Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  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 mi
nd 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!”