Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  We do know a few things about Jeffery Hudson, 1619–1682, “the first English dwarf of whom there is anything like an authentic history,” according to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published 1911. The son of a normal-sized butcher who kept and baited bulls for a duke, Hudson stood eighteen inches high and perfectly proportioned at the age of nine. He did not grow further until he was thirty (to three foot nine). “At a dinner given by the duke to Charles I and his queen,” according to this century-old Britannica, Jeffery “was brought in to table in a pie out of which he stepped, and was at once adopted” by the queen. He is said to have served in the Civil War as a captain of horse, earning the nickname “Strenuous Jeffery,” and to have “fought two duels—one with a turkey-cock, a battle recorded by Davenant, and a second with Mr. Crofts, who came to the meeting with a squirt, but who in the more serious encounter which ensued was shot dead by little Hudson, who fired from horseback, the saddle putting him on a level with his antagonist.”

  I guess you could mess with Jeffery just so much. (OED defines a squirt in this seventeenth-century sense as “a small tubular instrument by which water may be squirted.”) But standing eighteen inches, he was pitted against an adult male turkey? Those are big birds. And I come to find out that Davenant’s poem “Jeffereidos” was published in 1630, when Jeffery was eleven years old. A Lilliputian child. That’s the kind of sporting proposition the court of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria enjoyed? I wanted to know more about this. Not only because of my concern for Jeffery Hudson, and the paucity of X words and information about Xit, but also because one of the few things I remember, word for word, from graduate school is this note I took while trying to master the whole of English and American literature for a comprehensive exam: “Syphilis cost Davenant his nose.” How did that look?

  First of all, the bird. Originally in England turkey-cock referred to the male guinea fowl, which was brought into Europe from Guinea, in Africa, and which would have been for Jeffery a smaller, but loud and elusive, opponent. By Jeffery’s time, however, a turkey-cock meant a turkey—the American bird of which Benjamin Franklin would eventually say, “He is … a Bird of Courage [unlike the national-symbol eagle], and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.”

  The name turkey made some sense when applied to guinea fowl, because they were brought to Europe by way of Turkey. But turkeys were brought in from Mexico. So European imperialists came to the Americas, found an American bird, brought it to Europe, called it after a country it had never even seen, and then, when they came to colonize the Americas, called that bird, in its own home continent, what they had been mistakenly calling it back where they came from. (However, my 1975 edition of The New Columbia Encyclopedia—which maybe you think I should throw away, but it’s sitting in my lap right now and you’d have to pry it out of my cold, dead fingers—says the turkey’s name “derives from its ‘turk-turk’ call.”) The turkey we know today, at any rate, had arrived in England by the time wee Jeffery Hudson supposedly fought a duel with one, so we are probably talking about a big damn gallinaceous bird.

  Okay, gallinaceous. That’s the turkey’s species—no, I mean order. From the Latin for hen. And yet, OED tells us, the word has been used “humorously” to mean “resembling that of a cock; ‘cocky.’” It sounds cocky, doesn’t it? Why? Maybe gall and bodacious.

  “Rotted away” is how one literary historian describes Davenant’s nose, though an engraving of the period confers him with (besides laurel leaves) a nubbin. Have you ever noticed the nose of Jack Palance? Davenant’s is portrayed as like Jack Palance’s but even smaller. Eventually he married the widow of the doctor who treated his syphilis with mercury, and after she died he married again, to a rich woman, so he couldn’t have been too bad-looking. But he killed a man who mocked his appearance, so he had that in common with Jeffery.

  And he won the queen’s lasting favor by sending her “Jeffereidos,” in two cantos. It is a satire on Jeffery Hudson’s entire public career to that point. Recall that he’s eleven. He hasn’t served the royal cause in the Civil War or slain Mr. Crofts yet, but he has already been sent to France as part of a delegation to pick up a midwife for the queen. And on the way back to England he has been captured by Turkish pirates.

  Davenant depicts Jeffery as hiding from the pirates in, presumably, the ship’s privy, “where they sooner might / Discover him, with smelling than with sight.” The pirate captain declares, “This that appears to you, a walking Thumbe, / May prove, the gen’ral Spie of Christendome.” On the assumption that Jeffery is indeed a master of international intrigue, the pirates take him ashore and interrogate him (enabling Davenant to rhyme beseech you with Richelieu), but conclude he is after all just a dwarf. So they turn him loose, astride their fastest poodle. After a progress of seven inches, his mount throws him. At this point, the turkey-cock attacks. Jeffery draws his tiny sword.

  Some feathers float in the air. Witnesses cannot say for sure, the poet tells us, whether these feathers were knocked off the turkey-cock by Jeffery’s tiny sword, but

  This they affirme; the Turkey in his look

  Express’d how much, he it unkindly took

  That wanting food; our Jeffery would not let him,

  Enjoy the priviledge to eat him …

  At that the midwife shows up and Jeffery pleads:

  Thou that delivered’st hast so many, be

  So kinde of nature, to deliver me!

  Davenant goes on to say that no one knows how Jeffery got back home, but it seems likely that the pirates had had enough sport of him and sent him back to be a figure of old English fun, not a jester but a jestee. I venture to say that the turkey-cock duel (maybe some kind of oblique reference to the Turkish pirates?) was Davenant’s invention, and that in the war, Jeffery was a mascot. But on the Web you can find moldy historical fiction, supposedly based on tradition, in which Jeffery overhears a porter reading “Jeffereidos” aloud and inveigles the porter, who happens to be seven feet tall, into a duel inside the palace bakery oven, where the porter can’t swing his sword and the dwarf is able to jab him several times in the legs with a knife before the fight is broken up. And by all accounts I can find, Jeffery did shoot this Mr. Crofts. Let’s hope Xit got some satisfaction too.

  X-ray

  My friend Dave Barry has written that this ray was discovered by scientists trying to determine whether “anything came after W-rays.” Perhaps. We know what came after Fay Wray.

  xylophone

  This instrument is related, through phone (Greek for voice, sound) to fame—being talked about. But I wouldn’t count on it. The xylo- is from the Greek for wood. Compare xylem, which you may have encountered in high-school biology class, and xylene, which, aside from being the name of the girl who sat behind you, is a hydrocarbon obtained in part from wood and used in rubber cement.

  The vibraphone, or the vibes, has metal keys, but has anybody ever been famous on the vibes, even, besides Lionel Hampton? Then too, fame is tinsel, whereas percussion may be golden—on, say, the bouncily named marimba, whose provenance is African, or on the glockenspiel, from the German spiel, to play, and glocken, bells. From the sound of glock you’d think a glockenspiel’s keys were made of wood, or of horse hooves, but no, a glockenspiel’s keys are metallic—glock is the Old High German stab at capturing ding-dong.

  y · Y · y

  In Massachusetts we have Big Y supermarkets. I asked a checkout lady where the name came from. She blanched. She stammered. She cast her gaze furtively around. I thought to myself (but then, to whom other?):

  Aha! I may have stumbled upon something here. Perhaps the Big Y is Yahweh Himself. Or the Y in question is the Y that (for some reason, perhaps because H was taken) is the symbol for hypercharge, which according to AHD is “a quantum number equal to twice the average electric charge of a particle multiplet or, equivalently, to the sum of the strangeness and the baryon
number.” Or perhaps it relates to some secret ritual involving the yataghan—“a Turkish sword or scimitar having a double-curved blade and an eared pommel, but lacking a handle guard.” Or, even more mystically, ylem, “a form of matter hypothesized by proponents of the big bang theory to have existed before the formation of the chemical elements.” Or yottahertz (septillion cycles per second), or yippee (whee!), or Yggdrasil, “the great ash tree that holds together earth, heaven, and hell by its roots and branches in Norse mythology.” Or all of the above at once!

  The checkout lady’s voice trembled. “We learned it in orientation,” she said. “But I forgot.”

  She must have taken me for someone from headquarters come down to take her job away for insufficient grounding in company lore. I swore to her that I was nothing more than a guy with an interest in letters. Then I came home and Googled.

  According to Wikipedia, the chain began with the Y Cash Market in Chicopee, Massachusetts, “at the intersection where two roads converge to form a Y.”

  At least that’s what Big Y tells the public.

  y’all

  I trust that my remarks in Alphabet Juice and elsewhere have put to rest the tin-eared notion that y’all is singular and all y’all is plural. If you want a further guide to using this vernacular second-person plural, all you have to do is watch The Wire, whose grasp of idiom is impeccable. Does Omar ever address one person as y’all motherfucker? No, he addresses more than one as y’all motherfuckers. Or, just y’all. If Omar does not represent authority to you, then you should give Baltimore a wide berth.

  And to review: the difference between y’all and all y’all is the one-would-have-thought-rather-readily-graspable difference between you guys and all you guys.

  Okay. But I want to pass on to you what the late musicologist and folklorist Dr. Willis James, in a Smithsonian Folkways archival recording, calls “the super plural.” In his childhood Dr. James knew a fishmonger in Jacksonville, Florida, whose marketing cry to passersby went like this:

  I got shrimpsies,

  I got crabsies,

  I got fishies,

  I got all these

  For y’allsies.

  See you-all.

  yare, yar

  “My, she was yare,” Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord says in The Philadelphia Story. She follows up with a definition: “It means, uh, easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, bright, everything a boat should be … until she develops dry rot.”

  She’s speaking of the sailboat, the True Love, that she and the Cary Grant character, C. K. Dexter Haven, shared when they were married. By implication she is also talking about their marriage, and about herself. In the end (caution: SPOILER), when C. K. proposes to her again, she says, “Oh Dexter, I’ll be yare now, I promise to be yare.”

  For centuries yare has been applied to both people and boats. Seamen are exhorted to be yare in The Tempest: “fall to ’t, yarely, or we run ourselves aground … Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare!” And in Antony and Cleopatra, someone says, “Their ships are yare, yours heavy.” The Old English was gearu, meaning ready, prepared. Good to go.

  Kate pronounces it to rhyme with are. OAD and WIII accept that pronunciation, but prefer to rhyme it with care, which is the only pronunciation AHD and OED acknowledge. “My, she was yehr”? I don’t think so. But yehr in sailboat-owning British English wouldn’t really have an r sound in it. “My, she was yeah”?

  WIII, alone, says the word can also be spelled yar—as in fact it usually is spelled online—and then pronounced as Kate did. I don’t know how it’s spelled in the original script, but yar is trimmer, makes sense phonetically—yar is more yare than yare is.

  ylid

  A chemical compound of some kind, who cares, but here’s what’s interesting, and to me, annoying: this adjective is compounded of two suffixes: -yl and -ide. What’s up with that? “After you, Mr. -Yl.” “No, after you, Mr. -Ide.”

  Granted, you wouldn’t want to make it idyl. But isn’t there something creepy about two tails with no head? The noun form by the way is given as ylide (“silylated ylides of phosphorus, arsenic and sulphur …”), the adjective form, ylidic. So where does that leave ylid?

  The craziness doesn’t stop there. The next entry in OED is -ylidene. A suffix. Now we’re up to a three-tail tail. Furthermore, -ylidene (rhymes with “vanilla bean”) is to be “used” (watch this carefully) “in place of -idine when the name of the parent compound does not end in -yl.”

  So what if the parent compound is an ylide? You see what I’m getting at? We’re up to ylidylidene. And it’s all suffixes.

  Nice rhythm to it, though. Rhymes with “silly Willadean.”

  yo

  My wife has long maintained that English has no equivalent expression to nicht wahr or n’est ce pas. I thought of one once, but it didn’t satisfy her, and now I’ve forgotten what it was. One that comes close, only with scant interrogatory tinge, is the sort of recessive yo, defined by OED, in September 2009, as follows: “slang (orig. in African-American usage). In weakened use, following or punctuating an utterance for emphasis or as a general conversational filler.” OED cites David Simon’s Homicide: “Somebody ’round here been doin’ some talking, yo.”

  The more exclamatory yo, as in Rocky Balboa’s “Yo, Adrian,” is a different matter. In 1993, Ernest Paolino, a Philadelphia native, wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times claiming yo as a product of south Philadelphia, many of whose residents in the 1930s were immigrants from southern Italy. In the Neapolitan dialect, wrote Paolino, “guaglione (pronounced guahl-YO-nay) signified a young man. The chiefly unlettered immigrants shortened that to guahl-YO, which they pronounced wahl-YO. That was inevitably shortened to yo. The common greeting among young Italian-American males was ‘Hey, whal-YO!’ and then simply ‘Yo!’”

  The possessive yo’, as in “Yo’ mama,” is a contraction of your (as pronounced yore). Not of you.

  you

  “You!” she said.

  There are few more withering remarks than “You!” spoken in a certain way. Jeanne spoke it in just that way.

  —P. G. Wodehouse, “Rough-Hew Them How We Will”

  See U.

  you-all

  I have discovered dismaying things in dictionaries before—for instance, that judging from her photograph in AHD, the Wild West outlaw queen Belle Starr, played in movies by Jane Russell and Elsa Martinelli, actually looked like Harry Dean Stanton. But that shock was nothing compared to finding that the Oxford English Dictionary, which Ernest Weekley justly called “the noblest monument ever reared to any language,” is all wet on you-all.

  “Used in place of you pers. pron. Used, with no clear pattern, both as sing. and as pl.” That’s what OED says. For examples of you-all’s use as singular, it quotes the following people:

  A. Singleton: “Children learn from the slaves some odd phrases; … as … will you all do this? for, will one of you do this?” A. Singleton turns out to be Arthur Singleton, pen name of Henry C. Knight, author of Letters from the South and West, 1824. Knight was a New Englander. He visited Virginia. The fineness of his observation may be gauged by his reference to enslaved women’s breasts as “dark globose hanging fountains” and his casual remark, “I know not whether the slaves, in general, are not happy as their masters.” He says that in Virginia, the husk of corn is called the shuck. That’s right. Then he says, “What we call cob, they call husk.” I have never heard of such a thing in my life.

  Edna Ferber, in Show Boat, a question addressed to one person (Magnolia Ravenal): “You-all one of them Suhveys?” Edna Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, grew up in the Midwest, and was living in New York City when she heard, in Connecticut, about showboats. Her first venture south, to catch a showboat, was in 1925, to Bath, North Carolina, where during a two-day stay she could hardly bear to touch the bedsheets or the food. She had a wonderful lore-gathering trip north on the showboat. To write the book, she went to the Côte Basque, in Fran
ce. So she had not steeped herself in you-all culture. Furthermore, you notice that her fictional questioner (a black man in Chicago, who would have grown up in the South) does not say, “You-all one of them suhvey-takers”? His you-all seems to refer to her organization, as in, “So you work for BP. You-all sufficiently ashamed of yourselves?” His next question to Magnolia is not “Wha’ you-all want?” but “Wha’ you want?”

  Gerald Durrell. In a travel book, he writes of being asked, in South Africa, “Is youall to catch the Parika train?” Durrell is traveling in a party of three. I can’t speak for South Africans, but in the United States, a singular verb might well be used with you-all, but that is irregular grammar, not a sign that the you-all in question is itself singular. People from the Southern United States who wax adamant about the plurality of you-all are not trying to deny that Southerners use incorrect grammar. We are denying that you-all is an unfunctional affectation.