The Ys Have It

Amphibolously

2012-02-09T21:45:00.001-05:00

From William Gass's essay "The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence," in his collection Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts, as he speaks about altering the epistemological and ontological status of a sentence:

Amphibolously: "[Harold said that if] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman [he was a monkey's uncle]."

A tousled word, amphibolously. The sympathetic reader deems it endearing and slightly inebriated.

[from Macgardens]

Kay

2012-01-30T00:41:00.001-05:00

A slide accompanying Brian Newman's talk this evening at the panel on transmedia storytelling at UnionDocs quoted computer scientist Alan Kay:

The best way to predict the future is to invent it

Mr Newman pronounced Mr Kay's name to rhyme with sky, not stay.

It made me think of so many other names that look one way and are pronounced another--Kean, Deas--or simply words that people pronounce differently, such as Pulitzer, Judaism, Nabokov.

Another UnionDocs panelist, game designer Nick Fortugno, was introduced as if his name is spelled Fortuno and rhymes with uno , (not giugno).

It's interesting that most of the general public in America knows who Steve Jobs is. Fewer people know who Steve Wozniak is. I wonder how many people on the street know who Alan Kay is and where he fits in the picture.

I like Mr Kay's acknowledgment in this 1972 document titled "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages."

Trespassory

2012-01-28T23:06:00.001-05:00

From Sonia Sotomayor's opinion in United States v. Jones, decided January 23, 2012 (extra paragraphs included):

Nonetheless, as JUSTICE ALITO notes, physical intrusion is now unnecessary to many forms of surveillance. Post, at 9–12. With increasing regularity, the Government will be capable of duplicating the monitoring undertaken in this case by enlisting factory- or owner-installed vehicle tracking devices or GPS-enabled smartphones. See United States v. Pineda-Moreno, 617 F. 3d 1120, 1125 (CA9 2010) (Kozinski, C. J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc). In cases of electronic or other novel modes of surveillance that do not depend upon a physical invasion on property, the majority opinion’s trespassory test may provide little guidance. But “[s]ituations involving merely the transmission of electronic signals without trespass would remain subject to Katz analysis.” Ante, at 11. As JUSTICE ALITO incisively observes, the same technological advances that have made possible nontrespassory surveillance techniques will also affect the Katz test by shaping the evolution of societal privacy expectations. Post, at 10–11. Under that rubric, I agree with JUSTICE ALITO that, at the very least, “longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy.” Post, at 13.

In cases involving even short-term monitoring, some unique attributes of GPS surveillance relevant to the Katz analysis will require particular attention. GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations. See, e.g., People v. Weaver, 12 N. Y. 3d 433, 441–442, 909 N. E. 2d 1195, 1199 (2009) (“Disclosed in [GPS] data . . . will be trips the indisputably private nature of which takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on”). The Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future. Pineda-Moreno, 617 F. 3d, at 1124 (opinion of Kozinski, C. J.). And because GPS monitoring is cheap in comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and, by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: “limited police resources and community hostility.” Illinois v. Lidster, 540 U. S. 419, 426 (2004).

Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may “alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.” United States v. Cuevas-Perez, 640 F. 3d 272, 285 (CA7 2011) (Flaum, J., concurring).

I would take these attributes of GPS monitoring into account when considering the existence of a reasonable societal expectation of privacy in the sum of one’s public movements. I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the Government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on. I do not regard as dispositive the fact that the Government might obtain the fruits of GPS monitoring through lawful conventional surveillance techniques. See Kyllo, 533 U. S., at 35, n. 2; ante, at 11 (leaving open the possibility that duplicating traditional surveillance “through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy”). I would also consider the appropriateness of entrusting to the Executive, in the absence of any oversight from a coordinate branch, a tool so amenable to misuse, especially in light of the Fourth Amendment’s goal to curb arbitrary exercises of police power to and prevent “a too permeating police surveillance,” United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 595 (1948).* [* footnote omitted]

Stampedey

2012-01-20T22:04:00.001-05:00

A little like Patricia Marx's cleavagey, from March 2010.

From "The Stolen Cloned Mammoth," a short story by Shane Castle in the Winter 2011 issue of Indiana Review:

In blogs, the mammoth's theft was most often attributed to aliens--foreign and intergalactic--or to a stunt hatched at Democratic Party Headquarters intended to make Republicans look archaic and stampedey.

The story has some charm. I'm not sure about how everything brings the reader to the ending to which it brings the reader, but there's some funny Internet language riffs. The ending itself has a nice beginning. And the story does have a mammoth.

There is something going around with mammoths. The cynic says its copycat stuff. The true child says there's something in the collective unconscious making people yearn for woolly mammoths.

A few months ago I saw a play (seemed to me it got lost on its way to West 40-something Street and wound up in New Jersey) called "Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England." The cast included two actors who played diorama people. Frankly, I'd like to see the play again just for the diorama people and those actors. I could see those parts becoming the kind of parts people fight for and rotate into on a regular basis. Definitely an inspired set piece, the diorama.

Stampedey is more stampede-y than is stampedy, which is more stamping.

Fady

2012-01-18T01:08:00.000-05:00

From William Finnegan's Letter From Madagascar, "Slow and Steady," in the January 23, 2012, issue of The New Yorker.

Fortunately for the plowshare, the Sakalava people, who inhabit the area, consider eating the tortoise fady (taboo).

The plowshare is a rare species of tortoise. I'm not sure when or how people began using plowshare more than ploughshare; it could be one of those differences between American and British English. Donald G. McNeil Jr.'s July 1996 Times article also had plowshare.

I imagine there was once a more pronounced choice between fady and fadi. Fadi strikes me as further from English.

Painty

2012-01-16T22:49:00.000-05:00

From After a Funeral, by Diana Athill.

He also spread whitewash and black paint everywhere, so that I couldn't pick up a teaspoon without getting paint on my fingers, and my carpets were tracked with painty footprints.

Ms Athill is writing about Waguih Ghali, who wrote Beer in the Snooker Club. The novel was so satisfying, it made me look forward to Mr Ghali's next (the dust jacket said another was in the works).

I went on a casual hunt, beginning at the stack at Argosy Books. Nothing. Then the Strand. Nothing. Abebooks.com showed me many copies of Beer in the Snooker Club. I thought No no no, he can't possibly have written only one novel. The Spidey sense feeling came over me just before I read a note about how Mr Ghali had committed suicide at age 38.

So, wanting more of his something, I necessarily turned to After a Funeral, since Mr Ghali chose to commit suicide in Diana Athill's apartment. I wondered if in his case it was a mutant proposal of sorts, in the other direction.

Snakey

2012-01-06T23:19:00.002-05:00

From Stars Over Hawaiʻ i, by E.H. Bryan, Jr., with 2002 revisions and additions by Richard A. Crowe, Ph.D. and preface by Walter R. Steiger (note, this is not the Hawaiʻi stars book for sale at the top of Mauna Kea, The Sky Tonight: A Guided Tour of the Stars Over Hawaiʻ i, by Samuel E. Rhoads). I purchased Stars Over Hawaiʻ i after a walk (delayed plane) around the Ellison S. Onizuka Space Center at the Kona International Airport at Keahole.

Of Perseus, Mr. Bryan (whose middle name is Horace) writes,

He was returning from an adventure on which he had slain one of the wicked gorgons, Medusa with the snakey locks.

Her locks sound quite approachable when described as snakey.

When in Hawaiʻ i, one can see Canopus, the second brightest star in the night sky [image from the blog A Sky Full of Stars].

Punty

2012-01-02T03:15:00.000-05:00

I found punty while typing puny.

1964 H. Hodges Artifacts iii. 58 Bowls and drinking glasses may be produced by first sticking the bulb to a solid iron rod, a punty (French pontil).

Y Word(s) of 2011: Minatory and Sodality

2011-12-31T18:51:00.000-05:00

Aloha, readers. I couldn't choose only one word this year. Both minatory and sodality are beautiful-handsome. Trying to choose drove me to distraction, so I gave up.

And then (once I had decided) I remembered an article written about 15 years ago, possibly in Boston, about the New York Times wedding pages. The article said that the featured couples usually had one person who was the predatory sort and one who was the peace, love, and happiness sort--something like that.

Minatory and sodality?

Clinkery

2011-12-28T04:17:00.002-05:00

From a photo caption in the section "Around Kilauea" in Hawaii the Big Island Revealed: The Ultimate Guidebook, 5th Edition, by Andrew Doughty:

'A'a lava on the left (named by the first Hawaiian to walk on it barefooted) is rough and clinkery.

The 'a'a lava in the photo looks like a cascade of giant Grape Nuts, overly roasted and somewhat charred, and of various sizes. Up close the formation is highly porous and sure to cut your feet. Clinkery makes the lava sound downright friendly. One might think, "Rolling chunks of this lava make a pleasant clinking sound."

The OED includes clinkery as one of its Obs. rare words; it means "Contracted or shrivelled with heat or cold." One 1398 spelling has the word as klynkery.

Y Finalists for 2011

2011-12-26T22:11:00.001-05:00

I will miss pyththy, which seems destined only for a cameo.

Still in play:

Minatory
Sodality

Bey

2011-12-25T14:45:00.000-05:00

From Waguih Ghali's novel Beer in the Snooker Club:

The servants in the club have seen us grow up and call us by our Christian names, adding such honorific titles as 'Bey' and 'Pasha'.

Y semi-finalists for 2011

2011-12-22T00:28:00.000-05:00

Readers, I realize you're on the edge of your seats.

A newcomer has joined.

The semi-finalists are:

Dancetty
Minatory
Pyththy
Sodality

Jealouſy

2011-12-18T00:35:00.000-05:00

From Hercules. A Musical Drama. As performed at Oxford. Set by Mr. Handel. "At the Theatre Thursday July 5th 1774":

Something about jealousy as jealouſy with the long s brings to mind (tonight) poufy things--Reddi wip on red JELL-O, festoons, ottomans--and soft-shoe comedy in the spirit of "The Way You Look Tonight."

Of course jealoufy would be even poufier.

Sodality

2011-12-17T01:41:00.001-05:00

From Ian McEwan's tribute "Christopher Hitchens, Consummate Writer," in a December 16, 2011 issue (but not my paper one) of The New York Times.

It was the smile of recognition, or one that anticipates in late afternoon an “evening of shame:” — that is to say, pleasure, or, one of his favorite terms, “sodality.”

It seems like an Emily Dickinson sort of word, too.

Y Quarterfinalists for 2011

2011-12-15T01:02:00.002-05:00

It's that time again. And although there's still time for a newcomer to break into this group, the finalists are:

Dancetty
Minatory
Orfly
Presnelty
Py
Pyththy
Wuffly

Gracy

2011-12-07T00:42:00.001-05:00

Not Gracie.

It looks a bit odd.

From the interactive map accompanying Sam Roberts' March 20, 2011, New York Times article, "No Hero in 1811, Street Grid’s Father Was Showered With Produce, Not Praise."

I suppose some of John Randel's hand-drawn and colored maps are now on view at the just-opened Master Plan of Manhattan exhibit at The Museum of the City of New York.

The Times' interactive map is fun to play with. It allows the user to fade in and out of Randel's 1811 map of the proposed street grid and the grid as it now stands. Carl Schurz Park seems to be the latest layer to re-place the Gracy piece, the Gracy place.

Breakfasty

2011-12-04T19:01:00.000-05:00

From the menu of a Park Slope restaurant whose name I didn't write down. I think it's across the street from Mura, on 5th Avenue.

Possibly I didn't write it down because the wholesome goodness of it was so uninspiring. I can't recall if the heading was Breakfasty Items or what, but it was too cutesy, too stereotypically gingham and baskets with bows.

I stood there for a moment, editorially, thinking, Why not just breakfast? Breakfast is good. Breakfast is already two words (or three, depending on how you view it)--why add on this curlicue?

Breakfasty. The image was a piece of cotton cloth twisted to the choking point. Unappetizing! The opposite of Gino's menu charms (written about, if I remember correctly, in these posts).

I wonder how a translator would render breakfasty in French or Italian.

Affy

2011-11-18T11:14:00.003-05:00

Towards the end of the Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra's performance at Poets House on Monday, conductor Fagin suggested guests stop to take a walk around the Emily Dickinson exhibit.

From the closing of Letter 146, Emily Dickinson to Emily Fowler Ford, (December 21?) 1853:

Affy, Emily —

Isn't it curious that Emily Dickinson signed off with this kind of abbreviation? The terminal ys do draw attention to themselves, almost as a couple. The Dickinson dash—well: there it is.

Seeing the letters reminded me that I missed visiting the re-created Dickinson garden at the botanic garden.

The other day, I watched a video of a young Joni Mitchell singing "Urge for Going." I wonder how much Dickinson she read in her early years.

Custardy

2011-11-11T12:02:00.000-05:00

I take part in the Writhing Society's meetings. This week we did exercises using state and country abbreviations. Angelo Pastormerlo came up with a "cuppiece" for Cuba that included the word CUstardy. I liked custardy and said so. It called to mind Picardy and (distantly) Anna Madrigal's address in San Francisco.

Tom La Farge said,

Joint custardy,

and this was delightful.

Ansulary

2011-11-06T21:17:00.009-05:00

Another Obs. rare from the OED meaning "Of or pertaining to handles, handle-like."

1664 H. Power Exper. Philos. Pref. sig. A4v, The secondary Planets of Saturn and Jupiter and his Ansulary appearances.

This is my excuse to post one of the nicer illustrations from the Huygens book (of the previous post). I kind of love it, and wonder if its real-life form/real life form is superior to the digital one. Very possibly not.

Before his Systema Saturnium, Huygens wrote De Saturni luna observatio nova (New observation of a moon of Saturn), published in 1656, which formally announced his discovery of Saturn's moon and casually announced his theory about Saturn's ring--and welcomed others to offer theirs. Not wanting to give it away just yet, he set down the theory in the form of a letter list:

a a a a a a a c c c c c d e e e e e h i i i i i i i l l l l m m n n n n n n n n n o o o o p p q r r s t t t t t u u u u u.

Annulo cingitur, tenui, plano, nusquam cohaerente, ad eclipticam inclinato (It is surrounded by a thin flat ring, nowhere touching, and inclined to the ecliptic).

According to the 1999 notes of Ronald Brashear, then "Curator of Science and Technology Rare Books in the Special Collections Department at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries" (and now at the Othmer Library), Systema Saturnium was printed in modern times (after more than a half-century) in 1925, "when it was published in volume 15 of Oeuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens, a 22-volume set published over a sixty-year period by the Society of Sciences of Holland. The 1925 printing contained a French translation side-by-side with the original Latin text."

That would be interesting to see, the side-by-side translation.

Burndy

2011-11-03T20:23:00.003-04:00

Imagine if we had Ancarn Steel, the Ancarn Free Libraries, Ancarn Hall.

Bern Dibner was an electrical engineer who, among other things, collected books on the history of science.

From a pretty book plate in Christiaan Huygens's The System of Saturn, or On the matter of Saturn's remarkable appearance, and its satellite, the new planet (Systema Saturnium, sive de causis mirandorum Saturni phaenomenon, et comite ejus planeta novom, 1659), via the World Digital Library:

I wonder what kind of shape the book is in after being scanned.

Gynocracy

2011-11-01T00:13:00.000-04:00

From the "Out of Town" episode of Mad Men, spoken by the character John Hooker just after he looks at Bert Cooper's ant farm.

This place is a gynocracy.

I don't pass this word too often. Maybe it's more common in academic journals. The OED has an 1864 citation. That's the most recent one.

Great find by the writers.

"Out of Town" takes place in March of 1963. I watched the episode not long after two little girls rang my doorbell. One was dressed up as Snow White, the other as Wonder Woman. If they had arrived at the same time as the sweet hound dog (not the rude M&M), I feel they might have made a jolly group.

Autexousy

2011-10-31T00:00:00.002-04:00

I thought after struggling through the Thursday crossword with a friend last week that I would find an entire entry for aut in the OED. What I found was an Obs. rare word for free will.

In Greek it's τὸ ἐϕ' ἡμῖν.

Odilon Redon
Red Boat with a Blue Sail
1906-07

Arthur Hacker
Matinee afternoon,
Picadilly Circus (study)
1911

Beijing 2010

Minatory

2011-10-29T16:04:00.002-04:00

Not from the song "Homage to Marat," belted out last night at St. Ann's Warehouse by Justin Vivian Bond, who warmed up for The Tiger Lilies, an ensemble of impeccable performers:

Fighting all the gentry and fighting every priest,
Businessman, the bourgeois, the military beast

I heard minatory, not military--though the passing visual image was that of a labyrinth. How pretty, I thought. Minatory really is a very pretty word.

Grzny

2011-10-28T00:15:00.003-04:00

From The 50 Funniest American Writers: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to the Onion, edited by Andy Borowitz. By the way, a good number of the humorists in the book are dead. What does that say about American humor--or about this book?

And does The Onion qualify as a humorist? I wanted to know who wrote this article for the paper several years ago (and if they're now writing for the Onion News Network).

Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia
Cities of Sjlbvdnzv, Grzny to Be First Recipients

Before an emergency joint session of Congress yesterday, President Clinton announced U.S. plans to deploy over 75,000 vowels to the war-torn region of Bosnia. The deployment, the largest of its kind in American history, will provide the region with the critically needed letters A, E, I, O and U, and is hoped to render countless Bosnian names more pronounceable.

"For six years, we have stood by while names like Ygrjvslhv and Tzlynhr and Glrm have been horribly butchered by millions around the world," Clinton said. "Today, the United States must finally stand up and say, 'Enough.' It is time the people of Bosnia finally had some vowels in their incomprehensible words. The U.S. is proud to lead the crusade in this noble endeavor."

The deployment, dubbed Operation Vowel Storm by the State Department, is set for early next week, with the Adriatic port cities of Sjlbvdnzv and Grzny slated to be the first recipients. Two C-130 transport planes, each carrying over 500 24-count boxes of "E's," will fly from Andrews Air Force base across the Atlantic and airdrop the letters over the cities.

Citizens of Grzny and Sjlbvdnzv eagerly await the arrival of the vowels.

"My God, I do not think we can last another day, Trszg Grzdnjlkn, 44, said. "I have six children and none of them has a name that is understandable to me or anyone else. Mr. Clinton, please send my poor, wretched family just one 'E.' Please."

Said Sjlbvdnzv resident Grg Hmphrs, 67: "With just a few key letters, I could be George Humphries. That is my dream."

If the initial airlift is successful, Clinton said the United States will go ahead with full-scale vowel deployment, with C-130s airdropping thousands more letters over every area of Bosnia. Other nations are expected to pitch in as well, including 10,000 British "A's" and 6,500 Canadian "U's." Japan, rich in A's and O's, was asked to participate in the relief effort, but declined.

"With these valuable letters, the people of war-ravaged Bosnia will be able to make some terrific new words," Clinton said. "It should be very exciting for them, and surely much easier for us to read their maps."

Linguists praise the U.S.'s decision to send the vowels. For decades they have struggled with the hard consonants and difficult pronunciation of most Slavic words.

"Vowels are crucial to the construction of all language," Baylor University linguist Noam Frankel said. "Without them, it would be difficult to utter a single word, much less organize a coherent sentence. Please, don't get me started on the moon-man language they use in those Eastern European countries."

According to Frankel, once the Bosnians have vowels, they will be able to construct such valuable sentences as: "The potatoes are ready"; "I believe it will rain"; and "All my children are dead from the war."

The American airdrop represents the largest deployment of any letter to a foreign country since 1984. During the summer of that year, the U.S. shipped 92,000 consonants to Ethiopia, providing cities like Ouaououa, Eaoiiuae and Aao with vital, life-giving supplies of L's S's and T's. The consonant-relief effort failed, however, when vast quantities of the letters were intercepted and horded by violent, gun-toting warlords.

Shrimpy

2011-10-22T23:47:00.001-04:00

From the menu at Yama, where I'd never wanted to wait. Tonight I arrived during a 10-minute lull and actually entered--and then ate dinner. (Walking Irving Place and peeking into Gramercy Park--the "Gramercy Park Litmus Test" hovered a little--qualified as dessert).

I believe one of tonight's specials is

Crispy Shrimpy

.

There must be a word for when words have matching endings. Certainly the vowel corridor helps with the affinity between these two here.

Closing the menu, I remembered the time a woman on the subway platform asked me if the train went to Yankee Station. Also David Henry Hwang's new play Chinglish came to mind. (According to The Economic Times, M. Butterfly is "essentially banned" in China.)

What if it shrimpy were spelled schrimpy?

Orfly

2011-10-15T21:38:00.004-04:00

Pleasantly connected to Orphic and Orpheus and seal sounds that actually don't exist, this is from the first page of the comic supplement of The Chicago Tribune of September 16, 1906, exhibited at the Whitney Museum as part of its Lyonel Feininger exhibit. The text of the first panel reads:

This is the way Willie Winkie told it to me: You see, Unkie Fein- / inger, de ole sun was hot and tired, an orfly fretty, and wanted so bad to / have his face washed with a cool sponge and be put to bed, ‘cause he’d got / up early and been shining so hard all day long.

The sun is a bald, baby-old man face of an orb hung in a yellow sky.

As described in Feininger's online biography published by Ohio State University's Cartoon Library & Museum, Wee Willie Winkie’s World was the second strip Feininger wrote for the Tribune. Named after the nursery rhyme character,* "Wee Willie Winkie’s World first appeared . . . in August 19, 1906. The concept of Wee Willie Winkie’s World was similar to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. The comic centered on a wandering boy who brings elements in nature to life through his imagination. This strip was also short-lived, with its last appearance on January 20, 1907."

This is Carnival in Gelmeroda II, a 1909 work.

I liked paintings like this the most, something about Feininger's colors.

This is Edge of the Wood, Lobbe 1907.

Wasn't at the Whitney.

Neither was this,
The Proposal
1906.

Or this.

Steam Train 1908.

Feininger spent time in Paris from 1906 to 1908.

Is this a self-portrait?

I was interested to see that Feininger had composed music. Amazingly, three of his organ fugues are going to be played at Carnegie Hall this coming Friday by Leon Botstein's American Symphony Orchestra. It's too bad the Whitney provided so little space for Feininger's musical work. Part of what makes the artist so interesting was his capacity for working in so many mediums.

On a completely different note, I just want to say that although the name Lyonel is winning, the name Léonell (which was his at birth) is as good. I wonder when he began to live as Lyonel.

[Feininger images via the Splog of Michael Sporn Animation, Inc.]

Bol'shoy

2011-10-12T15:36:00.000-04:00

I'm so accustomed to seeing Bolshoi that it was a nice change to see it this way.

From a wonderful book about choral repertoire, the section on Rachmaninoff:

In the meantime, he continued to conduct, leading the Bol'shoy Theater between 1904 and 1906 and touring the United States in 1909.

Interestingly the author didn't go with Bol'shoy Teatr.

Sometime I'd like to hear the children's poems Rachmaninoff set to music, Six Choruses for Women's of Children's Voices with piano accompaniment, Op. 15. According to the book, they include poems about "a lonely pine tree that dreams of a far-off kingdom" and "a caged nightingale that does not sing until released." I wonder how often they're performed in Russia.

Smothery

2011-10-03T23:52:00.001-04:00

From Chapter XVIII of Huck Finn:

Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't.

I just noticed the mother in the center of the word. Wonder if Mark Twain saw it.

I was in my 20s when I read this book with a boy I was tutoring at the Prep for Prep program. Tonight I found a paper he wrote for me, in the book. I was not a Mickey Mouse tutor. Inside the book's back flap is a list of vocabulary words I looked up in the OED, and on the last page is the phone number for a man named Luke.

I had an enormous, speechless crush on Luke, and could never bring myself to admit it to anybody, not even to the mutual friends who introduced us.

We didn't have much to talk about. He knew about horses and I didn't. I knew about books and he didn't. When, for a chaste five minutes, we entered some horrible, grotty apartment on the Upper East Side--I recall it as dark, narrow, bachelor-bare, and non-furnished--the space between us widened. I could not begin to imagine how he could live in such blah circumstances. He was full of life. His apartment was about as interesting as a pocket protector. At the time, such things mattered to me.

We wouldn't make it through many more non-conversations together.

I couldn't have much of a conversation with my student, either. One day he asked me what reading Huck Finn had to do with his getting a job when he grew up, and I didn't really have an answer for him. I myself had never asked the question.

Synastry

2011-10-02T13:20:00.000-04:00

When seeking a rhyme for ministry.

1855 C. Kingsley Westward Ho! xv, That these strange attachments were due to a synastria, or sympathy of the stars, which ruled the destinies of each person.

DSNY

2011-09-29T19:34:00.000-04:00

From a comment posted by one Mitchel Cohen, of Brooklyn Greens/Green Party, on the Times website, in response to Rebecca White's City Room article "Gathering on Upper East Side to Oppose Garbage Station," either posted or printed on June 11, 2011:

When I and other brought this up more than six years ago during the initial City Council hearings on the siting of the new round of Marine Transfer Stations -- not only the one abutting Asphalt Green but also one near where I live in Southwest Brooklyn on the very same site as the old unlicensed municipal incinerator that poisoned our neighborhood -- Gravesend, Bath Beach, Bensonhurst and Coney Island) -- for decades until we finally organized and succeeded in closing it down in the 1990s, Doherty, the Commissioner of the Department of Sanitation (calling itself DSNY), mickey moused us and said nothing.

Yes, everybody has riffed on DKNY. It's still amusing when it's the Sanitation Department.

Mr. Cohen goes on to say that "The City needs to be united around a viable holistic approach to garbage."

I don't know if the city does holistic approaches, period--does it? Artists who work on trash-awareness issues understand something basic about the process of processes. Most city officials do not, I'm guessing. Even if DSNY would like to take a holistic approach to trash, could it? Considering the number of people here.

San Francisco (at least, under Gavin Newsom, who might give Rodel Fellow Jessica Lappin his opinion on whether it's possible to do for health care in NYC the kind of thing he accomplished in San Francisco) can do holistic--its residents actually compost--but San Francisco is not quite as populous as New York City. And it's not a city on the Eastern Seaboard, which (as anybody who lives on this coast knows) has its own entrenched codes.

Whether or not the city can one day embrace holistic anything, process-oriented anything, the people in the East 90s are now stuck wondering why the city embraced Asphalt Green and then eventually opened two new schools (East Side Middle School/M.S. 114 and Yorkville Community School/P.S. 151) while planning to reopen a long-closed garbage depot, albeit one whose trucks will now queue inside instead of outside.

Danuby

2011-09-27T00:28:00.002-04:00

In the organ loft at St. Ignatius Loyola this evening, at an informal talk about and a first performance (by the wonderful Renée Louprette) of composer David Briggs' Diptyque — Mannahatta 1611–2011, Mr. Briggs, responding to a question I had about what had "entranced" him so much about Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City that he was sufficiently inspired to compose a 20-minute organ piece commissioned by Ms. Louprette, referred to a line from John Donne, saying, "Change is the nursery of music."

Mr. Briggs is inspired, he said, by the very fact of change, and, apparently, by the way (the book) Mannahatta presented it.

He also said the book's authors know nothing of his composition, including its grand premiere on Wednesday night.

I was drawn to the book, which I don't even possess, because one of my favorite subways games when I lived in Brooklyn many years ago and took the Q train was to imagine the island as an island. A million New Yorkers must do this. Every now and then I do it when I'm biking back over the George Washington Bridge, look downstream and think of the Hudson with no bridge spanning it and no buildings along its banks.

Who knows what originally led Mr. Briggs to the book. He is a transplanted Brit who (among other things) directed music at Gloucester Cathedral for eight years before moving to New York City, which he left for Massachusetts.

His poetry citation sent me to Google Books, which had the line, and then to my old Norton Anthology, which didn't have it. The line, from the elegy "Change," is "change is the nursery/Of music, joy, life, and eternity."

Above the line, however, is this funny appearance of the Danube:

Though Danuby into the sea must flow,
The sea receives the Rhine, Volga, and Po.

No doubt there's a good reason why Donne did this.

Meanwhile there's no Donne in Mr. Briggs' composition—but there is a line from West Side Story. It comes out of the soundscape (with its fog horns and skyscraping file cabinets and parades and honking) in all its Leonard Bernstein-ness.

I had no idea what I'd hear in the organ loft tonight but it's safe to say that "I Have a Love" was nowhere in orbit.

Batty

2011-09-26T00:53:00.000-04:00

From the tote bag of a woman who'd attended the Bay Area Tarot Symposium, or SF Bats (billed, according to somewhat-of-a-sponsor Daughters of Divination, as "the oldest continuously produced Tarot event in the world"):

just a little batty

It may have said "just a little bit batty," but I didn't copy it down. We were pulling into Grand Central. I was ready to de-train.

Batty is an amiable word. Picture Audrey Hepburn attempting to sit down to cocoa and singing marshmallows with the singer Mark Volman.

Apparently it took on its meaning of "dotty" and "eccentric" just before the 20th century put down deep roots; I wonder how that happened. The OED didn't clue me in much, not that it's supposed to. One of its citations includes this from Ambrose Bierce, 1907: He was especially charmed with the phrase ‘bats in his belfry’, and would indubitably substitute it for ‘possessed of a devil’, the Scriptural diagnosis of insanity.

Has anybody hypothesized whether batty is one of many words and expressions that represent a shift from religiously charged language?

Wuzzy

2011-09-21T01:08:00.001-04:00

From the mouth of Norton Juster at the Brooklyn Book Festival this past Sunday.

I didn't take down the exact sentence.

Mr. Juster and Jules Feiffer were sitting along with Leonard Marcus at a table in front of a ~~shockingly~~ small (small considering the perfection of The Phantom Tollbooth) audience telling stories about their collaboration on the book.

One story concerned a prank Mr. Juster pulled on Mr. Feiffer at the Overseas Press Club. He had had a lot to drink that evening, and he said that (somewhere along the way) he had been feeling wuzzy.

I thought, "Wuzzy? . . . Woozy?" But he really did mean wuzzy, which the OED defines as "confused, fuddled, vague."

Some time-minded people--possibly from the Knopf publicity department--did a grand disservice to everybody who stood on line to have their books signed. The author and illustrator signed only their names. No Brooklyn. No New York. No date. Said one publicist: We have to move things along.

If the line had been longer--the audience did not even fill all 300 seats in the auditorium--I could see the publicist's point. But if The Phantom Tollbooth is, let's say, my idea of a True Book, and I am genuinely excited about having my book signed, and I go out to Brooklyn to stand on line for tickets and then stand on line for a good seat, and enjoy watching Jules Feiffer heckle a little boy who's giving him a hard time about the number of horses and the number of riders, and enjoy listening to the cadences of two very old friends, I don't see how moving things along will leave me with a happy memory when the day is over. In fact, once I got home I was a little sorry my book was signed at all. Which is too bad when you think about it.

I wonder what Jason Epstein (both the man c. 1961 and today) would say on this subject. I say (in this case) sign completely or don't sign at all.

Wuffly

2011-09-12T11:48:00.003-04:00

Perhaps my favorite y word from Nicholson Baker's delightful and adorable new novel House of Holes:

"Ah, old Chuzzlewit," Cardell said in a wuffly English accent.

Baker also uses the word whuffled:

"Mgonna come, mgonna come," he whuffled.

I asked him about these, via email, viz.,

EM: Did you know the meaning of the word wuffler or whuffle before turning in the manuscript?

NB: No, I just winged it. Wanged it?

EM: What can you tell me about the use of wuffly? Did Dickens or his era figure in somehow?

NB: I think I was going for the wuffly mustache effect. The Hollywood version of the British Empire subaltern. Could be the "h" should be in there.

EM: Could you say a little more about the wuffly mustache effect? Is everybody supposed to know what this is?

NB: Wuffly Rudyard Kiplingesque walrus mustache.

Lest you think that Baker does not attend closely enough to his y words, consider this portion of our exchange:

EM: On page 228, Dune sticks his pinky into Shandee's pussy. How did you choose pinky over the common pinkie?

NB: I've never gone for "pinkie"--too much of the Sunday afternoon lifting of the teacup, too much Hostess Twinkie. When the copyeditor corrected it I changed it back. Same with "hanky," as I remember.

Wakey-Uppy

2011-09-11T15:58:00.000-04:00

Heard today at brunch, from the mouth of a family member:

" . . . wakey-uppy pills."

Apparently there is a prescription drug called Provigil, which is "used to improve wakefulness in adults who experience excessive sleepiness (ES) due to one of the following diagnosed sleep disorders: obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), shift work sleep disorder, also known as shift work disorder, or narcolepsy."

Protensity

2011-09-07T22:38:00.000-04:00

From "A Perfectly Unique Moment," by Nathan Heller, posted Friday, Aug. 19, 2011, at 11:57 AM ET in Slate:

The Mezzanine is a slim book of Proust-like protensity, describing its narrator's return to his office one afternoon through the kaleidoscope of his wandering thoughts.

I don't come across this word very often.

Smoothy

2011-08-28T21:47:00.001-04:00

From Anthony Lane's review of "One Day," in the August 29, 2011, issue of The New Yorker:

They have just graduated from the University of Edinburgh; he is the high-born smoothy, dripping with confidence, and she is the scholarly mouse, as indicated by her large round spectacles.

The word applies just a sprinkle, a dusting, of disdain to the man described. Had Mr Lane/his editors rendered the character a smoothie, it's likely too many readers would associate him with the fruit shake, which, of course, would be the wrong connotation.

Below, all wrong.

[photo: Cassie of the blog Veda House, a February posting.]

Piggy

2011-08-27T22:06:00.001-04:00

Not from Lord of the Flies.

From the website of Jason Shelowitz, which features his Subway Etiquette signs. For contemplation while living through this, New York City's historic pocket of no-subway time:

Don't be a piggy.

Discovered while passing through the site of Jeremiah, possibly still hunkered down in the East Village (as opposed to another location).

Better than "Don't Be a Litterer."

Blabbity

2011-08-25T00:39:00.001-04:00

I'm not in Brooklyn enough to hear whether "blabbity blah" is a common expression.

From the mouth of Brooklyn resident Alex Basek, as quoted in the July 26 New York Observer article "A Twee Grows in Brooklyn":

“There’s Glass Shop, a fancy coffee spot, like single roaster blabbity blah, all the way on Classon Avenue."

It certainly doesn't make me think of Babbitty or even blabber. Possibly blubber. And maybe the verb blab.

Winningly, it has summoned from the depths of memory a phrase I once liked very much, viz., "blather blather."

Blabbity blah has more kick.

Mostly it makes me think about how seldom I hear people say this. Could be that the emphases work out well, though--a little like dickory dock. Blabbity wouldn't be the same if it were flying solo.

Amoy

2011-08-24T00:12:00.004-04:00

Tonight I was watching the CUNY TV channel. The Aspen Ideas Festival gave way to jellyfish and oceanographers, then Shanghai (city of ever-widening streets, though not on that program).

Who are CUNY's trustees these days?

One of them, Judah Gribetz, graduated (so says the website; I'd feel better if a New Yorker checker could verify) in 1946 from Boys High School of Brooklyn, of all local places. Were I to pass Mr. Gribetz at a philanthropic world, I would be tempted to ask him why Mount Sinai Medical Center (he's a trustee there, too) must erect so tall a building, it will throw a shadow across Central Park (check with Civitas about this.)

Back to the y path.

There is also a CUNY trustee named Wellington Z. Chen, whose bio states:

He is conversant in several languages, including Chinese (Amoy, Cantonese, Mandarin), and Brazilian-Portuguese. [My italics.]

All those children out there learning Chinese have likely heard of Amoy; I had not. Do they watch Amoy dialect films made in Hong Kong in the 1950s?

Meanwhile, in September, CUNY TV (which has quite a few arts shows) will be airing episodes of "Bouillon de Culture."

Insectary

2011-08-20T21:52:00.002-04:00

NOFA-NY's organic food guide led me to this word.

From Cornell University's College of Agriculture Bulletin of the Agricultural Experiment Station (November, 1888), by entomology professor, Station Council member, and uncommon husband J. H. Comstock:

As this, so far we know, is the first building of its kind, we were forced to coin a word; and have proposed the name Insectary for buildings arranged for keeping or raising living insects.

Dancetty

2011-08-11T23:14:00.000-04:00

From Heraldry, a slender book written by Julian Franklyn, with drawings by Alan Keith-Hill.

I began reading the book in earnest while waiting on line to get into the (small and overrated) Alexander McQueen exhibit. Fittingly, I began the book while standing across the way from a 15th-century statue of Saint Bavo, a Norwegian man carrying a book bag.

The author remarks in his introductory material how appealing the language of heraldry is, how musical. I found this out myself before turning from the back matter to the introductory note where he writes, "each term in its turn is a glittering gem, every sentence a poem. The auditory pleasure of Heraldry is as great as the visual." Indeed reading aloud the Blazon of Illustration portion of the book brings to mind Dylan Thomas and e.e. cummings.

By "visual," Franklyn means the shields; there are also the words themselves.

Argent, a saltire engrailed sable charged with another invected of the field, debruised by an orle azure guttée d'eau: on a chief of the third, three leopards [sic] heads erazed proper.

Gules, a chevron vairy Or and azure, cotised argent, between three roses of the last barbed and seeded proper.

Argent, crusily-fitchy sable . . .

Gyronny of eight ermine and gules . . .

Sable, two bendlets raguly between as many hawks argent . . .

Gules, three bendlets dancetty Or.

Sable, a cross parted and fretty between . . .

Barry-nebuly of six argent and vert . . .

Argent, on a bend sable, four crosses clechy voided and pommetty of the first . . .

Per fess dancetty argent and sable . . .

Per fess nebuly; in chief checky azure and Or . . .

Azure, in base barry wavy of four argent and of the first . . .

The thing to remember about dancetty is how many times people with little or no knowledge of heraldry have almost seen it, on the front of Charlie Brown's shirt (truly in the early 1950s, when the line of zigzags had no more than three peaks).

Of course there is more to say about the profusion of y words and the migration from French to English, but I'm not going to address that in this post.

Sorry

2011-08-04T22:14:00.000-04:00

Etymologically rooted not in sorrow, but in sore. Bodily pain enters the mental arena.

Relationshippy

2011-07-30T20:25:00.001-04:00

This is just a funny word, said aloud by a friend today near the Little Red Lighthouse.

It reminded me of another friend calling people who'd been together in what struck me as an excellent many-years-long relationship "coupled out".

Years ago I went out with a man who made it very clear that I was never to call him my "partner in crime." It would never have occurred to me to use that expression.

Another boyfriend was very particular about whether we were going out, seeing each other, dating, or involved.

I don't know if I like the idea of being in a serious relationship with a man who's relationshippy (the silliness of the word says it all), but coupling out seems all right.

Pyththy

2011-07-30T00:42:00.001-04:00

Here the word is ordinary and the date of origin is surprising. The OED dates the adjective to the beginning of the 15th century. Anybody who wants to know what pithy means need only think of the core of a stem.

Pith itself is an Old English word (peoþa or piða).

My favorite spelling and example of the adjective is from 1529. Little bit of python in there.

T. More Supplyc. Soulys i. f. xv, The sore pyththy poynt where wyth he knytteth vppe all hys heuy matter.

Fluty

2011-07-25T22:14:00.001-04:00

From John Rockwell's March 12, 1981, Times review of Musica Sacra's performance of Haydn's 'Creation' (the but might have been supplanted by an and):

From Kathleen Battle's fluty but commanding soprano, deliciously articulating the trills and ornaments, to John Aler's manly and idiomatic tenor to Simon Estes's richly sonorous, sweetly controlled bass, these were vocal performances fully capable of investing Haydn's time-bound vision with the profundity still inherent in it.

No comment on manly, a word I know best via the mouth of Melissa Gilbert.

There were some good music critics in the deep old days. Bill Zakariasen and Speight Jenkins also had a thing or two to say.

There is flutey as well but visually speaking fluty is more flute-like.

Bristly-Hairy

2011-07-23T14:19:00.000-04:00

From African Violets, Gloxinias, and their relatives: A Guide to the Cultivated Gesneriads, by Harold E. Moore, Jr., with illustrations by Marion Ruff Sheehan (Plate II from the book borrowed from the Central Coast Geranium Society's site).

There's lots of hairiness in here: short-hairy, glandular-hairy, pale-hairy, softly hairy, velvety-hairy, soft-velvety-hairy, stiffly hairy, appressed-hairy, rough-hairy, shortly hairy, finely hairy, reddish-hairy, rusty-hairy, sparsely hairy, white hairy, harshly hairy, red-brown hairy, brownish-purple hairy, minutely hairy, sparingly hairy.

Bristly-hairy is a sort of late fall afternoon honey on good bread kind of phrase.

Read aloud, Dr. Moore's book brings to mind Under Milk Wood.

Y, Utopian

2011-07-18T00:00:00.023-04:00

Though I did pass some y words on a vegetable table today at the Greenmarket outside of Columbia's gates (my purchase: organic cherry tomatoes), they did not rate. Sorry, farmers.

Continuing in my best imitation today of a librarian: from The Open Utopia site, reprinting the alphabet "from a facsimile of the woodcut, first edition, Louvain: 1516, reproduced in The Utopia of Sir Thomas More, translated by Ralph Robinson, edited and additional translation, J. H. Lupton, Oxford: Clare[n]don Press, 1895."

To the average reader, the Utopian y likely brings to mind the Soap and Detergent Association's symbol for

Cool/Cold (water temperature, machine wash)

and Low (heat setting, tumble dry)

Anthropogeny

2011-07-14T21:29:00.004-04:00

As I have discovered today, this should not be confused with anthropogenic.

I had been thinking about music and white noise and the increasing number of helicopters along the East River (and daydreaming about weekend quietude). An article in the National Park Service Park Science newsletter (Volume 26, Number 3, Winter 2009-2010) referred to that which should not be confused with anthropogeny:

With greater knowledge and understanding of the important role the acoustic environment plays in overall ecosystem health and visitor enjoyment as well as the potential impacts of anthropogenic noise, protection of the acoustic environment has received growing attention by managers and policy makers.

This makes me recall cringing years ago when I read that snowmobiles would be allowed in the parks, and also about an excellent short article in the Times a year or two ago.

The article was about how quiet the publishing industry had become, and what had been lost. I wondered what publishing people thought of it, both the old guard and the newly networked. No doubt some thought it was just another lament about the snows of yesteryear.

Glassphemy

2011-07-12T19:40:00.008-04:00

Back in November of 2005, I saved to email an idea I'd hatched a few years earlier:

The Smashatorium: a different kind of spa.

My notes read:

For anybody who needs a healthy alternative to yoga, meditation, swimming, jogging, crying jags, passive aggressive gestures, drama-queen scenes, facials, the bar.

A three month experiment in a space between tenants—raw space OR like traveling nightclub, moves

(Bitters) bottles, plates, fine crystal stemware

Bring your own—different pricing

Special requests taken; could have artists assemble room with a token piece of familiar furniture

Powder room—grind bottles to a fine powder with a _______ tool ; take home sand in a baggie to dispense as you please

Men’ s nights two nights a week

Need protective goggles

There was more to the spa services than just smashing bottles, but in time I realized I just wasn't finding the people I needed to find in order to turn the Smashatorium into a real place. I didn't present it as a recycling sport spot; I presented it as a therapeutic performance art installation.

I told a few friends about it. No luck intervened on behalf of my idea.

Today I came across a version of it, though the version has been around since May 2010.

Glassphemy is the name, and breaking glass is the game. My version did not include live people standing behind bulletproof--shattering-glass-proof--glass; it called upon the glass thrower to take an imaginative leap, or aim at a photograph. Bulletproof glass is a good idea. There's a video of the wife of one of the creator's throwing a bottle at her husband.

I like Smashatorium better than Glassphemy. Glassphemy doesn't make sense to me. For one thing, nobody's throwing the bottles in a house of worship.

Towery

2011-07-05T22:39:00.002-04:00

Had to look up J. Alfred's love song in my old Norton Anthology, and passed this on the way, from Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Duns Scotus's Oxford":

Towery city and branchy between towers;

And then it goes on to "Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;," which I quote for no very good reason except the stresses and all the work one's mouth must do to say this line, as if practicing Italian in the mirror.

Towery is so lightly touched in the center of word, it looks more substantial than its actual "mouthfeel".

More fun than reading "Pied Beauty" aloud, and Duns Scotus leads to more y words (quiddity, haecceity, univocity).

Chewy

2011-07-03T16:50:00.009-04:00

Yesterday I and several other people apparently in the throes of puppy withdrawl set upon a several-months old golden retriever on a Long Island beach, and one of the women called him not cute or sweet or smouchy, but chewy.

What a chewy puppy, she said, or He's a chewy puppy.

I was in the midst of trying to get my ring finger out of his mouth, so I can't quite remember how she said it. The phrase was definitely chewy puppy, and it occurred to me that she was saying something unique unto herself.

I appreciated it in a new light after hearing one of my sisters' friends talk about personal vocabularies. Before I tell you what this woman said, though, I want to mention how, many years ago, I started to take an interest in the books read by a man I knew. He'd read whatever he was reading, and I'd happen to read whatever he was reading--until the day he noticed what I was doing and told me that I really needed to get out of his wake. Which I did.

Even before that, there was a very short piece in the Observer called Cock A-Doodle Don't. I think either Phil Weiss or Peter Stevenson wrote it, or maybe it was that Stevenson wrote a parody of a book Phil Weiss wrote....? Something like that. It was a good piece, regardless, and in it there was this instance of an assistant to a Graydon Carter-like man using a word that the Carter-like man would have used. The assistant plucked a word from his boss's lexicon/wardrobe/arsenal and used it on his own lips.

Why I bring this up is because my sister's friend happened to articulate one of the best language practices going--best in my opinion, at least, because it speaks to (sorry) everything that is the opposite of salesmanship and slick, quick insta-relationships one-sidingly calculated and supposedly rooted in an organic common language .

The friend of my sister was talking about how nice it was to have a conversation with a certain architect we all know. It was nice, she said, because after she and her husband explained their thoughts about a project, the architect demonstrated his understanding of what they'd said by explaining it all back to them using his own words.

His words, not their words.

What she was getting at, I think, was the intelligence at work during that conversation. She wasn't saying, "He heard everything we said, as evidenced by his repeating our words to us"; she was saying, "He heard everything we said, as evidenced by his responding to us in his own way."

I glanced at my sister's friend. She could not, I am certain, know how grateful I was to hear this. I was grateful because sometimes when people echo my words, I've sometimes wanted to say, as my reader friend said to me: "It would be better if you could find your own words, so that this doesn't wind up feeling like an act of co-optation or a linguistic hijacking."

What might be regarded as a benign movement toward common ground or a gesture of friendliness can actually feel like something invasive--though it could also represent an instance of linguistic migration, or some such (a phrasing I picked up from an editor I once knew). I doubt I'm the only person who feels this way. Certainly there's plenty of language to go around.

I still call golden retrievers golden retrievers, even though a man I used to know called them Connecticut dogs. I always thought that was hilarious. When I see them, I sometimes think to myself, There's a Connecticut dog, but I never say so aloud. When I saw the puppy on the beach, all I thought was I have to pet that puppy right now.

::UPDATE:: However, it must be said that when there's an established context and some level of familiarity between people, people who affirm one another's vocabulary words do so in affinity. Also, for whatever it's worth, in the past two weeks the words group and team (or perhaps I should say group vs. team) actually posed some difficulties for an entire group/team of people who didn't know one another except in a business context.

Scoopy

2011-06-30T21:46:00.002-04:00

Although the OED's word of the day (today) is shouty, the word that caught my eye is scoopy.

From the list of citations for shouty:

1914 H. Coward Choral Technique & Interpretation 19 There are a great majority of untrained voices, which may be roughly classified as follows:—weak and quavery, worn and tinny, harsh and shrill, strident, metallic, shouty, throaty, cavernous, hooty, scoopy, and nondescript.

Needless to say, I have no idea what scoopy means. When I look it up in the OED, I arrive at

scoopy, adj.

Fashion slang.

Of the neck of a garment: rounded and low-cut. Cf. scoop neck n. at scoop n.2 Compounds, scooped adj. 1b.

1970 Daily Tel. 1 June 13 This summer's dresses are heaven-sent for this event. The voiles are in full swing, the necks are scoopy.

So scoopy and its 1914 meaning appears to be . . . unlisted.

Bloddy

2011-06-26T23:26:00.002-04:00

From the Society for Culinary Arts & Letters eGForums, by a person I could not reach. This is from a discussion about gazpacho.

It's a fasntastic way to start off a BBQ..somewhere between a bloddy mary & a salad..also a pretty good hangover lunch

I sort of like typos in dashed off notes. Not everything should be gone over with a fine-tooth comb.

(How long was the time period before spell checking and instant correction came along?)

Presnelty

2011-06-23T23:04:00.003-04:00

I went to Barnes & Noble to pick up the July issue of Velo News because there's an article on women's bikes. Took a peek at the racks to see what else was in there. An Italian Vogue special issue. n+1. Ceramics something or other, or maybe just plain Ceramics. A little magazine all about the wonderful world of meat. And Esopus, which I hadn't picked up for quite some time.

From Ray Johnson's November 30, 1988, letter to Robert Warner, as shown in Esopus' Spring 2011 issue:

I have the luxury of having a complete North Shore Estate, presnelty the Police Academy as my private walking place.

Because it's Ray Johnson and not, say, Robert McFadden, I wondered if perhaps the error had been committed on purpose. Was snelty a word? Could something be pre-snelty? What could that possibly mean?

Was I doing what many have before me--looking more deeply into Ray Johnson's work than is merited? Some think he was a real and Authentic artist; some think he was merely pretentious.

I wanted presnelty not to be a typo, even as I knew it was a (mid-level) typo. I wanted snelty to be a word. It's not. (Snelly is.)

A man I know used to have a coconut (maybe he still does) that a friend had sent him via mail.

The coconut sender, mail artists, users of the WASTE system, teachers who bring their students on field trips to the Post Office: I can't help but admire their connection to one of my favorite transportation systems.

Do I really really hold Ray Johnson's art in the highest esteem? Certainly I like his art, but what I almost love is his relationship with the U.S. Postal Service. I like the idea of an artist working with an institution this way. It somehow hooks up with the kind of ephemeral art Jim Devevan makes, though at the moment I'm not entirely sure how.

Howdy

2011-06-23T00:05:00.004-04:00

My shoemaker said this today. He greeted me with howdy and then called me "my dear."

My shoemaker does not say howdy, although, yes, today he did.

But he really doesn't (say it).

My shoemaker, a man I would truly miss were I to move to another state, is, if I recall correctly, Ukrainian.

Were I to apply a little-used form of Sarah Palin logic, I would posit that when I entered the cobbler shop, a pleasant memory (from Sunday) of watching the Georgian bread baker of Brighton Beach scrape his toné somehow infused the atmosphere of the shop, altering the climate so as to throw my usually laconic cobbler into a state teetering on the brink of loquacity.

Hurty

2011-06-17T18:53:00.003-04:00

Alerted to this one by a biking friend.

From Jill Outside, a blog with a lot of good photographs and a dutiful chronicle of terrains explored by a serious biker.

I've mostly stayed off my feet this week in a pre-emptive — though hopefully unnecessary —hurty-foot recovery plan to avoid plantar fasciitis.

Something about the phrase suggests an overwrought paw, reddened as if smarting from sunburn. Has a little of hacky-sack's kickiness and none of hurdy's weight.

Whoopy

2011-06-14T22:38:00.008-04:00

I stopped by Orwasher's today on the way to the CSA site, and they had some small whoopie pies under a cake dome. Chocolate cake with vanilla cream or white cake with lemon cream. I asked about the cream: a custard cream, or more like a frosting? It's more like a buttercream, said the hairnet-headed woman we all love (take away that woman and it's really goodbye, Orwasher's, which, of course, it sort of already has been since the new owners came along; but I digress). I bought a vanilla with lemon cream and delayed eating it until long after my first victim, a small apricot hamantaschen. (Orwasher's hamantaschen is quite good, but, Glaser's apricot hamantaschen, I must say, is the best I've had.)

Back to the whoopie pies. If an American elementary school were going to serve whoopie pies for dessert, I think it would be better to offer them as whoopy pies instead of whoopie pies, the y casting an effect similar to that of calling a Hoopoe a Hoopie (because this is how it was mispronounced in my household growing up). If the school were French, however, whoopie would be preferable.

Coincidentally I passed whoopy this weekend, while finishing Paul Zindel's Pardon Me, You're Stepping On My Eyeball!, a good book to follow The Phantom Tollbooth.

From about midway through the book, when Mrs. Shinglebox is complaining about her daughter not taking a computer dating service seriously enough:

" . . . I asked Edna one of the questions about where she thought the best place to make whoopy was, and she said on a horse."

Cramberry

2011-06-07T16:41:00.004-04:00

Another charming menu typo, this time from the cocktails list at Falai on Lafayette. Ingredients for the Costline (should this be Coastline?):

20gr. CRAMBERRY, 20gr. ORANGE JUICE, 35gr. TEQUILA, 15gr. PROSECCO.

Another cocktail is called City of Roses, with rose elixir from Santa Maria Novella. Whoever designed the liqueur bottles probably meant for them to be used afterwards as candle holders or lamp bases.

:: UPDATE :: On second thought, maybe the other cocktail is called Villa of Roses. It was Spanish, French, or Italian (Villa or Ville). Oops. Sorry.

If the cocktail is called City of Roses, I add only this thought: City of Roses would make a nice nickname for the city if Andrew Cuomo yields to patience and reason and bars methane companies from bringing their high-volume slickwater horizontal hydraulic fracturing technology to New York State and its so very good drinking water supply. Let rose bushes (and not toxic chemicals) crowd the governor's office and the halls of Albany if he makes the right decision. Certainly everybody will be able to breathe more easily (not to mention, literally, because who needs L.A. smog hanging around the Southern Tier of New York?) when it comes time to water the plants.

Pudsey

2011-06-05T02:16:00.002-04:00

I watched Bicycle Repairman, but it didn't have New Pudsey.

New Pudsey: at least as silly as Paglesham, a name Julie Christie somehow managed to say with a straight face.

Py

2011-05-25T14:05:00.002-04:00

From the wine list at Dovetail:

Morgon, "Côte du Py- Vieilles Vignes" J-M Burgaud 2008

I was there with some people from Landmark West!, one of the organizations that keeps the Upper West Side looking so pretty, and the most wine-savvy person at the table, in from Santa Cruz, California, ordered this for us (along with the Beaujolais and others):

"Toh-kai -- Exto Gredic Vineyard" Quattro Mani 2008 friulano

Recommendation: Excelsior

Whether it will be served at Landmark West! and Friends of Roosevelt Park's September dinner (produced by Outstanding in the Field) just outside the planetarium's glass box, one cannot say.

Prothonotary

2011-05-25T13:57:00.003-04:00

New vocabulary.

From the April 19, 2011, post on the Prince William Conservation Alliance blog:

Prothonotary Warblers are named after Catholic clergy called prothonotaries, who wear bright yellow robes.

Hello Again: A Return and Candle-Scenty

2011-05-25T11:59:00.010-04:00

That didn't last long, did it?

Everything was fine until about a month ago. I attended a baby shower. A guest said vowelly. I kept my hands in my lap.

Then, at MoMA, a friend, describing his friend who writes Internet poetry, said internetty. Naturally this conjured a filigree of netting.

There were at least two other words after that. I tried to keep the pressure from mounting.

Now I'm reading Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, and y-words are everywhere. It's a little obscene.

Last night I took myself to ABT at the Met to see the premiere of Christopher Wheeldon's ballet Thirteen Diversions. I first saw a Wheeldon piece several years ago, and I was determined to make sure yet another year didn't pass without seeing his work again.

It happened to be in a program with a Millepied. Now: I saw a Millepied some months ago, when we were still wearing furry boots and the sky was dark by 5 p.m. To my surprise, I thought it was quite good. It was different, strikingly so. I'm not a dance critic, so I can't say what was appealing.

Last night's Millepied piece, Troika, was, again, striking. A narrative featuring three male dancers and a cellist, it told a little story about relationships. One of the dark-haired dancers was particularly crisp.

A revival of a piece called Shadowplay came after the Millepied. Nobody seemed to be much impressed. Maybe they thought the dancers were miscast? I liked it (and happen to like The Jungle Book), and I had never seen it.

The program concluded with the Wheeldon. Here's what happened during the watching of it: candle-scenty, a y-word from the Lethem kept popping into my head (candle-scenty emitting precisely the right connotations for the scene in which it appeared); the phrase "hair-acting" came to mind, because I kept thinking that what was playing before me could be termed "arm-dancing"; and I wondered if perhaps Benjamin Millepied wasn't my preferred new choreographer.

I lost count of the movements--probably while wandering between a rigorous dance sequence from Fred Wiseman's "Paris Opera Ballet" and the Maria Tallchief scene in "Million Dollar Mermaid"--but am guessing that my favorites were the two Toccatas and possibly the Ritmico.

The lighting was superb, at once a nod to sun play on the horizon, computer screens, and the corner of a lone page of a blank book.

Philistine though it is to say, the stars of the show were the women's costumes, gossamer gorgeousnesses created by a man named Bob Crowley. What they were made of I don't know. A plunged V-neckline (with skin tone fabric stretched across the gap) blossoming to full three-quarter (?) length sleeves, coming back in to a cinched waist, then out into a bell-shaped skirt to the knees (slitted so as to fan at the hip line), with a little apron flap (surely there's a name for this) fluttering from the small of the back.

Where was the lagniappe? In the hem line.

The soloists's dresses were silver hemmed with pink and bright pink or .... something along those lines, in the reds, pinks, and purples. The others wore black hemmed with something approaching a cadmium yellow, although (because I took no notes) perhaps their hems were red and yellow. (Now I wish I had taken notes.)

I wondered if the dancers loved the costumes or not. I wondered how Bob Crowley created them. Did he test-dance them to see how they wore, how they moved, how they held up under the grip of the men's hands? Did he have people sit in the Family Circle (where I was originally) to see if the colors made it up that far? Were the hems hand-sewn? What were the ribbons made of? What is the function, if any, of the little flap?

After the program, I walked over to the fountain and lay back with my head toward the water plumes. Sometimes New York seems like just another big city, but last night wasn't one of those nights.

::UPDATE:: Looking at the photo in the Times this morning, I see that the sleeves on the silver (apparently grey, but such a luminous grey....) dresses were sleek sleeves, leotard-like. The corps wore black with yellow hems. The principals wore silver (grey) with pink hems.

::ADDITION:: Haglund's Heel characterizes the choreography of the first ballet of the evening, Dumbarton Oaks, as "very steppy and peppy, which seems to be Ratmansky's preference. It had a Great Galloping Gottschalk feel to it without the dynamics that Lynne Taylor-Corbett designed in her piece."

Surfy

2010-12-31T23:00:00.005-05:00

So it's goodbye!

A word about goodbyes, especially now that I've just come from La Traviata, at the Met (my first Traviata). I'm all for goodbyes. You know how Sylvia Plath wrote about the telephone being "off at the root"? No good-bye.

No good-bye is unsatisfying the way a ticket that's scanned with a light beam and not ripped in half with two hands is unsatisfying. The ticket is "used" but somehow has entered ticket limbo; it's passing for a materially whole ticket.

No goodbye is the marriage that shouldn't have taken place yet is not headed for divorce court. Like the scanned, unripped ticket, it's in limbo.

A friend asked why I'm ending this blog. I'm ending it because I feel it's time to do something as fun but perhaps more meaningful and mentally challenging and that will give rise to conversations with people (preferably beyond elementary-school age) who want to discuss something other than words that happen to end in the letter y. Should I discover otherwise, I will have no choice but to say hello again.

It's possible that this coming year my processed words will appear on Nearsay.com, a hyperlocal New York City news site, although whether my prose would qualify as news I could not begin to say.

Back to La Traviata, which was a visual feast. Excellent use of color, and the ending was marked by sound taste in metaphor. I almost was going to have this last y word be slutty, in honor of Violetta who died of pneumonia brought on by bougie values.

Also I considered higglety pigglety, from the title of a CD I saw in the opera shop (browsing there made me want to see Orpheus and Eurydice and Samson and Deliliah). However, higgledy-piggledy was already a post, from December 2008.

And, so, with the clock ticking towards midnight, it made sense to end at the beginning, with surfy. I can't even remember what body of water he was describing, but my friend James, who has a British accent, pronounced surfy in a way that perhaps recalled a radio broadcast by Virginia Woolf titled (if I remember correctly) "Why words fail". The way Woolf pronounced words and the way James pronounced surfy, there was a connection there. Her o was related to his u, something like that. James has a little smile of his own, so there was that visual element, too, which made his surfy memorable.

There it is. Thank you, James, wherever you are (probably England).

My thanks, too, to Ari, who encouraged me to write this blog when the few people to whom I mentioned it were indifferent or said it was a waste of time. Even if I have written to but five readers, it turns out it was worth the time because it was worth the process. This commitment, I discovered, has yielded invisible dividends.

Good night, and good-b'wy.

Y Word of 2010: Clowdy

2010-12-30T18:33:00.006-05:00

After much thought, I have selected clowdy as the Y word of the year. Showoffy is the runner-up, mainly because its double-f visually reifies its meaning (think of that poem about the giraffes and their necks and the fs).

Clowdy doesn't do performance art, but it is pleasing to the eye and the ear (I'm a softy for cl words), and I might consider having a New Year's Eve dinner party in its honor, down in Atlantis, and inviting all the mythical beasts, some of whom would be wearing their softest cardigans.

So: that's the word of the year, and this is the next-to-last day of this blog. It's been trivial, yes, but, bizarrely, it's been a joy in the idiosyncratic way blogs written by ordinary people and ostensibly devoted to suffixes are a joy.

2010 Finalists

2010-12-28T22:49:00.005-05:00

Ah, the triviality of this blog. I wonder if I shall miss it. I believe it's time to type toward something with a bit more ballast.

Meanwhile, I must say that taken in context the words pineappley and Band-Aidy are more appealing than they would be all alone.

Showoffy, clowdy, and dropsy are perhaps better as stand-alone words--especially clowdy.

Dropsy

2010-12-28T22:19:00.002-05:00

From the recipe for Electuary of 'Ud Qimâri, from An Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook of the 13th Century, translated* by Charles Perry and at the URL http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Medieval.html:

Its benefits: it strengthens the heart and lightens the spirit, digests foods, lightens the body gently, strengthens the liver, dissolves phlegm in various parts of the body, and aids in dropsy.

[* Apparently the "original project was to retranslate into English Ambrosio Huici-Miranda's Spanish translation of the Arabic original of the Manuscrito anónimo".]

In my old Winston dictionary, the next word (N+1 players would care) is droshky, a light four-wheeled carriage used in Russia. Not nearly as entertaining as dropsy.

Please note that the word of this post is not electuary.

Gilty

2010-12-28T21:37:00.002-05:00

From the boldface names-studded article "The Forbes 2010 All-Star Eateries" in the December 20, 2010 issue of Forbes, a magazine I haven't picked up in many, many years, and which has an interesting profile of Mr. Wikileaks, among other good pieces:

With its exquisite, hip-vibe decor [sic] and its opulent and baroque architecture, Gilt is a gilty pleasure, a memorable fine-dining experience.

Somehow, somebody neglected to mention that Gilt is located within what's left of the old (Renaissance Revival-style) Villard Houses on Madison Avenue--part of the Palace Hotel. The private dining room seems nice enough, although: were the chairs (at least in photographs) delivered to the wrong dining room?

What is there to say about gilty except What was wrong with the delete key?

Sympohny

2010-12-24T01:16:00.002-05:00

From an unbylined New York Mirror article about the anticipated demolition of Carnegie Hall:

HOWEVER, ITS principal tenant, the N.Y. Philharmonic-Sympohny Society, has four months in which to buy the building from the new purchaser, the Glickman Corp., which promised the society all the profits made on the present transaction.

Of all the typographical errors I've passed this year, this one is the sweetest.

At times I've wondered if newspaper editors these days deliberately retain typos in order to draw attention to a sentence or its topic.

I read the Mirror article tonight in the history room at Carnegie Hall. It was among other clippings and was hand-dated 7/25/56. Just before I read it, I was surprised to discover that the three noted "intermission is over" sequence is actually played by a man (tonight anyway) walking around with a xylophone.

Repeat: with a xylophone.

Good thing the Music Hall was not demolished. Apparently the Kaplan Rehearsal Space is slated to be demolished, but I have not confirmed that. My fact-checkers are on holiday.

Goodnight (good morning?) to all five of my readers. I hope one of you is wearing the soft sleeping hat I so covet.

Voluntary

2010-12-23T10:53:00.003-05:00

During a conversation about church wedding music, I learned that voluntary is also a noun.

Sappy

2010-12-19T19:42:00.002-05:00

A word with more meanings than one would guess. From a friend's email note this evening:

You know how sappy I am.

Flerry

2010-12-18T23:11:00.006-05:00

This has nothing to do with LASER (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation), nor a concerto by a composer whose work I like, nor the word flerd.

From the online OED (the new website of which, despite its many charms, places the word scroll list on the right and in a smaller, less legible form that includes a somewhat bouncy and rather irritating automatic scroll function; the previous site's colors and text bits were more pleasing to the peepers--not as many trips to the online OED for me this coming year):

Flerry: to split slate.

1865 J. T. F. Turner Familiar Descr. Old Delabole Slate Quarries 13 The better the quality of the slate, the easier will it flerry, and also cleave.

2010 Semi-Finalists

2010-12-18T15:36:00.004-05:00

Words posted from now until the end of the year also will be in the running.

The semi-finalists are:

Pineappley
Band-Aidy
Showoffy
Quey
Clowdy
Phizzintry
Trusty

Punty

2010-12-16T21:50:00.004-05:00

From Barovier & Toso's list of glassmaking terms, this as part of the description of "a torcélo, a torséllo".

Using the tongs called BORSELLE DA PISSEGAR, the glass is wound around the punty and mixed together to obtain a homogeneous colouring.

Buoy

2010-12-15T21:50:00.003-05:00

Nothing much to do with Phong Bui.

From Leslie Allen's short piece "Drifting in Static", in the January 2011 issue (print and online) of National Geographic:

The ten listening buoys now bobbing in Massachusetts Bay could actually help the animals.

Which speakers who come to English as a second language have the easiest or most difficult time with this word? What's it like for somebody who has spent a childhood deep in French or Catalan or Malayalam?

As for Allen's piece, it is interesting to think about how sea creatures fared when all the ships had sails. I wonder if Melville ever thought about the effects of man-made sounds.

Toddy

2010-12-15T10:41:00.002-05:00

Not what Lisa Loopner called Todd when she was trying to be flirty but a concoction served last night at Landmark West!'s 25th anniversary party, at the Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center.

It was toddy weather yesterday and is toddy weather again today.

After many sips of the aforementioned beverage, I slipped into the many windowed party room to listen to hear what honoree Tom Wolfe had to say about the state of the city. With a nimbus of snowy gray hair about his head, the author spoke briefly about Mayor Bloomberg.

Mr. Wolfe said that he and his wife like the mayor. He also said, "I don't think he's ever met a developer whose mattress he didn't like."

In his finale, before the benediction, the author said, "Landmark West is saving this city."

Mr. Wolfe said nothing about minor modifications and major modifications or the LPC's budget or air rights or big box stores or pop-up stores or people who buy everything they can online. He did not compare the Upper East and Upper West Sides, nor did he compare segments of the Upper East Side to Shanghai.

Here's a question: Why is so much of the Upper West Side so pretty? Ask Arlene Simon, the woman who was wearing the béret.

Phlegmy

2010-12-13T00:10:00.002-05:00

Spoken by a friend tonight at dinner, and sounding to my ears as flemmy.

Note: Soon the year's finalists will be revealed.

Annoy

2010-12-09T10:38:00.002-05:00

This word is hardly out of the ordinary; however, I was surprised to come across it in my Playbill from West Side Story.

From a note from the "fire commissioner".

Thoughtless persons annoy patrons and endanger the safety of others by lighting matches or smoking in prohibited areas during the performance and intermissions.

True enough, though I must say that after attending the ballet, the theater, the concert, the reading, and the puppet show: I find thoughtless persons endangering/marring/ruining my theatrical experience by lighting their screens during the performance.

I would like to believe that if Gerry Schoenfeld were still around, he would be the chair of a Broadway theaters committee that would set a precedent for the problem (not “issue”) of screen and ring plague.

There would be at least one attorney on this committee who would deem the act of, let's say, a cell phone ringing just after Anita says, "I got a message for your American buddy" to be more than annoying. She would argue that the person whose ringtone played "Never Can Say Goodbye" altered the experience for the entire audience, an audience listening for words and music as spoken and played by the performers.

This attorney would suggest that theater owners take matters into their own hands and fine the offending parties. This attorney would say something like, "We’ve had enough polite announcements. This is no longer about etiquette. 'Please turn off your cell phone and other electronic devices'—it's not working. People think that 'vibrate' means 'off'. People are positive they have turned off their phones and don’t check. People think they're so important they actually answer their phones in the middle of the second act—they actually scroll text messages after the lights have gone down! They behave as if they're watching television in their living rooms. They think little to nothing of the people behind them, nothing of the person on either side.

Somebody needs to take back the theater. The conditions of live performance presupposes a tacit agreement between the performers and audience members and between and among each and every audience member. If a member of the audience violates that agreement, he or she should get a ticket and pay $500, end of story. At worst, we'll make $5,000 a week in fines, and the show will get a cut. We should take this on a pilot run and see if it can be the end of anything goes. And then we can actually enjoy all of Anything Goes."

A supporter would say, "Should we also fine people who eat bags of potato chips and bring water bottles full of ice cubes?"

A skeptic would say, "C'mon, this isn’t the same as lighting matches."

The attorney would say, "Look, does the actor, does the tenor, does the conductor, does the ballerina—do these people perform with their cell phones? Not unless they're playing Osage County."

What would the fire commissioner say?

Touchy-feely

2010-12-07T23:28:00.003-05:00

Does this make a pair with happy-clappy? Or recall the feelies (not capitalized, not the music group)?

From an interview with John Bradshaw in the article "Those Who Felt Differently," by Ian Jack and Peter Marlow, in the Winter 1997 volume of Granta magazine:

Then the touchy-feely fascists got to work and it began to seem that not to feel unqualified grief was somehow a heresy.

Some time ago I knew a man one of whose parents was a child when the Third Reich was on the rise. The parent's family left Germany before the worst. "How did the family know to leave?" I asked. The man said he didn't know. I wonder if he found out. I wonder how that family closed off one life to begin another.

New Yorky

2010-12-03T19:19:00.004-05:00

The thing is, after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the country began to experience what I call the Mid-Westernization of New York. I proposed an article to Harper's with this title. I said the aftermath of the attacks bookended the arrival of the first McDonald's, at the start of the '70s (notes unavailable and surf patience at low tide).

A line from a show Mark Crispin Miller put on about George Bush, "Operation American Freedom", talked about Bush disliking New York because, among other things, it was "too Jewish".

[Note: being Jewish in New York ≠ (let's say) being Jewish in Ohio or even in Montana.]

The Times website does not state that Elaine was New Yorky, but she was; and so she is the absentee host of tonight's word.

“I’ve lived just about the most perfect life,” Ms. Kaufman said in 1998. “I’ve had the best time. If I wanted to do something, I did it. Designers designed my clothes and did my apartment. I had house seats for the theater. I was invited to screenings and book parties. I’ve had fun. What else can you ask in life?”

Gy

2010-12-01T22:31:00.004-05:00

A close runner-up for tonight was vy, from Nora Ephron's latest book, but visual matters prevail.

Today I met a little girl named Eleanor. She was both feisty and subdued, and my guess is that she is going to turn six this year. I don't know what kind of art projects Eleanor's school offers, but I often think how nice it would be if schools taught children (the way they teach math and English) color.

As recently as 1897 the Brooklyn Board of Education kept a book called Suggestions for a Course of Instruction in Color for Public Schools, by Louis Prang, Mary Dana Hicks, and John S. Clark. It was published by the Prang Education Company in 1893. Granted, Prang had a commercial interest in encouraging color education. I can live with that.

From the chart THE SEVEN GRAYS, THEIR TINTS AND SHADES.

Gy
RGy
OGy
YGy
GGy
BGy
VGy

Bray

2010-11-30T01:05:00.003-05:00

From "Braypins: musical and organological questions", the English translation of "Les harpions – questions organologiques et musicales: quel(s) réglage(s) pour quel usage sur les harpes anciennes aujourd’hui?", by Charles Besnainou and Véronique Musson-Gonneaud. This was a presentation delivered at the fifth Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology, held last year in Paris.

Then tangent brays are very interesting for the interpretation of music which is now played on the harp, all the more so since the harp is one of the rare medieval instruments which can play down to the Gamma Ut.

It's refreshing to see bray in a context that doesn't feature a donkey.

Tonight on New Sounds, in the middle of the show, before we arrived in Spain, John Schaefer said something like, "the kora is the tinkly harp you heard there."

Were koras plucked in Medieval Africa?

Groovy II

2010-11-28T17:06:00.004-05:00

Redux!

I like kinetic art, so this past week at the Museum of Modern Art, when I saw Zilvinas Kempinas' fan installation by the garden windows, I said, "That's cool."

"Yeah, it's groovy,"

my friend said.

I thought: She's right. Groovy is the better word here. There were two industrial fans air-hooping two loops of magnetic tape (one is 20 feet, the other 26). My friend added it was like watching a fire. I added that it would be nice to have in a large loft.

It's called "Double O".

Apparently the museum's art handlers attend to the set piece, watching for malfunctions (such as when the doors to the sculpture garden are held open just long enough to accidentally demonstrate what happens when the tape hits the fan).

I like to think that the ever-vigilant art handlers indulge in a little treat every now and then, in whatever form. On a recent Monday, they were expecting (because they had ordered and paid for) a special delivery of eight dozen oysters brought down by an oysterman from Charlestown, Rhode Island. No doubt they were anticipating the brine, the gelid yum, the New England East Coastiness of it all.

Unfortunately, something happened (what did happen?) on the way to West 53rd Street: most of the oysters wound up at a gathering on the roof of 1000 Fifth Avenue. As told by The New Yorker in the magazine's November 29 issue, the Met's art handlers happily snacked on sixteen dozen bivalves plucked from pearly shells. Five dozen of those, apparently, were MoMA's intendeds.

Three dozen oysters actually landed at MoMA. After finishing an installation at 9 p.m., the Midtown gang consumed their molluscs in a basement break room known as "the mezzanine". The oysters were declared fantastic. The handlers stanched their indignation with champagne and beer.

That week, apparently, the oyster farmer mailed eight dozen oysters (heavy shipping charges included) to MoMA's handlers. They never arrived.

E-said one art handler, "They are probably right now sitting on a shelf in some postal hub, unclaimed — and stinky."

Fabray

2010-11-24T18:49:00.001-05:00

When I was very small, Nanette Fabray was on a television commercial of some sort. I remember her enunciation, the way she pronounced her last name.

Too bad I never saw this when I was young.

Booby

2010-11-22T19:45:00.000-05:00

Self-sounding.

Egrimony

2010-11-22T18:41:00.002-05:00

Meaning: deep sorrow.

This emotion does not appear in I Can Fly! or "Monsters, Inc."

Happy-Clappy

2010-11-21T22:17:00.003-05:00

When the Times Book Review killed my review of Dog on the Cross several years ago, I was irritated mostly because I found the fictional stories of Pentecostals in Oklahoma enlightening. Perhaps the Times took issue with the absence of the term happy-clappy.

About the same time of Dog on the Cross's publication, Mike Davis told me that Pentecostalism was the fastest growing religion in the world. I wondered if the Landmark Forum--the program whose leaders tell participants "hope is for suckers"--counts as a new religion. Happy-clappy, again, did not surface during that time.

This past week at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, happy-clappy came up during a brief conversation about liturgical music. The speaker was expressing her preference for music that is not happy-clappy, and, thus, for the kind of music regularly performed at Ignatius Loyola.

A recent concert there included a U.S. premiere of Canticum Canticorum (Song of Songs), a cantata by Viktor Kalabis composed in 1986. I missed this part of the concert but could still look over the texts, half of which were in Latin.

Maybe in a play, a woman who believes in almost nothing and a man who has all but given up on the unpixelated world joke around with the Song of Songs, reading to each other:

Behold thou art fair, my beloved, and comely.
Our bed is flourishing.

. . .

Stay me up with flowers, compass me about with apples:
because I languish with love.

. . .

Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come.
For winter is now past, the rain is over and gone.

dilectus meus mihi et ego illi qui pascitur inter lilia
donec adspiret dies et inclinentur umbrae
revertere similis esto dilecte mi capreae aut
hinulo cervorum super montes Bether

"Shouldn't it be 'mountains of 'spices'?" the man says.

Ballsy

2010-11-18T17:15:00.006-05:00

One local kickball (kickball/drinking) team here in the city called Saved By the Balls.

In a mutant PG non-drinking movie version, the team is called Saved By the Balls but the movie title is "Saved By the Bells". The story: a heartwarming tale of what happens when a man who is a ball-keeper and master kicker meets a woman who is a bell-ringer at a church on Park Avenue. Starring Charlie Hofheimer and a young Debra Winger. No dogs, no Beaujolais. Lots of balls.

Feely

2010-11-18T17:11:00.001-05:00

Whose fear is more realized at this moment in time, Huxley's or Orwell's?

Vey

2010-11-17T20:22:00.003-05:00

An obsolete form of survey, apparently, from about 200 years before the window tax.

One could think of it as the vey in the expression vey iz mir, but this is not the vey I have in mind. (By the way, some people seem to think that this is what Jewish people say, vey iz mir. I'm afraid I have news for you: Jewish people do not say this as a matter of course, nor do people who consider themselves Jewish necessarily include the word oy in their personal lexicons.)

On another note, today marks the day that this site has registered 1,000 unique visitors.

Suzerainty

2010-11-16T20:21:00.003-05:00

I've often passed over this one and neglected to look it up.

From "Some Notes on the Stolberg Library," by Hilmar H. Weber, Ph.D., in Harvard Alumni Bulletin of 27 April 1934:

After negotiations and repeated treaties in the course of several centuries, the Kings of Prussia, as Margaraves of Brandenburg, finally established their suzerainty, but not their sovereignty.

When I lived in Boston, I had reading privileges at Harvard's libraries. Every now and then, I would daydream about the Harvard Libraries Vacation: a two-week pass with reading privileges to every one of the university's libraries, from Loeb to the botany archives.

Some know Harvard as the Stanford of the East.

Wonky

2010-11-16T11:21:00.005-05:00

As for so many people, Harvard Business School figures into my life. Six Degrees of Harvard Business School, right? ("Oh, you know/dated/are related to/had dinner with somebody who attended/teaches at/works at HBS? How about that? Me, too.") What do they teach there? Well, among other things--such as the place to order flowers from when you are completely clueless about such things and have never been to Eli's Flowers--they teach negotiation.

Ah, negotiation.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, that handy little book, states, The purpose of negotiating is to serve your interests. The chance of that happening increases when you communicate them. . . How do you discuss interests constructively without getting locked into rigid positions?

From the section "Invent Options for Mutual Gain": If the first impediment to creative thinking is premature criticism, the second is premature closure. By looking from the outset for the single best answer, you are likely to short-circuit a wiser decision-making process in which you select from a large number of possible answers. [Ed. note: Nice energy metaphor in there.]

Is this considered wonky? Or hooey (because people are mammals)? Do people in the real world really go around considering themselves problem solvers, as opposed to either friends or adversaries? Do people really separate the people from the problem not just once but over and over until it's a new habit? Not on their own, I don't think. Maybe if they learn negotiation skills at HBS.

Buffy

2010-11-14T16:54:00.003-05:00

From the reprint edition of A Field Guide to the Birds, by Roger Tory Peterson:

Juvenile Swamp Sparrows are buffy below with fine breast-streakings.

A Bird Book on a New Plan is one of the subtitles.

Peterson's book was published in April of 1934, miles of years before "problems" became "issues". I picked it up at Mast Books last night (after the party, the book shop) along with a little book of Cole Porter lyrics. Somebody really knew how to order the songs: "Begin the Beguine" and "Just One of Those Things" are on facing pages.

Groovy

2010-11-11T16:59:00.004-05:00

Music to read by . . .

From Newspoem's 18 March 1999 Items From Our Catalog (among Hemp Condoms and Rainforest Cigarettes):

Tie-Dyed Cat

The latest in our line of alternative pets. Check out the psychedelic patterns on these groovy kittens.

I arrived at Newspoem via Spineless Books, a subject much on my mind today.

Oakery

2010-11-08T23:37:00.002-05:00

An oak grove.

Cosimo was in the holm oak. The branches spread out--high bridges over the earth. A slight breeze blew; the sun shone. It shone through the leaves, so that we had to shade our eyes with our hands to see Cosimo. From the tree Cosimo looked at the world; everything seen from up there was different, which was fun in itself. The alley took on a new aspect, and so did the flower beds, the hortensias, the camellias, the iron table for coffee in the garden.

ay

2010-11-04T19:51:00.004-04:00

Admittedly, I am that person shower-shouting songs from "A Chorus Line" or "My Aim is True" or some other relic. Sometimes I hum a Howard Fishman song I like, or a song Kurt Andersen featured one day on Studio 360.

This week I visited the eye doctor and wanted to play "Faraway Eyes" while my pupils were dilating. Alas, all I had was "Sweet Virginia", "Tumbling Dice" and "Satisfaction"--not even "Loving Cup", although it was too early in the day for "Loving Cup", and, besides, I couldn't dance in the waiting room.

Partly because I do some work for a professional choral music group (it sings Messiah at Carnegie Hall), I am listening for more and more older music forms.

A couple of days ago I stumbled into the y-laden field of old French music.

So, then, from the title of a work by Guillaume Dufay:

Missa Se la face ay pale

A little different from the sea-captain ay.

wikisky

2010-11-04T11:42:00.002-04:00

Before c. 2000, likely pronounced with an emphasis on the second syllable.

When craving the Pleiades or the Majestic Sombrero Galaxy, there is this.

Folly

2010-11-03T23:06:00.005-04:00

Folly is vocab word #71 in a journal from when I was 16 years old. It's defined as "the quality or state of being foolish or deficient in understanding."

I wrote a fair amount about food, clothes, boys, and nail biting, and was prone to quoting from "Fanny and Alexander", songs, and F. Scott Fitzgerald books. There are also the requisite bad poems and short fictional pieces, diagrams, and lists.

Random jotting: It's so dumb to say Jesus/God is everywhere. Does that mean that he is, at this moment, residing within my tube of Neosporin?

On babies: I love their firm little patties of feet and their cute little detachable noses which dribble though the winter....My kid will probably look like a molded roll of charmin.

On riding home from Macy's without underwear: It was like air-skinnydipping. Nudist camps must be fun once you get over the initial shock.

The beginning of an entry composed while my parents were having a horrible fight: I wish I could just walk out the front door like some selfish rebellious kid, but I can't. I wouldn't. Maybe this is why [a friend] likes drugs so much.

The end of that entry: At least I'm not a giraffe.