That’s an Order!

Posted on April 4, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Mandamus is one of those legal terms being bandied about these days. It’s a court order that commands an official to do his or her duty or forbids him or her from doing something he or she shouldn’t be doing. Pundits are discussing this possible writ regarding the Trump documents case in Florida to push Judge Cannon to get a move on.

If you remember amo, amas, amat, amamus, etc., from your first day of Latin class, you might recall that the endings on that verb provide a pronoun subject. Amo means “I love.” Amas means “you love.” Amat means “she, he, or it loves,” and amamus means “we love.” If you studied French or Spanish instead of Latin, you might remember similar endings on those Romance languages’ verbs. (But you should have studied Latin.)

The ending on mandamus, then, means “we.” The verb itself means “command” or “order.” A writ of mandamus is not messing around. It means “we command,” and could result in the removal of an official who doesn’t hop to it. It’s the root of mandate and mandatory.

Like many other terms, mandamus has an Anglicized pronunciation. In Latin, one would say “mahn-dah-moose.” Today’s jurists, however, will not be prosecuted for saying “man-day-mus.” Commonly used in English, the word has taken on an English pronunciation. Imagine, for example, pronouncing bona fide as it would sound in Latin: “bona-feeday.” You’d sound like a pretentious jerk. Normal English speakers make “bona fide” rhyme with “fried.”

Similarly, habeas corpus (literally, “let you have the body”) takes on a long A in the first syllable: “hay-bee-us core-pus.” In Latin, the two A’s in habeas would have that “ah” sound.

More than once over my years of teaching Latin, an eager new student would stop at my desk to report an egregious error on the part of a family member. “I told them it’s pronounced ‘way-toe,’ not ‘vee-toe,'” they might report. I usually didn’t have the heart to correct them.

Keep on pronouncing veto, alter ego, ultimatum, via, ad litem, and ad hoc as you always have. You’re communicating with other English speakers, not ancient Romans.

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Parapros . . .What??

Posted on March 14, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by Braydon Anderson on Unsplash

I never encountered paraprosdokian before, but I liked it as soon as we met.

David Bordwell introduced us, by way of his 2016 book, The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture. Bordwell, one of my husband’s favorite critics, died a couple of weeks ago, and I overheard as John listened to a discussion of the book online.

James Agee, one of Bordwell’s subjects, piqued my interest. I love Agee’s novel A Death in the Family (1957), as I do his 1941 non-fiction examination of Depression-era sharecropping families, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (an affection I share with Jimmy Carter). Agee is one of four film critics Bordwell discusses, the others being Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler.

It’s Farber who most often employs paraprosdokian, sentences that do a 180-degree turn at the end. Here’s an example: “Stalag 17 is a crude, cliche-ridden glimpse of a Nazi prison camp that I hated to see end.” Agee, too, tries his hand: “Stage Door Canteen is a nice harmless picture for the whole family, and it is a gold mine for those who are willing to go to it in the wrong spirit.”

You can probably guess the word’s roots are Greek. (That k is a giveaway.) Coined around 1896, the compound consists of para-, meaning “against,” and prosdokia, meaning “expectation.” A paraprosdokian sentence has a surprise ending, in which the end of the sentence causes you to reevaluate the beginning.

Groucho Marx (see photo above) pumped out some famous ones. “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.” Also, “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read,” often attributed, at least, to Groucho.

Noted wits Dorothy Parker and Will Rogers used the device. Guess which one is whose: “If all the girls attending the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised” and “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

Read more good ones here. Tell us your favorites in the comments, or, even better, share some of your own!

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The Horseless Dashboard

Posted on March 6, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by Randy Tarampi on Unsplash

The term dashboard dates from the 1840s or so.

What? you exclaim. There were no cars in the 1840s! How could there have been dashboards?

You’re right about cars, of course. Karl Benz developed the first car in Germany, acquiring a patent in 1886. Henry Ford’s Model T, regarded as the first successfully mass-produced car, appeared in 1927.

But those autos, you’ll recall, were dubbed horseless carriages (though the term dates back to steam engines). That term demonstrates humans’ propensity for comparing what’s new with what came before, and actual carriages, that is, horsey-carriages, included a dashboard. It didn’t warn the driver that the horse needed fuel or that passengers’ seatbelts weren’t fastened. It didn’t flash or beep.

It consisted instead of a board that protected the driver from mud flung up by the horses’ hooves, mud that was said to be dashed. Dash can have the meaning “hurl,” “smash,” “crash,” “throw,” “toss,” or “pitch.” Think of ships dashed upon the rocks. An angry executive might dash his lunch onto a wall. Psalm 91 says that angels will bear you up “lest you dash your foot against a stone.”

Dirt would be dashed back upon a carriage’s driver, and the dashboard shielded him or her. Modern dashboards are in roughly the same position, that is, in front of the driver, and the name carried over to the new-fangled vehicle.

I looked this word up because the page on this site where I find reader statistics is called the Dashboard, piquing my curiosity. The website’s dashboard contains useful information, like our modern cars’ dashboards. The meaning has strayed from its etymological roots.

No mud is dashed into my face as I face my screen. Only pleasant, informative comments, which you should feel free to add below.

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Baltimore Boys

Posted on March 5, 2024 by Kathy

I wrote about R. Eric Thomas here, describing Thomas’s hilarious take on Mister Rogers and the mythical land of Bubbleland in his book of essays, Here for It, or, How to Save Your Soul in America.

Last week I read Thomas’s YA novel Kings of B’more. It’s such a good book. If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably not a Young Adult, but don’t let that stop you. If you enjoy meaningful, original, and funny fiction, it’s the book for you.

The main characters are two young gay Black men, Harrison and Linus, who live in Baltimore. They are funny, smart, and real. Like most adolescents, they watch their parents’ behavior carefully, trying to figure out how to become adults. But they watch with a skeptical, ironic attitude.

Here’s just one example of how gently, realistically funny this book is. The boys observe that their fathers, casual friends, take forever to say goodbye to one another. The two men seem unable both to carry on a conversation and end one. Near the novel’s close, Harrison’s father, Wally, calls Linus’s father to try to resolve some difficulties between the boys and their families. Linus is riding in the car with his dad, Obed, listening in. This is what he hears:

“What’s up, man?’

“How you doing?”

“All right. All right. How are you?”

“Can’t complain, brother. You know.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Right?”

“Right.” Linus was amazed that these two men were apparently friends, possibly good friends . . . and yet they seemed to have nothing to say.

After a while, it becomes clear that Obed is out of the loop. He’s not aware of the problems the boys have been having and doesn’t even know the whereabouts of his wife and son.

“Man, ain’t nobody in this house. . . . I don’t know. I just live here.”

“I know that’s right.”

“Tell me about it.”

Both men laughed. Incredible.

“All right,” said Wally. “Thanks . . . for your help with everything, Obed.”

“Course. Absolutely. Y’all drive safe, okay. We’ll see you soon.”

“All right.”

“Okay.”

“Take care.”

This went on for a while. Linus tuned out slightly.

The boys’ parents are likeable and rounded characters, as are their friends. Harrison’s older sister Corinne seems distant and troubled at first, but ends up shadowing him around the city to keep him out of trouble. This is just one of many sweet surprises in this book.

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Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis*

Posted on February 22, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

Ustekinumab? Ixabepilone? RimabotulinumtoxinB?

Weird words, indeed, but (even more weirdly) you can probably guess that these are medications. We’ve become accustomed to the unpronounceable alphabetic mishmashes that name our pills. Who concocts these words, and how do they do it?

The process is too labyrinthine for me to explain, or even to understand after looking it up. Suffice it to say, the United States Adopted Names Program attaches a generic name to new drugs. According to the AMA Journal of Ethics, “Pharmaceutical names are assigned according to a scheme in which specific syllables in the drug name (called stems) convey information about the chemical structure, action, or indication of the drug. The name also includes a prefix that is distinct from other drug names and that is euphonious, memorable, and acceptable to the sponsoring pharmaceutical firm.”

I especially love the “euphonious.” (Whose Greek roots, by the way, mean “sweet-sounding.”)

In short, drugs end up with three names: a generic (non-proprietary) name (acetaminophen), a brand name (Tylenol) , and a chemical name. According to Wikipedia, “The brand name Tylenol and the United States Adopted Name acetaminophen were generated by McNeil (Laboratories) from the chemical name of the drug, N-acetyl–para-aminophenol (APAP).”

Sinemet, for another example, a brand-name Parkinson’s drug, combines two roots: sine, meaning “without” in Latin, and emetic, from Greek (and then Latin), meaning “to vomit.” Sinemet doesn’t make you vomit! The drug combines levodopa, a dopamine replacement, which causes nausea, with carbidopa, which inhibits nausea by preventing the creation of dopamine outside of the brain. Sinemet’s generic name is carbidopa-levodopa. Its scientific name may or may not be something like (2S)-2-amino-3-(3,4-dihydroxyphenyl)propanoic acid;3-(3,4-dihydroxyphenyl)-2-hydrazinyl-2-methylpropanoic acid.

A cholesterol drug, Lipitor, goes by the generic name atorvastatin. The prefix lipi- derives from lipids, referring to cholesterol compounds, and the suffix –tor- comes from the second syllable in atorvastatin, which apparently comes from a Spanish word meaning “to clog.” Statin comes from the Latin verb stare, meaning “to stand” or “to stop,” as in status, solstice (when the sun “stops”), and stasis. The drug stops the clogging.

Because it’s hard not to get lost in the weeds and because I have probably already butchered much of the science, I’ll stop. Feel free to correct me, and to share some of your own favorite medicinal nomenclature.

In closing, I recommend you check out this website, wherein a pharmacist shares some delightful customer mispronunciations of drug names. X and X, anyone?

*See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

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Spoiler Alert

Posted on February 16, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by Neil Daftary on Unsplash

Working on Thursday’s New York Times Connections puzzle, I stared at the word suede long and hard, wondering what it had to do with broil, watch, blur, timer, hourglass, or any of the ten other words it supposedly might connect to. I stared at the word so long it became a meaningless concoction of letters, lacking any meaning at all.

[In case you’re not addicted, Connections offers sixteen words that break into four groups which have a common thread. A few days ago, for instance, buzz, drone, hum, and purr formed a “monotonous sound” group. Not usually so easy, though.]

Suede looked so strange to me, I began wondering about its roots. Where does that weird word come from?

Turns out suede comes from the name of a country, and if you’re guessing Sweden, you’re right. Before we get there, though, let’s examine the actual meaning–“undressed kid skin,” which has nothing to do with naked children (an understandable mistake). A clearer definition is “leather with the the flesh side rubbed to create a velvety nap.” No doubt much of what passes for suede today is some lab-created dried stretched smoothed soft plastic substance. Which is good news for the actual kids, i.e., baby goats.

Many countries turn out both critters and leather, so why Sweden? The Swedes produced prized, soft leather gloves, or gants de Suede, “gloves of Sweden,” and the term began being shortened to suede in English in the mid-19th century.

This research was merely putting off my struggles with Connections. I then tried looking up suede as a slang word, which is cheating but not really cheating. Sometimes Connections lists four ordinary words with hip new meanings I have never encountered. Suede in hip lingo, I learned, describes a cool, good-looking ladies man, as in suave. I would try to incorporate this term into my everyday conversation, but I don’t think I know anyone who fits the bill at this stage of my life. And none of the other Connections words connected with this meaning. Who calls a cute guy a timer or a survey?

As it turned out, the Connected suede is actually a proper noun (spoiler alert) with a musical link. Its three companions were blur, oasis, and pulp, which some of you smarter people probably recognize as 90s Britpop bands. I arrived at this conclusion only by solving the other combinations first.

Do you play? Thoughts?

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Lots of Good Fun That Is Funny

Posted on February 13, 2024 by Kathy

Photo by Reba Spike on Unsplash

Amid my interesting reading lately, I enjoyed revisiting a classic yesterday. Twice. 

The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
All that cold, cold, wet day.

The opening pages of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat are committed to memory, thanks to frequent bedtime rereadings about forty years ago. It’s also the first book I remember reading by myself.

So this gem has lots of sentimental value for me, but my enjoyment of reading it aloud goes beyond nostalgia. The book falls squarely in the category of “fun to read.”

All Dr. Seuss books, of course, are rhythmically fun. The anapestic beat of The Cat in the Hat chugs along–carrying you through the story with your pint-sized listener. An anapest, in case you’ve forgotten, consists of two short syllables followed by one accented one, as in the word interrupt. The children’s choleric fish is Master of the Anapest:

"Put me down!" said the fish.
"This is no fun at all!
Put me down!" said the fish.
I do not  wish to fall!"

{Try reading aloud but substituting two interrupts per line.)

The story itself is also lots of good fun, if you wish. Revisiting it now, I’m struck by just how weird it is, and I remember feeling similarly when I read it at the age of six. I didn’t love the cat, and I didn’t love the fish, but they fascinated me. Likewise my two-year-old granddaughter yesterday. When the fish shouts, “You should not be here when our mother is not!” she looked up at me and agreed that he shouldn’t. Who, after all, hops up and down on a ball while holding a cup and some milk and a cake and some books and a ship and a fish on a rake? I mean.

The story is subversive. My twin grandson often enjoys books at some remove while performing important construction work nearby with his excavator and dump truck, but he sidles up to view the mess created when the cat comes down with a bump and all the things fall. The cat is a home wrecker, and I imagine the book may be canceled at some point for depicting children’s letting a destructive stranger into their house.

Lastly, Dr. Seuss’s masterful drawings adhere perfectly to the words. When Thing 1 and Thing 2 run down the hall and bump their kites on the wall, there on the page are Thing 1 and Thing 2 and a hall and two kites and a wall. How could kids not learn to read from this book?

The Cat in the Hat consists of 236 different words–all one or two syllables long– demonstrating the magic of simple language, imaginative drawings, and a cockeyed, crazy story.

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More Nonsense Words

Posted on February 8, 2024 by Kathy

Writing last week about YouTuber Dana K. White’s dololly and other weird words, I intended to move on to whomper-jawed, Dana’s adjective for a rickety bookshelf she was getting rid of. But I forgot and moved on instead to thingamajigs and whatllIcallits.

How amazingly coincidental that reader and friend Barbara B., in her comment, referred to whopper-jawed, a common variant, which can also be spelled wapper-jawed, womper-jawed, and even whompsey-jawed. Words used more often in speech than writing often have multiple spellings, because no authority has stepped forward to standardize it. The variants are part of the charm.

I love whomper-jawed and all its variations. I intend to use it whenever I can, and our old house’s many whomper-jawed dolollies provide plenty of opportunities.

Which brings up a charming synonym, cattywampus, also spelled catawampus. It means “askew,” “messy,” “disordered.” I’ve probably heard the word in other contexts, but remember it fondly from an episode of The Office in which Andy, played by Ed Helms, straightened Dwight’s sport coat, admonishing him, “Do not walk around with your jacket cattywampus!” (At about 2:15) I was delighted to shoehorn the word into A Grandmother’s ABC Book, describing some of my embroidery that might have gone cattywampus. On the C is for Cat page, no less!

The Internet is rich with websites explaining such weird old-fashioned and regional usages. One includes a term dear to our current President, malarkey, referring to “talk that is particularly foolish.” Biden’s No Malarkey Tour, part of his Iowa campaign in 2019, raised issues about his age and relevance. Young people didn’t know the meaning of the word and therefore, I guess, might not vote for him. We could refer them to this Merriam-Webster page, which explains the term’s synonym, trumpery.

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Prose and Poetry

Posted on February 4, 2024 by Kathy

I let a few weeks pass after finishing Mozart: The Reign of Love before tackling American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, another massive tome. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2006 biography served as a source and template for Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, of which you may have heard. Have you seen it?

The book covers more of Oppenheimer’s childhood and family background than the film does and does not include the extensive courtroom drama surrounding Lewis Strauss’s Congressional confirmation hearings with which the movie ends. Otherwise, the film’s themes and details (such physicist Richard Feynman playing bongos at a Los Alamos party) clearly derive from the book. Nolan credits the authors in virtually every interview I’ve seen, and Bird expresses gratitude and admiration for the movie. (Co-author Sherwin passed away in 2021.)

I admire the book greatly. The authors labored over the research and writing for 25 years. It’s a massive achievement. It was, though, something of a chore to read, at least for me. So much detail does not necessarily make for elegant prose–it’s workmanlike. Well-written, but not gracefully so.

In that regard, I prefer the Mozart book, which, at times, made me tear up. Jan Swafford’s lyrical prose suited his masterful subject.

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Gizmos and Thingamabobs

Posted on February 1, 2024 by Kathy
Photo by Luca Laurence on Unsplash

When my book group was leaving my house the other night, I offered, with a smile, to get them their wraps. When they noted that quaint locution, I recalled my fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Bender suggesting we put on our wraps before recess. I added that Mrs. Bender also advised us to “red up” our desks before leaving for the day.

Nobody knew that expression. The Internet explains that red up (sometimes spelled redd up) has a Scottish origin and and is common out Pittsburgh way. It’s short for readying up, as in “getting ready” or tidying. Maybe Mrs. Bender was from Pittsburgh. Another source traces the phrase to rural Pennsylvania and posits a Pennsylvania Dutch root. Grammarphobia cites the Middle English verb redden, meaning “to rescue, to clear.”

Whatever its source, I like it. I like regional usages and don’t think they should be disparaged as non-standard, not that anyone in my book group did that.

Dana K. White, one of my favorite YouTubers, helps me red up my house and clear out the clutter. A Texan, she uses some charming idioms. What I might call a thingy or a doohickey or a thingamajig, she calls a dololly. My grandmother’s term for such a thing was whatllIcallit, but that was more for when she couldn’t think of a thing’s name than for things that don’t have a name. The housekeeping goal, as you might imagine, is to get rid of as many dolollies as you can.

When I tried looking up Dana’s word as doolally, based on her pronunciation, I learned that doolally is British slang for “crazy.” Take care in your writing to distinguish dololly from doolally to avoid both confusion and possible offense.

Do you have some favorite local expressions? What’s your favorite word for a thingamajig?

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