Category: Words Words Words

John McPhee drops a Celtic allusion into The Control of Nature to describe the severe hazard along the lower Mississippi. From the “Atchafalaya” section:

This threat to navigation could be called could be called an American Maelstrom—a modern Charybdis, a Corryvreckan—were it not so very much greater in destructive force.

The whirlpool in the Gulf of Corryvreckan, off the west coast of Scotland, is better known by Britons than by me. Fans of the Powell-Pressburger films should know it, too.

On the other hand, this word looks like a McPhee nonce. It appears only one place else online, in a Jstor-protected source.

Wells fills a dish with a dark soil from burned chaparral. He fills the eyedropper and empties it onto the soil. The water stands up in one large dome. Five minutes later, the dome is still there. Ten minutes later, the dome is still there. Sparkling, tumescent, mycophane, the big bead of water just stands there indefinitely, on top of the impermeable soil. (“Los Angeles Against the Mountains”)

Presumably the sense of mycophane is “semi-transparent, like threads of mycelium.”

They both rolled part of the way down the stairs.

—Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

Spang on page 2 of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a topical reference, never directly referred to again in the course of the short novel, but one definitely laden with foreshadowing. The work was published in 1961, but its events begin in 1930.

At that time they had been immediately recognizable as Miss Brodie’s pupils, being vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorised curriculum, as the headmistress said, and useless to the school as a school. These girls were discovered to have heard of the Buchmanites and Mussolini, the Italian Renaissance painters, the advantages to the skin of cleansing cream and witch-hazel over honest soap and water, and the word “menarche”; the interior decoration of the London house of the author of Winnie the Pooh had been described to them, as had the love lives of Charlotte Brontë and of Miss Brodie herself.

In the interwar period, the evangelist Frank N. D. Buchman formulated an approach to shared spiritual experience that became known as the Oxford Group. Even digging shallowly in the online record, it’s clear to me that Buchman’s methods attracted controversy. A snippy notice from an 1928 number of Time calls the Group a “curious collegiate cult” apparently obsessed with sex. Later in the 1930s, with war drums rumbling, Buchman and his followers organized under the banner of Moral Re-Armament (MRA). Buchman was active in Nazi Germany, ultimately denounced by the ruling party; Communists likewise attacked him. His work is also credited as one of the roots of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement.

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.