Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  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.