Category: Words Words Words

Smith decoded

So. So the fact is, at the end of the 4th century Greenwich was covered in the kind of plant life and so on that grows over the places no one goes to or uses. Probably there was a lot of ancient wildlife which came when that happened, the equivalents of frogs and hedgehogs and the kinds of things that come and inhabit places like on Springwatch on TV. On that programme they tell you how to make a wilderness in your garden so that live things will come and visit it or even decide to make their homes there. Some of them can be quite rare like the bird that is called a willow warbler which used to be widespread but now there are hardly any. But the point is, places that right now right this minute are places people go to in London and do not think twice about being in, can seriously just disappear. (There but for the, p. 286)

Ali Smith’s ten-year-old narrator Brooke has the gist of the conservation argument, but her facts regarding the status of Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus) are not quite there. Across Europe, the bird is not listed as a species of concern; it’s only in Britain that populations have fallen off, placing it on Amber conservation status.

Lewis decoded

Two proper names in Babbitt, both of which the Library of America edition’s editors chose not to gloss (although the note on the Torrens system of registering land titles is quite helpful):

The customer joined him in the worship of machinery, and they came buoyantly up to the tenement and began that examination of plastic slate roof, kalamein doors, and seven-eighths-inch blind-nailed flooring, began those diplomacies of hurt surprise and readiness to be persuaded to do something they had already decided to do, which would some day result in a sale. (ch. VI)

Kalamein was used as a trade name for the sheet metal cladding on doors and windows, applied as a fireproofing measure in the absence of high-quality timber. As John M. Corbett writes,

A century ago, wood windows were first clad in zinc coated or zinc plated steel, with the object of making them fire resistant, and marketed under the trade name “Kalamein”. This name refers to calamine, the mineral which furnishes the ore from which zinc, the eighth metal known to man, is extracted…. While the trade name “Kalamein” seems no longer to be maintained, the terms “kalamein”, “kalamien” and “calamine” persist, referring to the general practice of cladding architectural elements in sheet metal of any composition.

The implication of the passage from the 1920s by Sinclair Lewis is that kalamein, like the plastic slate, offered an inexpensive, relatively safe dwelling. Somewhat paradoxically, Corbett, addressing architectural restoration, says that kalamein doors now are no longer cheap.

It turns out that I’ve already done the research for the second mystery name. Babbitt is stumping around the city’s ethnic neighborhoods for mayoral candidate Lucas Prout:

Crowded in his car, they came driving up to Turnverein Hall, South Zenith…

I found a Turnverein Hall in Sacramento last month.

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.