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.

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.

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:

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,