“When I saw it was a snake’s head I just threw it down and called my kids and said I got a snake head in the green beans, everybody said ‘oh Lord, you got a snake head in the green beans.’”
But that’s a rare case. Even great oratory can do with tightening, and sometimes popular history will oblige. When Winston Churchill told the House of Commons “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,” one word was redundant. It’s almost an SAT question: Which word in this series doesn’t fit? Hint: three of them are bodily fluids. You don’t need the other one anyway, it’s covered by sweat. And by the way, doesn’t sweat, the word, kind of lie there? Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good word, but is it a good word to place right there? Wouldn’t we get more—how shall I put it?—more loft, if we ended on tears?
rhythm
In Austin, Texas, Town Lake was renamed Lady Bird Lake, but nobody calls it that, even though Lady Bird Johnson is generally well regarded in Austin. The problem, I would submit, is that Lady Bird Lake, rhythmically, piles in on itself. Lake Lady Bird would have caught on.
robinhood
What the familiar red-breasted bird achieves fully upon leaving the nest. Compare eliotness, the quality that is so T. S., the essence of “The Waste Land.” And siouxcity, roughly the opposite of insouciance. Or how about this one: oklahomacity, the state of belonging to a land that is grand.
rumpsprung
WIII and AHD inexplicably ignore this thumping good word for something saggy. OAD’s definition is fine as far as it goes—“informal (of furniture), baggy and worn in the seat: a rumpsprung armchair.” But how called for is that “informal”? I daresay you wouldn’t use rumpsprung in announcing a Supreme Court decision, but what would you use instead? And rumpsprung may apply not just to furniture but also to trousers, a dress, or even a person (OED example: “‘In my opinion,’ Mrs. Neuberger told the reporters, ‘Vancouver women are rump-sprung.’”)
The only attempt to define rump-sprung (the hyphen is optional but unnecessary so should be dropped, except in an attempt to fake a line of Gerard Manley Hopkins, see Introduction) on Urbandictionary.com is disappointing. If you were taking the time to contribute to a dictionary, for millions of people to read, wouldn’t you take care to avoid writing pertaing for pertaining and uphostry for upholstery? And by way of illustration, surely you would do better than this: “I can’t sit on the near end of the sofa, its rump-sprng to aunt Ethel’s ass”? What kind of lexicographer fails to notice that he has misspelled the very word he is defining? And that its should be it’s. And ending with just “to Aunt Ethel” would avoid redundancy. How much time would it take for people who write on the hyper-lickety-split Internet to stop and look at what they have written before they commit it to eternity?
s · S · s
I kept thinking that I had read somewhere that an enormous S had appeared somewhere—in the sky, in a cornfield as seen from the sky … ? At length I Googled “enormous s.” Presented with “about 18,100 items,” I had time for only thirty, which did not include whatever it was that I was trying to remember, but did include the following:
At myfamilydigest.net/holidays/news (cached), “Fourty [sic] Eight Ways to Hold Enormous s Time.” Beneath a photograph of an attractive and smiling young family, tips on making a special day even more special:
A Mother’s amorousness is one of the most effectual forces in this world. Here are 48 ways to celebrate her delight this Mother’s Day. Pick 1, 2 or besides ways to cause this Mother’s interval additional special.
1. Construct a Recall Basket. Fill the hamper with slips of paper, everyone detailing a recognition you, your siblings, and your Giant carry shared. Bestow her the basket and annex all of the family members sitting approximately her as she reads each mind slip …
3. I enjoy been called a “Guy’s Guy,” on the contrary I thirst for you to ante up Mom a tea party. Invite family as great as friends who are rapid to your Mom. Prepare some super-sweetened iced tea or flavoured broiling tea and serve my world-famous, not to be missed, will-make-you-toes-curl-they-are-so-good tea sandwiches (see my method below) and cookies. By the way, I don’t presume in those in fact little tea sandwiches. You’ll beam my trimming directions below …
4. Create Mom famous. Dossier you and the rest of the family and friends saying what they enjoy approximately Mom …
5. Booty Mom outside to the mall for some shopping.
And so on.
At vido4viet.com, a video, “Miss Diva Bbw With Enormous S,” which had been “removed by the user.”
At ncbi.nim.nih.gov: “Although, in both the stool and sputum direct smears of the patient, enormous S. stercoralis larvae were present, and no eosinophilia was found … .”
At Stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine, a story about advances made possible by the Global Positioning System. Stanford professor Brad Parkinson is “a guiding force” among researchers who “are perfecting a way to find anything, anytime, anywhere on the planet.”
So it happened that anyone flying over a patch of farmland in central California two summers ago could have seen a perfectly formed, enormous S carved into the field. A team of Parkinson’s graduate students had demonstrated that a driverless John Deere tractor, equipped with a GPS receiver linked to an automatic control system, could plow a field even in darkness or fog and achieve accuracy to within a few centimeters. In just 40 minutes, the tractor steadily plowed through John Deere’s half-mile-square experimental field, executing perfect turns and reverses guided by a computer program.
At The New York Times’s web archive, “Topics of the Times,” September 3, 1913:
Precisely what was done on Monday by the French aviator PEGOUD is not made unquestionable by the dispatches now at hand. By some of them, and the more detailed, he is said to have traversed from above downward the course of an enormous “S,” while others say that he made a complete vertical loop, more like the letter “O.”
The former feat, since it involves two perpendicular descents instead of one, would seemingly be the more difficult and perilous, but that, in the case of men like these, does not, perhaps, render it certain, or even highly probable, that the simpler exploit is the one that was performed. In either case there would be involved the amazing achievement of flying for a time with the aeroplane overturned and the occupant hanging from instead of resting on it.
And so on. Will wonders never cease?
-sh, sh-
Would people relish saying “when push comes to shove” so much if push and shove didn’t mesh so well? It’s a juicy, in fact mouthwatering sound, sh, however spelled: delicious, lush, luscious, sensuous. A long soft comforting shhhh is something a mother says to soothe an unhappy baby. It’s also a sound that can suggest pushing too far: lubricious, licentious, salacious, mush. Does the use of lush to mean a drunk derive in part from the convention that people in their cups say shay instead of say? It’s not a sound one wants to hear too much of. Sh’boom is good, and so is whoosh, but recently some friends and I listened to a jazz trio whose drummer brushed his high-hat cymbals so insistently he overshadowed the piano and the sax. Our table was tempted to try shushing him, but that would have compounded the problem.
See juice.
shrapnel
For Henry Shrapnel, who invented the “case-shot shell,” which exploded on impact and scattered deadly bits of metal through the air. Shr- as in shreds, shriek. The man’s name was rippingly appropriate for what he wrought. If he had been named Witticomb or Perkins (“torn apart by perkins”?), or had invented the birdbath instead, he’d not be remembered today.
As to contemporary shrapnel, see The Good Soldiers by David Finkel, who was embedded with U.S. soldiers in Iraq. One morning as Captain Al Walsh slept, a mortar shell landed outside his door:
In came a piece of shrapnel, moving so swiftly that before he could wake up and take cover, it had sliced through his wooden door, sliced through the metal frame of his bed, sliced through a 280-page book called Learni
ng to Eat Soup with a Knife, sliced through a 272-page book called Buddhism Is Not What You Think, sliced through a 128-page book called On Guerrilla Warfare, sliced through a 360-page book called Tactics of the Crescent Moon, sliced through a 176-page Calvin and Hobbes collection, sliced through the rear of a metal cabinet holding those books, and finally was stopped by a concrete wall. And the only reason that Walsh wasn’t sliced was that he happened in that moment to be sleeping on his side rather than on his stomach or back, as he usually did, which meant that the shrapnel passed cleanly through the spot where his head usually rested, missing him by an inch. Dazed, ears ringing, unsure of what had just happened, and spotted with a little blood from being nicked by the exploding metal fragments of the ruined bed frame, he stumbled out to the smoking courtyard and said to another soldier,
“Is anything sticking out of my head?” And the answer, thank whatever, was no.
See smithereens.
sic
Here’s a good reason to use words right: you don’t want a [sic] put on you. According to an item published in 2010 in the New York Post, a prison inmate in Florida sued a girlie magazine for failing to respond when he wrote to ask how he could go about ordering a copy of the April 2007 issue, featuring a nude pictorial of burlesque star Dita Von Teese. The people who put out the magazine, he alleged, had violated his constitutional rights by denying him “access to the media.” The bottom line, he claimed, was this: the staffers “are being prejudice [sic]” against him as a prisoner. The [sic] was the newspaper’s. It’s bad enough to be locked up, but when the New York Post can tell you’ve used a word wrong, it’s the [sic] of death.
sigh
Isn’t this a funny-looking word? I suppose advocates of simplified spelling would change it to, what, si, sie, sye? OED says it’s a back-formation from sihte, the past tense of siche, “through the guttural having more phonetic appropriateness than the palatal sound.” A dialect form was siff. Siche meant to sigh, but it was pronounced, I take it, more or less to rhyme with hitch, the palatal ch sound formed by the tongue pressed against the hard palate. Sike, a variant of siche, was even less sigh-sounding. Sithe was a little better (and the dialect siff much better), but not quite right. So the word moved to the glottis, the back of the throat, where the gh resonated as something like the ch in German ach. That soft ch does have a sighingness about it, but modern English pronunciation took out the c and retained a breath of h, and there you had sigh.
A similar evolution produced modern-day high, which Dr. Johnson defined as “long upwards.” You don’t want such a significant signifier to end up caught in the back of your throat, as in the Old Frisian hâch or hâg; so people in the fourteenth century (if I may speak for them) started pulling its pronunciation up out of the guttural and spelling it more or less phonetically: he, hee, hey, hi, hii, hie, and hye. None of which looked quite rootsy enough, I guess, so the -gh survived.
And a good thing, too. That ghostly postguttural -gh in both sigh and high contributes depth. In college I wrote a paper about the sighs in Shakespeare. The research got so fraught in the middle of the night (you’ll notice there’s a gh in fraught, and another one just past the middle of night, along about, say, three thirty a.m.) that I would have switched to another topic if the paper had not been due in the morning. Lady Macbeth sighs a sigh that causes her doctor to exclaim, “What a sigh is there! The heart is sorely charged.” Ross tells Macduff that things have got so bad in Scotland that “sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rent the air” go unremarked upon. Ophelia tells her father that Hamlet came out with “a sigh so piteous and profound /As it did seem to shatter all his bulk / And end his being.” The king for his part hears reports of Hamlet’s raving and reflects, “There’s matter in these sighs, these profound heaves.” Therefore, he explains to Laertes, putting something off (something like, say, killing Hamlet) is a bad idea:
That we would do,
We should do when we would; for this “would” changes
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
And then this “should” is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing.
Spendthrift sigh alludes to the common belief in Shakespeare’s day that every sigh shortens life by depriving the heart of a drop of blood. After the king goes on in that woulda-shoulda-coulda vein for a bit longer, he prods Laertes directly. What would Laertes be up to, if he could get at his father’s killer? Laertes’ one-line response is no sigh: “To cut his throat i’ the church.”
See gikl.
since
After this, I hope we will all avoid the logical fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc, which is Latin for “after this, therefore because of this.” As in, “I told you and told you not to go outdoors without your galoshes, but you didn’t listen, and now look, you’ve got hypoglycemia.”
But it’s a seductive fallacy. We want a sequence to be consequential. The early forms of the adverb since—sithenes, syns, synnes—meant only “afterward, later,” as in “He went out to get some mustard sardines and hasn’t been heard from since.” And the conjunction in the same forms meant only “after the time that,” as in “since my baby left me.” But after all, is it merely after your baby left you, or because your baby left you, that you’ve been living down on the corner of Lonely Street? Around 1450, according to Chambers, synnes came to mean not only after but also because.
The second episode of The West Wing was titled “Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc.” President Bartlet confides in his trusted father-figure doctor his doubts that he is willing enough, as president, to visit violence on anyone, even the nation’s enemies. Another matter comes up, and he gives his aides a little lecture about not falling into the fallacy of the title. Then he learns that the doctor has been killed in a plane blown up by terrorists, and he vows to wreak vengeance. Post Doc, or propter Doc?
slave
One night in a noisy sing-along Oxford, England, pub, many years ago when I was even stupider, it struck me as odd that “Rule, Britannia” includes the line “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.” Struck me, more specifically, as, I don’t know, kind of imperiopathetic. And I started singing things like “Britons never, never, never shall be tiedupandforcedtospeak-Frenchwiththeirpantsaroundtheirankles,” until my American friends, fortunately, told me to for God’s sake shut up.
Now I come to find out that around 850, when Danish settlers were moving into British territory and dominating the resident Celts and Anglo-Saxons, the Old English word Wealh, which was Germanic speakers’ term for a Briton (and whose traces survive in Wales, Wallace, and Cornwall), began to be used to mean serf or slave. So what “Rule, Britannia” is driving at is that our friends the Brits never never never shall be slaves again. Certainly they were not going to embrace, permanently, a word that meant both slaves and them. Around 1300, English borrowed sclave, meaning servant or slave, from Old French esclave, from Medieval Latin Sclavus, slave, from Slav.
Slav was Slavic-speaking people’s word for one of themselves. It was related to their words for “glory,” “fame,” and “word” or “talk”; in effect they were calling themselves, honorifically, “people who understand each other,” as opposed to foreigners, nemci, “mumbling, murmuring people.” Then the mumblers conquered the Slavs and turned so many of them into wholly owned workers that Slav came to mean slave. The Latin and the French versions derived from that. The English version evolved back toward the original.
As you may imagine, words for slave in Slavic languages do not sound anything like Slav. The Russian word, for example, is pronounced roughly rahb. It comes from the Old Slavic rabu, slave. The Czech robota, drudgery, and robotnik, slave, gave us our robot, which was popularized by Karel apek’s 1920 play, R.U.R. (the initials, at least in translation, stand for Rossum’s Universal Robots). The ultimate root is the PIE orbh-, whence English derives orphan.
It is insensitive to call an individua
l who lived in slavery, a slave. A more granular as well as a politically more correct way to refer to Sally Hemings, for instance, is as “an enslaved person.”
On the other hand, people who say ciao on parting are using a short form of the Italian sono vostro schiavo, which means, literally, “I am your slave.”
slaver/slobber
You might think that slaver (the one that means drool and rhymes with cadaver, as opposed to the one that means a person or ship involved in slave traffic and rhymes with graver) is simply a lah-di-dah form of slobber, or that it somehow derives from saliva.
But according to etymologists, the two words grew up more or less independently. Slaver is deemed akin to Norwegian slabbe, to slop, eat noisily; English dialect slabba, to roll in mud; Old Norse slafast, to droop or slacken; Lithuanian slõbti, to grow weak. Slobber’s relatives include Low German slubbern, to sip, lap, and sluf, loose, slack, tired; Old Norse lüfa, thick hair (no relation to loofah); Middle Dutch lobbe, thick underlip; Lithuanian slubnas, slack, tired, drooping; Frisian slobberje, to slurp; and, my favorite, Middle Dutch overslubberen, to wade through a ditch.
Saliva is from Latin. Before that, nobody knows, nor gives a spit. Saliva has no family; it isn’t sonicky.
Alphabetter Juice Page 23