A word for Washington

Just when you think we've run out of words to describe the politicians in Washington, along comes:

trumpery / trump-êr-ee / noun

1. (Obsolete) Deception, fraud, or trickery.
2. Rubbish, junk.  
3. Flashy but trashy finery in the home or on the body.

Does it get any better than this?

Dr. Goodword gives the history: The original meaning of this word, "deception", is now a bit dated and less frequently used but it explains how the word got into English. It was originally French tromper "to cheat, swindle, deceive". Once it entered English, though, as you can see, its meaning eventually dwindled to "nonsense". The similarity of this word to (to) trumpet explains its gravitation toward the sense of "trashy finery". Trumpery is unrelated to the trumping that goes on in many card games; that trump is an old mispronunciation of triumph!

What's in a sentence?

"The form and rhythm of sentences communicates as much meaning as their factual content, whether we’re conscious of it or not. In 1863, when General Grant took the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, the last hindrance to free passage of Union supplies along the river, President Lincoln wrote in a letter to be read at a public meeting: “The father of waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” It’s a poem of a sentence, “The father of waters” and “unvexed to the sea” perfectly balanced on the unexpected pivot of “again goes” rather than “goes again”, and all in the service of a metaphor that figures the Union as an inevitable force and the Confederacy as a blight on nature, without mentioning either. If cadence had no content, “Union supplies lines are now clear” would have the same power."

-- Adam Haslett

A sweet word

mellifluous / mê-li-flu-wês / adjective

1. Of speech: pleasant-sounding, beautiful, highly articulate, poetic.  
2. Sweet as honey or sweetened with honey.

Robert Beard, PhD, linguistics, aka Dr. Goodword, writes:

This word amply demonstrates how we often confuse the senses. It originally referred to honey flowing over the tongue, but this word now refers more often to the sweetness of speech than to that of taste, in other words, speech as beautiful as honey is sweet. Its synonymous cousin, mellifluent, has an equally beautiful noun, mellifluence.

Mellifluous is itself one of the most mellifluous words in English; it is almost onomatopoetic. The image of today's word is a smooth flow of speech approaching poetry if not reaching it: "The poet inundated his audience in mellifluous waves of words." This term describes the ultimate goal of the translator: "The interpreter translated each sentence into mellifluous, idiomatic English that flowed drippingly from her tongue."  

History: This word is the English makeover of Latin mellifluus "dripping with honey", based on mel "honey" + fluere "to flow". Latin mel and Greek meli "honey" come from the same root as French and Spanish miel "honey" and English mead "fermented honey". Flu- is a cognate of English flow and flu. The name of the disease, flu, is a clipping of Italian influenza "influence", from the days when diseases were believed to be the evil influence of celestial bodies.

A whole new strain of bad writing

Ben Yagoda, professor of English at the University of Delaware, dissects this hypothetical bit of writing, which illustrates errors that are all too common these days:

For our one year anniversary, my girlfriend and myself are going to a Yankees game, with whomever amongst our friends can go. But, the Weather Channel just changed their forecast and the skies are grey, so we might go with the girl that lives next door to see the movie, "Iron Man 2".

Here's what's wrong.

1. There should be no comma after "But."
2. The period after "Iron Man 2" should be inside the quotation marks around the title (which would be italicized in most publications, including The Chronicle).
3. No comma is needed after "movie."
4. "Its," not "their," is needed with "Weather Channel."
5. "Whomever" should be "whoever."
6. "Myself" should be "I."
7. "Girl that" should be "girl who"
8. "Gray" is the correct spelling, not "grey."
9. "Amongst" should be "among."
10. "One year anniversary" should be written as "one-year anniversary," but, really, "first anniversary."
11. It's a "Yankee," not "Yankees," game.

Read it all.

It's all lies, I tell you

Last week Rep. Steve King, a Republican from Iowa, accused the new Republican leadership of being liars. Except he didn't mean to.

"As I deliberate and I listen to the gentleman from Tennessee, I have to make the point that when you challenge the mendacity of the leader or another member ... " he said. And:"I would make the point that the leader and the speaker have established their integrity and their mendacity for years ... "

Trouble is, mendacity means 1. Untruthfulness, the tendency or habit of lying, deceiving, misrepresenting the truth. 2. A lie or falsehood.

Mendacity comes, Dr. Goodword writes, with an adjective, mendacious "untruthful, lying" and an adverb, mendaciously. It may also be combined with the second element of another Good Word, stultiloquent, creating mendaciloquent, meaning "speaking with a forked tongue", that is to say, "in lies".

So it's a pretty good word to have around Congress.

Here's its history: Mendacity was taken from the French reworking of Latin mendacitas "mendacity", a word derived from mendax (mendac-s) "lying, deceitful". This word came from an ancestor of mendum "fault, defect", whose root we see in amend, which became simply mend in English, and mendicant "beggar". The only relative of this word I could find outside Latin is Sanskrit minda "physical defect". So it seems to be an Indo-European word that did not spread far over the course of history.

Who needs verbs when you've got nouns?

At the start of my career, my editor in The Associated Press bureau in New Orleans would leave little notes for me critiquing my work on the overnight shift.

One I recall: "Is 'host' a verb?" Maybe. What about critiquing in the first sentence? Maybe.

Anthony Gardner explores the growing use of nouns as verbs.

Mothers and fathers used to bring up children: now they parent. Critics used to review plays: now they critique them. Athletes podium, executives flipchart, and almost everybody Googles. Watch out—you’ve been verbed.

No trend has been more obtrusive in recent years than the changing of nouns into verbs. “Trend” itself (now used as a verb meaning “change or develop in a general direction”, as in “unemployment has been trending upwards”) is further evidence of—sorry, evidences—this phenomenon.

New technology is fertile ground, partly because it is constantly seeking names for things which did not previously exist, he writes.

We “text” from our mobiles, “bookmark” websites, “inbox” our e-mail contacts and “friend” our acquaintances on Facebook —only, in some cases, to “defriend” them later. “Blog” had scarcely arrived as a noun before it was adopted as a verb, first intransitive and then transitive (an American friend boasts that he “blogged hand-wringers” about a subject that upset him). Conversely, verbs such as “twitter” and “tweet” have been transformed into nouns—though this process is far less common.

Verbing—or denominalisation, as it is known to grammarians—is not new.

Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, points out that “easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English.” Elizabethan writers revelled in it: Shakespeare’s Duke of York, in “Richard II” (c1595), says “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”, and the 1552 Book of Common Prayer includes a service “commonly called the Churching of Women”.

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Twain would have loved it

Twain and friend John Lewis, 1903.

The literary world is in a fine and dandy kerfuffle over a new edition of Mark Twain's Huck Finn that replaces the word "nigger" with "slave" and the word "Injun" with Indian.

Oh would the old man have loved the publicity!

Here are the facts, as we know them, from The New York Times.

A new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has generated much controversy because it will replace the word "nigger," which occurs 219 times in the book, with "slave." (The edition also substitutes "Indian" for "injun.") Alan Gribben, an English professor at Auburn University at Montgomery, proposed the idea to the publisher because he believes the pervasive use of that word makes it harder for students to read or absorb the book. In an introduction to the new edition, he wrote, “even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this racial appellative.” 

I'd give you my opinion, but why should you care? Instead, let me quote a few of the scholars posting on this at the Mark Twain Forum.

First, Twain expert Terrell Dempsey. A lawyer and long time resident of Hannibal, Mo., Twain's hometown, Terrell is the author of Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens's World.

I am certainly no literary scholar or educator, but I do know a bit about slavery in the upper Mississippi Valley from 1840 until 1865. If one is to understand slavery, one must understand the dehumanization of the enslaved by the master class. The word nigger certainly does not equal the word slave. Slavery ended in Missouri in January of 1865. The niggerization of a substantial portion of the population continued for another sad century denying people social, political, educational, and economic opportunities. The word nigger still floats around Northeast Missouri. "Nigger work" is used by the rougher sort of white people today to indicate hard dirty work. Asbestos siding made to look like bricks is referred to as "nigger brick." The latter has roots in a whole class of cheap goods manufactured and sold to the master class for use by slaves. Of course, it is still used by some to refer to African Americans. Though today most whites do not use these terms in the presence of non-whites, I still hear them from my clients from time to time.

I think that Twain understood exactly what he meant when he used the word "nigger." It certainly entailed far more than "slave." A slave could be freed, but the person remained a nigger. Surely we have progressed far enough that our students can discuss this concept. It is not necessary to whitewash the institution and clean up Twain. I understand the power of the word and I still wince when I hear it. However, it always strikes me as ironic when I hear my older non-white daughter use the word with her boyfriend (a practice she did not have until she moved to New York.) I think Gribben is taking a very wrong and misleading step with his sanitized Huck.

My friend Brent Colley, an historian of Redding, Ct., where Twain spent his final years, has this to say:

This issue is that Twain used those words for a reason. He was holding a mirror up to society... post-civil war society ... and shouting "THIS IS WRONG!"

As Twain Scholar Dr. Cindy Lovell notes:
"In "Huck Finn" Twain pokes us with a sharp stick, makes us squirm, makes us highly uncomfortable. And it's effective."

This will make this reply super long... but it says it well because it's from Twain himself. I see it as proof that he wrote this book, this way, for a reason:

"In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing--the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly to betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime; carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible--there were good commercial reasons for it--but that it should exist; did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag; bobtail of the community; in a passionate; uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck; his father the worthless loafer should feel it; approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that that strange thing, the conscience--the unerring monitor--can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education early; stick to it."

I'm almost certain that Twain somehow masterminded this controversy. After all, he instructed that his autobiography could not be published for 100 years after his death. Anything to sell books.

Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy: making reality convincing

"Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.

-- Leo Tolstoy

Some words of the year

as compiled by The New York Times.

coffice: In South Korea, a coffee shop habitually used as an office by customers, who mooch its space, electricity, Wi-Fi and other resources. Presumably, they pay for the coffee.
 
halfalogue: Half of a conversation, like an overheard phone call. The term was coined in the research paper “Overheard Cell-Phone Conversations: When Less Speech is More Distracting” in the journal Psychological Science.
 
sofalize: A British marketing term created for people who prefer to stay home and communicate with others electronically.
 
mansplainer: A man compelled to explain or give an opinion about everything — especially to a woman. He speaks, often condescendingly, even if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about or even if it’s none of his business. Old term: a boor.
 
social graph: The structure of personal networks, who people know and how they know them, especially online. The term probably came from the internal lingo at Facebook, but it has spread widely among technology companies.

Itching for a good fight/write

Boxing. You can press the language out of it. The sweathouse of the body. The moving machinery of ligaments. The intimate fray of rope. The men in their archaic stances like anatomy illustrations from an old-time encyclopedia. The moment in a fight when the punches slow down and the opponents watch each other like time-lapse photographs—the sweat frozen in midair, the blood still spinning, the maniacal grin like the teeth themselves have gone bare-knuckle.

Thus begins Colum McCann's delightful essay on writers' fascination with boxing.

Writers love boxing—even if they can’t box. And maybe writers love boxing especially because they can’t box. The language is all cinema and violence: the burst eye socket, the ruined cartilage, the dolphin punch coming up from the depths.

Language allows the experience, and what you have with a fight is what you have with writing, and they each become metaphors for each other—the ring, the page; the punch, the word; the choreography, the keyboard; the feint, the suggestion; the bucket, the wastebasket; the sweat, the edit; the pretender, the critic; the bell, the deadline. There’s the showoff shuffle, the head spin, the mingled blood on your gloves, the spitting your teeth up at the end of the day.

Literature re-creates the language of the epic. And what’s more epic and mythological than a scrap? For those of us who can’t fight, we still want to be able to step into a fighter’s body. We want to walk off woozy to the corner and have our faces slapped a little bit, then suddenly get up to dance, and hear the crowd roar, and step out once more with a little dazzle.

Read all of it.