@ sixes & sevens

Wharton's wordplay

By age and by education he belonged to the stout Positivist tradition, and his habit of thought had been formed in the days of the epic struggle between physics and metaphysics. But he had been, then and always, essentially a spectator, a humorous detached observer of the immense muddled variety show of life ...

This from an Edith Wharton story, "The Eyes," to which I was listening happily over a podcast of "Selected Shorts". (Luckily you can read the entire story online here.) Wharton's prose, I was reminded, has a real love of words nestled in it. Sometimes it's a bit dense, and you find yourself lulled into not listening to the words until a word or phrase suddenly leaps out at you.

In this instance I was reminded of an ancient New Yorker cartoon. ... caption, "He says he's just an observer of the passing scene."

Those months were delightful. Noyes was constantly with me, and the more I saw of him the better I liked him. His stupidity was a natural grace -- it was as beautiful, really, as his eye-lashes. And he was so gay, so affectionate, and so happy with me, that telling him the truth would have been about as pleasant as slitting the throat of some artless animal.

and a little farther on:

He shot his head out of the mist with a queer tortoise-like motion he sometimes had, and blinked approvingly at Frenham.

To this genius for capturing a turn of phrase is added a few queer word nuggets, just enough out-of-place to catch your attention but not so opaque as to cause your attention to stumble, at least not for more than a phrase or two, never for an entire sentence. (I am likely to stop the iPod or to scramble for my cell phone that I can leave myelf a note.) The trait is a variation of what reading Shakespeare becomes, where the endless variations in words (using one part of speech for another, as an adjective for a noun, or a by now obsolete form of a word) can make the reading both rewarding and frustrating at once.

Here are just two words that caught my ear in "The Eyes": dupery and hyacinthine. I'll leave it to you to find these words buried in the story.

And on and on it goes. This post was still in draft when I caught yet another Selected Shorts" podcast, reading this time from Wharton's "The Debt". Early on Wharton engages in another one of her sidelong characterizations. The victim this time, ultimately to find retribution, is one Galen Dregde:

He was as inexpressive as he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose silence is an interruption.

I've gotta put these thoughts in a post if only to get them out of my mind ... :

dour - pour - sour

You gotta love English for its aggravating inconsistencies. I think this lodged in my head after a discussion about how the first word in the list is usually pronounced door (which, now that I look at it, is a different word pronounced a different way, i.e., dore) and not dower to rhyme with sour or hour.

The second of these thoughts comes at it from a different angle: how the same word might be pronounced in any of several ways.

you're: ewer? yer? yore?

This may have come by analogy with your, a rhyming entry akin to pour above. I can't say with any certainty which of these pronunciations I use most frequently. If you check the different audio guides in Dictionary.com you'll hear a subtle difference. I expect I pronounce it ewer more than most people I know. But is some of this regional or just affected?

exaltation / exultation

I'm always attracted by those lists of frequently confused English words (there/their/they're), mentally testing myself and more often than not finding myself to be a genius -- if not a particularly modest one.

Yet I was reading the early pages of Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven the other afternoon when I came across the first of this similar sounding pair of words. It brought me up short: Exaltation? Shouldn't that be exultation?

Once I started thinking about it, however, I realized there was a distinction to be made, even if I didn't recognize it. After all the Biblical quotation (Isaiah 40:4, KJV) reads

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.

Mind you, I really know that citation through Handel's Messiah, but that's another story.

On the other hand, the lyrics to O Come All Ye Faithful (second verse) are

O Sing, choirs of angels, / Sing in exultation ...

With any luck I might remember this distinction for longer than it's taken me to write a blog post about it.

block that neologism ... but not this one.

comfortability

We heard this from one of the Mets sportscasters the other day. Kiki had her head turned, but when I squeaked "Comfortability?" she said, "Oh, I'm glad you noticed that." This is a classic case of adding on to a word when there's a perfectly useful and shorter word in use -- in this case, comfort.

Mind you, I'm not against word elaboration when there's a semantic need for it. Kiki brought this to mind when she quoted someone in an article in the Times, who referred to an heirloom's divineness. Clearly this 'divine' object had not so much divinity as divineness.

But what then of this word that Kiki came up with: definity? What could be more cumbersome that definiteness -- no better than comfortability, really. And the pre-existing noun definition has by now taken on so many other meanings that a new word is certainly called for.

Cast of thousands (well, the first few)

As if proof were needed that blogs are little more than a parking spot for useless information ...

I have occasionally had fictitious names pop into my head, usually involving what only I think is a cute play on words. It was while wading through piles of papers in our living room that I came across a short list of such names. I have been keeping a separate account in the Notepad section of my cell phone. Herewith a starter set of such fictitious names.

• Holling DeBry (Hauling debris)
• Yábada Bedú (Yabba Dabba Doo)
• Furwad al-Qitti
• Charmelle Shake (Sharm el-Sheikh)
• Perry Tonaitis (Peritonitis)
• Chuck Guzel / Chuck Goozell (çok güzel, Turkish for "Everything's good")
• Wythe Longface / Wyeth Longface (Why the Long Face?)
• Peter "Pete" Bog
• Ed Memoir (aide-mémoire)
• Ceil Antreaux (cilantro)
• Howie Doohan (how're we doin'?)

MTA-Creole Kreyol-MTA

311 vwazwen ou ki fè twòp bwi.

The MTA has been posting public service announcements for the city's 311 information line in various 'foreign' languages heard in New York. (I took a photograph of the Arabic-language version.) On the way home tonight I caught up with the Creole version.

Creole has always been frustrating for me. After years and years of French instruction and on-the-job refreshers, I can't quite master this close-but-no-cigar derivative. Totally anecdotally I have figured out some of the grammar and recognized a word or two.

Tonight I decided to give it another go. It helped that I'd seen the English-language version already. Some of the phrases were pretty easy, such as those for learning how to learn English or to license your dog. But the one above on first glance gave up nothing about its meaning. Strangely it was the unfamiliar first word that began to open the door. Sounding it out I made the connection between vwazwen and voisin, "neighbor".

I had seen ou before, and it struck me as a personal adjective even in the postposition. (What had confused me was that both ou and où have French meanings that make no sense in this context.) Here ou was akin to the French tu or as an adjective, ton.

So: "your neighbor." I think I know where this is going.

ki fè.Ah, of course: qui fait, "who makes": "Your neighbor who makes ...."

That leaves only the mysterious twòp bwi. Getting the hang of this, it was a short step from bwi to bruit, "noise". That leaves only twòp, which was certainly both in context and phonetically trop, "too much".

311 your noisy neighbor.

yet more further words

ventriloquence

1. the practice of projecting one's voice with fluency and aptness so that it seems to come from another source.
2. (fig.) the art of making other people say what you want them to say.

This is (as far as I can tell) a neologism.

personalty

This is a real world, or at least a word used in the legal profession. American Heritage Dictionary online defines it as "Personal property; chattels." This came up while talking with the estate lawyer yesterday afternoon. Of course, there in the forms I was signing was the very word "chattels" used in the definition above. In a sense, it's personality with the 'I' taken out. (yuk, yuk)

It put me in mind of other -ty words. The first one that sprang to my mind was admiralty, and it seems that the root word needs to end in al for it to work. [My literate and lawyerly neighbor reminded me of both realty, the apposite of personalty, and fealty.]  Is there a use for "the liberalty"?

More language observations

data squirrel

I came across this term in Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. (I'm still reading it, so it's a little early for a review.) Weinberger's thesis is that digital storage of information has freed us of earlier, inflexible models of information (which he calls first and second order of order). One such model, the tree of knowledge, requires information (which he compares to a leaf) to appear at only on place on the tree, and that two pieces of information are related through only one pathway. We, he says, often need to be like data squirrels, leaping from one branch to another, from one leaf of information to another.

The phrase "data squirrel", by the way, doesn't appear in the index to his book. (tsk tsk!) A Google search of the phrase comes up largely empty.

prepárate / preparate

There is a Spanish-language public service billboard on the route the Chinatown bus takes from New York to Boston -- it's somewhere near New Haven. The word "preparate" appears prominently. For some reason I'm always looking out the window when we pass it. I know it's in Spanish, and that the word means prepare yourself. But I always try to make the word English, and a particularly awkward sort of English at that. It seems like an untutored person's take on prepare, an effort to sound 'educated', perhaps as a back formation from preparation. I also think about the nonce word disapparate, popularized in the Harry Potter series.

More words for you

yesternight

The contemporary textile artist El Anatsui uses this lovely if underused word in his podcast interview with MPOW's African art curator Alisa LaGamma. Of course, it's worth listening to for more than just this one word.

tofaux

This popped into my mind while emailing a friend about a vegetarian Chinese restaurant's menu. I would define it as tofu-based imitations of meat. Tofurkey is only one such product.

Another sit upright quotation

Innumerable books and dissertations have naturally ventured explanations of such incantatory texts ...; these analyses have uncovered the disguised presence of a lover or some erotic motif, but as with the analyses of Cubist pictures, finding a pipe or a smokestack or a cigar only goes so far in explaining the deeper meaning of the art.

This sit-upright quotation comes from, of all things, a Michael Kimmelman review of Janet Malcolm's recent biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. It appears in the Oct. 25, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books. It follows a selection from Stein's cryptic poem "Sweet Tail (Gypsies)".