May 22, 1987

A Word In Your Ear

The Insomniac’s Dictionary: The Last Word on the Odd Word by Paul Hellweg. New York, Facts on File Publications. 159 pp. $17.

Dimboxes, Epopts, and Other Quidams: Words to Describe Life’s Indescribable People by David Grambs. New York, Workman Publishing. 190 pp. $6

The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Words by George Stone Saussy III. Harmondworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books. 277 pp.

Word Mysteries and Histories: From Quiche to Humble Pie by the editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. 308 pp. $17

    “The next best thing to knowing something,” said the eminent lexicographer Samuel Johnson, “is knowing where to find it.” For the inveterate sufferer of lethologica (the temporary inability to recall a word or name) who fumbles with whatchamacallits, whojemeflips and so-and-so’s, three of these compilations should be as handy as a standard dictionary.

    This trove of tomes is a lexical elixir for the deipnosophist (one who is good at dinner-table conversations) with loganamnosis (mania for trying to recall forgotten words), handicapped by the yaffling (eating greedily and noisily) needs of fork and knife in hand, which renders pasimology (speaking with the hands) pretty difficult.

    Be careful, though: unless you mix in very brilliant circles or very ignorant ones, nobody likes a lexiphanes (a person given to pretentious, bombastic words and phrases), whose verbal philosophy is one of sesquipedalianism (the habitual use of long words), periphrasis (beating around the bush), or obscurantism (keeping them guessing). See what I mean?

    Hellweg’s Insomniac’s Dictionary is far from syndyasmian  (a one night stand): you will probably not reach Z before you reach zzzzzzzzzzzz. You grumble about the government being all talk and no action? There’s a word for it: logocracy. Staying in power might depend on a cunning spokesman (logodaedalus) whose logolatry (worship of words) might prevent logomachy (strive over mere words) with logical logomonomaniacs (long-winded speakers) who – hey, who’s responsible for this logonefariousness? The logogogue, that’s who.

    If you’re still with me (I’ve only reached page 3 of the dictionary), let’s move on before logomisia (disgust for certain words) sets in.

    You fear your mother-in-law? Join Pentheraphobics Anonymous. No matter what your fear, it’s here: 555 of them, including such terrors as phalacrophobia (going bald), decidophobia (making decisions), medectophobia (the fear of the contours of one’s penis being visible through one’s clothes), telephonophobia (Bezek), and arachibutyrophobia (the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, obviously). And if you just don’t fit into this brave new world of ours and all 555 phobias apply to you, you’re a pamphobic, and maybe you shouldn’t be touching newsprint.

    By comparison there are only 277 manias listed, including such beauts as coprolalomania (the use of foul language), onomatomania (mental derangement with regard to words), scribblemania (a penchant for doodling – not to be confused with Scrabblemania) and typomania (a mania for writing for publication. Who, me?) The gamut, if you were wondering, runs from hedonomania (the compulsive pursuit of pleasure) to misomania (hatred of everything), beyond which exists another word, apathy.

    One of the most charming lists is of collective nouns for animals. Lots of fish make a school; many lions a pride. With logogogical wit, we also have a crash of rhinoceroses, a parliament of owls, a murder of crows, an exaltation of larks, a shrewdness of apes and a convocation of eagles.

    Eponyms are people for whom something is named, favored by trivia freaks. Did you know that mayonnaise is named after the town Mahon, which is named after Mago, who was Hannibal’s brother? Denim comes from the French town de Nimes; sideburns are named after Civil War general Burnside, who popularized the style. Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet, and Dr. Condom the prophylactic. Even boo! has a rich genealogy, coming from Captain Bo, a legendary English fighter of such fame, Hellweg tells us, that his name was used to terrify the enemy.

If you’re still egersic (suffering from intense wakefulness) try some of the mental word games suggested here. Pangrams, univocalics, palindromes, lipograms, and if you’re not sleeping alone, fictionary; or the acronym game where you make a phrase  with words whose initial letters spell a related thing or person. For example: LAWYERS = Losing As Winning, Yet Earning Remunerations Safely. The finest acronym I’ve ever come across spells out the name of that bombastic American, IACOCCA: I Am Chairman Of Chrysler Corporation of America. Hours of fun and frustration; anyway, it beats counting sheep.

    Where Hellweg fails to please is in t he apologetic nature of his writing. He seems a little embarrassed by his love of words, several times using the annoying “I hope this material will be a source of pleasure” (adding, in the chapter on sexual words, “and not of offense”). He concludes with the inane “I’ve very much enjoyed writing this dictionary,” which is silly to read in anything beyond a Grade 5 composition. His book’s strength lies in its content, not its readability. Kudos, however, for a replete bibliography, which gives even the most esoteric entries credibility.

   

THE LACK of a bibliography is the only shortcoming of David Grambs’s book. He bubbles with wit and wicked punnery, celebrating his obvious love of words with adept adoxography (writing cleverly on a trivial subject). Grambs doesn’t confine himself to somber definition when nimble alliteration, spiffy word-play and cute colloquialisms will do. Whereas The Insomniac’s Dictionary informs us that bibliobibuli (a babbling word coined by H.L. Mencken) means “people who read too much,” Grambs indulges in “bookworms with blinders, or print porers, delvers and scanners who don’t believe a word of what they’re not reading or that a truck is coming until they see it in print.”

    Dimboxes, Epopts and Other Quidams restricts itself to, as the subtitle says, people words. It is restricting insofar as Grambs paints himself into a corner with more than 500 everyday oddballs, though sticking to a solitary theme makes this collection of sobriquets as much solid reference as poisonous substance.

    Shove over your Roget’s and make space on your book shelf for Grambs; his indescribable people are conveniently categorized into types you’re likely to know, but never knew there was a word for. Check out the chapter on Personalities and meet the tsitser (“one of those annoying, head-wagging deplorers or hissing commenters always going tsk, tsk”), or the curmudgeon (“cranky, cantankerous and crotchety, an irascibly difficult individual who won’t take yes for an answer”). Among the Friends and Enemies: fefnicute (a hypocrite or sneak), foumart (“somebody who is despicable, whom one is slightly not at all fond of. An expressive but clean word that begins with a satisfying F is always good to keep in reserve for superior name-calling”). Snollygoster is a shrewd, unscrupulous opportunist, while ancilla is the sidekick who helps another to accomplish or master something difficult or complicated.

    There are Likers (oniomaniac: the compulsive buyer, or that person you know can’t window-shop without self-control going right in the window), Dislikers (embusque: a draft dodger; and misocapnist: a wincing, hand-waving hater of tobacco smoke) and Paragons (dimbox: the smoother-over of disputes, an expert at getting others to make up. The opposite is a makebate, a person with a penchant for stirring up strife between others), Troublemakers (quidnunc: a gossip or newsmonger), Workers (panjandrum: a grandly self-important personage or official) and Talkers (paraphrast: “one of those conversationalists always paraphrasing their own words; that is, a paraphraser, who repeats things in different ways, which is to say, he or she expresses the meaning in yet another fashion, or, as it were, simplifies and rephrases the sentence in order to clarify, in a word, by paraphrasing”).

    And inevitably, he gives us the sexy types, such as your everyday basic melcryptovestimentaphile (a male with a thing for women’s black underwear).

IF THE NAME George Stone Saussy III sounds too goyish to trust with a simple Jewish word, you’re right: there, on page 62 of The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Words we learn that daven means to swat to and fro rapidly while praying. That’s shokel! I hope the rest of the book is more dependable, because I want to believe its wealth of narishkeit.

    Here we see the words at work. Each entry is followed by a literary source where the word has been used. Saussy limits these sources to works published since 1945. He doesn’t say why.

    The book is intellectually stimulating for word lovers, as it supplies little glimpses into literary styles, albeit only of contemporary writers, and whets the appetite for brilliant literacy with a gastrogasm of food for thought. Besides, for the most voluminous array of backside words, for fullness and fulsomeness, this is it. Ladies and gentlemen, The Bum: steatopygous (having a fat ass or bulging buttocks), kakopyge (someone with ugly buttocks); barrelass (to tumble head over heels, ass over tea kettle), cacafuego (“shit fire”), callipygian (beautiful buttocks), mesopygion (the anal cleavage), and on and on. Still, my own collection of sesquipedalia includes a few bum raps Saussy’s does not: meconium (an infant’s first fecal excretion), tenesmus (an urgent but ineffectual effort to defecate), and dasyproctic (having hairy buttocks).

    Vladimir Nabokov used the word stillicide (a column of raindrops falling successively from one point) with a sultry succession of similar sounds: “... the svelte / Stilettos of a frozen stillicide.”

    What I don’t like about Saussy’s compilation is the inclusion of apparently made-up words by writers making too much of an effort to be clever. Legitimizing a “word” such as zeppelinically (“swollen in the sense of being filled with gas”) only undermines the richness of the language.

IF BY NOW you long for short, familiar, everyday words, Word Mysteries and Histories is an elixir.

    Digging through the depths of the family of languages, the book traces the origins and developments of even the most innocuous words. Authored by the editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries, the research is indisputable.

    Word ancestries could be divided into two broad categories, those of long linear derivation from ancient (or modern) tongues, and others that were sudden, inspired coinages. That generally takes care of the histories; the word mysteries are those genealogies that cannot be traced to a certain origin, in which case this book does not attempt to solve the mysteries, merely to present their intrigues.

    The first category, which includes the majority of our words, can get a mite academic for the casual logophile. “Elephant”, for example, is traced back to ancient Egyptian, Greek, Hittite, the hypothetical source language Hamitic, Persian and Arabic, with references to Latin and Sanskrit. On the other side of the coin, there is the surprising derivation of “dollar”. The German form is taler, which is short for Joachimstaler, a silver coin minted in Joachimstal (now Jachymov in northwestern Czechoslovakia). Thus, the root of all capitalist evil is located right in one of the most communist of countries!

    Checking up on a word often produces the serendipity of finding other words that share a common background. The noun “fawn” is traced through the Old French feon, meaning “the young of an animal,” which comes from feton (Vulgar Latin), which comes from the Latin fetus, meaning offspring.

    “Salt” is an outstanding example. Its Latin word, sal, produced salami and sausage (salted meats), salad and sauce (salted dishes that accompany a meal), saucer, and – incredibly – salary, from the Latin salarium, which first meant “money given to soldiers to buy salt.”

    “Copper” is traced to the Late Latin cuprum, derived from Latin Cyprium, meaning “Cyprian”; copper was mined mainly in Cyprus in ancient times. (Similarly, the scallion, which this book does not tell us about, is an onion originating in he ancient seaport Ascalon, today known as Ashkelon).

    The little word “gas” was coined by a 17^th century Flemish chemist, Jan Baptista van Helmont, who wrote that gas is not very different “from the Chaos of the ancients.”

    A more contemporary coinage was the work of the early 20^th century American Gelett Burgess. Illustrating his own book Are You A Bromide? with a jacket-cover drawing of a buxom woman he named Miss Belinda Blurb, Burgess later wrote that this “blurb” attested to the book as the “sensation of the year.”

    As for word mysteries, perhaps the most enthralling for the Israeli reader is the debate about the term “copacetic”, meaning “excellent; first rate.” Among the theories is that it comes from the Hebrew kol betzedek.

    Copacetic, certainly, are the book’s illustrations, stunning wood engravings by Barry Moser. With their wit, whimsy and touch of the macabre, Moser’s 34 illuminations might be worth 1,000 words each.