Lest We Forget

 

Lest we all lose sight of the sole reason this blog sprang into life, I find it incumbent upon myself to remind the few readers who are hanging on by their droopy eyelids that it’s all done as a subliminal means of promoting my new book, Words Gone Wild, which is to be published in June by Skyhorse Publishing Co. Okay, that’s enough of subliminal techniques—advance orders are now being taken at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and other web sites yet unknown.

As just a sample of the verbal delights that await the perspicacious purchaser of this slim but meaty volume, try these on for size:

Puns:

            Out of every two dozen squid, there's always one who doesn't know how to swim away quickly--but twenty-three squid do.

Naughty limericks:                        

            At the beach a gent from Toledo            

            Ogled a gal in a Speedo.

            He liked both her suit,           

            Which he thought was quite cute,

            And the way it aroused his libido.

Tom Swifties:

            “I’ll try again to learn this code,” Tom said remorsefully.

Tongue-Twisters:

            Bats might bite gnats by night, but note gnats might not bite nits or mites.

WGW (as it is affectionately known in certain esoteric literary circles) also contains a profusion (some would say a glut) of clerihews, anagrams, palindromes, mondegreens, feghoots, crosswords, cryptic and acrostic puzzles, light verse that beggars description, lipograms, spoonerisms, malapropisms, double entendres, euphemisms, rhopalics, and I don’t know what-all. If you love words, or if you need a highly effective fly-swatter (place the insect between two pages and slam shut with force), this volume is for you.

Although fundamentally opposed to all commercial enterprises, the Bard of Buffalo Bayou was persuaded (by a handful of salted nuts and a glass of cheap Australian Chardonnay) to add his dubious talents to the cause.  Following is one of the Bard’s promotional verses, which I hasten to assure you, does not appear in the book I am hawking:

            Words Gone Wild is bound to thrive,

            It’s witty, it’s fun—it’s almost alive!

            It’s a whimsical book,

            And the principal hook

            Is that it’s just twenty-two ninety-five.

‘When You Got It, Flaunt It!’

Stop the presses! No, no, in this case, keep them rolling. It is rare to encounter the verbs flaunt and flout in the same newspaper article—and, moreover, used correctly. But such was the case in a New York Times piece by Lawrence Sheets.  Writing about the Russian-Georgian conflict, he observed, “As if to flaunt their impunity…the Russians refused to let the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conduct observation patrols…”  Later Mr. Sheets insisted that “Moscow is openly flouting the cease-fire agreement it signed.…”

As if you didn’t already know, flaunt from Old Norse flanan (“to run around”) means to “display ostentatiously,” as Max Bialystock shouts to the world in The Producers: “That’s it, baby, when you got it, flaunt it!” Flout  (from Middle English flouten, “to play the flute”) means to “treat with contempt,” as Ross complains to Duncan in Macbeth:  “Norwegian banners flout the sky.”

But wait!  The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary says a secondary meaning of flaunt is “to treat contemptuously” (i.e. “to flout”), and it lists authors no less distinguished than Louis Untermeyer, Marchette Chute,  and R. T. Blackburn—writing in the Bulletin of the American Association of University Profesors, to boot!—as evidence.  The lexicographer adds, however, that if you use flaunt in that way, people may think you’re wrong.

What to do?  What to do?  The flat-footed Bard of Buffalo Bayou flounced in, fluttered a bit, and fluted as follows:

    Flaunt or flout?
    Flout or flaunt?
    Day in, day out,
    They tease and taunt.

    But I’m undaunted
    And never doubted
    They're often flaunted
    But seldom flouted.

Meryl Streep Can Make You Weep

Some of the customers of this blog have demanded to know exactly what a clerihew is, inasmuch as there have been some verses in earlier blogs characterized by that name. Okay: a clerihew is a verse form invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956), an English journalist and author.  As a bored 16-year-old in chemistry class—and who hasn’t been?—he idly doodled these lines about the subject of that day’s lecture:

     Sir Humphry Davy
     Was not fond of gravy.
     He lived in the odium
     Of having discovered sodium.

Once he got in the habit of writing these bits of doggerel, he couldn’t stop (you know how that is), and in 1905, under the name of E. Clerihew, he published Biography for Beginners. It was a whole blooming book of four-line verses, in AABB rhyme scheme, in which the first line contained the name of a famous person, the second line rhymed with the name, and the last two lines made a whimsical comment about that person.  One of the terrific things about writing clerihews is that they don’t have to conform to metrical regularity, and you can toss around your dactyls and anapests with impunity.

Fuller details about E. C. Bentley and more samples than you would really like of actual clerihews (both his and mine) will be found in Words Gone Wild, a book-like object that will be on sale at your neighborhood icehouse next spring.  Meanwhile, please try to subsist on this latter-day clerihew, fetched up from the bottomless trunk of the Bard of Buffalo Bayou.

    Meryl Streep
    Can make you weep,
    Especially when you see a
    Movie like Mamma Mia!