slip
“Of doubtful form and obscure origin,” humphs OED. Perhaps that humph is unfair, but I don’t know why OED uses doubtful in this way. It’s as if the word has no real claim to itself. “Mysterious form” would be more scientific.
OED suggests comparison to the Norwegian slip, slipa, meaning the slime on a fish, or German dialect schlipper, curdled milk. Does either of those references do justice to “Excuse me while I slip into something more comfortable”? Actually, in Hell’s Angels, Jean Harlow said, “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?,” which is pretty perky itself, but slip—thanks to movie lovers’ faulty, enhancing collective memory—adds a lot. Not to mention “slip into.”
“Put on” could be a sweater, over what she’s wearing. “Slip into” is a kinephonic (see sonicky) picture. If you’re wearing outerwear, a tweed skirt, say, you’re not going to be slipping into something without taking the skirt off and getting down to a silken level.
“Slipping around.” “Slip-sliding away.” “Slip the surly bonds of earth.”
slush
A good sonicky term for melting ice or snow, liquid mud, or soggy nonsense. But why slush fund? The OED quotes an 1839 source: “The sailors in the navy are allowed salt beef … From this provision, when cooked … nearly all the fat boils off; this is carefully skimmed … and put into empty beef or pork barrels.” Some of this slush was used to slush or slush down the masts, to keep them from drying out and snapping, and unsqueamish tars used some for flavoring, but the bulk was sold for use in oil lamps, “and the money so received is called the slush fund.” These proceeds went to buy treats or performance rewards for the crew. All aboveboard. But the sound of slush is—aptly—unpleasantly slippery. By 1884 slush fund was used to mean off-the-books money for the lining of pockets and the greasing—again, aptly—of palms.
Not until 2006 did OED recognize slush pile, “the unsolicited manuscripts submitted for consideration at a publishing house, magazine, etc., considered collectively,” originally an Americanism (going back at least as far as 1952) that had sloshed up in the Times Literary Supplement in 2004. As of November 2009, WIII still hadn’t got round to slush pile, although there were websites called SlushPile.net and Slushpilemag.com. Wikipedia (where the concept “slush pile” doesn’t apply) had posted a brief but adequate entry explaining the term. And Salon.com had published Patricia Chui’s account of her years as a publisher’s slush-pile reader. “I wish I could say,” Chui wrote, “that serving as a conduit between the publishing elite and the uncorrupted masses taught me valuable lessons in compassion and grace. Instead, it convinced me that the world is full of lunatics.” One submission she fielded was a collection of love poems whose author signed herself “Mrs. Jesus Christ.” On the other hand, one of the thousands of submissions that came in did get published by her firm. You are not a lunatic, probably. But if you are coming from out of the blue with a book proposal or manuscript, you’re better off sending it to agents. Libraries have agents’ addresses.
smithereens
Awfully satisfying to utter, this word, and let’s face it: so is the phrase “blown to bits.” Yet we may deplore moviemakers’ tendency to fall back on explosions.
Wouldn’t you think there would be an interesting story in this word? Wouldn’t you think this word would spread out in all directions? But it’s just from the Gaelic smidirín, a diminutive of another word that means small fragment. (Or else, cautions OED, smidirín is from smithereens.) No connection to any part of a smithy, or of anyone named Smith. No one, except me (hello?), seems to want to link smithereen to smidgen, which is perhaps from the unrelated Scottish smitch, a tiny amount. I would love to link smithereen to smith, as in blacksmith, and both of them to smite. But no.
snazzy
It’s a good word, eh? OED quotes a 1935 book titled Underworld & Prison Slang: “That’s a snazzy dressup you’ve got.” Chambers says “sometimes thought of as a blend of snappy and jazzy.” I don’t see why not. OED first picks jazzy up in the Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1915: “‘Blue’ Marion sat down and jazzed the jazziest streak of jazz ever.” Snappy meaning “neat and elegant; smart, ‘natty,’” popped up in Punch in 1881, in reference to a little boat.
See yare.
sneeze
According to Gary Clothier, Mr. Know-It-All columnist for the Newspaper Enterprise Assn., “The scientific name for sneezing is sternutation.” I don’t deny this; I just find it irritating. Sternutation is from the Latin, of course. Does science gain anything by calling sneezing sternutation? Does science think everyone will start giggling and blushing if it indulges in kinephonically evocative words of Germanic rather than Latin derivation?
“Some people sneeze when looking at a bright light, such as the sun, which is known as photic sneeze reflex,” Mr. Know-It-All goes on, “and some sneeze after eating a large meal. This oddity is called snatiation. Do you know that a person can’t sneeze while asleep?”
Interesting. According to a Wikipedia entry, snatiation is a portmanteau, as one might expect, of sneeze and satiation, coined by Dr. Judith G. Hall, a pediatrician (also a “dysmorphologist,” which would appear to be someone who studies birth defects). The same entry also calls snatiation a “backronym” standing for “Sneezing Non-controllably At a Time of Indulgence of the Appetite—a Trait Inherited and Ordained to be Named,” which is just silly. But the word backronym (another portmanteau) is worth a look. According to the Wikipedia entry for backronym, “Its earliest known citation in print is ‘bacronym’ in the November 1983 edition of The Washington Post monthly neologism contest (1983–2004): journalist Bob Levey quoted winning reader ‘Meredith G. Williams of Potomac’ defining it as the ‘same as an acronym, except that the words were chosen to fit the letters.’ Actual use of the word is found in texts since at least 1994.” The Wikipedia example of an acronym is quite right: radar, from “Radio Detection And Ranging.” Its example of a backronym is the U.S. Justice Department’s giving “their Amber Alert program the meaning ‘America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response, ’ although the term originally referred to Amber Hagerman, a 9-year old abducted and murdered in Texas in 1996.”
Thanks to Mr. Know-It-All I have learned some things that are not to be sneezed at. But calling yourself Mr. Know-It-All doesn’t entitle you to indulge in syntactical short circuits like “ … the sun, which is known as photic sneeze reflex.” Earlier in the same column, while answering a question about Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot who was captured by the Soviet Union, Mr. Know-It-All gives us this blatant dangling modifier: “After completing several successful flights, a surface-to-air missile brought him down in May 1960.”
Bill Watterson in his late, lamented Calvin and Hobbes comic strip once rendered a sneeze as “Kbthchh!”
so
It may seem unfair that in order to become globalized, Chinese people must learn English. How would you like to master from scratch all the uses of, say, the word so?
“So!”
“So what?”
“That is so you: ‘So what.’”
“No, no—so far as that goes …”
“It hasn’t gone so far, so far.”
“So? So far, so good.”
“So you say.”
“All the more so!”
“No. Just so-so.”
“You want everything to be just so.”
“So do you—just so you’re happy.”
“Not so.”
“Yeah, yeah, and so on, and so on …”
“So that’s it, then?”
“So long.”
“So soon?”
“In a minute or so.”
“Say it ain’t so.”
“You so-and-so.”
“So’s yer old man. So to speak.”
“I am so out of here.”
“So much for my hopes and dreams.”
“So … ?”
“‘So …’ what?”
“You are so … S
o say so!”
“I’ll miss you so!”
“Ah, so.”
“So help me!”
And so to bed.
Let those of us who were born into English be glad we are not required (so far) to master Chinese. My friend Marianne Swan lived for a year in China. To mean so-so, as in “not so hot,” the Chinese say “mama hoho,” which means, literally, “horsehorse tigertiger.” A Chinese person, knowing that Marianne had been fighting flulike symptoms, asked her how she felt. “Mama hoho,” said Marianne. Now you would think that a willingness to express one’s feelings in such outlandish terms would be meeting Chinese at least halfway. But she didn’t get the tone just right. So the Chinese person thought she was saying—who knows? At any rate, the Chinese person looked at her in stark bewilderment as she said “mama hoho” in every combination of tones she could muster. Eventually she gave up. By then she was feeling much worse than mama hoho anyhow.
It’s a good tipoff, by the way, that people are so goddamn backward that they actually do plan to shoot it out with the Antichrist, if in their scripturesque website utterances they put so ahead of God. So spake the so-called Hutaree, an extremist militia organization busted in Michigan for plotting to murder policemen, blow up their funeral, and start an anti-Antichrist revolution: “Hutaree will one day see its enemy and meet him on the battlefield if so God wills it.” You can hear Jahweh rumbling, “NO, NO, IT’S LIKE, ‘GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD THAT …’ NOT ‘SO GOD LOVED THE WORLD THAT.’ TIME TO FORSAKE THESE BUTTHEADS.”
See such.
sonicky
I won’t say I coined this word until it circulates more widely. As of August 18, 2010, it could boast 27,200 Google hits, but they are a mixed bag. Some of them refer to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s son, Icky. (What a nickname. Sort of like Little Ike, I guess, but it can’t have given the poor kid much of a swagger. Icky died of scarlet fever before he was four years old. Ike’s son John once told me, on short acquaintance, that his father was “a son of a bitch,” but surely Ike didn’t call his first son Icky because he was sickly.)
I did make sonicky up, for Alphabet Juice. I needed a word that combined sonic and kinesthetic. Maybe kinesonic or, to keep it Greek, kinephonic, would have sounded more nearly scientific, but I didn’t want to put on airs, and I thought sonicky had more kick to it. I needed a better word than onomatopoeic, echoic, or imitative to describe an intrinsic significant value that isn’t clearly onomatopoeic, as in snap, crackle, and pop, but does evoke meaning by a combination of its sound and its movement.
The value of a word, or even just a syllable. Consider ob-.
I forget in which city ob- came up. Sun Valley, Key West, Chapel Hill? At any rate, the audience was receptive as I held forth, as an author must, about Alphabet Juice. I told the Wilt Chamberlain story and the hoo-hoo story, and touched upon the issue of pig-noise verbalization. I emphasized my opposition to a tin-eared principle of theoretical linguistics: that the relation between words and their meaning is “arbitrary.”
That means skimpy might as well switch meanings with voluminous? Fuzzy with sleek? Gobble with spew? Any huckster, any animal caller, any lover, any poet, anybody knows better than that. The sounds of letters and the words they constitute, and the kinetics involved in their oral utterance, and the rhythms of their combinations, have inherent significant value. And words have roots, and words evolve, and some words substantiate their meanings better than others. To study language without considering these aspects of it is like studying forestry without considering trees. Or, okay, bark and leaves.
I was not talking about just quaint flamboyant words like flabbergasted or lickety-split. I was talking about common words whose physicality we take for granted.
Mouth the word through, I urged the audience. Note how it flows through your mouth. Then mouth the word thwart. And throttle. For that matter, mouth the word mouth. These words have what I call sonicky value. It was time to throw open the floor (interesting expression—you can’t throw the floor open, you can just throw open the floor) for questions.
Well, said someone, if words aren’t arbitrary, why can’t everyone understand every language? You can’t just look at, or mouth, the vast majority of words and tell what they mean. So surely most words are in fact arbitrary.
Arbitrary as in random? In that case how would they get attached to meaning? Arbitrary as in laid down by decree? What red-blooded language user would stand for that? Calling any word arbitrary is using the word arbitrary arbitrarily, to mean something like “less than self-evident.”
“But obviously,” I said, and here I quote myself directly, “a lot of words are without much in the way of sonicky value. For instance, obviously.”
That’s when ob- hit me. Obdurate. Obfuscate. Object. Oblate. Obliterate. Obnoxious. Obscure. Obsequious. Obstacle. Obstinate. Obstreperous. Obstruct. Obtrude. Obtuse. Gob. Blob. Cob. Snob. Stob. Bobble. Hobgoblin. Thingamabob. Plumb bob. Bobbing for apples. Don’t tell me there’s nothing sonicky about ob-; ob- is as obvious as the nose on your face. It sticks out like a knob.
I’m not saying some caveperson started to say ahhh and blocked it off (bobbed it, in fact) by pressing his blunt lips together and thought, “Hmm, that has value—might be used to evoke a kind of dull-thud-but-with-possibility-of-bounce element, as in ‘Well, it’s a job.’” We know that ob-is from the Latin preposition ob, meaning against, toward, before. I’m just saying ob- works in some physical way.
OED defines eighteen different bob’s, including an old verb meaning to strike with the fist or anything rounded or knobbed, “perhaps onomatopoeic, expressing the effect of a smart, but not very heavy blow”; and the current verb meaning “to move up and down like a buoyant body,” which OED says is “apparently onomatopoeic, expressing short jerking or rebounding motion.” Does either of those verbs actually make the sound of bob? The second one makes no sound at all. And yet we do—even austere OED does—pick up a sensuous connection: kinesthetic but somehow mixed with sound. The way the body forms the sound bob has a familiar ring.
And high is a higher word than low, and back moves from the front of the mouth to the back, whereas forth pushes forward. And life sounds livelier than death, and up peppier than down, and grudge runs deeper than pique, and a nod is shorter than a bow, and a bounce is springier than a bump, and be is more solid than seem … And see, as a handy example, splotch.
spelling
People who spell, on the Web, like drunken sailors—how do they use Word search? If you don’t spell what you’re looking for exactly right, Word throws up its hands. “The search item was not found,” you are stiffly informed. On Google, on the other hand, you don’t have to spell, because as soon as you enter a couple of letters, Google is nudging you like a dog with a ball in its mouth. Or, rather, like a parent hovering over an Easter-egg hunt: “Not that way, Sweetie, you don’t want to go there do you? How about over this way? That’s right, you’re getting warmer, no, now you’re cooling off, maybe you’d like to, uh-huhhhh, that’s better, that’s better, warmer, oh now you’re red hot—don’t step on it. Oh for God’s sake.” On my iPad I enter Xa and here come the “Google Suggestions”: Xanax, xanga, xavi, xampp, xabi alonso … Or say I’m trying to spell Xanadu by ear. By the time I get to Zanad, Google is urging the correct spelling on me, and if I persist all the way to Zanadu, Google gives it to me but with the heading, “Did you mean: xanadu.” And mixes a couple of Xanadu sites in with the Zanadu’s (there are quite a few, for instance Zanadu Sportswear on Staten Island), like real blueberries among the Froot Loops. It’s helpful, all right, maybe even loosely educational, but it doesn’t foster independence.
See E.
splotch
OED says, “Of obscure origin; perh. merely imitative.” As in the case of bubble, I have to ask: Why merely? Is splotch not a stroke of genius? Does it not capture, with panache, “a large irregular spot or patch of light, colour, or the like; a blot, smear, or stain”?
To be sure, t
he original meaning of merely was “magnificently, excellently, splendidly, wonderfully,” but that is way obsolete. And you know why? Because mere doesn’t sound splendid or wonderful. It sounds more like meager. It’s a tight little word in your mouth. Now mere pops up, or peeps up, in “a mere bagatelle,” “a mere two dollars an hour,” “merely a flesh wound,” “the merest whisper.”
There’s nothing mere about splotch. It explodes from the mouth and makes an unmissable mess of itself. Etymonline.com says “possibly a blend of spot, blot, and botch.” I’d lob a smitch of splash in there too.
sports talk
Ballplayers operate in a physical world. Denard Span of the Minnesota Twins hit a foul ball that struck his mother, sitting in the stands, in the chest, understandably making her cry and causing him great concern. “It tore him up pretty good,” said one of the Twins’ coaches, who relieved Span somewhat by determining that “It hit her in the meat.” Didn’t hit a bone, in other words, so nothing broken.
Sometimes that physicality gives rise to an instinct for metaphor. Reggie Jackson, asked what would make him decide to retire, said, “I don’t want to go on wringing out the rag of ability.” By way of pointing out the truism that anyone playing first or third base had to be not only a good fielder but also productive with the bat, Reggie said, “To hang out on the corner, you got to lean on the pole.”
Chipper Jones of the Braves said that Jamie Moyer, the wily forty-seven-year-old pitcher for the Phillies, was still effective because “He stays off the barrel.” That may sound like something from an old navy joke, but what it means is that Moyer adjusts the speed and location of his pitches in such a way that a hitter can’t get the fat part, the barrel, of his bat on the ball.
Alphabetter Juice Page 24