Crazed Teacups

Anagrams and Crossing Delancey

I finally have an answer to the old question: if you could choose any superpower, what would it be?  Why, I'd like to be able to anagram (if I may use it as a verb) any word, headline or sentence that comes my way!  A Word a Day (awad) recently tweeted a link to their other blog, and my new favorite site, The Anagram Times.  They take current headlines and make anagrams out of them.  For example:

Original:  Conan O'Brien makes debut on The Tonight Show

Anagram: NBC booked a hot, huge Irishman.  Town tense... not.

Then, while I was on the Anagram Times site, I saw a link to DelanceyPlace, a site that sends you nonfiction literary excerpts every day.  I was somewhat suspicious as to the quality of these excerpts, but these amazing paragraphs greet you on the first page:

In today's excerpt, John Steinbeck eulogizes his recently deceased friend, Ed Ricketts:

I have tried to isolate and inspect the great talent that was in Ed Ricketts, that made him so loved and needed and makes him so missed now that he is dead. Certainly he was an interesting and charming man, but there was some other quality that far exceeded these. I have thought that it might be his ability to receive, to receive anything from anyone, to receive gracefully and thankfully, and to make the gift seem very fine. Because of this everyone felt good in giving to Ed--a present, a thought, anything.

Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver...It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it is well-done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving, you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.

It requires self-esteem to receive--not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.

John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Appendix, ""About Ed Ricketts"", Penguin Books, 1951, pp. 272-3

Beautiful.  I signed up for a subscription right away.

Can Herc Come to My House?

Feb. 16 is interesting in my word-of-the-day calendar:

 

Augean stable - a condition or place marked by great accumulation of filth or corruption

Used in a sentence: Ulysses S. Grant's presidency was marred by his failure to clean out the Augean stables of his own administration.

 

I'd never even heard this phrase before, but I like it, especially because they chose it for Presidents Day.  (By the way, Augean is pronounced with a 'je' sound, as though Augean would rhyme with 'dodgy and'.)  Here's their description of the origin of the phrase:

 

"The mythical Augeas, king of Elis, kept great stables that held three thousand oxen and had not been cleaned for 30 years before the job was finally assigned to Hercules, who caused two rivers to run through the stables.  The word 'Augean' is also sometimes used by itself with the meaning 'extremely difficult and usually distasteful.' We can refer to 'Augean tasks,' 'Augean labor,' or even 'Augean clutter.'"

Headline of the Day

From Serious Eats:  Photo of the Day: Duoseptuagenuple Stuf Oreo

I could only find one page on the web to confirm that duoseptuoagenuple is an actual word that refers to '72.'  In this particular post, it refers to a man who took all the fillings from a 36-count pack of Double Stuf Oreos and stacked them into one Oreo Cookie sandwich. 

Nu-nu-nugatorius (Latin, adj)

Recently, my word of the day from my, well, word-of-the-day calendar was:

 

Nugatory, adj.

1. of little or no consequence: trifling, inconsequential

2. having no force: inoperative

 

One of the reasons I found this word so interesting was their description of its relationship to its synonyms: 

 

"Like its synonyms 'vain,' 'idle,' 'empty,' and 'hollow,', 'nugatory' means 'without worth or significance.'  But while 'nugatory' suggests triviality or insignificance ("a monarch with nugatory powers," for example)...

- vain implies either absolute or relative absence of value (as in 'vain promises')

- idle suggests being incapable of worthwhile use or effect (as in 'idle speculations')

- empty and hollow suggest a deceiving lack of real substance or genuineness (as in 'an empty attempt at reconciliation' or 'a hollow victory')"

Word of the Day

I've got a new word-of-the-day calendar that I'm probably going to bring up quite a bit on the blog.  Earlier this week, it explained the origins of the word epiphany.  It comes from the "Greek verb epiphainein, meaning 'to manifest,', which in turn is based on the older verb phainein, meaning 'to show.' Phainein is also the source of such showy English words as 'fancy' and 'fantasy.'"

Phrase of the Day

My sister subscribes to the "Urban Word of the Day" from Urban Dictionary and occasionally sends them my way. This was yesterday's, which I particularly liked:

September 26: You forgot Poland

What you say to a person when you have been one-upped by said person in an argument or debate of some sort. Pretty much just lets you try to get the last word in when you have no other retort.

Person A: "Oh man! We got jumped by like twelve guys and kicked all their asses!"

Person B: "Actually there were three; Steve McPeterson, Dave Ellis, and that guy that works the Wendy's drive-thru."

Person A: "Well, you forgot Poland."

I looked it up on the web to find out the origins of it.  This is what wikipedia says:

In the first debate of the United States Presidential election of 2004, John Kerry accused President Bush of failing to gain widespread international support for the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, saying "... when we went in, there were three countries: Great Britain, Australia and the United States. That's not a grand coalition. We can do better." Bush, who had used Poland earlier in the debate as an example of the international presence in Iraq, replied by saying "Well, actually, he forgot Poland."^[2] Paraphrased as "You forgot Poland", the term became a popular catch phrase among Bush detractors....

Word of the Day

iPologize

- The subject heading to Wells Fargo's Daily Advantage newsletter, which includes an item about Apple's $100 rebate to iPhone buyers. (Thanks, Tom!)

Notes from a Dictionary Evangelist

The Editor-in-Chief of Oxford's American dictionaries is PowellsBooksBlog's guest blogger this week. Below are some highlights from Erin McKean's posts so far, but check it out for yourself throughout the week here:

I'm not interested, lexicographically, in Perfect English. (In fact, I'm not even sure it exists.) What I'm interested in is changing English. What are the new words? What are the old words being used in new ways? Are nouns getting verbed, or adjectivized? That's what I want to see. I want to see English at the fuzzy boundaries, at the edge, not the safe stuff in the middle. Then I can describe it, and keep watching for more.

****

Most lexicographers I know read things far, far from their normal areas of interest so as to find new and unusual words, or just to get a better feel for the variety of English. For instance, I read a lot of magazines for work, most of which I have a personal interest in (Threads Magazine, New Scientist, etc.) but I also read The Oldie, which is a magazine for British senior citizens. It's like a palate cleanser, reading something so different. It helps you taste your everyday language better.

When Crossword Puzzle Addicts Attack!

What's the New York Times and its readers got against the word scumbag? Plenty. Find out what has Slate asking "How offensive can a word be if people don't realize it's offensive?" here.

Woolf in Sheep's Clothing

Wow! I'm sitting here in amazement, having just heard Virginia Woolf's voice for the first time in my whole life, thanks to a link from the PowellsBlog. Initially, her voice was a shock to me. I pictured her sounding fragile, sensitive, nervous, young, even though the recording was done in 1937, when she was 55. Instead, she sounded older and more schoolmarmy than I imagined. I find it enormously reassuring somehow that she didn't sound like a quivering mass. She sounded downright formidable.

She reads an essay called "A Eulogy to Words", and I've copied some of the excerpts below.

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations--naturally. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today--that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.

****

Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing upon the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still--do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticized, untaught? Is our Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.

****

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live--the mind--all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious.

****

Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light. . . . That pause was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create everlasting beauty. But no--nothing of that sort is going to happen to-night. The little wretches are out of temper; disobliging; disobedient; dumb. What is it that they are muttering? "Time's up! Silence!"