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 b
uzz. (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.)
Alphabetter Juice Page 3