Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  “He is if he has to be,” said Clark. “He’d rather just mosey along.”

  When all is said and done, however, I wonder, myself, what Mr. Pugh was thinking, other than just “Pig … hotel desk … hot damn!” I believe we may speculate. You notice that no animal-throwing incident is said to have occurred in a locally owned hotel or restaurant. According to the town’s website, “The charm of West Point will hold you spellbound, as you stroll along her quaint downtown sidewalks … . West Point captures a simplicity of life rarely found in today’s fast-paced society.” She has been named, according to the website, “one of the ‘Top 100 Small Towns in America.’”

  Might Mr. Pugh have been protesting the intrusion of chain genericism into such a genuinely local locale? I don’t know that Hardee’s serves anything really vile, like reconstituted chicken meat, but maybe they don’t get their beef from nearby farmers, and I do know that there is nothing less reconstituted than a live possum. And in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we may assume that the thrown pigs were local.

  Or Mr. Pugh may have been being postmodern. Here is as far as I got a couple of years ago on a think piece about how the South might save America from where it was headed:

  In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard defined the postmodern condition as “incredulity towards metanarratives.” Since then a metanarrative has infected the world’s only superpower, the United States. An imperialistic good-versus-evil metanarrative has drawn the nation into a preemptive war halfway around the world. It is a cheesy, treacherous metanarrative, which has proved more than a match, however, for snarky incredulity. Is there an alternative metanarrative to be forged, or at least a grittier incredulity?

  If so, it will come from the Southern United States, from whose cultural debris the cheesy, treacherous metanarrative has been forged.

  Here’s what I had in mind: down-home Southern values and feistiness, which I felt had been perversely evoked by the Bush administration’s jingoism (“git those evildoers before they start blowing up our church suppers” summoning us to a big crazy mess of a war), might somehow erupt into …

  Into something … better. I have a hard time sticking with a think piece for very long. But I’ll say this: I can’t see that this animal-throwing story fits any metanarrative at all.

  Unless. There is one possibility. I am by no means implying any sort of complicity here. But it just could be that the metanarrative of the animal throwing is an effort to establish, internationally (and credibly, as far as I’m concerned), that there is a police lieutenant in West Point, Mississippi, who is not a redneck.

  me-time

  As of this writing, neither OED nor WIII online defines this term. I suppose it has arisen too recently, and also perhaps—not that your typical lexicographer is dour anymore—a touch too ickily. But the number-one Urbandictionary.com definition, “A euphemism for masturbation,” overstates the case.

  Wiktionary.org at one time defined me time satisfactorily: “a period during which someone relaxes by doing something he/she enjoys.” This is an excellent example of the advantage of using he/she (better, he or she) instead of the (ugh) singular they. “A period during which someone relaxes by doing something they enjoy” would not do, because the point of me time is precisely not to do what they or even we want to do.

  But note how odd that looks: “the point of me time is … .” Even odder would be “Sometime I got to get me some me time.” I agree with Urbandictionary.com that this term calls for a hyphen.

  mimi

  A colloquial French term for a little kiss, and, by extension, mon mimi: “my sweetie.”

  mixed metaphor

  Nice example in The Borzoi Handbook for Writers: “You can’t sit on your hands if a recession is coming because you don’t know where the bottom is.”

  modernism/postmodernism

  I will not go deeply into this distinction, because anyone who cares about it knows much more about it than I do, probably, and certainly thinks so. But I will say this: nobody ever talks about postmodern life. And I will quote this from John Lanchester’s novel The Debt to Pleasure: “Modernism is about finding out how much you could get away with leaving out. Postmodernism is about how much you can get away with putting in.”

  I quote that, for one reason, because I think “how much you could get away with” is an element of the arts that is too seldom brought to the fore. I mean, when critics or foundations write about someone’s getting away with presenting, say, a rotting shark or a roomful of peat moss as art, do they never chuckle? Give one another a high five? Surely they should, if anything, whoop. Do they never say, even to themselves, “Love this crazy shit”? Maybe they do, in their own circles; but by the time their comments reach me, their mode is straight-faced, hushed-tone analytical. You’d think art was a public service. And so it is, but not because of its gravity. Because people enjoy, whether they want to admit it or not, successful rascality. Thank goodness for Philistines—you can get a rise out of them.

  mouse

  As recently as 1982 (which, come to think of it, isn’t all that recent), The New York Times had to explain what a computer mouse was. “Instead of typing commands or code words to request information, users can point to words or symbols on the screen … through manipulation of a hand-held device known as a mouse.” The inventor of the mouse was Douglas Engelbart of Stanford. In 1965 he and his colleague Bill English, who had constructed the prototype mouse from Engelbart’s designs, mentioned the device by its rodental name in print for the first time, according to OED: “Within comfortable reach of the user’s right hand is a device called the ‘mouse’ which we developed for evaluation … as a means for selecting those displayed text entities upon which the commands are to operate.”

  At various sites online, under “Mother of All Demos,” you can check out Engelbart demonstrating, in 1968, a number of technologies, experimental at the time, that we have come to take for granted: interactive text, e-mail, hypertext, and the mouse—all in the interest of “helping humans to operate within the domain of complex information structures.” At one point he says, “You have a [tracking?] device called a mouse … . I don’t know why we call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologize. It started out that way and we never changed it.” Apologizing! Apologizing for the mouse! It’s like Eve saying “We call it a ‘baby,’ I don’t know, someone will probably come up with something more technical, but it made that sound, ba-ba, when it was being relatively bearable—we didn’t want to call it waaaaaaaah.” According to Wikipedia, Engelbart never made any money off the mouse because his patent lapsed before mouses, or mice, became commercially available.

  These days the mouse may be on its way out, but its realm has greatly expanded. If you Google “mouseover mouseout,” as my sister, Susan, the computer person suggests, you get for instance this severely underhyphenated excerpt from an instructional site:

  Mouse Events. The mouse events are by far the most important events … We’ll go through all mouse events: mousedown, mouseup and click, dblclick, mousemove and finally mouseover and mouseout … Finally the Microsoft proprietary mouseenter and mouseleave events … You’ll see the events that take place in the textarea …

  By “severely underhyphenated,” I mean: mouseenter? That looks as though it should be pronounced mow-seenter. Mouseleave? What language is that from? Maybe you’d say moo-se-lay-av-eh. Textarea? Ugh. I guess we’re in a textarea right now. Feh. It looks like it should be pronounced tex-ta-ria; a shopping mall in Lubbock, maybe.

  music

  The verb muse, to reflect to oneself, goes back to the Old French noun muse, muzzle or snout, which gave rise to the Old French verb muser, to ponder—literally, to stand there with one’s nose in the air. Etymologists disagree whether a clear etymological connection can be made between that muse and the Muses, Greek goddesses of the arts, but Muse certainly inspired music.

  Can we assume, however, that a person who is good at music is good at other arts, for instance writing?
As the least musical member of a notoriously challenged rock-and-roll band of authors, the Rock Bottom Remainders, I may be biased. But I don’t think many great writers have been known for their musical talent. James Joyce had a fine tenor voice, we are told, but then he was Irish. So was the late lamented Frank McCourt, but I was once present on stage (in a vague capacity) when Frank sang one Beatles song as the rest of the band, the Remainders, played another, and the discrepancy—or I should say, the nature of the discrepancy—was not readily apparent.

  Flannery O’Connor was no nightingale, either, nor even a listener of note. “All classical music sounds alike to me,” she said, “and the rest of it sounds like the Beatles.”

  At a concert, Samuel Johnson was clearly musing to himself, or attending to his own Muse, instead of listening to a virtuoso violinist. A friend urged him to observe how difficult the performance was. “Difficult do you call it, Sir?” replied the doctor; “I wish it were impossible.” On another occasion a harpsichordist, after playing brilliantly, asked an unresponsive Johnson whether he was fond of music generally. “No, madam,” Johnson replied, “but of all the noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.”

  “Music, I regret to say,” said Vladimir Nabokov, “affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.”

  None of those three great prose stylists can be accused of having a tin ear. Sad as indifference to music is, it does remove the temptation to enhance, self-amusingly, one’s own keyboard performance by humming along, so to speak. Tone and rhythm have to be there in the letters on the page.

  A certain old person of Tring,

  When someone asked her to sing,

  Replied, “Ain’t it odd?

  I can never tell ‘God

  Save the Weasel’ from ‘Pop Goes the King.’”

  —Anon.

  n · N · n

  Might I suggest, without being branded as a nut or a crank, that n carries a negative value? There are of course some upbeat n-words: new, natural, nimble , neat, nectar, neighborly, noble, normal, nourish, nugget, nurture, nuzzle.

  But weigh those against no, not, none, nyet, nicht, nein, non, neither, nor, in-, un-, anti-, under, nag, narc, narcissism, narcosis, narrow, narwhal (the nar- part is from Old Icelandic for corpse, a reference to the animal’s color resembling that of a drowned person), nasal, nasty, natter, naught, naughty, nausea, Nazi, needy, nefarious, negligent, nerd, nettle, neuralgia, neuter, never, night, necrology, nefarious, niggle, ninny, nit, noir, noisome, noogie, noose, nosy, notorious, noxious, nudge, nudnik, nugatory, nuisance, null, numb, and nut.

  Also weigh, against the stylishness of snazzy and the sweetness of snuggle and snookums, the following sn- words: snafu, snag, snail, snake, snallygaster (a legendary huge reptilian bird of prey), snap, snarf, snarky, snarl, sneaky, sneer, snicker, snide, sniffling, sniffy, snigger, snipe, snippy, snit, snitch, snivel, snob, snockered, snollygoster (a wily, unprincipled politician), snooker, snoop, snooty, snore, snort, snotty, snout, snub, snuff. Many of those words’ derivations are nasal, even if not obviously—snitch for instance was originally a slang word for the nose, and snit comes from snort. I submit to you that pronouncing n evokes, however distantly, a wrinkling of the nostrils. As in stink, stench, dung, rank, rancid, funky, skunk.

  Or should I go snaffle myself?

  name, fictional, too often taken for granted

  Humpty Dumpty maintains, in Through the Looking Glass, that he is the master of words, but he’s at the mercy of his own name: Humpty is his character and Dumpty is his fate.

  names, common but relationship straining (I would imagine)

  At one time, according to the popular press, Taylor Lautner, a young male actor who has achieved phenomenal popularity by playing a cuddly werewolf, was the real-life boyfriend of Taylor Swift, a young female singer whose own phen. p. derives from her performance of cuddly country music.

  But what did they call each other? Was one of them, to the other, “Tay,” and the other, to the party of the first part, “Lor”?

  Pet names, of course; you would have to nail down a couple of those (and perhaps resent, sometimes, the necessity). But while it is all very well, at a peak of passion, to be addressed as “OH! PUMPKIN!,” there is nothing quite so reassuring as being invoked by one’s own name at such a juncture. And if we’re both named Taylor …

  Let’s not intrude into real lives. Let’s take an imaginary couple, straight or gay, who are both named Pat. “OH! PAT! OH MY SWEET PITTY-PATTY.” Won’t the Pat who is crying out feel just the least bit self-referential, and won’t the other Pat wonder how primarily he or she is in fact the Pat that the other Pat has in mind? Especially if the Pat who is not crying out is at something less than a peak of passion.

  There must also be awkward social moments. I don’t suppose Taylor and Taylor ever needed to introduce each other to anyone, but how about Pat and Pat?

  “I’d like you to meet … Pat.”

  Do you see what I mean?

  names, funny

  Why is Muncie a funny name for a town? Because it falls between munchy and mincy? It’s obvious why Fort Mudge is a funny name for a town: it rhymes with fudge. To my knowledge, nothing rhymes with Muncie, unless you force it:

  To a fretful young lady from Muncie

  An angel made an Annunci-

  Atorial visit.

  “All right, what is it?”

  She snapped, and …

  … we are left hanging.

  names, good ones

  Dr. Wild Willie Moore, blues sax player.

  Jerome Cotchery, New York Jets wide receiver.

  O. J. Mayo, Memphis Grizzlies guard. The initials stand for Ovinton J’Anthony. His fan site is OJMayonnaise.com.

  names, not so good

  Cleveland Browns linebacker D’Qwell Jackson.

  Professed scientist and healer (who was paid more than $100,000 by the Los Angeles Dodgers to send the team positive energy from his Boston-area home) Vladimir Shpunt.

  names, unexpected

  Desiree Fish, an American Express spokeswoman.

  The Newark Eurekas, a nineteenth-century baseball team.

  negative, double

  Say I say to you, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” You will not think me illiterate. You will know, I assume, that I am adopting the grammar of the Rolling Stones song. (Ask your parents. Okay, grandparents.) To mean that I can’t get any.

  You might answer, “I can’t see why not.” Is that a double negative? Not in any negative sense. It’s a semicontradiction of my remark, but it doesn’t contradict itself. It means something distinct—not the same as “I can see why not,” which would be insulting.

  You might answer, “No you can’t.” The import would depend upon rhythm and tone. “No. You can’t,” is a straightforward, rather deflating confirmation. “No you can’t” might be a sarcastic contradiction along the lines of “Yeah [i.e., “Like hell”] you can” if I had said “I can satisfy your mama.”

  But. If you say “I can’t neither,” you are not using English well. If you say, “Nobody can’t get none, no more,” a quadruple negative, you are calling too much attention to yourself.

  And there are subtler double negatives for which nothing can be said. I don’t remember what I clipped this sentence from, but it still annoys me: “The nosy and stern-but-loving materfamilias is a venerable character that never seems to lose its usefulness, if not its charm.” What that means to say is, “always seems to retain its usefulness, if not its charm.”

  And here is Jay Leno: “I’m sure you heard those rumors that NBC is talking about canceling our show. You know what that means? I didn’t sleep with any of my staff for nothing.” Listening, we might not have wondered how those negatives are wired together. Even in cold print, we see what he means, because we are aware that David Letterman did jeopardize his talk-show security, briefly, by sleeping, fairly extensively, with some of his staff. But Leno’s literal meaning might be “Not
for nothing did I sleep with any of my staff” or “I refrained from sleeping with any of my staff for nothing”—both of which seem to say, “I slept with only those members of my staff who compensated me for doing so.”

  Would there have been a crystal-clear way of putting Leno’s joke? “My refraining from sleeping with any of my staff was all for naught.” I didn’t say funny, I said crystal clear.

  nice

  This is an easy word to use, approvingly (I have often done so in this book), and yet there is something unreliable about it. According to OED, the development of its meaning “from ‘foolish, silly’ to ‘pleasing’ is unparalleled in Latin or in the Romance languages.” Along the line of that development lies, on the one hand, the expression “‘nice’ girls didn’t used to compete with each other in getting lipstick on boys’ private parts” and, on the other, the obsolete sense of nice as wanton, lascivious: Antony, in his cups the night before battle, assures Cleopatra that although people may have mocked him “when mine hours / Were nice and lucky,” he will henceforth “set my teeth.”

  In December 1970, President Richard Nixon sent an eleven-page single-spaced memorandum to his closest aide, H. R. Haldeman, conveying how upset he was that his staff had not established an image of him as warm and caring. “There are innumerable examples of warm items,” he wrote. For instance, he had been “nicey-nicey to the cabinet, staff and Congress around Christmastime,” had treated not only cabinet but subcabinet officials “like dignified human beings and not dirt under my feet.” He emphasized, however, that all White House promotion of this “warmth business” should stress that it wasn’t being promoted by the White House, and that the president (Nixon referring to himself in the third person) “does not brag about all the good things he does for people.”