On the other hand, Alex Rodriguez, after fessing up that he had taken a performance-enhancing substance, said, “I laid my bed, I’m going to have to sit on it.” Come to think of it, maybe that was an intentional hedge.
Bill Virdon, who was fellow Pirate Bill Mazeroski’s roommate for years, said he couldn’t remember Mazeroski having ever said anything other than “Time to get up” and “I got it.”
Billy Martin was more voluble. When he was managing the Yankees, in intense competition with Earl Weaver’s Orioles, he said, “I don’t like to talk strategy and the different ways guys handle their clubs, but let me say I could win with the Baltimore team under any condition: a salami and a pizza in my mouth, two big cheeses in my ears, blindfolded and not knowing the situation.”
sportswriting
Too often violates the literal physicality of metaphors. There is no excuse for writing that someone has undergone “a handful of surgeries.” Or has “shut the door on a milestone.”
And here is a pet peeve of mine among standard sportswriting constructions. From ESPN.com: “Tony La Russa reached the 2,500-win mark on Sunday, joining Connie Mack and John McGraw as the only managers in MLB history to accomplish the feat.” No. Should be “Tony La Russa won his 2,500th game as a manager on Sunday. The only others to accomplish this feat were Connie Mack and John McGraw.”
squelch
This word is “imitative,” OED admits. But “imitative of the sound made” by “a heavy, crushing blow or fall on a soft body,” as Chambers puts it? Let’s all go get a grape (I can wait) and step on it.
Okay. Let’s try it with a tangerine. One that’s about to go bad, so as not to waste a good one.
I stepped on a hamster once. Accidentally. Her name was Ann. It was kind of a pop. Plpp, only more explosive. It haunts me still. Squelching something doesn’t make the sound squelch.
Yet squelch is sonicky, for sure.
Let’s look at other squ- words. All the ones in Chambers:
Squab, squabble, squad, squalid, squall, squalor, squamous, squander, square, squash, squat, squawk, squeak, squeal, squeamish, squeeze, squib, squid, squiggle , squint, squire, squirm, squirrel, squirt, squish.
One thing these words have in common, except for squab, squad,
One thing these words have in common, except for squab, squad, squamous, square, squire, and squirrel, is that they are all said by Chambers to be of either imitative, unknown, or uncertain origin (or to derive from other words with such origin). Chambers, irritably, on squirm: “sometimes said to be of imitative origin, but imitating what and by what association is not stated.”
Another thing these words have in common, except for squab, squander , squid, squire, and squirrel, is that their meanings involve tightness, narrowness, compression, being forced down (maybe not in the case of squamous, scaly, but scales are thin and flat).
How do you make the squ- sound? You set it up with a hiss and then you press the tongue forcefully against the roof of the mouth, as if you were squashing, say, a grape. There you have the kinesthetic element of sonicky.
sting
According to Richard Conniff in The New York Times, the entomologist Justin O. Schmidt has established the Justin O. Schmidt Sting Pain Index, regarding insect stings. Schmidt has been stung by a hundred and fifty different species on six continents. He rates sting intensity on a scale of 1.0 (sweat bee) to 4.0 (bullet ant), but what interests me are his verbal assessments.
Sweat bee sting: “Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.”
Bald-faced hornet: “Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.”
Harvester ant: “felt like somebody was putting a knife in and twisting it.”
And people of a certain other gender sometimes complain that men are no good at expressing feelings!
It is good to put words to sensations, so that they stay put. I was stung by an army ant in the Amazon rain forest. Like getting hit with a ball-peen hammer.
strumpet
A synonym for whore that rhymes with trumpet! If that ain’t brassy, what is? But etymologists don’t have much fun with it. “For conjectures, see Skeat,” says OED. Walter W. Skeat’s conjectures, in this case, aren’t very interesting. Etymonline.com finally gets us somewhere, reporting that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the word was “often abbreviated as strum and also used as a verb, which led to some odd dictionary entries,” to wit, in Captain Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1796: “TO STRUM: to have carnal knowledge of a woman, also to play badly on the harpsichord or any other stringed instrument.”
(OED acknowledges both strum and thrum to be “echoic.”)
These days strumpet—as in “cream-splattered beach strumpet Pamela Anderson”—tends to connote style rather than profession. Bette Midler is said to have “created the whole archetype of the brassy, size-accepting strumpet-as-entertainer.” On nytimes.com, in choosing her favorite recordings, Marisa Meltzer, coauthor of How Sassy Changed My Life, writes: “I will never get tired of the simple confidence of ‘Strumpet.’ When Lois Maffeo sings ‘They said I’m walking around like I own the whole place, well I do / Anybody can have it all, too,’ she captures the riot grrrl ethos perfectly.”
Meltzer describes her first impression of that ethos as follows: “The photos of girls in halter tops, torn fishnets and smeared red lipstick, with words like ‘slut’ written across their stomachs, freaked out and excited my 14-year-old self. I think I’ve always aspired to be a little more of a bad girl than I really am, so riot grrrl—with the word ‘girl’ transfigured into a ferocious growl—became my chosen outlet.”
I must say that “Anybody can have it all, too” strikes me as insincere. But it’s better, from a male point of view, than swooning over vampires who don’t bite.
See gillie, girl.
subjunctive
It is in my interest, at least presumably, to encourage reading. So for the Big Read project of the National Endowment for the Arts, I produced a testament:
I read because I like it. I get kicks from reading. If reading were bad for me, I would read. If reading were illegal, I would read. If the only way to get at any reading material were to lift one end of a big concrete slab up off it and hold the slab there with my hip while I was reading, I would read. And reading isn’t bad for me, it isn’t illegal, and it doesn’t require heavy lifting. What a deal!
Then I thought to myself (as opposed to out loud), Maybe I should change all those were’s to was’s. “If reading was bad for me,” and so on. That might make the statement sound more natural, and therefore more appealing to someone who is teetering on the brink of deciding whether to give reading a shot.
But no. If I’m going to make a flat-out statement that what I have just said is contrary to fact, how can I, in good conscience, eschew the subjunctive?
Well, Noël Coward—Noël Coward!—evidently committed such solecisms without turning a hair. According to The New York Times, Coward once remarked of his play Blithe Spirit, “There’s no heart in the play. If there was a heart, it would be a sad story.”
And then there are people who—because they will use if where a punctilious person would use whether—fall into the quasi subjunctive. Here, from an article in The American Scholar—The American Scholar!—is a rare example of a spurious subjunctive and a true subjunctive, in that order, in the same sentence: “All this had occurred by the time Dickinson asked him if he were too busy to read her poems, as if it were the most reasonable request in the world.”
Walking in Savannah a while back, I came upon a car that must have been parked there for months, because it was covered with a thick coat of grimy dust. On the windshield, someone had written with his (or her) finger, “I wish my girlfriend was as dirty as this.” My first impulse was to cross out was and insert were, but then I thought, Nah. Descriptivists have more fun.
succinct
That is a definition that so does not suck. Let us pause for a moment to appreciate the gritty radicality, the granularity, of a definition that strictly refrains from assuming that the reader has the slightest inkling of what, in this instance, suck means. A definition that assumes, on the contrary, that the reader may very well be from someplace where sucking has not, to this date, been tried. A definition that therefore renews our awareness of the strange intimate physicality of human concepts.
But: succinct. You can tell me that succus has no place in succinct, and I can quote no authority to refute you. To be sure, -cinct is the defining syllable. It derives etymologically from Latin cingere, meaning to gird (as in to cinch up a saddle). And pronouncing -cinct aptly tightens up the mouth like a mosquito’s tweeter. The suc- in succinct is not from succus but from sub-, which we think of as meaning under, as in submarine, but which in Latin also means close to, up to, toward.
But a succinct (brief, lean, terse) statement worthy of its adjective is one that compresses a lot of juice. A person donning a girdle (Latin cinctura) first sucks in to tighten. Suck … cinct.
But don’t let me go on and on and on about succinct. You want a good example of succinctness? Annette Gordon-Reed is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, which made a solid case, even before DNA evidence came in, that Jefferson and Hemings, who was legally his slave, had an enduring intimate relationship. In 2009 Gordon-Reed was asked by a Public Broadcasting Service interviewer what would have happened if Jefferson had acknowledged Hemings as his wife. It would have ended his political career, said Gordon-Reed. “That was such a taboo at the time.”
The interviewer, who would seem to have confused American history with that of some other, gentler, planet, persisted:
Some people have suggested that he had an opportunity. America was still a fledgling nation, and that if he had been forthcoming about this, he may have helped us get past a difficult racial impasse that we subsequently had to deal with in history. If Jefferson had taken a position like this, might it have helped America?
Gordon-Reed:
No.
such
From the same PIE root, *swo-, as so. The Old English version of such was swylc, a contraction of primitive words translatable as so like. The agelong jam session that gave rise to such and so also involved which and sic and German sich.
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
OED is funny on this. The makers of the movie Mary Poppins, which came out in 1964, were sued by the writers and publisher of “Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus; or, The super song,” written in 1951. The plaintiffs lost, reports OED, “in view of earlier oral uses of the word sworn to in affidavits and dissimilarity between the songs.” OED quotes from the decision: “The complaint alleges copyright infringement of plaintiff’s song ‘Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus ’ by defendants’ song ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.’ (All variants of this tongue twister will hereinafter be referred to collectively as ‘the word.’)” Understandable if a bit high-handed, since there were two words involved. According to “The Straight Dope” column, the affadavits about the word’s having been used before 1949 came from “two New Yorkers, Stanley Eichenbaum and Clara Colclaster.” What their linguistic expertise was, I don’t know. Neither of them turns up in an online search of The New York Times since 1851.
The blog Shroud of Thoughts, by taking the word’s syllables one by one, rather neatly though not scientifically construes that it could mean not just something to say when you can’t think of anything to say, as Mary Poppins says, but “atoning for instruction by fragile warmth.” The same blogpost says that in the 1942 werewolf movie The Undying Monster, “a male character says of a female character, ‘She has an over active supercalifragilis. ’ He defines … supercalifragilis as ‘female intuition.’” Nothing about that on imdb.com.
As monster-haunted-manse movies go, The Undying Monster is not bad—crisply shot by Lucien Ballard, who would go on to a distinguished cinematographical career entailing Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, and Henry Hathaway’s True Grit.
Heather Thatcher, an English actress of considerable experience—she was “Anna Dora, an Actress as Actresses Go,” in The Private Life of Don Juan, and, later, “Lady Dalroy” in Gaslight and a countess in Anna Karenina—plays Miss Christopher, or Christy, a detective’s assistant. Christy is a bit Poppinsesque, in fact, with the notable exception that “she gets restless,” as the detective puts it, “unless there’s something happening that makes her blood run cold.” Having arrived in the manse, Christy says, “You can laugh if you want to, but there’s something here. Something strange. Very strange. I can feel it.”
“I should have warned you,” says the detective, “Miss Christopher suffers from an overdeveloped supercalafagalus.” (No r sound after the f. Hard g.)
“A supercala-what?” asks another female character.
“Feminine instinct,” says the detective, and a cozy pre-feminist chuckle is had by all. I don’t think supercalafagalus is close enough to supercalifragilisticexpialidocious to establish anything. The movie was adapted from a much crazier and better 1922 novel of the same name by Jessie Douglas Kerruish. Nothing like supercala-anything appears in the book, which is a far richer verbal pudding than the movie. Here is the final word of the spell under which man turns into beast:
“Heysa-aa-a-a—”
The word began as a human shout, broke halfway, turned to the unspeakable droning snarl of the hidden room, and swelled into a crackling, roaring, screaming, demonic howl. It was like the hoarded lust and hunger and hate of all the ages, expressed in a voice that passed the bestial in its perversion of the human.
In the book, the intuitive woman is the hero—a vigorous psychic named Luna, who finds herself caught up in the glorious yet horrifying perception that the man who, unbeknown to himself, is the werewolf is also the man of her dreams. Well (spoiler alert), she saves him, but it isn’t easy, it isn’t pretty, and it exhausts, permanently, her special powers. Also leaves the fellow rather gobsmacked.
“You’ve known all the time I’m no better than a mad cannibal? … That I mauled and half-ate a woman … ?” he asks rhetorically. “I begin to understand. I’ll realise by and by.”
See fancy.
syllabus
When students are handed a summary of what is to be covered in a class, they are holding a living ghost. The word syllabus was created by a misprint.
In a fifteenth-century edition of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, the Greek sittybas, meaning parchment labels on a manuscript, was rendered as syllabos and translated to mean a table or index. It looked like a Greek word (a lot more like one than sittybas), it had a nice dignified ring to it, it served a purpose in English as syllabus , and etymologists were able to connect it to the verb sullambanein, to take together. We do get syllable from that Greek verb, but syllabus has no more to do with it, as Ernest Weekley wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1924, than with syllabub (a drink of wine and milk, bleh, of unknown origin).
So syllabus is what is called a “ghost word.” In most cases, such words are preserved only in dictionaries, and in subsequent copycat dictionaries. These are words, as Walter W. Skeat wrote, that never had “any real existence, being mere coinages due to the blunders of printers or scribes, or to the perfervid imagination of ignorant or blundering editors.” For instance, dord, defined to mean density, appeared in the 1934 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, because someone had misread a consultant’s three-by-five card suggesting that “D” or “d” be included as an abbreviation for d
ensity. In 1939, an editor discovered the error, and the next edition had no dord.
But by the time my seventeenth-century forebear Thomas Blount included syllabus (he was the first) in his Glossographia, he was right to do so, because it had passed into educated usage.
synesthesia
In Alphabet Juice, you may recall, I spoke of people who strongly associate letters with colors—Rimbaud, for instance, regarded o as blue. A rarer phenomenon, according to The New York Times, is people who “involuntarily ‘taste’ words when they hear them.” Julia Simner, a cognitive neuropsychologist at the University of Edinburgh, told the Times that she had found ten such people in Europe and the United States. One of them “hates driving because road signs flood his mouth with the flavors of things like pistachio ice cream and earwax … Another subject tastes only proper names: John is his corn bread, William his potatoes … ‘Stephanie’ linked to sage stuffing, ‘civil’ to gravy, ‘London’ to potato, ‘perform’ to peas, ‘union’ to onions, ‘microscope’ to carrots, ‘city’ to mince pie and ‘confess’ to coffee.”
t · T · t
If you ever forget how to pronounce T, you could go to OED, under T, and be reminded that
contact of the tip of the tongue with the teeth gives the true dental t, which is common in continental European languages, very distinct in Anglo-Irish, and heard in north-western English dialects before r, where it is often represented in dialect specimens by spelling thrue or t’hrue for true, and the like … The Indian languages, Aryan as well as Dravidian, distinguish two kinds of t, the dental, and the retracted or “cerebral” … , of which the latter is formed by contact of the retracted tip of the tongue with the roof of the palate. The English t is formed between these two extreme positions, the contact being with the back of the gum or the front margin of the palate; its sound is much closer to the cerebral than to the dental.
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