed by our teacher: “Oh, ho! Me went to the store, me did!”

Me-fear is not a universal condition, certainly not in professional football. Rex Ryan, coach of the New York Jets: “I’m man enough to be me.” Terrell Owens, the noted National Football League pass catcher: “I love me some me.”

I am told on good authority that a guy on a reality TV show once referred to “Gretchen and I’s relationship.”

memory, institutional

My friend Veronica Geng told me that when she was an editor at The New Yorker, the magazine published a short humor piece of hers not close to the front, as was the usual practice, but farther back, in one column down the middle of a single page. The week that issue came out, there appeared at Veronica’s office doorway the magazine’s longtime City Hall reporter, Andy Logan. Veronica did not know Ms. Logan well, but she knew how deeply woven she was in The New Yorker’s fabric. Born Isabel Ann Logan, she had taken “Andy” while at Swarthmore, in tribute to the New Yorker pillar E. B. White, who had been called Andy since college because everybody named White who went to Cornell when he did was called that in honor of somebody, I forget who, named Andy White. Logan had been a New Yorker writer since 1942. All this aside, Veronica thought Andy Logan was cool.

And now here she was to fill Veronica in on the background of her piece’s placement in the magazine: the rarity of that placement, the editorial thinking that must have gone into it, and the tradition it perpetuated. The first piece so published, Logan informed her, was back in the late thirties, a few years before Logan came to The New Yorker. It was one of several brief humorous sketches by John O’Hara about a character named Pal Joey.

Veronica would of course be aware, Logan went on, that O’Hara had gone on to expand those sketches into a novel, which inspired a Rodgers and Hart Broadway musical, best known for including such standards as “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and a movie starring Rita Hayworth, Kim Novak, and Frank Sinatra—by no means at his best—in the title role.

Then Logan paused, said “God damn, I’m interesting,” and disappeared.

metanarrative, pig and possum throwing

Like, the cultural assumptions underlying a story. Black-and-white movies don’t mind coming right out with these. Victor Mature, a crook, to Brian Donlevy, a cop, in Kiss of Death: “Your side of the fence is as dirty as mine.” Donlevy: “With one difference. We hurt bad people, not good people.” The movie, a good one, colors outside those lines in various ways, and its crowning glory is Richard Widmark as the leering evil guy Tommy Yudo, whose chuckle is like a snarl. But the moral framework is there, so we can enjoy the kissing and killing and so on.

In the postmodern era, we are meant to go “Yeah, right” to moral frameworks—to be radically skeptical of metanarratives. And whoops-a-daisy. According to Wikipedia (which is good enough for me when it comes to something like this):

Thinkers like Alex Callinicos and Jürgen Habermas argue that [Jean-François] Lyotard’s description of the postmodern world as containing an “incredulity toward metanarratives” could be seen as a metanarrative in itself. According to this view, post-structuralist thinkers like Lyotard criticise universal rules but postulate that postmodernity contains a universal skepticism toward metanarratives; and this “universal skepticism” is in itself a contemporary metanarrative. Like a post-modern neo-romanticist metanarrative that intends to build up a “meta” critic, or “meta” discourse and a “meta” belief holding up that Western science is just taxonomist, empiricist, utilitarian, assuming a supposed sovereignty around its own reason and pretending to be neutral, rigorous and universal. This is itself an obvious sample of another “meta” story, self-contradicting the postmodern critique of the metanarrative.

That would seem to cover everything. But. What if, for the life of you, you can find no metanarrative? Some years back I wrote a book about being a Southerner in the North. As I trudged from city to city trying to induce people to buy that book, I was called upon to explain what non-Southerners regarded as characteristically Southern phenomena. In Wellesley, Massachusetts, a lady handed me a printout of this article:

MAN FINED FOR TOSSING PIG OVER HOTEL COUNTER

AP

WEST POINT, Miss. (Dec. 6, 2006)—When pigs fly, indeed. Kevin Pugh, 20, of Cedar Bluff, has been fined $279 for tossing a pig over the counter at the Holiday Inn Express in West Point on Nov. 12.

Pugh pleaded guilty Tuesday in city court to a charge of disturbing the peace.

West Point Police Lt. Danny McCaskill has said Pugh didn’t know the employees of the hotel. There was no evidence intoxication was a factor. No one was hurt, including the pig, officers said.

“This was the silliest thing I’ve ever seen,” McCaskill said. “Almost every officer we had was involved because the incidents kept happening at different hours.”

McCaskill said Pugh was accused of walking into the hotel and throwing the 60-pound pig over the counter.

“He said it was a prank,” McCaskill said. “It must be some redneck thing, because I haven’t ever heard of anything like it.” McCaskill said there have been four late-night incidents involving animal-tossing at West Point businesses. Twice a pig was tossed and two of the incidents involved possums.

All four of the disturbances took place between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., McCaskill said.

Pugh is accused in a second animal-throwing incident at a Hardee’s restaurant. He has pleaded innocent to disturbing the peace in that case.

“Why would they do that?” the lady wanted to know. I had the feeling that if Wellesleyans had a clear-cut second-person plural she might have said, “Why do you-all do that?”

I was tempted to make something up. This man undoubtedly belongs to SPOT, I could have told her. Society of Pig and Opossum Throwing. They do a lot of good things, too—raise money for new fire engines and so on. And most of the throwing is ceremonial and open to the public. They throw pigs and possums back and forth to each other, and it is something to see, especially the catch-and-release action, which must be accomplished in one motion so the tossed animal will not get its bearings and bite the receiver. “Hot possum,” they will cry, or “Hot pig.” Up North, I believe the game is watered down to “hot potato,” which is a good indication of the difference between North and South. But some SPOT members, if they don’t get to bed early enough, are bad to indulge on occasion in what might be seen as extracurricular pig or possum throwing.

But saying that would have contributed to misunderstanding between the regions. I assured the lady that this story, to the best of my knowledge, was an isolated instance, or, okay, a series of isolated instances, not amounting to a trend or custom. She wasn’t satisfied. She looked at me as though she felt I was covering something up. Maybe I should have just said, “Y’all don’t ever pay a hotel bill that way in Wellesley?”

Truth is, I was curious about the story myself. So I did some Googling.

That news story, it turns out, circulated internationally. Here is the Romanian version:

PORC ARUNCAT INTR-UN HOTEL

Oana OLARU

Kevin Pugh, in vârsta de 20 ani, din Cedar Bluff a primit o amenda de 279 dolari pentru ca a aruncat un porc in hotelul Holiday Inn Express din West Point, informeaza site-ul abclocal.go.com. Pugh a pledat vinovat pentru deranjarea linistii publice, iar in urma incidentului nimeni nu a fost ranit, nici macar porcul.

Din declaratiile politiei, se pare ca Pugh a intrat in hotel si a aruncat pur si simplu un porc de 27 kilograme la receptia hotelului. Locotenentul Danny McCaskill a declarat:

“A fost cea mai mare grozavie pe care am vazut-o vreodata. Acuzatul spune ca a fost o gluma, insa nu inteleg ce fel de gluma e asta, pentru ca nu am mai auzit niciodata de asa ceva.” Locotenentul a mai declarat ca nu e prima data când in orasul West Point au loc astfel de incidente: de doua ori s-a intâmplat sa se arunce porci, iar in alte doua incidente au fost aruncati oposumi, si toate acestea s-au petrecut intre orele 2 si 4 dimineata.

And here, the Slovenian:

EZ PULT JE VRGEL ŽIVEGA PRAŠIA

Zanimivosti, 6:11 7.12.2006

Amerian Kevin Pugh je moral plaati 279 dolarjev kazni zaradi kaljenja miru, ker je v nekem hotelu v recepciji ez pult vrgel prašia.

Policijski naelnik Danny McCaskill je povedal, da 20-letni Pugh ni poznal zaposlenih v hotelu, prav tako pa ni bilo nobenega dokaza, da bi bil pijan.

V incidentu ni bil ranjen nihe, niti letei, približno 30 kilogramov težki praši.

“To je najbolj smešna stvar, ki sem jo kdaj videl,” je priznal

McCaskill in dodal, da je Pugh prašia vrgel zaradi šale. Policija je tisto no, ko se je to zgodilo, med drugo in etrto uro zjutraj naštela še štiri podobne izgrede, v katerih so eno osrednjih vlog igrale letee živali: dva prašia in dva oposuma.

Pugh je sodeloval tudi pri metanju nebogljenih živali v neki restavraciji, vendar tega prekrška ni priznal in se bo moral zagovarjati pred sodnikom.

Evidently the word for “possum” is similar in Romanian and Slovenian, but “pig” appears to be quite different in the two languages. Romanian for “lieutenant” is “Locotenentul,” which I like. I can’t tell whether the words for “redneck” or “silliest” are in there or not. I don’t see anything like “Mississippi,” so Romanians and Slovenians may not associate pig and possum throwing with the South particularly. They might even associate it with the West Point in New York where our elite army officers are educated. That would be unfair to the army, but a break for Mississippi.

No Kevin Pugh is listed in the Cedar Bluff area, according to Information, so we may never know what motivated him in these acts.

Or I should say, “in this act,” because we don’t know that he was the perpetrator of more than the one throwing. It is even possible that no possums were thrown, since you’ll notice that the story says only that possums were “involved.” Which is not to imply that the possums were the brains behind any of these incidents. I once asked Basil Clark, who organized the Possum Growers’ Benevolent Association in Clanton, Alabama, whether a possum was intelligent.

“He is if he has to be,” said Clark. “He’d rather just mosey along.”

When all is said and done, however, I wonder, myself, what Mr. Pugh was thinking, other than just “Pig … hotel desk … hot damn!” I believe we may speculate. You notice that no animal-throwing incident is said to have occurred in a locally owned hotel or restaurant. According to the town’s website, “The charm of West Point will hold you spellbound, as you stroll along her quaint downtown sidewalks … . West Point captures a simplicity of life rarely found in today’s fast-paced society.” She has been named, according to the website, “one of the ‘Top 100 Small Towns in America.’”

Might Mr. Pugh have been protesting the intrusion of chain genericism into such a genuinely local locale? I don’t know that Hardee’s serves anything really vile, like reconstituted chicken meat, but maybe they don’t get their beef from nearby farmers, and I do know that there is nothing less reconstituted than a live possum. And in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we may assume that the thrown pigs were local.

Or Mr. Pugh may have been being postmodern. Here is as far as I got a couple of years ago on a think piece about how the South might save America from where it was headed:

In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard defined the postmodern condition as “incredulity towards metanarratives.” Since then a metanarrative has infected the world’s only superpower, the United States. An imperialistic good-versus-evil metanarrative has drawn the nation into a preemptive war halfway around the world. It is a cheesy, treacherous metanarrative, which has proved more than a match, however, for snarky incredulity. Is there an alternative metanarrative to be forged, or at least a grittier incredulity?

If so, it will come from the Southern United States, from whose cultural debris the cheesy, treacherous metanarrative has been forged.

Here’s what I had in mind: down-home Southern values and feistiness, which I felt had been perversely evoked by the Bush administration’s jingoism (“git those evildoers before they start blowing up our church suppers” summoning us to a big crazy mess of a war), might somehow erupt into …

Into something … better. I have a hard time sticking with a think piece for very long. But I’ll say this: I can’t see that this animal-throwing story fits any metanarrative at all.

Unless. There is one possibility. I am by no means implying any sort of complicity here. But it just could be that the metanarrative of the animal throwing is an effort to establish, internationally (and credibly, as far as I’m concerned), that there is a police lieutenant in West Point, Mississippi, who is not a redneck.

me-time

As of this writing, neither OED nor WIII online defines this term. I suppose it has arisen too recently, and also perhaps—not that your typical lexicographer is dour anymore—a touch too ickily. But the number-one Urbandictionary.com definition, “A euphemism for masturbation,” overstates the case.

Wiktionary.org at one time defined me time satisfactorily: “a period during which someone relaxes by doing something he/she enjoys.” This is an excellent example of the advantage of using he/she (better, he or she) instead of the (ugh) singular they. “A period during which someone relaxes by doing something they enjoy” would not do, because the point of me time is precisely not to do what they or even we want to do.

But note how odd that looks: “the point of me time is … .” Even odder would be “Sometime I got to get me some me time.” I agree with Urbandictionary.com that this term calls for a hyphen.

mimi

A colloquial French term for a little kiss, and, by extension, mon mimi: “my sweetie.”

mixed metaphor

Nice example in The Borzoi Handbook for Writers: “You can’t sit on your hands if a recession is coming because you don’t know where the bottom is.”

modernism/postmodernism

I will not go deeply into this distinction, because anyone who cares about it knows much more about it than I do, probably, and certainly thinks so. But I will say this: nobody ever talks about postmodern life. And I will quote this from John Lanchester’s novel The Debt to Pleasure: “Modernism is about finding out how much you could get away with leaving out. Postmodernism is about how much you can get away with putting in.”

I quote that, for one reason, because I think “how much you could get away with” is an element of the arts that is too seldom brought to the fore. I mean, when critics or foundations write about someone’s getting away with presenting, say, a rotting shark or a roomful of peat moss as art, do they never chuckle? Give one another a high five? Surely they should, if anything, whoop. Do they never say, even to themselves, “Love this crazy shit”? Maybe they do, in their own circles; but by the time their comments reach me, their mode is straight-faced, hushed-tone analytical. You’d think art was a public service. And so it is, but not because of its gravity. Because people enjoy, whether they want to admit it or not, successful rascality. Thank goodness for Philistines—you can get a rise out of them.

mouse

As recently as 1982 (which, come to think of it, isn’t all that recent), The New York Times had to explain what a computer mouse was. “Instead of typing commands or code words to request information, users can point to words or symbols on the screen … through manipulation of a hand-held device known as a mouse.” The inventor of the mouse was Douglas Engelbart of Stanford. In 1965 he and his colleague Bill English, who had constructed the prototype mouse from Engelbart’s designs, mentioned the device by its rodental name in print for the first time, according to OED: “Within comfortable reach of the user’s right hand is a device called the ‘mouse’ which we developed for evaluation … as a means for selecting those displayed text entities upon which the commands are to operate.”

At various sites online, under “Mother of All Demos,” you can check out Engelbart demonstrating, in 1968, a number of technologies, experimental at the time, that we have come to take for granted: interactive text, e-mail, hypertext, and the mouse—all in the interest of “helping humans to operate within the domain of complex information structures.” At one point he says, “You have a [tracking?] device called a mouse … . I don’t know why we call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologize. It started out that way and we never changed it.” Apologizing! Apologizing for the mouse! It’s like Eve saying “We call it a ‘baby,’ I don’t know, someone will probably come up with something more technical, but it made that sound, ba-ba, when it was being relatively bearable—we didn’t want to call it waaaaaaaah.” According to Wikipedia, Engelbart never made any money off the mouse because his patent lapsed before mouses, or mice, became commercially available.

These days the mouse may be on its way out, but its realm has greatly expanded. If you Google “mouseover mouseout,” as my sister, Susan, the computer person suggests, you get for instance this severely underhyphenated excerpt from an instructional site:

Mouse Events. The mouse events are by far the most important events … We’ll go through all mouse events: mousedown, mouseup and click, dblclick, mousemove and finally mouseover and mouseout … Finally the Microsoft proprietary mouseenter and mouseleave events … You’ll see the events that take place in the textarea …

By “severely underhyphenated,” I mean: mouseenter? That looks as though it should be pronounced mow-seenter. Mouseleave? What language is that from? Maybe you’d say moo-se-lay-av-eh. Textarea? Ugh. I guess we’re in a textarea right now. Feh. It looks like it should be pronounced tex-ta-ria; a shopping mall in Lubbock, maybe.

music

The verb muse, to reflect to oneself, goes back to the Old French noun muse, muzzle or snout, which gave rise to the Old French verb muser, to ponder—literally, to stand there with one’s nose in the air. Etymologists disagree whether a clear etymological connection can be made between that muse and the Muses, Greek goddesses of the arts, but Muse certainly inspired music.

Can we assume, however, that a person who is good at music is good at other arts, for instance writing? As the least musical member of a notoriously challenged rock-and-roll band of authors, the Rock Bottom Remainders, I may be biased. But I don’t think many great writers have been known for their musical talent. James Joyce had a fine tenor voice, we are told, but then he was Irish. So was the late lamented Frank McCourt, but I was once present on stage (in a vague capacity) when Frank sang one Beatles song as the rest of the band, the Remainders, played another, and the discrepancy—or I should say, the nature of the discrepancy—was not readily apparent.

Flannery O’Connor was no nightingale, either, nor even a listener of note. “All classical music sounds alike to me,” she said, “and the rest of it sounds like the Beatles.”

At a concert, Samuel Johnson was clearly musing to himself, or attending to his own Muse, instead of listening to a virtuoso violinist. A friend urged him to observe how difficult the performance was. “Difficult do you call it, Sir?” replied the doctor; “I wish it were impossible.” On another occasion a harpsichordist, after playing brilliantly, asked an unresponsive Johnson whether he was fond of music generally. “No, madam,” Johnson replied, “but of all the noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.”

“Music, I regret to say,” said Vladimir Nabokov, “affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.”

None of those three great prose stylists can be accused of having a tin ear. Sad as indifference to music is, it does remove the temptation to enhance, self-amusingly, one’s own keyboard performance by humming along, so to speak. Tone and rhythm have to be there in the letters on the page.

A certain old person of Tring,

When someone asked her to sing,

Replied, “Ain’t it odd?

I can never tell ‘God

Save the Weasel’ from ‘Pop Goes the King.’”

—Anon.

n · N · n

Might I suggest, without being branded as a nut or a crank, that n carries a negative value? There are of course some upbeat n-words: new, natural, nimble , neat, nectar, neighborly, noble, normal, nourish, nugget, nurture, nuzzle.

But weigh those against no, not, none, nyet, nicht, nein, non, neither, nor, in-, un-, anti-, under, nag, narc, narcissism, narcosis, narrow, narwhal (the nar- part is from Old Icelandic for corpse, a reference to the animal’s color resembling that of a drowned person), nasal, nasty, natter, naught, naughty, nausea, Nazi, needy, nefarious, negligent, nerd, nettle, neuralgia, neuter, never, night, necrology, nefarious, niggle, ninny, nit, noir, noisome, noogie, noose, nosy, notorious, noxious, nudge, nudnik, nugatory, nuisance, null, numb, and nut.

Also weigh, against the stylishness of snazzy and the sweetness of snuggle and snookums, the following sn- words: snafu, snag, snail, snake, snallygaster (a legendary huge reptilian bird of prey), snap, snarf, snarky, snarl, sneaky, sneer, snicker, snide, sniffling, sniffy, snigger, snipe, snippy, snit, snitch, snivel, snob, snockered, snollygoster (a wily, unprincipled politician), snooker, snoop, snooty, snore, snort, snotty, snout, snub, snuff. Many of those words’ derivations are nasal, even if not obviously—snitch for instance was originally a slang word for the nose, and snit comes from snort. I submit to you that pronouncing n evokes, however distantly, a wrinkling of the nostrils. As in stink, stench, dung, rank, rancid, funky, skunk.

Or should I go snaffle myself?

name, fictional, too often taken for granted

Humpty Dumpty maintains, in Through the Looking Glass, that he is the master of words, but he’s at the mercy of his own name: Humpty is his character and Dumpty is his fate.

names, common but relationship straining (I would imagine)

At one time, according to the popular press, Taylor Lautner, a young male actor who has achieved phenomenal popularity by playing a cuddly werewolf, was the real-life boyfriend of Taylor Swift, a young female singer whose own phen. p. derives from her performance of cuddly country music.

But what did they call each other? Was one of them, to the other, “Tay,” and the other, to the party of the first part, “Lor”?

Pet names, of course; you would have to nail down a couple of those (and perhaps resent, sometimes, the necessity). But while it is all very well, at a peak of passion, to be addressed as “OH! PUMPKIN!,” there is nothing quite so reassuring as being invoked by one’s own name at such a juncture. And if we’re both named Taylor …

Let’s not intrude into real lives. Let’s take an imaginary couple, straight or gay, who are both named Pat. “OH! PAT! OH MY SWEET PITTY-PATTY.” Won’t the Pat who is crying out feel just the least bit self-referential, and won’t the other Pat wonder how primarily he or she is in fact the Pat that the other Pat has in mind? Especially if the Pat who is not crying out is at something less than a peak of passion.

There must also be awkward social moments. I don’t suppose Taylor and Taylor ever needed to introduce each other to anyone, but how about Pat and Pat?

“I’d like you to meet … Pat.”

Do you see what I mean?

names, funny

Why is Muncie a funny name for a town? Because it falls between munchy and mincy? It’s obvious why Fort Mudge is a funny name for a town: it rhymes with fudge. To my knowledge, nothing rhymes with Muncie, unless you force it:

To a fretful young lady from Muncie

An angel made an Annunci-

Atorial visit.

“All right, what is it?”

She snapped, and …

… we are left hanging.

names, good ones

Dr. Wild Willie Moore, blues sax player.

Jerome Cotchery, New York Jets wide receiver.

O. J. Mayo, Memphis Grizzlies guard. The initials stand for Ovinton J’Anthony. His fan site is OJMayonnaise.com.

names, not so good

Cleveland Browns linebacker D’Qwell Jackson.

Professed scientist and healer (who was paid more than $100,000 by the Los Angeles Dodgers to send the team positive energy from his Boston-area home) Vladimir Shpunt.

names, unexpected

Desiree Fish, an American Express spokeswoman.

The Newark Eurekas, a nineteenth-century baseball team.

negative, double

Say I say to you, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” You will not think me illiterate. You will know, I assume, that I am adopting the grammar of the Rolling Stones song. (Ask your parents. Okay, grandparents.) To mean that I can’t get any.

You might answer, “I can’t see why not.” Is that a double negative? Not in any negative sense. It’s a semicontradiction of my remark, but it doesn’t contradict itself. It means something distinct—not the same as “I can see why not,” which would be insulting.

You might answer, “No you can’t.” The import would depend upon rhythm and tone. “No. You can’t,” is a straightforward, rather deflating confirmation. “No you can’t” might be a sarcastic contradiction along the lines of “Yeah [i.e., “Like hell”] you can” if I had said “I can satisfy your mama.”

But. If you say “I can’t neither,” you are not using English well. If you say, “Nobody can’t get none, no more,” a quadruple negative, you are calling too much attention to yourself.

And there are subtler double negatives for which nothing can be said. I don’t remember what I clipped this sentence from, but it still annoys me: “The nosy and stern-but-loving materfamilias is a venerable character that never seems to lose its usefulness, if not its charm.” What that means to say is, “always seems to retain its usefulness, if not its charm.”

And here is Jay Leno: “I’m sure you heard those rumors that NBC is talking about canceling our show. You know what that means? I didn’t sleep with any of my staff for nothing.” Listening, we might not have wondered how those negatives are wired together. Even in cold print, we see what he means, because we are aware that David Letterman did jeopardize his talk-show security, briefly, by sleeping, fairly extensively, with some of his staff. But Leno’s literal meaning might be “Not for nothing did I sleep with any of my staff” or “I refrained from sleeping with any of my staff for nothing”—both of which seem to say, “I slept with only those members of my staff who compensated me for doing so.”

Would there have been a crystal-clear way of putting Leno’s joke? “My refraining from sleeping with any of my staff was all for naught.” I didn’t say funny, I said crystal clear.

nice

This is an easy word to use, approvingly (I have often done so in this book), and yet there is something unreliable about it. According to OED, the development of its meaning “from ‘foolish, silly’ to ‘pleasing’ is unparalleled in Latin or in the Romance languages.” Along the line of that development lies, on the one hand, the expression “‘nice’ girls didn’t used to compete with each other in getting lipstick on boys’ private parts” and, on the other, the obsolete sense of nice as wanton, lascivious: Antony, in his cups the night before battle, assures Cleopatra that although people may have mocked him “when mine hours / Were nice and lucky,” he will henceforth “set my teeth.”

In December 1970, President Richard Nixon sent an eleven-page single-spaced memorandum to his closest aide, H. R. Haldeman, conveying how upset he was that his staff had not established an image of him as warm and caring. “There are innumerable examples of warm items,” he wrote. For instance, he had been “nicey-nicey to the cabinet, staff and Congress around Christmastime,” had treated not only cabinet but subcabinet officials “like dignified human beings and not dirt under my feet.” He emphasized, however, that all White House promotion of this “warmth business” should stress that it wasn’t being promoted by the White House, and that the president (Nixon referring to himself in the third person) “does not brag about all the good things he does for people.”

Lots of things wrong there (“warm items”!), but what stands out is the use of nicey-nicey, which fails as a synonym for warm in part because it rhymes with icy. Distinctly enunciated, warm is orally enclosing, like a sip of wine taken in and rolled around; nicey entails a wince and a hiss.

Nice works best, in fact, in its mostly obsolete meaning of precise or even finicky, which survives in nicety and “a nice distinction.” When you add the -y and double it, you’re pushing nice’s sonics too far. (I’m not sure how Nicely-Nicely Johnson, in Guys and Dolls, fits inhere, but the l’s make a difference.)

Chilling nice’s are spoken in the movie Revolutionary Road, when the Leonardo DiCaprio character finds to his astonishment, after a night of vicious marital discord, that his wife, played by Kate Winslet, is calmly, submissively fixing him breakfast. Although her expression appears to be frozen—and she will kill herself, in administering a home abortion, after he leaves for work—he says, in a genuinely relieved yet walking-on-eggshells tone, as he finishes his eggs, “This was really nice. I don’t know when I’ve had a nicer breakfast.”

nitty-gritty

Online I came upon a dumb British discussion deploring the tyranny of “political correctness” as reflected in a police constable’s assertion that in police work nitty-gritty had been banned as racist. The expression, according to a story in the Daily Mail, was “said to have its origins in the 18th Century slave traders’ phrase for the debris left at the bottom of a slave ship after a voyage. A visit to the hold was described as ‘going to the nitty-gritty.’” What’s offensive is the knee-jerk anti-PC faux etymology there, not the good granular term nitty-gritty.

But even an eminent linguist can find extraneous stink there. Anatoly Liberman knows a lot more about etymology than I do, but in his book Word Origins, and How We Know Them, he writes (in an aside from a bracing appreciation of sonicky gr- words) that “dictionaries pass by the obscene origin of nitty-gritty.”

No. Yourdictionary.com (citing Webster’s New World College Dictionary) does in fact say “orig. black slang: rhyming euphemism for shitty,” but that doesn’t ring true. Black slang, to be sure; but that derivation sounds more like Cockney rhyming slang than anything ebonic; and the way nitty-gritty has been used down through the years evinces no fecal influence. “Perhaps ultimately connected with nit egg of the louse, and grits finely ground corn,” says Chambers. Okay, and how about the grit in sandy soil (“I believe I will dip my pink-and-white body in yon Roman tub,” says W. C. Fields in My Little Chickadee. “I feel a bit gritty after the affairs of the day”), and in “the hard, gritty facts,” and in “true grit.”

And in Grit magazine, which deals with fundamentals. Its March/April 2010 issue featured an article titled “Behold the Hoe! An ancient tool becomes the go-to item for any gardener.” A sidebar carried this quotation from Henry David Thoreau:

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.

I am aware that “the shit” is hip for “the real thing,” but never in my life have I heard or read anything called shitty except something that was a poor excuse for whatever it was supposed to be. OED’s definition of nitty-gritty , though abstract, is palpably sound: “The most important aspects or practical details of a situation, subject, etc.; the harsh realities; the heart of the matter.” Scratching your head, digging in dirt, yanking on a wrench, you can get a feel for nitty-gritty.

o · O · o

The last sentence in OED’s lengthy discussion of the letter O’s development is this: “The fancy, frequent in authors of the 16th and 17th centuries, that the shape of the letter O represented the rounded shape of the mouth in forming the sound can be seen from the history of the letter to be without foundation in fact.”

Oh, I don’t know. David Sacks, in Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z, which came out in the twenty-first century, writes: “O is the only letter whose name creates its shape, however imperfectly, on the speaker’s lips.” Sacks studied Greek and Latin at Oxford, and is also the author of Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World.

And in its recounting of O’s history, the first thing OED, itself, says about the sound of O is: “From Greek times downward, this letter has regularly represented some variety or varieties of mid or low back vowel, usually rounded.”

According to WIII, rounded in this sense means “produced with rounded lips, labialized,” and round means “to make (the lips) more or less round and protruded by lessening the distance between the corners of the mouth (as in the pronunciation of \ü\”), which is to say, oo. Which is two o’s.

Coincidental? Maybe. The oldest ancestor of the O was a Semitic representation of the eye. It had a guttural sound, unspellable in English. The Greeks didn’t need that sound. They had a short-o sound, for which they chose the O sign, and called it omicron, or little o. They also had a long-o sound, for which they fashioned an O with a gap in the bottom and two big feet sticking out on the sides, and called it omega, or big O. “Just possibly,” Sacks says, the Greeks’ “marriage of shape O and sound ‘o’ was prompted by the letter’s shape, which suggested the shape of a speaker’s mouth saying ‘o.’”

If you don’t believe that Sacks, how about Oliver Sacks? He wrote about a novelist who woke up unable to read (able still to write, but not to read anything including what he had written, because unable to recognize letters). According to Sacks, a certain area of the brain—damaged in the novelist’s case by a stroke—“appears exquisitely tuned to the act of reading,” that is to say, the act of recognizing and appreciating letters. But that area “could not have evolved specifically for this purpose,” because the human capacity for writing did not emerge until “little more than five thousand years ago—far too recently to have occurred through evolution by natural selection.”

What researchers have found, writes Sacks, is that neurons dedicated to letter recognition have been “recruited” from parts of the brain that evolved eons earlier to serve the obviously essential purpose of object recognition. “The world of objects must be learned through experience and activity: looking, touching, handling, correlating the feel of objects with their appearance.” Researchers at Caltech who “examined more than a hundred ancient and modern writing systems” concluded that the shapes of letters “share certain topological similarities.” These researchers hypothesize that the shapes of letters, in all languages, “have been selected to resemble the conglomerations of contours found in natural scenes, thereby tapping into our already-existing object recognition mechanisms.”

So.

See arbitrary.

oaf

Originally this meant a child whose deformity was explained by its having been left by elves, in place of the real child. An elf-left child.

OED and me

Readers of Alphabet Juice may recall my disappointment at having leafed through the entire AHD and failed to find myself cited as a user of any word at all, even though I am a member of that dictionary’s Usage Panel. Well, I realized recently that a person can seek himself digitally. And oh, baby.

I’ll have you know that I am among the online Oxford English Dictionary’s acknowledged users of thing. In connection with “any old thing,” colloquial U.S., but still. Words don’t get much more essential than thing.

I am also to be found in the definition of psychopathology, more precisely, psychopathologist: “Don’t give any more interviews. Unless it’s to a licensed psychopathologist.”

I pop up in portray (derivative: portrayable), and Panamanian, and the prefix over- (overmellow, shared with Tennyson), and outslick.

The English language, I realize, is not all about me. But I can feel that my work has not been entirely in vain, knowing as I do now that I have provided a certified example, for the ages, of outslick. Along with Erle Stanley Gardner, the Pittsburgh Courier, a book titled The Life, and Boxing Monthly, I have got your out slick covered.

Then too I have a piece of nut (nut-cutting), and no more, and ’mongst. Indulge me a moment on ’mongst. When it comes to ’mongst, I am in there amongst such ’mongst users as Christopher Marlowe, Milton, and Mark Twain—and my ’mongst is the only ’mongst after 1907!

I’m in on maid, too, not to mention mad (with Shakespeare for God’s sake and Noël Coward and Oliver Goldsmith and St. Thomas More), and Mace (the verb), and kiss and tell.

And involve. “I was not horny or crazy enough to get involved with a Klanswoman even if I weren’t already in love … with a Maid of Orleans whose cause I believed in”—that brief passage, from my novel First Hubby, got me into maid, too. Two OED cites from one sentence!

And fink, and feel-good, and affecting.

Seventeen in all. I used these words, and they stuck. I’ll probably never catch Tennyson’s 4,739. All the same, I am deeply humbled. I want to thank the Decatur, Georgia, public school system, which so often required me, so many years ago, to “use each of the following words in a sentence.”

off-off rhymes

oodles/bloodless

firefly/briefly

mysterious/my serious

sausage/assuage

shapelier/Montpelier

laundress/undress

heartthrob/bathrobe

ominous/nominees

voodoo/video/voh-doh-de-oh-doh

boat ramp/ boa tramp

alumni/aluminum

forebearing/furbearing

knits/stink

Off-off limerick:

“Yes!” he affirmed, feeling bubbly,

“That is, I mean to say, probably,

Or possibly so.

I wouldn’t say no.

Which is not to say that I’m wobbly.”

Ojibwa/Chippewa/Anishanabe

European explorers spelled the name of this Native American tribe many different ways. Achipouá, Anchipawah, Cheppewes, Chiappawaws, Dshipowehága , Etchipoës, Gibbaways, Icbewas, Jibewas, Ochipay, Odgjiboweke, Ojeebois , Ojibaway (Lewis and Clark), Ojibua, Otchipoises (LaSalle), Otjibwek, Ouchipawah, Outchibouec, Shepawees, Tsipó, and Uchipweys are just a few.

To the rapids near where the tribe lived, Frenchmen gave the name Sault Ste. Marie (sault being French for tumbling, leaping rapids), so another French name for the people was Saulters. English speakers mistranslated that into Jumpers or Leapers, and were no doubt disappointed when the Ojibwa didn’t leave the ground any more notably than anyone else. Champlain called them Cheveux-relevés, because they wore their hair up.

Iroquois, on the other hand, called them Dwakanen, which sounded to Europeans like it should be spelled Doewogannas or variations thereof. Dakotas called them Lyohahanton(wan) , with lots of diacritical marks that I can’t find in my computer, meaning “those at the waterfall.” One English speaker rendered that as Hahatona, another as Ra-ra-to-oans. Other tribes called them Baawitigong, or Pouichtigouin, both of which meant “those at the rapids.” Or so I understand.

The matter is still not entirely settled. In English, Chippewa took hold, and it still appears in dictionaries as an alternative, but in the mid-1800s Ojibwa or Ojibway began to be preferred, especially in Canada, as phonetically correct. Some contemporary members of the tribe—for instance, the activist Winona LaDuke, with whom I went wild-rice gathering in 1996 (see fox)—prefer Anishinabe, which means “original people.” OED uses Odjibewa.

Mississippi is an Ojibwa word. It means “big river.” Chicago is said to come from an Ojibwa word meaning “at the skunk place” or “place of the bad smell.”

English gets totem from an Ojibwa word, either nindoodem, “my totem,” according to AHD and OAD, or ototeman, “his totem,” according to WIII. RHU offers a more extended derivation that clarifies, somewhat, the discrepancy. OED points out that “Rev. P. Jones (a native Odjibewa)” in 1861 rendered it toodaim … , while the Abbé Thavenel “gives the simple form as ote, ‘the possessive of which is otem.’”

The word chipmunk is from either the Ojibwa ajidamoon or the Chippewa atchitamon, meaning in either case “one who comes down trees headfirst.”

Explorer: “I say, what is that little animal coming down the tree there? Chipper little fellow.”

Local person (thinking, “As any fool can see”): “Ajidamoon.”

Explorer: “I see. A chipmunk. Picked up the chip part right off, if I do say so. Not much resemblance to a monk. But I suppose, if you don’t look too close …”

It used to be correct for English speakers to call Inuit people what the Ojibwa called them: Eskimo, meaning “eats it raw.” Inuit, in Inuit, means “the human beings.” The verb intuit, “to know intuitively,” from a Latin verb meaning “to look at,” has nothing to do with any of this.

See ouistiti and knee.

omen

When a bald eagle, carrying a deer’s head, fails to clear a power line, causing a power outage and killing the eagle—what is the word for that?

Not myth, allegory, or fable. This eagle story is different from Icarus flying too close to the sun, so that his artificial wings melt, or Hemingway’s Old Man, trying to get back to shore with a fish bigger than his boat.

This eagle story is not fictional. It actually happened, in January 2007, in Juneau, Alaska. An explosion! Ten thousand people’s lights went out! A repair crew sped to the site! And there lay a deer’s head and a dead eagle.

The eagle had evidently picked up the head from a nearby landfill. (Who throws away a deer’s head?) The eagle, said a spokesman for Alaska Electric Light and Power, “got ahold of a little bit more than he could handle.”

An omen. (“Several etymologies of the Latin word have been suggested,” says OED, “none of which seems more likely than the others.”) Yes. But an omen of what?

Clearly the eagle is America (the eagle in that song, “Let the Eagle Soar,” that John Ashcroft used to sing, remember him?), writing a check with its talons that its wings can’t cash. And the power outage is, well, loss of power.

But what is the deer’s head, exactly?

Before we decide what the deer’s head represents to us, let us consider what it represented to the eagle. Was the eagle going to eat that deer’s head? Or was he going to hang it on the wall of his eyrie?

“This would have been a major score,” said the AEL&P spokesman, putting himself in the eagle’s shoes. “That eagle would have been the king eagle of the Lemon Creek group.”

The eagle wasn’t flying too high, for horizon expansion’s sake, like Icarus. The eagle wasn’t trying to preserve a hard-earned product of his labor, like Hemingway’s fisherman. The eagle had found a trophy.

A trophy that was too big for him. And when you get right down to it, a trophy that was trash. Presumably some human hunter, or more likely his spouse, had finally gotten it out of the house. Even if the eagle had managed to get home with it, the other eagles would have busted his chops:

“Oh, a deer scrap. How long did you have to chase that deer before you threw him down and ripped his head off?”

Not simply a trophy, then, but an oversize, cheesy trophy.

The secret word must be hypertrophy, which means exaggerated, abnormal, generally unhealthy development or growth, as of an organ or an enterprise.

Steroids … obesity … banking bubble … housing bubble … excessive CEO compensation … two wars at once lasting on and on and on …

If the eagle came to warn us, it came too late. An after-omen.

See metanarrative.

onesies

I was wondering, why does The New York Times have a “Thursday Styles” section? Do people in stylish circles dress in a particular way on Thursday? Indoor work clothes I guess, but if you don’t find out what to wear until the week is almost over … . Maybe it’s to prepare people for casual Fridays, but that’s not the impression I got, thumbing through it.

If I had been reading on Nytimes.com, I would not have ventured into “Thursday Styles.” And the phrase “funereal onesies” would not have jumped out at me. But I was reading in the actual newspaper, so there it was, “funereal onesies.” What in the hell. Was this some sort of reference to our all dying alone? In “Thursday Styles”?

No, the story was about how “the skull motif” had taken hold in fashionable clothing. There was a photograph of a funereal onesie. (That’s how I assumed the singular would be spelled, much as I preferred onesy because it looked like an off-off rhyme with Jonesy.) A little black one-piece garment, a leotard, with snaps on the bottom. This onesie was emblazoned with a grinning skull wearing a black cap, and the words “The Misfits Fiend Club.”

Setting aside the funereal aspect, I found onesie provocative. For one thing, it doesn’t look like English. But then one doesn’t look like it ought to be pronounced wun. One is from the same PIE root—oi or oi-no—as only and alone. Perhaps there’s an inkling of w there—in French oi is pronounced wa (with singular intimacy in moi and toi), and Chambers cites an extension, oi-wo-s, as the ancestor of certain other languages’ versions of one. But that’s a stretch.

Let us turn to AHD, which says, “Over time, stressed vowels commonly become diphthongs, as when Latin bona became buona in Italian and buena in Spanish.” Ah. As so often, we are brought back to the mouth. Twenty-wun and gimme wun, or for that matter only wun, vocalize more smoothly than twenty-on and gimme on and only on. Beginning in Wales and the west of England, one’s pronunciation evolved, according to AHD, from on as in only to oo-on to woon to (around 1400) wun. According to Chambers, one was only occasionally spelled the way it was pronounced—the pronunciation wun “is first referred to by a scholar in 1701; earlier grammarians give to one the sound that it had in alone, atone, only, and the … suffix -one,” as today in acetone. By the time grammarians’ ears caught up, it was too late to change the spelling. (In certain other British dialects, one is or has been pronounced yahn and eena. See the wonderfully baffling rundown on eena, as in eena meena mina mo, in Anatoly Liberman’s Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology. He says that in Yorkshire eena is still used, instead of one, for counting sheep.)

That wasn’t the only way I found onesie provocative.

“What you doing?”

“Lying in bed.”

“What you wearing?”

“Oh, my onesie.”

Imagine my chagrin when I Googled onesies and found that a onesie was infantwear. You couldn’t tell that from the Times’s picture, which displayed the onesie, out of scale, next to a skull-motif bikini bottom. The accompanying story never mentioned the onesie. Come to think of it, I believe what first brought my attention to this matter was my impression that the bikini bottom was the onesie.

But okay, a baby thing. The snaps are so you can get at the baby’s diaper.

What kind of people put a grinning skull on their baby?

For that matter, WHAT KIND OF FAMILY NEWSPAPER RUNS A PICTURE OF A BABY THING NEXT TO ONE OF A BIKINI BOTTOM?

But wait. My wife tells me that a friend of ours, a grown woman, wears onesies. Adult sizes are getting harder to find, but she tracks them down. “That’s her underwear. I’ll ask her about it.”

“No,” I say. “Never mind.”

ooze

Is this a great word, or what? It didn’t happen overnight. Going back to Old English, attempts to capture it, as noun and verb, include wase, waise, woise, woyse, woze, woose, woes, wozy, oous, oes, owes, oase, ouze, owze, oose, owse, and oaze. West Frisian tried weaze. Something to be said for the w, which was abandoned in the sixteenth century, but it came in handy in the nineteenth, when O. Henry was the first to publish woozy. And we wouldn’t have wanted ooze to get confused with woo—as in pitching it, for instance. (Nobody knows where woo came from.)

Chambers relates ooze to virus. Neither OED nor any other source I have found is willing to suggest that there is anything sonicky about it. Come on!

Louis Armstrong on one of the pleasures of life at home in Queens, New York: “A Garage with a magic up and down Gate to it. And of course our Birthmark Car a Cadillac (Yea). The Kids in our Block just thrill when they see our garage gate up, and our fine Cadillac ooze on out.”

ouistiti

While looking at squ- words on OED (see squelch), I found, under squiff (a contemptible person), this quote from a letter written in 1939 by Ezra Pound: “that squiff, that femme ouistiti and lowest degree of animal life (apart from Cambridge Eng. profs).”

What in the world, I wondered, is a ouistiti? OED prefers wistiti and calls it a South American monkey or marmoset, named (as so often happens) for its call. Who first used wistiti in English print? Of all people, Oliver Goldsmith, in his History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1776): “Of the sagoins with feeble tails, there are six kinds … . The third is the Wistiti; remarkable for the large tufts of hair upon its face, and its annulated tail.”

What did dotty but sweet-natured Oliver Goldsmith (see Alphabet Juice) have in common with certifiably insane, fascism-loving Ezra Pound? Why would anyone use this monkey or marmoset as an insult? Because of its feeble tail? The game was afoot!

In OED I looked up sagoin and several other terms that arose in that connection, and all I learned was that Goldsmith was a pioneer mentioner of monkeys across the board. The marakina, the sapajou … It’s not that he was an expert on monkeys. Goldsmith was a man who wrote for a living. Aside from the aforementioned History of the Earth and so on, and his several abiding imaginative works, Goldsmith produced The Bee (essays), The Grecian History, An History of England in a Series of Letters From a Nobleman to His Son, The History of England, The Memoirs of a Protestant Condemned to the Galleys of France for His Religion, Miscellaneous Works, A Survey of Experimental Philosophy, a biography of a famous fop, and on and on and on.

I Googled ouistiti. The first thing that came up was a photograph of several beaming naked people riding bicycles, led by a woman with very large breasts. Do algorithms have a weakness for cheap -titi jokes? After that came photos of monkeys or marmosets looking much more elegant than the nude bikers. I couldn’t see that it would be so insulting to be called a wistiti. They’re not suspending themselves by their tails from trees, but they’re not sitting buck naked on bicycle seats, either.

I Googled on, and the nudists were explained. In France, to smile while posing for a photo, which the nudists were demonstrably doing, you don’t say “fromage.” You say “ouistiti.” In Pardon My French, Unleashing Your Inner Gaul, Charles Timoney writes that if you say ouistiti “in a flat English accent reminiscent of the cartoon dog Droopy, you will look thoroughly miserable,” but if “you say it enthusiastically in a strong French accent, the two last syllables force your mouth sideways into a broad grin.” Just like cheese.

A literary madman (fou littéraire) named Claude-Charles Pierquin de Gembloux theorized that people and animals originally spoke the same language. By way of rather oblique proof, he produced a glossary of words used by the ouistiti. For instance, he maintained that when a ouistiti goes “Irouah-gno,” it means (as Google translates, poorly, from Gembloux’s French) “I have a terrible emotional pain, save me, save it for me.” Whereas “O coco” means “terror deep,” and “Q uouéée” is a ouistiti’s way of saying “suffer with despair at what we can not escape.”

Then I found where Pound might have picked up the word. In his 1921 translation of Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love, we read that “the vagina is more or less closed by a membrane, which the male penis tears in first encounter, in … certain small monkeys, the marmoset, certain carnivore … The maidenhead is, therefore, not peculiar to human virgins, and there is no glory in a privilege which one shares with the marmoset.” The word Pound translated as “marmoset” in that distinctly unappealing passage is ouistiti.

From there the trail of Pound and the ouistiti got even less pleasant. Possibly the person Pound was insulting was Marcel Proust, whom he calls a ouistiti by name in another letter. Proust was gay (so the femme might be meant to apply) and half Jewish. In the thirties, shortly before being elected the first Jewish president of France, Léon Blum was beaten nearly to death by anti-Semites and called, by another French politician, “a ouistiti of the ghetto.”

The push-button Google translation of that politician’s diatribe is lousy, but the nastiness of what he called Blum comes through: “Grumpy Little Girl vivisectionism the early days of birth, marmoset ghetto of twit who is not even from us.” In ouistiti the polyglot Pound may have been resorting to a common French ethnic slur of the time. He was living in Italy, where he made pro-Fascist, Jew-hating radio broadcasts during World War II. He was captured by American troops, thrown brutally into a literal cage, charged with treason, judged incompetent to stand trial, and sent to a mental hospital for twelve years. After his release, he told Allen Ginsberg, in an interview, “The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” Suburban, is it? Sub-something, anyway.

But it’s a pretty little animal (except in the squinchy, beady-eyed face), the ouistiti. A series of popular French children’s books chronicle the adventures of a ouistiti (a mignon, or cute, ouistiti) named Sapristi. P’tit ouistiti is sweet to the tongue. So is ouistiti neutral? Only in the sense that sweet is. You can call someone “Sweetie” sweetly or meanly, and either way, the we/wee/oui/tweet/twee/teeny in there evokes a squeeze.

outdo

“You’ve outdone yourself” strikes me as a dubious compliment. An editor told me that once about a book review I’d written, which, to be sure, was deftly turned, but I had to wonder: Hadn’t he for God’s sake ever read the much better stuff I’d been doing over several decades? Also, to outdo myself would be to perform over my head, to reach a fortuitous level I’d be lucky to reach again. Wouldn’t it?

I am not usually this touchy.

ox

This strong, stolid animal might feel better about his loss of testicles, and his consignment to hard labor, if he knew that no other animal has everything (at least in terms of tick-tack-toe, football plays, and, yes, kisses and hugs) summed up so succinctly in its name.

p · P · p

This is one of the first alphabet sounds a baby can make, and you can tell it pleases the baby. No wonder it looms so large in the arts:

Pap, Huck Finn’s reprobate father.

Pep, Nathanael West’s nickname (because he tended to lack pep).

Willie Pep, the great featherweight fighter.

Pip, the hero of Great Expectations. That novel’s other memorable characters include Aged P., Mr. Wemmick’s aged father (the P is for Parent), who though stone deaf has a propensity for social cheerfulness. “All right, ain’t you, Aged P.?” Wemmick will ask the dad, who will reply, “All right, John my boy, all right!” Says Pip, of a meal with the Wemmicks, “We ate the whole of the toast, and drank tea in proportion, and it was delightful to see how warm and greasy we all got after it. The Aged especially, might have passed for some clean old chief of a savage tribe, just oiled.”

Then there’s Pip in Moby-Dick, the diminutive, jolly-bright black youth who can’t resist jumping into the water when they’ve got a whale harpooned, and goes eloquently mad. Why has no one rewritten Moby-Dick from his point of view?

Pop, let’s see, “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Pop Fligh, the retired ballplayer who becomes the adoptive grandfather of Dondi, in the old comic strip, remember? The rocker Iggy Pop, and, well, pop.

Pup, there’s Pupdog in Pogo, and Officer Pupp in Krazy Kat.

Then there’s Papagena/Papageno, Papa Hemingway, paper, Joseph Papp, Pappy Yokum, Bo Peep, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life.

Peeping Tom, “We, the People,” Pépé le Moko, Pepé Le Pew, Pepe the Prawn (Muppet), Pepi Katona (the slimy character in The Shop Around the Corner), and the Person from Porlock (see peeve).

Peter Pan, Wally Pipp, Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Pippa Passes” (“God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world”) , Pippi Longstocking, Louis “Pops” Armstrong, Poe, Pooh, “You can’t Pooh-Pooh Paducah, That’s Another Name for Paradise,” pop art, popcorn, Alexander Pope, Popeye, Popeye Doyle, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, the W. C. Fields movie Poppy, Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, and puppets.

You say, oh, the same thing could be claimed for any letter. You’re welcome to try.

pachyderm/pachysandra

What do an elephant and a “small genus of the family Buxaceae comprising procumbent subshrubs and perennial herbs with simple leaves and spikes of insignificant white or pinkish flowers, native to eastern Asia and eastern North America” (OED) have in common? Pachy is from the Greek for thick. Thick skin, in the elephant’s case. In pachysandra’s case, the reference is not to how well this visually benevolent plant (subshrub?) covers ground, but to the thickness of the male flower’s stamens. Strike you as sexist, to look at pachysandra and focus on its stamens? The sandra part derives from no woman’s name but from the Greek for male, as in androcentric. Now: what makes a flower “insignificant”?

page turning

Now that there are so many e-alternatives to books made of paper, it dawns on me that the physical act of page turning—separating one leaf from the next (some people actually wet their fingertips to do this), and the next, and so on, and sometimes one leaf is slightly more or less wide than the next, or leaves may cling to one another, and sometimes you can flip leaves but other times you have to take two of them together between thumb and forefinger and rub until they separate, and often a good deal of fumbling is involved—where were we?

The act of proceeding through physical reading material—that is to say, through printed matter—may strike future generations as bizarre. (“Wait—one page is on the back of the previous page? What’s up with that?” “If you think the so-called mouse was clunky, imagine having to separate two razorthin sheets of paper, or leaves, over and over again, with your fingers.”) Someday, before I punch my last Scroll-ahead button, leafing may strike even me as bizarre. I wrote eight or nine books on a manual typewriter, and today I can’t conceive how anyone would begin to go about such a thing. (There was something called a platen, I recall, and you cranked paper in around it and when you struck keys, clickety clack, letters on the end of metal stalks would swing up and hit the paper—or, rather, would press an inky ribbon against the paper, a ribbon that would rise up just in time, unless it got tangled, and sometimes you’d strike more than one key at once and the metal stalks would get jammed together and your fingers would get inky trying to separate the keys, and don’t get me started on carbon paper … It’s a wonder I survived to tell the tale. But by thunder, me hearties, didn’t we bang out some prose?)

If page turning dies out, however, certain pleasures will die with it. I applaud a magazine article that jumps—from page 24 to page 78, say. That article has not been cut to fit just one hole, it has been allowed to continue in the back of the book, where it can loosen its tie and breathe.

And how about the suspense involved in turning a page. Turning it at a pace that blends your intention and the page’s resistance. Or turning several pages in unseemly haste, as I did when I came to this in the lower right-hand corner of a story in Vanity Fair:

She wore a silky maternity dress under a blue blazer … . After a while, she took off the jacket, and there were her CONTINUED ON PAGE 132

Do you think Vanity Fair did that on purpose? Anyway, I leafed and leafed and came at last to page 132, where I found the following:

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 74 arms with their hieroglyphic tattoos …

Yes, I did feel sheepish, especially since the lady was with child. (See gillie, girl.) But in the course of the leafing I was up. Maybe after all page turning is a natural pleasure—there is something distinctly engrossing about it. In the New Orleans zoo I watched a silverback gorilla perusing a flattened wad of brown paper. He would lift a flap of it, turn it over, study the other side of it …

pang

As you say it you can almost feel it, can’t you? Ernest Weekley, who knew pangs, derived the word from prong with the r lost, as in Frances evolving into Fanny. Current dictionaries, doubting that etymology, fall back on “of obscure origin.” But I like Weekley’s suggestion: “For ground-sense of constriction, cf. anguish, angina.” Those two words, as well as anger and Latin angere (to strangle), come from a PIE root *angg-, narrow. Is that what Weekley means by ground-sense? Is he suggesting that ang is sonicky? If he isn’t, I am. It tightens the throat, evoking, however distantly, “a sudden sharp spasm of pain which grips the body or a part of it,” as OED defines pang.

peeve

People, including me, love our pet peeves. And I stress our. When I sense a peeve about to come boiling up at me from an audience, I pray it isn’t one to which I must frankly respond, “No, the truth is, I like snuck” or “Well, as far as gone missing goes, I can’t think of any expression that expresses the meaning meant to be expressed, uh, as well as gone missing does, actually.” Which will cause the bearer of the peeve in question to look at me as if I had just said, “No, in point of fact, I can’t see anything much about your baby that is what I would call cute.”

What we can all agree on, I think, is that peeve is a word that sounds just right. Across, we might imagine, between pique and skeeve.

The adjective, peevish, came first. OED says it may derive ultimately from Latin perversus, but then again (hold on to your hat):

An alternative suggestion links the word to classical Latin expavidus startled, shy (< ex- + pavidus PAVID adj.) via an unrecorded variant with -ai- of Middle French espave (of an animal) stray, (of a person) foreign, (as noun) lost property, flotsam (1283 in Old French; French épave). The semantic connection is thought to be the behaviour of stray animals.

OED gets like that sometimes. When you click on pavid, the first definition is from my seventeenth-century forebear Thomas Blount’s Glossographia: “fearful, timerous, quaking, starting.” The original sense of peevish, at any rate, is “perverse, refractory; headstrong, obstinate; capricious, skittish; (also) coy.” OED’s first example, which I will be so bold as to convert into modern spelling, is from Piers Plowman, fifteenth century: “And bade him go piss with his plow, peevish shrew!” That’s not Piers calling the disrespecter of his plow a shrew, it’s the disrespecter calling Piers one—originally, a shrew could be male or female. A recent translation of that passage renders shrew as bastard.

Not until 1901 did peevish give rise to the verb peeve, meaning make peevish, or annoy.

Then in 1909 The Washington Post referred to “a fit of peeve.” Finally in 1917 we get “little pet peeve.” Don’t ever call someone’s pet peeve a little one. It’s like insulting somebody’s plow.

One of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s pet peeves was “that vile and barbarous vocable talented.” We might suspect that Coleridge had been called “talented” by a reviewer, as in “This quite talented writer has produced a book in no wise worthy of this critic’s willingness to consider him quite talented.” But Coleridge’s objection was grammatical: “The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse.” OED cites this cavil as an example of “groundless objections … by writers ignorant of the history of the language.” Ooh, snap. You may be a poet, but that don’t mean you know whereof the language. (Or even if you are a lexicographer of sorts—the other example of history-of-the-language ignorance that OED cites, under -ed, suffix^2, is Dr. Johnson’s disapproval of cultured.)

Heck of a poet, Coleridge. Today we may find “five miles meandering in a mazy motion” too blatantly sonicky. But do we think we are likely to write anything that will last as long as “a sadder and a wiser man, / He rose the morrow morn”? Or “water, water everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink”? (Granted that everyone misremembers those lines as “but not a drop” and “sadder but wiser man.”)

No ray of sunshine was the man Coleridge, though. On hearing Wordsworth’s poem about a rainbow, he went home and wrote “Dejection: An Ode.” How would you like to wake up feeling chipper and, I don’t know, maybe even talented—cultured, too—and you go out walking along, whistling, and here comes Coleridge to inform you that your felicity is “very peculiar.” Coleridge sought felicity in laudanum, tincture of opium in alcohol. (Paracelsus, who gets credit for originating laudanum, claimed that his version also included gold leaf and unperforated pearls—ground up, I guess—but come on.)

Talk about pet peeves, if you are a big Coleridge fan you probably say “That son of a—” whenever you hear any reference to anybody from the town of Porlock. Coleridge, by his account, awoke one morn from an opiated dream in which he had envisioned a fantastical “pleasure-dome” built in Xanadu by Kubla Khan. With a whole bedazzling poem pulsating in his head, he had managed to write down only a wondrous fragment when, wouldn’t you know, “a person on business from Porlock” interrupted. By the time that person was gone, so was the rest of the poem.

Now you and I, if we had something that hot going, would have said “Shove off, Porlock person”—or maybe we wouldn’t have. Think about it. It’s a burden to have something visionary, or let’s say conceivably visionary, or visionary so far, to get off your chest and onto paper (or screen), for the ages. Once I e-mailed my friend Kathi Kamen Goldmark the lyrics for what would have been—okay, again, conceivably—the first stanza and chorus of an all-time great country song, “A Sadder Budweiser Man.” When she came to put those lyrics to music, she had lost them, and so had I.

It was Coleridge who first came up with the phrase “willing suspension of belief.” So let’s—no, let’s not give him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s look at Porlock. I’m not saying Coleridge made up the village; it is real enough, to this day, and very near to Nether Stowey, where Coleridge was living at the time. Nether Stowey may suggest something subconsciously tucked away. Another neighboring village, Minehead, may evoke excavation of the brain (or dome). But Porlock! A blend of poor and block. I’m saying Coleridge made up the person, and provenanced him, so to speak, from Porlock.

Look at the last bit of what Coleridge eventually published, titled “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream.” In the lines that Coleridge was professedly pouring out when the alleged Porlockian came knocking, the poet has quick-cut from his pleasure-dome vision itself to something he has already forgotten: a song, played by a damsel on a dulcimer, which, if only the poet could recall it, he would be filled with such “deep delight” that he could build a pleasure-dome of his own:

That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

That’s pretty damn good. And if it’s not a picture of peculiar felicity, I don’t know what is. And it leaves the poet crazed and unfit for human company. Also unfit, quite imaginably, to imagine anything next. The job of the wonder-working writer, wrote Coleridge, is to “trace the nice boundaries, beyond which terror and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions—to reach those limits, yet never to pass them.” Oh, some person from somewhere (presumably not the poet’s opium connection) may have interposed himself as Coleridge was reeling at the brink, but I’m saying Coleridge wasn’t so much interrupted, as stuck. And his visitor got him off the hook.

Snuck, by the way, is “orig. and chiefly U.S.,” says OED. WIII says it’s “chiefly dialect,” which I suppose comes to the same thing. I like it. It sounds quicker and also more underhanded than sneaked.

pet, peevish

Recently a mailing from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals put this question to me: “Would your pet like to become a blood donor?” In case my pet would, the mailing provided a number in Boston to call.

“Snowpaw, would you like to become a blood donor?”

“Rrrrr.”

“Okay. I’m just asking, because—”

“Rrrrr.”

See R.

ping-pong

The “sound imitation” origin of this word “is not in doubt,” writes Anatoly Liberman in Word Origins, and How We Know Them. Well, sure. But gnipgnop , which is what I called it when I was thirteen and played it a lot, is better. And you know the sound of a loose ping-pong ball bouncing on a floor, wild and free and derisively eluding its pursuer—pingk … pingk … pingk … pink, ping-pingpingpng—and then rolling, more and more slowly, with the inimitable, unwritable noise made only by a rolling ping-pong ball? Why does it fall to me, a print person, straining every literary fiber, to memorialize that sound? Why hasn’t it been used in a movie?

Not to mention the sound of an empty tennis-ball can rolling, wonkily, zephyr-blown, across an asphalt court.

plank

This word is believed to derive from the Latin plancus, flat. Okay, but plank also evokes the sound of a plank planked down onto another long flat board. Plunk, as in “‘Quit plunking that damn cello,’ I tells him, so he plunks the clunky thing in my lap,” is in either sense “probably of imitative origin,” says Chambers. You can use plank to mean plunk in the second sense, but not in the first, perhaps because plank sounds off-key. If you plink something, it is probably a piano key, at the high end.

The thicker a plank is, the more the sound of a plank planked onto another is like blonk.

Pluck, meaning pick, without the resonant n of plunk, may, or may not, come from Latin piluccare, to remove hair from.

Strum is sonicky and that’s that. And so is twang.

Pick comes from various Germanic roots involving pricking and pecking. It occurs to me that pick is a term widely applied in sports. In basketball (but not, legally, in football), you set a pick, screening away your teammate’s defender. In baseball you pick off a runner (perhaps first catching him in a pickle); and you may “pick something up” in a pitcher’s delivery that reveals what he is about to throw; and if you are a snazzy infielder, you are said to “really pick it.” In football, you pick apart a defense, and to pick off a pass is to intercept it—so interceptions are called picks. In bullfighting, which some deem a sport, there is the picador, who pokes a lance into the bull’s neck muscles so he will keep his head down. In various sports, teams acquire draft picks, and when some players are in a slump, their teammates, ideally, pick them up by perhaps outdoing themselves. In betting on sports, you try to pick winners. I remember Bill Leggett of Sports Illustrated (at a time when people displayed less sensitivity in ethnic references) criticizing his own record in the office football pool as follows: “I couldn’t pick my father out of a boatload of Chinamen.”

poop-noddy, noddypoop

Don’t confuse ’em. According to OED, poop-noddy is a rare seventeenth-century term—still not quite obsolete—for sexual intercourse. It is obsolete as a synonym for nincompoop. For that you need noddypoop. “Apparently,” muses OED, noddypoop is formed from noddy plus “a second element of uncertain origin. Perhaps compare POOP.”

Someday, perhaps, in a last-ditch appeal to younger readers, we will take up poop. (According to Anatoly Liberman, every meaning of poop is “slangy” except for poop as in poop deck, and that one probably derives from Latin slang, and furthermore, “The origin of all poops but one is unknown; poop ‘[to make] an abrupt sound’ is an indelicate onomatopoeia.”) For now I am content to report that noddy is another word for fool or simpleton.

Another noddy, modern-day but perhaps not entirely unrelated to the other noddy, is a feature of a filmed or videotaped interview. OED defines that noddy (also called noddy shot) as “a brief shot of the interviewer (or interviewee) appearing to be listening or nodding in agreement, usually recorded after the main interview and edited to form part of it; the action captured by such a shot.”

You love television, don’t you? You “trust” television, sort of—no, of course you don’t believe it, but you let it take you by the eyes. And television pulls shit like that on you. Showing someone nodding at nothing, as if—you know, there is something significant about a nod of agreement—as if that person were nodding at something. I’m trying to think whether print pulls anything like that on you. No denying print pulls things on you, I’m just saying I don’t think print … . Maybe I can’t think of whatever it is that print pulls, any more than a tropical fish is aware of the charm of— whatever its charms are. Personally, I have never been charmed by tropical fish—oh, maybe the print equiv of a noddy is what I’m doing right now, writing and rewriting these sentences in an attempt to sound like I’m talking. But here’s a difference between TV journalism and print: if there were such a thing as a noddy in print, print would not have a name for it. Print has names, which it seldom shares with its audience, for the fatuous rituals it covers—“grip and grin,” for photos of politicians shaking hands with thereby distinguished constituents, but of course that’s a fatuous photo ritual. Print journalism traffics in clichés, to be sure, but more ingenuously, for what that may be worth, than TV resorts to noddies.

portmanteau

By way of edifying Alice, Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty explains a word in Carroll’s great nonsense poem Jabberwocky as follows: “Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ … You see it’s like a portmanteau, there are two meanings packed up into one word.” A portmanteau being a piece of luggage that opens into two halves. Portmanteaus not coined by Carroll include smog, motel, brunch, transistor (transfer/resistor), Brangelina, wholphin (cross between a dolphin and a false killer whale, whatever that is—seems like ocean survival would favor, if anything, a false vegetarian whale), scratch (see itch), and Spanglish.

Carroll’s portmanteaus are not so simply folded. His chortle, which has had legs, is the backside of snort replacing the middle of chuckle. Here is how he unpacks another bit of Jabberwocky: “Take the two words fuming and furious. Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … If you have that rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say frumious.” But that is whimsy. The most firmly packed portmanteaus capture physical acts or phenomena. Seeing someone give herself a twist and begin to swirl, the language comes up (pushing aside the existing but inadequate tirl) with twirl.

Refudiate, the portmanteau issued twice publicly in 2010 by Alaska’s abdicated governor, Sarah Palin, seems unlikely to travel well, for when her apparent notion that refudiate was already a word was refuted, she in effect repudiated refudiate by changing it to refute and then to regret.

“Shakespeare liked to coin new words too,” Palin tweeted. To be sure Shakespeare is credited with writing a great many words for the first time, but most of these were adoptions and adaptations. For instance alligator, spelled allegater, first appears in the First Folio edition of Romeo and Juliet , but it had been in print as alligarta or alligarto (from the Spanish el lagarto, the lizard) for nearly half a century. He is credited with dawn, but dawning had been around for centuries; with bandit, but he wrote bandetto , borrowed from Italian. He was the first to write leapfrog, but probably boys were playing it already. He inventively turned cake into a verb, as in caked in blood, but the noun had long been established. By and large the words Shakespeare made up from scratch (for instance directitude, a servant’s apparent attempt, in Coriolanus, at a high-flown synonym for discredit) were comical characters’ blunders. The closest thing to a portmanteau I can find in lists of Shakespeare’s coinages is bubukles, coined by Fluellen, the staunch but ill-spoken Welshman in Henry V. A nineteenth-century scholar traced bubukles to the French bube, a blotch or sore, and buccal, from the Latin for cheek; OED calls it “a confusion of bubo and carbuncle.”

Speaking of packing, here is a definition of unpack, from Urbandictionary.com, that might have been composed by a cross between Humpty Dumpty and Alice herself. (Except that “Sunlight,” the definition’s author, would seem to have paid regrettably less attention to English teachers—note auther and had shook—than either of those characters):

UNPACK

verb. A tedious activity invented by English teachers. The meaning of every word in a sentence must be explained with an entirely new sentence or paragraph.

The sentence: “Mrs. Goodwater nodded, held up her hands, and there was silence.”

Unpacked becomes: “Well, the auther calls her Mrs. Goodwater and not Clara to emphasize her position of authority over the audience. The fact that she nodded implies a positive emotional impact, rather than if she had shook her head or frowned, which would have been negative. This explains that she is on friendly terms with the audience. Since the audience was not living in fear of her authority, they were not quiet immediately. Therefore she also had to hold up her hands, which means she was on the verge of becoming exasperated, and which is also an example of the author’s use of alliteration. But when she did that the audience became silent. Since the author used ‘silent’ instead of ‘quiet,’ or ‘softer,’ it shows that he meant every person had stopped talking and they all had their attention on Mrs. Goodwater.”

That’s why I read books, not English papers.

See chimera.

preemptive

From the Latin meaning literally to prepurchase. The empt- is as in caveat emptor. When the Bush administration prepared to make a preemptive attack on Iraq, Colin Powell was quoted as cautioning, “You break it, you bought it.”

prescient

Odd quote from Frank Rich used as a blurb on The Next Attack by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon: “The Next Attack is prescient to a scary degree.”

You can say something was prescient. You can say someone’s work has been prescient. But can you say something is prescient? Only if you are being prescient yourself.

See hunch.

prick

Did you know that prick in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, according to OED, was “a term of endearment for a man: darling, sweetheart”? From a colloquy by Erasmus as translated in 1671: “Ah, ha! are we not alone, my prick? … Let us go together into my inner bed-chamber.”

(This is not Erasmus speaking to himself, so to speak. It’s a likable strumpet , Lucretia, addressing a friend and former customer, Sophronius, who, having reformed himself, proceeds to talk her into leaving off her lewd ways. In another translation she calls him “cocky.” I always wanted to read me some Erasmus. I’m going to find a good modern translation.)

The sixteenth century was also when prick turned up in print meaning, quite frankly, the penis. In 1555, an anonymous author described a prime tactic of highway robbers as follows: “The first precept thereof is to be as secret in working, as he that keeps a man company from London to Maidenhead and makes good cheer along the way, to this end in the thicket: to turn his prick upward, and cast a weavers knot on both his thumbs behind him.” (I have modernized the spelling. Don’t ask me what dastardly form of apparent bondage is being described. I’m not even entirely sure whose prick is alluded to.)

Not until 1598 did prick appear in print as an insult, and then it connoted pert, saucy near sissiness: “A pillicock, a primcock, a prick, a prettie lad, a gull, a noddie.” Only by 1927 does OED find prick clearly meaning a mean, overbearing male. John O’Hara (who by all accounts could certainly be one): “I’ll need you to … keep me from getting to be too much of a prick.”

See A.

prior to

There is no need for this phrase. It reeks of soulless organization. Before is what people say.

proposal, wording of, proper

According to J. B. Morton (Beachcomber), “A man who says, during courtship, ‘Will you be mine?’ is a potential tyrant. If, however, he says, ‘Will I be yours?’ he is inviting the girl to be a tyrant. The ideal proposal is, ‘Let us be ours.’”

See fancy.

pshaw

Some authorities say this is pronounced shaw—the p would be silent, then, as in swimming. But OED puts a “(p)” in there. An option, then, or a wispy p. I like the p myself, the idea of it, but am constrained to admit I never say “pshaw!” one way or the other. Does anyone anymore? OED quotes this from Vibe in 1992: “James Brown: the Godfather of Soul? Pshaw! He’s the Godfather of Modern Culture.” You never know where James Brown is going to pop up. (I know pop is too faint a word.)

OED cites the intransitive verb pshaw in a 1991 Michael Dibdin novel: “I pshawed. You don’t often get a chance to pshaw these days, and I made the most of it.” The transitive form turns up even more recently, in The Nation, 2005: “Johnson had always pshawed the notion that his fights were blows against the white empire on behalf of the beleaguered Black man.” That would be Jack Johnson. He pshawed? I always think of pshaw more in connection with, say, George Bernard Pshaw.

pu-

From this one PIE root, which is in effect pooh or phew or p-yew or phooey, reaction to a foul odor, we get putrid, pus, purulent, suppurate, foul, filth, and maybe puke. So this entry is a fitting lead-in to the next one.

(And see well and ew.)

puffery

Moody’s Investors Service rates the investment-worthiness of government and commercial entities based, supposedly, on rigorous and reliable research. Jonathan Weil on Bloomberg.com pointed out that in its 2005 annual report, Moody’s proclaimed: “Independence. Performance. Transparency … are the watchwords by which stakeholders judge Moody’s.” But when Moody’s was taken to court for having given its highest ratings to toxic investments, the company asserted that “generalizations regarding integrity, independence and risk management amount to no more than puffery.”

Weil, a hardened observer of high (a word that may mean lofty or stoned or stinking) finance, was shocked that Moody’s would “characterize the principles it brought to the job of grading investments that wind up in the portfolios of retirement funds and money-market accounts” as puffery. “It would be like the pope revealing that his belief in God was just fluff.”

What does Moody’s mean by puffery? Weil asked a Moody’s PR man, Anthony Mirenda. Mirenda replied, “Our legal team’s use of that term does not suggest that these statements are in any way false and does not in any way diminish Moody’s long-standing commitment to the integrity and independence of our ratings.” When Weil asked Mirenda whether the statement Mirenda had just made was puffery, he said, “No, that statement was not puffery.”

Piffle. How can people at Moody’s hold up their heads?

pun

Some people actually hate puns. William Shawn, the near-godlike editor of The New Yorker, was one. Dan Menaker, in his book A Good Talk, says that even though he was well aware of this aversion, he couldn’t resist ending a Talk of the Town item with a pun. Mr. Shawn took it out. Menaker put it back in. Mr. Shawn called Menaker into his office and said, “I think you must not understand that to use this pun would destroy the magazine.”

Menaker’s item was about how people were getting around Manhattan during a transit strike. One man’s answer was, “Diesel.” Pointing to his feet, he explained: “Diesel get me anywhere.”

What I hate is having no occasion to use puns that have come to me out of the blue. For instance:

“Does your husband know his way around a dance floor?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s managed to avoid one for thirty-five years.”

The Algonquin Round Table, a group of dedicated, highly competitive witticizers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel in New York in the 1920s, tried to outdo each other in a game of punning on unlikely words. For instance, Dorothy Parker was given the word horticulture. She had to use it in a sentence within ten seconds. “You can lead a horticulture,” she said, “but you can’t make her think.” Alexander Woollcott came up with “Demosthenes can do is bend, and hold the legs together.” I wonder if you’d like to hear my pun on indefensible:

He doesn’t have much sense, a bull,

And he is mean and immense, a bull,

And jealousy makes him intense, a bull,

And I will tell you all right now,

If he spies you milking his favorite cow,

He’ll tear a hole indefensible.

Anyway, here’s a pun from a Cole Porter song, “Don’t Look at Me That Way,” which you may not be familiar with:

“My will is strong, but my won’t is weak.”

punctilious

Meticulous generally connotes commendable particularity (note the tic in both words); punctilious extends scrupulosity to “extremely or excessively particular or correct” (OED) lengths. I want to say the negative aspect of punctilious is reinforced by the echoes of punk and Tillie (George Kaufman in the Algonquin pun game said of sisters Lizzie and Tillie, “Lizzie is okay, but you have no idea how punctilious”), but neither of these suggests fussiness over details. According to the Jargon File at catb.org (whatever the hell that means), “Aunt Tillie” is “the archetypal nontechnical user, one’s elderly and scatterbrained maiden aunt. Invoked in discussions of usability for people who are not hackers and geeks, one sees references to the ‘Aunt Tillie test.’”

Punk has a long interesting history, from prostitute to Billy Idol, but at no point along the way has it been related to punctilious, which springs from the PIE root peuk- or peug-, to prick, from which we also get pugnacious, impugn, poignant, point, pounce, punctual, punctuate, puncture, pungent, and Pygmy. That last is from the Greek pugme, in ancient Greece a unit of measure representing the length from the average man’s elbow to his knuckles. It was hard to be punctilious about measurements back then, but the African tribesmen known as Pygmies were probably never that short.

At any rate, I applaud when The New York Times runs a punctilious correction like this one:

An obituary on Friday about the actor Fess Parker included several errors. Mr. Parker’s daughter is Ashley Parker Snider, not Parker-Snyder. Eddy Arnold—not Eddie—was the singer who recorded one of many versions of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” … And a line from that song should have read, “Raised in the woods so’s he knew ev’ry tree”—not “Raised in the woods so he knew every tree.”

puppy

According to Ben Schott in The New York Times, a Russian doctor named Marie de Manacéine “discovered,” in 1894, “that puppies died when kept awake for 4–6 days, or 96–144 hours.”

What kind of person—? And I’ll bet this so-called doctor complained: “One had constantly to keep poking the puppies, and poking the puppies, and addressing the puppies more and more sharply, and then when one needed a break, one’s assistant might be expected to take over—but Igor was not to be trusted. When my back was turned Igor would indulge the puppies in little catnaps (oops); and as I beat him for this, oh, the excuses [here she adopts a sarcastic version of a hunchback’s whine]: ‘The puppies whimper and yip! The puppies whimper and yip! And they blink those sleepy puppy eyes!’ This from a person with a penchant for suspending human subjects head-down over hot coals—but give him puppies to keep awake, and ‘Oh, oh, it’s tearing me up inside!’”

To be fair, the Russian word for puppy, as best I can determine, is pronounced something like sh’chenok. No excuse for Dr. de Menacing, but a puppy regarded as a sh’chenok may smell less sweet. And we cannot assume, even given Dr. de Maniac’s French name, that she was familiar with the evolution of Middle French poupée, doll, into English puppy, meaning toy dog for a while before it extended to young dogs. (French for puppy is chiot, more endearing than sh’chenok but far more chichi than puppy. The very sound of puppy is enough to make a normal person—one who is aware of how intensely puppies value sleep—want to go oo-wooby-wooby-wooby.)

The Old English word for a young dog was the drastically less whelp, which became whelp and lurked around for centuries. In 1682, Sir Thomas Browne wrote, “I kept an Eagle two years, which fed upon Kats, Kittlings, Whelps and Ratts.” As late as 1894 (while over in Russia Dr. Demoniac was jostling puppies to death), Rudyard Kipling employed the simile “mean as a collier’s whelp.” (Colliers, who made and sold charcoal, were “notorious for cheating,” according to Etymonline.com, so no wonder their puppies turned mean.) You wouldn’t say “cute as a collier’s whelp.” Whelp sounds like a backhanded slap. Puppy cropped up in the late sixteenth century. It has superseded whelp, and that is a good thing.

From the same Old French stock (and farther back from Latin pupa meaning girl or doll), we get pupil, in the ocular sense, because of the tiny image of oneself one sees reflected in that dark spot in the middle of another person’s eye. The other pupil, student, is from back in that etymology somewhere; originally it meant orphan child or ward. Etymonline.com quotes Plato: “Self-knowledge can be obtained only by looking into the mind and virtue of the soul, which is the diviner part of a man, as we see our own image in another’s eye.” Now that I look at that, it’s not so clear. Is Plato saying we do have the power, in this limited sense, to see ourselves as others see us? Or that two people seeing eye to eye are each just seeing an image of himself or herself? (See each other.)

I don’t know whether we can see ourselves in puppies’ pupils, or vice versa. The next time I get hold of a puppy that will hold still long enough with its eyes open, I will look.

purl

A purling stream swirls, murmurs, and gurgles. Maybe an “imitative formation,” says OED grudgingly.

The other purl, to knit with inverted stitches, may be seen to bear a faint family resemblance—Chambers connects that purl to Middle English pirlying, revolving or twisting. But no bloodlines have been found.

q · Q · q

During World War I, the British and U.S. navies lured German submarines to their destruction by setting out “mystery ships,” which were camouflaged to look like half-sunk merchant vessels but in fact were seaworthy and armed. A submarine would close in for what looked like an easy kill and be surprised. These mystery ships were also called Q-boats. Why? OED says “probably arbitrary” or “perhaps” from “the initial letter of query,” or “probably after slightly earlier use of P-boat for a patrol boat.” Two probablies and a perhaps, and yet no hint of the explanation that strikes me as most likely. What were German submarines called? In German, Unterseeboots; in English, U-boats. Call me alphabet-obsessed, but don’t you think somebody said, “Troll with a Q, and a U is bound to follow”?

Q-tip

Did you think this would be in OED? I didn’t either. But it is. The Q, according to OED, is for quality. “The product was apparently invented in 1923 by Leo Gerstenzang, a Polish-born American, who initially named them Baby Gays.” Not that there was anything wrong, or particularly Polish, about that. “In 1926 the name was changed to Q-tips Baby Gays, and later shortened to Q-tips.”

questions not to ask an author, with answers

Q. How is your book coming?

A. Don’t know. Let’s hope.

Q. How is your book doing?

A. Don’t know. Let’s hope.

Q. Are you working on anything right now?

A. No, I’m being fed by whatever those birds are in the Bible that fed whoever that was.

Q. You can work anywhere, right?

A. Not here, for instance.

Q. What do you want people to take away from your book?

A. If I told people that, why would they buy it? My focus is on what I want to take away from my book: enough revenue to help keep me afloat while I’m figuring out some way to write another one.

Q. Do you write on a computer?

A. I hope in time to catch up with that technology. So far, I’m using a bloody finger on bathroom mirrors.

Q. What is your book about?

A. That must seem a reasonable question. It probably is a reasonable question. It makes me want to sob brokenly. I conceived the son of a bitch. I proposed the son of a bitch. My agent and I found a publisher for the son of a bitch. I wrote the son of a bitch. And rewrote the son of a bitch. And rewrote the son of a bitch again. And again. And read the son of a bitch printed out. And fiddled some more with the son of a bitch. And read the son of a bitch in galleys. And haggled with the copy editor—with pleasure, but still—over the son of a bitch. And read the son of a bitch again in corrected galleys. And survived the reviews of the son of a bitch. And presented the son of a bitch to forty-eight insanely various audiences. And now I have to sum up the son of a bitch? Let’s just say, you’ll love it.

Q. Don’t you love it?

A. William Faulkner handed the typescript of The Sound and the Fury to his editor and said, “It’s a real son of a bitch.”

See upaya.

quip

OED borders on acknowledging that this word, whose origin is unknown, has a sonicky element by saying “perhaps influenced by words of similiar ending,” like clip, nip, and whip, “which contain the idea of something sharp or cutting.” Sharp, cutting, and quick, I would say. A zinger, or particularly telling quip against someone, is certainly “echoic,” as OED says of zing.

I would urge journalists to eschew quipped as a verb meaning “observed, humorously,” as in (from The Wall Street Journal MarketWatch), “This next year, history may not repeat itself, but as Mark Twain quipped, it could rhyme.” Setting up a statement with quipped renders it less humorous, less clever; not more.

r · R · r

Nick Benson is a third-generation stone carver and calligrapher, who has designed letters and inscribed them in stone at the John F. Kennedy Memorial, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, the National World War II Memorial, and the National Gallery of Art. Asked whether he had a favorite letter, he replied:

“R is one of my favorite letters because it incorporates all the strokes of the alphabet. You have the vertical, the horizontal, the curved form, and the diagonal. That’s what we use often as a sample, test letter. It’s a good letter.”

R’s are yare. The verb are, by the way, became standard English in the sixteenth century, replacing the third-person-plural be, which survives in expressions like “the powers that be” and “Here be dragons.”

racism

When it came out that Supreme Court then nominee (now Justice) Sonia Sotomayor had once said, publicly, that “a wise Latina woman” would know more about certain matters than a white man would, Newt Gingrich—a white man—posted this Twitter message:

“White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”

Ugh. Sound like white man tweet with thumbs of movie Injun. If there is evidence that wise white men are discriminated against, it is that we see so few of them in positions of authority. Meanwhile foolish white men, in such positions, seem to be taking every opportunity to make statements even more foolish than might have been expected. Maybe foolish white men are determined to embarrass themselves, so they will be put out of power, so they can take offense at being made fun of. Except that voters who like foolish white men seem to love it when a foolish white man exceeds expectations.

rank

Over centuries, this word’s meaning has evolved from “strong, upright” to “offensively strong” or worse. Is it the influence of rancor and the first syllable of rancid, or is it just the sound? Rhymes with unpleasant words: stank, dank, crank, yank, spank, clank, sank, wank, lank, blank, prank, tank, skank, shank as in hitting a golf ball wrong, hank as in “hank of hair.” Of course so does thank, but the th- softens it?

recursion, excessive

This is the first sentence from a March 2010, newspaper item: “A federal appeals court has ruled that Anna Nicole Smith’s estate will get none of the more than $300 million the late Playboy model claimed a Texas billionaire to whom she was briefly married meant to leave her after he died.”

And this, from The Berkshire Eagle, is recursion gone astray: “The recognition that a simple blow to the head can lead to lifelong debilitating injury is spreading is good news.” Should begin “That the recognition”; then it would be just excessive.

And this, from The New York Times, is recursion run amok: “Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to let the disappointment of the second half of Mr. Salinger’s career—consisting of a long short story called ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’ that reads as though he allowed the pain of hostile criticism to blunt the edge of self-criticism that every good writer must possess, followed by 45 years of living like a hermit in the New Hampshire woods—to overshadow the achievements of the first half.” We are not going to win contemporary readers with sentences such as that. Sentences such as that don’t even justify our thinking it’s contemporary readers’ fault.

redundancy

From the Latin to reflood, to overflow (the und part plays a happier role in undulation). As Noah must have said to the Deluge after a week or so: enough already! Cut, cut, cut! To the quick, to the chase, to the bone! Maybe, these days, you do have to tell people what you’re going to tell them; tell them; and tell them what you told them. But those are three different things. “I’ll tell you what I mean by ‘Get on with it’: Get on with it; ‘G-E-T O-N W-I-T-H I-T.’”

Okay, sometimes redundancy works. After Ernestine Jamison of Houston, Texas, found a frozen snake’s head in a bag of frozen green beans she was about to thaw out for her family, she was quoted in news accounts as follows:

“When I saw it was a snake’s head I just threw it down and called my kids and said I got a snake head in the green beans, everybody said ‘oh Lord, you got a snake head in the green beans.’”

But that’s a rare case. Even great oratory can do with tightening, and sometimes popular history will oblige. When Winston Churchill told the House of Commons “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,” one word was redundant. It’s almost an SAT question: Which word in this series doesn’t fit? Hint: three of them are bodily fluids. You don’t need the other one anyway, it’s covered by sweat. And by the way, doesn’t sweat, the word, kind of lie there? Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good word, but is it a good word to place right there? Wouldn’t we get more—how shall I put it?—more loft, if we ended on tears?

rhythm

In Austin, Texas, Town Lake was renamed Lady Bird Lake, but nobody calls it that, even though Lady Bird Johnson is generally well regarded in Austin. The problem, I would submit, is that Lady Bird Lake, rhythmically, piles in on itself. Lake Lady Bird would have caught on.

robinhood

What the familiar red-breasted bird achieves fully upon leaving the nest. Compare eliotness, the quality that is so T. S., the essence of “The Waste Land.” And siouxcity, roughly the opposite of insouciance. Or how about this one: oklahomacity, the state of belonging to a land that is grand.

rumpsprung

WIII and AHD inexplicably ignore this thumping good word for something saggy. OAD’s definition is fine as far as it goes—“informal (of furniture), baggy and worn in the seat: a rumpsprung armchair.” But how called for is that “informal”? I daresay you wouldn’t use rumpsprung in announcing a Supreme Court decision, but what would you use instead? And rumpsprung may apply not just to furniture but also to trousers, a dress, or even a person (OED example: “‘In my opinion,’ Mrs. Neuberger told the reporters, ‘Vancouver women are rump-sprung.’”)

The only attempt to define rump-sprung (the hyphen is optional but unnecessary so should be dropped, except in an attempt to fake a line of Gerard Manley Hopkins, see Introduction) on Urbandictionary.com is disappointing. If you were taking the time to contribute to a dictionary, for millions of people to read, wouldn’t you take care to avoid writing pertaing for pertaining and uphostry for upholstery? And by way of illustration, surely you would do better than this: “I can’t sit on the near end of the sofa, its rump-sprng to aunt Ethel’s ass”? What kind of lexicographer fails to notice that he has misspelled the very word he is defining? And that its should be it’s. And ending with just “to Aunt Ethel” would avoid redundancy. How much time would it take for people who write on the hyper-lickety-split Internet to stop and look at what they have written before they commit it to eternity?

s · S · s

I kept thinking that I had read somewhere that an enormous S had appeared somewhere—in the sky, in a cornfield as seen from the sky … ? At length I Googled “enormous s.” Presented with “about 18,100 items,” I had time for only thirty, which did not include whatever it was that I was trying to remember, but did include the following:

At myfamilydigest.net/holidays/news (cached), “Fourty [sic] Eight Ways to Hold Enormous s Time.” Beneath a photograph of an attractive and smiling young family, tips on making a special day even more special:

A Mother’s amorousness is one of the most effectual forces in this world. Here are 48 ways to celebrate her delight this Mother’s Day. Pick 1, 2 or besides ways to cause this Mother’s interval additional special.

1. Construct a Recall Basket. Fill the hamper with slips of paper, everyone detailing a recognition you, your siblings, and your Giant carry shared. Bestow her the basket and annex all of the family members sitting approximately her as she reads each mind slip …

3. I enjoy been called a “Guy’s Guy,” on the contrary I thirst for you to ante up Mom a tea party. Invite family as great as friends who are rapid to your Mom. Prepare some super-sweetened iced tea or flavoured broiling tea and serve my world-famous, not to be missed, will-make-you-toes-curl-they-are-so-good tea sandwiches (see my method below) and cookies. By the way, I don’t presume in those in fact little tea sandwiches. You’ll beam my trimming directions below …

4. Create Mom famous. Dossier you and the rest of the family and friends saying what they enjoy approximately Mom …

5. Booty Mom outside to the mall for some shopping.

And so on.

At vido4viet.com, a video, “Miss Diva Bbw With Enormous S,” which had been “removed by the user.”

At ncbi.nim.nih.gov: “Although, in both the stool and sputum direct smears of the patient, enormous S. stercoralis larvae were present, and no eosinophilia was found … .”

At Stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine, a story about advances made possible by the Global Positioning System. Stanford professor Brad Parkinson is “a guiding force” among researchers who “are perfecting a way to find anything, anytime, anywhere on the planet.”

So it happened that anyone flying over a patch of farmland in central California two summers ago could have seen a perfectly formed, enormous S carved into the field. A team of Parkinson’s graduate students had demonstrated that a driverless John Deere tractor, equipped with a GPS receiver linked to an automatic control system, could plow a field even in darkness or fog and achieve accuracy to within a few centimeters. In just 40 minutes, the tractor steadily plowed through John Deere’s half-mile-square experimental field, executing perfect turns and reverses guided by a computer program.

At The New York Times’s web archive, “Topics of the Times,” September 3, 1913:

Precisely what was done on Monday by the French aviator PEGOUD is not made unquestionable by the dispatches now at hand. By some of them, and the more detailed, he is said to have traversed from above downward the course of an enormous “S,” while others say that he made a complete vertical loop, more like the letter “O.”

The former feat, since it involves two perpendicular descents instead of one, would seemingly be the more difficult and perilous, but that, in the case of men like these, does not, perhaps, render it certain, or even highly probable, that the simpler exploit is the one that was performed. In either case there would be involved the amazing achievement of flying for a time with the aeroplane overturned and the occupant hanging from instead of resting on it.

And so on. Will wonders never cease?

-sh, sh-

Would people relish saying “when push comes to shove” so much if push and shove didn’t mesh so well? It’s a juicy, in fact mouthwatering sound, sh, however spelled: delicious, lush, luscious, sensuous. A long soft comforting shhhh is something a mother says to soothe an unhappy baby. It’s also a sound that can suggest pushing too far: lubricious, licentious, salacious, mush. Does the use of lush to mean a drunk derive in part from the convention that people in their cups say shay instead of say? It’s not a sound one wants to hear too much of. Sh’boom is good, and so is whoosh, but recently some friends and I listened to a jazz trio whose drummer brushed his high-hat cymbals so insistently he overshadowed the piano and the sax. Our table was tempted to try shushing him, but that would have compounded the problem.

See juice.

shrapnel

For Henry Shrapnel, who invented the “case-shot shell,” which exploded on impact and scattered deadly bits of metal through the air. Shr- as in shreds, shriek. The man’s name was rippingly appropriate for what he wrought. If he had been named Witticomb or Perkins (“torn apart by perkins”?), or had invented the birdbath instead, he’d not be remembered today.

As to contemporary shrapnel, see The Good Soldiers by David Finkel, who was embedded with U.S. soldiers in Iraq. One morning as Captain Al Walsh slept, a mortar shell landed outside his door:

In came a piece of shrapnel, moving so swiftly that before he could wake up and take cover, it had sliced through his wooden door, sliced through the metal frame of his bed, sliced through a 280-page book called Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, sliced through a 272-page book called Buddhism Is Not What You Think, sliced through a 128-page book called On Guerrilla Warfare, sliced through a 360-page book called Tactics of the Crescent Moon, sliced through a 176-page Calvin and Hobbes collection, sliced through the rear of a metal cabinet holding those books, and finally was stopped by a concrete wall. And the only reason that Walsh wasn’t sliced was that he happened in that moment to be sleeping on his side rather than on his stomach or back, as he usually did, which meant that the shrapnel passed cleanly through the spot where his head usually rested, missing him by an inch. Dazed, ears ringing, unsure of what had just happened, and spotted with a little blood from being nicked by the exploding metal fragments of the ruined bed frame, he stumbled out to the smoking courtyard and said to another soldier,

“Is anything sticking out of my head?” And the answer, thank whatever, was no.

See smithereens.

sic

Here’s a good reason to use words right: you don’t want a [sic] put on you. According to an item published in 2010 in the New York Post, a prison inmate in Florida sued a girlie magazine for failing to respond when he wrote to ask how he could go about ordering a copy of the April 2007 issue, featuring a nude pictorial of burlesque star Dita Von Teese. The people who put out the magazine, he alleged, had violated his constitutional rights by denying him “access to the media.” The bottom line, he claimed, was this: the staffers “are being prejudice [sic]” against him as a prisoner. The [sic] was the newspaper’s. It’s bad enough to be locked up, but when the New York Post can tell you’ve used a word wrong, it’s the [sic] of death.

sigh

Isn’t this a funny-looking word? I suppose advocates of simplified spelling would change it to, what, si, sie, sye? OED says it’s a back-formation from sihte, the past tense of siche, “through the guttural having more phonetic appropriateness than the palatal sound.” A dialect form was siff. Siche meant to sigh, but it was pronounced, I take it, more or less to rhyme with hitch, the palatal ch sound formed by the tongue pressed against the hard palate. Sike, a variant of siche, was even less sigh-sounding. Sithe was a little better (and the dialect siff much better), but not quite right. So the word moved to the glottis, the back of the throat, where the gh resonated as something like the ch in German ach. That soft ch does have a sighingness about it, but modern English pronunciation took out the c and retained a breath of h, and there you had sigh.

A similar evolution produced modern-day high, which Dr. Johnson defined as “long upwards.” You don’t want such a significant signifier to end up caught in the back of your throat, as in the Old Frisian hâch or hâg; so people in the fourteenth century (if I may speak for them) started pulling its pronunciation up out of the guttural and spelling it more or less phonetically: he, hee, hey, hi, hii, hie, and hye. None of which looked quite rootsy enough, I guess, so the -gh survived.

And a good thing, too. That ghostly postguttural -gh in both sigh and high contributes depth. In college I wrote a paper about the sighs in Shakespeare. The research got so fraught in the middle of the night (you’ll notice there’s a gh in fraught, and another one just past the middle of night, along about, say, three thirty a.m.) that I would have switched to another topic if the paper had not been due in the morning. Lady Macbeth sighs a sigh that causes her doctor to exclaim, “What a sigh is there! The heart is sorely charged.” Ross tells Macduff that things have got so bad in Scotland that “sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rent the air” go unremarked upon. Ophelia tells her father that Hamlet came out with “a sigh so piteous and profound /As it did seem to shatter all his bulk / And end his being.” The king for his part hears reports of Hamlet’s raving and reflects, “There’s matter in these sighs, these profound heaves.” Therefore, he explains to Laertes, putting something off (something like, say, killing Hamlet) is a bad idea:

That we would do,

We should do when we would; for this “would” changes

And hath abatements and delays as many

As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;

And then this “should” is like a spendthrift sigh,

That hurts by easing.

Spendthrift sigh alludes to the common belief in Shakespeare’s day that every sigh shortens life by depriving the heart of a drop of blood. After the king goes on in that woulda-shoulda-coulda vein for a bit longer, he prods Laertes directly. What would Laertes be up to, if he could get at his father’s killer? Laertes’ one-line response is no sigh: “To cut his throat i’ the church.”

See gikl.

since

After this, I hope we will all avoid the logical fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc, which is Latin for “after this, therefore because of this.” As in, “I told you and told you not to go outdoors without your galoshes, but you didn’t listen, and now look, you’ve got hypoglycemia.”

But it’s a seductive fallacy. We want a sequence to be consequential. The early forms of the adverb since—sithenes, syns, synnes—meant only “afterward, later,” as in “He went out to get some mustard sardines and hasn’t been heard from since.” And the conjunction in the same forms meant only “after the time that,” as in “since my baby left me.” But after all, is it merely after your baby left you, or because your baby left you, that you’ve been living down on the corner of Lonely Street? Around 1450, according to Chambers, synnes came to mean not only after but also because.

The second episode of The West Wing was titled “Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc.” President Bartlet confides in his trusted father-figure doctor his doubts that he is willing enough, as president, to visit violence on anyone, even the nation’s enemies. Another matter comes up, and he gives his aides a little lecture about not falling into the fallacy of the title. Then he learns that the doctor has been killed in a plane blown up by terrorists, and he vows to wreak vengeance. Post Doc, or propter Doc?

slave

One night in a noisy sing-along Oxford, England, pub, many years ago when I was even stupider, it struck me as odd that “Rule, Britannia” includes the line “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.” Struck me, more specifically, as, I don’t know, kind of imperiopathetic. And I started singing things like “Britons never, never, never shall be tiedupandforcedtospeak-Frenchwiththeirpantsaroundtheirankles,” until my American friends, fortunately, told me to for God’s sake shut up.

Now I come to find out that around 850, when Danish settlers were moving into British territory and dominating the resident Celts and Anglo-Saxons, the Old English word Wealh, which was Germanic speakers’ term for a Briton (and whose traces survive in Wales, Wallace, and Cornwall), began to be used to mean serf or slave. So what “Rule, Britannia” is driving at is that our friends the Brits never never never shall be slaves again. Certainly they were not going to embrace, permanently, a word that meant both slaves and them. Around 1300, English borrowed sclave, meaning servant or slave, from Old French esclave, from Medieval Latin Sclavus, slave, from Slav.

Slav was Slavic-speaking people’s word for one of themselves. It was related to their words for “glory,” “fame,” and “word” or “talk”; in effect they were calling themselves, honorifically, “people who understand each other,” as opposed to foreigners, nemci, “mumbling, murmuring people.” Then the mumblers conquered the Slavs and turned so many of them into wholly owned workers that Slav came to mean slave. The Latin and the French versions derived from that. The English version evolved back toward the original.

As you may imagine, words for slave in Slavic languages do not sound anything like Slav. The Russian word, for example, is pronounced roughly rahb. It comes from the Old Slavic rabu, slave. The Czech robota, drudgery, and robotnik, slave, gave us our robot, which was popularized by Karel apek’s 1920 play, R.U.R. (the initials, at least in translation, stand for Rossum’s Universal Robots). The ultimate root is the PIE orbh-, whence English derives orphan.

It is insensitive to call an individual who lived in slavery, a slave. A more granular as well as a politically more correct way to refer to Sally Hemings, for instance, is as “an enslaved person.”

On the other hand, people who say ciao on parting are using a short form of the Italian sono vostro schiavo, which means, literally, “I am your slave.”

slaver/slobber

You might think that slaver (the one that means drool and rhymes with cadaver, as opposed to the one that means a person or ship involved in slave traffic and rhymes with graver) is simply a lah-di-dah form of slobber, or that it somehow derives from saliva.

But according to etymologists, the two words grew up more or less independently. Slaver is deemed akin to Norwegian slabbe, to slop, eat noisily; English dialect slabba, to roll in mud; Old Norse slafast, to droop or slacken; Lithuanian slõbti, to grow weak. Slobber’s relatives include Low German slubbern, to sip, lap, and sluf, loose, slack, tired; Old Norse lüfa, thick hair (no relation to loofah); Middle Dutch lobbe, thick underlip; Lithuanian slubnas, slack, tired, drooping; Frisian slobberje, to slurp; and, my favorite, Middle Dutch overslubberen, to wade through a ditch.

Saliva is from Latin. Before that, nobody knows, nor gives a spit. Saliva has no family; it isn’t sonicky.

slip

“Of doubtful form and obscure origin,” humphs OED. Perhaps that humph is unfair, but I don’t know why OED uses doubtful in this way. It’s as if the word has no real claim to itself. “Mysterious form” would be more scientific.

OED suggests comparison to the Norwegian slip, slipa, meaning the slime on a fish, or German dialect schlipper, curdled milk. Does either of those references do justice to “Excuse me while I slip into something more comfortable”? Actually, in Hell’s Angels, Jean Harlow said, “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?,” which is pretty perky itself, but slip—thanks to movie lovers’ faulty, enhancing collective memory—adds a lot. Not to mention “slip into.”

“Put on” could be a sweater, over what she’s wearing. “Slip into” is a kinephonic (see sonicky) picture. If you’re wearing outerwear, a tweed skirt, say, you’re not going to be slipping into something without taking the skirt off and getting down to a silken level.

“Slipping around.” “Slip-sliding away.” “Slip the surly bonds of earth.”

slush

A good sonicky term for melting ice or snow, liquid mud, or soggy nonsense. But why slush fund? The OED quotes an 1839 source: “The sailors in the navy are allowed salt beef … From this provision, when cooked … nearly all the fat boils off; this is carefully skimmed … and put into empty beef or pork barrels.” Some of this slush was used to slush or slush down the masts, to keep them from drying out and snapping, and unsqueamish tars used some for flavoring, but the bulk was sold for use in oil lamps, “and the money so received is called the slush fund.” These proceeds went to buy treats or performance rewards for the crew. All aboveboard. But the sound of slush is—aptly—unpleasantly slippery. By 1884 slush fund was used to mean off-the-books money for the lining of pockets and the greasing—again, aptly—of palms.

Not until 2006 did OED recognize slush pile, “the unsolicited manuscripts submitted for consideration at a publishing house, magazine, etc., considered collectively,” originally an Americanism (going back at least as far as 1952) that had sloshed up in the Times Literary Supplement in 2004. As of November 2009, WIII still hadn’t got round to slush pile, although there were websites called SlushPile.net and Slushpilemag.com. Wikipedia (where the concept “slush pile” doesn’t apply) had posted a brief but adequate entry explaining the term. And Salon.com had published Patricia Chui’s account of her years as a publisher’s slush-pile reader. “I wish I could say,” Chui wrote, “that serving as a conduit between the publishing elite and the uncorrupted masses taught me valuable lessons in compassion and grace. Instead, it convinced me that the world is full of lunatics.” One submission she fielded was a collection of love poems whose author signed herself “Mrs. Jesus Christ.” On the other hand, one of the thousands of submissions that came in did get published by her firm. You are not a lunatic, probably. But if you are coming from out of the blue with a book proposal or manuscript, you’re better off sending it to agents. Libraries have agents’ addresses.

smithereens

Awfully satisfying to utter, this word, and let’s face it: so is the phrase “blown to bits.” Yet we may deplore moviemakers’ tendency to fall back on explosions.

Wouldn’t you think there would be an interesting story in this word? Wouldn’t you think this word would spread out in all directions? But it’s just from the Gaelic smidirín, a diminutive of another word that means small fragment. (Or else, cautions OED, smidirín is from smithereens.) No connection to any part of a smithy, or of anyone named Smith. No one, except me (hello?), seems to want to link smithereen to smidgen, which is perhaps from the unrelated Scottish smitch, a tiny amount. I would love to link smithereen to smith, as in blacksmith, and both of them to smite. But no.

snazzy

It’s a good word, eh? OED quotes a 1935 book titled Underworld & Prison Slang: “That’s a snazzy dressup you’ve got.” Chambers says “sometimes thought of as a blend of snappy and jazzy.” I don’t see why not. OED first picks jazzy up in the Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1915: “‘Blue’ Marion sat down and jazzed the jazziest streak of jazz ever.” Snappy meaning “neat and elegant; smart, ‘natty,’” popped up in Punch in 1881, in reference to a little boat.

See yare.

sneeze

According to Gary Clothier, Mr. Know-It-All columnist for the Newspaper Enterprise Assn., “The scientific name for sneezing is sternutation.” I don’t deny this; I just find it irritating. Sternutation is from the Latin, of course. Does science gain anything by calling sneezing sternutation? Does science think everyone will start giggling and blushing if it indulges in kinephonically evocative words of Germanic rather than Latin derivation?

“Some people sneeze when looking at a bright light, such as the sun, which is known as photic sneeze reflex,” Mr. Know-It-All goes on, “and some sneeze after eating a large meal. This oddity is called snatiation. Do you know that a person can’t sneeze while asleep?”

Interesting. According to a Wikipedia entry, snatiation is a portmanteau, as one might expect, of sneeze and satiation, coined by Dr. Judith G. Hall, a pediatrician (also a “dysmorphologist,” which would appear to be someone who studies birth defects). The same entry also calls snatiation a “backronym” standing for “Sneezing Non-controllably At a Time of Indulgence of the Appetite—a Trait Inherited and Ordained to be Named,” which is just silly. But the word backronym (another portmanteau) is worth a look. According to the Wikipedia entry for backronym, “Its earliest known citation in print is ‘bacronym’ in the November 1983 edition of The Washington Post monthly neologism contest (1983–2004): journalist Bob Levey quoted winning reader ‘Meredith G. Williams of Potomac’ defining it as the ‘same as an acronym, except that the words were chosen to fit the letters.’ Actual use of the word is found in texts since at least 1994.” The Wikipedia example of an acronym is quite right: radar, from “Radio Detection And Ranging.” Its example of a backronym is the U.S. Justice Department’s giving “their Amber Alert program the meaning ‘America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response, ’ although the term originally referred to Amber Hagerman, a 9-year old abducted and murdered in Texas in 1996.”

Thanks to Mr. Know-It-All I have learned some things that are not to be sneezed at. But calling yourself Mr. Know-It-All doesn’t entitle you to indulge in syntactical short circuits like “ … the sun, which is known as photic sneeze reflex.” Earlier in the same column, while answering a question about Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot who was captured by the Soviet Union, Mr. Know-It-All gives us this blatant dangling modifier: “After completing several successful flights, a surface-to-air missile brought him down in May 1960.”

Bill Watterson in his late, lamented Calvin and Hobbes comic strip once rendered a sneeze as “Kbthchh!”

so

It may seem unfair that in order to become globalized, Chinese people must learn English. How would you like to master from scratch all the uses of, say, the word so?

“So!”

“So what?”

“That is so you: ‘So what.’”

“No, no—so far as that goes …”

“It hasn’t gone so far, so far.”

“So? So far, so good.”

“So you say.”

“All the more so!”

“No. Just so-so.”

“You want everything to be just so.”

“So do you—just so you’re happy.”

“Not so.”

“Yeah, yeah, and so on, and so on …”

“So that’s it, then?”

“So long.”

“So soon?”

“In a minute or so.”

“Say it ain’t so.”

“You so-and-so.”

“So’s yer old man. So to speak.”

“I am so out of here.”

“So much for my hopes and dreams.”

“So … ?”

“‘So …’ what?”

“You are so … So say so!”

“I’ll miss you so!”

“Ah, so.”

“So help me!”

And so to bed.

Let those of us who were born into English be glad we are not required (so far) to master Chinese. My friend Marianne Swan lived for a year in China. To mean so-so, as in “not so hot,” the Chinese say “mama hoho,” which means, literally, “horsehorse tigertiger.” A Chinese person, knowing that Marianne had been fighting flulike symptoms, asked her how she felt. “Mama hoho,” said Marianne. Now you would think that a willingness to express one’s feelings in such outlandish terms would be meeting Chinese at least halfway. But she didn’t get the tone just right. So the Chinese person thought she was saying—who knows? At any rate, the Chinese person looked at her in stark bewilderment as she said “mama hoho” in every combination of tones she could muster. Eventually she gave up. By then she was feeling much worse than mama hoho anyhow.

It’s a good tipoff, by the way, that people are so goddamn backward that they actually do plan to shoot it out with the Antichrist, if in their scripturesque website utterances they put so ahead of God. So spake the so-called Hutaree, an extremist militia organization busted in Michigan for plotting to murder policemen, blow up their funeral, and start an anti-Antichrist revolution: “Hutaree will one day see its enemy and meet him on the battlefield if so God wills it.” You can hear Jahweh rumbling, “NO, NO, IT’S LIKE, ‘GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD THAT …’ NOT ‘SO GOD LOVED THE WORLD THAT.’ TIME TO FORSAKE THESE BUTTHEADS.”

See such.

sonicky

I won’t say I coined this word until it circulates more widely. As of August 18, 2010, it could boast 27,200 Google hits, but they are a mixed bag. Some of them refer to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s son, Icky. (What a nickname. Sort of like Little Ike, I guess, but it can’t have given the poor kid much of a swagger. Icky died of scarlet fever before he was four years old. Ike’s son John once told me, on short acquaintance, that his father was “a son of a bitch,” but surely Ike didn’t call his first son Icky because he was sickly.)

I did make sonicky up, for Alphabet Juice. I needed a word that combined sonic and kinesthetic. Maybe kinesonic or, to keep it Greek, kinephonic, would have sounded more nearly scientific, but I didn’t want to put on airs, and I thought sonicky had more kick to it. I needed a better word than onomatopoeic, echoic, or imitative to describe an intrinsic significant value that isn’t clearly onomatopoeic, as in snap, crackle, and pop, but does evoke meaning by a combination of its sound and its movement.

The value of a word, or even just a syllable. Consider ob-.

I forget in which city ob- came up. Sun Valley, Key West, Chapel Hill? At any rate, the audience was receptive as I held forth, as an author must, about Alphabet Juice. I told the Wilt Chamberlain story and the hoo-hoo story, and touched upon the issue of pig-noise verbalization. I emphasized my opposition to a tin-eared principle of theoretical linguistics: that the relation between words and their meaning is “arbitrary.”

That means skimpy might as well switch meanings with voluminous? Fuzzy with sleek? Gobble with spew? Any huckster, any animal caller, any lover, any poet, anybody knows better than that. The sounds of letters and the words they constitute, and the kinetics involved in their oral utterance, and the rhythms of their combinations, have inherent significant value. And words have roots, and words evolve, and some words substantiate their meanings better than others. To study language without considering these aspects of it is like studying forestry without considering trees. Or, okay, bark and leaves.

I was not talking about just quaint flamboyant words like flabbergasted or lickety-split. I was talking about common words whose physicality we take for granted.

Mouth the word through, I urged the audience. Note how it flows through your mouth. Then mouth the word thwart. And throttle. For that matter, mouth the word mouth. These words have what I call sonicky value. It was time to throw open the floor (interesting expression—you can’t throw the floor open, you can just throw open the floor) for questions.

Well, said someone, if words aren’t arbitrary, why can’t everyone understand every language? You can’t just look at, or mouth, the vast majority of words and tell what they mean. So surely most words are in fact arbitrary.

Arbitrary as in random? In that case how would they get attached to meaning? Arbitrary as in laid down by decree? What red-blooded language user would stand for that? Calling any word arbitrary is using the word arbitrary arbitrarily, to mean something like “less than self-evident.”

“But obviously,” I said, and here I quote myself directly, “a lot of words are without much in the way of sonicky value. For instance, obviously.”

That’s when ob- hit me. Obdurate. Obfuscate. Object. Oblate. Obliterate. Obnoxious. Obscure. Obsequious. Obstacle. Obstinate. Obstreperous. Obstruct. Obtrude. Obtuse. Gob. Blob. Cob. Snob. Stob. Bobble. Hobgoblin. Thingamabob. Plumb bob. Bobbing for apples. Don’t tell me there’s nothing sonicky about ob-; ob- is as obvious as the nose on your face. It sticks out like a knob.

I’m not saying some caveperson started to say ahhh and blocked it off (bobbed it, in fact) by pressing his blunt lips together and thought, “Hmm, that has value—might be used to evoke a kind of dull-thud-but-with-possibility-of-bounce element, as in ‘Well, it’s a job.’” We know that ob-is from the Latin preposition ob, meaning against, toward, before. I’m just saying ob- works in some physical way.

OED defines eighteen different bob’s, including an old verb meaning to strike with the fist or anything rounded or knobbed, “perhaps onomatopoeic, expressing the effect of a smart, but not very heavy blow”; and the current verb meaning “to move up and down like a buoyant body,” which OED says is “apparently onomatopoeic, expressing short jerking or rebounding motion.” Does either of those verbs actually make the sound of bob? The second one makes no sound at all. And yet we do—even austere OED does—pick up a sensuous connection: kinesthetic but somehow mixed with sound. The way the body forms the sound bob has a familiar ring.

And high is a higher word than low, and back moves from the front of the mouth to the back, whereas forth pushes forward. And life sounds livelier than death, and up peppier than down, and grudge runs deeper than pique, and a nod is shorter than a bow, and a bounce is springier than a bump, and be is more solid than seem … And see, as a handy example, splotch.

spelling

People who spell, on the Web, like drunken sailors—how do they use Word search? If you don’t spell what you’re looking for exactly right, Word throws up its hands. “The search item was not found,” you are stiffly informed. On Google, on the other hand, you don’t have to spell, because as soon as you enter a couple of letters, Google is nudging you like a dog with a ball in its mouth. Or, rather, like a parent hovering over an Easter-egg hunt: “Not that way, Sweetie, you don’t want to go there do you? How about over this way? That’s right, you’re getting warmer, no, now you’re cooling off, maybe you’d like to, uh-huhhhh, that’s better, that’s better, warmer, oh now you’re red hot—don’t step on it. Oh for God’s sake.” On my iPad I enter Xa and here come the “Google Suggestions”: Xanax, xanga, xavi, xampp, xabi alonso … Or say I’m trying to spell Xanadu by ear. By the time I get to Zanad, Google is urging the correct spelling on me, and if I persist all the way to Zanadu, Google gives it to me but with the heading, “Did you mean: xanadu.” And mixes a couple of Xanadu sites in with the Zanadu’s (there are quite a few, for instance Zanadu Sportswear on Staten Island), like real blueberries among the Froot Loops. It’s helpful, all right, maybe even loosely educational, but it doesn’t foster independence.

See E.

splotch

OED says, “Of obscure origin; perh. merely imitative.” As in the case of bubble, I have to ask: Why merely? Is splotch not a stroke of genius? Does it not capture, with panache, “a large irregular spot or patch of light, colour, or the like; a blot, smear, or stain”?

To be sure, the original meaning of merely was “magnificently, excellently, splendidly, wonderfully,” but that is way obsolete. And you know why? Because mere doesn’t sound splendid or wonderful. It sounds more like meager. It’s a tight little word in your mouth. Now mere pops up, or peeps up, in “a mere bagatelle,” “a mere two dollars an hour,” “merely a flesh wound,” “the merest whisper.”

There’s nothing mere about splotch. It explodes from the mouth and makes an unmissable mess of itself. Etymonline.com says “possibly a blend of spot, blot, and botch.” I’d lob a smitch of splash in there too.

sports talk

Ballplayers operate in a physical world. Denard Span of the Minnesota Twins hit a foul ball that struck his mother, sitting in the stands, in the chest, understandably making her cry and causing him great concern. “It tore him up pretty good,” said one of the Twins’ coaches, who relieved Span somewhat by determining that “It hit her in the meat.” Didn’t hit a bone, in other words, so nothing broken.

Sometimes that physicality gives rise to an instinct for metaphor. Reggie Jackson, asked what would make him decide to retire, said, “I don’t want to go on wringing out the rag of ability.” By way of pointing out the truism that anyone playing first or third base had to be not only a good fielder but also productive with the bat, Reggie said, “To hang out on the corner, you got to lean on the pole.”

Chipper Jones of the Braves said that Jamie Moyer, the wily forty-seven-year-old pitcher for the Phillies, was still effective because “He stays off the barrel.” That may sound like something from an old navy joke, but what it means is that Moyer adjusts the speed and location of his pitches in such a way that a hitter can’t get the fat part, the barrel, of his bat on the ball.

On the other hand, Alex Rodriguez, after fessing up that he had taken a performance-enhancing substance, said, “I laid my bed, I’m going to have to sit on it.” Come to think of it, maybe that was an intentional hedge.

Bill Virdon, who was fellow Pirate Bill Mazeroski’s roommate for years, said he couldn’t remember Mazeroski having ever said anything other than “Time to get up” and “I got it.”

Billy Martin was more voluble. When he was managing the Yankees, in intense competition with Earl Weaver’s Orioles, he said, “I don’t like to talk strategy and the different ways guys handle their clubs, but let me say I could win with the Baltimore team under any condition: a salami and a pizza in my mouth, two big cheeses in my ears, blindfolded and not knowing the situation.”

sportswriting

Too often violates the literal physicality of metaphors. There is no excuse for writing that someone has undergone “a handful of surgeries.” Or has “shut the door on a milestone.”

And here is a pet peeve of mine among standard sportswriting constructions. From ESPN.com: “Tony La Russa reached the 2,500-win mark on Sunday, joining Connie Mack and John McGraw as the only managers in MLB history to accomplish the feat.” No. Should be “Tony La Russa won his 2,500th game as a manager on Sunday. The only others to accomplish this feat were Connie Mack and John McGraw.”

squelch

This word is “imitative,” OED admits. But “imitative of the sound made” by “a heavy, crushing blow or fall on a soft body,” as Chambers puts it? Let’s all go get a grape (I can wait) and step on it.

Okay. Let’s try it with a tangerine. One that’s about to go bad, so as not to waste a good one.

I stepped on a hamster once. Accidentally. Her name was Ann. It was kind of a pop. Plpp, only more explosive. It haunts me still. Squelching something doesn’t make the sound squelch.

Yet squelch is sonicky, for sure.

Let’s look at other squ- words. All the ones in Chambers:

Squab, squabble, squad, squalid, squall, squalor, squamous, squander, square, squash, squat, squawk, squeak, squeal, squeamish, squeeze, squib, squid, squiggle , squint, squire, squirm, squirrel, squirt, squish.

One thing these words have in common, except for squab, squad,

One thing these words have in common, except for squab, squad, squamous, square, squire, and squirrel, is that they are all said by Chambers to be of either imitative, unknown, or uncertain origin (or to derive from other words with such origin). Chambers, irritably, on squirm: “sometimes said to be of imitative origin, but imitating what and by what association is not stated.”

Another thing these words have in common, except for squab, squander , squid, squire, and squirrel, is that their meanings involve tightness, narrowness, compression, being forced down (maybe not in the case of squamous, scaly, but scales are thin and flat).

How do you make the squ- sound? You set it up with a hiss and then you press the tongue forcefully against the roof of the mouth, as if you were squashing, say, a grape. There you have the kinesthetic element of sonicky.

sting

According to Richard Conniff in The New York Times, the entomologist Justin O. Schmidt has established the Justin O. Schmidt Sting Pain Index, regarding insect stings. Schmidt has been stung by a hundred and fifty different species on six continents. He rates sting intensity on a scale of 1.0 (sweat bee) to 4.0 (bullet ant), but what interests me are his verbal assessments.

Sweat bee sting: “Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.”

Bald-faced hornet: “Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.”

Harvester ant: “felt like somebody was putting a knife in and twisting it.”

And people of a certain other gender sometimes complain that men are no good at expressing feelings!

It is good to put words to sensations, so that they stay put. I was stung by an army ant in the Amazon rain forest. Like getting hit with a ball-peen hammer.

strumpet

A synonym for whore that rhymes with trumpet! If that ain’t brassy, what is? But etymologists don’t have much fun with it. “For conjectures, see Skeat,” says OED. Walter W. Skeat’s conjectures, in this case, aren’t very interesting. Etymonline.com finally gets us somewhere, reporting that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the word was “often abbreviated as strum and also used as a verb, which led to some odd dictionary entries,” to wit, in Captain Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1796: “TO STRUM: to have carnal knowledge of a woman, also to play badly on the harpsichord or any other stringed instrument.”

(OED acknowledges both strum and thrum to be “echoic.”)

These days strumpet—as in “cream-splattered beach strumpet Pamela Anderson”—tends to connote style rather than profession. Bette Midler is said to have “created the whole archetype of the brassy, size-accepting strumpet-as-entertainer.” On nytimes.com, in choosing her favorite recordings, Marisa Meltzer, coauthor of How Sassy Changed My Life, writes: “I will never get tired of the simple confidence of ‘Strumpet.’ When Lois Maffeo sings ‘They said I’m walking around like I own the whole place, well I do / Anybody can have it all, too,’ she captures the riot grrrl ethos perfectly.”

Meltzer describes her first impression of that ethos as follows: “The photos of girls in halter tops, torn fishnets and smeared red lipstick, with words like ‘slut’ written across their stomachs, freaked out and excited my 14-year-old self. I think I’ve always aspired to be a little more of a bad girl than I really am, so riot grrrl—with the word ‘girl’ transfigured into a ferocious growl—became my chosen outlet.”

I must say that “Anybody can have it all, too” strikes me as insincere. But it’s better, from a male point of view, than swooning over vampires who don’t bite.

See gillie, girl.

subjunctive

It is in my interest, at least presumably, to encourage reading. So for the Big Read project of the National Endowment for the Arts, I produced a testament:

I read because I like it. I get kicks from reading. If reading were bad for me, I would read. If reading were illegal, I would read. If the only way to get at any reading material were to lift one end of a big concrete slab up off it and hold the slab there with my hip while I was reading, I would read. And reading isn’t bad for me, it isn’t illegal, and it doesn’t require heavy lifting. What a deal!

Then I thought to myself (as opposed to out loud), Maybe I should change all those were’s to was’s. “If reading was bad for me,” and so on. That might make the statement sound more natural, and therefore more appealing to someone who is teetering on the brink of deciding whether to give reading a shot.

But no. If I’m going to make a flat-out statement that what I have just said is contrary to fact, how can I, in good conscience, eschew the subjunctive?

Well, Noël Coward—Noël Coward!—evidently committed such solecisms without turning a hair. According to The New York Times, Coward once remarked of his play Blithe Spirit, “There’s no heart in the play. If there was a heart, it would be a sad story.”

And then there are people who—because they will use if where a punctilious person would use whether—fall into the quasi subjunctive. Here, from an article in The American Scholar—The American Scholar!—is a rare example of a spurious subjunctive and a true subjunctive, in that order, in the same sentence: “All this had occurred by the time Dickinson asked him if he were too busy to read her poems, as if it were the most reasonable request in the world.”

Walking in Savannah a while back, I came upon a car that must have been parked there for months, because it was covered with a thick coat of grimy dust. On the windshield, someone had written with his (or her) finger, “I wish my girlfriend was as dirty as this.” My first impulse was to cross out was and insert were, but then I thought, Nah. Descriptivists have more fun.

succinct

I wish some reputable etymology connected this word to succulent, juicy. Succulent derives from Latin succus, juice, which OED says is related, by “parallel root,” to the verb suck, which OED defines as follows: “To draw (liquid, esp. milk from the breast) into the mouth by contracting the muscles of the lips, cheeks, and tongue so as to produce a partial vacuum.”

That is a definition that so does not suck. Let us pause for a moment to appreciate the gritty radicality, the granularity, of a definition that strictly refrains from assuming that the reader has the slightest inkling of what, in this instance, suck means. A definition that assumes, on the contrary, that the reader may very well be from someplace where sucking has not, to this date, been tried. A definition that therefore renews our awareness of the strange intimate physicality of human concepts.

But: succinct. You can tell me that succus has no place in succinct, and I can quote no authority to refute you. To be sure, -cinct is the defining syllable. It derives etymologically from Latin cingere, meaning to gird (as in to cinch up a saddle). And pronouncing -cinct aptly tightens up the mouth like a mosquito’s tweeter. The suc- in succinct is not from succus but from sub-, which we think of as meaning under, as in submarine, but which in Latin also means close to, up to, toward.

But a succinct (brief, lean, terse) statement worthy of its adjective is one that compresses a lot of juice. A person donning a girdle (Latin cinctura) first sucks in to tighten. Suck … cinct.

But don’t let me go on and on and on about succinct. You want a good example of succinctness? Annette Gordon-Reed is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, which made a solid case, even before DNA evidence came in, that Jefferson and Hemings, who was legally his slave, had an enduring intimate relationship. In 2009 Gordon-Reed was asked by a Public Broadcasting Service interviewer what would have happened if Jefferson had acknowledged Hemings as his wife. It would have ended his political career, said Gordon-Reed. “That was such a taboo at the time.”

The interviewer, who would seem to have confused American history with that of some other, gentler, planet, persisted:

Some people have suggested that he had an opportunity. America was still a fledgling nation, and that if he had been forthcoming about this, he may have helped us get past a difficult racial impasse that we subsequently had to deal with in history. If Jefferson had taken a position like this, might it have helped America?

Gordon-Reed:

No.

such

From the same PIE root, *swo-, as so. The Old English version of such was swylc, a contraction of primitive words translatable as so like. The agelong jam session that gave rise to such and so also involved which and sic and German sich.

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

OED is funny on this. The makers of the movie Mary Poppins, which came out in 1964, were sued by the writers and publisher of “Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus; or, The super song,” written in 1951. The plaintiffs lost, reports OED, “in view of earlier oral uses of the word sworn to in affidavits and dissimilarity between the songs.” OED quotes from the decision: “The complaint alleges copyright infringement of plaintiff’s song ‘Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus ’ by defendants’ song ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.’ (All variants of this tongue twister will hereinafter be referred to collectively as ‘the word.’)” Understandable if a bit high-handed, since there were two words involved. According to “The Straight Dope” column, the affadavits about the word’s having been used before 1949 came from “two New Yorkers, Stanley Eichenbaum and Clara Colclaster.” What their linguistic expertise was, I don’t know. Neither of them turns up in an online search of The New York Times since 1851.

The blog Shroud of Thoughts, by taking the word’s syllables one by one, rather neatly though not scientifically construes that it could mean not just something to say when you can’t think of anything to say, as Mary Poppins says, but “atoning for instruction by fragile warmth.” The same blogpost says that in the 1942 werewolf movie The Undying Monster, “a male character says of a female character, ‘She has an over active supercalifragilis. ’ He defines … supercalifragilis as ‘female intuition.’” Nothing about that on imdb.com.

As monster-haunted-manse movies go, The Undying Monster is not bad—crisply shot by Lucien Ballard, who would go on to a distinguished cinematographical career entailing Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, and Henry Hathaway’s True Grit.

Heather Thatcher, an English actress of considerable experience—she was “Anna Dora, an Actress as Actresses Go,” in The Private Life of Don Juan, and, later, “Lady Dalroy” in Gaslight and a countess in Anna Karenina—plays Miss Christopher, or Christy, a detective’s assistant. Christy is a bit Poppinsesque, in fact, with the notable exception that “she gets restless,” as the detective puts it, “unless there’s something happening that makes her blood run cold.” Having arrived in the manse, Christy says, “You can laugh if you want to, but there’s something here. Something strange. Very strange. I can feel it.”

“I should have warned you,” says the detective, “Miss Christopher suffers from an overdeveloped supercalafagalus.” (No r sound after the f. Hard g.)

“A supercala-what?” asks another female character.

“Feminine instinct,” says the detective, and a cozy pre-feminist chuckle is had by all. I don’t think supercalafagalus is close enough to supercalifragilisticexpialidocious to establish anything. The movie was adapted from a much crazier and better 1922 novel of the same name by Jessie Douglas Kerruish. Nothing like supercala-anything appears in the book, which is a far richer verbal pudding than the movie. Here is the final word of the spell under which man turns into beast:

“Heysa-aa-a-a—”

The word began as a human shout, broke halfway, turned to the unspeakable droning snarl of the hidden room, and swelled into a crackling, roaring, screaming, demonic howl. It was like the hoarded lust and hunger and hate of all the ages, expressed in a voice that passed the bestial in its perversion of the human.

In the book, the intuitive woman is the hero—a vigorous psychic named Luna, who finds herself caught up in the glorious yet horrifying perception that the man who, unbeknown to himself, is the werewolf is also the man of her dreams. Well (spoiler alert), she saves him, but it isn’t easy, it isn’t pretty, and it exhausts, permanently, her special powers. Also leaves the fellow rather gobsmacked.

“You’ve known all the time I’m no better than a mad cannibal? … That I mauled and half-ate a woman … ?” he asks rhetorically. “I begin to understand. I’ll realise by and by.”

See fancy.

syllabus

When students are handed a summary of what is to be covered in a class, they are holding a living ghost. The word syllabus was created by a misprint.

In a fifteenth-century edition of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, the Greek sittybas, meaning parchment labels on a manuscript, was rendered as syllabos and translated to mean a table or index. It looked like a Greek word (a lot more like one than sittybas), it had a nice dignified ring to it, it served a purpose in English as syllabus , and etymologists were able to connect it to the verb sullambanein, to take together. We do get syllable from that Greek verb, but syllabus has no more to do with it, as Ernest Weekley wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1924, than with syllabub (a drink of wine and milk, bleh, of unknown origin).

So syllabus is what is called a “ghost word.” In most cases, such words are preserved only in dictionaries, and in subsequent copycat dictionaries. These are words, as Walter W. Skeat wrote, that never had “any real existence, being mere coinages due to the blunders of printers or scribes, or to the perfervid imagination of ignorant or blundering editors.” For instance, dord, defined to mean density, appeared in the 1934 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, because someone had misread a consultant’s three-by-five card suggesting that “D” or “d” be included as an abbreviation for density. In 1939, an editor discovered the error, and the next edition had no dord.

But by the time my seventeenth-century forebear Thomas Blount included syllabus (he was the first) in his Glossographia, he was right to do so, because it had passed into educated usage.

synesthesia

In Alphabet Juice, you may recall, I spoke of people who strongly associate letters with colors—Rimbaud, for instance, regarded o as blue. A rarer phenomenon, according to The New York Times, is people who “involuntarily ‘taste’ words when they hear them.” Julia Simner, a cognitive neuropsychologist at the University of Edinburgh, told the Times that she had found ten such people in Europe and the United States. One of them “hates driving because road signs flood his mouth with the flavors of things like pistachio ice cream and earwax … Another subject tastes only proper names: John is his corn bread, William his potatoes … ‘Stephanie’ linked to sage stuffing, ‘civil’ to gravy, ‘London’ to potato, ‘perform’ to peas, ‘union’ to onions, ‘microscope’ to carrots, ‘city’ to mince pie and ‘confess’ to coffee.”

t · T · t

If you ever forget how to pronounce T, you could go to OED, under T, and be reminded that

contact of the tip of the tongue with the teeth gives the true dental t, which is common in continental European languages, very distinct in Anglo-Irish, and heard in north-western English dialects before r, where it is often represented in dialect specimens by spelling thrue or t’hrue for true, and the like … The Indian languages, Aryan as well as Dravidian, distinguish two kinds of t, the dental, and the retracted or “cerebral” … , of which the latter is formed by contact of the retracted tip of the tongue with the roof of the palate. The English t is formed between these two extreme positions, the contact being with the back of the gum or the front margin of the palate; its sound is much closer to the cerebral than to the dental.

That sounds about right. As I sit here thinking, and chewing on a Stim-U-Dent plaque remover, mint flavor, which over the years has become my titty-while-writing (couple of packs a day), replacing all forms of tobacco, I wonder whether life in general doesn’t fall somewhere between the cerebral and the dental.

ta

Not an abbreviation of thanks, but a “natural infantile [and adult British] sound of gratitude,” says Ernest Weekley. I’m thinking of taking it up. Despite my firm belief in casual good manners, I get tired of saying “Thank you” so much, and hearing other people saying “Thank you so much,” so much.

I’m thinking in terms of business travel. Cabdriver, ticket-counter person, news-and-notions cash-register person, coffee cash-register person, three or four security persons, airline person who takes my ticket, flight attendant, another flight attendant, the first flight attendant again, person in the seat next to me, flight attendant again, the other flight attendant again, the pilot, and on and on and on:

“Thanks.”

“No, thank you.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Thanks very much.”

“Thankyouthankyou.”

“Tha-anks.”

“Ta” is sufficient, I think. Or “Tak,” Danish, nice and crisp. According to OED, Old Frisian (q.v.—this may elucidate the frog reference) was thonk. AHD says thank and think are both from the PIE root *tong-. Maybe I’ll start saying “Tong.” No, too resonant.

Here are some exotic alternatives from Omniglot.com:

Abenaki, wiliwni; Afrikaans, dankie; Ainu, hioy’oy; Albanian, faleminderit; Aleut, qagaasakug; Arapaho, hohóu; Aromanian, hristo; Basque, eskerrik asko; Bislama, tangkiu; Bulgarian, blagodarya; Cimbrian, Vorbàis Gott!; Corsican, à ringraziè vi; Czech, dík; North Frisian (again, q.v.), foole tunk; West Frisian, tige tank; Georgian, either gmadlobth or didi madloba; Okinawan, nifee deebiru; Zulu, ngiyabonga.

Other people sure talk funny, don’t they? Except the Bislamans.

T and A

If your doctor says, “I recommend we remove your T and A,” he or she is behind the times but not a maniac. T and A used to refer, in medical circles, to tonsils and adenoids.

tare

From the Arabic for “that which is thrown away,” tare means the container as distinct from the contents. If you want to know how much the monkeys in a barrel of monkeys weigh, you weigh the whole thing and then subtract from that the weight of an identical empty barrel, the tare. We might compliment a writer’s style by saying its tare is slight, it is nearly all cargo.

Next we might speak of metonymy, one example of which is the container for the thing contained (“If you ask Aunt Neecy, the theory of relativity is a crock”). But if you ask me, any term for a rhetorical device, as opposed to that device in use, is tare.

The signifier for the signified? Back when I majored in English, you didn’t get into all that crap. Instead you read, like, Yeats, and your eyes bugged out of your head.

tenrec

According to the first edition of AHD, tenrecs are “any of various insectivorous, often hedgehoglike mammals of Madagascar.” A lovely flow of words, even including the sudden, unlikely hedgehoglike. But often hedgehoglike? That raises (no, it does not beg) the question, what is a tenrec like when it’s not hedgehoglike? Does it get to drinking and loom more wolverinish?

Fourth edition AHD’s version is more specific, if less musical: “Any of various insectivorous mammals of the family Tenrecidae, of Madagascar and adjacent islands, similar to the hedgehog but having a long pointed snout and often no tail.” We are left to wonder, now, how it manages to have a tail just some of the time.

See ukulelelike.

their, them, they, the singular

Lani Guinier: “It is easy to understand the idea of viewing an individual on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.” (Would we say “It is easy to understand the idea of viewing an individual on the content of their character rather than the gender of their self”?)

Would we go up to an infant or dog and say to the person with the infant or dog, “How old is they?” No, we would say, “How old is … he … or … she?” Or vice versa. Nothing wrong with that honest tentativeness.

But we can avoid the singular they, them, their without letting gender raise its (its?) troublesome head. Consider this horrible sentence: “If someone who is an authority says, ‘This is what I want to see done,’ those who see them as an authority will pursue that goal or at least support it, not because they feel threatened or powerless, but because that’s what they want to do.”

Feh, on several grounds. But let’s focus on who is them, who are they. Let’s rewrite that sentence into something humanly tolerable: “If someone in a position of authority says, ‘This is what I want to see done,’ then those who have reason to recognize that authority will try to get the thing done, not out of feeling threatened or powerless, but because they want to.” Which you might think would go without saying in a democratic society. But at least in this version the working they aren’t being sucked up into the boss’s them.

How about this story in The New York Times. Headline, fine: A VIDEO POSTED ON LINE POSES A RIDDLE FOR POLICE. Let’s go to the story:

The amateur video lasts for just a few minutes. It shows a group of young people standing over a man seated in a New York subway car, taunting him, waving a plastic bottle in his face and eventually striking him with their hands as he cowers under their blows.

The question (the despicability of these young people’s behavior, one way or the other, aside) is whether this video was real or staged. Okay, so far. But here’s what a New York Police Department spokesman said: “We are attempting to see if it was a real event, and if so, did a victim identify themselves.”

Themselves? It is stupid, stupid to refer to a victim as themselves, when we know that he is one individual male. Not only stupid, stupid, but depersonalizing. The singular them is not just dumb, it’s potentially wicked.

Sometimes, however, the person in question is an abstraction, a generality. We don’t know the person’s gender. In that case, what is fussy and awkward about he or she? Here is a sane sentence from Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker: “If, instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water, Finkelstein calculates, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less.” Does something about that offend your sensibilities? Would you rather allude to “the average American” as “they”? The average American isn’t that fat, or that vague, yet.

there

I can see why we say so there, defiantly, as in “I am going to run away with Emil, and get my pet name for him—which happens to be Mr. Goosey—tattooed all up and down both of my arms, and devote my life to his career of inspirational sayings, so there!” We surely don’t know what we are doing when we say that, but we do know what we are saying: “There it is, that’s the deal, get used to it.”

That there is an example, says OED, of there “used interjectionally, usually to point (in a tone of vexation, dismay, derision, satisfaction, encouragement, etc.) to some fact, condition, or consummation, presented to the sight or mind.”

Okay. It’s a little bit like “Now see here!”

But why do we say “There, there,” to comfort someone? Maybe we are saying, “Just step back for a moment, away from the here and now, and look with some detachment at this thing that you are taking so hard. So some weirdo named Emil drove off and left you at a Laundromat in Tegucigalpa. You’re young, you’ll meet somebody else you can call Mr. Goofy.”

“Goosey!”

“Oh … Looks more like an f. I see the e, but I just thought you’d misspelled Goofy.”

“Aaaaarrrr.”

In other words, “There, there” means “Why not be as objective about your heartbreak as I am?” Not very comforting. But there you are.

thigh

Where the leg gets really serious. Yeats’s apocalypic beast approaches “moving his slow thighs.” Samson attacking Philistines “smote them hip and thigh.” Mercutio tries to call Romeo away from the Capulets’ orchard by invoking the lady Romeo was smitten with, pre-Juliet. Sounds pretty good to me:

I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes,

By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,

By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh,

And the demesnes that there adjacent lie.

That’s one thing about thighs: what they’re close to. “Don’t you feel my leg, don’t you feel my leg, cause when you feel my leg, you’re gonna feel my thigh, and if you feel my thigh, you’re gonna go up high,” sang Blue Lu Barker and, after her, Maria Muldaur.

But thighs can be impressive in themselves. Larry Brown, the great professional running back, had thighs so robust, each one looked like two thighs bound together.

OED traces the word back to the Lithuanian tukti, to become fat. Which is the context in which I have often heard women discuss this juicy part of the body. “In college they called me ‘thunder thighs.’”

“Yeah, heh-heh—I mean, hey, sounds good to me.”

“Noooo.”

Under thigh-slapper, “an exceptionally funny joke, description, or the like,” OED cites, from The Wall Street Journal, 1965: “The thigh-slapper … the President got off to reporters when Lynda Bird showed up in a billowy muu-muu dress.” I’m betting Lynda Bird Johnson’s reaction was less than full of mirth. (From the same root as merry.)

See elephant.

thong

“Etymologically, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, “a thong is something that ‘binds’ up. The word comes from a prehistoric Germanic *twangg-, which also produced German zwang, ‘constraint.’ In the Old English period it was thwong; it began to lose its w in the 13th century.”

Back then a thong was just a leather strip, a shoelace, for instance. Now it is underwear. I’d like to see it regain not only its w but also its second g, given the resonance of Monica Lewinsky’s thong, or, as I would prefer, her thwongg, in political history.

I wouldn’t want to wear one, though. Talk about binding up.

though, the lazy

I keep seeing lazy though’s in the press. Here’s a random example from The New York Times: “The president has repeatedly challenged [the Washington political and media culture’s] focus on short-term results, though it remains unclear whether he will succeed.” Why though? When though or although introduces a subordinate clause, it means “in spite of the fact that.”

You could make it “ … focus on short-term results, but it remains unclear whether he will succeed.” Or, simply, “ … focus on short-term results. It remains unclear whether he will succeed.” But either of those makes the reader want to respond, “Well, duh.”

You could be assertive: “So far, he is not succeeding.” Or you could risk a bit of wordplay: “ … short-term results. The results of that challenge have not been short term.”

How about this though, from an Associated Press story about “monkey carcasses, smoked anteater, even preserved porcupine” being smuggled into Europe from Africa as “bushmeat”: “Some animals were identifiable, though scientists boiled the remains of others and reassembled the skeletons to determine the species.” I don’t know who is in charge of conjunctions at the AP, but he or she should be advised that that though is neither fish nor fowl.

See but.

tight like that

Ian McEwan, quoted in The New Yorker: “You spend the morning, and suddenly there are seven or eight words in a row. They’ve got that twist, a little trip, that delights you. And you hope they will delight someone else. And you could not have foreseen it, that little row. They often come when you’re fiddling around with something that’s already there. You see that by reversing a word order or taking something out, suddenly it tightens into what it was always meant to be.”

tit

This is the original spelling. It captures the ticking noise that a nursing baby makes. The unphonetic teat replaced tit, as more polite. Still pronounced tit. Why are people embarrassed by sonicky spelling?

(For breast the French have sein and mamelle, both from the Latin, but they also have tette, meaning tit, and téter, to breast-feed. An infant’s feeding time is l’heure de la tétée.)

toadless

If I asked you whether you thought OED had toadless in it, your answer would be, “Is the Oxford English Dictionary toadless? No toads in it? Of course there must be, reflecting the influence—”

And I would interrupt: “No, I didn’t ask whether you thought OED was toadless, I asked whether you thought OED had toadless in it.”

“Toadless? How do you mean?”

“I mean the word toadless. A separate entry for that word.”

“Shouldn’t think so. Silly sort of word.”

But OED does have toadless. It doesn’t have frogless, lizardless, crabless, duckless, goatless, rabbitless, gooseless, chickenless, snailless, hareless, squirrellless , ferretless, moleless, otterless, mouseless, ratless, badgerless, or weaselless. It does have toadless. And it doesn’t even call toadless a nonce word (one coined for a specific occasion), as it does cowless.

Toadless. The elements are toad, whose derivation is obscure (“The etymological jungle stretching around the designations of the toad is almost impassable,” writes Anatoly Liberman, who does draw a tentative connection to toddle), and -less. The meaning is “devoid of toads.” A 1921 example: “No dog can be thoroughly happy in a toadless garden.”

The OED also has toadess, “a female toad,” with only one example: “The toad’s highest idea of beauty is his toadess.” And toadery, “a place where toads are kept or abound.” And toadlet and toadling, each meaning “a young or little toad.” And toadality, “the personality of a toad.”

“Bless my soul,” you will say. “But we both must know,” you will add, “whose influence this reflects.”

Mr. Toad, of Toad Hall.

touchy

I continue to assume, as I have always assumed, that a touchy person is an oversensitive one—who is too readily, and irritably, provoked. (Similarly, a spooky horse is one that is easily spooked.) But -y as an adjectival suffix most often means “inclined to.” A picky person is not one who is inclined to be picked, but one who is inclined to pick. A pushy or needy or jumpy person is inclined to push or need or jump. A touchy-feely person is inclined to touch and feel. The other day in an airport I heard one young woman say to another, “He’s too touchy. And his hands are all sweat. Uighlk.” Here’s an Urbandictionary.com definition: “Touchy McToucherson: Refers to someone who cannot keep their hands to themselves,” seven thumbs up, none down. If the meaning of touchy is shifting toward “touching too much,” then its long-standing meaning is beginning to reverse, and misunderstanding will ensue:

“Don’t be so touchy!”

“What? Me touchy? I’m not leaning far enough away from you? You’re the one with the big paws!”

translation, of Mark Twain, into English

The English author Bram Stoker, in Dracula, had Van Helsing, the vampire hunter, refer to “an American” who defined faith as “that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.”

Stoker had met, near worshipfully, Mark Twain, who had observed that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”

tsk-tsk

Not only animal sounds but also human ones are hard to spell. This timehonored orthographical venture is an attempt to spell the sound, closer perhaps to tsch-tsch or tch-tch (almost has a j in it, but not quite—see, it’s hard), made by the tongue against the hard palate to express commiseration or disapproval. Tsk-tsk (or tsk, tsk, which is slower and a touch more reproachful) has come to be pronounced sometimes as if it were a word, tisk, tisk.

OED offers no pronunciation of tsk but helpfully calls it “alveolar click formed by suction” and records Lawrence Durrell’s alternate version: “Balthazar … walked slowly … making the little clucking noise he always made with his tongue … Tsck, tsck.” That’s pretty good, better than Kipling’s attempt (see OED’s tck entry), “Tck! Tck! And thou art in charge.”

OED suggests we compare tsk to tchick, which it defines as “a representation of the click made by pressing some part of the tongue against the palate and withdrawing it with suction. Properly, the unilateral palatal click, used to urge on a horse.” Withdrawing it with suction—nicely put. But wouldn’t withdrawing it from suction be better?

Here is an anecdote recorded by Zora Neale Hurston. A man sends his daughter off to school for seven years, and when she returns he sits her down and dictates a letter to his brother:

“Our mule is dead but Ah got another mule and when Ah say (clucking sound of tongue and teeth) he moved from de word.”

He asks his daughter whether she’s got that. She says no, sir. He waits awhile and asks again. She says no, sir.

How come?

“Cause Ah can’t spell (clucking sound).”

“You mean to tell me you been off to school seben year and can’t spell (clucking sound)? Why Ah could spell dat myself and Ah ain’t been to school a day in mah life. Well jes’ say (clucking sound) he’ll know what yo’ mean and go on wid de letter.”

Notice “clucking sound of tongue and teeth.” But OED is right, the tongue is close to the teeth, but not quite there—unilateral palatal, on one side of the palate (I prefer the left side). You know what, though? There’s no t in there at all. See T.

Nadine Gordimer in Nature captures the sound of a sprinkler: “Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk: the long, wavering squirts jerk round, changing direction under their own pressure,” and Francine du Plessex Gray in World Without End, that of castanets: “tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk.”

OED’s first citation of tsk is 1947. This is oddly late since the quotation is as follows: “Do you get … a sound resembling the noise of commiseration which is sometimes written in literature as ‘tsk-tsk’ or ‘tut-tut’”? I’ve just searched tsk tsk through thirty-seven pages of Google Books, and the earliest appearance I find is 1930 in Life magazine. It’s also in Our Town, 1938. A fairly recent coinage, at any rate, compared to tut-tut. (Shakespeare tut’s quite often, but never tsk’s.)

According to The New Joys of Yiddish, “The man who habitually clicks, ‘Tsk, tsk!’ is … called a tsitser.”

See ch.

tut-tut

OED traces tut back to 1529, and tut, tut, tut to 1536. “A natural utterance,” says OED, “expressing impatience or dissatisfaction with a statement, notion, or proceeding, or contemptuously dismissing it.” Don’t you love a good definition? Pronunciationt Λ t, which is to say, tut, but “the spelling tut sometimes represents the palatal click.”

I have to say, in all respect to this venerable form, tsk-tsk is an improvement.

tutu’s, the two

Two words to be confused at your peril: tutu and tutu.

If someone says to you, “I believe you’ve eaten your tutu,” you may feel complimented—if you’re in New Zealand. In that country there grows a poisonous shrub, the tutu. (Originally, a Maori word.) According to a nineteenth-century account cited by OED, the leaves of the tutu “may be eaten with safety by cattle gradually accustomed to its use, but are often fatal to newly-landed animals.” Which makes you wonder how many times the tutu has to kill you before you get accustomed to it. At any rate, if a person is said to have eaten his or her tutu in, as I say, New Zealand, it means he or she has become a real New Zealander.

If someone tells you that you appear to have eaten your tutu anywhere else, you will be justifiably nonplussed. In the great majority of English-speaking countries, not to mention France, a tutu is a ballet skirt with stiff frills sticking out all around. The romantic tutu is ankle length, the classic tutu much shorter. This tutu is from French baby talk, an alteration of cucu, a diminutive of cul, which means, not to put too fine a point on it, buttocks.

We may suppose that a very young French child was taken to a ballet, and what did the child take note of? Les jetés? Les pirouettes? La musique? Non. The bottoms. (Frill framed, to be sure.) When my friend Madeline Jaynes’s small step-granddaughter visited her in New York City for the first time, Madeline took her to the zoo, to the Imax, to the Statue of Liberty, to lunch in Chinatown, and on and on. When the child returned home to rural Georgia and was asked what she had seen, she replied: “We walked Willie on a leash and Willie pooped and Mammy picked it up.”

We may see from tutu that the French language is very different from yours and mine. Hiney-hiney would never do for a ballet costume. Culottes and cul-de-sac are also from cul. Much nicer than buttottes or rump-of-the-bag. The ribald seventies review Oh! Calcutta! was a pun on “O quel cul t’as!” Even if there were a city that sounds anything like “Oh, what a fanny you have!” (I can’t think of one, and I have tried), it wouldn’t have the right, how shall I say this, ton.

See bum.

Twain, Mark, little bits he never used

From his notebooks:

“Like sweetheart of mine whose breath was so sweet it decayed her teeth.”

“Boy dipped the worm in the hot tea,—said, ‘By G—you won’t tickle me any more, I don’t reckon.’”

“In that Russian town of Yalta I danced an astonishing sort of dance an hour long, and one I had never heard of before, with the most beautiful girl that ever lived, and we talked incessantly, and laughed exhaustingly, and neither one ever knew what the other was driving at.”

“The water begins to taste of the casks.”

“Political parties who accuse the one in power of gobbling the spoils &c, are like the wolf who looked in at the door & saw the shepherds eating mutton & said—

‘Oh certainly—it’s all right as long as it’s you—but there’d be hell to pay if I was to do that!’”

“ … like the fellow’s sow—had to haul her ears off to git her up to the trough, & then had to pull her tail out to get her away again.”

“It’s as easy as killing your father whom you take for a burglar. It is as hard to hit as a burglar—anybody can hit a relative, but a Gatling gun won’t get a burglar.”

typos, going with them

From The Berkshire Eagle, June 24, 2009: “The solution was to create a parking area in a former gavel pit on Rockwell Road.” A gavel pit! Where presiding officers bury their worn-out little hammers? If this old pit could pound!

Or maybe it’s a place where presiding officers compete, trying to outgavel one another, like pit bulls—gavel pitted against gavel. The very next day, a headline in The New York Times: ONE STATE SENATE BUT TWO GAVELS AS A POWER STRUGGLE CONTINUES IN ALBANY.

The Times reports that the state senate, regrettably comprising thirty-one Democrats and thirty-one Republicans, “like feuding junior high schoolers refusing to acknowledge each other, began holding separate legislative sessions at the same time. Side by side, the two parties … talked and sometimes shouted over one another, gaveling through votes that are certain to be disputed. There were two Senate presidents, two gavels, two sets of bills being voted on.”

Republicans passed more bills, eighty-five of them compared to the Democrats’ fourteen, but Democrats seized “the official Senate gavel, which is large and made of black walnut, its whack echoing through the chamber with authority.” The Republican president “was left to peck at a table in front of him with a small, ten-inch gavel used by Republicans for their private conferences.”

The origin of gavel, by the way, is unknown. Etymonline.com says “perhaps connected with Ger. dial. gaffel, ‘brotherhood, friendly society.’”

See garden path phenomenon.

u · U · u

It would break my heart to see the Weblish u replace good old English you in …

I was going to say, in print. Can it be that the very word print is beginning to look quaint, even to me?

It would break my heart to see u replace you any more generally than it already has online. Sure, you can be withering, but it’s a stand-up, up-front, embraceable word. That u is ugly, dismissive, depersonalizingly personal. It looks more like a grunt (this little piggy went u, u, u, all the way home) than a form of address. “You’re not as hot as u think u are” is an example, according to The New York Times, of anonymous messages appearing on a nasty “social networking site” that is said to be drawing mean teenagers like flies. Note that whoever deposited that message lacked the imagination to form a contraction of u and are. Or maybe the opening You’re—can anyone resist a message beginning in You’re?—was designed to draw someone into the range of those belittling u’s.

In the Old English éow, the Northumbrian íuih, and the Old Frisian iuwe, you can hear the centuries of effort (yearning, we, and wow) that went into you, that gave it the tensile strength to absorb ye and thee and thou. Better not throw two-thirds of that energy away, yo.

ukulelelike

Who would have expected any instrument to warrant such an adjective? (You wouldn’t call a balalaika ukulelelike at all.) But I was pleased to see it used by the music critic Jon Pareles, writing about Brazilian samba music, in The New York Times: “the syncopated strumming of the ukulelelike cavaquinho.” It made me start singing, from Meet Me in St. Louis, “if you like-a me like I like-a you and we like-a both the same …” And it made me wonder about ukulele’s provenance.

The ukulele may have been named for Edward Purvis, a British army officer of the late 1800s. Ukulele is Hawaiian, not as you might imagine, for Purvis, but for “leaping flea” (uku, flea, lele, to leap.) Purvis, a member of King Kalakaua’s court, was himself so nimble and diminutive, especially compared to the locals, that the Hawaiians nicknamed him Ukulele. And he was so adept at playing the ukulele that the instrument took his name. Or vice versa: the instrument’s name may have been inspired by the way the fingers of adept players of ukulele licks leapt on the strings. (The notion that “My dog has fleas” refers to the uku root is doubtful, given that as far as I know I just now made that notion up.)

The cavaquinho is ukulelelike, all right—a ukelele is more or less a smaller cavaquinho. Portuguese colonizers introduced the cavaquinho to Brazil, and a shipload of Portuguese workers brought it, in 1879, to Hawaii. According to WIII, cavaquinho is Portuguese for a hollowed-out piece of wood. Brazilians have sometimes called it machete, conceivably (but don’t quote me) for something like the same reason jazz musicians call a saxophone or a bass guitar an ax.

A great Brazilian composer of samba became known as Nelson Cavaquinho for his distinctive two-finger expertise on the instrument, which, however, he soon gave up for the guitar.

On YouTube you can watch a performance on the cavaquinho that has elicited this comment (in Portuguese, I’m guessing): “XAROOOOOOOP!!!”

The sound track of The Third Man is nothing but zither music. Has there ever been a movie whose sound track was nothing but ukulele music? That was the question I e-mailed blind to the Oak Park Ukulele Meetup Group (Harrison St. Ukulele Players!) (exclamation point theirs), whose website I Googled up. The gracious response:

Aloha Roy ~

Honestly, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Possibly “Hula Girls” which was composed by Jake Shimabukuro, but I can’t remember the entire sound track. That’s a really good question. If you find the answer, please let us know … we might be interested in taking on the challenge of playing the entire sound track … maybe.

Take care ~

GiGi

Jake Shimabukuro, it turns out, is an Okinawan-American ukulele virtuoso. He plays everything from “Thriller” to Bach’s Two-Part Invention No. 4 in D Minor on the ukulele. In November 2009, he performed his arrangement of the Beatles’ “In My Life” with Bette Midler for the queen of England. I have to say, though, that what he gets out of a ukulele is not—and this is a tribute—what most people would think of as ukulelelike. To my ear, on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” at least (you’ll note it’s not “While My Ukulele Gently Weeps”), Jake sounds more balalaikalike. His ukulele did in fact supply part of the sound track of Hula Girls, which was named best film at the 2007 Japanese Academy Awards. (Sound track album Hitchhike Records.)

But only one track is just Jake soloing. On other tracks is music that might be called balalaikalike, boom-chockalockalike, funiculi-funiculalike, and not particularly like any other music than itself. Mostly quite lovely. None of it—if when we think of ukulele we think of Tiny Tim, Arthur Godfrey—even slightly ukulelelike.

See plank.

undertaker yarns, lost

“Put in the undertaker yarns,” Mark Twain wrote in a notebook as he was planning A Tramp Abroad. Here are his notes for some that he never got around to sharing with us:

“‘Do her good? Why she’s down in the cabin on ice.’”

“Sent husband home in box with turnips as vegetable freight—corpses being costly.”

“His farmer who came & priced a coffin for his wife who was only sick.”

undulation

From Latin undula, wavelet. “Would you,” Walt Whitman requested of the sea, “the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer.”

Beautiful word. But wavelet ain’t bad.

upaya

This is a Sanskrit word for an element of Buddhist enlightenment that may seem mundane. Upaya means “means.” Skillful means to an end—the end being to express what you mean, in ways that other people can take on board. In a Dilbert strip, an employee wearing a pained expression and a beret says he’s really an artist, he’s working there only to support himself. “You must not be much of an artist,” says Dilbert, “if you have to work here.”

And Wally, who is always carrying a coffee cup and ingeniously avoiding doing anything like work, adds the clincher: “It’s not art if nobody likes it.”

We know this to be the opinion of a Philistine. Much great art has been disliked by nearly everyone until later. But Wally has a way of getting to the bottom of things. Once he said he was going to start playing golf. Would he take lessons? “You get to hit the ball more,” he said, “if you don’t.”

Allen Ginsberg used upaya in a New York Times interview in February 1972. He said upaya was something his mother lacked. “She used to say, ‘I’m a truly beautiful woman, a great soul and that’s why they’re after me.’ On one level that was true—on the level that the nature of the modern mechanical, scientific robot government was inimical to any manifestation of human individuality and non-mechanical organic charm.” But instead of translating her visions into practical, communicable terms, she insisted that President Roosevelt was spying on her and there was a man on the corner with poison germs for her. So people concluded she was crazy.

From that, Ginsberg “realized that if I ever got to the point where I was insisting on an idea or facts that everyone around me said were wrong I’d better pay attention. That inhibited me from going all out in any apocalyptic direction.” He didn’t give up and become an optometrist—nothing that useful. But he did learn to write, and to chant, and to set himself up as a credible figure of his time.

At that time many mediagenic young people were doing drugs, letting their hair get very long, going mystical, and advocating revolution. Ginsberg was on their side. But many young revolutionaries, he told the Times, were blaming everything that was wrong in their lives on the government. “They say, ‘The reason I am having trouble is that they are after me.’ A lot of madness begins with a grand universal insight, the insight that there is more in the world than subways and offices. When the young revolutionary tries to explain this, or to explain why automobiles are wrong, he meets so much resistance that he takes to insistency on his point. If he develops upaya he leads people on a long slow walk into the mountains above the smog where they can breathe the clean air and look down and then he can say to them, ‘Don’t you realize now what all those cars are doing down there?’”

Let me stress that it isn’t marketing, exactly, that we are talking about here.

Which is not to suggest I have any reservations about the marketing of this book.

So let me clarify: upaya, as I see it, is not the sort of marketing exemplified by the character in Dilbert who says, “I need someone who can make our product sound competitive without vomiting on his own copy.”

See questions not to ask an author, with answers.

urge

What a sonicky word, and yet etymology presumes to tell us no more about it than that it comes from the Latin. That’s such a letdown, it’s like French etymology. French thought is deductive, Cartesian (so they were right about invading Iraq), as opposed to inductive messy English, because everything in French is from Latin.

Okay, there’s zut. According to my copy of Larousse grand dictionnaire étymologique et historique du Français, which I read with some difficulty, zut is an onomatopoeic cross between zest (not the English word zest, but part of the onomatopoeic expression entre le zist et le zest, neither one thing or another, which suggests to me a French pronunciation of “this and that”) and flûte, which means flute but serves also (perhaps—just my suggestion, again—because it derives from the German) as an interjection meaning, more or less, damn!

And, okay, oui is interesting: a combination of ancient French o, meaning that, and il, meaning it, so oui is a kind of portmanteau of “that’s it”—but the o comes from Latin hoc and the il comes from Latin ille.

French food, wine, films, countryside, Paris: exquise. French etymology: eh.

v · V · v

Linguists have concluded that ancient Romans did not have the v sound. They had a letter, not to mention a numeral, that looked like a V, but they pronounced it w. So when Julius Caesar said, “Veni, vidi, vici,” “I came, I saw, I conquered,” he pronounced it Waynee, weedee, weekee. If you think that’s disappointing, how about Venus, which Romans pronounced Waynus. It seems so wrong. If Julius Caesar came back today, he would be no commanding figure at, say, art openings. He’d be saying “Weeweean, I lo-wed your weedayo—werry weeweed.” Except that video artists aren’t generally named Vivian—that might save him.

We might excuse the Romans by pointing out that they had no internal combustion engines, so they never heard anything go voom, and no phonograph needles, so they couldn’t see that a letter that came to a point should create groovy vibes. The Anglo-Saxons had managed to come up with a vee sound, but they spelled it with an f: Old English for love was lufu, pronounced luh-vuh. When the Normans conquered, they brought in v or alternatively u to spell the vee sound. Not until the seventeenth century did v take sole control of that sound, and not until the mid-nineteenth was v accorded its own place in the alphabet. Try taking it out now, though.

vim

“Commonly,” says OED, vim is regarded as the accusative singular of Latin vis, strength or energy. The OED’s “commonly,” there, must refer to the high-school Latin teacher (if any still exist) in the street. That estimable but perhaps predictable manner of person would presumably expect OED to plump for what looks like slam-dunk Latinism.

But no. OED flashes an openness to the sonicky by noting an 1850 adverbial usage of vim (“He thought of his spurs, … an’ drove them vim into the hoss’s flanx”), which “suggests a purely imitative or interjectional origin.”

Aha. And how is the pronunciation of vim imitative of spurring a horse? It’s a quick word, vim, but more forceful than, say, the word quick. Vim generates force by starting, v, with both labial and vocal-cord vibration, simultaneously in the front and the back of the oral appartus. Then ih thrusts that force forward from down deep, and the m, up front but still with laryngeal backup, slams it home.

vowel

OED: “A sound produced by the vibrations of the vocal cords; a letter or character representing such a sound (as a, e, i, etc.).” So why does the word start with a consonant? Because v revs up those vibrations (as in va va voom). So why isn’t v a vowel? Because it is produced by vibrations of the lips, with vocal-cord backup.

Speaking of backup, OED follows its definition with this quote, in smaller type, from “Sweet Primer of Phonetics,” which is not where Tennessee Williams got the idea for Sweet Bird of Youth: “A vowel may be defined as voice (voiced breath) modified by some definite configuration of the super-glottal passages, but without audible friction (which would make it into a consonant).” For a view, indeed a tour, of the superglottal passages, see E.

The word said to have the most consecutive vowels in it is Hawaiian: hooiaioia. It means “certified.” Looks to me more like something someone would say after sitting on something drastically unexpected. In a certain tone of voice I guess it could sound like a stamp of approval, but how can anyone sustain a certain tone of voice through that many vowels? In English, the record holder for consecutive vowels is said to be queueing. Records are made to be broken. How about queueiary? The English are a queueiary race. Or queueial. A sporting event in which people lined up competitively might be called a queueo, but that would only tie queueing, not exceed it, vowelly—which is how OED spells the word for “having many vowels; characterized by vowels,” though its most recent example, from a Chicago newspaper of 1883, drops a consonant: “In their soft, vowely tongue.”

Vowel is from the Old French vouel, from Latin vocalis, voiced. Seems fitting that English dispensed with the hard c. Too consonantal, like a crack in a record, a catch in the throat.

One of the pleasures of reading baseball box scores in an especially narrow-columned newspaper is seeing players transformed into alien beings when their vowels are squeezed out. C. Guzman becomes CGzmn; Zimmerman, Zmmn; Willingham, Wlngh; Alb. Gonzalez, AlGnzlz; DavMurphy, DvMrp. In each of these cases there is room for a couple more letters, so if by chance some human hand was involved in setting the box score in type, the setter must have been trying to see how short he or she could make a name without blowing people’s minds.

w · W · w

The mustache of Kaiser Wilhelm II was his monogram. In the early 1890s, as the dashing young emperor of Germany and king of Prussia, he “was constantly photographed,” according to Miranda Carter’s George, Nicholas and Wilhelm. “Even his moustache—teased into the shape of a wide up-thrusting w—was so famous it acquired a name: ‘Er ist erreicht!’ ‘It is achieved!’” The achievement was made possible by “the miracle of pomade—its key ingredient the remarkable new product, petroleum jelly.” Later, caricaturists exaggerated Wilhelm’s trademark to make him look foolish and sinister.

Once when I turned on a hotel room TV, it was tuned to a religious channel. The show’s host, signing off, was giving out the URL that people should go to for further spiritual counsel: “www—or as I call it, ‘wubbly wubbly wubbleyoo’ …”

I swear to God.

wasp

Not a bad word for the insect in question, but vespa, the Latin and Italian (and also the modern Icelandic), has more buzz, more sting (and works for pesty motor scooters). The Lithuanian, szirszu, is better still.

French for wasp is guêpe. I don’t think so. For Wasp, maybe.

wavelet

Want to read a masterly definition? OED’s of wave:

A movement in the sea or other collection of water, by which a portion of the water rises above the normal level and then subsides, at the same time travelling a greater or smaller distance over the surface; a moving ridge or swell of water between two depressions or “troughs”; one of the long ridges or rollers which, in the shallower parts of the sea, follow each other at regular intervals, assuming an arched form, and successively break on the shore. Sometimes the word is applied to the ridge and the accompanying trough taken together, and occasionally to the concave curve of the surface between the crest of one ridge and that of the next.

But the word wave, in this sense, falls short, kinephonically. Originally, the noun wave was waw, which gets at the swelling and the looming aspect. Here comes another one: waaawwww. A sixteenth-century example in print: “The water of the river … was so troublous of wawe, that the brydge therwith was all to shaken.” Wave replaced waw owing to the popularity of the verb wave meaning “move to and fro or up and down.”

Wavelet, on the other hand—pretty little word, isn’t it?—sounds better than wawlet would. Run wavelet through your mouth and it gravely washes or laps back on itself.

I always thought eddy (from the Scots ydy), from the sound of it, meant a wavelet, but I come to find out it’s a whirlpool! So let’s gear down to ripple. Rhymes with nipple and stipple, and is unrelated to rip as in riptide, according to OED, which confesses that it does not know where this ripple comes from, this ripple defined as “a light ruffling of the surface of water, such as is caused by a slight breeze; a wavelet.”

“As the train pulled out I jumped up and down and hollered ‘Good-bye, you fine, sweet thing! And do you love me?’ and she peeked out the window and gave me this little, aw, man, this little wavelet.”

Weekley, Ernest

We may not think of etymologists as flesh and blood. But they are. Ernest Weekley, 1865–1954, author of The Romance of Words and An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, was a big, robust fellow, an athlete in youth, in maturity described by a colleague as “a man of distinguished presence and natural dignity of bearing.” But when, in 1912, his wife ran away with D. H. Lawrence, Weekley wrote to his mother-in-law: “Please Mama, make her understand what a state I’m in: I cannot see her handwriting without trembling like a cripple.”

He had fallen head over heels for Frieda von Richthofen, a distant relative of the Red Baron, when he ran into her while hiking in Germany. They married when she was twenty and he thirty-four. She was full figured and had long, untamable wheat-colored hair. “I only wish, for her sake,” Weekley wrote in another letter, “that I could offer her a more brilliant future than that of being the wife of a plain English professor: she ought to be an empress.”

Over the years Frieda set down several accounts of their wedding night. “In spite of his age and strong passions,” goes one of them, “he had never let himself go. His love had been of the ideal, pure adoration kind, sex he had not let enter consciously. How he suffered now!,” as they rode by train to their honeymoon hotel.

In their room, he told her, “I must tell you we aren’t married yet,” as if she didn’t know. When she sat on his knee, she could feel his legs trembling. “Go to bed, my child,” he said. “I’ll go and drink something, then I will come and say good-night to you.”

That wasn’t what this child had in mind. Eager to lose her virginity, she undressed and climbed up on a big oak armoire, “beautifully carved with a stiff Eve and an ape-like Adam.” By one of her accounts, when Ernest returned she sat there with her legs dangling. By another of her accounts, she jumped on him, naked, from the armoire. It should be said that on the spectrum of irresistible women, Frieda was well toward the fleshy end. Still, by all of Frieda’s accounts, Weekley responded far less readily than we would wish him to have done to her hearty availability. “He was horrified.” Two hours later Frieda herself “was in an unspeakable torment of soul. It had been horrible, more than horrible.”

But it got better. Frieda was soon pregnant with the first of their three children. Judging from the character based on Weekley in Lawrence’s autobiographical novel Mr. Noon, Weekley became a passionate, and for some time a satisfying, lover of his wife. He tended, though, to be sarcastic. And in Nottingham, where Weekley taught, there was nothing going on to match the aristocratic life Frieda had lived in Germany. In 1912, when the Weekleys had been married for thirteen years, and Ernest’s first etymological book, The Romance of Words, was just out and attracting excellent reviews, he happened to take D. H. Lawrence on as a part-time French student. At twenty-seven Lawrence was six years younger than Frieda and four inches taller but looked smaller. He was working class and had not yet become an important writer. He was obsessed with sex. He and Frieda eloped to Germany.

In letters, Weekley threatened to kill him, her, and the children. Then he settled on demanding that she give him a righteous divorce—“We are not rabbits”—and forsake all access to their children. Over the years Frieda tried surreptitiously to see her children but managed only a few moments with them until they were grown.

Lawrence had guilty visions of Weekley as Christ. Frieda didn’t. “I rather like Christ,” she told Lawrence. Lawrence wrote to Weekley, “Mrs. Weekley is afraid of being stunted and not allowed to grow, and so she must live her own life. All women in their natures are like giantesses.” To someone else, later, Lawrence wrote, “What is interesting in the laugh of the woman is the same as the binding of the molecules of steel or their action in heat; it is the inhuman will … that fascinates me.”

If only somewhat of Lady Chatterley, Frieda was distinctly the model of Ursula in The Rainbow. Under her influence Lawrence wrote more rhapsodically, blurred his characters’ boundaries. She had affairs with other men but was still married to Lawrence when he died. In a letter defending his first great novel, Sons and Lovers, she wrote, “I have heard so much about ‘form’ with Ernst [sic], why are you English so keen on it … I hate art, it seems like grammar, wants to make a language all grammar, language was first and then they abstracted grammar.”

Weekley never married again. In 1921 his etymological dictionary was published. The first thing it says about horn is that it is “connected with betrayed husband in most Europ. langs., perh. from the practice of grafting spurs of capon on the bird’s comb, where they become horns.” He cites the Byzantine Greek keparthopos, cuckold, literally horn bearer. And he quotes from Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida:

“He was tho glad his hornes in to shrinke.”

Here’s what is up at that juncture in Chaucer’s long poem: the heretofore cooling-it Troilus has realized how deeply in love he is with Cressida—just as she begins to look at him slightly askance. Before, he had let his eyes drift to other women—the horns in question allude to a snail’s eyes on their stalks—but now they are shrunken and fixed on her, so that he hardly knows how to look or wink. And now she is not so into him. Before, he had scorned those who spoke of the pains of love. Now Cressida has given him a look that makes him realize how she loved him before, and how she doesn’t anymore. Her look kills the spirit in his heart. And she dumps him for the Greek warrior Diomede.

At cuckold, Weekley quotes Chaucer again: “Who hath no wyf he is no cokewold.”

At husband, Weekley quotes the Wycliffe Bible: “Gif the housbonde man wiste in what houre the theef were to cumme.”

Weekley defines wittol as “husband conniving at wife’s infidelity.” Apparently “from witewal or woodwale, the green woodpecker, from a belief that it hatched the cuckoo’s eggs and reared the cuckoo’s young as its own. No doubt the application of the nickname was partly determined by a punning allusion to wit, knowledge.”

Weekley’s next entry is wivern, which he calls a heraldic term for “dragon.” OED doesn’t recognize wivern.

Weekley had written to Frieda, “Are you not worse than a prostitute?” At whore, Weekley cites the Anglo-Saxon hor, adultery, cognate with Latin carus, dear. This is slightly out of keeping with other etymologies. John Ayto is so brash as to begin, “A whore is etymologically a ‘lover,’” going back to the link with carus (“source of English caress and charity”), but he doesn’t connect the word to adultery at all. OED notes whore’s PIE root in common with carus, but while it gets around eventually to the Old Norse hór, adultery, it cites no such Anglo-Saxon word. Only Weekley puts adultery and dearness together and leaves the roots of whore at that.

Frieda’s roots were in Saxony. At Saxon, Weekley quotes an Irish bishop: “The filthy compound of burglary and murder, and sodomy, bigamy and infidelity, child-murder, divorce and sexual promiscuity that covers the standing pool of Saxon life.”

OED cites Lawrence 1,653 times, of which thirteen are for various combinations with sex, from sex-anger to sex-compulsion to sex-thrill. Weekley rates forty-five citations. The closest to spicy is his suggestion that boloney was “influenced perhaps by the contemptuous sense associated with the German wurst.”

When Weekley died, after a long, distinguished academic career, his children found in his desk a photograph, which had been cut to fit a pocket watch, of Frieda, in her first pregnancy, and him together.

See ling, lit, don’t invite ’em.

well

Headline in The New York Times: THREE MEN DIE IN SEWAGE WELL, OVERCOME BY TOXIC FUMES. How can there be such a thing as a sewage well? According to Robert D. McFadden’s report, a man and his son and an employee “apparently [fell] one after another into the Stygian gloom of a putrid, manhole-size, 18-foot-deep well they were trying to vacuum.”

The accident occurred in an industrial neighborhood of Queens that is “crowded with waste collection companies and adrift in noxious odors that suggest rotting food and oil. The avenue is littered with oil stains, broken glass and dirty piles of something resembling eggplant.”

First the son went down into this well and passed out into its depths. Then the father, a native of Israel, went down to save him. Then the employee, a native of El Salvador, went down to save them both. They were all found floating in “four feet of murky water.” They had succumbed one after another to lethal levels of hydrogen sulfide, “a common byproduct of the decomposition of organic matter.”

Well. Let’s take off our hats to (multicultural, incidentally) altruism. You would go down into such a hole after your son, your heart in your throat, but the worker who went down there after his boss and the son of his boss went above and beyond. Otherwise, what a horrible story. A malevolent well—it’s bad enough to think of drowning in a well, or drinking out of a poisoned well, but a well of poison is like an evil mom. Next to air, water is the primary thing we need to live, and we need to count on a well (as millions of people in the world, to be sure, cannot) as a source of clean water. We wish into a well. In The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser refers to Geoffrey Chaucer’s work as “the well of English undefiled.”

Between well as in a source of water and well meaning healthy or in a good manner, etymology has found no connection. Both well’s (one as wel, one as wall) date back to earliest written records, but they come from two different roots spelled wel-. The water well comes from a wel- (the connection to bubbling, the boiling up, of spring), which also produced various words involving turning and rolling: waltz, wallow, revolve, and vulva. The healthy well comes from a wel- whose offspring involve wishing and willing: wealth, will, voluntary, gallant, gallop, and well, the verb, as in “tears may—may well—well up in our eyes as we read that story in the Times.”

Yet surely at some level of the mind the two well’s are well acquainted. (As are ear and hear, which also lack a common root.) As far back as Old English, well was an interjection, an expression of surprise or of turning something over in one’s mind:

Ah, well. Well, I don’t know. Well, well, well. Well, then. Well!

Which wel- do those well’s bubble up from? The health-related one, says OED: “Employed without construction to introduce a remark or statement, sometimes implying that the speaker or writer accepts a situation, etc., already expressed or indicated, or desires to qualify this in some way, but frequently used merely as a preliminary or resumptive word.” Sounds a bit like the bubble-up well at work, doesn’t it? At any rate, well is a comfort sound, relaxing to pronounce.

If I had any influence over the waste business, I would urge it to call a repository of sewage a pit, not a well. A well isn’t a dump; it’s a source: an oil well, of oil; an inkwell, of ink; a wheelwell, of wheels. The well in your boat where you keep fish you’ve caught has freshwater coming into it, so the fish won’t spoil.

Behind the sewage pit in question, reports the Times, are bays “where the trucks pull up with materials to be sorted for recycling. Signs indicate the types: ‘Putrescible’ and ‘Non-putrescible,’ separating solid wastes from those that are likely to become rotten.”

There’s an ugly word, putrescible. From putrid, from Latin putretre, “to rot.” From the PIE pu-, “to rot, stink.” Quite natural, but p-u.

Edward G. Robinson to his corrupt employer in Five Star Final (1931): “I want you to wake up in the night and see your own squashy, putrid soul.”

,well,

As in, say, “If you ask me, that godforsaken dog of yours has been, well, forsaken by God.” This device, if you ask me, has grown threadbare.

well-intentioned

Why do we say this instead of well-intended? I suppose a person isn’t intended, unless by his or her creator: Adam was well-intended, just not so well designed. But well-intentioned is clunky. “Has good intentions” serves perfectly well and doesn’t clog up a sentence. Coleridge actually used well-intentionedness. Try saying that out loud a few times.

wheatear

If you’re new at bird-watching? And you go out with a veteran birder? And both of you spot a small bird with a bluish-grey back, black wings, and white belly and rump? And you say, “What’s that one?” And your friend says, “Wheatear”?

Do not embarrass yourself by responding (in a tone implying rather heavily, first of all, that you weren’t born yesterday and, second of all, that your friend must not be quite the hotshot authority he makes himself out to be), “No, I don’t think so. You’ll notice that this bird has no ears at all.” First of all, all birds have ears, generally holes covered by feathers. Second of all, wheatear is a corruption, dating back to the seventeenth century, of “white arse.”

whistle

“Of imitative origin,” as the dictionaries say—imitative of (AHD) “a clear, sharp, musical sound.” In Middle English, according to Etymonline.com, whistle was also used to convey “the hissing of serpents.” Sonically, that works for me. It might even evoke the way snakes proceed, slick (or rather, slithery) as a whistle. (Here’s a question: can a snake backup?)

But where is any music in whistle? When I was a boy, a younger neighbor (Neal Elliott, whose father, Sambo, was one of the first three people inducted into the Softball Hall of Fame) couldn’t whistle. He would call his dog Lady by crying, “Whurt Lady whurt!” Neal knew instinctively that there should be an r in whistle. You don’t make an r sound in whistling, but your tongue is up against the roof of your mouth as if you were just about to make an r. If you didn’t have the term “wolf whistle,” how would you try to capture that sound in letters? Maybe fweeeet-fwyew(r). Whistle ought to be whir, in fact, and whir (vibration, buzzing, bustle) should be whistle.

Whistle is Middle English from Old English hwistlian. Whir is Middle English probably from Norse hvirfla. You’d think whir could have had dibs on the musical sound. But the buzzy whir got in ahead of it somehow. Might there have been a compromise? Whirstle has too many consonants in a row—if it looked pronounceable at all, it might be taken to rhyme with firstly.

There are r’s in the animal-music words twitter (God help us) and, more to the point, chirp, chirr, and chirrup. How is chirrup pronounced? To rhyme with syrup, one way or another. AHD and WIII prefer chur-up, which doesn’t fit the spelling (OAD prefers the pronunciation chir-up) but does follow suit with chirp and chir. As to syrup, AHD and OAD prefer the pronunciation sir-up over sur-up. WIII prefers sur-up, as do I: sir-up is too far from slurp. Slurp is an exquisitely sonicky word. The German schlürfen may be even more refined—in an imitative, if not a mannerly, sense. When you make a slurpy sound, by the way, your tongue does the aforementioned r-move. See slaver/slobber.

whiz

OED: “An act, or the action, of whizzing; a sibilant sound somewhat less shrill than a hiss, and having a trace of musical tone like a buzz; a swift movement producing such a sound.”

That’s some exquisite defining by ear. Except … there’s just a touch missing. The pronunciation, OED makes clear, is hwiz. In the definition, is the h taken sufficiently into account? A hiss (not the word hiss) is pretty much all s’s. I would add to the mix elements of the OED’s broader-brush definition of the verb whiz, “To make a sound as of a body rushing through the air; … (of trees) to rustle.” Now I hear the breathiness. As in whoosh.

Then there’s “take a whiz,” meaning urinate. I’ve never cared for that expression. Perhaps it’s gender bias. Women have sometimes complained that my kinephonic analysis of piss (see Alphabet Juice) fails to accord with their perspective. From my standpoint, I want a p in there. Once I broke up with a woman I was still in love with (which is to say, she broke up with me), whose last words to me, as she emerged with surprising dispatch from an airport ladies’ room (I had been fretting, at least ostensibly, that I would miss my plane), were “I’m a good whizzer.”

who, whom, tsk, tsk

The American Scholar: “Vote for whomever you please, but …” Wrong. It’s not whom you please that you’d be voting for (although that person might be pleased to hear that you did), it’s who pleases you.

The New York Times: “Some of the residents have a sense of whom Dalkowski was, or might have been.” Doesn’t that sound wrong, on the face of it?

The New Yorker: “ … her own desires, in particular, for the happy-golucky blond cousin, Rodolpho … , whom Eddie thinks is ‘a weird.’” The New Yorker!

Wikipedia

One problem with citing Wikipedia in permanent (so to speak) ink is that scrupulosity would require “according to Wikipedia (as of 11:43 a.m. October 28, 2010).” And of course Wikipedia, unlike academia, can be wrong.

In the Dilbert comic strip, one office worker says to another, “My first baby weighed 12 pounds. I gave birth in the cab of a stolen backhoe.”

A third worker, the guy who always has to top everything, butts in:

“That’s nothing! I once passed a gallstone so big that it became secretary of labor in the Clinton Administration.”

First worker: “I find that hard to believe.”

Topper guy: “Give me ten minutes and then check Wikipedia.”

However, Wikipedia grows more and more nearly reliable. Footnotes and all. And it sure is handy as a first resort. Last time I looked, though, it was still calling me an actor and a musician. And you can’t fix information about yourself. If some gentle reader could change “also a reporter, actor, and musician with the Rock Bottom Remainders …” to something like “also a reporter, speaker, and versifier who can’t act but did appear as himself in a cameo in Treme and is heartbrokenly unable to make music in any form yet performs in an ill-defined capacity with the Rock Bottom Remainders … ,” Wikipedia would be that little bit more nearly golden.

wisdom

From a review (by James Longenbach in The New York Times Book Review) of poetry by Mary Jo Salter: “Rather than dispensing wisdom, Salter asks eviscerating questions.” Now, Salter is a fine poet, but doesn’t anyone who is literary approve of wisdom anymore? Or disapprove of evisceration?

By wisdom I mean, for instance, this from Warren Buffett: “Never ask a barber whether you need a haircut.” Or a lesson Chico Marx taught Harpo when they were boys: “Never shoot dice on a blanket.” Or something Edgar says to Gloucester in King Lear: “Ripeness is all. Come on.”

wise, -wise

These come from two branches of the same PIE root meaning to see, to know. From one branch we get vision, idea, and wit as well as wise. The branch that gave rise to -wise, as in the sociable likewise, the clotted underdevelopmentalwise, and Dylan Thomas’s spooky “Altarwise by Owl-light,” took the vision aspect of the root off into various Germanic-language words meaning appearance, shape, manner. In English, we have way and also wise, as “in no wise,” which survives today pretty much only as a suffix.

Ever since 1973, when it appeared, I have saved a United Press International story about two tornadoes hitting Burnet, Texas, at once. “My home is all over everywhere,” said one local man; and another, “It just tore the trailer house all to pieces and we were on the ground when it was over—125 feet from where we started out.” But no one was killed: “the good Lord was good to us fatality-wise.”

Oh what the weather’s done to us

Exceeds our wild surmise,

But the good Lord has been good to us

Fatality-wise.

wobble

Is this not a great word? From the PIE root *webh-, whence also (according to AHD) web, weevil, waffle, wag, walleyed. Well, walleyed more precisely “from Old Norse vagl, chicken roost, perch, beam, eye disease, from Germanic *waglaz.”

But don’t you think the sound fits the action, somehow? (See sonicky.)

A spinning top wobbles. A thrown or punted football wobbles somewhat, however tight the spiral. In the eighteenth century, a boiling pot was said to wobble. To wobble can be, says OED, “To shake or quiver like a jelly or fleshy body.” The word has also been spelled wabble, as when certain heavy birds “go to fly up they wabble a great way before they can raise themselves upon the wind.”

Earth wobbles. This phenomenon is called the Chandler wobble, sounds a little like a dance step:

You do your hips this way,

A little like a sway

And a little bit like a hobble.

Then proceed sort of hoppy,

Just a little sorta sloppy—

You’re doing the Chandler wobble.

As so often happens, in 1891 a Jr. managed to get something named after himself. American astronomer Seth Carlo Chandler Jr. calculated that the earth’s spin deviated from perfect rotation by twenty feet at the North Pole, and that it went through a full wobble every 433 days. But why didn’t the wobble correct itself? In 2000, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that “the century-old mystery”—what causes and sustains the earth’s wobble—had been solved. Richard Gross, a geophysicist at the lab, had determined that “the principal cause of the Chandler wobble is fluctuating pressure on the bottom of the ocean.”

Had to have something to do with a bottom.

woe

A natural exclamation of lament, various forms of which (the vey in Yiddish oy vey, for instance, and Welsh gwoe) go way, way back to Indo-European roots. In Middle English, woe was wa. OED says wail is an offshoot. Comicbook children (I’m thinking of Little Lulu, now, which, okay, dates me, but that was a damn good comic book) cry like this: WAAAAAAAH.

Today we see woe primarily in headlines, CHILEAN BUDGET WOES PERSIST; in jocular expressions, “a tale of woe”; and in woebegone, “beset by woes,” geogrified in A Prairie Home Companion’s Lake Wobegon.

In Mandarin Chinese, wo is me.

See so.

woomph

I love how OED is all over woomph:

slang. Also woomf. [Imitative.] (Expressing) a sound similar to a “whoof” (WHOOF int. (n.) 2) but with a deeper or more resonant component. Cf. the synonymous WHOOMPF int. (n.).

And if (I say if—as though anyone, in that magnificent dictionary’s history, has resisted the impulse) you proceed to click on whoof, you learn that whoof goes back to around 1766, that it has been spelled alternatively whuph, whoogh, and woof, and that it was employed perhaps most granular ly by John Updike in The Coup: “He took up a hand mike … , whoofed into it experimentally.”

writer’s block

On the day after I was born, Tennessee Williams, in New Orleans, which is my favorite city, wrote this in a journal:

It is never as bad as you think.

It is never as good as you think …

But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while

you are writing the first draft.

Do all great writers feel that manic about their first drafts? I’m afraid to ask. If they said yes, it would make me feel even more depressive about my first drafts. Writer’s block, in my experience, is the fear that you will write something really bad. It comes to me in midsentence. I have to keep shaking it off, like a broken-field runner shaking off tackles. (See gillie, girl.)

But broken-field runners don’t keep doubling back. Look at the first sentence of this entry. I must have changed it seven or eight times, already.

“On the day after I was born, in New Orleans …” would mean that I was born in New Orleans. “Tennessee Williams, in New Orleans, which is my favorite city, wrote this (quite unaware that I had been born one day before) …”? Too choppy. For one thing.

Maybe I don’t start the workday right. Maybe I should do something like what Olivia de Havilland told the actor who played her son in Lady in a Cage: “When they call ‘Places,’ think of the camera as your lover and you’re breathing in and out together. In and out. In and out.”

But when you’re writing, no one calls “Places.” You have to call “Place” for yourself. After you do that, you’d feel silly breathing in and out with your blank page. I mean screen. It’s not as though your blank page, okay, okay, screen, has nowhere else to be. And your blank screen gives you such a blank look.

What if I ask a great writer how he or she gets under way and the rather startled response is, “Well, you must mean after I motate.”

“Motate?”

“You don’t motate?”

“Oh, sure, motate. I thought you said mutate.”

“You don’t mutate?”

“I do of course mutate, I just thought you were saying you mutate first.”

“Uh-huh.”

And word gets out, and I never get invited to a writers’ conference again. I just made up motate and mutate, as terms of the writer’s craft (I think), but my point is, I have a hard time getting under way. Then sometimes I feel like I’m really cooking, but meanwhile I’m thinking, Yeah, yeah, we’ll see. This is one of several reasons why, even if Tennessee Williams had not beat me to it, I would never have written A Streetcar Named Desire.

A writer, like everybody else, probably does need this sustaining virtue: the inclination to assume that when you do something wrong it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, much, and when you do something right it does. So even as I’m dreading the mess I’m about to make, I tell myself to lighten up. I deal in leavened dread.

The older, or let’s say the more distinguished, I get, the more disheveled my first stabs at sentences get, for some reason. So I have to be more lapidary. Sound technicians have a term for such a process: “polishing the turd.” You just have to hope it will develop along the lines described in The New Yorker by Matthew Carter, the great designer of typefaces:

The heavy lifting begins when the alphabet is finished. I begin then to see how the letters go together to make words, how they line up next to each other, how they sit on the page or the screen, how they work with the punctuation and the symbols. I print up forty or so pages, and when I first see them I feel suicidal. Nothing is working. If it isn’t working, I don’t necessarily know immediately why it isn’t. It simply looks bad. Then starts the long process of going back and making changes here and there. You change something one day, and the next day you change it back, because you realize that it wasn’t the problem. Nothing gets better, you despair, until one day you’re looking—you’ve changed something small—and you realize suddenly you’re looking at a typeface.

A footnote: According to Leo Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra, she and her sisters were reading War and Peace aloud, “and father came into the room, and he stood there with his hands inside the belt of his blouse, and he said, ‘Who wrote that? It isn’t badly written.’”

See tight like that and upaya.

x · X · x

Are you an x-er or a checker? According to a study by the American Graphological Institute, people who fill out forms by placing an in the box of their choice differ psychologically from those who use the (known in Britain as the tick). Since the is associated with wrong answers in early schooling, and the with correct ones, and since ’s tend to huddle within the box whereas ’s swing up and out, it is not surprising that checkers tend to be more cheerful and adventurous than x-ers, who often suffer from low self-esteem. Of the more than two hundred successful television stars studied by the institute, 81 percent were checkers. Of the same number of violent criminals, almost the same percentage were x-ers.

No, I made all that up. But if there is an American Graphological Institute, it might want to look into this.

Xanadu

Anglicization (X more exotic looking, let us suppose) of Kublai Khan’s summer capital, Shang-tu, in what is now Inner Mongolia. First appeared in English as Xandu. Extra a scanned better for Coleridge.

In the late thirteenth century, according to Marco Polo, Shang-tu had two palaces, one made of marble and the other of varnished cane. The walls inside the marble one were all decorated with gilt and astonishing pictures of animals and men. The cane one, held together by bonds of silk, was taken down at summer’s end. The khan would ride in the environs with a leopard perched on the back of his saddle. When he saw an animal that caught his fancy, he would sic the leopard on it, then have the prey taken away and fed to his falcons. Nothing is left but rubble and traces of wall.

As Xanadu did Orson Welles a stately pleasure-dome decree, in Florida, for Charles Foster Kane, in Citizen Kane—“world’s largest private pleasure ground … twenty thousand tons of marble … Xanadu’s landlord leaves many stones to mark his grave.”

See peeve.

Xit

A man or boy by this name is said to have been the royal dwarf of Edward VI, who became king of England from 1547, when he was nine years old, until he died six years later. Xit was a boy’s dwarf, then. To what extent was he jester or playmate or laughingstock? All we know of Xit is X for unknown and it for whatever—not even how he got his name or how it was pronounced. Jennifer Loach’s biography of Edward VI provides a rich description of the boy king’s court. To wear, presumably on special occasions, Edward had a sable skin “with a head of gold, containing in it a clock, with a collar of gold, enamelled black, set with four diamonds, and four rubies, and two pearls hanging at the ears, and two rubies in the ears, the same skin having feet of gold, the claws thereof being sapphires.” He “took over his father’s fool, Will Somers,” and was also attended by harp players, lute players, flautists, singing men, a bagpipe player, minstrels, a virginals player, a rebec player, viol and sackbut players, a thirty-member choir, a troop of yeomen “all blond and of the same height,” and John Heywood, England’s first publisher of proverbs (“Haste maketh waste,” “Look ere ye leap,” and “She looketh as butter would not melt in her mouth”—all his). Not a word about any dwarf.

We do know a few things about Jeffery Hudson, 1619–1682, “the first English dwarf of whom there is anything like an authentic history,” according to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published 1911. The son of a normal-sized butcher who kept and baited bulls for a duke, Hudson stood eighteen inches high and perfectly proportioned at the age of nine. He did not grow further until he was thirty (to three foot nine). “At a dinner given by the duke to Charles I and his queen,” according to this century-old Britannica, Jeffery “was brought in to table in a pie out of which he stepped, and was at once adopted” by the queen. He is said to have served in the Civil War as a captain of horse, earning the nickname “Strenuous Jeffery,” and to have “fought two duels—one with a turkey-cock, a battle recorded by Davenant, and a second with Mr. Crofts, who came to the meeting with a squirt, but who in the more serious encounter which ensued was shot dead by little Hudson, who fired from horseback, the saddle putting him on a level with his antagonist.”

I guess you could mess with Jeffery just so much. (OED defines a squirt in this seventeenth-century sense as “a small tubular instrument by which water may be squirted.”) But standing eighteen inches, he was pitted against an adult male turkey? Those are big birds. And I come to find out that Davenant’s poem “Jeffereidos” was published in 1630, when Jeffery was eleven years old. A Lilliputian child. That’s the kind of sporting proposition the court of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria enjoyed? I wanted to know more about this. Not only because of my concern for Jeffery Hudson, and the paucity of X words and information about Xit, but also because one of the few things I remember, word for word, from graduate school is this note I took while trying to master the whole of English and American literature for a comprehensive exam: “Syphilis cost Davenant his nose.” How did that look?

First of all, the bird. Originally in England turkey-cock referred to the male guinea fowl, which was brought into Europe from Guinea, in Africa, and which would have been for Jeffery a smaller, but loud and elusive, opponent. By Jeffery’s time, however, a turkey-cock meant a turkey—the American bird of which Benjamin Franklin would eventually say, “He is … a Bird of Courage [unlike the national-symbol eagle], and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.”

The name turkey made some sense when applied to guinea fowl, because they were brought to Europe by way of Turkey. But turkeys were brought in from Mexico. So European imperialists came to the Americas, found an American bird, brought it to Europe, called it after a country it had never even seen, and then, when they came to colonize the Americas, called that bird, in its own home continent, what they had been mistakenly calling it back where they came from. (However, my 1975 edition of The New Columbia Encyclopedia—which maybe you think I should throw away, but it’s sitting in my lap right now and you’d have to pry it out of my cold, dead fingers—says the turkey’s name “derives from its ‘turk-turk’ call.”) The turkey we know today, at any rate, had arrived in England by the time wee Jeffery Hudson supposedly fought a duel with one, so we are probably talking about a big damn gallinaceous bird.

Okay, gallinaceous. That’s the turkey’s species—no, I mean order. From the Latin for hen. And yet, OED tells us, the word has been used “humorously” to mean “resembling that of a cock; ‘cocky.’” It sounds cocky, doesn’t it? Why? Maybe gall and bodacious.

“Rotted away” is how one literary historian describes Davenant’s nose, though an engraving of the period confers him with (besides laurel leaves) a nubbin. Have you ever noticed the nose of Jack Palance? Davenant’s is portrayed as like Jack Palance’s but even smaller. Eventually he married the widow of the doctor who treated his syphilis with mercury, and after she died he married again, to a rich woman, so he couldn’t have been too bad-looking. But he killed a man who mocked his appearance, so he had that in common with Jeffery.

And he won the queen’s lasting favor by sending her “Jeffereidos,” in two cantos. It is a satire on Jeffery Hudson’s entire public career to that point. Recall that he’s eleven. He hasn’t served the royal cause in the Civil War or slain Mr. Crofts yet, but he has already been sent to France as part of a delegation to pick up a midwife for the queen. And on the way back to England he has been captured by Turkish pirates.

Davenant depicts Jeffery as hiding from the pirates in, presumably, the ship’s privy, “where they sooner might / Discover him, with smelling than with sight.” The pirate captain declares, “This that appears to you, a walking Thumbe, / May prove, the gen’ral Spie of Christendome.” On the assumption that Jeffery is indeed a master of international intrigue, the pirates take him ashore and interrogate him (enabling Davenant to rhyme beseech you with Richelieu), but conclude he is after all just a dwarf. So they turn him loose, astride their fastest poodle. After a progress of seven inches, his mount throws him. At this point, the turkey-cock attacks. Jeffery draws his tiny sword.

Some feathers float in the air. Witnesses cannot say for sure, the poet tells us, whether these feathers were knocked off the turkey-cock by Jeffery’s tiny sword, but

This they affirme; the Turkey in his look

Express’d how much, he it unkindly took

That wanting food; our Jeffery would not let him,

Enjoy the priviledge to eat him …

At that the midwife shows up and Jeffery pleads:

Thou that delivered’st hast so many, be

So kinde of nature, to deliver me!

Davenant goes on to say that no one knows how Jeffery got back home, but it seems likely that the pirates had had enough sport of him and sent him back to be a figure of old English fun, not a jester but a jestee. I venture to say that the turkey-cock duel (maybe some kind of oblique reference to the Turkish pirates?) was Davenant’s invention, and that in the war, Jeffery was a mascot. But on the Web you can find moldy historical fiction, supposedly based on tradition, in which Jeffery overhears a porter reading “Jeffereidos” aloud and inveigles the porter, who happens to be seven feet tall, into a duel inside the palace bakery oven, where the porter can’t swing his sword and the dwarf is able to jab him several times in the legs with a knife before the fight is broken up. And by all accounts I can find, Jeffery did shoot this Mr. Crofts. Let’s hope Xit got some satisfaction too.

X-ray

My friend Dave Barry has written that this ray was discovered by scientists trying to determine whether “anything came after W-rays.” Perhaps. We know what came after Fay Wray.

xylophone

This instrument is related, through phone (Greek for voice, sound) to fame—being talked about. But I wouldn’t count on it. The xylo- is from the Greek for wood. Compare xylem, which you may have encountered in high-school biology class, and xylene, which, aside from being the name of the girl who sat behind you, is a hydrocarbon obtained in part from wood and used in rubber cement.

The vibraphone, or the vibes, has metal keys, but has anybody ever been famous on the vibes, even, besides Lionel Hampton? Then too, fame is tinsel, whereas percussion may be golden—on, say, the bouncily named marimba, whose provenance is African, or on the glockenspiel, from the German spiel, to play, and glocken, bells. From the sound of glock you’d think a glockenspiel’s keys were made of wood, or of horse hooves, but no, a glockenspiel’s keys are metallic—glock is the Old High German stab at capturing ding-dong.

y · Y · y

In Massachusetts we have Big Y supermarkets. I asked a checkout lady where the name came from. She blanched. She stammered. She cast her gaze furtively around. I thought to myself (but then, to whom other?):

Aha! I may have stumbled upon something here. Perhaps the Big Y is Yahweh Himself. Or the Y in question is the Y that (for some reason, perhaps because H was taken) is the symbol for hypercharge, which according to AHD is “a quantum number equal to twice the average electric charge of a particle multiplet or, equivalently, to the sum of the strangeness and the baryon number.” Or perhaps it relates to some secret ritual involving the yataghan—“a Turkish sword or scimitar having a double-curved blade and an eared pommel, but lacking a handle guard.” Or, even more mystically, ylem, “a form of matter hypothesized by proponents of the big bang theory to have existed before the formation of the chemical elements.” Or yottahertz (septillion cycles per second), or yippee (whee!), or Yggdrasil, “the great ash tree that holds together earth, heaven, and hell by its roots and branches in Norse mythology.” Or all of the above at once!

The checkout lady’s voice trembled. “We learned it in orientation,” she said. “But I forgot.”

She must have taken me for someone from headquarters come down to take her job away for insufficient grounding in company lore. I swore to her that I was nothing more than a guy with an interest in letters. Then I came home and Googled.

According to Wikipedia, the chain began with the Y Cash Market in Chicopee, Massachusetts, “at the intersection where two roads converge to form a Y.”

At least that’s what Big Y tells the public.

y’all

I trust that my remarks in Alphabet Juice and elsewhere have put to rest the tin-eared notion that y’all is singular and all y’all is plural. If you want a further guide to using this vernacular second-person plural, all you have to do is watch The Wire, whose grasp of idiom is impeccable. Does Omar ever address one person as y’all motherfucker? No, he addresses more than one as y’all motherfuckers. Or, just y’all. If Omar does not represent authority to you, then you should give Baltimore a wide berth.

And to review: the difference between y’all and all y’all is the one-would-have-thought-rather-readily-graspable difference between you guys and all you guys.

Okay. But I want to pass on to you what the late musicologist and folklorist Dr. Willis James, in a Smithsonian Folkways archival recording, calls “the super plural.” In his childhood Dr. James knew a fishmonger in Jacksonville, Florida, whose marketing cry to passersby went like this:

I got shrimpsies,

I got crabsies,

I got fishies,

I got all these

For y’allsies.

See you-all.

yare, yar

“My, she was yare,” Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord says in The Philadelphia Story. She follows up with a definition: “It means, uh, easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, bright, everything a boat should be … until she develops dry rot.”

She’s speaking of the sailboat, the True Love, that she and the Cary Grant character, C. K. Dexter Haven, shared when they were married. By implication she is also talking about their marriage, and about herself. In the end (caution: SPOILER), when C. K. proposes to her again, she says, “Oh Dexter, I’ll be yare now, I promise to be yare.”

For centuries yare has been applied to both people and boats. Seamen are exhorted to be yare in The Tempest: “fall to ’t, yarely, or we run ourselves aground … Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare!” And in Antony and Cleopatra, someone says, “Their ships are yare, yours heavy.” The Old English was gearu, meaning ready, prepared. Good to go.

Kate pronounces it to rhyme with are. OAD and WIII accept that pronunciation, but prefer to rhyme it with care, which is the only pronunciation AHD and OED acknowledge. “My, she was yehr”? I don’t think so. But yehr in sailboat-owning British English wouldn’t really have an r sound in it. “My, she was yeah”?

WIII, alone, says the word can also be spelled yar—as in fact it usually is spelled online—and then pronounced as Kate did. I don’t know how it’s spelled in the original script, but yar is trimmer, makes sense phonetically—yar is more yare than yare is.

ylid

A chemical compound of some kind, who cares, but here’s what’s interesting, and to me, annoying: this adjective is compounded of two suffixes: -yl and -ide. What’s up with that? “After you, Mr. -Yl.” “No, after you, Mr. -Ide.”

Granted, you wouldn’t want to make it idyl. But isn’t there something creepy about two tails with no head? The noun form by the way is given as ylide (“silylated ylides of phosphorus, arsenic and sulphur …”), the adjective form, ylidic. So where does that leave ylid?

The craziness doesn’t stop there. The next entry in OED is -ylidene. A suffix. Now we’re up to a three-tail tail. Furthermore, -ylidene (rhymes with “vanilla bean”) is to be “used” (watch this carefully) “in place of -idine when the name of the parent compound does not end in -yl.”

So what if the parent compound is an ylide? You see what I’m getting at? We’re up to ylidylidene. And it’s all suffixes.

Nice rhythm to it, though. Rhymes with “silly Willadean.”

yo

My wife has long maintained that English has no equivalent expression to nicht wahr or n’est ce pas. I thought of one once, but it didn’t satisfy her, and now I’ve forgotten what it was. One that comes close, only with scant interrogatory tinge, is the sort of recessive yo, defined by OED, in September 2009, as follows: “slang (orig. in African-American usage). In weakened use, following or punctuating an utterance for emphasis or as a general conversational filler.” OED cites David Simon’s Homicide: “Somebody ’round here been doin’ some talking, yo.”

The more exclamatory yo, as in Rocky Balboa’s “Yo, Adrian,” is a different matter. In 1993, Ernest Paolino, a Philadelphia native, wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times claiming yo as a product of south Philadelphia, many of whose residents in the 1930s were immigrants from southern Italy. In the Neapolitan dialect, wrote Paolino, “guaglione (pronounced guahl-YO-nay) signified a young man. The chiefly unlettered immigrants shortened that to guahl-YO, which they pronounced wahl-YO. That was inevitably shortened to yo. The common greeting among young Italian-American males was ‘Hey, whal-YO!’ and then simply ‘Yo!’”

The possessive yo’, as in “Yo’ mama,” is a contraction of your (as pronounced yore). Not of you.

you

“You!” she said.

There are few more withering remarks than “You!” spoken in a certain way. Jeanne spoke it in just that way.

—P. G. Wodehouse, “Rough-Hew Them How We Will”

See U.

you-all

I have discovered dismaying things in dictionaries before—for instance, that judging from her photograph in AHD, the Wild West outlaw queen Belle Starr, played in movies by Jane Russell and Elsa Martinelli, actually looked like Harry Dean Stanton. But that shock was nothing compared to finding that the Oxford English Dictionary, which Ernest Weekley justly called “the noblest monument ever reared to any language,” is all wet on you-all.

“Used in place of you pers. pron. Used, with no clear pattern, both as sing. and as pl.” That’s what OED says. For examples of you-all’s use as singular, it quotes the following people:

A. Singleton: “Children learn from the slaves some odd phrases; … as … will you all do this? for, will one of you do this?” A. Singleton turns out to be Arthur Singleton, pen name of Henry C. Knight, author of Letters from the South and West, 1824. Knight was a New Englander. He visited Virginia. The fineness of his observation may be gauged by his reference to enslaved women’s breasts as “dark globose hanging fountains” and his casual remark, “I know not whether the slaves, in general, are not happy as their masters.” He says that in Virginia, the husk of corn is called the shuck. That’s right. Then he says, “What we call cob, they call husk.” I have never heard of such a thing in my life.

Edna Ferber, in Show Boat, a question addressed to one person (Magnolia Ravenal): “You-all one of them Suhveys?” Edna Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, grew up in the Midwest, and was living in New York City when she heard, in Connecticut, about showboats. Her first venture south, to catch a showboat, was in 1925, to Bath, North Carolina, where during a two-day stay she could hardly bear to touch the bedsheets or the food. She had a wonderful lore-gathering trip north on the showboat. To write the book, she went to the Côte Basque, in France. So she had not steeped herself in you-all culture. Furthermore, you notice that her fictional questioner (a black man in Chicago, who would have grown up in the South) does not say, “You-all one of them suhvey-takers”? His you-all seems to refer to her organization, as in, “So you work for BP. You-all sufficiently ashamed of yourselves?” His next question to Magnolia is not “Wha’ you-all want?” but “Wha’ you want?”

Gerald Durrell. In a travel book, he writes of being asked, in South Africa, “Is youall to catch the Parika train?” Durrell is traveling in a party of three. I can’t speak for South Africans, but in the United States, a singular verb might well be used with you-all, but that is irregular grammar, not a sign that the you-all in question is itself singular. People from the Southern United States who wax adamant about the plurality of you-all are not trying to deny that Southerners use incorrect grammar. We are denying that you-all is an unfunctional affectation.

Two contributors to American Speech. One claims to have often heard you-all “used in speaking to one person” as a plural in the Ozarks, the other to have heard it used “again and again … in speaking to one person.” As we have seen in our BP example, the use of you-all in speaking to one person does not mean that it refers to only one person. Also you will note that all these authorities on you-all have heard it used. Everyone I have ever discussed this with, who used you-all, has confirmed that they meant it, and that other people who use you-all understood it, to be plural. Sometimes not obviously plural, as in our BP example, but you-all is not singular.

You say to me that OED is a higher authority than I am. I say to you goodness gracious yes; but not in every, particularly American, particular. For instance:

OED says the verb bloop means, in baseball, “To score (a run or runs) by hitting the ball just beyond the reach of the infield.” I guess that gets the trajectory of a bloop right, if by “beyond” is meant over, but I’m bothered by the implication that anyone is likely to bloop on purpose; and the part about runs is dead wrong—also wrong under the noun bloop, where OED takes a bloop single (the noun used attributively) to mean a single run scored by a bloop. A bloop single is just a one-base hit. In cricket, a single is a hit that scores a run, but in baseball (as OED says correctly under single) it just gets the batter on base.

OED defines triple play correctly, but double play inadequately, as a play “in which two runners are put out successively by throws of the basemen.” A double play may involve other fielders than basemen—or just one fielder, unassisted, with no throws.

By way of defining hit and run, in baseball, OED quotes from D.A., which turns out to be short for Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1951, whose definition of hit and run was way out of date then and by a century or so now: “A play wherein a base runner starts with the pitcher’s throw as the batter attempts a hit, a sacrifice hit.” No sacrifice is involved in a post-1910-or-so hit and run—ideally, the runner draws the shortstop or second baseman over to the base and the batter places a hit through the resultant hole.

According to OED, a field goal in American football is “a goal scored from the field of play.” Where else would you score a goal from? A field goal is a three-point goal made by kicking. OED’s definitions of safety and touchdown, in American football, and sacrifice fly, in baseball, are not right either.

And to all of you who insist to me that you have personally heard someone in the South use y’all as a singular, I say that is like telling me that the South has mice that are over five feet tall, because you saw one at Disney World.

See y’all.

z · Z · z

“In southern Ontario,” according to the linguist J. K. Chambers, “the pronunciation of Z as zee is stigmatized, as might be expected. American immigrants to the region … routinely report that their name for Z is one of the first things they change after arriving there, because calling it zee unfailingly draws comments from the people they are talking to.” Canadians have expressed resentment that Sesame Street’s rhyming zee is poisoning the zed’s of our neighbor to the north’s innocent children.

It is true that zed is standard in every English-speaking country besides the United States, and that it has an old-world pedigree: from the French zède, from the Greek zeta. But the French don’t say bède nor the English bed for b, which derives from beta. I can’t see anything particularly to be cherished about zed, except that it brings the alphabet to a halt better than open-ended zee. In support of zee, we can point out that it rhymes with b, c, d, e, g, p, t, and v.

OED cites Edward Augustus Freeman, the English author of Some Impressions of the United States, as having reported, in 1893, that “the name … given to the last letter of the alphabet … in New England is always zee; in the South it is zed.” I was not around in 1893, but I have never heard tell of zed’s ever having had any currency in the American South. (As in ZedZed Top? E-Zed Rollers?) Maybe Freeman heard an Anglophile in Charleston, South Carolina, say zed, or he heard someone call someone Zed, short for Zedekiah, a biblical name. (Yes, the creep in Pulp Fiction who rapes the Ving Rhames character, who in turn shotguns him fatally in the groin thanks to the intervention of the Bruce Willis character, is named Zed.) Beware of English people’s impressions of American English (see you-all and, in Alphabet Juice, y’all). But Freeman goes on genially to suggest a third way: that z be pronounced neither zed nor zee, but rather ez, by analogy with l, m, n, and s.

I did a Google Book Search for “zed in America” and found a volume printed in London in 1860, Notes and Queries: A Medium of InterCommunication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. I take it to be a semiannual compilation from a weekly magazine of academic correspondence—the Victorian equivalent of an Internet chat site. John Camden Hotter, of Picadilly, writes: “We pronounce the last letter of our alphabet zed; in America it is universally termed ze.” That seems right, if a bit skimpy on e’s. Hotter, who says he has returned from teaching school in the United States, adds: “A million spelling-books in America has it ze, whilst perhaps another million here has it zed.”

From Hotter’s has’s, we might conclude that for literate nineteenth-century Picadillians, spelling-books was singular. (Compare you-all.) Perhaps the subject is construed as “a million of spelling-books.” Would Hotter have written “a thousand [of] years has passed” or “a dozen [of] eggs has been laid”? Too late, now, to write in and find out.

zeroth

“Coming next in a series before the one conventionally regarded as the first,” says OED.

So if your first and present wife finds out you were married before, that would be known thereafter as your zeroth marriage, you hope.

If there are two strikes against you and no balls, and the pitcher is throwing ninety-nine miles an hour, home plate may feel like zeroth base.

Or say a long-suppressed amendment to the U.S. Constitution is in danger of being discovered. That amendment was in fact the first one approved by the Congress. That amendment stated, “By the expression the people hereinthroughout is meant white men of property.” But then Jefferson, who had written it, got up and said, “No, seriously, gentlemen, it goes without saying. Let’s start with freedom of speech and so on,” and everybody laughed and acknowledged it a goodly jest. Then that (and the Dan Brown novel about it) would be known as the Zeroth Amendment.

zest, zester

The other evening my wife showed me an instrument she had just acquired: “I’ve got a zester,” she said. “I didn’t know there were zesters, and now I have one.”

She spoke zestfully. It was a nice moment, and it’s a nice device, especially designed for the scraping of zest from citrus rinds.

Zest was defined in 1674 by Thomas Blount in his Glossographia: “the pill [peel] of an Orange, or such like, squeesed into a glass of wine, to give it a relish.” Squeeze, to use the modern spelling of the same sound, is an aptly sonicky word. One test of sonickiness is, can the word be pronounced exaggeratedly to evoke its meaning more thoroughly—perhaps as the voice-over accompanying a more literal, that is to say more bodily, expression: “Come here you sweet thing and let me give you the biggest ssqwweeeeezzze!”

“Enough! I can’t breathe!”

The original, now obsolete, word was quease. (Not related etymologically to queasy, apparently, though one wonders.) The initial s intensifies, sets up, prolongs the squeeze.

Zest is a quicker word for a brisker action. OED’s second citation, after Blount, is from a 1712 history of drugs: “Citron Oil … is made … by the Zest or the rasping or grating of the Citron Peel.”

Origin is obscure, says OED. Hendrickson says French zeste may come from Latin scistus, meaning cut. The z sound suggests friction, as in the sound of an electric shaver hitting whiskers, and -est is superlative. At any rate zest is firmly rooted in physicality and orality, having referred first to citrus essence, then to general spicing up of food and drink, then generally to “keen relish or enjoyment displayed in speech or action” (OED).

See vim.

zizz

A rare case of a one-syllable contradiction in terms: OED says zizz can mean “gaiety, liveliness, ‘sparkle’” or, on the other hand, a nap. The first meaning uses the z sound as pizazz, sizzle, and whiz do. The second uses it to evoke sawing logs. On Z as an only indirect representation of snoring, see Alphabet Juice. Come to think of it, Z evokes sawing visually, not just because of its cartoon associations, but in its shape.

zolotnik

An old Russian unit of weight. Ninety-six of them made up a funt, which was 14.4 ounces, so a zolotnik was roughly a sixth of an ounce. Crazy Russians! But zolotnik is cognate with the Polish monetary unit zloty, each coming from the respective language’s word for gold.

And funt is related to German Pfund and English pound. Here’s how that went down: Germanic people, in trading with Latin speakers, took the pondo in Latin libra pondo to be the monetary unit, when it fact the pondo meant “by weight,” the libra being the unit. It’s as if you were to take the weight in “thirty-weight oil” to be the measurement, so that when someone at the gas station asked you what weight oil you wanted, you said, “Yes.”

“What do you mean, ‘Yes’? What weight?”

“Weight weight.”

Or it’s sort of as if that. (Maybe it would be clearer if we use as an example a ten-penny nail. Or would have been clearer if we had; I don’t think either one of us wants to go back through that.) OED says libra pondo meant “pound by weight,” but wait. It meant “libra by weight.” Since libra is from the Latin for scales, you can see why the Goths, or whoever they were, were confused.

Perhaps it was when some Roman slave, or some Latin scholar, said, “No, wait, excuse me—you’ve got this wrong-end-to.”

“What do you mean, ‘No weight?’”

“What? Oh, no, I meant ‘No, wait as in w-a-i-t wait.’”

The Goth is losing interest.

“Forget that. My point is, pondo is not the unit; libra is the unit”—perhaps that’s when lb was adopted as the abbreviation for pound, and a cursive L with a little line through it for the monetary pound (originally, a poundweight of silver). So British authorities could say, “The libra is there, it’s just silent. It’s understood.” The little line was added after people got confused, thought they were just looking at an L.

So let’s not be so quick to say, “Crazy Russians!”

Scale, by the way, is related to shell and skoal. Originally meaning cup, it was extended to the little pans of the early balancing mechanism used to weigh things.

zwischenzug

An interim or temporizing move, in chess. And in this book, while I’m trying to come up with just the right word to go out on.

Zydeco

Danceable Creole-Cajun hybrid music, from les haricots, the beans, from the song, “Les Haricots Sont Pas Salés,” which means the beans aren’t dirty. Nick Spitzer, who knows, spells it zodico, presumably pronounced zoddico, which would fit the a involved in a Creole or Cajun (or anybody else’s) pronunciation of les haricots better, but Zydeco, for some reason always capitalized, is established.

zythum

A beer. Why not end our session here with a beer? Zythum, we are told, was an ancient Egyptian beer brewed from malt and wheat, no hops.

OED: “Much of the word’s continuing use is due to its status as the last word listed in several dictionaries.” Including OED.

We should’ve let Zydeco play us on off.

But hop is an interesting word, in any number of connections. Hops in basketball means jumping ability. Hopped up is an old reference to opium. Between hops is a baseball term of potentially broad application. (You don’t want your sentences to catch people between hops.) And how about the simple bunny-associated verb, which goes back at least to around the year 1000: “To spring a short way upon the ground or any surface with an elastic or bounding movement, or a succession of such movements: said of persons, animals, and things. Formerly a general synonym of leap; now implying a short or undignified leap” (OED). Oh, man, can OED define a word? (See “Is the pope fallible?,” alternatives to.) But enough. Here’s hopping we meet now and then, maybe in Alphabest Juice.

See jump.

Also by Roy Blount Jr.

Hail, Hail, Euphoria!

Alphabet Juice

Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South

Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans

I Am the Cat, Don’t Forget That (with Valerie Shaff)

Robert E. Lee: A Life

Am I Pig Enough for You Yet? (with Valerie Shaff)

I Am Puppy, Hear Me Yap (with Valerie Shaff)

If Only You Knew How Much I Smell You (with Valerie Shaff)

Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story

Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor (editor)

Camels Are Easy, Comedy’s Hard

First Hubby

About Three Bricks Shy … and the Load Filled Up

Now, Where Were We?

Soupsongs/ Webster’s Ark

It Grows on You: A Hair-Raising Survey of Human Plumage

What Men Don’t Tell Women

Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

One Fell Soup

Crackers

About Three Bricks Shy of a Load

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my editor, Sarah Crichton; my production editor, Chris Peterson; and my copy editor, Cynthia Merman, for their meticulous (no comma here) sweet perusal.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-two previous books, covering subjects from the Pittsburgh Steelers to Robert E. Lee to Duck Soup to what dogs are thinking. He is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me! and a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel. Born in Indianapolis and raised in Decatur, Georgia, Blount now lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, the painter Joan Griswold.

Copyright © 2011 by Roy Blount Jr.

All rights reserved

Sarah Crichton Books

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

www.fsgbooks.com

Designed by Ralph Fowler / rlfdesign

eISBN 9781429922784

First eBook Edition : April 2011

First edition, 2011

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “An Old Joke” from Twigs & Knucklebones by Sarah Lindsay, copyright © 2008 by Sarah Lindsay. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blount, Roy.

Alphabetter juice : or, the joy of text / Roy Blount.—1st ed.

p. cm.

“Sarah Crichton books.”

1. Vocabulary—Humor. 2. English language—Dictionaries—Humor. I. Title.

PN6231.W64 B49 2011

818’.5407—dc22

2010039937