Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  The Vulgate version, in turn, was a translation of Erasmus’s version of the original Greek, where the word for “pricks” is a word usually translated as “goads.” But in earlier Greek manuscripts, the expression “kick against the pricks” does not occur at that point. It does occur in chapter 26, verse 14, where Paul, in chains, is describing to the Roman governor Agrippa his conversion, and he says that Jesus spoke to him in Hebrew. Since versions of “kick against the pricks” had popped up in classical literature since well before the birth of Christ, Paul may have been departing from direct literal quotation to use an expression that Agrippa would understand.

  Within a few years after the Wycliffe Bible, a very different character from St. Paul, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, asserted on the road to Canterbury that it is wise to flatter a woman, not reprove her, because anyone, if scratched on his or her sore spot, will kick. The first use of kick as a noun was “Kicke of an horse.”

  So kicking begins as knee-jerk bucking or payback, instinctive, quick: kick. Over centuries the concept has expanded—to kick the bucket, to kick someone in the pants, to kick a ball, kick as the recoil of a rifle, kick as a jerk or jolt, and kick as (OED) “a strong or sharp stimulant effect, … a thrill, excitement, pleasure.”

  Louis Armstrong, when Murray Kempton told him how much he liked his record of “When You’re Smilin’,” replied, “I was working the house band at the Paramount when I was young. And the lead trumpet stood up and played that song, and I just copied what he did note for note. I never found out his name but there was kicks in him. There’s kicks everywhere.”

  kiss

  William Makepeace Thackeray, in Pendennis, pointed out that this word, used to represent both “the salute which you perform on your grandmother’s forehead, and that which you bestow on the sacred cheek of your mistress,” is of four letters, “not one of them a labial.” A labial is a letter whose utterance requires complete or partial closure (and generally some pooching) of the lips: p, b (buss, baiser), m, w (note the air-kiss sound, mwah), f, v, and the rounded vowels, basically o and oo. That’s why smooch (compare German schmusen) is better. Even for your grandmother, though for her you might want to cut it off at smoo.

  See ch.

  kludge

  Here’s a word that gets computer people’s juices flowing. Though kludge may date farther back in oral culture (see online discussion at Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words), OED calls it “J. W. Granholm’s jocular invention.” In a 1962 article, “How to Design a Kludge,” in the computer magazine Datamation, Granholm defined kludge as “an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole.” Granholm said it “derived from the same root as the German Kluge … , originally meaning ‘smart’ or ‘witty,’” and “eventually came to mean ‘not so smart’ or ‘pretty ridiculous.’” Granholm added that “the building of a Kludge … is not work for amateurs. There is a certain, indefinable, masochistic finesse that must go into true Kludge building.”

  According to Quinion, kludge “is used in computing and electronics … for a hastily improvised solution to some fault or bug, but doesn’t seem to have moved much outside those fields, if at all.”

  It should do. Whether pronounced klooj, as dictionaries have it (roughly following the German), or to rhyme with fudge, it’s sonicky enough, and it certainly applies to a great many things besides computers. Granholm, known outside the OED as Jackson Granholm, had a long career in aerospace and electronic physics. On the side he wrote frequently about “things that were basically silly in the computing world,” as he put it in an interview. He would “take a five-page IBM press release and edit it for content and end up [with] two lines.”

  The “many idiocies welded into” computer programs that Granholm pointed out in that interview included the weird-looking numbers at the bottom of a bank check:

  I reach in my checkbook and take out a check and it’s got magnetic character recognition on the bottom … And every bank in the world has that, and they have that because Bank of America footed the bill to do it, really, and then sold the project to General Electric. So the whole world uses magnetic ink. Optical recognition was just as well-developed, in fact came along before magnetic ink character recognition was done. And if that were used, we could use an ordinary typographer’s font … readable by any human being as well as any machine, and we would have eliminated the cost of magnetic ink, special type fonts, and revision of printing technology in order to have checks processed by a machine. It didn’t happen that way. And it’s never going to go back. The stupidity is wired in now.

  Granholm, who grew up in Puyallup, Washington, was an Army Air Force officer in World War II, therefore familiar with a wide range of kludges. In 2000 he published, in the UK for some reason, a lively memoir, The Day We Bombed Switzerland: Flying with the US Eighth Army Air Force in World War II. He was appointed defense counsel in the court-martialing of two young pilots who happened, by mistake, to bomb Zurich. A remarkable aspect of the trial is that the presiding judge was Colonel James Stewart, who behaved in that real-life situation as you would expect one of the characters he played in the movies to do. He was fair minded, unpretentious, and smooth. When the corporal charged with recording the complex testimony began to sob softly, Stewart said, “Just a doggone minute here! Let’s just hold it up here a bit. This poor lady is snowed with all this big technical talk. Yeah, yeah, that’s all right dear. Just take your time.”

  knee

  From a PIE root *g(e)neu-, whence French genou, Italian ginocchio, and, in English, genuflect. John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins adds genuine, from the ancient custom of a father’s acknowledging a newborn as his own by placing the infant on his knee. But now I see that OED and Chambers both throw cold water on this notion, which was the only reason I got into knee in the first place.

  Seems like it should be an interesting word. Popular song from 1918: “Would You Rather Be a Colonel with an Eagle on Your Shoulder (Or a Private with a Chicken on Your Knee)?” In England at about the same time, the song “Knees Up, Mother Brown!” urged the lady in question to cheer up and dance, giving rise to the term knees-up, meaning a party.

  To “give a knee” to a boxer, in England in the nineteenth century, was to serve as his second—the boxer would sit on second’s knee between rounds. When an American football quarterback “takes a knee,” he is semi-kneeling immediately upon receiving the ball from his center, downing the ball because his team is ahead with seconds to play and the clock will continue to tick.

  Eh.

  Knee and gnu? No. Gnu is probably from the Hottentot. But then Hottentot is considered (OED) “both archaic and offensive; the word Khoekhoe … is now usually used in its place.” Hottentot may have come from a Dutch word meaning stammerer, stutterer—typical imperialistic insensitivity. To be fair, that can work both ways. According to Dennis Tedlock, editor of 2000 Years of Mayan Literature, the name Yucatán came about when a Spanish explorer asked some locals what the name of that area was, and he misheard what he took to be their reply. “What they actually said was k’iut’an, which means, ‘The way he talks is funny.’”

  According to OED, to kneeify meant “to make a knee of,” that is, “to attach (the toe of a shoe) to the knee by a chain, as was the fashion” in the fourteenth century. From The Tragedy of Richard II: “This chayne doth (as it were) soe tooefy the knee, and so kneefye the tooe, that …” Oh, never mind.

  There is no English word for the back of the knee. How about eenk?

  knickers

  Short for knickerbockers, trousers gathered at the knee, named for the knee pants in George Cruikshank’s illustrations of Washington Irving’s satirical History of New York, … by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), which proved so popular with New Yorkers of Dutch descent that they began to call themselves Knickerbockers, which is why New York City’s pro basketball team is the Knicks.

  Irving got the name from his friend Herman Knickerbocker. Dutch knikkerbakker m
eans “marble baker.” As a young girl, my friend Marianne Swan, born and reared in Holland, played with marbles made of clay. The kn in knikkerbakker, I am advised by her husband, Jon, “would not be an n sound that smothers the k. The k would be present and accounted for. Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker loses that sound, as does knickers, which in Dutch slang are called turd catchers. Our Icelander friend told me of how that language, basically Old Norse, preserves the k sound in its knee and knife words, but you combine the k and the n in your nose, like a controlled sneeze.”

  In England, of course, knickers are panties. Dating back to when they were knee length. Now try not to think of naughty and nookie.

  knickknack

  Often spelled knicknack, occasionally even nicnac, but I’m for preserving the four k’s. Nicnac would suffice to fix the pronunciation, but I like to sense unvoiced k sounds in the background. The echoic word knack, as in (sixteenth century) “make a fillip or knack with the fingers,” betokened a sharp rapping noise. (The onomatopoeic fillip, first cousin to flip, is when you bend a fingertip back with your thumb, generate tension, and release, to flick a booger or some other tiny object at someone or to tap smartly against someone or something: “Hee … gives the cup a phillip to make it cry Twango,” 1619.) We might imagine Fred Astaire dancing and singing “Knack knack knack on wood.”

  That knack may have been the precursor of knack meaning trick, trinket, or delicacy and, as we use the word today (OED): “A ‘trick’ of action, speech, etc.; a personal habit of acting or speaking in a particular way.”

  Knickknack is a reduplication with a quicker vowel in the first part, for rhythm’s sake, as in click-clack, and “This old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on my drum.” You know that clickety instrument “the bones”? It has been called “a pair of Knick-knacks.”

  The knickknack we know today is a gimmick, trinket, kickshaw. Note all the k’s. Knickknacks tend to be clicky little things on the shelf.

  l · L · l

  This letter ought not to be so angular; the l sound goes with long, slow, flowing, relaxed, langourous lolling. Certainly there was nothing cut-and-dried about the old unit of measure, the ell. The foot, the yard, the inch, the cubit varied, but the ell was all over the place. Originally it represented an arm. Or just a forearm. The English ell was 45 inches, the Scots one 37.2, the Flemish one 27, we are told by OED, which then cites a period authority as saying that in Scotland an ell was either 42 or 38, and another that 50 English ells were equal to 102 Danish. I don’t think we can find in those numbers the answer to whether the Danes or the Scots had shorter arms. Than each other. Or than the English.

  Why should we care about the ell? Well, it’s related to our elbow, isn’t it? The el- means arm, the -bow means bend. Or if you go back farther, according to John Ayto, the el- comes from a PIE root (which also gave us ulna, the longer forearm bone) meaning bend, so an elbow is a bend-bend proposition (unless you happen to catch one in the head), which fits right in with this little festival of flexibility.

  laughing, in letters

  Her laugh is a raucous Ha!, as if an H and an A had collided in midair.

  —Tad Friend in The New Yorker, on Phyllis Diller

  laughs, textual

  I have watched humorous authors, in performances geared to the selling of their books, getting laughs by batting their eyes, mugging, hopping like kangaroos. If the material is good enough, none of that is needed. And it’s false marketing: those laughs are not going to be there in the text some few kind souls in the audience (maybe) will shell out their hard-earned dollars for. At any rate, selling the material in this way offends against a long tradition of authorial straightface. Which can be effective. Mark Twain’s casual-seeming pretense was to address an audience in utter earnestness, even solemnity. With friends, he went perhaps farther. “He always appeared to be pained in a gentle lovable way if his listeners smiled,” said J. M. Barrie, “and it almost broke him up [today we would say “broke him down”] if we laughed.”

  lawyer joke, earliest

  OED cites this proverb from 1553: “The lawyer never dieth a beggar. The lawyer can never want a livyng until the yearth want men.” But maybe that’s a joke on men. Saint Ives, or Yves, who devoted his life to representing the poor and is sometimes called the patron saint of lawyers, died in 1303. The following is said to have been inscribed on his tomb: Sanctus Ivo erat Breto, Advocatus et non latro, Res mirando populo. “Saint Ives was a Breton, an attorney, but not a bandit—a thing astonishing to the people.”

  Or we could go with this improved version (if I do say so myself) of the looser, rhyming translation by E. Cobham Brewer in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

  Ives, from the land of beef,

  A lawyer and not a thief!

  Beyond most folks’ belief.

  Maybe in part a Breton joke. I don’t know enough about early fourteenth-century Breton stereotypes—beefeaters?—to be sure. I can pass on to you a contemporary Cape Breton joke. Cape Breton is a Nova Scotian island. Apparently Cape Breton jokes are popular in Canada.

  In an art gallery in Toronto, an obvious out-of-towner is looking at a portrait of three naked men side by side. They’re black all over except the middle man’s penis is pink. The gallery owner assumes that the visitor is baffled by the painting, so he goes over and kindly fills him in:

  “You see, this is a depiction of the sexual emasculation of African Americans in a white-dominated society.”

  “Nope.”

  “Ah … . Or, it might also be seen to reflect the objectification of gay men in society today, because of course—”

  “Nope.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “No African American, nor gay man either.”

  “I see. Perhaps you could tell me how you can be so sure of that.”

  “Watched it being painted, back in Cape Breton. Those are three Cape Breton coal miners, picking up extra money posin’. And the one in the middle went home for lunch.”

  ling, lit, don’t invite ’em

  In a 1971 New Yorker profile of Noam Chomsky, Ved Mehta asked Chomsky why linguists write so awkwardly. He replied:

  “The ability to use language well is very different from the ability to study it. Once, the Slavic Department at Harvard was thinking of offering Vladimir Nabokov an appointment. Roman Jakobson, the linguist, who was in the department then, said that he didn’t have anything against elephants but he wouldn’t appoint one a professor of zoology.”

  See upaya.

  looks, poetic

  “The first words Dylan Thomas said to me,” the poet David Waggoner said to me, “were ‘I’m only a poet when I’m writing poetry. The rest of the time—Christ, look at me.’”

  lunge

  From French allonger, to lengthen. First taken into English as the fencing term allong, which English improved upon—lunge is more sudden, more thrusty. The l is good, the -ge is good. Lose the al and change the on to uhn. Voilà.

  -ly

  My friend the biographer Jean Strouse has a problem with leisurely used as an adverb, as in “He walked leisurely down the street,” which, she says, “makes you want to say ‘He walked leisurely-ly down the street.’ So I use it only as an adjective (‘He walked in a leisurely way down the street’).”

  I know what she means. But I have come around to liking “walked leisurely down the street,” maybe because thinking about it—taking on board a sort of adjectival-adverbial wobble—slows me down, appropriately. To me the adverbial leisurely is akin to the lively in “Step lively” or “Look lively.” You could say that the latter lively is an adjective, as in “Here come the media—put on your wig and look lovely. And try to make Daddy look lifelike, at least.” But when you tell someone to look lively you are telling him or her to get cracking, not just to appear a certain way.

  At any rate, I concur in Jean’s recoil from leisurely-ly, or even leisurelily. Chambers says forms such as earlily and lovelily “are still found i
n the 1600s … , but are now considered ungraceful, except for an occasional use of friendlily.” I don’t feel friendly toward friendlily, even. For one thing it looks like “my friend Lily,” and the only Lily I know, I don’t see often.

  Ghostlily, motherlily, manlily, beastlily are all dictionary-approved but prohibitively awkward, as is, in another way, lily-liveredly. Lilylikely, though …

  “She lay palely, lilylikely, upon her laid-out lover’s breast.” Not bad.

  For that matter, awkward can be infectious:

  “Bah,” he said woollily.

  Must you murder people so grislily?

  “Coochy-coo,” he said touchy-feelily.

  He proceeded wobblily along.

  In American English, at least, there seems to be no way to say something along these lines: “For the nine months I carried you, growing inside me, no charge,” Tammy Wynette sang motherlily.

  WIII has no space for either motherlily or fatherlily and brands adverbial motherly archaic and adverbial fatherly obsolete.

  OED calls adverbial motherly “now rare,” but cites an example as recently as 1997: “touched her lightly, motherly, as she passed through.” Aww. For adverbial fatherly, OED has noted nothing since 1853: “The sky … That great smooth Hand of God stretched out / On all his children fatherly.”