The Other Tiger

Christopher Hitchens’s October Atlantic essay “Zuckerman Undone,” on Philip Roth’s new novel, Exit Ghost, is devastating. It’s one of those reviews that’s fun to read because the writer is so inventive in coming up with rips—the highbrow Yo Mama joke.

This one is a little different from most, though. Often, at the end of this sort of review, you leave feeling amused but not much wiser. It’s candy. (Read Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of Star Wars Episode III.) But Hitchens’s review tells us something about Roth’s oeuvre, cultural moment, and technique. One of the main purposes of criticism is to do just this, but it’s much harder to spin strands of useful knowledge when all you’ve got to work with is hay.

Which two (non-identically named) stops on Chicago’s el rhyme?

Now that it’s football season again, you’ve probably seen those fan signs that fans in Louisiana wave for either LSU’s college or New Orleans’s NFL team: “Geaux Tigers” and “Geaux Saints.”

I don’t want to try to make the losing argument that poster-board fan signs are the height of typographical, linguistic, or sensical correctness. (Some of the tortured initialisms that fans create out of the names of whatever station is broadcasting the game are particularly sense-strained, especially on Fox, with that pesky X. I’d love to see a sign that went whole-hog into the surrealist camp with something like “Full Of X-rays.”) And the sign is indeed a fairly clever way of gesturing to the region’s French heritage. But I have a small quibble.

French pronunciation can nearly always be predicted by spelling. (Lundi is one exception. Anyone else know another?) When a g is followed by e or i, it makes the sound of the central consonant in the English word vision. Followed by a, o, or u, it’s the first sound in goat. By the orthographically consistent rules of French, geaux would be pronounced the way you might guess to pronounce zho.

There’s an easy solution, though. To preserve a /g/ sound when an e or i simply must follow, the orthographic practice is to insert a u. Gueaux Saints!

There’s a category of words with two pairs of double letters where people have trouble remembering both pairs are there. The three cardinal examples of this category are guerrilla, accommodate, and millennium, all of which seem to be more often misspelled than correctly spelled in casual usage, and all of which are disproportionately in error in professional publications.

The impulse to millenium instead of millennium is illustrative. Most people who know both the words centennial and millennium would recognize after a moment’s thought that the enni- fragment in the two is identical—which would make it hard to write millenium. Nevertheless, the impulse is strong enough that The Millenium Hilton was labeled thus, in ten-foot tall letters, on a building just east of the former World Trade Center.

I wonder whether there’s a sort of subconscious switch in word-storage in which there’s an on-off setting for “double letter,” but not a sliding scale that could accommodate 0-1-2-plus. That is, when the average Joe goes to spell guerrilla, maybe the proverbial inner homunculus tells him, “double letter,” and Joe gleefully pats himself on the back for remembering and writes guerilla.

(There must be something to the commonness of the parts, though. For example, no one misspells commonness, with its easy common + -ness.)

Linguists talk about this kind of language setting for languages as a whole. A switch tells a speaker whether prepositions come before or after their objects. A switch tells whether verb objects come before or after the verbs. Could the same thing happen with individual words in a lexicon?

If so, creating an artificial category in one’s brain that stores these exceptions might override the erroneous default setting. File guerrilla there, dear reader, along with a cappella and misspell and appellation and Andy Pettitte.

So remember this post. Maybe it’ll save you some embarrassment (!).

Today, according to the formulation I learned in elementary school, is my golden birthday. That is, today I turn 28, on June 28th. Everyone has one golden birthday in his life, occurring when his age becomes the cardinal equivalent of the date on which he was born.

In telling people about the red-letterness of this day, I’ve found that they don’t know what I’m talking about. Or they think I’m turning 50. This leads me to believe that this is one of those things, enculturated during childhood, that seems natural to the knower and bizarre to others.

Another example: Virtually everyone outside of my family who has ever heard me use the phrase a horse apiece, which is equivalent to “six of one, half a dozen of the other,” has found it strange. (The origin of this phrase continues to elude me. The best I found on the Internet was a blog post that suggested it’s a term from the game of bar dice, largely played in southeast Wisconsin.)

Another: My grandfather used the phrase to hack one’s watch to mean “to set one’s watch.”

Another: In Minnesota, where I grew up, mint chocolate chip ice cream is white. The green version that goes by that term in most other places is called “peppermint bon bon.”

Another: The structure that goes by the term parking garage in most of the country is still a parking ramp in my default lexicon. I believe this is also regional.

Even though they sometimes inhibit communication, however briefly, these things are fun. It’s a shame that greater mobility and mass communications are likely to wither them away.

A circle of loose associations: The number 11 is made up of two ones. If you unvoice the final consonant, you get the word once. If you pronounce that English word as Spanish, you have the word once, which means 11!

Can anyone come up with another such confection?

[Addendum: Apologies to the sticklers who notice the apostrophe flipped the wrong way in this post’s title. WordPress doesn’t appear to be intelligent enough to do otherwise. Or I’m not intelligent enough to figure out how.]

[Addendum 2: Where would I be without designers? It’s fixed.]

From a March 2, 1944, New York Times story about a murder:

Detectives who questioned the man said the motive for the crime was anger at Miss Reardon, who had reported that Fisher failed to sweep properly under her desk. This report went to James Berkely, verger of the Cathedral, who scolded the handyman.

Firewood the Death Weapon

The weapon was a piece of firewood, the police added, and after hitting Miss Reardon over the head with it, according to his confession, Fisher dragged the body to the basement pit and stuffed it under some steam pipes. He used her dress and a part of her underwear to wipe up bloodstains in the library.

Detectives said the victim was not criminally assaulted.

Well, that’s a relief. For a while there I thought he had assaulted her with a piece of firewood.

To those who think newspapers are too prudish today: It could be worse.

If you read and liked Marilynne Robinson’s essay on Richard Dawkins in Harper’s, which I recommended some months ago, you’ll love Terry Eagleton on Dawkins in The London Review of Books. A highlight:

He [Dawkins] seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.

Excerpts from the article on the society debut of Ethel Roosevelt, Teddy’s daughter, as published in The New York Times:

Modest and retiring to the verge of bashfulness, of the simplest tastes, and enjoying keenly the most innocent pastimes—a really “old-fashioned girl” in the good sense . . .

In personal appearance she is attractive because of that winsome, vivacious spontaneity which is so evidently natural and ever magnetic . . .

Of medium height, with charmingly rounded figure . . .

“. . . to me the most wonderful thing about Miss Roosevelt is her great blue eyes. To be sure, she has a way of squinting at times, like the President; in some other particulars her temperament resembles his . . .”

Only recently one caller discovered her sitting upon the floor in a dark corner, hiding from the son of the President-elect, Charlie Taft—disheveled, but happy in the sport with the youngsters. Incidents like this, at an age when many young women would consider such playfulness beneath their dignity, only go to show the sweet, unspoiled girlishness which is so large a part of her charm.

It’s common to compare the size of things to football fields, especially when the comparer wants to make whatever’s being measured seem large. For example, “The National Cathedral is 1 2/3 football fields long,”—docent-led tour material. I have two quibbles with this practice, one small and one large.

The small quibble is that the yardstick used, so to speak, isn’t the right length. The National Cathedral quotation, for example, uses 300 feet (100 yards) as the length of a football field, as compared to the Cathedral’s length of 517 feet. The distance from goal line to goal line on a football field is indeed 100 yards, but each end zone is 10 yards long, and the end zones are part of the field of play. A football field is 360 feet (120 yards) long.

The large quibble is that football fields aren’t that big, really. Take these other measures of length. One quarter of a lap around a standard high school track: 110 yards. The standard distance between two numbered streets in Manhattan: 88 yards. The height of the tallest building in Delaware, the Chase Manhattan Centre in Wilmington: 110 yards. Approximate distance golf pros can hit a pitching wedge: 120 yards.

The problem is that when you talk about football fields, people think about football stadiums, which are enormous. But when you remove the fans, stands, and hot dog vendors, the actual playing area is fairly modest in size. At about 1.25 acres, it’d be a largish suburban lawn, but nothing to wow the Joneses with.