One of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s pet peeves was “that vile and barbarous vocable talented.” We might suspect that Coleridge had been called “talented” by a reviewer, as in “This quite talented writer has produced a book in no wise worthy of this critic’s willingness to consider him quite talented.” But Coleridge’s objection was grammatical: “The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse.” OED cites this cavil as an example of “groundless objections … by writers ignorant of the history of the language.” Ooh, snap. You may be a poet, but that don’t mean you know whereof the language. (Or even if you are a lexicographer of sorts—the other example of history-of-the-language ignorance that OED cites, under -ed, suffix2, is Dr. Johnson’s disapproval of cultured.)
Heck of a poet, Coleridge. Today we may find “five miles meandering in a mazy motion” too blatantly sonicky. But do we think we are likely to write anything that will last as long as “a sadder and a wiser man, / He rose the morrow morn”? Or “water, water everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink”? (Granted that everyone misremembers those lines as “but not a drop” and “sadder but wiser man.”)
No ray of sunshine was the man Coleridge, though. On hearing Wordsworth’s poem about a rainbow, he went home and wrote “Dejection: An Ode.” How would you like to wake up feeling chipper and, I don’t know, maybe even talented—cultured, too—and you go out walking along, whistling, and here comes Coleridge to inform you that your felicity is “very peculiar.” Coleridge sought felicity in laudanum, tincture of opium in alcohol. (Paracelsus, who gets credit for originating laudanum, claimed that his version also included gold leaf and unperforated pearls—ground up, I guess—but come on.)
Talk about pet peeves, if you are a big Coleridge fan you probably say “That son of a—” whenever you hear any reference to anybody from the town of Porlock. Coleridge, by his account, awoke one morn from an opiated dream in which he had envisioned a fantastical “pleasure-dome” built in Xanadu by Kubla Khan. With a whole bedazzling poem pulsating in his head, he had managed to write down only a wondrous fragment when, wouldn’t you know, “a person on business from Porlock” interrupted. By the time that person was gone, so was the rest of the poem.
Now you and I, if we had something that hot going, would have said “Shove off, Porlock person”—or maybe we wouldn’t have. Think about it. It’s a burden to have something visionary, or let’s say conceivably visionary, or visionary so far, to get off your chest and onto paper (or screen), for the ages. Once I e-mailed my friend Kathi Kamen Goldmark the lyrics for what would have been—okay, again, conceivably—the first stanza and chorus of an all-time great country song, “A Sadder Budweiser Man.” When she came to put those lyrics to music, she had lost them, and so had I.
It was Coleridge who first came up with the phrase “willing suspension of belief.” So let’s—no, let’s not give him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s look at Porlock. I’m not saying Coleridge made up the village; it is real enough, to this day, and very near to Nether Stowey, where Coleridge was living at the time. Nether Stowey may suggest something subconsciously tucked away. Another neighboring village, Minehead, may evoke excavation of the brain (or dome). But Porlock! A blend of poor and block. I’m saying Coleridge made up the person, and provenanced him, so to speak, from Porlock.
Look at the last bit of what Coleridge eventually published, titled “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream.” In the lines that Coleridge was professedly pouring out when the alleged Porlockian came knocking, the poet has quick-cut from his pleasure-dome vision itself to something he has already forgotten: a song, played by a damsel on a dulcimer, which, if only the poet could recall it, he would be filled with such “deep delight” that he could build a pleasure-dome of his own:
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
That’s pretty damn good. And if it’s not a picture of peculiar felicity, I don’t know what is. And it leaves the poet crazed and unfit for human company. Also unfit, quite imaginably, to imagine anything next. The job of the wonder-working writer, wrote Coleridge, is to “trace the nice boundaries, beyond which terror and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions—to reach those limits, yet never to pass them.” Oh, some person from somewhere (presumably not the poet’s opium connection) may have interposed himself as Coleridge was reeling at the brink, but I’m saying Coleridge wasn’t so much interrupted, as stuck. And his visitor got him off the hook.
Snuck, by the way, is “orig. and chiefly U.S.,” says OED. WIII says it’s “chiefly dialect,” which I suppose comes to the same thing. I like it. It sounds quicker and also more underhanded than sneaked.
pet, peevish
Recently a mailing from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals put this question to me: “Would your pet like to become a blood donor?” In case my pet would, the mailing provided a number in Boston to call.
“Snowpaw, would you like to become a blood donor?”
“Rrrrr.”
“Okay. I’m just asking, because—”
“Rrrrr.”
See R.
ping-pong
The “sound imitation” origin of this word “is not in doubt,” writes Anatoly Liberman in Word Origins, and How We Know Them. Well, sure. But gnipgnop , which is what I called it when I was thirteen and played it a lot, is better. And you know the sound of a loose ping-pong ball bouncing on a floor, wild and free and derisively eluding its pursuer—pingk … pingk … pingk … pink, ping-pingpingpng—and then rolling, more and more slowly, with the inimitable, unwritable noise made only by a rolling ping-pong ball? Why does it fall to me, a print person, straining every literary fiber, to memorialize that sound? Why hasn’t it been used in a movie?
Not to mention the sound of an empty tennis-ball can rolling, wonkily, zephyr-blown, across an asphalt court.
plank
This word is believed to derive from the Latin plancus, flat. Okay, but plank also evokes the sound of a plank planked down onto another long flat board. Plunk, as in “‘Quit plunking that damn cello,’ I tells him, so he plunks the clunky thing in my lap,” is in either sense “probably of imitative origin,” says Chambers. You can use plank to mean plunk in the second sense, but not in the first, perhaps because plank sounds off-key. If you plink something, it is probably a piano key, at the high end.
The thicker a plank is, the more the sound of a plank planked onto another is like blonk.
Pluck, meaning pick, without the resonant n of plunk, may, or may not, come from Latin piluccare, to remove hair from.
Strum is sonicky and that’s that. And so is twang.
Pick comes from various Germanic roots involving pricking and pecking. It occurs to me that pick is a term widely applied in sports. In basketball (but not, legally, in football), you set a pick, screening away your teammate’s defender. In baseball you pick off a runner (perhaps first catching him in a pickle); and you may “pick something up” in a pitcher’s delivery that reveals what he is about to throw; and if you are a snazzy infielder, you are said to “really pick it.” In football, you pick apart a defense, and to pick off a pass is to intercept it—so interceptions are called picks. In bullfighting, which some deem a sport, there is the picador, who pokes a lance into the bull’s neck muscles so he will keep his head down. In various sports, teams acquire draft picks, and when some players are in a slump, their teammates, ideally, pick them up by perhaps outdoing themselves. In betting on sports, you try to pick winners. I remember Bill Leggett of Sports Illustrated (at a time when people displayed less sensitivity in ethnic references) criticizing his own
record in the office football pool as follows: “I couldn’t pick my father out of a boatload of Chinamen.”
poop-noddy, noddypoop
Don’t confuse ’em. According to OED, poop-noddy is a rare seventeenth-century term—still not quite obsolete—for sexual intercourse. It is obsolete as a synonym for nincompoop. For that you need noddypoop. “Apparently,” muses OED, noddypoop is formed from noddy plus “a second element of uncertain origin. Perhaps compare POOP.”
Someday, perhaps, in a last-ditch appeal to younger readers, we will take up poop. (According to Anatoly Liberman, every meaning of poop is “slangy” except for poop as in poop deck, and that one probably derives from Latin slang, and furthermore, “The origin of all poops but one is unknown; poop ‘[to make] an abrupt sound’ is an indelicate onomatopoeia.”) For now I am content to report that noddy is another word for fool or simpleton.
Another noddy, modern-day but perhaps not entirely unrelated to the other noddy, is a feature of a filmed or videotaped interview. OED defines that noddy (also called noddy shot) as “a brief shot of the interviewer (or interviewee) appearing to be listening or nodding in agreement, usually recorded after the main interview and edited to form part of it; the action captured by such a shot.”
You love television, don’t you? You “trust” television, sort of—no, of course you don’t believe it, but you let it take you by the eyes. And television pulls shit like that on you. Showing someone nodding at nothing, as if—you know, there is something significant about a nod of agreement—as if that person were nodding at something. I’m trying to think whether print pulls anything like that on you. No denying print pulls things on you, I’m just saying I don’t think print … . Maybe I can’t think of whatever it is that print pulls, any more than a tropical fish is aware of the charm of— whatever its charms are. Personally, I have never been charmed by tropical fish—oh, maybe the print equiv of a noddy is what I’m doing right now, writing and rewriting these sentences in an attempt to sound like I’m talking. But here’s a difference between TV journalism and print: if there were such a thing as a noddy in print, print would not have a name for it. Print has names, which it seldom shares with its audience, for the fatuous rituals it covers—“grip and grin,” for photos of politicians shaking hands with thereby distinguished constituents, but of course that’s a fatuous photo ritual. Print journalism traffics in clichés, to be sure, but more ingenuously, for what that may be worth, than TV resorts to noddies.
portmanteau
By way of edifying Alice, Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty explains a word in Carroll’s great nonsense poem Jabberwocky as follows: “Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ … You see it’s like a portmanteau, there are two meanings packed up into one word.” A portmanteau being a piece of luggage that opens into two halves. Portmanteaus not coined by Carroll include smog, motel, brunch, transistor (transfer/resistor), Brangelina, wholphin (cross between a dolphin and a false killer whale, whatever that is—seems like ocean survival would favor, if anything, a false vegetarian whale), scratch (see itch), and Spanglish.
Carroll’s portmanteaus are not so simply folded. His chortle, which has had legs, is the backside of snort replacing the middle of chuckle. Here is how he unpacks another bit of Jabberwocky: “Take the two words fuming and furious. Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … If you have that rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say frumious.” But that is whimsy. The most firmly packed portmanteaus capture physical acts or phenomena. Seeing someone give herself a twist and begin to swirl, the language comes up (pushing aside the existing but inadequate tirl) with twirl.
Refudiate, the portmanteau issued twice publicly in 2010 by Alaska’s abdicated governor, Sarah Palin, seems unlikely to travel well, for when her apparent notion that refudiate was already a word was refuted, she in effect repudiated refudiate by changing it to refute and then to regret.
“Shakespeare liked to coin new words too,” Palin tweeted. To be sure Shakespeare is credited with writing a great many words for the first time, but most of these were adoptions and adaptations. For instance alligator, spelled allegater, first appears in the First Folio edition of Romeo and Juliet , but it had been in print as alligarta or alligarto (from the Spanish el lagarto, the lizard) for nearly half a century. He is credited with dawn, but dawning had been around for centuries; with bandit, but he wrote bandetto , borrowed from Italian. He was the first to write leapfrog, but probably boys were playing it already. He inventively turned cake into a verb, as in caked in blood, but the noun had long been established. By and large the words Shakespeare made up from scratch (for instance directitude, a servant’s apparent attempt, in Coriolanus, at a high-flown synonym for discredit) were comical characters’ blunders. The closest thing to a portmanteau I can find in lists of Shakespeare’s coinages is bubukles, coined by Fluellen, the staunch but ill-spoken Welshman in Henry V. A nineteenth-century scholar traced bubukles to the French bube, a blotch or sore, and buccal, from the Latin for cheek; OED calls it “a confusion of bubo and carbuncle.”
Speaking of packing, here is a definition of unpack, from Urbandictionary.com, that might have been composed by a cross between Humpty Dumpty and Alice herself. (Except that “Sunlight,” the definition’s author, would seem to have paid regrettably less attention to English teachers—note auther and had shook—than either of those characters):
UNPACK
verb. A tedious activity invented by English teachers. The meaning of every word in a sentence must be explained with an entirely new sentence or paragraph.
The sentence: “Mrs. Goodwater nodded, held up her hands, and there was silence.”
Unpacked becomes: “Well, the auther calls her Mrs. Goodwater and not Clara to emphasize her position of authority over the audience. The fact that she nodded implies a positive emotional impact, rather than if she had shook her head or frowned, which would have been negative. This explains that she is on friendly terms with the audience. Since the audience was not living in fear of her authority, they were not quiet immediately. Therefore she also had to hold up her hands, which means she was on the verge of becoming exasperated, and which is also an example of the author’s use of alliteration. But when she did that the audience became silent. Since the author used ‘silent’ instead of ‘quiet,’ or ‘softer,’ it shows that he meant every person had stopped talking and they all had their attention on Mrs. Goodwater.”
That’s why I read books, not English papers.
See chimera.
preemptive
From the Latin meaning literally to prepurchase. The empt- is as in caveat emptor. When the Bush administration prepared to make a preemptive attack on Iraq, Colin Powell was quoted as cautioning, “You break it, you bought it.”
prescient
Odd quote from Frank Rich used as a blurb on The Next Attack by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon: “The Next Attack is prescient to a scary degree.”
You can say something was prescient. You can say someone’s work has been prescient. But can you say something is prescient? Only if you are being prescient yourself.
See hunch.
prick
Did you know that prick in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, according to OED, was “a term of endearment for a man: darling, sweetheart”? From a colloquy by Erasmus as translated in 1671: “Ah, ha! are we not alone, my prick? … Let us go together into my inner bed-chamber.”
(This is not Erasmus speaking to himself, so to speak. It’s a likable strumpet , Lucretia, addressing a friend and former customer, Sophronius, who, having reformed himself, proceeds to talk her into leaving off her lewd ways. In another translation she calls him “cocky.” I always wanted to read me some Erasmus. I’m going to find a good modern translation.)
The sixteenth century was also when prick turned up in print meaning, quite frankly, the penis. In 1555, an anonymous author described a prime tactic of highway robbe
rs as follows: “The first precept thereof is to be as secret in working, as he that keeps a man company from London to Maidenhead and makes good cheer along the way, to this end in the thicket: to turn his prick upward, and cast a weavers knot on both his thumbs behind him.” (I have modernized the spelling. Don’t ask me what dastardly form of apparent bondage is being described. I’m not even entirely sure whose prick is alluded to.)
Not until 1598 did prick appear in print as an insult, and then it connoted pert, saucy near sissiness: “A pillicock, a primcock, a prick, a prettie lad, a gull, a noddie.” Only by 1927 does OED find prick clearly meaning a mean, overbearing male. John O’Hara (who by all accounts could certainly be one): “I’ll need you to … keep me from getting to be too much of a prick.”
See A.
prior to
There is no need for this phrase. It reeks of soulless organization. Before is what people say.
proposal, wording of, proper
According to J. B. Morton (Beachcomber), “A man who says, during courtship, ‘Will you be mine?’ is a potential tyrant. If, however, he says, ‘Will I be yours?’ he is inviting the girl to be a tyrant. The ideal proposal is, ‘Let us be ours.’”
See fancy.
pshaw
Some authorities say this is pronounced shaw—the p would be silent, then, as in swimming. But OED puts a “(p)” in there. An option, then, or a wispy p. I like the p myself, the idea of it, but am constrained to admit I never say “pshaw!” one way or the other. Does anyone anymore? OED quotes this from Vibe in 1992: “James Brown: the Godfather of Soul? Pshaw! He’s the Godfather of Modern Culture.” You never know where James Brown is going to pop up. (I know pop is too faint a word.)
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