Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  Notice “clucking sound of tongue and teeth.” But OED is right, the tongue is close to the teeth, but not quite there—unilateral palatal, on one side of the palate (I prefer the left side). You know what, though? There’s no t in there at all. See T.

  Nadine Gordimer in Nature captures the sound of a sprinkler: “Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk: the long, wavering squirts jerk round, changing direction under their own pressure,” and Francine du Plessex Gray in World Without End, that of castanets: “tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk.”

  OED’s first citation of tsk is 1947. This is oddly late since the quotation is as follows: “Do you get … a sound resembling the noise of commiseration which is sometimes written in literature as ‘tsk-tsk’ or ‘tut-tut’”? I’ve just searched tsk tsk through thirty-seven pages of Google Books, and the earliest appearance I find is 1930 in Life magazine. It’s also in Our Town, 1938. A fairly recent coinage, at any rate, compared to tut-tut. (Shakespeare tut’s quite often, but never tsk’s.)

  According to The New Joys of Yiddish, “The man who habitually clicks, ‘Tsk, tsk!’ is … called a tsitser.”

  See ch.

  tut-tut

  OED traces tut back to 1529, and tut, tut, tut to 1536. “A natural utterance,” says OED, “expressing impatience or dissatisfaction with a statement, notion, or proceeding, or contemptuously dismissing it.” Don’t you love a good definition? Pronunciationt Λ t, which is to say, tut, but “the spelling tut sometimes represents the palatal click.”

  I have to say, in all respect to this venerable form, tsk-tsk is an improvement.

  tutu’s, the two

  Two words to be confused at your peril: tutu and tutu.

  If someone says to you, “I believe you’ve eaten your tutu,” you may feel complimented—if you’re in New Zealand. In that country there grows a poisonous shrub, the tutu. (Originally, a Maori word.) According to a nineteenth-century account cited by OED, the leaves of the tutu “may be eaten with safety by cattle gradually accustomed to its use, but are often fatal to newly-landed animals.” Which makes you wonder how many times the tutu has to kill you before you get accustomed to it. At any rate, if a person is said to have eaten his or her tutu in, as I say, New Zealand, it means he or she has become a real New Zealander.

  If someone tells you that you appear to have eaten your tutu anywhere else, you will be justifiably nonplussed. In the great majority of English-speaking countries, not to mention France, a tutu is a ballet skirt with stiff frills sticking out all around. The romantic tutu is ankle length, the classic tutu much shorter. This tutu is from French baby talk, an alteration of cucu, a diminutive of cul, which means, not to put too fine a point on it, buttocks.

  We may suppose that a very young French child was taken to a ballet, and what did the child take note of? Les jetés? Les pirouettes? La musique? Non. The bottoms. (Frill framed, to be sure.) When my friend Madeline Jaynes’s small step-granddaughter visited her in New York City for the first time, Madeline took her to the zoo, to the Imax, to the Statue of Liberty, to lunch in Chinatown, and on and on. When the child returned home to rural Georgia and was asked what she had seen, she replied: “We walked Willie on a leash and Willie pooped and Mammy picked it up.”

  We may see from tutu that the French language is very different from yours and mine. Hiney-hiney would never do for a ballet costume. Culottes and cul-de-sac are also from cul. Much nicer than buttottes or rump-of-the-bag. The ribald seventies review Oh! Calcutta! was a pun on “O quel cul t’as!” Even if there were a city that sounds anything like “Oh, what a fanny you have!” (I can’t think of one, and I have tried), it wouldn’t have the right, how shall I say this, ton.

  See bum.

  Twain, Mark, little bits he never used

  From his notebooks:

  “Like sweetheart of mine whose breath was so sweet it decayed her teeth.”

  “Boy dipped the worm in the hot tea,—said, ‘By G—you won’t tickle me any more, I don’t reckon.’”

  “In that Russian town of Yalta I danced an astonishing sort of dance an hour long, and one I had never heard of before, with the most beautiful girl that ever lived, and we talked incessantly, and laughed exhaustingly, and neither one ever knew what the other was driving at.”

  “The water begins to taste of the casks.”

  “Political parties who accuse the one in power of gobbling the spoils &c, are like the wolf who looked in at the door & saw the shepherds eating mutton & said—

  ‘Oh certainly—it’s all right as long as it’s you—but there’d be hell to pay if I was to do that!’”

  “ … like the fellow’s sow—had to haul her ears off to git her up to the trough, & then had to pull her tail out to get her away again.”

  “It’s as easy as killing your father whom you take for a burglar. It is as hard to hit as a burglar—anybody can hit a relative, but a Gatling gun won’t get a burglar.”

  typos, going with them

  From The Berkshire Eagle, June 24, 2009: “The solution was to create a parking area in a former gavel pit on Rockwell Road.” A gavel pit! Where presiding officers bury their worn-out little hammers? If this old pit could pound!

  Or maybe it’s a place where presiding officers compete, trying to outgavel one another, like pit bulls—gavel pitted against gavel. The very next day, a headline in The New York Times: ONE STATE SENATE BUT TWO GAVELS AS A POWER STRUGGLE CONTINUES IN ALBANY.

  The Times reports that the state senate, regrettably comprising thirty-one Democrats and thirty-one Republicans, “like feuding junior high schoolers refusing to acknowledge each other, began holding separate legislative sessions at the same time. Side by side, the two parties … talked and sometimes shouted over one another, gaveling through votes that are certain to be disputed. There were two Senate presidents, two gavels, two sets of bills being voted on.”

  Republicans passed more bills, eighty-five of them compared to the Democrats’ fourteen, but Democrats seized “the official Senate gavel, which is large and made of black walnut, its whack echoing through the chamber with authority.” The Republican president “was left to peck at a table in front of him with a small, ten-inch gavel used by Republicans for their private conferences.”

  The origin of gavel, by the way, is unknown. Etymonline.com says “perhaps connected with Ger. dial. gaffel, ‘brotherhood, friendly society.’”

  See garden path phenomenon.

  u · U · u

  It would break my heart to see the Weblish u replace good old English you in …

  I was going to say, in print. Can it be that the very word print is beginning to look quaint, even to me?

  It would break my heart to see u replace you any more generally than it already has online. Sure, you can be withering, but it’s a stand-up, up-front, embraceable word. That u is ugly, dismissive, depersonalizingly personal. It looks more like a grunt (this little piggy went u, u, u, all the way home) than a form of address. “You’re not as hot as u think u are” is an example, according to The New York Times, of anonymous messages appearing on a nasty “social networking site” that is said to be drawing mean teenagers like flies. Note that whoever deposited that message lacked the imagination to form a contraction of u and are. Or maybe the opening You’re—can anyone resist a message beginning in You’re?—was designed to draw someone into the range of those belittling u’s.

  In the Old English éow, the Northumbrian íuih, and the Old Frisian iuwe, you can hear the centuries of effort (yearning, we, and wow) that went into you, that gave it the tensile strength to absorb ye and thee and thou. Better not throw two-thirds of that energy away, yo.

  ukulelelike

  Who would have expected any instrument to warrant such an adjective? (You wouldn’t call a balalaika ukulelelike at all.) But I was pleased to see it used by the music critic Jon Pareles, writing about Brazilian samba music, in The New York Times: “the syncopated strumming of the ukulelelike cavaquinho.” It made me start singing, from Meet Me in St. Louis
, “if you like-a me like I like-a you and we like-a both the same …” And it made me wonder about ukulele’s provenance.

  The ukulele may have been named for Edward Purvis, a British army officer of the late 1800s. Ukulele is Hawaiian, not as you might imagine, for Purvis, but for “leaping flea” (uku, flea, lele, to leap.) Purvis, a member of King Kalakaua’s court, was himself so nimble and diminutive, especially compared to the locals, that the Hawaiians nicknamed him Ukulele. And he was so adept at playing the ukulele that the instrument took his name. Or vice versa: the instrument’s name may have been inspired by the way the fingers of adept players of ukulele licks leapt on the strings. (The notion that “My dog has fleas” refers to the uku root is doubtful, given that as far as I know I just now made that notion up.)

  The cavaquinho is ukulelelike, all right—a ukelele is more or less a smaller cavaquinho. Portuguese colonizers introduced the cavaquinho to Brazil, and a shipload of Portuguese workers brought it, in 1879, to Hawaii. According to WIII, cavaquinho is Portuguese for a hollowed-out piece of wood. Brazilians have sometimes called it machete, conceivably (but don’t quote me) for something like the same reason jazz musicians call a saxophone or a bass guitar an ax.

  A great Brazilian composer of samba became known as Nelson Cavaquinho for his distinctive two-finger expertise on the instrument, which, however, he soon gave up for the guitar.

  On YouTube you can watch a performance on the cavaquinho that has elicited this comment (in Portuguese, I’m guessing): “XAROOOOOOOP!!!”

  The sound track of The Third Man is nothing but zither music. Has there ever been a movie whose sound track was nothing but ukulele music? That was the question I e-mailed blind to the Oak Park Ukulele Meetup Group (Harrison St. Ukulele Players!) (exclamation point theirs), whose website I Googled up. The gracious response:

  Aloha Roy ~

  Honestly, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Possibly “Hula Girls” which was composed by Jake Shimabukuro, but I can’t remember the entire sound track. That’s a really good question. If you find the answer, please let us know … we might be interested in taking on the challenge of playing the entire sound track … maybe.

  Take care ~

  GiGi

  Jake Shimabukuro, it turns out, is an Okinawan-American ukulele virtuoso. He plays everything from “Thriller” to Bach’s Two-Part Invention No. 4 in D Minor on the ukulele. In November 2009, he performed his arrangement of the Beatles’ “In My Life” with Bette Midler for the queen of England. I have to say, though, that what he gets out of a ukulele is not—and this is a tribute—what most people would think of as ukulelelike. To my ear, on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” at least (you’ll note it’s not “While My Ukulele Gently Weeps”), Jake sounds more balalaikalike. His ukulele did in fact supply part of the sound track of Hula Girls, which was named best film at the 2007 Japanese Academy Awards. (Sound track album Hitchhike Records.)

  But only one track is just Jake soloing. On other tracks is music that might be called balalaikalike, boom-chockalockalike, funiculi-funiculalike, and not particularly like any other music than itself. Mostly quite lovely. None of it—if when we think of ukulele we think of Tiny Tim, Arthur Godfrey—even slightly ukulelelike.

  See plank.

  undertaker yarns, lost

  “Put in the undertaker yarns,” Mark Twain wrote in a notebook as he was planning A Tramp Abroad. Here are his notes for some that he never got around to sharing with us:

  “‘Do her good? Why she’s down in the cabin on ice.’”

  “Sent husband home in box with turnips as vegetable freight—corpses being costly.”

  “His farmer who came & priced a coffin for his wife who was only sick.”

  undulation

  From Latin undula, wavelet. “Would you,” Walt Whitman requested of the sea, “the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer.”

  Beautiful word. But wavelet ain’t bad.

  upaya

  This is a Sanskrit word for an element of Buddhist enlightenment that may seem mundane. Upaya means “means.” Skillful means to an end—the end being to express what you mean, in ways that other people can take on board. In a Dilbert strip, an employee wearing a pained expression and a beret says he’s really an artist, he’s working there only to support himself. “You must not be much of an artist,” says Dilbert, “if you have to work here.”

  And Wally, who is always carrying a coffee cup and ingeniously avoiding doing anything like work, adds the clincher: “It’s not art if nobody likes it.”

  We know this to be the opinion of a Philistine. Much great art has been disliked by nearly everyone until later. But Wally has a way of getting to the bottom of things. Once he said he was going to start playing golf. Would he take lessons? “You get to hit the ball more,” he said, “if you don’t.”

  Allen Ginsberg used upaya in a New York Times interview in February 1972. He said upaya was something his mother lacked. “She used to say, ‘I’m a truly beautiful woman, a great soul and that’s why they’re after me.’ On one level that was true—on the level that the nature of the modern mechanical, scientific robot government was inimical to any manifestation of human individuality and non-mechanical organic charm.” But instead of translating her visions into practical, communicable terms, she insisted that President Roosevelt was spying on her and there was a man on the corner with poison germs for her. So people concluded she was crazy.

  From that, Ginsberg “realized that if I ever got to the point where I was insisting on an idea or facts that everyone around me said were wrong I’d better pay attention. That inhibited me from going all out in any apocalyptic direction.” He didn’t give up and become an optometrist—nothing that useful. But he did learn to write, and to chant, and to set himself up as a credible figure of his time.

  At that time many mediagenic young people were doing drugs, letting their hair get very long, going mystical, and advocating revolution. Ginsberg was on their side. But many young revolutionaries, he told the Times, were blaming everything that was wrong in their lives on the government. “They say, ‘The reason I am having trouble is that they are after me.’ A lot of madness begins with a grand universal insight, the insight that there is more in the world than subways and offices. When the young revolutionary tries to explain this, or to explain why automobiles are wrong, he meets so much resistance that he takes to insistency on his point. If he develops upaya he leads people on a long slow walk into the mountains above the smog where they can breathe the clean air and look down and then he can say to them, ‘Don’t you realize now what all those cars are doing down there?’”

  Let me stress that it isn’t marketing, exactly, that we are talking about here.

  Which is not to suggest I have any reservations about the marketing of this book.

  So let me clarify: upaya, as I see it, is not the sort of marketing exemplified by the character in Dilbert who says, “I need someone who can make our product sound competitive without vomiting on his own copy.”

  See questions not to ask an author, with answers.

  urge

  What a sonicky word, and yet etymology presumes to tell us no more about it than that it comes from the Latin. That’s such a letdown, it’s like French etymology. French thought is deductive, Cartesian (so they were right about invading Iraq), as opposed to inductive messy English, because everything in French is from Latin.

  Okay, there’s zut. According to my copy of Larousse grand dictionnaire étymologique et historique du Français, which I read with some difficulty, zut is an onomatopoeic cross between zest (not the English word zest, but part of the onomatopoeic expression entre le zist et le zest, neither one thing or another, which suggests to me a French pronunciation of “this and that”) and flûte, which means flute but serves also (perhaps—just my suggestion, again—because it derives from the German) as an interjection meaning, more or less, damn!

  And, okay, oui is interesting: a combination of
ancient French o, meaning that, and il, meaning it, so oui is a kind of portmanteau of “that’s it”—but the o comes from Latin hoc and the il comes from Latin ille.

  French food, wine, films, countryside, Paris: exquise. French etymology: eh.

  v · V · v

  Linguists have concluded that ancient Romans did not have the v sound. They had a letter, not to mention a numeral, that looked like a V, but they pronounced it w. So when Julius Caesar said, “Veni, vidi, vici,” “I came, I saw, I conquered,” he pronounced it Waynee, weedee, weekee. If you think that’s disappointing, how about Venus, which Romans pronounced Waynus. It seems so wrong. If Julius Caesar came back today, he would be no commanding figure at, say, art openings. He’d be saying “Weeweean, I lo-wed your weedayo—werry weeweed.” Except that video artists aren’t generally named Vivian—that might save him.

  We might excuse the Romans by pointing out that they had no internal combustion engines, so they never heard anything go voom, and no phonograph needles, so they couldn’t see that a letter that came to a point should create groovy vibes. The Anglo-Saxons had managed to come up with a vee sound, but they spelled it with an f: Old English for love was lufu, pronounced luh-vuh. When the Normans conquered, they brought in v or alternatively u to spell the vee sound. Not until the seventeenth century did v take sole control of that sound, and not until the mid-nineteenth was v accorded its own place in the alphabet. Try taking it out now, though.