Category: Words Words Words

F. Scott Fitzgerald may have committed neologism in his story from 1922, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (I’m reading the version collected as Tales of the Jazz Age in the Library of America edition, pp. 913-953). Rich scion John Unger is visiting his richer school friend Percy Washington in Percy’s family retreat, a Hearstian fastness in cis-Canadian Montana:

On one of the towers, the tallest, the blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort of floating fairyland—and as John gazed up in warm enchantment the faint acciaccare sound of violins drifted down in a rococo harmony that was like nothing he had heard before.

Now my desktop source, The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Don Michael Randel, ed.), defines acciaccatura as a musical ornament of the 17th and 18th centuries, featuring a nonharmonic tone that is neither prepared nor resolved. Randel proposes a derivation “perhaps from acciaccare, to crush.” But he doesn’t provide an English musical sense for acciaccare on its own.

Google Books does turn up James F. Warner’s 1841 translation from the German of Godfrey Weber’s General Music Teacher, which does treat the two words together in one glossary entry:

The substantive acciaccatura, from the verb acciaccare, means literally a violent seizing, or attacking, and is employed in a similar sense in music, though it is used in such extremely different applications, that its signification has become entirely indefinite. (p. v)

Not much to hang onto there, and certainly not enough for us to guess what “the faint acciaccare sound of violins” might sound like. Indeed the only examples of acciaccare in English that I’ve found are quotations from Fitzgerald.

By the way, what does “a rococo harmony” suggest to you?

A page previous, Fitzgerald does better. After being picked up at a train flag stop, bouncing along a boulder-flecked road, and undergoing a sort of portage, John and Percy find the way to the castle easier going:

“The worst is over,” said Percy, squinting out the window. “It’s only five miles from here, and our own road—tapestry brick—all the way.”

Tapestry brick was a fancy brick with variable coloration, used to clad buildings. A tony apartment building that opened in Washington in 1925 featured its tapestry brick exterior as a selling point. It would seem to have a rough texture: one source uses “rug face brick” as a synonym and shows a brick with irregular vertical striations. A document prepared by D.C.’s Capitol Hill Preservation Society describes tapestry brick as “usually tan or buff-colored.” Fiske & Co. manufactured what it claimed was “the only Tapestry Brick in the world” and used Tapestry as an unregistered trademark. Their mark, undefended, fell into generic use, and the product ultimately fell out of popularity.

So shiny, polished bricks were out of fashion at the time. Still, I would think they would make for a smoother ride when used as a road surface.

Eugene Jolas’s translation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz offers this poser. Karl is being questioned by the authorities about his role in the death of Franz’s girlfriend Mieze:

“Who told you that?” “To bury it? Well, somebody. I just wanta know how I stand. Did I commit a crime when I helped to bury a corpse?” “Look here, the way you put the thing, it’s hardly a crime at all, or only a petty one. If you were not involved at all and had no interest in it. But why did you help?” “I’m tellin’ you, I just gave a hand for friendship’s sake, but that didn’t matter, at any rate, I wasn’t involved in the affair and it didn’t matter to me whether the person was or wasn’t found.” “Was there some kind of femic murder in your gang?” “Well—” (Eighth Book, p. 307)

The only definition that femic turns up is something my geology teacher would be interested: it’s a category of igneous rock with certain proportions of iron and magnesium.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is a missed translation to/from femicide, which does show up in Oxford as “murder of a woman.”

My goodness, two more posts about the sizzling practice of copy editing, this time via The Morning News. First, Lori Fradkin’s “What It’s Really Like to Be a Copy Editor”, followed up with Johnson’s (R.L.G.’s) reply. To which I can only add Charlie Baker’s lament:

CHARLIE: …That’s why she wanted me to go away, you see. She simply finds me shatteringly, profoundly—boring.

FROGGY: Now, why would she think that, eh?

CHARLIE: Oh, because I am. I know it. There I’ve sat behind my gray little proofreader’s desk for twenty-seven years, now—I sometimes wonder whether a science fiction magazine even needs a proofreader. Does anyone really care whether there is one K or two in “Klatu, barada, nikto”?

—Larry Shue, The Foreigner, I:i

Via Arts & Letters Daily, Andy Ross interviews Mary Norris about editing copy at The New Yorker.

One stubborn editor refused to believe that “arrhythmia” was spelled with two “r”s. This doesn’t come up often, but it is odd to have someone simply refuse to spell a word right because he thinks it looks funny. It’s almost admirable.

As a side note, Ross notes that there will be a master class on copy editing on 18 October as part of this year’s New Yorker Festival.

A goody with several examples online but no authoritative dictionary entry (and no etymology!):

In the suite occupied by Patricia Van Riis, lobster and champagne were the rule. The patrons of Powder River Rose usually ordered mountain oysters and washed them down with forty-rod. And so on down the list: while with Dolores O’Riely, tortillas and prune brandy from the Imperial Valley…

—Nathanael West, A Cool Million, ch. 18

Unless you count Mencken:

Other characteristic Americanisms (a few of them borrowed by the English) are red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, forty-rod, squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, moon-shine, hard-cider, apple-jack and corpse-reviver, and the auxiliary drinking terms…

The American Language, ch. 3

Ah, but OED comes through:

1889 FARMER Americanisms, * Forty Rod Lightning, whisky of the most villainous description, so called because humorously warranted to kill at forty rods.

Much snappier than 201-meter lightning. Forty rods are also equivalent to 1 furlong.

Nathanael West slips an archaism into the mannered, allusive novella The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931):

… all would agree that “Life is but the span from womb to tomb; a sigh, a smile; a chill, a fever; a throe of pain, a spasm of volupty: then a gasping for breath, and the comedy is over, the song is ended, ring down the curtain, the clown is dead.”

Easily decodable from context, borrowed from French, is volupty (stress on the first syllable), but what’s sort of interesting is that it leaves little online trace. It’s a word on the verge of extinction. The 1913 Webster dismisses it as “Voluptuousness. [Obs.],” the OED also marks it “Obs.” while Webster II (1960) gives it some life as “Pleasure; now, usually, sexual pleasure.” Harold P. Simonson, in his Beyond the Frontier (1989), slaps a sic on his quotation from old Nat.

We learned in grammar school how to multiply two-digit numbers with pencil and paper, but I’ve never heard this phrase, which metaphorically substitutes the placement for the arithmetical operation. In this passage from Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in 1911, pedlar Selig is buying finished cookpots from artisan Seth at a dollar apiece, who is in turn buying raw materials (eight sheets of metal) from Selig:

SELIG: How many of them pots you got?

SETH: I got six. That’s six dollars minus eight on top of fifteen for the sheet metal come to a dollar twenty out of the six dollars leave me four dollars and eighty cents.

SELIG (Counting out the money): There’s four dollars… and… eighty cents.

—August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, I:1

Or (6 · 1) – (8 · 0.15 ) = 4.80.

Bernd Brunner, in his Bears: A Brief History (trans. Lori Lantz), introduces the denizen of the Appalachian woods as the American Black Bear (Ursus americanus) with the synonym baribal, a term unknown to me. Furthermore, as a 1982 query by A. Richard Diebold, Jr. indicates, it’s not at all clear where this word came from. Folk etymology suggests a loanword from a Native American language, but Diebold could find no evidence for this claim.

Via Leta’s Day, according to this codebook for telegraphic communication, my birthday is Attitle. What an interesting 19th-century word list: obsolete legalisms, iconographic terms, spelling bee words not borrowed from the Italian, all mingled with the mundane.

Chapter IV of Absalom, Absalom! repeats the word durance several times, as in the passage, “…Henry waited four years, holding the three of them in that abeyance, that durance, waiting, hoping, for Bon to renounce…” It doesn’t quite mean the way it looks. My Compact Oxford glosses it as “archaic imprisonment (in durance vile),” but yet there is an etymologic connection to durable and one of Bill’s favorite words, endure.

Sutpen’s adjunctive (ch. VII, “when he repudiated that first wife and that child when he discovered that they would not be adjunctive to the forwarding of the design”) is also in the desktop dictionaries, but only as a related form to the main entry, and adjectival form of another adjective, not unlike his own attitude to spouse and spawn.

Doggery is clear from context (ch. VII, “doggeries and taverns now become hamlets, hamlets now become villages, villages now towns”), yet only turns up in American Heritage as “dogs, collectively.” Merriam-Webster adds the more apposite slang definition, “cheap saloon.”

Joe Palca has a great job: he gets to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull on air. Mark Liberman checks off various presenters’ runs at the tricksy Icelandic volcano’s name.

Language Log contributor Geoff Nunberg explores new crannies of curmudgeonliness. My kind of guy:

I have this notion that “gingerly” shouldn’t be used as an adverb, as in, “She hugged the child gingerly,” because there’s no corresponding adjective “ginger” — you wouldn’t say, “She gave the child a ginger hug.” I’ll concede that “gingerly” has been used as an adverb for 400 years, and nobody’s ever complained about it before. But so much the better: Every time I see the word used as an adverb, I can take a quiet satisfaction in knowing that I’m marching to a more logical drummer than the half-billion other speakers of English who haven’t yet cottoned to the problem.

Now let me explain how to pronounce the names of the years of this past decade…

At the present time, in the dark little parlour certain feet below the level of the street—a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only ornamented with the coarsest of baize table-covers, and the hardest of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering in its decorative character no bad allegorical representation of Grandfather Smallweed’s mind—seated in two black horse-hair porter’s chairs, one in each side of the fireplace, the superannuated Mr and Mrs Smallweed wile away the rosy hours.

—Bleak House, ch. 21, p. 343

Wile away: eggcorn or no? Arnold Zwicky isn’t so sure. My edition is merely the 1971 Penguin paperback, and doesn’t offer any editorial suggestions about Dickens’ intentions. There are many versions of the book online that amend the phrase to the more widely accepted while away.

In chapter 38, Mr. Guppy is hypermeticulously securing an oral witness (Caroline) to a renunciation of a marriage proposal:

‘Married woman, I believe?’ said Mr Guppy. ‘Married woman. Thank you. Formerly Caroline Jellyby, spinster, then of Thavies Inn, within the City of London, but extraparochial; now of Newman Street, Oxford Street. Much obliged.’ (p. 602)

A dictionary and some thought gives us extraparochial as “outside of any church parish.” So before she married Turveydrop, Caroline lived in a place within the City that was not part of any parish. But the connotations of this term run deeper, when we consider Dickens’ (who composed Bleak House in the early 1850s) steady theme of providing for the poor. A UK government guide to 19th century census reports elaborates:

Besides parishes, with their tythings or townships and chapelries, there were also many places in England and Wales not contained in the limits of any parish. These extra-parochial places had inherited an independence by which they enjoyed virtual exemption from taxation; from maintaining the poor, since there was no Overseer on whom a Magistrate’s Order could be served; from the Militia Laws because there was no Constable to make returns; and from repairing the highways, because there was no official surveyor….

In 1857 the peculiar privileges enjoyed by extra-parochial places were curtailed under an Act ‘to provide for the Relief of the Poor in Extra-Parochial Places’ which decreed that places named extra-parochial in the 1851 Census report were to be deemed parishes for this purpose and to have Overseers appointed for them by the Justices of the Peace. In the case of extra-parochial places covering a very small piece of land, the place was annexed to an adjoining parish, if the consent of the owners and occupiers of two-thirds in value of the land was forthcoming. Special provision was made for the particular cases of the places in London termed the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn where the officer acting for the time being as Under Treasurer, and the Registrar in Charterhouse were appointed Overseers. This act did not apply to places not specified as extra-parochial in the census reports. In these cases the act was merely permissive and, therefore, largely inoperative. In a later Act of 1868 it was declared that every extra-parochial place existing on 25 December 1868, should be added to the next adjoining civil parish which had the longest common boundary. In spite of these acts there are still some places in England and Wales which are extra-parochial from civil parishes. They are all islands or lighthouses which were probably overlooked in the act since they were not contiguous with any parish and, therefore, could not be added to any. There are also still many extra-parochial places from ecclesiastical parishes which enjoy special privileges under Church laws or custom.

Yes, I’m a little woozy after reading that, too. According to a Wikipedia article stub, certain places in the City are yet today considered extraparochial. Something to do with the Knights Templar, ’nuff said.