OED cites the intransitive verb pshaw in a 1991 Michael Dibdin novel: “I pshawed. You don’t often get a chance to pshaw these days, and I made the most of it.” The transitive form turns up even more recently, in The Nation, 2005: “Johnson had always pshawed the notion that his fights were blows against the white empire on behalf of the beleaguered Black man.” That would be Jack Johnson. He pshawed? I always think of pshaw more in connection with, say, George Bernard Pshaw.
pu-
From this one PIE root, which is in effect pooh or phew or p-yew or phooey, reaction to a foul odor, we get putrid, pus, purulent, suppurate, foul, filth, and maybe puke. So this entry is a fitting lead-in to the next one.
(And see well and ew.)
puffery
Moody’s Investors Service rates the investment-worthiness of government and commercial entities based, supposedly, on rigorous and reliable research. Jonathan Weil on Bloomberg.com pointed out that in its 2005 annual report, Moody’s proclaimed: “Independence. Performance. Transparency … are the watchwords by which stakeholders judge Moody’s.” But when Moody’s was taken to court for having given its highest ratings to toxic investments, the company asserted that “generalizations regarding integrity, independence and risk management amount to no more than puffery.”
Weil, a hardened observer of high (a word that may mean lofty or stoned or stinking) finance, was shocked that Moody’s would “characterize the principles it brought to the job of grading investments that wind up in the portfolios of retirement funds and money-market accounts” as puffery. “It would be like the pope revealing that his belief in God was just fluff.”
What does Moody’s mean by puffery? Weil asked a Moody’s PR man, Anthony Mirenda. Mirenda replied, “Our legal team’s use of that term does not suggest that these statements are in any way false and does not in any way diminish Moody’s long-standing commitment to the integrity and independence of our ratings.” When Weil asked Mirenda whether the statement Mirenda had just made was puffery, he said, “No, that statement was not puffery.”
Piffle. How can people at Moody’s hold up their heads?
pun
Some people actually hate puns. William Shawn, the near-godlike editor of The New Yorker, was one. Dan Menaker, in his book A Good Talk, says that even though he was well aware of this aversion, he couldn’t resist ending a Talk of the Town item with a pun. Mr. Shawn took it out. Menaker put it back in. Mr. Shawn called Menaker into his office and said, “I think you must not understand that to use this pun would destroy the magazine.”
Menaker’s item was about how people were getting around Manhattan during a transit strike. One man’s answer was, “Diesel.” Pointing to his feet, he explained: “Diesel get me anywhere.”
What I hate is having no occasion to use puns that have come to me out of the blue. For instance:
“Does your husband know his way around a dance floor?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s managed to avoid one for thirty-five years.”
The Algonquin Round Table, a group of dedicated, highly competitive witticizers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel in New York in the 1920s, tried to outdo each other in a game of punning on unlikely words. For instance, Dorothy Parker was given the word horticulture. She had to use it in a sentence within ten seconds. “You can lead a horticulture,” she said, “but you can’t make her think.” Alexander Woollcott came up with “Demosthenes can do is bend, and hold the legs together.” I wonder if you’d like to hear my pun on indefensible:
He doesn’t have much sense, a bull,
And he is mean and immense, a bull,
And jealousy makes him intense, a bull,
And I will tell you all right now,
If he spies you milking his favorite cow,
He’ll tear a hole indefensible.
Anyway, here’s a pun from a Cole Porter song, “Don’t Look at Me That Way,” which you may not be familiar with:
“My will is strong, but my won’t is weak.”
punctilious
Meticulous generally connotes commendable particularity (note the tic in both words); punctilious extends scrupulosity to “extremely or excessively particular or correct” (OED) lengths. I want to say the negative aspect of punctilious is reinforced by the echoes of punk and Tillie (George Kaufman in the Algonquin pun game said of sisters Lizzie and Tillie, “Lizzie is okay, but you have no idea how punctilious”), but neither of these suggests fussiness over details. According to the Jargon File at catb.org (whatever the hell that means), “Aunt Tillie” is “the archetypal nontechnical user, one’s elderly and scatterbrained maiden aunt. Invoked in discussions of usability for people who are not hackers and geeks, one sees references to the ‘Aunt Tillie test.’”
Punk has a long interesting history, from prostitute to Billy Idol, but at no point along the way has it been related to punctilious, which springs from the PIE root peuk- or peug-, to prick, from which we also get pugnacious, impugn, poignant, point, pounce, punctual, punctuate, puncture, pungent, and Pygmy. That last is from the Greek pugme, in ancient Greece a unit of measure representing the length from the average man’s elbow to his knuckles. It was hard to be punctilious about measurements back then, but the African tribesmen known as Pygmies were probably never that short.
At any rate, I applaud when The New York Times runs a punctilious correction like this one:
An obituary on Friday about the actor Fess Parker included several errors. Mr. Parker’s daughter is Ashley Parker Snider, not Parker-Snyder. Eddy Arnold—not Eddie—was the singer who recorded one of many versions of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” … And a line from that song should have read, “Raised in the woods so’s he knew ev’ry tree”—not “Raised in the woods so he knew every tree.”
puppy
According to Ben Schott in The New York Times, a Russian doctor named Marie de Manacéine “discovered,” in 1894, “that puppies died when kept awake for 4–6 days, or 96–144 hours.”
What kind of person—? And I’ll bet this so-called doctor complained: “One had constantly to keep poking the puppies, and poking the puppies, and addressing the puppies more and more sharply, and then when one needed a break, one’s assistant might be expected to take over—but Igor was not to be trusted. When my back was turned Igor would indulge the puppies in little catnaps (oops); and as I beat him for this, oh, the excuses [here she adopts a sarcastic version of a hunchback’s whine]: ‘The puppies whimper and yip! The puppies whimper and yip! And they blink those sleepy puppy eyes!’ This from a person with a penchant for suspending human subjects head-down over hot coals—but give him puppies to keep awake, and ‘Oh, oh, it’s tearing me up inside!’”
To be fair, the Russian word for puppy, as best I can determine, is pronounced something like sh’chenok. No excuse for Dr. de Menacing, but a puppy regarded as a sh’chenok may smell less sweet. And we cannot assume, even given Dr. de Maniac’s French name, that she was familiar with the evolution of Middle French poupée, doll, into English puppy, meaning toy dog for a while before it extended to young dogs. (French for puppy is chiot, more endearing than sh’chenok but far more chichi than puppy. The very sound of puppy is enough to make a normal person—one who is aware of how intensely puppies value sleep—want to go oo-wooby-wooby-wooby.)
The Old English word for a young dog was the drastically less whelp, which became whelp and lurked around for centuries. In 1682, Sir Thomas Browne wrote, “I kept an Eagle two years, which fed upon Kats, Kittlings, Whelps and Ratts.” As late as 1894 (while over in Russia Dr. Demoniac was jostling puppies to death), Rudyard Kipling employed the simile “mean as a collier’s whelp.” (Colliers, who made and sold charcoal, were “notorious for cheating,” according to Etymonline.com, so no wonder their puppies turned mean.) You wouldn’t say “cute as a collier’s whelp.” Whelp sounds like a backhanded slap. Puppy cropped up in the late sixteenth century. It has superseded whelp, and that is a good thing.
From the same Old French stock (a
nd farther back from Latin pupa meaning girl or doll), we get pupil, in the ocular sense, because of the tiny image of oneself one sees reflected in that dark spot in the middle of another person’s eye. The other pupil, student, is from back in that etymology somewhere; originally it meant orphan child or ward. Etymonline.com quotes Plato: “Self-knowledge can be obtained only by looking into the mind and virtue of the soul, which is the diviner part of a man, as we see our own image in another’s eye.” Now that I look at that, it’s not so clear. Is Plato saying we do have the power, in this limited sense, to see ourselves as others see us? Or that two people seeing eye to eye are each just seeing an image of himself or herself? (See each other.)
I don’t know whether we can see ourselves in puppies’ pupils, or vice versa. The next time I get hold of a puppy that will hold still long enough with its eyes open, I will look.
purl
A purling stream swirls, murmurs, and gurgles. Maybe an “imitative formation,” says OED grudgingly.
The other purl, to knit with inverted stitches, may be seen to bear a faint family resemblance—Chambers connects that purl to Middle English pirlying, revolving or twisting. But no bloodlines have been found.
q · Q · q
During World War I, the British and U.S. navies lured German submarines to their destruction by setting out “mystery ships,” which were camouflaged to look like half-sunk merchant vessels but in fact were seaworthy and armed. A submarine would close in for what looked like an easy kill and be surprised. These mystery ships were also called Q-boats. Why? OED says “probably arbitrary” or “perhaps” from “the initial letter of query,” or “probably after slightly earlier use of P-boat for a patrol boat.” Two probablies and a perhaps, and yet no hint of the explanation that strikes me as most likely. What were German submarines called? In German, Unterseeboots; in English, U-boats. Call me alphabet-obsessed, but don’t you think somebody said, “Troll with a Q, and a U is bound to follow”?
Q-tip
Did you think this would be in OED? I didn’t either. But it is. The Q, according to OED, is for quality. “The product was apparently invented in 1923 by Leo Gerstenzang, a Polish-born American, who initially named them Baby Gays.” Not that there was anything wrong, or particularly Polish, about that. “In 1926 the name was changed to Q-tips Baby Gays, and later shortened to Q-tips.”
questions not to ask an author, with answers
Q. How is your book coming?
A. Don’t know. Let’s hope.
Q. How is your book doing?
A. Don’t know. Let’s hope.
Q. Are you working on anything right now?
A. No, I’m being fed by whatever those birds are in the Bible that fed whoever that was.
Q. You can work anywhere, right?
A. Not here, for instance.
Q. What do you want people to take away from your book?
A. If I told people that, why would they buy it? My focus is on what I want to take away from my book: enough revenue to help keep me afloat while I’m figuring out some way to write another one.
Q. Do you write on a computer?
A. I hope in time to catch up with that technology. So far, I’m using a bloody finger on bathroom mirrors.
Q. What is your book about?
A. That must seem a reasonable question. It probably is a reasonable question. It makes me want to sob brokenly. I conceived the son of a bitch. I proposed the son of a bitch. My agent and I found a publisher for the son of a bitch. I wrote the son of a bitch. And rewrote the son of a bitch. And rewrote the son of a bitch again. And again. And read the son of a bitch printed out. And fiddled some more with the son of a bitch. And read the son of a bitch in galleys. And haggled with the copy editor—with pleasure, but still—over the son of a bitch. And read the son of a bitch again in corrected galleys. And survived the reviews of the son of a bitch. And presented the son of a bitch to forty-eight insanely various audiences. And now I have to sum up the son of a bitch? Let’s just say, you’ll love it.
Q. Don’t you love it?
A. William Faulkner handed the typescript of The Sound and the Fury to his editor and said, “It’s a real son of a bitch.”
See upaya.
quip
OED borders on acknowledging that this word, whose origin is unknown, has a sonicky element by saying “perhaps influenced by words of similiar ending,” like clip, nip, and whip, “which contain the idea of something sharp or cutting.” Sharp, cutting, and quick, I would say. A zinger, or particularly telling quip against someone, is certainly “echoic,” as OED says of zing.
I would urge journalists to eschew quipped as a verb meaning “observed, humorously,” as in (from The Wall Street Journal MarketWatch), “This next year, history may not repeat itself, but as Mark Twain quipped, it could rhyme.” Setting up a statement with quipped renders it less humorous, less clever; not more.
r · R · r
Nick Benson is a third-generation stone carver and calligrapher, who has designed letters and inscribed them in stone at the John F. Kennedy Memorial, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, the National World War II Memorial, and the National Gallery of Art. Asked whether he had a favorite letter, he replied:
“R is one of my favorite letters because it incorporates all the strokes of the alphabet. You have the vertical, the horizontal, the curved form, and the diagonal. That’s what we use often as a sample, test letter. It’s a good letter.”
R’s are yare. The verb are, by the way, became standard English in the sixteenth century, replacing the third-person-plural be, which survives in expressions like “the powers that be” and “Here be dragons.”
racism
When it came out that Supreme Court then nominee (now Justice) Sonia Sotomayor had once said, publicly, that “a wise Latina woman” would know more about certain matters than a white man would, Newt Gingrich—a white man—posted this Twitter message:
“White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”
Ugh. Sound like white man tweet with thumbs of movie Injun. If there is evidence that wise white men are discriminated against, it is that we see so few of them in positions of authority. Meanwhile foolish white men, in such positions, seem to be taking every opportunity to make statements even more foolish than might have been expected. Maybe foolish white men are determined to embarrass themselves, so they will be put out of power, so they can take offense at being made fun of. Except that voters who like foolish white men seem to love it when a foolish white man exceeds expectations.
rank
Over centuries, this word’s meaning has evolved from “strong, upright” to “offensively strong” or worse. Is it the influence of rancor and the first syllable of rancid, or is it just the sound? Rhymes with unpleasant words: stank, dank, crank, yank, spank, clank, sank, wank, lank, blank, prank, tank, skank, shank as in hitting a golf ball wrong, hank as in “hank of hair.” Of course so does thank, but the th- softens it?
recursion, excessive
This is the first sentence from a March 2010, newspaper item: “A federal appeals court has ruled that Anna Nicole Smith’s estate will get none of the more than $300 million the late Playboy model claimed a Texas billionaire to whom she was briefly married meant to leave her after he died.”
And this, from The Berkshire Eagle, is recursion gone astray: “The recognition that a simple blow to the head can lead to lifelong debilitating injury is spreading is good news.” Should begin “That the recognition”; then it would be just excessive.
And this, from The New York Times, is recursion run amok: “Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to let the disappointment of the second half of Mr. Salinger’s career—consisting of a long short story called ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’ that reads as though he allowed the pain of hostile criticism to blunt the edge of self-criticism that every good writer must possess, followed by 45 years of living like a hermit in the New Hampshire woods—to oversh
adow the achievements of the first half.” We are not going to win contemporary readers with sentences such as that. Sentences such as that don’t even justify our thinking it’s contemporary readers’ fault.
redundancy
From the Latin to reflood, to overflow (the und part plays a happier role in undulation). As Noah must have said to the Deluge after a week or so: enough already! Cut, cut, cut! To the quick, to the chase, to the bone! Maybe, these days, you do have to tell people what you’re going to tell them; tell them; and tell them what you told them. But those are three different things. “I’ll tell you what I mean by ‘Get on with it’: Get on with it; ‘G-E-T O-N W-I-T-H I-T.’”
Okay, sometimes redundancy works. After Ernestine Jamison of Houston, Texas, found a frozen snake’s head in a bag of frozen green beans she was about to thaw out for her family, she was quoted in news accounts as follows:
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