Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  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.