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.
Alphabetter Juice Page 7