Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  Edward G. Robinson to his corrupt employer in Five Star Final (1931): “I want you to wake up in the night and see your own squashy, putrid soul.”

  ,well,

  As in, say, “If you ask me, that godforsaken dog of yours has been, well, forsaken by God.” This device, if you ask me, has grown threadbare.

  well-intentioned

  Why do we say this instead of well-intended? I suppose a person isn’t intended, unless by his or her creator: Adam was well-intended, just not so well designed. But well-intentioned is clunky. “Has good intentions” serves perfectly well and doesn’t clog up a sentence. Coleridge actually used well-intentionedness. Try saying that out loud a few times.

  wheatear

  If you’re new at bird-watching? And you go out with a veteran birder? And both of you spot a small bird with a bluish-grey back, black wings, and white belly and rump? And you say, “What’s that one?” And your friend says, “Wheatear”?

  Do not embarrass yourself by responding (in a tone implying rather heavily, first of all, that you weren’t born yesterday and, second of all, that your friend must not be quite the hotshot authority he makes himself out to be), “No, I don’t think so. You’ll notice that this bird has no ears at all.” First of all, all birds have ears, generally holes covered by feathers. Second of all, wheatear is a corruption, dating back to the seventeenth century, of “white arse.”

  whistle

  “Of imitative origin,” as the dictionaries say—imitative of (AHD) “a clear, sharp, musical sound.” In Middle English, according to Etymonline.com, whistle was also used to convey “the hissing of serpents.” Sonically, that works for me. It might even evoke the way snakes proceed, slick (or rather, slithery) as a whistle. (Here’s a question: can a snake backup?)

  But where is any music in whistle? When I was a boy, a younger neighbor (Neal Elliott, whose father, Sambo, was one of the first three people inducted into the Softball Hall of Fame) couldn’t whistle. He would call his dog Lady by crying, “Whurt Lady whurt!” Neal knew instinctively that there should be an r in whistle. You don’t make an r sound in whistling, but your tongue is up against the roof of your mouth as if you were just about to make an r. If you didn’t have the term “wolf whistle,” how would you try to capture that sound in letters? Maybe fweeeet-fwyew(r). Whistle ought to be whir, in fact, and whir (vibration, buzzing, bustle) should be whistle.

  Whistle is Middle English from Old English hwistlian. Whir is Middle English probably from Norse hvirfla. You’d think whir could have had dibs on the musical sound. But the buzzy whir got in ahead of it somehow. Might there have been a compromise? Whirstle has too many consonants in a row—if it looked pronounceable at all, it might be taken to rhyme with firstly.

  There are r’s in the animal-music words twitter (God help us) and, more to the point, chirp, chirr, and chirrup. How is chirrup pronounced? To rhyme with syrup, one way or another. AHD and WIII prefer chur-up, which doesn’t fit the spelling (OAD prefers the pronunciation chir-up) but does follow suit with chirp and chir. As to syrup, AHD and OAD prefer the pronunciation sir-up over sur-up. WIII prefers sur-up, as do I: sir-up is too far from slurp. Slurp is an exquisitely sonicky word. The German schlürfen may be even more refined—in an imitative, if not a mannerly, sense. When you make a slurpy sound, by the way, your tongue does the aforementioned r-move. See slaver/slobber.

  whiz

  OED: “An act, or the action, of whizzing; a sibilant sound somewhat less shrill than a hiss, and having a trace of musical tone like a buzz; a swift movement producing such a sound.”

  That’s some exquisite defining by ear. Except … there’s just a touch missing. The pronunciation, OED makes clear, is hwiz. In the definition, is the h taken sufficiently into account? A hiss (not the word hiss) is pretty much all s’s. I would add to the mix elements of the OED’s broader-brush definition of the verb whiz, “To make a sound as of a body rushing through the air; … (of trees) to rustle.” Now I hear the breathiness. As in whoosh.

  Then there’s “take a whiz,” meaning urinate. I’ve never cared for that expression. Perhaps it’s gender bias. Women have sometimes complained that my kinephonic analysis of piss (see Alphabet Juice) fails to accord with their perspective. From my standpoint, I want a p in there. Once I broke up with a woman I was still in love with (which is to say, she broke up with me), whose last words to me, as she emerged with surprising dispatch from an airport ladies’ room (I had been fretting, at least ostensibly, that I would miss my plane), were “I’m a good whizzer.”

  who, whom, tsk, tsk

  The American Scholar: “Vote for whomever you please, but …” Wrong. It’s not whom you please that you’d be voting for (although that person might be pleased to hear that you did), it’s who pleases you.

  The New York Times: “Some of the residents have a sense of whom Dalkowski was, or might have been.” Doesn’t that sound wrong, on the face of it?

  The New Yorker: “ … her own desires, in particular, for the happy-golucky blond cousin, Rodolpho … , whom Eddie thinks is ‘a weird.’” The New Yorker!

  Wikipedia

  One problem with citing Wikipedia in permanent (so to speak) ink is that scrupulosity would require “according to Wikipedia (as of 11:43 a.m. October 28, 2010).” And of course Wikipedia, unlike academia, can be wrong.

  In the Dilbert comic strip, one office worker says to another, “My first baby weighed 12 pounds. I gave birth in the cab of a stolen backhoe.”

  A third worker, the guy who always has to top everything, butts in:

  “That’s nothing! I once passed a gallstone so big that it became secretary of labor in the Clinton Administration.”

  First worker: “I find that hard to believe.”

  Topper guy: “Give me ten minutes and then check Wikipedia.”

  However, Wikipedia grows more and more nearly reliable. Footnotes and all. And it sure is handy as a first resort. Last time I looked, though, it was still calling me an actor and a musician. And you can’t fix information about yourself. If some gentle reader could change “also a reporter, actor, and musician with the Rock Bottom Remainders …” to something like “also a reporter, speaker, and versifier who can’t act but did appear as himself in a cameo in Treme and is heartbrokenly unable to make music in any form yet performs in an ill-defined capacity with the Rock Bottom Remainders … ,” Wikipedia would be that little bit more nearly golden.

  wisdom

  From a review (by James Longenbach in The New York Times Book Review) of poetry by Mary Jo Salter: “Rather than dispensing wisdom, Salter asks eviscerating questions.” Now, Salter is a fine poet, but doesn’t anyone who is literary approve of wisdom anymore? Or disapprove of evisceration?

  By wisdom I mean, for instance, this from Warren Buffett: “Never ask a barber whether you need a haircut.” Or a lesson Chico Marx taught Harpo when they were boys: “Never shoot dice on a blanket.” Or something Edgar says to Gloucester in King Lear: “Ripeness is all. Come on.”

  wise, -wise

  These come from two branches of the same PIE root meaning to see, to know. From one branch we get vision, idea, and wit as well as wise. The branch that gave rise to -wise, as in the sociable likewise, the clotted underdevelopmentalwise, and Dylan Thomas’s spooky “Altarwise by Owl-light,” took the vision aspect of the root off into various Germanic-language words meaning appearance, shape, manner. In English, we have way and also wise, as “in no wise,” which survives today pretty much only as a suffix.

  Ever since 1973, when it appeared, I have saved a United Press International story about two tornadoes hitting Burnet, Texas, at once. “My home is all over everywhere,” said one local man; and another, “It just tore the trailer house all to pieces and we were on the ground when it was over—125 feet from where we started out.” But no one was killed: “the good Lord was good to us fatality-wise.”

  Oh what the weather’s done to us

  Exceeds our wild surmise,

  B
ut the good Lord has been good to us

  Fatality-wise.

  wobble

  Is this not a great word? From the PIE root *webh-, whence also (according to AHD) web, weevil, waffle, wag, walleyed. Well, walleyed more precisely “from Old Norse vagl, chicken roost, perch, beam, eye disease, from Germanic *waglaz.”

  But don’t you think the sound fits the action, somehow? (See sonicky.)

  A spinning top wobbles. A thrown or punted football wobbles somewhat, however tight the spiral. In the eighteenth century, a boiling pot was said to wobble. To wobble can be, says OED, “To shake or quiver like a jelly or fleshy body.” The word has also been spelled wabble, as when certain heavy birds “go to fly up they wabble a great way before they can raise themselves upon the wind.”

  Earth wobbles. This phenomenon is called the Chandler wobble, sounds a little like a dance step:

  You do your hips this way,

  A little like a sway

  And a little bit like a hobble.

  Then proceed sort of hoppy,

  Just a little sorta sloppy—

  You’re doing the Chandler wobble.

  As so often happens, in 1891 a Jr. managed to get something named after himself. American astronomer Seth Carlo Chandler Jr. calculated that the earth’s spin deviated from perfect rotation by twenty feet at the North Pole, and that it went through a full wobble every 433 days. But why didn’t the wobble correct itself? In 2000, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that “the century-old mystery”—what causes and sustains the earth’s wobble—had been solved. Richard Gross, a geophysicist at the lab, had determined that “the principal cause of the Chandler wobble is fluctuating pressure on the bottom of the ocean.”

  Had to have something to do with a bottom.

  woe

  A natural exclamation of lament, various forms of which (the vey in Yiddish oy vey, for instance, and Welsh gwoe) go way, way back to Indo-European roots. In Middle English, woe was wa. OED says wail is an offshoot. Comicbook children (I’m thinking of Little Lulu, now, which, okay, dates me, but that was a damn good comic book) cry like this: WAAAAAAAH.

  Today we see woe primarily in headlines, CHILEAN BUDGET WOES PERSIST; in jocular expressions, “a tale of woe”; and in woebegone, “beset by woes,” geogrified in A Prairie Home Companion’s Lake Wobegon.

  In Mandarin Chinese, wo is me.

  See so.

  woomph

  I love how OED is all over woomph:

  slang. Also woomf. [Imitative.] (Expressing) a sound similar to a “whoof” (WHOOF int. (n.) 2) but with a deeper or more resonant component. Cf. the synonymous WHOOMPF int. (n.).

  And if (I say if—as though anyone, in that magnificent dictionary’s history, has resisted the impulse) you proceed to click on whoof, you learn that whoof goes back to around 1766, that it has been spelled alternatively whuph, whoogh, and woof, and that it was employed perhaps most granular ly by John Updike in The Coup: “He took up a hand mike … , whoofed into it experimentally.”

  writer’s block

  On the day after I was born, Tennessee Williams, in New Orleans, which is my favorite city, wrote this in a journal:

  It is never as bad as you think.

  It is never as good as you think …

  But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while

  you are writing the first draft.

  Do all great writers feel that manic about their first drafts? I’m afraid to ask. If they said yes, it would make me feel even more depressive about my first drafts. Writer’s block, in my experience, is the fear that you will write something really bad. It comes to me in midsentence. I have to keep shaking it off, like a broken-field runner shaking off tackles. (See gillie, girl.)

  But broken-field runners don’t keep doubling back. Look at the first sentence of this entry. I must have changed it seven or eight times, already.

  “On the day after I was born, in New Orleans …” would mean that I was born in New Orleans. “Tennessee Williams, in New Orleans, which is my favorite city, wrote this (quite unaware that I had been born one day before) …”? Too choppy. For one thing.

  Maybe I don’t start the workday right. Maybe I should do something like what Olivia de Havilland told the actor who played her son in Lady in a Cage: “When they call ‘Places,’ think of the camera as your lover and you’re breathing in and out together. In and out. In and out.”

  But when you’re writing, no one calls “Places.” You have to call “Place” for yourself. After you do that, you’d feel silly breathing in and out with your blank page. I mean screen. It’s not as though your blank page, okay, okay, screen, has nowhere else to be. And your blank screen gives you such a blank look.

  What if I ask a great writer how he or she gets under way and the rather startled response is, “Well, you must mean after I motate.”

  “Motate?”

  “You don’t motate?”

  “Oh, sure, motate. I thought you said mutate.”

  “You don’t mutate?”

  “I do of course mutate, I just thought you were saying you mutate first.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  And word gets out, and I never get invited to a writers’ conference again. I just made up motate and mutate, as terms of the writer’s craft (I think), but my point is, I have a hard time getting under way. Then sometimes I feel like I’m really cooking, but meanwhile I’m thinking, Yeah, yeah, we’ll see. This is one of several reasons why, even if Tennessee Williams had not beat me to it, I would never have written A Streetcar Named Desire.

  A writer, like everybody else, probably does need this sustaining virtue: the inclination to assume that when you do something wrong it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, much, and when you do something right it does. So even as I’m dreading the mess I’m about to make, I tell myself to lighten up. I deal in leavened dread.

  The older, or let’s say the more distinguished, I get, the more disheveled my first stabs at sentences get, for some reason. So I have to be more lapidary. Sound technicians have a term for such a process: “polishing the turd.” You just have to hope it will develop along the lines described in The New Yorker by Matthew Carter, the great designer of typefaces:

  The heavy lifting begins when the alphabet is finished. I begin then to see how the letters go together to make words, how they line up next to each other, how they sit on the page or the screen, how they work with the punctuation and the symbols. I print up forty or so pages, and when I first see them I feel suicidal. Nothing is working. If it isn’t working, I don’t necessarily know immediately why it isn’t. It simply looks bad. Then starts the long process of going back and making changes here and there. You change something one day, and the next day you change it back, because you realize that it wasn’t the problem. Nothing gets better, you despair, until one day you’re looking—you’ve changed something small—and you realize suddenly you’re looking at a typeface.

  A footnote: According to Leo Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra, she and her sisters were reading War and Peace aloud, “and father came into the room, and he stood there with his hands inside the belt of his blouse, and he said, ‘Who wrote that? It isn’t badly written.’”

  See tight like that and upaya.

  x · X · x

  Are you an x-er or a checker? According to a study by the American Graphological Institute, people who fill out forms by placing an in the box of their choice differ psychologically from those who use the (known in Britain as the tick). Since the is associated with wrong answers in early schooling, and the with correct ones, and since ’s tend to huddle within the box whereas ’s swing up and out, it is not surprising that checkers tend to be more cheerful and adventurous than x-ers, who often suffer from low self-esteem. Of the more than two hundred successful television stars studied by the institute, 81 percent were checkers. Of the same number of violent criminals, almost the same percentage were x-ers.

  No, I made all that up. But if there is
an American Graphological Institute, it might want to look into this.

  Xanadu

  Anglicization (X more exotic looking, let us suppose) of Kublai Khan’s summer capital, Shang-tu, in what is now Inner Mongolia. First appeared in English as Xandu. Extra a scanned better for Coleridge.

  In the late thirteenth century, according to Marco Polo, Shang-tu had two palaces, one made of marble and the other of varnished cane. The walls inside the marble one were all decorated with gilt and astonishing pictures of animals and men. The cane one, held together by bonds of silk, was taken down at summer’s end. The khan would ride in the environs with a leopard perched on the back of his saddle. When he saw an animal that caught his fancy, he would sic the leopard on it, then have the prey taken away and fed to his falcons. Nothing is left but rubble and traces of wall.

  As Xanadu did Orson Welles a stately pleasure-dome decree, in Florida, for Charles Foster Kane, in Citizen Kane—“world’s largest private pleasure ground … twenty thousand tons of marble … Xanadu’s landlord leaves many stones to mark his grave.”

  See peeve.

  Xit

  A man or boy by this name is said to have been the royal dwarf of Edward VI, who became king of England from 1547, when he was nine years old, until he died six years later. Xit was a boy’s dwarf, then. To what extent was he jester or playmate or laughingstock? All we know of Xit is X for unknown and it for whatever—not even how he got his name or how it was pronounced. Jennifer Loach’s biography of Edward VI provides a rich description of the boy king’s court. To wear, presumably on special occasions, Edward had a sable skin “with a head of gold, containing in it a clock, with a collar of gold, enamelled black, set with four diamonds, and four rubies, and two pearls hanging at the ears, and two rubies in the ears, the same skin having feet of gold, the claws thereof being sapphires.” He “took over his father’s fool, Will Somers,” and was also attended by harp players, lute players, flautists, singing men, a bagpipe player, minstrels, a virginals player, a rebec player, viol and sackbut players, a thirty-member choir, a troop of yeomen “all blond and of the same height,” and John Heywood, England’s first publisher of proverbs (“Haste maketh waste,” “Look ere ye leap,” and “She looketh as butter would not melt in her mouth”—all his). Not a word about any dwarf.