Lexicon Avenue

They were positive about him being a crook, however

2008-11-09T09:35:00.000-08:00

Today is the 90th birthday of Spiro Agnew, 39th Vice President of the U. S. (he died in 1996), who served under Richard Nixon and who delivered one of the great (and most alliterative) epithets ever, when he referred to members of the media as "nattering nabobs of negativity."

In October of 1973 Agnew was forced to resign as Vice President after being charged with accepting bribes of more than $100,000 while governor of Maryland and also Vice President.

"Spiro Agnew" is an anagram of "prison wage."

Quackle snap pop

2008-10-28T10:52:00.000-07:00

Quackle is the name of a Scrabble software program that allows you to play against a computer. The other day is scored 320 points against Quackle with "FANZINES," an idiotic word recently added to the Scrabble dictionary. Today Quackle retaliated with "WHEEZING" against me for 356 points. Still, I won't duck Quackle, ever.

Scrabble in Music City, and that starts with S

2008-10-26T13:42:00.000-07:00

Big Scrabble tournament in Musical City yesterday. There were six of us "experts" in the top division. I finished second. In my most interesting game I led off with ANTEFIX for 100 points. My opponent was stunned, of course, but then he went to town adorning the word, first hooking it with an A (ANTEFIXA) and then hooking that with an E (ANTEFIXAE), scoring 40 or so on each play. Meanwhile I was busy elsewhere, following up my opening play with IODOPHOR and then RECURVES, all without the benefit of a blank. I had 247 points after three turns. I added another late bingo, and if it hadn't been for a little lull when I was saddled with a surfeit of vowels I would have scored over 600. I had 542.

Dumb word of the day (mainly because I challenged it and lost): toileted. The Scrabble dictionary says this the past tense of the verb toilet. Merriam-Webster does not count toilet as a verb, but since when has that ever deterred the intrepid adventurers responsible for the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary?

The litmus test for including a word in the OSPD, to my way of thinking, ought to be this: Has anyone in the history of spoken English ever uttered the word?

Rail away, Twain

2008-09-16T04:20:00.000-07:00

Today is the birthday of James Fenimore Cooper, the popular American frontier novelist of the early 19th century. His most famous book is The Last of the Mohicans.

About fifty years after Cooper wrote his tales, Mark Twain took them up -- and then put them down, with a vengeance. In his famous essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," Twain did the opposite of Tom Sawyer, who whitewashed that fence: he lay bare what he saw as the glaring sins of a literary fraud.

"Cooper’s art has some defects," Twain wrote. "In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

"There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction–some say twenty-two. In 'Deerslayer' Cooper violated eighteen of them."

Twain gave Cooper absolutely no "clemensy":

"Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment...Cooper's eye was splendidly inaccurate. Cooper seldom saw anything correctly...

"Cooper was certainly not a master in the construction of dialogue. Inaccurate observation defeated him here as it defeated him in so many other enterprises of his life. He even failed to notice that the man who talks corrupt English six days in the week must and will talk it on seventh...

"Cooper's word-sense was singularly dull."

The critic built up steam until he was a runaway Twain:

"I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that 'Deerslayer' is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that 'Deerslayer' is just simply a literary delirium tremens.

"A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language."

Today's coined word: atwaint, v.: to denounce the literary pretensions of someone or some thing.

How the Grunch stole driving

2008-09-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

Every hick down in Hickville liked driving a lot,
But the Grunch, who lived north of Hickville,
Did not!
The Grunch hated autos, and people who ran them;
If he'd had his way, the government would ban them!
It could be that his head was screwed on the wrong way;
It could be, perhaps, that he just had a sleigh.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
Was the Grunch, being Arab, didn't want to play ball.

(Grunch: proper noun, a portmanteau word composed of gas and crunch)

A story played out

2008-08-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

Today's ghost phrase:

Ad favreum: adj., Referring specifically to a sports news story -- often brett-takingly trivial to begin with -- reported to the point of absurdity.

Just banning "Trees" would have saved a million trees

2008-07-29T12:38:00.000-07:00

Kay Ryan was named poet laureate of the United States. "I might take it upon myself," she said, "to prevent all bad poetry from being published."

She's a poet,
And boy, does she know it.
Just because she's the Laureate,
She feels entitled to excoriate
The poetasters among us?
As if we were fungus,
To be scraped away.
But how can say
What is superior in verse
Without preserving what's worse?

Any portmanteau in a storm

2008-07-04T10:32:00.000-07:00

On July 4, 1865, Alice in Wonderland was first published.

In the book, Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that the word “slithy” in the poem Jabberwocky is a "portmanteau" word – a cross between “slimy” and “lithe.”

He also points out that the word “mimsy” in the same poem is another portmanteau word, a cross between “miserable” and “flimsy.”

My meal ticket

2008-06-20T08:09:00.000-07:00

Thinking of starting a new business, offering specialty placemats for diners and cafeterias. They would feature pithy quotations, riddles, jokes, et al.

The name: Place Mots.

Dickens, as dead as a door-nail, still lives

2008-06-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

Charles Dickens died on yesterday's date -- June 9, 1870.

He gave his name to idioms in this vein -- A "dickens" of a time, the "dickens" you say, what the "dickens," et al.

Dickens also created many characters whose names have entered the lexicon, or instantly suggest an image of a certain type of person -- Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Micawber, Pickwick, Fagin.

Some characters, only Dickens could have named: Sweedlepipe, Honeythunder, Bumble, Pumblechook, M'Choakumchild, Podsnap, Gradgrind.

The word Dickensian, of course, conjures up a whole slew of images.

One scientist of onomastics (the study of names) has declared that Dickens created 989 distinct characters, which inspires us to coin a word of our own to describe this fastidious scholar:

Onomastochist.

For more about Dickens, visit Farewells, June 9

Noisy Parker

2008-06-07T01:54:00.000-07:00

Writer and wit Dorothy Parker died on this day in 1967. She was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, journalists, raconteurs and general idlers and time wasters that regularly met at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City to drink and insult everyone including each other, and to exchange the barbs and one-liners they'd saved up for the occasion.

Parker was probably the most talented of the group. She wrote several short stories that have stood the test of time, notably "Big Blonde," and her poems ("Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses.") are still quoted.

She apparently coined the phrases "what the hell," "one-night stand," and "ball of fire."

"Maybe it is only I," Parker wrote, "but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies."

For more about Dorothy Parker, visit Today in Farewells

A Bentley of an insult

2008-06-04T07:53:00.000-07:00

Today is the birthday of George III of England, born in 1738.

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

-- Edmund Clerihew Bentley

For more about clerihews, see March 30.

Of cribbages and kings

2008-06-01T18:30:00.000-07:00

Sir John Suckling, the English Cavalier poet, died on this day in 1842. He invented the game -- and apparently the word -- cribbage.

I met a lady last year who played in a cribbage group every week. Each time she left home to attend, her husband would ask her:

"Going to play that cabbage game again?"

More Tom Swifties

2008-05-30T13:55:00.000-07:00

"You just don't turn me on," Tom said limply.

"You just think I'm a cow or something?" she asked moodily.

"No, I just don't much care for small, sharp breasts," Tom said pointedly.

"Maybe I should wear falsies," she said flatly.

"Here, put on this mink bra," Tom said furtively.

"OK. Well, my lovely, that seems to have done the trick," she said gruesomely.

"I think you're right," Tom said firmly.

Unbe-lievable

2008-05-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

On this day in 1897, the first copies of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula went on sale in London bookstalls.

Stoker coined the noun un-dead, which he in fact considered as a title for his story. The word had appeared before that in the Oxford English Dictionary, as an adjective.

The Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary considers undead to be a noun. It gives legitimacy to the extremely dumb word unbe, "to cease to have being." Most other dictionaries list unbe as archaic.

It also lists "unlive" as a verb, defining it as "to live so as to make amends for."

Other amusing "un-" verbs in the OSPD:

Unchoke ("to free from choking"); unchurch ("to expel from a church"); unguard ("to leave unprotected"); unmingle; unsell; unswear; and unthink.

Balzacology

2008-05-20T10:35:00.001-07:00

French novelist Honore de Balzac was born on this day in 1799.

Here is how a contemporary decribed him:

"A fat little flabby person with the face of a baker, the clothes of a cobbler, the size of a barrelmaker, the manners of a stocking salesman, and the dress of an innkeeper."

Balzac coined the word bricabracologie, meaning the hobby or practice of collecting knickknacks, or bric-a-bracs.

Not for all the tea in China can anyone prove...

2008-05-18T08:59:00.000-07:00

Philosopher Bertrand Russell was born on this day in 1872.

Russell coined an analogy about a Celestial Teapot. It was in answer to those who said that the burden of proof lies upon the sceptic to disprove unfalsifiable claims of religions.

Russell wrote:

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.

"But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.

"If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."

Today's ghost word: crackteapot, n. One who believes steadfastly in the existence of something despite evidence that is flimsy as a teabag.

For more about Russell, visit Today in Cynic's Almanac

A be-night-ed expression

2008-05-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

Having seen the annoying "at the end of the day..." already attain the status of a cliche in its relatively short existence, we were wondering: Why its popularity?

We're guessing it's because it sounds metaphorical and lends a touch of color to an otherwise drab pronouncement ("At the end of the day, I had to think about what's right for my family and I.").

But as poetry we feel it lacks that certain je ne sais quoi. In the first place, what does it mean, exactly? Is the end of the day at nightfall? Then what about the night? Or is the end of the day when one goes to bed?

And what about the next day? Do you have to reassess the previous day's events and come to a conclusion again at the end of that day?

All in all, it's pretty unsatisfactory, as sayings go.

What was wrong with "When all is said and done," or even "All things considered?" These are perfectly serviceable expressions and not ones that someone reaches for to make himself sound eloquent, as if he'd just invented a novel turn of phrase.

These are my thoughts on the matter -- at the end of the day.

Tom Swifties, part 1

2008-05-09T07:32:00.000-07:00

"That big fat baseball player died," she said ruthlessly.

"Well, he did like his hotdogs," Tom said frankly.

"He must have loved his desserts, too," she said piously.

"They're burying him tomorrow," Tom said gravely.

Borne back into the present

2008-05-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

May 5 is a palindromic date (5.05) -- one that is the same backward as forward.

There is no tome
That's a palindrome,
Nor scarcely a paragraph, I believe;
The form is plain,
As: when the first swain
Said "MADAM, I'M ADAM" to EVE.

If you frankly give a damn

2008-05-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

On this day in 1937, Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone With the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize.

"Gone with the wind" is a phrase synonymous with one of the most beautiful of words, ephemeral (from the Greek epi, meaning around or about, and hemera, "a day"), and one of the ugliest, fugacious (derived from the Latin fugax, meaning ready to flee or fly).

For more about Gone With the Wind, Go here.

Nessie was tartled

2008-05-02T10:29:00.000-07:00

On this day in 1933, the first rumor of the Loch Ness Monster went abroad. (For more information, Go here.)

Today's Word of the Day:

Tartle, (Scottish; verb): to hesitate in recognizing a person or thing.

Knock it off, Nabokov

2008-04-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

Vladimir Nabokov was born on this day in 1899. He died in 1977.

Nabokov's stories were rife with wordplay -- anagrams, puns, allusions, portmanteau words (see Lewis Carroll), coined words, etc.

In Lolita, Nabokov coins the word nymphet to describe the object of Humbert Humbert's lustful love. A character in that novel is named Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov. And Humbert recounts a youthful fling of his on the seashore, with a girl named Annabelle Leigh. (See Poe's Annabel Lee.)

Collectively speaking (2)

2008-04-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

If you can have a gaggle of geese, how about a giggle of children? Or a gurgle of fish?

If there's a clowder of cats, there ought to be a clowder of minds.

There is a peal of bells, why not a peel of strippers?

Would a group of objectionable volumes in a library be called a band of books?

Is there a collective noun for collectors?

The Twain holds

2008-04-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

Mark Twain died on this day in 1910.

Twain made writing look easy, but here is what he said in regard to the craft of writing:

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter -- it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

Today's ghost word:

Twainkling, adj.: Characteristic of a word that gives off its own light.

Hashing it over

2008-04-15T04:24:00.001-07:00

On this day in 1865, Abraham Lincoln died from wounds he received at the hands of assassin John Wilkes Booth.

Assassin, word origin:

During the time of the Crusades the members of a certain secret Muslim sect engaged people to terrorize their Christian enemies by performing murders as a religious duty. These acts were carried out under the influence of hashish, and so the killers became known as hashshashin, meaning eaters or smokers of hashish.

Hashshashin evolved into the word assassin.

Booth was not a drug user, or a drunk like his father. But on his way to Ford's theater he was accosted by a drunk man who told him: "You'll never be half the actor your father was."

Booth supposedly replied: "There will be some fine acting tonight....when I leave the stage, I will be the most famous man in History."

Rose is not a rose

2008-04-14T09:24:00.000-07:00

Pete Rose is 67 years old today.

Pun:

Rose-tainted classes -- all those who naively believed that Charlie Hustle never bet on baseball.

Bless this lessness

2008-04-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

Samuel Beckett was born on this day in 1906. The Irish playwright (Waiting for Godot) wrote a short work of prose fiction called Sans, which he later translated into an English version called Lessness, a word he apparently coined.

Beckett said that the 24 sentences of both stories were put in a container, drawn out and strung together in that random order.

We all remember Les Nessman, the flighty news director on WKRP in Cincinnati. Perhaps the show’s creators had Beckett in mind when they invented the name. Maybe not. Regardless, our ghost word for the day is:

Lessnessman, improper noun (accent on first syllable). One who is more random or nondescript than another.

Sydow-analysis

2008-04-10T06:38:00.000-07:00

This is the 79th birthday of Max von Sydow, the Swedish actor who was a stalwart in Ingmar Bergman movies. He played the knight who had the chess game with Death in The Seventh Seal.

Von Sydow's character was usually anguished and brooding. His long face and serious mien were effective in casting a pall over the proceedings.

Today's ghost words: sydow, n. A gaunt, angular shadow.

A coincidence worth noting: Von Sydow will play in the upcoming movie Truth and Treason opposite Haley Joel Osment, who has the same birthday (he is 20 today).

Don't be born again

2008-04-09T04:14:00.000-07:00

According to records, the philosopher Buddha was born right around this time in 563 B. C.

Buddha taught, roughly speaking, that all life is suffering and that we must strive for release from the endless recurrence of suffering life through a renunciation -- an annihilation -- of self.

The flaw, or paradox, of this philosophy has always seemed to me that we must first be able to develop a self, capable enough of enlightened self-awareness, in order to renounce it.

In any event, Buddha and his adherents called this self-lessness, or egolessness, anatta. Ever since Buddha's time, of course, and before it, societies have conspired to facilitate the process of eroding and destroying the individual self.

Which leads me to today's ghost word: anattamization.

Anattamization is the systematic eradication of the self, carried out by the state in collaboration with the culture.

Get out your Hankies, and weep

2008-04-08T09:48:00.000-07:00

On this day in 1975, Henry ("Hank") Aaron hit his 715th career home run, overtaking Babe Ruth as the all-time leader.

Since then, Barry Bonds, the Sullen of Swat, has supplanted Aaron at the top, though not, apparently, in the hearts and minds of baseball fans.

Today's ghost word: Hankaaroning, n. (From hankering) A yearning for a more innocent era, real or imagined, in sports.

A word worth keeping

2008-04-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

Poet William Wordsworth was born on this day in 1770. Wordsworth was said to have coined the word pedestrian, the noun meaning someone going on foot. That could be, however, just another of the pedantries (anagram of pedestrian) of certain word scholars.

Pedestrian comes from the Latin pedester, going on foot (from pedes, foot).

Has A PRESIDENT (another anagram of pedestrian) ever been a pedestrian of note? Our current one is pedestrian (adj.), to be sure -- meaning dull and mediocre -- but no modern Presidents have been walkers, to speak of, except maybe Eisenhower, who walked along golf courses.

Gored by bull

2008-03-31T06:50:00.000-07:00

Ghost word:

Algorism, n.: A statement, easily disproved, claiming credit for something.

Today is Al Gore's 60th birthday. At one time or another, to some degree or another, the Nobel Prize-winner has said that he was instrumental in the creation of the Internet, and in coining the terms "nanotechnology" and "the Information Superhighway."

Wait around long enough, and Gore will claim he discovered global warming.

Anagram of the day:

Albert Arnold Gore = blander rot galore

This is also the 60th birthday, by the way, of Rhea Perlman, who played Carla on Cheers. She coined a word of her own: Birdzilla, the oversized turkey that Norm stuck in her oven on Thanksgiving Day.

Do you clerihew?

2008-03-30T12:04:00.000-07:00

Edmund Clerihew Bentley died today in 1956. He invented the verse form named after him, the clerihew. Here is one of his famous ones:

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

Bentley's first collection of verse in this vein, Biography for Beginners, was published in 1905. The name clerihew was bestowed on the form soon after.

There are no rigid rules to creating a clerihew, but basically it should be a humorous quatrain about someone well-known, rhymed as two couplets with lines of unequal length. The name of the subject usually ends the first or second line.

Here are some clerihews by the Master:

The people of Spain think Cervantes
Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes;
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.

The meaning of the poet Gay
Was always as clear as day,
While that of the poet Blake
Was often practically opaque.

I doubt if King John
Was a sine qua non.
I could rather imagine it
Of any other Plantagenet.

Dante Alighieri
Seldom troubled a dairy.
He wrote the Inferno
On a bottle of Pernod.

Nicholas Bentley followed in his father's footsteps with this admirable clerihew:

Cecil B. De Mille,
Rather against his will,
Was persuaded to leave Moses
Out of 'The Wars of the Roses'.

Here’s my attempt:

The playwright Moliere
Could be quite a holy terror.
While telling audiences they were vile,
He had them rolling in the aisle.

Tipperware

2008-03-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

Ghost word (one that appears in the language for a time, but may just as quickly disappear):

Tipperware, n.: The means, methods, or technology of labeling items, in order to apprise consumers of the content within.

Originally applied to record albums, the systemology has since been extended to other categories of items, such as alcoholic spirits, tobacco and food.

On this day in 1990, record companies agreed to carry warning labels on the albums they produced. That innovation came about largely through the efforts of Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Gore, wife of the future Nobel Prize winner.

As a teenager and college student back in the heyday of vinyl, I would certainly have appreciated warning labels on record albums. Buying one was often a hit-or-miss proposition, and a label along the lines of "Warning: There's only one decent song on this entire album -- the one you heard on the radio," or "Warning: There are some dirty words on this album but the music is so loud you can't understand them" would have been helpful.

I don't know why Tipper Gore didn't go after books, which can be just as seditious and corrupting as music.

Someone could have done an inestimable service to adolescents everywhere by labeling books. I remember spending a couple of feverish hours paging through my mom's copy of Lolita, searching for the titillating stuff. A label like "Warning: Kids should not expect to find any tawdry sex or filthy language in this book, as it is literature" would have saved me, and many others like me, I'm sure, a lot of disappointment.

And what about labels like this: "Warning: This book may induce headaches or extreme drowsiness in underage persons; read at your own risk." They might even have made our teachers think twice about administering too-heavy doses of the classics.

It's a pleasure to present...

2008-03-25T16:57:00.000-07:00

Today is the birthdate of author Flannery O'Connor. Here are some excerpts from her great short story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

"A young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage..."

"She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus..."

"In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady."

"The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled."

"His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe."

"Behind them the woods gaped like a dark open mouth."

"She could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long satisfied insuck of breath."

"'Lady', the Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, 'there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip.'"

And the last, stunning, musical line:

"'Shut up, Bobby Lee,' the Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life.'"

Happy (and lucky) EASTER!

2008-03-23T12:30:00.001-07:00

What is EASTER?

One of the best of all combinations of letters to have on your rack in Scrabble.

You can form all of these Scrabble-acceptable six-letter anagrams of EASTER: ARETES, EATERS, RESEAT, SEATER, TEASER.

EASTER is also an acceptable Scrabble word. It means a wind or a storm from the east.

You can also combine the letters in EASTER with 20 of the 25 other letters of the alphabet to make seven-letter words, or bingos, worth a bonus of 50 points. Using these 20 other letters, you can make a total of 49 seven-letter bingos.

The Scrabble word geeks who compute such things rate EASTER as the 10th-best (bingo-prone) six-letter combination of letters.

Collectively Speaking

2008-03-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

A slew of gladiators

A herd of sounds

A rash of diapers

A brash of burglaries

A brood of beers

A drove of cars

A knot of zeroes

A muster of hotdogs

An order of skunks

A horde of prostitutes (or journalists)