Category: Words Words Words

Kinbote writes of dialling 11111 to summon first responders to the scene of the shooting (“I then dialled 11111 and returned with a glass of water to the scene of the carnage,” Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, note to line 1000). At the time of these events, various countries were beginning to adopt 3-digit emergency telephone numbers, following the lead of Britain’s 999. New Zealand introduced a 111 emergency number in 1958; the year before, California rolled out a ZEnith 1-2000 (presumably one asked for rather than dialled this number, since Z is not assigned a digit on the telephone dial); Australia adopted 000 in 1961. Use of 11111 for emergency purposes is undocumented, as far as my searches go.

Old World/New World: “…the disguised king’s arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole.” (note to line 691) As is often the case, a New World family of birds (the black and yellow Icteridae, “jaundiced ones”) is not closely related to its Old World namesake, in this case the orioles, family Oriolidae.

Nabokov appears to have introduced two coinages in the book, one by Shade (“And that odd muse of mine,/My versipel, is with me everywhere,/In carrel and in car, and in my chair.” [ll. 946-948]) and one by Kinbote (“The Shades were out, said the cheeky ancillula, an obnoxious little fan who came to cook for them on Sundays and no doubt dreamt of getting the old poet to cuddle her some wifeless day.” [note to line 802]). Versipel is glossed as a back-formation from versipellous, “changeable; protean; having a form, nature or appearance that changes often.” Ancillula is from the Latin, and is a diminutive of ancilla, “handmaid.”

11D points to a round-up of recommendations on the whats and the hows of purging books from your library. I’ve been promising that I will get rid of back issues of IEEE journals (I have a digital subscription as backup), and the minor water damage I incurred after the big December snowstorm will make that finally happen. What other useless space-fillers do I have downstairs?

In the course of tracking down some of the more obscure vocabulary in Blood Meridian (obscure, unless you’re a Scots-descended horseman living in what is now the American Southwest), I ran across the interesting word scantlin or scantling (“I got busted in the head with a scantlin,” chap. III, p. 32 in the Modern Library edition). It refers to a timber used for framing a house or a ship, like a 2×4, and is often used in the plural. It has several other older senses, reaching back to its derivation from scantillon, jumping from the French échantillon, with senses of “a sample” or “a measuring rod.” But of course the confusion with scant is all too easy, and one proceeds with caution in tracing its etymology.

Slear (“Climbing up through ocotillo and pricklypear where the rocks trembled and sleared in the sun…”, chap. V, p. 62) does not show up in my printed references, but there are online uses of slearing as a industrial process performed on coiled metals. Perhaps a portmanteau of shear and slit? And is this the sense that Cormac McCarthy had in mind?

I’m a little disappointed with the notes to the LOA edition of The Beautiful and Damned. We get no help with “a seidel of beer” (p. 516) (nothing more complicated than a drinking glass, but still); most of the song lyrics are glossed, but not “Out in—the shimmee sanitarium…” (p. 784). And, most significantly, nothing on Bilphist and Bilphism (pp. 475 and passim), apparently a brand of spiritualism of Fitzgerald’s own invention.

However, a trip to the dictionary was worth it for this sentence. The Patches have come down in the world:

Anthony lay upon the lounge looking up One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Street toward the river, near which he could just see a single patch of vivid green trees that guaranteed the brummagem umbrageousness of Riverside Drive. (“No Matter!”, p. 760)

Brummagem, a Menckenesque “cheap and showy; meretricious.” Umbrageousness here doesn’t mean what you think, but rather the property of “affording shade”. Coleridge has “A chestnut spread its umbrage wide.”

I have yet to make much of this passage in A Peculiar Treasure:

One of my delights was to have [Grandpa Neumann] take me on his knee and tell me stories of Edelvard and Kunigunda. (p. 25)

I suspect that the personages were Neumann’s own invention.

Tracking down Cutler-Hammer, to which Edna Ferber refers as an important employer in the upper Midwest, is much easier. Although the electrical and electronic products supplier was acquired by Eaton Corp. in 1978, the brand maintains an identity, albeit diminished, to this day.

Although I am defeated (as many others before me) by Edna Ferber’s “The schnuckle among the nations of the world,” (A Peculiar Treasure, p. 10), Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish gives some guidance on the following:

It was Alexander Woollcott who acted as schatchen in the marriage between the novel entitled Show Boat and the music of Jerome Kern. (p. 304)

Rosten has:

schadchen

1. A professsional matchmaker
2. Anyone who brings together, introduces, or maneuvers a man and woman into a meeting that results in a wedding.

And, indeed, context explains this one. Woollcott and Ferber, attending an opening together, are hanging out at intermission, in different parts of the lobby, when Woollcott is accosted ever so gently by Kern:

“Look, Aleck, I hear you are a friend of Edna Ferber. I wonder if you’ll kind of fix it for me to meet her. I want to talk to her about letting me make a musical from her Show Boat. Can you arrange an introduction or a meeting or something?”

Mr. Woollcott, with a dreadful relish for the dramatic plum which had thus fallen into his lap (if any), said, musingly, “M-m-m, well, I think I can just arrange it if I play my cards right.”

“Thanks,” said Kern. “Thanks awfully, Aleck, I’ll be—”

Woollcott now raised his voice to a bellow: “Ferber! Hi, Ferber! Come on over here a minute.” Then, “This is Jerome Kern. Edna Ferber.”

Via kottke.org, a surprisingly hard book quiz: identify the title from its Amazon.com Statistically Improbable Phrases. I scored only 12 (plus one near miss) out of 69 books (20th century, mostly originally in English, everything from high art to genre fiction), and I’m not telling you the ones I missed that I should have recognized. Here’s one of the easier ones: “inner party, three superstates, chinless man, chocolate ration, varicose ulcer.” I should have remembered this one, but it’s been a while since I read the book: “plait round, plaited cord, extra button.”

Rob Slade takes up Henry’s argument from The Real Thing in a post about the semantic drift of terminology in the field of computing security. Along the way he makes a great analogy:

… language is kind of like a giant Wikipedia, where anyone at all can make an entry. And anyone at all can try and modify that entry.

Mark Liberman riffs on a word that I like to beat people up with.

In a proper name that includes a numerical designation, when do we (or most of us) pronounce the name as a cardinal and when do we use an ordinal? For instance, we read Elizabeth II as “Elizabeth the second” but Super Bowl II as “Super Bowl two.” Is the distinction just people vs. everything else? Don’t names of ships sometimes use ordinals and sometimes cardinals? How about horses, like Canonero II?

(Prompted by a momentary misreading of Discoverer I as “Discoverer the first” [Only Revolutions, p. 291S.] Conversely, our friend David refers to Shakepeare’s best-known history play as “Henry five.”)

bit-player asks an interesting question: are there any board positions in Scrabble that are stymied, i.e., in which no additional words can be formed? (Let’s stipulate a two-player game, and that only acceptable words are played. As we know, it’s perfectly legal to invent a word and play it, so long as your opponent doesn’t challenge it; it may be in your opponent’s interest not to challenge a bogus word.) I suspect that such a stymied position, if it exists, uses all four of the S’s. This is actually a two-part problem: find a board position and state of the players’ racks that is stymied, and (harder) find a board position that is stymied no matter how the remaining tiles are distributed.

“And your English lakes—Vindermere, Grasmere—are they, then, unhealthy?”

“No, Frau Liesecke; but that is because they are fresh water, and different. Salt water ought to have tides, and go up and down a great deal, or else it smells. Look, for instance, at an aquarium.”

“An aquarium! Oh, Meesis Munt, you mean to tell me that fresh aquariums stink less than salt? Why, when Victor, my brother-in-law, collected many tadpoles—”

“You are not to say ‘stink,'” interrupted Helen; “at least, you may say it, but you must pretend you are being funny while you say it.”

“Then ‘smell.’ And the mud of your Poole down there—does it not smell, or may I say ‘stink, ha, ha’?”

—E.M. Forster, Howards End, chap. 19