droid /’dɹɔɪd/

There was a frisson of excitement in the cellular telephony market a few days ago with the launch of a new mobile phone called the Droid. As the owner of a very old Motorola® MOTOKRZR™ phone and tied to the Verizon network, this new technology could be the ersatz iPhone® I have been looking for.

Motorola Droid

So, over the unseasonably warm Ohio weekend, I took a trip out on my Triumph® motorcycle to the local Verizon store, where I was able to get my hands on this new smartphone. It is, as the marketing suggests, a pretty cool device and offers the same general features as Apple® iPhone, as well as access to new apps – even if there are currently fewer on offer than the iTunes® store.

The word droid is clearly a contraction of android, which the OED defines as “An automaton resembling a human being.” (OED, Vol. I, p.452.) However, the phone in no way, shape, or form resembles a human being – unless the human being under consideration has had a horrific accident in a car crushing machine.

So how has this change comes about?

The first mention of android is in Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences, which was published between 1722 and 1751. Here, he says, “Albertus Magnus is recorded as having made a famous androides.”

By the mid-20th century, androids were also seen as being part human. The Spectator magazine on 19th September, 1958, said, “Today SF [science fiction - Ed.] must be more than a blood-and-sex day-dream spattered with words like android (robots made of flesh and bone).” This also marks the distinction between a robot (from the Czech word robota meaning “forced labor”) and android.

The use of the circumcised form, droid, appears to have originated in the first of the Star Wars series of movies back in 1977. Incidentally, this lopping off of the linguistic foreskin is called aphesis, from the Greek ἀπό for “away” andἵημι meaning “to send.” Cutting off the end of a word is apocope, from the Greek ἀποκόπτω, which means “cut off.”

Imperial probe droid

This notion of Star Wars being the progenitor of droid is reinforced by the very recent filing for Droid as a trademark by Lucasfilm Ltd. They claim specifically that they want the mark reserved for;

“Wireless communications devices, including, mobile phones, cell phones, hand held devices and personal digital assistants, accessories and parts therefor, and related computer software and wireless telecommunications programs; mobile digital electronic devices for the sending and receiving of telephone calls, electronic mail, and other digital data, for use as a digital format audio player, and for use as a handheld computer, electronic organizer, electronic notepad, and digital camera; downloadable ring tones and screen savers; cameras, pagers and calling cards.”

I add all this information to highlight the fact that words can be very, very serious business. Many people think that etymologists (folks who are interested in word origins) are geeks who live in cloud cuckoo land. Not so. In fact, trademarking is an area of business where etymologists can be very useful folks to have around.

More interesting is that the filing comes now, just prior to the release of the Motorola Droid, which doesn’t appear with a trademark but is cited as being “under license from Lucasfilms Ltd.” The actual filing is dated October 9th, 2009, which looks suspiciously like a last-minute dash by the Lucas attorneys to snag the mark before Motorola.

The word android is rooted in the Greek word ὰνδρο, meaning “man,” and the suffix -ειδῄς, “having the likeness of.” It’s the same root as the word androgyne, a being with the physical characteristics of both a man and a woman. More commonly, the word hermaphrodite is used for such as blended person. This comes from the myth of Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who became half-man, half-woman after the gods fused him with the nymph, Salmacis.

Salmacis and Hermaphroditus - Navez (1892)

The adjective form of the word is androidal, meaning “like an automaton,” but it is rare. A quick Google search reveals 150,000 ghits, most of which seem to be the names of companies.

Now not only can the iPhone brigade get their dose of The Word Guy on their phones but now the Droid set can join in with words on the web.

pimp /pɪmp/

I’m not a lawyer and more specifically not an intellectual property (IP) lawyer, but this particular area of the law is one I have been involved in as a patent owner. It’s somewhat weird to think that you can patent ideas such that other folks cannot use them without permission – but there yah go!

The field of IP is, however, a source of great entertainment for those who are not suing or being sued. For example, an 8-year battle between McDonalds and Malaysian fast-food company McCurry (allegedly short for “Malaysian Chicken Curry“) still continues.

McCurry Restaurant and Owners

One other linguistically based skirmish took place in 2006 between Viacom International (owners of MTV, VH1, Paramount Pictures, and a host of media companies) and sole-proprietor web site Pimp My Snack. I thought of headlining this SpongeBob Whips Sponge Cake but thought better of it.

The alleged infringing site, now called Pimp THAT Snack, is dedicated to the “art” of taking a particular item of food and turning it into a much larger version. I came across it while watching an episode of BBC’s The F-Word and saw one of the presenters create a two-foot wide Jaffa(R) cake – a popular chocolate-coated orange-based cookie.

Huge Jaffa cake with originals in foreground

The use of the word pimp in this situation reflects a modern change to refer to something as being wonderful, great, cool, or desirable. It appears to have been originally used in this way in the 1970’s by African-American males to describe an attitude or swagger, and being pimp was a good thing. It also seems to have been happy to jump across parts of speech from noun (“He’s a pimp“) to adjective (“That’s a pimp outfit you’re wearing”) to verb (“I’ve pimped out my ride”), and even interjection (“Pimping!”)

It’s in its use a verb that the Viacom lawsuit is based. In 2004, MTV launched the show Pimp My Ride, where the mechanics of LA car shop, West Coast Customs, would take a beat-up old car and transform it into something glamorous and desirable. Viacom have clearly decided that they can claim ownership of the phrase Pimp My X, hence the “cease-and-desist” order against the linguistically similar Pimp My Snack.

Legally, I suspect that only the words “pimp my” are covered because changing to Pimp THAT Snack doesn’t seem to have incurred a further law suit. The word “my” is used as a possessive determiner whereas “that” is used as a demonstrative, so clearly it’s true that “possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

Legal arguments aside, the word pimp first makes an appearance in 1607 to refer to someone who “provides means and opportunities for unlawful sexual intercourse.”  (OED, Vol XI, p.845)

The famous diarist Samuel Pepys wrote in his 1666 diary on 10th June that, “The Duke of York is wholly given up to his new mistress… Mr. Brouncker, it seems, was the pimp to bring it about.”

It’s thought that the word derives from the 16th century French verb, pimper, which translates as “to render elegant,” and then from the past participle, pimpant,  to mean alluring or seductive in appearance or dress. However, this is still open to discussion.

Interestingly, the word is also used dialectically to mean a bundle of firewood or faggot, which first appears in print in 1742 in De Foe’s Tour of Great Britain; “Those small light Bavins, which are used in Taverns in London to light their Faggots, and are called in the Taverns a Brush, and by the Wood-men Pimps.”

Pimp or faggot

Continuing with the word as a noun, in Australian and New Zealand slang a pimp is an informer or tell-tale, while in Welsh dialect it’s a Peeping Tom.

As a verb, it is used intransitively. In the New Yorker magazine on May 26th, 1975, you’ll find “His father (Jack Warden) pimps to add to his income as a taxi-driver.”

Oh, and those of you who are fascinated by bacronyms may want to stop by the Urban Dictionary site to find a few that have appeared for pimp. These include “Person Into Marketing Prostitutes,” “Player In Many Places,” “Put It In My Pocket” and even “Penis In Many People.”

And who says modern youth are not linguistically creative

Intermission: Down down down down town

It’s Road Trip time once again and your sun-loving Word Guy has gone north to Chicago. Although I try to ensure all my trips are to areas warmer than Cleveland, inevitably I have to “take one for the team” and go from cold to colder. So in lieu of my regular ramble around a specific word, I’m breaking into an older article that looks at how many times you can put the same word consecutively in a sentence.

So how often have you found yourself in a situation where you’re writing a letter or article and as you review it, you see you’ve written the same word twice? If you use a word processor, a good one will pick this up and highlight it for you. But how often is it actually correct to use multiple instances of a word?

Over one particular weekend, my daughter and I were deciding on when to go to the movies. She said she wanted to go to the late show, to which I responded, “Do you want to go to the early late show or the late late show?” For a few moments, we looked at each other wondering if there was anything wrong with either the notion of an “early late” show or even the double-barreled “late late” show. “It’s OK,” I said, “to have ‘early late’ and ‘late late’ so long as we understand that ‘late show’ is actually a single noun meaning ‘a showing that is held in the evening at some indeterminate time, but such that it would not be considered early.’”

Before you stop reading, I should explain that yes, we do talk like that, especially when we’re having breakfast and just “chillin’” or “shooting the breeze” – though how you can shoot a gentle waft of air is probably best left for a future column. The more ridiculous the topic, the more we talk.

“Of course,” I continued, “If the late show in question were no longer in existence, we could have the sentence ‘We used to go to the late late late show,’ because this new use of ‘late’ refers to something now passed on.” This triple play of “lates” got us to thinking about how many such words you could get into a sentence legitimately. Examples such as “Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!” as said by an excited child who’s just been asked if he wants a trip to Disney or a free bucket of ice cream would be excluded. The sentence has to be coherent and valid.

So we moved on to the notion of a city having a “down town” area. If that area had a region that was depressed and unappealing, you could use the word “down” (as in “I’m feeling a little down today”) as a descriptor. You can thus have a “down down town.” Then, if that city were built on a slope – Seattle, for example – you could conceivably have a physically higher area described as the “up down down town” and a correspondingly lower region called the “down down down town.” Finally, you could use the word “down” again to describe the action of going somewhere, forming the sentence “Let’s go down down down down town.”

At that point, we were finding it hard to keep up with ourselves, and as I was writing this article, my word processor was having a real hard time with so many multiples of the same word, drawing many red lines under them screaming “Stop it, that’s not allowed!”

This is not the longest word run of which I am aware. Stephen Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, gives the following example: “The Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” Frankly, if you can work this one out, you’re way too smart to be reading this column! But if you can’t, let me know and I’ll send you the reference.

prostitot /’prɒstɪtɒt/

Always on the lookout for new words, I came across one recently that caught my ear. It was close to Halloween and someone told me how a friend was going to let her pre-teen daughter go out Trick-or-Treating dressed “like a prostitot.”

It doesn’t take a degree in linguistics to work out that this is a portmanteau of prostitute and tot but what is significant is that someone somewhere seems to have picked up on a cultural phenomenon that needs a name. The phenomenon is that of pre-teen (or at least early teen) girls dressing in a slutty or lascivious manner.

There’s much debate on the internet about Toddlers and Tiaras, a TV show from TLC that chronicles the child beauty pageant industry. Although billed as “family entertainment,” the show features girls as young as four years of age dressed in tight-fitting gowns and sometimes swimsuits, “enhanced” by fake tans, heavy make-up, and glamorous hairstyles. Supporters argue it’s a legitimate way to help girls develop self-confidence, while detractors suggest it’s close to child pornography. I, for one, am NOT going to include any screen shots because although I don’t know what exactly would count as pornographic, I don’t want to take the risk of someone somewhere construing such images as inappropriate.

What I can comment on is the derivation of the word itself. Clearly the first element is from prostitute, the English printed debut being in 1572 in Buchanan’s Detection Mary Queen of Scots; “One of hir awne traine, one past all shame and of prostitute vnchastitie.”  Here it appears as an adjective meaning “offered or exposed to lust,” and usually applied to women (with men, the word is typically prefaced by the word “male,” as in “male prostitute.”)

By 1613, it was used as a noun to describe a woman who offers her body for sexual activity, most frequently for money. In his Pilgrimages, Samuel Purchas wrote, “I haue scene houses as full of such prostitutes, as the schooles in France are full of children.”  By extension, the word was also found to refer to anyone in general who sells himself or herself for gain.

This non-sexual selling of self for personal gain is the root of the modern use of prostitute as a verb. In 1674, when talking of the English Civil War, Clarendon wrote, “This Argumentation… made a great impression upon all Men who had not prostituted themselves to Cromwell and his Party.”

The word tot used to refer to a small child dates from 1725 and is of uncertain origin. Interestingly, the word Tottr in Iceland is the nickname for a dwarfish person, and in Danish the original Tom Thumb (a fairy tale character) was called tommel-tot. However, neither can be traced definitively to being the origin of tot on its own.

Tommel-tot

I was unable to find any reference to a date of first use for prostitot but the earliest dated web comment I could find was in August 2003. Another similar word is kinderwhore, which is referenced by Wikipedia as being used in 1998.

halcyon /’hælsɪən/

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I will now: If you are only going to read one piece of classical literature in your life, then make sure it’s Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Sure, Homer’s Odyssey is a blast, but I’d put him second on the list. And the reason for recommending Ovid is that the stories he tells cover as much Greek and Roman mythology as you can squeeze into one book. Well, apart from the Oxford Classical Dictionary, which certainly contains all information but is hardly a “good read.”

One of the tales from the Metamophoses is that of Ceyx (/’si:ɪks) and Alcyone (/ælˈsaɪˌni/). It’s a tragic love story between a king and the daughter of a god. Ceyx was the king of Trachis on central Greece and Alcyone was the daughter of Aeolus, god of the winds. The couple so loved each other that they would play around by calling each other Zeus and Hera. Alas, although most of the gods adored the couple, Zeus took the huff and decided – as he was wont to do often – make life a little difficult for the harmless pair.

Following the death of Ceyx’s brother, he decided to consult the oracle of Apollo in Ionia because he was worried that the death was a bad sign. To get the the oracle, he had to sail across the Mediterranean, which his wife, Alcyone, felt was a bad idea.

And as wives usual are, she was. After leaving the shores, Zeus tossed a few thunderbolts towards his ship and everyone was drowned. Like most gods, having hissy fits is par for the course.

Richard Wilson's Ceyx and Alcyone

Hera, as wives usual are, was much more sensitive to lovers and felt that Zeus had been somewhat over-zealous in his treatment of Ceyx. So she arranged for Morpheus, the god of sleep, to break the news to Alcyone of Ceyx’s demise, which he did by creating a ghost of the husband who visited her in a dream to tell her of his death.

Alcyone, in her pain and anguish, ran to the shore and threw herself in sea to drown. With both of them dead, the rest of the gods felt that this tragedy should never have occurred, so they persuaded Zeus to give them a second chance. Rather than restore them to their original forms, he turned them into kingfishers.

As a final twist, every year, in January, Aeolus would calm the winter seas for two weeks so that Alcyone could safely lay eggs by the shores. These calm days became know as Halcyon Days – periods of calm on the sea.

Kingfisher (Halycon)

The Greek word for “kingfisher” was ὰλκυών with a hard /k/sound. However, as it was Latinized, the /k/ gave way to the softer /s/ and appears in the 4th century CE as alceon and alicion. In 1398, John de Trevisa wrote in his Bartholomeus De proprietatibus;

In the cliffe of a ponde of Occean,
Alicion, a see foule, in wynter maketh her neste
And layeth egges in vii dayes and sitteth on brood…seuen dayes

Here the notion of the two weeks of calm is made explicit with one week of laying and aweek of brooding.

In the 16th century, we see the phrase Halcyon days making an appearance. For example, George Joye wrote “I remembered the halcyons dayes” in his 1545 pot-boiler, The exposicion of Daniel the prophete.”

Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692), an English poet and playwright, penned the verse;

Halcyon days, now wars are ending.
You shall find where-e’er you sail
Tritons all the while attending
With a kind and gentle gale.

Much later, the American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) wrote the poem entitled Halcyon Days, which includes the wonderful lines;

As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs
really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!

After reading this, I hope you’re now curious enough to spend a few of your own halcyon days reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses. If you only ever read one piece of classical literature…

crematory /’kɹɛmətəɹɪ/

As the saying goes, there’s nothing certain except death and taxes. The truth is that you might escape the latter but never the former. So when you finally shuffle off the mortal coil, buy the farm, sleep with the fishes, or kick the bucket, the only thing left is for someone to work out what to do with your remains.

One option is to consign yourself to the flames and be cremated. The word cremation comes from the Latin cremare, which means to consume by fire, and more specifically to reduce a corpse to ashes. It’s not recommended to do this yourself at home because folks in general seem to frown on discovering their neighbor having a large bonfire simply to get rid of their dearly departed.

So, that’s why people use a crematory or crematorium. The first part of the word clearly comes from the aforementioned cremare, but the second is the Latin suffix, -orium, which means “a place for.” Literally, it’s a place for burning.

Crematory

As a noun, the OED defines a crematory as “A place or establishment for cremation; spec. an erection for the incineration of corpses.” In an 1876 edition of the Fortnightly Review, Lionel Tollemache wrote, “The aspect of death might be a little softened, if cemeteries gave place to crematories.” And the Times newspaper of 1885 printed that “Yesterday morning, the crematory erected at St. John’s, Woking, Surrey, as made use of for the first time.”

The -ory suffix for crematory means “place for,” as in dormitory (place for sleeping), lavatory (place for washing), and armory (place for keeping arms). It can also appear as -orium, hence the alternative word crematorium. The difference is that -orium is older than -ory: The -ory suffix came by way of the Anglo-Norman French suffix -ori, which went on to be written as “-ori” and “-ory.”

Phew! Complicated, eh? This also happened with lavatory and lavatorium, the latter being used in a very restricted sense to refer to the wash places of old monasteries and castles. Gloucester Cathedral in the UK has a noted lavatorium that is in excellent condition.

Gloucester Lavatorium

Oh, and in the spirit of pouring cold water on an otherwise exciting example of the use of -orium as a suffix; the Roman vomitorium was not a place to go and throw up during a meal but a passageway in a theater through which people moved. It derives from the Latin vomere, which means “to discharge” with the -orium suffix creating the meaning of  “place of discharge.” Sadly, the only thing discharging were people, not puke.

Sometimes, an etymologist can be a real spoilsport.

eldritch /’ɛldɹɪtʃ/

Like most people, there are times when I find myself thinking of things that seem to pop out of nowhere. In this case, my mind drifted back to a novel I read many years ao by Philip K. Dick called The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The name “Palmer” and the link to “stigmata” seems fair enough but I was unfamiliar with the word eldritch, assuming at the time that is merely a name. Hard as it might seem to believe, there was a time when I was younger that language didn’t have the same fascination for me – although reading did. So I simply enjoyed the book for what it was and moved on.

Philip K. Dick book

The OED defines the word as meaning “weird, ghostly, unnatural, frightful, hideous.” So, a spooky, eerie sort of word. The Scottish poet, William Dunbar (1460-1520), used it on his 1508 poem The Golden Targe;

“There was Pluto, the elrich incubus,
In cloke of grene – his court usit no sable”

At around the same time in Scotland, Bishop Gavin Douglas (1474–1522) was working on a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Scottish version of which became known as the Eneados. At one point her writes, “Vgsum to heir was hir wyld elriche screik.”

Its status as a Scottish word continued with its use by other Caledonian writers such as William Stewart () in his Buik of the Croniclis of Scotland, where it appears as eldritche, and by Robert Burns’ (1759 – 1796) On The Late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations Thro’ Scotland (1789) in the sentence;

“By some auld, houlet-haunted biggin,
Or kirk deserted by its riggin,
It’s ten to ane ye’ll find him snug in
Some eldritch part,
Wi’ deils, they say, Lord save’s! colleaguin
At some black art.”

At this point, the spelling settled down to the current form of eldritch. Prior to this, other variants included alriche, elraige, and eltrich.

The derivation is thought to be from the Old English ælf-rice, which means “elf” and “sphere of influence or domain,” thus describing an elvish domain or supernatural associations. However, there is some (academic) debate still going on. In 2007, at an annual conference on Scottish Language, Alric Hall gave a paper entitled The etymology and meanings of eldritch, and argues that  it “is unlikely etymologically to contain elf-, but *alja-, meaning ‘foreign, strange’, deriving from Old English *æl-rīce~el-rīce.”

al-, el-, or elf-, the word scores low on ghits (672,000), of which a sizable proportion refer to people’s surnames or company names. And an image search turns up lots of pictures of characters from games, comics, or virtual worlds.

Eldritch Knight of Deriahn

It seems that the word describes itself; eldritch indeed.

sarcasm /’sɑ:kæzəm/

Many years ago, I spent the princely sum of one pound and fifty pence for a copy of The Lowest Form Of Wit by Leonard Rossiter. Rossiter, who died in 1984, was best known in the UK for his comedic roles as the landlord Rigsby in the series Rising Damp, and Reginald Perrin in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. In both of these classics, he was not averse to the use of sarcasm, and his 1981 book was a paen to what has been called “the lowest form of wit.”

The phrase, “the lowest form of wit” is oft used, but its origin is obscure. The Internet, being the Mother of All Lies, ascribes it to Oscar Wilde, who was a master of sarcasm himself and certainly a worthy owner of the phrase. Alas, no Wilde scholar has been able to point to its existence in any of his works. Some folks say that it is actually a corruption of “sarcasm is the lowest form of humor but the highest form of wit,” a phrase that is similarly cited as being from Wilde, yet just as impossible to demonstrate!

And it doesn’t stop there. Michael DeJong, in an article for The Huffington Post, wrote a piece on “Sarcasm Month” and supplied a new misquote  where he says, “as Oscar Wilde stated, Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence.’” Sorry Michael, it appears he didn’t say that either!

Proverbial origins aside, the actual word sarcasm is of Greek origin, from σαρκάζειν meaning “to tear flesh, gnash the teeth, speak bitterly.” (OED, Vol. XIV, p. 480). This evolved into the Latin sarcasmus, and took on the meaning of “A sharp, bitter, or cutting expression of remark; a bitter gibe or taunt.” (Ibid.)

Sarcastic? You bet!

If you use sarcasm, you are being sarcastic, or you may even be described as being a sarcast. The word can also be used in its adverbial form, sarcastically - or even, at a pinch, sarcasmically. This is a rare word indeed and first appears in John Jones’ 1658 tome, Ovid’s Invective or curse against Ibis, where he writes, “It is inhumane sarcasmically to insult over a captive as a Cat over a Mouse.”

Recent research suggests that contrary to its “lowest form of wit” appellation, sarcasm requires some sophisticated mental processing. In an article entitled The Neuroanatomical Basis of Understanding Sarcasm and Its Relationship to Social Cognition, psychologists Simone Shamay-Tsoory, Rachel Tomer, and Judith Aharon-Peretz found that understanding sarcasm requires a healthy right frontal lobe. Underlying this is the fact that in order to know sarcasm is taking place, you have to be able to appreciate the point of view of the speaker – a skill that requires the hearer to shift from an egotistical point of view. This is thought to be a skill lacking in folks who exhibit autistic behavior; the inability to appreciate the perspective of other people.

So let me finish with a few examples of sarcasm culled from the wit of various writers – including Oscar Wilde:

“I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying. ” Oscar Wilde.

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” Mark Twain.

“I did not attend his funeral:  but I wrote a nice letter saying that I approved of it. Mark Twain.

“Jane Austen’s books, too, are missing from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.” Mark Twain.

“I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you don’t like?” Jean Cocteau.

“The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.” George Bernard Shaw.

“He is a man of great common sense and good taste… meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.” George Bernard Shaw.

“The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.” Robert Frost.

“This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Voltaire.

“I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on I go to the library and read a good book.” Groucho Marx.

Food for thought

Intermission: How To Organize Your Books

The Word Guy is on the road. The upshot of this is that I don’t have access to my OED and that makes it difficult to provide interesting and accurate word etymologies. This, of course, is a marvelous example of why buying the OED on CD is worth doing. If I were to spring for the disk (another $200 – $300 or so depending on where I buy it) I could have mobile access.

So in the absence of my source books – which also includes Joseph T. Shipley’s The Origin of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots and Donald Ayers’ English Words from Latin and Greek Elements – I’ve decided to offer an intermission piece that was originally published in a local periodical. I’ll be back home by the weekend and working on the word sarcasm.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Great Library of Alexandria; the Bodleian Library of Oxford; the Library of Congress; and even Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel – all world famous examples of cathedrals to bibliophilia – the love of books. Since the first caveman scrawled the prehistoric version of “Kilroy was here” on the walls of his rocky condo, mankind has sought to record his story, laying the foundations for a cultural existence. And as the number of literary efforts increases, so does the need for cataloging and organizing them. Whether on tablets of stone, in jars of clay, or engraved onto the surfaces of grains of rice, accessing what has been written is as important as the actual content of the text.

When Melvil Dewey devised his system of classification back in the 1870s, who could have thought that this would become the standard method of choice for the world? And who would argue that this relatively simple and efficient system didn’t make life easier for the common reader.

Melvil Dewey

Well, the editor of In Style magazine for one. The February 2006 edition of this veritable vade mecum of fashion answers the age-old question of how best to organize a collection of books. And here is it, in black and white, from page 325:

“Books look best when organized by size or grouped in color blocks.”

So there you have it. Problem solved. And thank goodness, I say, that the Oxford English Dictionary is made up of individual volumes that are (a) all the same color and (b) all the same size. However, bad luck if you’re looking for a copy of the Bible. Considering that there are bibles in as many colors and sizes as rainbows and rocks, finding one might turn out to be a bit of a problem.

Imagine the scenario:

Student: “Excuse me, my fine fellow. Pray, tell me, where might I find the latest offering by that goodly scribe, John Grisham?”

Librarian: “Ah, my honest scholar, wouldst that be the big brown one, the big blue one, or the more portable small black one?”

Student: “Goodness, my educated friend, in truth, I know neither of the size nor the color.”

Librarian: “Ah, my hapless seeker-after-wisdom, then art thou up a raging river without aid of a rowing implement. Without such critical information regarding appearance and girth, I am, alas, unable to help thee in thy quest.”

Student: “Oh, sweet mother of mercy, is there not a way of finding it by, for example, using the first letter of the honorable scribe’s surname of ‘Grisham?’”

Librarian (chuckling softly): “What a unique suggestion, my witty colleague! But if we were to adopt such a method, wouldst it not then make it almost impossible to find, for example, yonder large, green tome? Why, how would I decide where to locate a new middling orange epistle?”

Student (crestfallen and dejected): “Aye, there’s the rub.”

Librarian (surprised): “’Struth, art thou familiar with the contents of the large, thick work – in green, red, and brown – found on the third shelf on the twentieth case in the fourth room?”

Student (equally surprised): “Yes, although in my own humble abode, it is found on the first shelf, next to a fetching gold small tome about a young girl named Alice who finds herself in a bizarre world of fantasy.”

Librarian: “Ah yes, fantasy indeed. A little like your joke about ordering books by letter.

Exeunt Librarian and Scholar, slapping each other’s backs, laughing together at the absurdity.

Color-coded Bookcase

syllepsis /sɪˈlɛpsɪs/

There’s small gem of a movie starring Mike Myers and Nancy Travers called So I Married An Axe Murderer, which borders on being a cult offering and contains prescient hints of the hit Austin Powers series. It’s a fluffy romantic comedy set in San Francisco with Myers playing Charlie Mackenzie, an aspiring poet and Travers is Harriet Michaels, the daughter of a butcher.

So I Married an Axe Murderer

As well as being the inspiration for an incident where The Word Guy danced with a friend through the aisles of a small grocery store in San Francisco’s Russian Hill district, it also provides a splendid example of the linguistic phenomenon known as syllepsis. This is where two or more parts of a sentence are yoked together by a common verb or noun, more often than not for humorous effect. The example in So I Married An Axe Murderer is a line from a poem written by Charlie for Harriet; “She was a thief, you gotta believe, she stole my heart and my cat.”

The syllepsis here is in the last phrase, where the word stole is used to refer both to heart and cat. The meaning of the sylleptic word changes relative to the nouns. In this instance, the first gloss is related to the phrase to steal someone’s heart, which doesn’t mean literally ripping a beating heart from someone’s chest like an Aztec sacrifice but to cause someone to fall deeply in love with another. The second gloss is, indeed, the literal meaning of the word steal in that the cat is physically taken without consent.

According to the OED, syllepsis is a figure of speech where “a word, or a particular form or inflexion (sic)  of a word, is made to refer to two or more other words in the same sentence, while properly applying to or agreeing with only one of them.” (OED, Vol. XVII, p. 446).

The Greek origin is the word σύλληψις, which in turn is derived from the prefix, σύν- meaning together or with, and λῆψις meaning taking. Thus, the notion is that the sylleptic word and those it refers to are “taken together.”

Charles Dickens was not above using a little sylleptic humor in The posthumous papers of the Pickwick Club when he wrote “She went straight home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair[1],” and Alexander Pope in The Rape of the Lock said of Queen Anne;

“Here thou art, Great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take – and sometimes tea.”

The Rolling Stones offer an example of what I’d call a semi-syllepsis in their song, Honky Tonk Woman, where they sing, “”She blew my nose and then she blew my mind.” To be truly sylleptic, Mick and Keith should have tossed out that second blew. However, this would clearly have changed the meter of the song so I guess it was more a prosodic decision than a grammatical one.

Syllepsis is related to another word – zeugma. For some, it is simply a synonym; for others, it is a sub-type of several different zeugmas. I’ll leave that discussion for another day.

I’ll stop here because I think I’m out of time and imagination.

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[1] Full quote: “All these things combined with the noises and interruptions of constant comings in and goings out made Mr Pickwick play rather badly. The cards were against him also and when they left off at ten minutes past eleven Miss Bolo rose from the table considerably agitated and went straight home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair.”