A Note (Again!) to the Editors of The New York Times

You—yes, you—you so-called editors at The New York Times—are you aware you have a serious “what ever/whatever” problem? In a recent arts page story, you announced a new remake of that classic horror movie “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”  Tch, tch! How many times must I remind you that what ever, in this sense, is two words?  I did just that in a previous blog of April 12 this very year.  Please see, without delay:

http://wordsgoingwild.blogspot.com/search?q=what+ever

I must admit, it’s getting tiresome to have to keep correcting you about such a simple and straightforward grammatical matter, over and over again.  Okay, Times editors, listen up, once more:

In that movie title you mentioned, what is an interrogative pronoun, requesting information about “the identity, nature, or value of an object or condition,” and ever is an adverbial modifier meaning “over a period of time.”

Now if you should have a sentence in which whatever can be used as one word, it would be something like this one: “Whatever happened to Baby Jane is a matter of indifference to me.” Or “Whatever they do, The Times editors cannot seem to remember the difference between what ever and whatever.”

In these cases, whatever is one word, a pronoun, meaning anything,” “everything,”  “no matter what,” or “other similar things.”  It can also be an adjective, meaning “of any kind” or an adverb meaning “in any case.”  For example: “Whatever grammar book you’re using doesn’t seem to help,” or “My corrections of your solecisms seem to do no good whatever.”

Just in case youTimes editors need some reinforcement, I’ve asked the Bard of Buffalo Bayou to whip up a little sestet as a reminder—and if you get it wrong again, he’s going to write a whole sonnet, something we want to avoid at all costs!

            What ever became of the rules of good grammar?

            Today’s writers think rules don’t have enough glamour,

            So the rules have to be pounded in with a hammer.

            Whatever they write in their latest endeavor

            Today’s writers think is exceedingly clever,

            But as for the grammar, they just shrug, “Whatever.”

Whatever…

The New York Times, bastion of all the news that’s fit to print, and then some, opened a recent story with the sentence “Whatever happened to Ron Paul?”  Somewhere on the staff of that august publication there must be editors who know better. 

In that sentence, as in the classic movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, what  and ever should be two words.  What is an interrogative pronoun, requesting information about “the identity, nature, or value of an object or condition,” and ever is an adverbial modifier meaning “over a period of time.”

The same paper in another story indicated that Mitt Romney will do “whatever it takes” to win the Republican nomination.  Maybe so, but at least this time they got whatever right. In this case it is properly one word, a pronoun meaning “anything,” “everything,”  “no matter what,” or “other similar things.” For example: Whatever I say, you tell me to “shut up” or I enjoy Chardonnay, bock beer, single-malt whiskey, or whatever.

The one-word whatever can also be an adjective, meaning “of any kind” or an adverb meaning “in any case.”  For example: I’ll take whatever money you have or There is no point whatever in your resisting because I have a gun.

Contemporary usage of the one-word whatever, following a question and usually accompanied by a rolling of the eyes and/or a shrug of the shoulders, is adverbial in this sense, with an added connotation of “why are you bothering me with this?”

What ever became of the Bard of Buffalo Bayou?  Whatever.

            Mitt Romney on the Campaign Trail

           

            I’m not concerned about the poor,

            They have a safety net.           

            Ten thousand dollars says that you’re

            Not going to take my bet.

           

            I really like it when I’m able

            To fire the people who

            Repair my cars, install my cable,

            Or give me a shampoo.

            You’re out of work? Now, listen—shucks,

            I, too, am unemployed.

            Of course, two hundred million bucks

            Does help to fill the void.

           

            My income taxes cause me pains—

            Almost fifteen percent!

            I try to save my capital gains

            (But some of them I spent).

            I do get speakers’ fees and such

            At places I appear,

            But they don’t amount to much—

            Just half–a-mill last year.

           

            Corporations?  They are people,

            Just like me and you.

            Just wait—that Democratic Veep’ll

            Claim that isn’t true.

           

            My love of sports goes to extremes,

            I love to cheer and yell,

            I follow almost all the teams

            And know their owners well.

            How often do I wish again,

            That I could catch a flight

            To see those trees in Michigan—

            They’re just the perfect height.

            Home ownership? We need much more

            To make our nation thrive,

            Why, I myself own three or four—

            Or possibly it’s five.

           

            Obamacare’s abomination,

            I really do abhor it,

            With just one tiny reservation:

            In my state I was for it.

            For the price of gas we owe great thanks

            To Democrats who tax:

            It makes it hard to fill the tanks

            Of all my Cadillacs.

            On my lawn crew, I told their foreman,

            Hire no illegal alien.

            After all, I am a Mormon—

            And not Episcopalian.

            They say I’m like an Etch-a-Sketch,

            But, heck, that’s just plain nutty,

            When there’s a fact I have to stretch,

            I’m more like Silly Putty.

            As for that dog, atop my car

            To Canada—I swear,

            It really wasn’t all that far,

            And the dog just loves fresh air.

           

            You won’t find more, if you should delve

            Much deeper into Romney.

            Just vote for me in 2012,

            And I mean Anno Domini.    
    
   

What the Funk?

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, currently has an exhibit of artifacts relating to the Egyptian King Tutankhamun, or Tut, as his pals called him, or Funky Tut, as Steve Martin referred to him in that eponymous golden oldie “King Tut.”  What is a “funky Tut”?  What, for that matter, is “funk”? 

As it turns out, there are two kinds of funk. One means “a state of extreme fear” or “depression,” either emotional or economic. This funk derives from the Flemish word fonck (“agitation, distress”) and was first noted in English as Oxford slang around 1743.  This kind of funk is sometimes known as a “blue funk”—and has nothing to do with Martin’s views of Tut.   (A 14^th-century Middle English but now obsolete funk meant a “spark.”)

Funky Tut is more than likely a reference to the kind of funk derived from the dialectical French funquer (“to give off smoke”), which was applied to certain popular music in the early 20^th century.  Funky, meaning “having a strong, offensive odor, like smoke or cheese” has been in use since 1784.

Another view says that funky has semantic roots in the Kikongo word lu-fuki, meaning “bad body odor,” which was emblematic of work of great integrity, requiring great exertion, i.e. perspiration.  Those who were lu-fuki (or funky) were energetic, positive, sweaty achievers with B.O.

As applied to African-American jazz music, around the turn of the century, funky (and the back-formation noun funk) referred to an honest, earthy, back-to-basics sound. The word later evolved to mean “groovy, mellow, deeply felt, sexy, rhythmic, syncopated, danceable,” always with a strong carnal quality.  By the 1950s, the term was being applied more broadly to jazz music, especially soul and rhythm-and-blues.

Time Magazine in 1954 referred to “funky, authentic, swinging blues, down to earth, smelling of earth.” Funky evolved further in the 1960s when it acquired the broad sense of “stylish, authentic, eccentric, or excellent.”

So there you have King Tut—groovy, mellow, sexy, stylish, and probably, after all these thousands of years, smelling pretty bad, as well.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has emerged from his funk—more of a puce funk than a blue one—to deposit these words in a funky little pile:

            What ever became of the great Guy Lombardo?

            By now he’d be older by far than Don Pardo.

            His music was sweet,

            Just like cream of wheat,

            And earned him pots full of big-buck, super-star 
                        dough.

            But now the hot music we hear is called crunk,

            Not too long ago we all knew it as funk,

            It may be progressing,

            But not with my blessing--

               I’m afraid it’s becoming electronic junk.

With the Greatest Respect…

Some astute person with one foot on each side of the English Channel (try that sometime and see how comfortable it is) has published a translation guide that may explain why the British chose to exit the European Union: it was all a big misunderstanding. Try as they might, the Brits and their Continental colleagues—or the Americans, for that matter—just don’t speak the same language. This is clear from the following examples:

What the British say:           What the British mean:            What the European hears:

“I hear what you say.”            “I disagree and do not               “He is sympathetic to my      

                                                wish to discuss it further.”          point of view.”

“With the greatest                   “You are an idiot.”                     “He greatly respects me."

respect….”                                                                                              

“That’s not bad.”                     “That’s bad.”                             “That’s good.”

“Quite good.”                           “A bit disappointing.”               “Very good.”

“Very interesting.”                    “That is clearly nonsense.”       “He is very interested."

“I almost agree.”                       “I do not agree at all.”              “He is close to         

                                                                                                      agreement.”

“That is a brave proposal.”       “You are insane.”                      “He thinks I’m courageous.”

“Oh, incidentally…”                   “This is the main point.”           “This is not important.”

“I’m sure it’s my fault.”              “It’s your fault.”                         “Why does he think it's his 

                                                                                                      fault?" 

“I’ll bear it in mind.”                  “I have forgotten it already.”       “He’ll almost certainly do it.”

No one has ever understood what the Bard of Buffalo Bayou is saying, and that is not surprising.

            With the greatest respect, I hear what you say,

            I’ll bear it in mind, very good.

            That is not bad, I almost agree…

            How I hope that I’m misunderstood!

                                   

One, Two, Twee

Recently I've seen the word twee in print several times, describing art works, fashion, movies, and even an individual or two. I don’t recall ever coming across this word prior to about ten years ago, although the Online Etymological Dictionary says it’s been around since 1905. Twee doesn’t even make it into Webster’s New International Second Edition, published in 1949, except as a variation of tweeze.

Twee means “cute, dainty, quaint, precious, mawkish, affected, sentimental, and cloying.” More widely used by Brits than Yanks, it usually is a derogatory term, referring to something that is sweet to the point of being nauseating. You can probably think of things you regard as twee (and they may not be the same things I would categorize in that way). For me, what comes to mind as twee are the use of baby talk especially among adults, or overly affected speech with obsessively precise enunciation, or excessive niceties in one’s manners, such as extending the little finger when drinking a cup of coffee or tea. 

Twee has a specialized use to refer to pop music of a simple, sweet kind—also known as “cuddlecore,” “cutie pop,” and “jangle pop” and performed, or so I understand, by such artistes as Velvet Underground, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Orange Juice, Stone Roses, Dinosaur Jr., The Field Mice, Razor Cuts, Belle and Sebastian, and C86.

Linguists suggest the etymology of twee is from a mispronunciation of sweet in baby talk—but by which baby in what place and under what circumstances they do not say.

Whatever you might say about the Bard of Buffalo Bayou, you probably would not call him twee. Nauseating, to be sure, but not twee.

                        I’m sure that I shall never see

                        A word as sickening as twee.

                        A word whose cloying lips will pucker

                        And plant a kiss upon some sucker

                        Who is sufficiently unwary

                        To welcome twee’s vocabulary,

                        Like tummy, blankie, pee-pee, poo-poo,

                        Din-din, jammies, num-nums, choo-choo—

                        Those words are precious, mawkish, quaint,                                   

                        But on my lips is what they ain’t.

                        Some folks think twee is mighty cute,

                        But I’m not one who gives a hoot.

Eponymic Earls

If you happen to be playing bridge after the Kentucky Derby, while eating a sandwich, wearing your new cardigan underneath your chesterfield, and idly admiring an orrery, when you are suddenly dealt a yarborough—then you are making use of six eponyms derived from British earldoms. As if you didn’t already know, an eponym (from the Greek epi meaning “attached to” and onyma meaning “name”) is a person for whom something is named.

Six British earls gave their names to the items above.  In case you’re wondering who they are, please read on.

Edward Stanley (1752-1834), 12^th Earl of Derby, founder of the horse race known in his honor as the English (now Epsom) Derby, a name adopted by other annual horse races.  He can brag of a double-whammy in the eponym department: in 1888 he visited America wearing a rounded, rigid hat known in England as a bowler (from its manufacturer, the London hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler), and Americans named the style of hat as a tribute to the Earl.

John Montagu (1718-1792), the 4^th Earl of Sandwich, ordered his dinner meat brought to him between two slices of bread so that he could continue playing cribbage without getting the cards greasy (as he would have done by eating the meat with his fingers, as was his custom). He didn’t really invent the sandwich—people had been eating meat between pieces of bread for millennia—but his friends soon started referring to food served in that manner as a “sandwich.”

James Thomas Brudnell (1797-1868), 7^th Earl of Cardigan, was a British cavalry officer for whom a sweater that buttons in the front was named.  No one seems to know what the Earl’s connection to the sweater was, but so what, who cares?

           

An overcoat with concealed buttons and a fur collar is known as a chesterfield, named for one of the 19^th-century Earls of Chesterfield, but nobody seems to know which one or why.

Charles Boyle (1676-1731), the fourth Earl of Orrery, commissioned a model of the solar system, including the sun, the moon, the earth and all the other known planets in approximate scale to each other and mechanized to make orbital movements.  This device, often seen in science museums, is known as an orrery.

Charles Anderson Wosley (1809-1897), the 2^nd Earl of Yarborough, was a betting man, and he offered £1000 to anyone who was able to deal a bridge hand containing no card higher than a nine—provided the opponent paid the Earl  £1 each time he failed to achieve such a hand.  The Earl was on solid ground, since the odds of getting such a hand (in a fair deal, of course) are 1827 to 1. Such a hand has since been known as a yarborough, in the Earl’s honor.

Nothing has ever been named for the Bard of Buffalo Bayou, but that has not stopped him from resolutely turning out metrical slop like the following:

            There was a worried little eponym—

            Who always feared someone would step on him.

            He longed, instead, be a toponym,

            And then, he said, there’d be no stoppin’ him.

        

Great Granma!

The Cuban government has a new upscale housing project it’s calling Project Granma.  No, it's not a retirement home for grandmothers, but rather fancy apartments for certain loyal government officials. So what’s Granma got to do with it?

Granma, a variant spelling of Grandma, was the yacht that was used to carry 82 Cuban Revolutionists from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 to try to overthrow the Batista regime. A 60-foot cabin cruiser built to accommodate 12 people, it was named by the original American owner as a tribute to his grandmother. The yacht was bought from the Schuylkill Products Company by a Mexican gun dealer named Antonio “The Friend” del Conde, who was secretly acting for Fidel Castro.

Although the coup was not successful until a few years later, Granma has become an icon of the Cuban Revolution.  The official daily newspaper of the Cuban Communist Central Committee is also called Granma.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou did not have a grandma or grandpa since he was found as an infant hidden in some bulrushes wrapped in an old copy of Variety.  He has been “on” ever since, but it is not clear on what.

            When I’d snorkel and I’d scuba

            In the waters down by Cuba,

            I'd drop in on a bar quite near Havana,

            Where I’d sip a Cuba Libre

            Like a very thirsty zebra,

            And sometimes munch an overripe banana.

           

            One day I met a young barista,

            Who urged me to go see Batista,

            But the people had decided to rebel,           

            And in el jefe’s chair was Castro,

            So from way back on the last row,

            I stood and shouted out, “Hola, Fidel!”

            “Viva Marx!” the rebels shouted,

            And since I felt those Marxists doubted

            Me, I tried to act just like a gaucho.

            “Viva Marx!” I answered proudly,

            Then I added, very loudly:

            “Three cheers for Harpo, Chico, and for Groucho!” 

           

"It Was A Dark and Stormy Night"

I have been remiss in the past few years in my reportage of the winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This is an annual competition sponsored by San Jose State University’s English Department to honor bad opening sentences of imaginary novels. It was inspired by the legendary bad opening sentence of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford:  

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

As the department's website reports, in keeping with the gravitas, high seriousness, and general bignitude of the contest, the grand prize winner is awarded a pittance--which some reports indicate might be as much as $150.

To make up for lost time, here are the winners of the past three years’ competitions, beginning with 2016:

“Even from the hall, the overpowering stench told me the dingy caramel glow in his office would be from a ten-thousand-cigarette layer of nicotine baked on a naked bulb hanging from a frayed wire in the center of a likely cracked and water-stained ceiling, but I was broke, he was cheap, and I had to find her.”

                                                            —William "Barry" Brockett, Tallahassee, FL

“Seeing how the victim's body, or what remained of it, was wedged between the grill of the Peterbilt 389 and the bumper of the 2008 Cadillac Escalade EXT, officer ‘Dirk’ Dirksen wondered why reporters always used the phrase ‘sandwiched’ to describe such a scene since there was nothing appetizing about it, but still, he thought, they might have a point because some of this would probably end up on the front of his shirt.”

                                                            —Joel Phillips, West Trenton, NJ

“When the dead moose floated into view the famished crew cheered – this had to mean land! – but Captain Walgrove, flinty-eyed and clear headed thanks to the starvation cleanse in progress, gave fateful orders to remain on the original course and await the appearance of a second and confirming moose.”

                                                            — Betsy Dorfman, Bainbridge Island, WA

That old Bard of Buffalo Bayou has no trouble in writing bad opening lines for his verse, not to mention all that lines that follow:

            A fellow they called Bulwer-Lytton

            Wrote the worst books that ever were written,

                 But he said, “What the hell,

                 As long as they sell,

            I’ll be top of the heap here in Britain.”

Traduttore Traditore

The Italian expression traduttore traditore may be translated as “the translator is a traitor”—meaning that any translation is always a betrayal of the true meaning of the original. This may be true, but it’s also a troublesome fact that some words pose particular challenges when you try to express them in other than their original languages.

Today Translations, a British company, has conducted a survey of translators worldwide, asking them the most difficult words they have encountered. Jurga Zilinskiene, head of the company, points out that while it may be easy enough to find a definition in a dictionary, true translation requires conveying the cultural experience and social context into a different language.

On that basis, the translators who were surveyed chose these as the ten words with the most elusive meanings:

ilunga  - Tshiluba for a person who will forgive any abuse for the first time and tolerate it a second time--but never a third time. Tshiluba is a Bantu language spoken in southeastern Congo and Zaire.

shlimaz - Yiddish for a chronically unlucky person.

radioukacz - Polish for a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain.

naa - Japanese word only used in the Kansai area of Japan, to express agreement or emphasis.

altahmam  - Arabic for a kind of deep sadness.

gezellig - Dutch for cosy.

saudade - Portuguese for a certain type of longing.

selathirupavar - Tamil for a certain type of truancy.

pochemuchka - Russian for a person who asks a lot of questions.

klloshar -Albanian for loser.

What’s that?  Oh, you don’t speak Tshiluba or Tamil and you want to know the most untranslatable words in English. Okay, here’s what the experts said—but you have to provide the definitions yourself:

 plenipotentiary

 gobbledegook

 serendipity

 poppycock

 googly (British)

 Spam

 whimsy

 bumf (British)

 chuffed (British)

 kitsch 

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou’s works have never been translated into any language, including English.

            Some say it’s debatable

            If words are translatable

            When they're untransmittable,

            Or just not admittable

            Because they’re inscrutable,

            Or maybe unsuitable.

            So since they’re not quotable

            And won’t ever be notable,

            Because they’re not writable

            Or not even citable,

            It may be regrettable,

            But they’re just forgettable.

Getting Right Down to It

In the coming cataclysmic Armageddon—or should I say Presidential election?—it will soon be time to get down to the nitty-gritty. The nitty-gritty is defined as “essential, practical, basic details—often harsh or unpleasant.” And where, you ask, does the phrase originate?

It has been around since the 1930s, but gained great currency in the 1990s after President Bush 41, in a classic malapropism at a country music awards show, referred to the “Nitty Ditty Nitty Gritty Great Bird,” instead of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. (In doing so, Mr. Bush rivaled John Travolta’s introduction of Idina Menzel at the Oscar awards as Adele Dazeem.)

Consult a dictionary and you will find that nitty-gritty’s etymology falls back on that favorite explanation: “origin unknown.” The term has etymologists stumped—but not for lack of trying.

It has been alleged that it started as a derogatory allusion to the scant belongings of enslaved Africans carried on British ships in the 18^th century, with “nitty” perhaps a euphemism for another n-word.  But there is absolutely no evidence for this theory and the phrase does not appear in print until the 1930s.

The Online Etymological Dictionary suggests it has something to do with “grits,” i.e. finely ground corn, and was a term used by African-American jazz musicians. Other word sleuths point to the “nit” reference to head lice, without much logical justification. Still others, perhaps under the influence of President Bush’s favorite band, think it stems somehow from the qualities of dirt or gravel, and there have been attempts to link the phrase to the kind of stubborn determination known as “true grit” and to the lamebrained person we call a “nitwit.” None of these ideas can be substantiated.

Copyright records from 1937 show a song called “The Nitty Gritty Dance,” by Arthur Harrington Gibbs. The term pops up in Alice Childress’ 1956 novel Like One of the Family and in the phrase “nitty-gritty gator” (“a low-life dude”) in a description of hepcat slang in The Daily Journal of Commerce, Texas, in June of 1956.

But it was not until the 1960s that the term came into general usage, popularized by “The Nitty Gritty,” a song by Lincoln Chase, recorded by Shirley Ellis and later by Gladys Knight and the Pips. In the lyrics of that song,

            Everybody's asking what the nitty gritty,
            The nitty gritty's anything you want it to be,
            Just stir it up from the soul,
            And when it starts to fizz,
            That's what the nitty gritty is.

According to the blogger Azizi Powell, “getting right down to the nitty-gritty” in a dance context means “ to be real in the way that you dance–to put aside fake societal notions of being stiff, or refined, or too controlled in the way you move….to get funky.”

That may be all we ever know about “nitty-gritty”—and all we need to know.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou doesn’t mind getting down to the nitty, but he prefers to have nothing to do with the gritty.

                       

            There once was an old etymologist

            Who longed to be a philologist,

                        When he failed in that quest,

                        He said, “Still I’m blessed,

            For at least I’m not a proctologist.”