Alphabetter Juice
Page 14
Nobody ever said getting granular was a day at the beach—oh, wait a minute.
“A friend of mine,” adds Jean Strouse, “now talks about manularity, as in doing the dishes by hand.” I’ll say this: writing is manual work. Maxim Gorky wrote of Leo Tolstoy, “Sometimes, when talking, he would move his fingers, and gradually close them into a fist, and then, suddenly opening them, utter a good full-weight word.”
growsome
There’s a likable old word, meaning apt to grow or conducive to growth. OED cites an 1863 Staffordshire source, “Our pig is such a growsome little thing; it will eat anything”; and an 1877 Lincolnshire one, “It’s growsome weather noo.”
h · H · h
If letters were people, I could see bony H hanging out with round O. Oh. Ho. Hohoho. H2O. H as bred-to-be-upright Prince Hal. O as eternally globular old Falstaff.
How fitting, then, that someone designing a new typeface will customarily begin with capital H and capital O. Designer Tobias Frere-Jones in The New Yorker:
Just drawing the H, there are a number of choices to make. How substantial? How wide? Are there serifs, and, if so, how broad, how thick? When you get to the O, you have to decide how heavy the heaviest part of the letter should be. There are reasons it can’t be the same as the H. If the heaviest part of the O is the same as the heaviest part of the H, the O will look too thin, because the O reaches its heaviest weight only for a moment, whereas the H gets to hold that maximum weight all the way to the top. Also, if you draw the capital H and O at the same height, that O will look too short, so the base of the O has to fall a bit lower than the H, and the top has to rise a bit higher for them to seem compatible.
Haskell, Eddie
American television has produced many indelible characters—Urkel, Paulie Walnuts, Roseanne Roseannadanna, Dan Rather, Bubbles on The Wire—but only one stone archetype. Eddie.
head
Originally, in Old English, this word was héafod, pronounced more or less heh-uh-vud. Perhaps we have all known mornings when that felt about right. Even the modern head, pronounced hed, is heavy compared to French tête, Italian testa, Spanish cabeza, or Latin caput (which by the way is not related to kaput meaning finished but does happen to be Tupac backward). Even German Kopf has more bounce than head. Why does such a potentially uplifting part of the body rhyme with dead and lead and dread? It is no inducement to thinking. “Why don’t you use your head?” parents say.
“Don’t want to. Want to use my hips,” b’dumpadump.
Head does, however, have gravitas. That’s why it’s hard to hold up.
Why do we say that someone fell “head over heels,” when that is the upright order of things? Ernest Weekley called the phrase “a curious perversion” of the Middle English “heels over head.”
While “head over heels” may be illogical, it has the right rhythm. Let us ask ourselves why.
We say tip-top—see blob—instead of top-tip because top has a broader, heavier sound: top-tip is top-heavy, about to topple, and we don’t want that in tip-top. We do want it in head over heels, and head is heavier than heels.
Here’s a consideration: “I’m head over heels in love” connotes falling forward, headlong. “I’m heels over head in love” suggests feet slipping out from under, causing a person to fall backward. Doesn’t it?
I know this: “head over” is faster to say, more sudden, less deliberate, than “heels over.” “Let’s not have Amy and Ed over” tumbles out. “Let’s not have the McNeils over” requires careful articulation.
Eelzover is an interesting sound—“I’ll have two eels over easy,” “This dream feels overdetermined”—but it doesn’t turn over readily, like eddover , like an easy-cranking car. “Now the back wheel’s over my leg”—the tongue must pick its way through. Compare: “Let’s move your bed over next to mine.” “The trail led over the hill.”
At the phrase’s end, on the other hand, heels works well. The long vowel (wheee, eeek), the liquid l, the buzz at the end—it sprawls. Well, it doesn’t exactly sprawl, because nothing sprawls like sprawl, but head at the end would jam on the brakes; heels evokes extended loss of control. Head over heels is fun to say.
The tongue hath its reasons that reason doth not necessarily know, until reason takes into account the physicality of the tongue, without which, where would reason be? Oral gratification trumps logic. That’s one reason our heads feel like héafods some mornings.
headlines
There is something about a good newspaper headline that I fear will not be perpetuated online. Here is a great headline from the nonvirtual New York Times:
GERMANY, FORCED
TO BUOY GREECE,
RUES EURO SHIFT
What that is, is a triumph of compression. But headlines can be more alluring than that. In the paper-and-ink Berkshire Eagle I read:
COCONUT-CARRYING OCTOPUS FOUND
And I do want to know about the octopus (which, Current Biology reports, has been filmed collecting coconut shells for shelter—“the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal”), but I also love the headline itself, which fits its four-column space, to a T, and is metrically gratifying. Let’s see if we can’t incorporate that headline into a verse form discussed in Alphabet Juice, the double dactyl:
Higgledy-piggledy,
Current Biology
Now is reporting, to
Plaudits all round,
Divers have proof of in-
Vertebrate tool-use: a
Coconut-carrying
Octopus found.
And how about the poetry (without going into the meter, which is essentially iambic, with a variant first line) of this headline from The New York Times (over a story suggesting that it is too soon—as always—for New York’s National League baseball team to feel good about itself):
METS, MISSING LEADERSHIP,
ARE WISE TO TEMPER JOY
“Are wise to temper joy.” Where are you going to find language that poetic anymore (not in contemporary poetry, surely) except in headlines? Yet headlines tend to be stereotyped as superficial hypery!
So often, a headline is anything but sensational. This was the lead headline in The Berkshire Eagle one day in 2010:
COUNTY
WELLNESS
LAGGING
hiccup
OAD’s definition seems fine, if a bit over the top, until the last word: “an involuntary spasm of the diaphragm and respiratory organs, with a sudden closure of the glottis and a characteristic sound like that of a cough.” A cough? To me a hiccup sounds more like a reaction to being clothes-lined (to use the felicitous football term for running into a forearm with your Adam’s apple), only somewhat more upbeat. AHD’s definition is better: “A spasm of the diaphragm resulting in a rapid, involuntary inhalation that is stopped by the sudden closure of the glottis and accompanied by a sharp, distinctive sound.”
Sometimes hiccup, pronounced the same way, is spelled hiccough. If the gh were intended to be pronounced as in ugh, there would be some sonicky justification for this, but anything that looks like it ought to be pronounced hih-coff is a denial of basic onomatopoeia. I don’t think anybody quite articulates a p in hiccupping (the French go hoquet, Danes hikke, Walloons hikéte, Swedes hicka, the Dutch just hik), but the lips do come together at the end, as if preparing to form a p. There is something to be said for up in that a hiccup makes your torso bounce.
Walter W. Skeat in his discussion of this “spasmodic inspiration” alludes to the expression “a hacking cough” (also to hitch—a hiccup is a hitch in one’s oral getalong) but as to the spelling hiccough he is firm: “seems to be due to a popular etymology from cough, certainly wrong; no one ever so pronounces the word.”
Some hiccups might have more of a higg sound to them. Skeat points out that the Welsh have a word ig meaning sob.
Why not hickup? Too quick. We are familiar with pickup, stickup, lick up, brick up, trick up, prick up, but I don’t think there’s another wo
rd in English with -iccu- in it. (A mysterious tenth-century sticcum crops up in OED’s entry on ice, but it warrants neither its own entry nor credit as an ancestor of the American colloquial stickum, which OED first finds in print in 1909.)
Note that when two hard c’s come together in a two-word phrase—public cup, say, or static cling—they don’t run together. Each is sounded separately. So -iccu- educes a mental hic’cup. Previous attempts to get hiccup right were hickock and hicket, both of which Skeat thinks were “better forms” than hiccup. But there’s no glottal hitch in those ck’s. And hiccet would look like it should be pronounced hik-set, maybe, and hiccock—well, that might not be bad. Etymonline.com says all of these forms replaced Old English “aelfsogoða, so called because hiccups were thought to be caused by elves.” We know today, of course, that they are caused by Wiccans.
Just kidding! If Wicca were a corporation, we might suspect it of spelling itself funny to attract attention. But Wicca the neopaganistic sect, also known as the Old Religion, comes by its name traditionally, wicca being Old English for wizard. Male wizard, actually. The female was wicce, which in modern English would not look like anything.
hippopotamus
From the Latin for horse and river, but you don’t have to know that to enjoy saying the word while thinking of or looking at the animal in question. Hippopotamus sounds appropriately ponderous, not to mention hippy and bottomous. French hippopotame is too perky, if you ask me.
hopefully
One can see why a public official would like to say, “Hopefully, the ecosystem will not collapse” instead of “I hope the ecosystem will not collapse.” The latter is more straightforward. It is more nearly responsible. Yet it sounds relatively wishy-washy. In the Idaho State Journal of August 20, 2009, an Idaho Fish and Game official, when asked whether hunters would be able to track down wolves by tapping into the frequencies of their radio collars, responded as follows: “I don’t think so. I hope not. I don’t know if that would be considered fair chase. I’m pretty sure that would be against the law.”
For his own job-covering sake (and maybe even, who knows?, the wolves’) he would have been better off saying, “Thinkfully, no. Hopefully not. Nonknowfully, that would be considered fair chase. Pretty be-fully sure, that would be against the law.”
So, go ahead, make your peace with hopefully, but don’t come complaining to me when a publisher sends you this rejection:
“Regretfully, our dog ate your manuscript. Mournfully, your manuscript killed him. Doubtfully, you can write anything now we will read with pleasure.”
humble
Almost inevitably, a person who has just been given grounds for feeling high pride, in public will instead profess to be humbled. “Thank you, Mr. President,” said Sonia Sotomayor when nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court, “for the most humbling honor of my life.” Jerry Lewis, in his acceptance of a lifetime-achievement Oscar, went, not surprisingly, farther: “My humility in this moment is staggering.” There may be cases, then, where it is humility that goeth before a fall. But I am content to believe that the average person cannot possibly comprehend the titanic humility a Jerry Lewis can feel.
About humble there is something aw-shucks and down-to-earth. Like humus , earth, humble comes from Latin humilis, lowly. But no one is likely to say, when honored, “I have never been so humiliated.” Humble has a homey sound—hum, bumble. The bumblebee was originally called a humblebee.
But David Simon, auteur of the great TV series The Wire, says that “to give a humble,” in Baltimore law-enforcement parlance, is to arrest someone—whose offense had otherwise been too routine to warrant his being charged—because the perp presumed to give the officer a dirty look: “He eye-fucked me so I gave him a humble.”
hunch
A fine example of a sonicky word, and there are scientific grounds for saying so. IN BATTLE, HUNCHES PROVE TO BE VALUABLE ASSETS was the headline of a story in which The New York Times reported, unsurprisingly, that in combat you often don’t have time to think; you have to react to subtle cues. “As the brain tallies cues,” the Times reported, “it may send out an alarm before a person fully understands why.”
And how do hunches manifest themselves in the body? That question was addressed by a 1997 experiment in which people chose cards based purely on hunches. When a hunch was coming on, “their bodies usually tensed up—subtly, but significantly.” Subtle tensing was quantified, in this case, by “careful measures of sweat,” but I can recall, from tense situations, the physical tensing, or coiling, that comes with the flash of how to react.
The noun hunch, meaning a premonition or an unreasoned basis for action, derives from the verb to hunch, which means, according to AHD, to “bend or draw up,” to “assume a crouched or cramped position.” Pronouncing the word hunch tenses up the whole vocal apparatus.
hyphen
Far too much hyphenation goes on in popular media today. On The Huffington Post we read of a senator “worried about the supposedly-lax” language in a bill, and another who “would support a less-restrictive proposal.” Huffpo, again: “The president’s actions in the wake of the BP disaster has been a case-in-point.” (Subject-verb disagreement there, too.)
The New York Times: “220,000 voters the G.O.P. can ill-afford to lose” and “to venture into even-deeper waters.”
A post on the Romenesko news-of-the-media site: “I was pretty-much broke at the time.”
Andrew Sullivan’s website quoted Barack Obama: “I believe that change comes not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up.”
AP photo caption: “California quarterback Kevin Riley hands-off to tailback Jahvid Best.”
I despise every one of those hyphens (except mine in news-of-the-media). They form clumps. It’s as if perfectly functional individual words can’t be trusted to stay on track unless they are forced to hold hands.
I can’t believe that any stylebook sanctions those hyphens. It is standard practice, however, to underhyphenate when an expression of more than one word is joined to another word. For instance, in Ron Powers’s estimable biography of Mark Twain, someone is referred to as “a little main chance-struck.” Surely that needs to be “main-chance-struck.” In Paste magazine, we find a “Jack Kerouac-by-way-of-Tom Waits tune.” That looks like someone named Jack Waits whose middle name is Kerouac-by-way-of-Tom. And how about this, from the Times: “ … plans to open seven gyms in the area for high school-aged basketball players.” School-aged players who are high? (This was the Times’s attempt to improve upon LeBron James, who had announced on Nike’s website his plans to open such gyms for “high-school aged” players. LeBron’s version is better, but it suggests players who have become aged in high school. Why not “high-school-aged players”? Or, better, “high-school-age.”)
Somewhere online I came upon this dictum from a New York University editing workshop: “The hyphen has no analogue in speech; it is punctuation created purely by the needs of print.” That makes no sense. All punctuation was created “by the needs of print.” And a hyphen is, or should be, audibly significant, nearly as vocal as a comma. Surely NYU can hear the difference between the stuck-up in “You’re a stuck-up little snob” and the stuck up in “You’re stuck up,” or “You stuck up a bank?” In stuck-up, there is more stress on stuck, a bit of a push, so that it catches onto up. In stuck up, the stress is equal between stuck and up, so the two are distinct. In its original Greek form, the hyphen was probably an indication (Chambers) “that two notes were to be held or blended together in music.” In print today, the hyphen betokens a quickening that pointedly connects two words into one.
A hyphen is something you need to get a feel for. The great radio comedian Fred Allen, whose voice was notably nasal, once wrote to Groucho Marx that he was “taking a refresher course” in “nose oratory.” Eschewing capital letters, as he was wont to do in correspondence, Allen went on: a “problem that confronts the man who talks through his nose is the hyphenated word. saying the word quickl
y, one part can come down each nostril. the catch is how to handle the hyphen. it takes quick thinking to … decide instantly which way you will tip the hyphen to have it tumble out of the nostril you have chosen.”
i · I · i
In electronics (iPhone, iMac, iPod, iPad), little-letter i has come to loom larger than any capital I. The New York Times quotes David Sloan, producer of a TV program called i-Caught, which exploits video clips sent in by viewers: “the ‘i’ is emblematic. It stands for information and the Internet. It also stands for the first person, … active, user-generated content that’s catching something of the moment. Who’d have thought one little skinny lowercase letter could mean so much?”
“The small -‘i’ trend,” says the Times, “seems to have begun in earnest with the arrivals in 1995 of iVillage.com, a Web site aimed at women, and in 1996 of the iMac computer from Apple. ‘I guess I could say, “Ay, ay, ay,” but flattery is a beautiful thing,’ said Deborah I. [note middle initial] Fine, president at iVillage Properties in New York.”
This, on the Times’s part, is a terrible lapse in phonetic spelling. Obviously what Ms. Fine said was “i-yi-yi.”