WHOLE WORD CATALOG
Jerry
Harkins
Preface
P
|
ity
the poor writer scratching away in the age of MTV. It is perfectly possible for the average American college
graduate to watch one music video after another for hours on end without ever
understanding a single word and still be intellectually burned out at the end
of the evening. Now that the world
has mastered tweeting and texting, the next step will be to take our
information intravenously.
But,
you protest, why feel sorry for the writer? Even if no one actually reads anything more complicated than
a stop sign anymore, lots of stuff still has to get written down. Which means there’ll always be work for
the writer which is more than you can say for any other profession except
garbage collecting.
No,
Virginia, whoever told you that was wrong. Already there are fewer writers around than buggy whip
makers. What there is is a word
processor. It has no moving
parts. It never suffers from
writer’s block or jock itch. It
has never inhaled. Anything. It was programmed by a Japanese
technician employed by a socially ambitious shipbuilding company. Marshall McLuhan spelled it out for you
forty-five years ago but it was already too late. Tipper Gore tried to warn you but who pays attention to a
blond who was once married to a jerk like Al? Now, even though it’s too late by several decades, you
should try to get it straight. One
more time, repeat after me:
The
medium is the message.
It
wasn’t always so. But it is now
and there’s nothing to be done about it.
Let me give you a pathetic example. In 1958, there was a famous advertising slogan that went
like this:
At
sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise in the
new
Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.
Ten
years later, the most famous advertising slogan was:
Uh-huh!
Any
questions? Don’t be
embarrassed; feel free to ask
stupid questions. Like, who wrote
that second line? You may know
that the first one was written by a Scotch-Irish Oxford classics scholar named
David Ogilvy. But who wrote “Uh-huh!”
for Pepsi-Cola? Please note: do not ask why it was written.
That’s a hard question and hard questions are against the rules. Maybe you’d like to know what it means
but that too is a hard question.
So, first things first.
Once
upon a time there was a meeting of High Priced Creative Types (HPCT’s). They were sitting around a big table
made out of a single slab of wood from the last living specimen of an exotic
rainforest species. It is not
crucial to the story, but you may be interested in knowing they were all naked
as they brainstormed the perfect line.
One suggested:
At
sixty miles an hour, the loudest sound is the fizzing of the bubbles.
The
boss said:
Uh-huh!
Another
HPCT came up with:
At
sixty miles an hour, things go great with Pepsi.
The
boss said:
Uh-huh!
Are
you beginning to see why she was the boss? Can you fill in the rest of the story yourself? I don’t want to spend too much time on
this because I really want to tell you about the way things were before Uh-huh and it won’t be on the test
anyway. No matter, you can
probably answer the second question yourself now. Right! Uh-huh! doesn’t actually mean
anything. At least not in the old
fashioned meaning of meaning.
Neither do most political speeches, newspaper editorials, religious
sermons or, of course, MTV videos.
It’s
okay that they don’t because no one reads or listens anymore. Remember, the medium is the message.
MTV, by the very fact of its existence (ex opere operato as my Jesuit teachers used to say in a slightly
different context), tells us more about our culture than all the words in all
the songs it will ever air. It’s a
gestalt. Its semiology is not
deducible from its component parts.
Like a snapshot whose meaning to the viewer is completely independent of
its physics and chemistry, MTV, uh-huh and stop signs are in the business of
eliciting instant emotional responses.
They are not intellectual and they cannot be parsed.
Before
you were born, when reading and writing were important to the process of preserving
cultural values, writers worked diligently to express themselves clearly and
memorably. I often think of Homer
asking himself how best to describe Odysseus and coming up with the marvelous
epithet:
polutropon
Pronounced
pol-you-tro-pon and usually translated as “wily,” the literal meaning of this
lovely word is having many turnings. It refers to the hero’s
wanderings on his way home from the late unpleasantness at Troy as well as to
his habit of mind which is both clever and devious. It is the absolutely perfect word, capturing Odysseus’
heroic strength and tragic flaw as well as Homer’s sophisticated understanding
of situational ethics, all in a single breath. Try explaining that to your favorite teenager. As Lee Hayes said, “Things ain’t what
they used to be and, what’s more, they never were.” But there was a time, before words were processed, when
writing was an art and a discipline, when there were tools writers used to work
magic with ideas. This is a
meditation on those tools and that magic.
THE TOOL BOX
Alliteration.
A sequence of words beginning with the same initial consonant
sound. Beloved equally by poets
and fourth rate politicians, alliteration is hard to resist and is not resisted
as often as it should be. We
would, for example, be no poorer had we never heard of “nattering nabobs of
negativism” which was created for one fourth rate politician, Spiro Agnew, by a
third rate scribbler, William Safire, who remained proud of his achievement for
the rest of his life.
Surely
the most graceful examples of alliteration in English are contained in Gerard
Manley Hopkins’ masterpiece The Windhover,
the first two lines of which are:
I
caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom
of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon
Anaphora.
The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses,
sentences, verses or paragraphs.
On June 4, 1940, following the evacuation of Dunkirk, Winston Churchill
spoke to the British people about a possible Nazi invasion of perfidious
Albion. Among the many stirring
things he said that day was:
…we shall fight on the
beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields
and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
Repetition
can be thought of as the infrastructure of the auditory arts of poetry and
music. In the third of his Norton
Lectures at Harvard, Leonard Bernstein pursued this idea by arguing that
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is an extended exploration of the F to A Major
Third which the composer repeats repeatedly.
Aphorism.
A pithy statement of behavioral guidance. Most of the ones you learned as a child have, by now, failed
you. You have discovered, for
instance, that a mere ounce of prevention will get you exactly nowhere and may
indeed require megatons of cure.
You have first hand experience that words can hurt you far more than
sticks and stones. Fortunately,
some aphorisms do express eternal verities. Oscar Wilde hit upon several of these including, “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence
without civilization in between.” He also observed, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”
Florynce Kennedy was another master of the form. It was she who wrote, “If men could get
pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”
My
father, an effusive admirer of the Algonquin Round Table, was full of
aphorisms. He claimed, for
example, that one must never discuss cosmology with people who think the moon
is made of green cheese even if it turns out they’re right. I inherited a small degree of the same
skill:
In
the land of the blind, the one-eyed man
sees
only the shadows on Plato’s wall.
Apostrophe.
A digression in which a different audience is addressed. In drama, an aside is a form of
apostrophe in which an actor steps out of character and speaks directly to the
audience, the other actors feigning not to hear what is said. A variation of this has the actor
addressing someone or something not actually present. This produces an eerie effect of eavesdropping on the
innermost thoughts of the character.
Early in his funeral oration over the body of Caesar, Mark Antony turns
from the assembled crowd of Romans and the audience to address Judgment itself:
O
judgment! Thou art fled to brutish
beasts
And
men have lost their reason.
Addressed
to the Romans or the audience, the play of “brutish” on Brutus would have been
premature. By saying the same
thing to Judgment, Antony signals that he has been temporarily overcome by
emotion. He plants a seed that
will grow to the conclusion that Brutus is a bloody traitor. A few lines later, he does the same
thing again:
Judge
O you gods how dearly Caesar loved him.
When
he has finally roused the rabble and is alone on the stage, he murmurs:
Now
let it work. Mischief, thou art
afoot,
Take
thou what course thou wilt!
Assonance (1). The
repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in an often imperfect
pattern. More subtle than
alliteration, assonance is better at establishing a mood because of the
musicality of vowel sounds. Hence
the sense of foreboding created by Edgar Allan Poe in the first verse of
Ulalume:
In
was night in lonesome October
Of
my most immemorial year
It
was down by the dank tarn of Auber
In
the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
Assonance (2).
Any rhyme (q.v.) that is less than perfect. The reader/listener recognizes that the poet is
stretching. Sometimes done out of
desperation, it is also a useful device for avoiding boredom. Coleridge, for example, resorts to it
regularly in The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner to break what would otherwise be the monotony of his heroic
couplets. For example:
Four
times fifty living men,
(And
I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With
heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They
dropped down one by one.
The
ear is expecting something that rhymes with groan. One by one is close enough to be jarring. Its very flatness, however, cleanses
the ear and restores the reader’s alertness.
Ogden
Nash raised assonance to an art form by forcing imperfectly rhyming words and
phrases into mock perfection. Consider
these bits of doggerel:
A
thrifty soprano of Hingham
Designed
her own dresses of gingham
On
the blue and white squares
She
wrote opera airs
So
when they wore out
She
could singham.
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There
was a young belle of old Natchez
Whose
garments were always in patchez.
When
comment arose
On
the state of her clothes
She
drawled, When Ah itchez, Ah
Scratchez.
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Nash
was also responsible for a luscious line, part of one of his titles, that
combines both forms of assonance.
Speaking of the flexibility that should come with age and taking off on
the assonant phrase “hardening of the arteries” he wrote:
I
recommend softening of the oughteries.
Catachresis. A strained, paradoxical or sarcastic use of a word. Each time Antony refers to Brutus as an
honorable man the meaning gets a little more catachretical. When my father responded to me by
saying “Brilliant! Fucking brilliant!” he probably meant I should reconsider my
position.
Chiasmus.
A reversal of the grammatical elements from one part of an expression to
a parallel part as in the reversal of subject and indirect object in JFK’s
famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for
your country.”
Enjambment.
A run-on line from the French word meaning to bestride or step
over. The continuation of an idea
from one line or stanza of poetry to the next. It is common in English poetry where the idea is to give the
reader or speaker a sense of momentum and, incidentally, to force one to pay
attention to the punctuation. Consider,
for example, the scene where Lady Macbeth is trying to encourage her husband to
assassinate Duncan. She tells him
that she herself would not hesitate even to kill a baby suckling at her breast:
I would as it was smiling in my face
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
Macbeth:
If we should fail?
Lady
Macbeth:
We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking place
And we’ll not fail.
The words “Have done to this. If we should fail?
We fail?” constitute three lines of dialogue within a single line of
iambic pentameter. Shakespeare did
not punctuate the line. Later
editors and actors usually insert the question marks following the convention
of ending iambs with a stressed syllable.
I do not agree. The
question mark merely says the thought of failure is inconceivable. With a period, it would have ended the
discussion with a note of contempt for anyone who could even think of
failure. Much more like the Lady
willing to dash out the brains of an nursing infant.
Hyperbole.
Obvious exaggeration without the intent to deceive. Paul Bunyon as opposed to Mr.
Clean. The opening line of one
version of the Paul Bunyon story is:
“Well now, one winter it
was so cold that all the geese flew backward and all the fish moved south and
even the snow turned blue. Late at night, it got so frigid that all spoken
words froze solid afore they could be heard. People had to wait until sunup to
find out what folks were talking about the night before.”
Ictus. The quality of
silence in the spoken language that can be quite meaningful. Jack Benny shrugs his shoulders, rolls
his eyes, pauses for a second or two and then says, “Well…” Writers suggest it with unusual
punctuation as in the three dots following Well
in the previous sentence.
Malapropism.
It’s time to get this one straight. It is the substitution of one word for another. The words must sound alike and produce
a humorous result. Mrs. Malaprop’s
originals are by now obscure. But
you may be tempted to address your annual contribution to the Infernal Revenue
Service, an agency not noted for its sense of humor. If you went to a parochial school, you may remember:
And
lead us not into Penn Station
As an
adolescent essayist, your correspondent once wrote about jubilant
delinquents. But his very best
Malapropism occurred more recently when he informed his attorneys he had no
interest in a phallic victory. The
greatest Malapropism of all time was uttered one day at the Round Table. The habitués were playing a game in
which the idea was to use a given word in a humorous sentence. You tried to stump your opponent by
providing the most unfunny word your could think of. Dorothy Parker got the word horticulture and, without
blinking one of her formidable eyelashes, she replied:
You
can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.
“Whore
to culture” is a Malapropic pun.
“Whore” is a simple Malapropism on the word “horse: as is “think” to
“drink.” (In case you’re
interested, the second greatest Malapropism was delivered by Franklin P. Adams
playing the same game. His word
was “meritritious.” With the
advantage of having had several Martinis, he said, “Meri-tritious! And Happy New Year, too!”
Metaphor.
Ah, metaphor! The romance
of language. The genius by which
we seek to illuminate one idea by comparing it with another. The best metaphors give wing to ideas
that are otherwise inexpressible but even the most hackneyed are ripe with
implication and connotation. (A
winged idea is, of course, one capable of leaping the surly bonds of
earth. A hackneyed idea is like a
special breed of horse suited for the most routine jobs. A ripe idea is like a piece of fruit
just ready to fall from the tree—succulent and juicy.)
The
most elegant metaphor of recent years is undoubtedly the title of the late Maya
Angelou’s inaugural poem for Bill Clinton, On the Pulse of Morning. Here is how she uses it in the final stanza:
Angelou’s inaugural poem for Bill Clinton, On the Pulse of Morning. Here is how she uses it in the final stanza:
Here,
on the pulse of this new day
You
may have the grace to look up and out
And
into your sister’s eyes, and into
Your
brother’s face, your country
And
say simply
With
hope—
Good
morning.
Consider
the word “pulse.” She might have
said, “On the threshold of a new day” or even “At the dawn of a new era.” But calling it the “pulse of a new day”
is what made her a poet. The pulse
is a tangible, intimate sensation of your own heartbeat. You are most aware of it in quiet
moments that precede high drama.
If you have ever waited for sunrise in an open field, you know that dawn
is just such a moment.
Metonymy.
A name for someone or something derived from some characteristic of the
person or thing being named. Big Blue. Big Easy. Air
Jordan.
Onomatopoeia.
Words that sound like what they mean. Hiss.
Rattle. Whisper. Rock ‘n Roll. The Irish are very good at this. I have often thought a Martian could understand the poetry
of Father Hopkins in spite of his obscure vocabulary because the words sound
right. The master, of course, is
Jimmy Joyce. Who else would have
thought of the “hither and thithering waters of the Night?”
Personification.
Treatment of any non-human thing as though it had human
characteristics. This is more
common than a sensitive reader might wish. It is frequently used deliberately in persuasion when logic
and evidence fail but is always fallacious. Occasionally, however, it can be as sublime as any metaphor
as, for example, this excerpt from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac:
Only the mountain has lived
long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. We all strive for safety, prosperity,
comfort, long life and dollars.
The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with his trap and
poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes and
dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time.
A measure of success in this is all well and good, and perhaps is a
requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger
in the long run. Perhaps this is
behind Thoreau’s dictum: In
wildness is the salvation of the world.
Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known
among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.
Pun. The lowest
form of humor, a play on words. In
comparing American and European humor I once observed that, “…European fairy
tales are nothing if not grim.” My
father once told me that the greatest pun he had ever heard involved the way
Bostonians pronounced the word “scrod.”
But he said I was not emotionally ready for it and he took it with him
to his grave together with the meaning of crista
da mortis which he claimed was a Gaelic-Latin pun. The best puns (note the oxymoron) are
never obvious. My own personal
best was a sign I made for my first electronic calculator:
Cogito
Ergo ∑
All you need is a little
Latin, a touch of Greek, a pinch of statistics and a dash of philosophy. It’s no wonder George Wallace thought
we were all pointy-headed intellectuals.
Rhopalism.
A sentence the words of which increase at the rate of one letter per
word. The most potent such
sentence may be, “I do.” A more
challenging example is the 20-word sentence, “I do not know where family
doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality,
counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’
incomprehensibleness.”
Rhyme. In English,
words or phrases rhyme in the strict sense if their final stressed vowels and
all following sounds are identical and the preceding consonant sounds are
distinctly different. Pairs that
do not meet these conditions are said to be assonant. If the identical vowel sounds are not stressed, the rhyme
may also said to be weak. The
problem with rhyme is that, although English is replete with strong ones, Joyce
Kilmer is not our greatest poet.
Simile. Metaphor
calling attention to itself. The
giveaway is the word like as in, “My
love is like a red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June.” Metaphors are said to be more elegant
but sometimes they are too obvious.
I mean, wouldn’t you feel awkward writing, “My love is a red, red rose?”
Spoonerism.
A form of metathesis in which sounds are transposed between two
words. W. A. Spooner, a Oxford
don, appears to have done this all the time, his most famous example being kinquering kongs when he meant conquering kings. This can be humorous as when your usher
offers to sew you to your sheet.
Synecdoche.
A form of metonymy in which a name is devised based on a definitive
characteristic. Old Blue Eyes does
not qualify because Mr. Sinatra’s eyes were not his defining
characteristic. Conversely, The
Velvet Fog is synecdoche because it refers to the one thing that makes Mr.
Torme different from any other singer.
In South Pacific, there is a song about a
sailor’s archetypical girlfriend who is given the name Honey-Bun in honor of
one (well, perhaps two) of her principal attributes. You will recall:
And
she’s broad where a broad should be broad.
Calling
a woman a broad is metonymy, to say nothing of misogyny. Calling her Honey-Bun adds stress,
thereby transforming more metonymy into sexist synecdoche,