Going where I have to go

"This is how the career ends. Not with a retirement party and a gold watch but with a second career in the gig economy." --Reuven Perlman, "How Other Things End" in the Sept. 22 New Yorker.

What I'm telling myself this morning: I may have had a bizarre day that revealed once again the appalling level of incompetence running rampant in the universe, and I may have left my umbrella in the library so that I had to run through this morning's badly-needed rain without protection, and I may be required to give up my lunch hour to meet with someone I've never heard of to deal with an issue that does not concern me, and I may be facing students who think it's cute to ask out loud in class things like "I'm a computer science major--why do I have to learn to write?", BUT at least my job does not require me to be hit in the face with a 99-mile-per-hour fastball on live  television. Neither does it require me to instruct the editor of the AP story about David Fry's unfortunate injury that it is not correct to write that Fry "laid in the dirt for several minutes." He lay! Lay lay lay! This is not that difficult, people!

On the plus side, this morning my Nature Writing students discussed Annie Dillard's marvelous essay "Total Eclipse," which includes a quote from Theodore Roethke's poem "The Waking," which none of my students had read before so we took a look at it in class and examined how he uses end stops to reinforce the feeling of a person stumbling blindly down a poorly marked path, and I am taking the final verse as my marching orders for the brief amount of time left in my teaching career:

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

 

 

 

 

 

Twiddling the time away

According to our old pal the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of twiddling appeared circa 1547 in J. Redford's Moral Play of Wit & Science: "As for her syngyng, pypyng, and fydlyng, what unthryftynes therin is twydlyng?" Twiddling emerges from the marriage of twisting and fiddling, and an alternate spelling (tweedling) suggests that the patron saints of twiddling ought to be Tweedledum and Tweedledee. 

No relation to tiddlywinks, a game requiring facility with winks and squidgers and the ability to squop. Tiddlywinks derives from British slang and may be related to both kiddlywink and pillywink, a word that ought to apply to tiddlywinks played with fluffy pink pillows but most definitely does not. Pillywinks are instruments of torture also known as thumbscrews.

While twiddling appears in the sixteenth century, thumb-twiddling is first recorded much later, in the 1930s. So when I twiddle away my morning by exploring the more esoteric uses of twiddling, I am following a long tradition.

I probably shouldn't say this out loud where any of my overworked colleagues can hear me, but my skills are being underutilized this semester. Few classes, low enrollments, few papers to grade, few colleagues interested in attending workshops or training events--whatever the reasons, I keep finding myself with time on my hands. I haven't quite been reduced to thumb-twiddling, but yesterday I finally submitted an essay to a journal and today I'm thinking about writing a letter of recommendation that isn't due until November.

And it looks like things won't be much better next semester. If current enrollment trends continue, I'll finish my career teaching negative 27 students and grading no papers at all.

But I'll think about that tomorrow. Today I sit and twiddle my thumbs and wonder where I can locate some winks and squidgers and find someone to teach me to squop.  

Great ideas illuminating the path ahead

When the academic Powers that Be proclaim that we need to work on negotiating the compliance landscape, my first question runs toward wardrobe: does this kind of excursion call for pith helmets, snowshoes, or parasols? I guess I'm going to find out because the compliance landscape plays an important part in our institutional goals for the year. I'll keep my eyes on the new president so I know when to reach for appropriate accessories.

Whatever landscape we're entering this year, I'll be well equipped with good ideas. I brought a container full of them today, tiny yellow tomatoes that look like lightbulbs, so sweet and juicy that every time I eat one I'm reminded that planting them was a really great idea. I'll take my tiny lightbulbs to the workshop I'm leading this afternoon and tell my colleagues I'll share my great ideas with you if you share yours with the rest of us.

I hope they'll comply--otherwise, the landscape will feel really lonely.

Edible lightbulbs--great idea!

 

But is there a futon in that elevator?

 I want to write about the word repose, but I'm too tired right now. 

I've been attending too many long, exhausting, emotional meetings full of people on the verge of meltdown whose valid concerns keep being met by soothing buzzwords. I've just gotten accustomed to being told that it's not yet time to elevate our concerns to the next level, as if we could just punch the Up button and everything would be taken care of, and now comes a Person in a Position of Authority repeatedly telling a group of campus leaders that we need to find repose in the situation, which makes me wonder whether some major donor has come through with the funds to install futons in all our offices. I mean, I'm as big a fan of repose as the next guy, but if the building is on fire, the last thing you want the firefighters to tell you is Why don't you calm down and take a nice nap?

And speaking of the next guy, I've heard that it's problematic to address students as guys, which makes some sense if they're not all guys, but I've just used the word guy to refer to myself, which suggests that I don't really conceive as guys as gendered, which explains why I'm having a hard time not addressing groups as guys. Old dog/new tricks, blah blah blah. But I'm trying! I asked a class how they'd like to be addressed and someone suggested pupils, which makes me think of Mrs. Davis back in third grade, with her white hair piled high and gems on her glasses and a hanky tucked up her sleeve. I may be old, but I'm not ready to be Mrs. Davis. I'll never find repose until I elevate that concern to the next level--but wait, where's the Up button? 

 

A sort of a thingamawhozit

My daughter reports this enlightening conversation with her seven-year-old:

Little E: Mom, what's a Doohickey?

Mom: A thingamabob. 

Well, what am I supposed to do with that? 

Ahem: 

A Whozit, a Whatsit, a Whatchamacallit

Met for lunch with a Thingamahooey:

Just a nibble, a nosh, and an ort—oh my gosh!—

A dribble, a crumb, some chop sooey,

A smidgen, a schmear, a firkin of beer,

And a gulp of some whim-wham-wandango,

But they swallowed it all and went out of the hall

With a floop, flip, and flashing fandango.

With a wink and a wiggle they commenced up the middle

Of Whangdoodle Street, where—kerphlooey!

The Whozit, the Whatsit, the Whatchamacallit

Parted ways with the Thingamahooey. 

You can look for them here, you can look for them there,

You can seek out their kind slow or quickly,

But the word you can't find at the edge of your mind--

Well, we'll just name that fellow Doohickey.

Pandemic planning 101

The threat of a global coronavirus pandemic inspired the person who supplies faculty snacks to announce a new policy: no more communal potato-chip bags; single-serve packages only! Pandemic Packaging she called it, or, if you prefer a peppy portmanteau, pandackaging.

This proposal caused the pandemic skeptics (pandeptics) to decry the needless expense, while the pandemic fatalists (pandatalists) objected for a different reason: we're all doomed anyway, so why not share our misery as we share our snacks? 

"Just tell everyone to wash their hands and we'll all be fine," insisted the resident pandoptimist, at which point a pandessimist proposed stationing strong men bearing baseball bats in every public rest room to encourage compliance.

"I'm telling my students to take all their textbooks home over spring break so they can keep up with the reading if they get quarantined," said an old-school tweed-jacket-with-elbow-patches prof (pantweedademic), provoking a trauma-informed pedagogue (pantraumagogue) to shriek about spinal damage and PTSD caused by bearing heavy backpacks.

The last word, of course, came from our fearless leader, Dr. Pangloss, who assured us that all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, which is where the coronavirus lives. Resistance is futile. We are all Panglossademics now.  

Collective nouns for the end of the semester

a plague of plagiarists
an excrescence of exams (exhausting)
a drift of drafts
a snifter of snafus
an ambuscade of assessment reports


More, anyone?
 
 

Marie Curie & me

Would Marie Curie have known the word "loogie"?

Probably not. Merriam-Webster defines "loogie" as "a mass of saliva and phlegm hawked up from the throat" and first locates the word in print in a baseball article from 1967. Since Marie Curie was neither a baseball fan nor alive in 1967, the person who played the word "loogie" in a Words with Friends game this afternoon was probably not really Marie Curie.

Of course I knew from the first that I was playing against a bot, and not just because of her unusual word choice. Marie is just one of ten Women of History bots available for individual play this week, and I knew something was screwy about this challenge from the first because of the tag phrase that came up when I clicked Play: "I was the first woman, so far, to win two Noble Prizes. Think you got what it takes?"

I have a few problems with this statement.

1. "Noble Prizes"? Granted, "Nobel" is a proper noun and is therefore not playable in Words with Friends, but surely someone who works for that fine organization should know that the prizes are named for Alfred Nobel, not anybody Noble.

2. This Marie Curie bot claims to have been "the first woman, so far, to win two Noble Prizes," but what can "so far" possibly mean in this context? You think some other woman is going to suddenly waltz up and become the first woman to win two Nobel (not Noble) Prizes? Only if she invents a time machine!

3. "Think you got what it takes" is pretty informal English, not what you'd expect from a highly educated scientist whose writing tends toward the formal academic end of the spectrum.

For the record, I have indeed got what it takes--I creamed Marie Curie, despite her clever placement of "loogie" on a triple-word score. She's got pretty good aim for a dead person.

Overshadowed by "umbrage"; or, you learn something old every day

My student wanted to know what umbrage meant in a poem by Wordsworth, and although I know what umbrage means in the phrase to take umbrage, I took umbrage over the use of the word in these lines describing the earth beneath a grove of yew trees:

                                              a pillared shade,
Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,
By sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged
Perennially...

"It looks like umbrage is being used as a color word," I said, "but that doesn't make sense."

"You could Google it," my student said, and so we did, and you'll never guess what we found: umbrage survives in common use today only in phrases like to take umbrage, but in the past it carried a whole host of usages as a term relating to shadow. The OED lists dozens of citations for umbrage meaning shadow or shade, alongside figurative uses meaning a feeling of suspicion or doubt or even a suspicion, hint, inkling, or slight idea. I had no inkling that an umbrage could be an inkling.

I was even more surprised to find that umbrage was once used as a verb with meanings like to shade or shadow, or to overshadow, or even to disguise, as in this example from the OED: 

1675   R. Burthogge Cavsa Dei 312   If she mentioned others, it was by way of caution, only to secure her self, and Umbrage what she said that it might down the better.

Apparently, just a spoonful of umbrage makes the medicine go down. But the woman above may have found her match in a young gallant described under the meaning to give a pretext for:

1689   E. Hickeringill Speech Without-doors 35   Like that young Gallant, studying what he should see in her [sc. an old woman] to Vmbrage the fondness of his Embraces.

So umbrage leads us into the shadows, where women shade their meanings to make them more palatable while young men invent pretexts to embrace older women. That's pretty far from today's meaning, but not far from Wordsworth's usage to describe the shade under a grove of yew trees--the kind of umbrageous place that could provide cover for all kinds of shady behavior.
 
 

Snow fun

"Grandma, let me snow you something," she said with glee, and so I watched while she pulled on the end of the branch. That'll snow her!

 

Ixnay on the athwray

Note to self: Who made you the Parking Police? Starting the day with a heated altercation over traffic laws is not a brilliant idea, even if the anger grows every time you see that particular colleague violate the one-way street sign until you feel as if you're going to explode. Releasing the pressure with a face-to-face encounter first thing in the morning is only going to sour the rest of the day--and on a day when you have a horde of first-year students coming to conferences, you can't afford to be sour.

So here I am in my office trying to think happy thoughts before my students start arriving. This is all I've got:

• Language Log comments on the new Range Rover model called the Velar, which makes me wonder: will we ever see a Ford Fricative on the market? (Click here for a little linguistics humor--very little.)  
• Speaking of language, if you missed Talk Like a Pirate Day, McSweeney's offers some other options (click here). Hey, I won't even have to practice for "Talk Like a Woman Who's Constantly Freezing at Work Day"!
• In other language-related news, I could have made a real killing points-wise the other day if only Words With Friends would accept Pig-Latin. Ixnay on the ointspay!

Hmmm....this isn't working. Someone tell me something funny--or else! (What? I'm not even authorized to issue parking tickets, much less comedy tickets.)
 

Language as unruly child: Kory Stamper's Word by Word

"We think of English as a fortress to be defended," writes Kory Stamper, "but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don't want it to go....We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else's socks."

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries is Stamper's love song to the English language, written by a Merriam-Webster lexicographer skilled at explaining how the world of dictionaries works. Stamper explores the history of dictionaries and their cultural impact along with the nitpicky work required to construct them, but this wealth of detail does not weigh down the volume because Stamper infuses her stories with freshness and verve.

Her love affair with language takes into account etymology, grammar, spelling, and sound, sometimes separated from meaning--Stamper defies readers "to say the word 'hootamaganzy' aloud and not immediately fall in love with it, regardless of what it means." (I'll let you have the pleasure of looking it up.) But even the process of researching and describing nuances of meaning becomes compelling in Stamper's telling, as when she devotes an entire chapter to the many weeks she once spent updating the definition of the word "take." 


Stamper admits that lexicography has its occupational hazards, among them a tendency to develop a clinical approach to language. "When you spend all day looking carefully at words," she writes, "you develop a very detached and unnatural relationship with them. It's much like being a doctor, I imagine: a beautiful person walks into your office and takes off all their clothes, and you spend all your time staring at the sphygmomanometer."

Despite spending her working days surrounded by "the fusty glut of old papers bunged hastily into metal bookshelves," Stamper maintains a sense of wonder at the quirks of an ever-evolving language. If language is an unruly child that insists on going its own way, studying language can turn lexicographers into curious toddlers intent on examining everything: 

A job where you read all day can be a pleasure, to be sure, but it can also ruin you. Words cease to be casual, tossed off, and able to be left alone. You are that toddler on a walk, the one who wants to pick up every bit of detritus and gunk and dead insect and dog crap on the sidewalk, asking, "What's that, what's that, what's that?' while a parent with better things to do tries to haul your over-inquisitive butt away.

And while the lexicographer's work requires long hours spent in solitude and silence with only words for company, some of the more compelling chapters in the book describe the interactions between lexicographers and the public.  Stamper faced a firestorm of abuse after Merriam-Webster updated its definition of "marriage," but a more mundane task is tackling the constant stream of letters from readers demanding that the dictionary give them credit for inventing certain words, or that it recognize their pet peeves or cherished folk etymologies, or that it remove certain words because they are ungrammatical or hurtful or "made-up":

Of course 'irregardless' is a made-up word that was entered into the dictionary through constant use; that's pretty much how this racket works. All words are made-up. Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine for them in some remote part of Wales?

Further, she feels the need to point out that "removing a word from the dictionary doesn't do away with the thing that word refers to specifically, or even tangentially." In response to demands that the dictionary police grammar rules rather than describing the way language is actually used, she asserts, "Humanity sets up rules to govern English, but English rolls onward, a juggernaut crushing all in its path."

In Word by Word, English is a juggernaut, an unruly child, a patient, a "murky swamp," and the ocean in which we're plunged, says Stamper, and 

Lexicographers spend a lifetime swimming through the English language in a way that no one else does; the very nature of lexicography demands it. English is a beautiful, bewildering language, and the deeper you dive in, the more effort it takes to come up to the surface for air.

I wanted to remain plunged beneath the surface of Stamper's work, but alas, all good books must come to an end. Fortunately, though, the work of creating dictionaries is never complete, because "A dictionary is out of date the minute that it's done." This is good news for lexicographers like Kory Stamper, who calls herself a "drudge" but makes her drudgery feel vibrant and vital. "English bounds onward," she concludes, "and we drudges will continue our chase after it, a little ragged for the rough terrain, perhaps, but ever tracking, eyes wide with quiet and reverence."

Bubble, bubble, simile trouble

It's awkward comparisons day in Creative Nonfiction class! I get to share the most cringe-inducing simile ever perpetrated by a student ("the aroma of the hot cocoa spiraled like a staircase up her nose") along with some winners gleaned from professional writers:

As he advanced…all his fat bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown. --Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

The penguins tottered and clucked and dived, slipping off the habitat rocks like amiable hams but living under water like tuxedoed muscles. --Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

Norah Jones and her foot soldiers are organic, grass-fed artists taking back the castle from the injection-molded, poly-blend popbots. --Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker

If that's not enough, I'll introduce my students to some of the many random simile generating machines available online. High Coup Journal, for instance offers up these gems:

Disappointment is like a can of ravioli.

Irritation is like Canada.

Sadness is like a rainbow.

Confidence is like a school play.

Or we'll head over to WritingFix's Serendipitous Simile Generator:

His greed was like a swimming pool.

Her apathy was like a birdcage.

His generosity was like a toolshed.

WritingFix offers helpful advice for teachers and writers using the Serendipitous Simile Generator, such as this inspiring paragraph:

Here's a hint to make a more successful simile.  Try adding an adjective in front of the Interesting Noun you're given.  For example, if you're dealt "His love is like a swimming pool," change it to "His love is like a crowded swimming pool," or "His love is like a public swimming pool," or "His love is like a well-chlorinated swimming pool" before writing your description.  And have serendipitous fun!

(Why would love need to be chlorinated? Maybe it's a hunk o' germy love.)

These sites may be as disappointing as a can of ravioli, but I've got more nourishing food at my beck and call (and I'm not talking about swimming hams): my students' essays. For every student who assaults my nasal passages with a staircase, I've got three capable of serving up macaroni and cheese so comforting it's like "a hug in a bowl." Mm-mm good, and it doesn't even need to be chlorinated.