Category: Words Words Words

Selby decoded

Nothing too hard to figure out, but I found it interesting as a bit of antique technology.

The machines finally stopped and [Lucy] told the children to sit right there and she emptied the machines then sat back on the bench and waited to use the extractor. While she waited a woman came in with a cart of clothes and asked if she could use the extractor, the one in her laundromat across the way broke down. The woman in charge told her she would have to wait until all her people were finished, that she couldnt let people from other buildings come in here and use her extractor until her people were finished and she didnt know if theyd be finished in time, it was getting late and there were a awful lot of people waiting and she had to close soon.

—Hubert Selby, Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn (1957), pp. 260-261

There are several online definitions of extractor that fit the specific sense of a laundry machine more advanced than a wringer, among them Infoplease’s “a centrifuge for spinning wet laundry so as to remove excess water”.

Warner decoded

Or, rather, not.

I rather like it that William W. Warner doesn’t slow down to define every bit of terminology that he uses in Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay. Words like cultch and shunpike (a great word, that) are fairly accessible through desk dictionaries. But the following passage defies lookup:

Presently the Dorolena threads the long, dredged channel into Tangier [Island]’s crowded harbor. Crab ponds and shanties are everywhere, and on shore one can detect busy people shuttling around on bicycles and golf carts. The feeling of having arrived somewhere out-of-the-way is very strong; passengers line the rail in anticipation of setting foot on this dot of land in the emptiest reaches of the Chesapeake. Indeed, for all true nesophiles, the journey on the Dorolena is reason enough to go to Tangier. (ch. 10, p. 244)

The mystery word doesn’t ruin the sense of the paragraph, but what exactly does Warner mean by nesophile? My fat dictionaries downstairs offer no help; online sources likewise. Bing, somewhat inexplicably, offers Anne-Sophie Mutter’s official site.

Is a nesophile a lover of islands? A devotee of hard-working ships like the Dorolena, a freight-passenger-mail vessel in service more than 30 years? Or is it someone who likes being in the middle of nowhere? Was Warner going for mesophile and mistyped?

Some lists: 11

Via kottke.org, the Guardian‘s list of the greatest 100 nonfiction books. I’m acquainted with about a fifth of the titles, if you count a couple high school assignments: lots of hits in the society category, not so much in politics, history, and travel. Some odd choices here: as much as I enjoyed it 30 years ago, I’m not sure that I would choose Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid as the sole representative in the mathematics category.

Sage decoded

Robert Sage, in his contribution to the Joyce symposium Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, looks at the prosody of this passage from what would become Finnegans Wake:

She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then, sauntering, by silvamoonlake and he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for whose sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees (peats be with them!) used to rustle that time down by the dykes of killing Kildare, for forstfellfoss with a plash across her. (Book I, chapter 8, known as “The Washers at the Ford”, p. 202 in the Viking edition)

Here’s part of Sage’s analysis:

Then comes the stronger three-syllable word sauntering, indicating development (adolescence) and leading by a short beat to the epitritus silvamoonlake, signifying full growth (maturity), the further associations with the latter stage being sylvan and the silver moon reflected in the lake. (p. 168)

So I marked epitritus in the margin, and when I got home started tracking it down. An internet search founders on the various inflections of the four-to-three ratio and a genus of ants. Randel’s Harvard Dictionary of Music offers, “A sesquitertian ratio, e.g., 4:3, which characterizes the interval of a perfect fourth.” Not what I had in mind. So let’s hit Webster II. Nothing under epitritus, but epitrite is glossed as: “A foot consisting of three long and one short syllables;—so called from being compounded of a spondee (which contains 4 times, or morae) with an iamb or a trochee (which contain 3 times). It is called 1st, 2d, 3d, or 4th epitrite according as the short syllable stands 1st, 2d, etc.”

I think that Sage heard the second syllable of silvamoonlake as the unstressed one, making this a second epitrite, but it’s a close call. To me, the four syllables sound almost equally stressed.

Spenser decoded

So I’m working my way through the evening’s ten pages of Spenser and I come to a passage in Book II, Canto XII of The Faerie Queene where he apparently feels the need to demonize certain species of birds and flying mammals:

Even all the Nation of unfortunate
And fatal Birds about them flocked were,
Such as by nature Men abhor and hate;
The ill-fac’d Owl, Death’s dreadful Messenger,
The hoarse Night-Raven, Trump of doleful Drere,
The Leather-winged Bat, Day’s Enemy,
The rueful Strich, still waiting on the Bier,
The Whistler shrill, that whoso hears, doth die;
The hellish Harpies, Prophets of sad Destiny.

Whistler is glossed by the edition that I am recording as plover, and I don’t know where that disrespect is coming from.

But it was Strich that caught my eye. The word, perhaps already obsolete when Spenser used it at the end of the 16th century, refers to the various petite screech-owls, and was formed through some sort of collision between the sound the bird makes and the ominous, bloodthirsty Strix of classical mythology—or at least so Oxford reasons. To add to the confusion, nowadays Strix names a genus of much larger owls, among them the Great Gray Owl and Barred Owl, and it is the nominate genus of the True Owls family, the Strigidae.

Coover decoded

Robert Coover oversteps a bit when he writes in The Public Burning of Time magazine, personified in his novel as the national poet laureate,

Time in any case has kept his father’s counsel, pursuing those stylistic infatuations that bedizened his earliest work and have been ever since the only passion he’s ever known: the puns and quips, inverted sentences, occupational titles, Homeric epithets and rhythms, … and Time‘s own personal idioglossary of word-coinages, inventions like “kudos” and “pundits” and “tycoons” and hundreds more which have passed into the national lexicon. (ch. 18, p. 326)

Not quite on the coinages. The magazine may have popularized their use, but Oxford gives several 19th-century cites for kudos, pundit, and tycoon; in the case of the first two, definitely the modern senses. The 1987 supplement does give Time a cite (from 1959) for pundit as a verb. Stronger is the case for Henry Luce (in Coover, the mother of Time) and Briton Hadden’s (the father) introduction of the current sense of tycoon as “business magnate,” adapting a 19th century word used by Westerners for a Japanese official. The sense evolved from a nickname for Abraham Lincoln:

1861 J. Hay Diary 25 Apr. in Lincoln & Civil War (1939) 12 Gen. Butler has sent an imploring request to the President to be allowed to bag the whole nest of traitorous Maryland Legislators. This the Tycoon… forbade. 1886 Outing (U.S.) IX. 164/1 The tycoon of the baggage car objected to handling the boat. 1926 Time 14 June 32/3 Married. Fred W. Fitch, 56, rich hair-tonic tycoon.

One down

I knocked off my first book in the year-long Chunkster Challenge, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning. I picked up my copy from Encore Books in Philadelphia. (Encore was a chain somewhat like our failed Crown Books here, trafficking in new releases, overstocks and remainders, and other castoffs. My copy, originally retailing new at $13, sold as a recycled library book for $1.98.) The last time I started the book, I bailed out at page 44, and marked my place with a phone directory listing notice from Bell of Pennsylvania.

Some time later in the next eleven months, after I finish class reading and everything else on my shelf, I am slated for Apollo’s Angels, Watership Down, and The Annotated Origin, Charles Darwin annotated by James T. Costa.

Franzen decoded

Richard Katz has just knocked off work on a construction job on White Street, in Tribeca, on page 198 of Freedom:

Darkness had fallen. The snow had dwindled to a flurry, and the nightly nightmare of Holland Tunnel traffic had commenced. All but two of the city’s subway lines, as well as the indispensable PATH train, converged within three hundred yards of where Katz stood.

For suitable values of “three hundred yards.” If Richard is still somewhere on White Street, he can’t be both within 300 yd of the 7th Avenue IRT (under Varick Street) and also within 300 yd of the F (under Essex Street). Even if we smear Richard along all of Canal Street, he is still not that near the stations of PATH trains (which take him home to New Jersey) at World Trade Center (to the south) and Christopher Street (to the north).

But let’s be generous, and place Richard in sufficient proximity to all the lines that run in Manhattan, one way or another, south of Canal Street, leaving the L (14th Street) and the 7 (42nd Street) as the “all but two.” And we still haven’t accounted for the G: it serves New York City, just not Manhattan.

Eye/insufficiency

Via kottke.org, next month the University of Kansas will mount a production of A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream in Elizabethan era pronunciation, one of very few full productions ever staged. The English of Shakespeare’s period sounds tingly to me, so I welcome the effort.

I have one quibble with the rehearsal footage that Paul Meier and his students have made available: the team chose Dream because so many of the rhyming couplets don’t any more, neither in RP nor Standard American. But the performances are so focused on rhyme that pauses are introduced (however slight) at the ends of lines that are enjambed.

King decoded

Not particularly obscure (it’s in AHD), but a new word for me (and Firefox’s spell-checker): adscititious, “not inherent or essential; derivative.” Use it in a sentence? Why, yes, we can:

Despite my meager funds, I started bicycling each Saturday morning to the estate auctions I saw advertised in the paper, where I would take note of wonderful objects to covet, things that might answer my need to be an owner. However, the few crumpled dollars I had stuffed in my jeans kept my attention tied to the boxes of bric-a-brac and potpourri and nearflung gewgaws, which were always assigned to the very end of the auction, when the high-end collectors had already roped their prizes to the roof of the station wagon and driven off. I thrilled to crates of chilly hardware—coffee tins of rusty nails and mismatched bolts and buts, odd attachments, gimcrack, rickrack, and adscititious crap—because at least then my dollar or two would bring me something hefty, clumped, and durable, in good quantity, penny per pound. Sometimes my fifty-cent bid would be enough to claim it all, and I’d sweat to get it home by bike, understanding at last what I really meant by “adscititious crap.”

—William Davies King, Collections of Nothing, pp. 31-32