Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  Lots of things wrong there (“warm items”!), but what stands out is the use of nicey-nicey, which fails as a synonym for warm in part because it rhymes with icy. Distinctly enunciated, warm is orally enclosing, like a sip of wine taken in and rolled around; nicey entails a wince and a hiss.

  Nice works best, in fact, in its mostly obsolete meaning of precise or even finicky, which survives in nicety and “a nice distinction.” When you add the -y and double it, you’re pushing nice’s sonics too far. (I’m not sure how Nicely-Nicely Johnson, in Guys and Dolls, fits inhere, but the l’s make a difference.)

  Chilling nice’s are spoken in the movie Revolutionary Road, when the Leonardo DiCaprio character finds to his astonishment, after a night of vicious marital discord, that his wife, played by Kate Winslet, is calmly, submissively fixing him breakfast. Although her expression appears to be frozen—and she will kill herself, in administering a home abortion, after he leaves for work—he says, in a genuinely relieved yet walking-on-eggshells tone, as he finishes his eggs, “This was really nice. I don’t know when I’ve had a nicer breakfast.”

  nitty-gritty

  Online I came upon a dumb British discussion deploring the tyranny of “political correctness” as reflected in a police constable’s assertion that in police work nitty-gritty had been banned as racist. The expression, according to a story in the Daily Mail, was “said to have its origins in the 18th Century slave traders’ phrase for the debris left at the bottom of a slave ship after a voyage. A visit to the hold was described as ‘going to the nitty-gritty.’” What’s offensive is the knee-jerk anti-PC faux etymology there, not the good granular term nitty-gritty.

  But even an eminent linguist can find extraneous stink there. Anatoly Liberman knows a lot more about etymology than I do, but in his book Word Origins, and How We Know Them, he writes (in an aside from a bracing appreciation of sonicky gr- words) that “dictionaries pass by the obscene origin of nitty-gritty.”

  No. Yourdictionary.com (citing Webster’s New World College Dictionary) does in fact say “orig. black slang: rhyming euphemism for shitty,” but that doesn’t ring true. Black slang, to be sure; but that derivation sounds more like Cockney rhyming slang than anything ebonic; and the way nitty-gritty has been used down through the years evinces no fecal influence. “Perhaps ultimately connected with nit egg of the louse, and grits finely ground corn,” says Chambers. Okay, and how about the grit in sandy soil (“I believe I will dip my pink-and-white body in yon Roman tub,” says W. C. Fields in My Little Chickadee. “I feel a bit gritty after the affairs of the day”), and in “the hard, gritty facts,” and in “true grit.”

  And in Grit magazine, which deals with fundamentals. Its March/April 2010 issue featured an article titled “Behold the Hoe! An ancient tool becomes the go-to item for any gardener.” A sidebar carried this quotation from Henry David Thoreau:

  I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.

  I am aware that “the shit” is hip for “the real thing,” but never in my life have I heard or read anything called shitty except something that was a poor excuse for whatever it was supposed to be. OED’s definition of nitty-gritty , though abstract, is palpably sound: “The most important aspects or practical details of a situation, subject, etc.; the harsh realities; the heart of the matter.” Scratching your head, digging in dirt, yanking on a wrench, you can get a feel for nitty-gritty.

  o · O · o

  The last sentence in OED’s lengthy discussion of the letter O’s development is this: “The fancy, frequent in authors of the 16th and 17th centuries, that the shape of the letter O represented the rounded shape of the mouth in forming the sound can be seen from the history of the letter to be without foundation in fact.”

  Oh, I don’t know. David Sacks, in Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z, which came out in the twenty-first century, writes: “O is the only letter whose name creates its shape, however imperfectly, on the speaker’s lips.” Sacks studied Greek and Latin at Oxford, and is also the author of Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World.

  And in its recounting of O’s history, the first thing OED, itself, says about the sound of O is: “From Greek times downward, this letter has regularly represented some variety or varieties of mid or low back vowel, usually rounded.”

  According to WIII, rounded in this sense means “produced with rounded lips, labialized,” and round means “to make (the lips) more or less round and protruded by lessening the distance between the corners of the mouth (as in the pronunciation of ü”), which is to say, oo. Which is two o’s.

  Coincidental? Maybe. The oldest ancestor of the O was a Semitic representation of the eye. It had a guttural sound, unspellable in English. The Greeks didn’t need that sound. They had a short-o sound, for which they chose the O sign, and called it omicron, or little o. They also had a long-o sound, for which they fashioned an O with a gap in the bottom and two big feet sticking out on the sides, and called it omega, or big O. “Just possibly,” Sacks says, the Greeks’ “marriage of shape O and sound ‘o’ was prompted by the letter’s shape, which suggested the shape of a speaker’s mouth saying ‘o.’”

  If you don’t believe that Sacks, how about Oliver Sacks? He wrote about a novelist who woke up unable to read (able still to write, but not to read anything including what he had written, because unable to recognize letters). According to Sacks, a certain area of the brain—damaged in the novelist’s case by a stroke—“appears exquisitely tuned to the act of reading,” that is to say, the act of recognizing and appreciating letters. But that area “could not have evolved specifically for this purpose,” because the human capacity for writing did not emerge until “little more than five thousand years ago—far too recently to have occurred through evolution by natural selection.”

  What researchers have found, writes Sacks, is that neurons dedicated to letter recognition have been “recruited” from parts of the brain that evolved eons earlier to serve the obviously essential purpose of object recognition. “The world of objects must be learned through experience and activity: looking, touching, handling, correlating the feel of objects with their appearance.” Researchers at Caltech who “examined more than a hundred ancient and modern writing systems” concluded that the shapes of letters “share certain topological similarities.” These researchers hypothesize that the shapes of letters, in all languages, “have been selected to resemble the conglomerations of contours found in natural scenes, thereby tapping into our already-existing object recognition mechanisms.”

  So.

  See arbitrary.

  oaf

  Originally this meant a child whose deformity was explained by its having been left by elves, in place of the real child. An elf-left child.

  OED and me

  Readers of Alphabet Juice may recall my disappointment at having leafed through the entire AHD and failed to find myself cited as a user of any word at all, even though I am a member of that dictionary’s Usage Panel. Well, I realized recently that a person can seek himself digitally. And oh, baby.

  I’ll have you know that I am among the online Oxford English Dictionary’s acknowledged users of thing. In connection with “any old thing,” colloquial U.S., but still. Words don’t get much more essential than thing.

  I am also to be found in the definition of psychopathology, more precisely, psychopathologist: “Don’t give any more interviews. Unless it’s to a licensed psychopathologist.”

  I pop up in portray (derivative: portrayable), and Panamanian, and the prefix over- (overmellow, shared with Tennyson), and outslick.

  The English language, I realize, is not all about me. But I can feel that my work has not been entirely in vain, knowing as I do now that I have provided a certified example, for the ages, of outslick. Along with Erle Stanley Gardner, the Pittsburgh
Courier, a book titled The Life, and Boxing Monthly, I have got your out slick covered.

  Then too I have a piece of nut (nut-cutting), and no more, and ’mongst. Indulge me a moment on ’mongst. When it comes to ’mongst, I am in there amongst such ’mongst users as Christopher Marlowe, Milton, and Mark Twain—and my ’mongst is the only ’mongst after 1907!

  I’m in on maid, too, not to mention mad (with Shakespeare for God’s sake and Noël Coward and Oliver Goldsmith and St. Thomas More), and Mace (the verb), and kiss and tell.

  And involve. “I was not horny or crazy enough to get involved with a Klanswoman even if I weren’t already in love … with a Maid of Orleans whose cause I believed in”—that brief passage, from my novel First Hubby, got me into maid, too. Two OED cites from one sentence!

  And fink, and feel-good, and affecting.

  Seventeen in all. I used these words, and they stuck. I’ll probably never catch Tennyson’s 4,739. All the same, I am deeply humbled. I want to thank the Decatur, Georgia, public school system, which so often required me, so many years ago, to “use each of the following words in a sentence.”

  off-off rhymes

  oodles/bloodless

  firefly/briefly

  mysterious/my serious

  sausage/assuage

  shapelier/Montpelier

  laundress/undress

  heartthrob/bathrobe

  ominous/nominees

  voodoo/video/voh-doh-de-oh-doh

  boat ramp/ boa tramp

  alumni/aluminum

  forebearing/furbearing

  knits/stink

  Off-off limerick:

  “Yes!” he affirmed, feeling bubbly,

  “That is, I mean to say, probably,

  Or possibly so.

  I wouldn’t say no.

  Which is not to say that I’m wobbly.”

  Ojibwa/Chippewa/Anishanabe

  European explorers spelled the name of this Native American tribe many different ways. Achipouá, Anchipawah, Cheppewes, Chiappawaws, Dshipowehága , Etchipoës, Gibbaways, Icbewas, Jibewas, Ochipay, Odgjiboweke, Ojeebois , Ojibaway (Lewis and Clark), Ojibua, Otchipoises (LaSalle), Otjibwek, Ouchipawah, Outchibouec, Shepawees, Tsipó, and Uchipweys are just a few.

  To the rapids near where the tribe lived, Frenchmen gave the name Sault Ste. Marie (sault being French for tumbling, leaping rapids), so another French name for the people was Saulters. English speakers mistranslated that into Jumpers or Leapers, and were no doubt disappointed when the Ojibwa didn’t leave the ground any more notably than anyone else. Champlain called them Cheveux-relevés, because they wore their hair up.

  Iroquois, on the other hand, called them Dwakanen, which sounded to Europeans like it should be spelled Doewogannas or variations thereof. Dakotas called them Lyohahanton(wan) , with lots of diacritical marks that I can’t find in my computer, meaning “those at the waterfall.” One English speaker rendered that as Hahatona, another as Ra-ra-to-oans. Other tribes called them Baawitigong, or Pouichtigouin, both of which meant “those at the rapids.” Or so I understand.

  The matter is still not entirely settled. In English, Chippewa took hold, and it still appears in dictionaries as an alternative, but in the mid-1800s Ojibwa or Ojibway began to be preferred, especially in Canada, as phonetically correct. Some contemporary members of the tribe—for instance, the activist Winona LaDuke, with whom I went wild-rice gathering in 1996 (see fox)—prefer Anishinabe, which means “original people.” OED uses Odjibewa.

  Mississippi is an Ojibwa word. It means “big river.” Chicago is said to come from an Ojibwa word meaning “at the skunk place” or “place of the bad smell.”

  English gets totem from an Ojibwa word, either nindoodem, “my totem,” according to AHD and OAD, or ototeman, “his totem,” according to WIII. RHU offers a more extended derivation that clarifies, somewhat, the discrepancy. OED points out that “Rev. P. Jones (a native Odjibewa)” in 1861 rendered it toodaim … , while the Abbé Thavenel “gives the simple form as ote, ‘the possessive of which is otem.’”

  The word chipmunk is from either the Ojibwa ajidamoon or the Chippewa atchitamon, meaning in either case “one who comes down trees headfirst.”

  Explorer: “I say, what is that little animal coming down the tree there? Chipper little fellow.”

  Local person (thinking, “As any fool can see”): “Ajidamoon.”

  Explorer: “I see. A chipmunk. Picked up the chip part right off, if I do say so. Not much resemblance to a monk. But I suppose, if you don’t look too close …”

  It used to be correct for English speakers to call Inuit people what the Ojibwa called them: Eskimo, meaning “eats it raw.” Inuit, in Inuit, means “the human beings.” The verb intuit, “to know intuitively,” from a Latin verb meaning “to look at,” has nothing to do with any of this.

  See ouistiti and knee.

  omen

  When a bald eagle, carrying a deer’s head, fails to clear a power line, causing a power outage and killing the eagle—what is the word for that?

  Not myth, allegory, or fable. This eagle story is different from Icarus flying too close to the sun, so that his artificial wings melt, or Hemingway’s Old Man, trying to get back to shore with a fish bigger than his boat.

  This eagle story is not fictional. It actually happened, in January 2007, in Juneau, Alaska. An explosion! Ten thousand people’s lights went out! A repair crew sped to the site! And there lay a deer’s head and a dead eagle.

  The eagle had evidently picked up the head from a nearby landfill. (Who throws away a deer’s head?) The eagle, said a spokesman for Alaska Electric Light and Power, “got ahold of a little bit more than he could handle.”

  An omen. (“Several etymologies of the Latin word have been suggested,” says OED, “none of which seems more likely than the others.”) Yes. But an omen of what?

  Clearly the eagle is America (the eagle in that song, “Let the Eagle Soar,” that John Ashcroft used to sing, remember him?), writing a check with its talons that its wings can’t cash. And the power outage is, well, loss of power.

  But what is the deer’s head, exactly?

  Before we decide what the deer’s head represents to us, let us consider what it represented to the eagle. Was the eagle going to eat that deer’s head? Or was he going to hang it on the wall of his eyrie?

  “This would have been a major score,” said the AEL&P spokesman, putting himself in the eagle’s shoes. “That eagle would have been the king eagle of the Lemon Creek group.”

  The eagle wasn’t flying too high, for horizon expansion’s sake, like Icarus. The eagle wasn’t trying to preserve a hard-earned product of his labor, like Hemingway’s fisherman. The eagle had found a trophy.

  A trophy that was too big for him. And when you get right down to it, a trophy that was trash. Presumably some human hunter, or more likely his spouse, had finally gotten it out of the house. Even if the eagle had managed to get home with it, the other eagles would have busted his chops:

  “Oh, a deer scrap. How long did you have to chase that deer before you threw him down and ripped his head off?”

  Not simply a trophy, then, but an oversize, cheesy trophy.

  The secret word must be hypertrophy, which means exaggerated, abnormal, generally unhealthy development or growth, as of an organ or an enterprise.

  Steroids … obesity … banking bubble … housing bubble … excessive CEO compensation … two wars at once lasting on and on and on …

  If the eagle came to warn us, it came too late. An after-omen.

  See metanarrative.

  onesies

  I was wondering, why does The New York Times have a “Thursday Styles” section? Do people in stylish circles dress in a particular way on Thursday? Indoor work clothes I guess, but if you don’t find out what to wear until the week is almost over … . Maybe it’s to prepare people for casual Fridays, but that’s not the impression I got, thumbing through it.

  If I had been reading on Nytimes.com,
I would not have ventured into “Thursday Styles.” And the phrase “funereal onesies” would not have jumped out at me. But I was reading in the actual newspaper, so there it was, “funereal onesies.” What in the hell. Was this some sort of reference to our all dying alone? In “Thursday Styles”?

  No, the story was about how “the skull motif” had taken hold in fashionable clothing. There was a photograph of a funereal onesie. (That’s how I assumed the singular would be spelled, much as I preferred onesy because it looked like an off-off rhyme with Jonesy.) A little black one-piece garment, a leotard, with snaps on the bottom. This onesie was emblazoned with a grinning skull wearing a black cap, and the words “The Misfits Fiend Club.”

  Setting aside the funereal aspect, I found onesie provocative. For one thing, it doesn’t look like English. But then one doesn’t look like it ought to be pronounced wun. One is from the same PIE root—oi or oi-no—as only and alone. Perhaps there’s an inkling of w there—in French oi is pronounced wa (with singular intimacy in moi and toi), and Chambers cites an extension, oi-wo-s, as the ancestor of certain other languages’ versions of one. But that’s a stretch.