A good crop of words

What the words ad-lib, bimbo, red ink, self-service, supersonic and white-collar have in common is that each is 100 years old this year. And none of them shows its age.

New words coined during the war years (1914-1918) were often influenced by the war (bomber, machine-gunner, enlistee, buck private, etc.) or the Russian Revolution (Bolshevist, Soviet, neo-marxism). And many of the words from that period now seem dated. Not so the majority of the words from 1919, which in many cases still sound relatively new, even modern, a century later.

I am using as a reference Sol Steinmetz's book There's a Word for It, which lists words originating in the years from 1900 to 2009.

Here are a few other words Steinmetz says were coined in 1919: air freight, aircraft carrier, airmail, barbital, culturalism, co-star, dunk, mandated, offline, overreact, skyway, snooty, synchronized, technocracy and tweenie.

Fifty years later, in 1969, there was another war going on, and some of the new words from that year reflect it: grunt, Vietnamization and weaponization, for example. And so many words from that year already seem dated, such as acid freak, jockette and Naderism.

By comparison 1919, with its return to peace and prosperity, seems to have been a banner year for new words.

The textbook conspiracy

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call away from the frankly interesting.

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson

On the television series Young Sheldon, Sheldon Cooper loves his textbooks and finds them fascinating when they aren't too far beneath him. But this is a comedy, and that's one of the gags. Do you remember any interesting textbooks from your own school days? I don't either.

Well, I take that back. I do recall being enthralled by those lessons on weather in my eighth-grade science book, so much so that I considered becoming a meteorologist for a time.  And my literature classes provided interesting  reading. Not always, of course. We did have to read Henry James. But usually the reading was well above the typical textbook.

I love it that Bill Bryson's memories of boring science textbooks inspired him to write A Short History of Nearly Everything, a science book that is anything but boring. He proves one can present a vast amount of information -- names, dates, scientific terms and all that -- without putting his readers to sleep. He accomplishes this with a breezy style and metaphors that seem to make even difficult concepts understandable. For example, when talking about exploring the ocean bottom in early submersibles with little visibility, he writes, "It's rather as if our firsthand experience of the surface world were based on the work of five guys exploring on garden tractors after dark."

Bryson ridicules scientists who couldn't write well enough to explain their discoveries to others, such as James Hutton, the 18th century geologist, who was "without rival when it came to understanding the mysterious slow processes that shaped the Earth." Yet, he adds, "Nearly every line he penned was an invitation to slumber." Hutton could have written geology textbooks.

So why are textbooks so dull? Partly it's because their authors want to pack them so full of information that they are willing to sacrifice readability for content. Mostly, however, it is probably because textbooks are written by specialists in particular fields, not by professional writers. There are scientists, historians and other academic types who can write very well, but they would rather write best-selling books than textbooks. Textbooks are usually left to the academics who know their stuff but can't explain it very well.

As for Bill Bryson, he is no scientist, just a gifted writer who devoted himself to learning enough about the various sciences and their histories to explain it in an entertaining way. His new book, The Body, is a sequel of sorts. He explains how the human body works in language we can understand.

Science for nonscientists

Sometimes the world just isn't ready for a good idea.

Bill Bryson,  A Short History of Nearly Everything

Reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, his 2003 history of science for readers who don't know beans about science, one gets the idea that the world isn't ready for a good idea not sometimes but rather most of the time. The science establishment was reluctant to accept the big bang theory, continental drift, evolution, the theory of relativity and just about every other major discovery in science you might think of. Scientists, like just about everyone else in the world, are slow to welcome change.

Those who propose new scientific theories often don't live long enough to see their theories accepted, and even then somebody else often gets the credit for them. Bryson does much to right some of these wrongs.

Much of his book is dated now. More than 15 years after its first publication, scientists have explored much deeper into the oceans and much farther into space than they had in 2003, to cite just two examples. But history books should be read more for what they say about the past than what they say about the present, and here the author excels even now.

The book covers just about every field of science you might think of, from astronomy to zoology, and does so with easy transitions from one to another. A background in any of these fields proves unnecessary to grasp what Bryson writes or to enjoy his narrative. As readers of his other books know well, he has gift for explaining things in a way that makes reading seem more like entertainment than work.

Again and again Bryson returns to what has been called the Goldilocks effect. That is, everything has been just right for life on Earth and for human existence. Not too close to the sun nor too far away. The right kind of orbit, the right kind of atmosphere, the right circumstances at just the right time. We are overdue for another ice age, he writes, and overdue for another catastrophic explosion of the Yellowstone volcano. You name it, we have been very fortunate, even blessed. Yet even in 2003 Bryson warned of negative human influences on the planet's climate and the survival of species. Such warnings have not been dated by the passage of time.

Reading A Short History of Nearly Everything proved to be a very good idea, even if it did take me a decade and a half to get around to it.

Jazz, dogies and the Irish

Most of the words that Daniel Cassidy attributes to Irish origins in How the Irish Invented Slang, reviewed here a few days ago, make perfect sense. Large numbers of Irish immigrants sailed to the United States to escape poverty and famine, and most of these settled in eastern urban areas such as New York City and Boston. And so words that sound like they could be urban slang, such as biddy and hokum, seem quite reasonable. But jazz and dogie (as in "Git Along Little Dogies")? How can they be Irish?

Jazz, after all, began in New Orleans, not New York or Boston, and it began with black musicians, not Irish musicians. For years some people thought of jazz as black music. It turns out, as Cassidy explains, jazz (sometimes spelled jaz or jass in the early days) was a name later attached to that form of music, but not by those who performed it. In fact, early jazz stars hated the term and declined to use it themselves. Some preferred calling it ragtime or Negro music. Duke Ellington once said that calling this music jazz was like calling it a "four-letter word." Still the name stuck. But where did it come from?

Cassidy says it comes from the Irish word teas, which is actually pronounced as j'ass or chass, he says. It can mean heat, passion, excitement or ardor, all feelings that might be generated by the music in question. A century ago the word was usually associated with sex, one reason why musicians frowned on the word and why authorities in New Orleans wanted to ban the music. It was Scoop Gleason, an Irish-American baseball writer, who popularized the word jazz in San Francisco. He was writing about baseball, but the word spread and soon became attached to the music that emerged from New Orleans.

And what of the word dogie? Google the words "Irish cowboys" and you will discover that there was a significant presence of Irishmen in the Old West, Billy the Kid among them. There is even a book called How the Irish Won the West. So Irish words certainly could have made their way into western slang.

As for dogie, Cassidy writes it stems from the Irish word dothoigthe, meaning hard to rear, hard to fatten or an orphan calf. An orphan calf would certainly be hard to fatten without a nursing mother. Every large herd in the West must have had some dogies, as well as some Irish cowboys.

Creating memories

Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy; photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.

Sally Mann, Hold Still

Sally Mann

For a woman whose career is taking photographs, Sally Mann, in her memoir Hold Still, makes a surprising number of negative comments about photography. One of these, that photography is "an invasive act,"  I mentioned in my review of the book two days ago. One the same page she writes that "many, I daresay even most, good pictures of people come to one degree or another at the expense of the subject."

Yet her sharpest comment, one she makes above in her prologue and repeats throughout her memoir, is that photos corrupt memories while creating their own.

"I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory," she writes. Later she says she remembers photos of her father more clearly than she remembers her father himself. "It isn't death that stole my father from me; it's the photographs." Still later she observes that photos "not only corrupt memory, they also have a troubling power to distort character and mislead posterity." That is, we can easily misjudge a person's character on the basis of that person's expression in a single photograph, something biographers are guilty of all the time. In fact, Mann does the same kind of thing herself when commenting on a photo of one of her ancestors.

So which is right, do photographs preserve memories or alter them? Both, I think. Yesterday I looked at a professional portrait taken when my son was about 18 months old. I recalled not that particular occasion but the studio where that and other portraits were taken during his childhood, the photographer, the clothes my son wore that day, his haircut and the way he looked as a child. Rather than distort my memory, the photo brought back memories that might otherwise stay forgotten.

Yet photos show just an instant in time, and that instant can be misleading. We don't always look the way we look when our photos are taken. We usually straighten our hair and our clothing before the shutter is snapped. Women check their makeup, men their flies. We stand up straight. We say cheese. Photos at their best show the ideal, not the reality.

Mann gives us an example in a photograph her father took of her she was a little girl. Something of a wild child by her own admission, she was "not the most willing subject," but her father finally got a photo of which he was proud and which he later framed for his office. It may have distorted reality, but only because one moment in time cannot represent every other moment in time.

Being as much into words as Mann is into photographs, I have often thought that words can distort reality in a way similar to what she says about pictures. Why do witnesses in a courtroom, or let's say an impeachment hearing, see the same thing so differently? It has much to do with their attitudes and world views, but it may also have something to do with how they first put what they observed into words. Afterward they may remember their words more distinctly that they remember the actual events they observed.

An invasive act

Photographer Sally Mann won both fame (or was it infamy?) and fortune with the publication in 1992 of Immediate Family, which included many photographs of her naked children. More recently (2015) she won a measure of literary fame with her excellent book Hold Still, a memoir filled with photographs taken by her and members of her family.

Over her creative life, Mann (now in her 70s) has moved from one major project to another, each taking several years. After photographing her young children, she moved on to landscapes, then black men. Later she focused her camera on dead bodies. If you think you are shocked by her nude children, wait until you get to the chapter showing photos of decaying corpses.

Mann describes herself as a rebellious child who refused to wear clothes and, when forced to put them on, refused to take them off, wearing them until they became filthy rags. She offers photos taken by her parents to prove both points. The rebellion continued into college and, indeed, until her marriage to Larry Mann. When they had children of their own, clothing was optional on their isolated farm, and neither she nor her children saw anything wrong with her photographs. Thus she says she was amazed when much of the reaction to Immediate Family was negative. It even led to stalkers and fears for her life. Yet the book continued to sell for years. The public, shocked or not, wanted to own her book.

She writes not just about her own life but about the lives of her parents and grandparents, and about Larry's parents, as well. These details, mostly discovered in attic trunks and supported by old photos also found there, are much more interesting than you might think. Her father, for example, was a physician, yet his abiding passions were art and death, usually art about death. Mann, when she got to the point in her career where she found herself photographing corpses, realized she had much more in common with her father than she once thought. "Am I suggesting here that I was born to redeem my father's lost artistic vision, the child destined to make the art that he was unable to make ...?," she asks. "Maybe I am, and maybe I was. God knows I have tried."

Mann returns again and again to her thoughts about the power and legitimacy of photographic art. At one point she describes photography as "an invasive act, a one-sided exercise of power, the implications of which, when considered in historical perspective, are unsettling." She is speaking here about her pictures of black men, but the words can apply as well to those of her children.

Irish slang

Long a puzzle to linguists is why the Irish, despite Ireland's proximity to England and the large number of Irish immigrants to the United States, have had so little influence on the English language. English has loads of French words, Spanish words, Latin words, Greek words, Arab words, Indian words and even American Indian words. So why so few Irish words other than the likes of shamrock and blarney?

David Cassidy, founder of the Irish Studies Program at New College in California, wondered the same thing until someone gave him an Irish dictionary. At first he wanted to just throw it away, but then he decided to cover a few words each night before going to sleep. The result of this unusual bedtime reading is How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads.

What he discovered was that numerous English words, mostly slang or originally slang, were introduced by the Irish, but so subtly that nobody seemed to notice. His 303-page book includes a dictionary of Irish-American vernacular more than 200 pages long. That's a lot of words, and includes such words and phases as drag race, jazz, poker, humdinger, hokum, lunch, so long, nincumpoop. scallawag and scam.

So how is it possible that so many trained linguists could have missed the Irish connection to so many words? Cassidy doesn't have much to say on this topic, but I have a few ideas:

1. Although linguists tend to learn a variety of different languages, Irish (or Gaelic) is not necessarily one of them. The number of people who speak it continues to shrink, so why bother?

2. If respected experts have previously concluded that the Irish language had little influence on English, later scholars may have been disinclined to challenge them on that question.

3. Irish words, as is true of many languages, don't look the way they are pronounced, at least not to English speakers. Ailteoir seaoilte, for example, doesn't look much like helter skelter, yet the pronunciation is similar, as are the meanings.

4. Most of these English slang terms were probably coined by second generation immigrants who learned Irish in their homes and English at school and on the streets. They took Irish words but gave them English pronunciations, often substituting existing English words that sounded like the Irish words.  Thus the Irish word anacal, meaning mercy or surrender, came to be uncle, as in "say uncle," when one boy gives up to a tougher boy.

"The Irish had invented slang by remembering the Irish language without knowing it," Cassidy writes.

In Robert L. Chapman's 1987 reference book American Slang, he traces the word guzzle to the French word gosier, meaning throat. Cassidy, on the other hand, says guzzle sprang from the Irish word gus oil, meaning "high-spirited, vigorous drinking." My vote goes to Cassidy.

Treasure hunt

Novelist Louis Bayard likes to build his fiction around real people (Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln), although in Mr. Timothy he imagines a famous fictional character, Tiny Tim, all grown up. In his 2010 effort, The School of Night, his focus rests on Thomas Harriot, a prominent 17th century English scientist who is little remembered today, although a recent biography may help.

Harriot knew William Shakespeare, at least according to the novel, and was a pal of Sir Walter Ralegh (the novel includes an interesting discussion of why this spelling is favored here over the more familiar Raleigh). Harriot, Ralegh and other prominent men of the day used to meet at night to discuss topics frowned upon when discussed during the day, such as atheism. This they called the School of Night, which surprisingly has relatively little to do with Bayard’s plot.

It seems that Harriot has left behind a treasure map so vague that it isn’t even clear if the treasure, whatever it might be, is in the United States (he had once visited the colonies) or England. People die, or in some cases appear to die, while scholars compete to find the prize.

Bayard shifts his story back and forth from 2009, where the treasure hunt takes place, to 1603, where we find Harriot discovering love with a servant girl almost as brilliant as he is.

My enthusiasm for Bayard’s novel seemed to rise and fall as the pages turned. Sometimes it seemed wonderfully clever and other times contrived.

First the character, then the story

Susan Isaacs

Last Saturday at the Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading in St. Petersburg, I had the opportunity to listen to novelist Susan Isaacs talk about writing. Now in her mid-70s, Isaacs said she was a bored housewife on Long Island, reading as many as four murder mysteries a week, when she decided she could write one too. The result, in 1978, was the bestseller Compromising Positions, which like several of her books features a bored housewife as its heroine.

I had a notebook with me, but I wrote down just four Susan Isaacs quotes from that 45-minute presentation. Here they are:

“The character comes first.”

Some other novelists may start with the plot, then find a character to put at its center. Isaacs said that doesn’t work for her. As an illustration she cited her latest novel Takes One to Know One, which she worked on for more than two years without having a main character she could believe in. She knew the plot was good, but while going through it one last time before submitting it for publication she realized she needed to find her character, then start over.

“It’s more like taking dictation than writing.”

This comes after she has her main character and her plot, of course. That’s the hard part for her. Then, once begun, the story seems to flow out of her mind and through her fingers as if she were only the medium. I have heard other novelists says much the same thing, while on the other side are those, like Ann Patchett, who maintain they are very much the captains of their ships, the source of everything that ends up on their pages.

I tend to think both points of view are correct. If the dictation theory were literally true, then anyone, including you and me, could write novels as good as anything both Isaacs and Patchett have written. But we don’t. Rather I think that when a good writer, like a good wood carver or a good clothing designer, has done good work often enough, good work comes to seem natural, requiring less thought, less effort than it once did.

“I write the story I most want to read and nobody else is kind enough to write.”

Isn’t that true of anyone who creates anything, whether it’s a book, a painting or a pot roast? We make what we like. If some else likes it, all the better. The first objective of artists is to please themselves.

“Knowing the ending is a comfort.”

Before writing the beginning of a novel, Isaacs said she knows how it will end. Or at least how it may end. Because she is only “taking dictation,” in her phrase, her novels don’t always end the way she she first imagined in her outline. But having an ending in mind when she begins gives her confidence that she will not, after working months on a book, find herself in a dead end.

How Popular Science has changed

I have before me four copies of Popular Science, a magazine founded in 1872, or almost 150 years ago. One is the July 1927 issue with an illustration of a speeding race car getting the checkered flag on the cover. The July 1937 cover shows what appears to be a tank on a safari, but instead of guns the occupants of the vehicle have a camera and a microphone aimed at a tiger. The December 1952 issue has a cover illustration showing the new 1953 Plymouth and Packard in the snow. Finally the fall 2019 issue has what looks to be a cross between a robot, a parking meter, one of those viewing devices sometimes available to tourists at overlooks and a periscope sticking out of the water and, perhaps, peering into the future. Some observations.

1. The cover price was 25 cents in 1927 but dropped to 15 cents in 1937, perhaps because of the Depression. In 1952 the magazine again cost 25 cents (although I paid $3.50 for it in an antique shop). The magazine, now a quarterly rather than a monthly, costs $7.99 today.

2. The current issue has a theme, "The Fringes of What We Know," unlike the earlier editions, which each focused on a variety of topics, from cars to home movies to bridges to how to make a porch lantern.

3. The size of the magazine has changed over the years. The 1927 and 1937 publications are both 8.5"-by-11.5" and relatively thin, just 120 pages in the case of the 1937 issue (again the Depression and reduction in advertising may be the reason). The 1952 issue is 6.75"-by-9.5", which was the size of the magazine for many years. This issue is 276 pages long and is loaded with advertising. The classified section alone fills 14 pages. Today there is hardly any classified advertising at all. The magazine measures  8"-by-10.5" and is 130 pages long.

4. Font sizes have also varied over the years. The largest body type, and thus easiest to read, is found in the 1952 issue, which also helps explains why it has more pages. Reading the other issues can be a challenge, especially the current edition, which often has black type on blue or brown backgrounds or white type on black or red backgrounds. The font size on sidebars is even smaller than it is for main articles.

5. Articles today are longer than they used to be, but they usually deal with real science. This fall's issue has articles on exploring the deepest parts of the world's oceans, the challenge of living on Mars, digging up the ruins of Pompeii and mirrored telescopes. Compare this with articles on traffic cops of other lands (1927), surfboarding (1937) and how the automatic choke works (1952). Whether making the magazine finally live up to its name makes it more interesting, and thus more popular, is another matter. I am not so sure. I doubt the magazine still has as much circulation as it once did, or it might still be a monthly.

6. Like so many magazines today, Popular Science has gone arty. While earlier generations of the publication had loads of photographs and vivid illustrations, the magazine today features few photos. Obscure drawings dominate the pages. Many of these seem like wasted space, and rather than luring me into the articles, which should be their purpose, they tend to scare me away.

The power of rhymes

I tell you, one reason I like rhyming poetry is it forces ideas you wouldn't have otherwise.

Kurt Vonnegut, interview, Pages magazine, November/December 2006

Kurt Vonnegut

Today we think of Kurt Vonnegut as a novelist, primarily as the author of Slaughterhouse-Five. Yet he was also, at various points in his career, a journalist for both newspapers and magazines,  an advertising copywriter, an essayist and a short story writer. He was also, as suggested by the above quotation, a poet and a writing teacher.

In The World's Strongest Librarian, which I recently read, there is a wonderful seven-line poem by Vonnegut, reprinted from Cat's Cradle. And yes, it rhymes. As for being a writing coach, he was a favorite instructor at the Iowa Writers Workshop back in the Sixties, and for decades afterward many of America's best writers remember his contribution to their careers. One of his strengths was that he could teach a variety of different kinds of writing

So it may be worth listening to his advice about the value of poetry that rhymes.

Until a century ago, most poetry rhymed. Then came free verse, and rhymes began to seem dated, something serious poets avoided. Rhymes were left to songwriters, writers of light verse and children's verse, and Robert Frost.

Yes, Frost continued to believe in rhymed poems after most of his contemporaries had left them behind. Perhaps he would have agreed with Vonnegut, that rhyming poetry "forces ideas you wouldn't have otherwise."

So what did Vonnegut mean? Writers of free verse may be too willing to settle for the first line that comes to mind, or at least the first line that sounds good to them. Writing poetry becomes like writing prose. It is just the expression of an idea, albeit in more beautiful language. A necessity to rhyme, however, closes some doors while opening others. A rhyming scheme can force poets toward ideas they might otherwise have never had, perhaps more beautiful and original than they might have at first imagined.

The illustration that comes to mind is not from Frost or any other serious rhyming poet but rather Ogden Nash, the mid-20th century master of light verse. Consider these lines from a poem called "The Voice of Experience."

There is none so irate and awkward
As a husband being Chautauquard.

Nash was famous for making up clever words or clever pronunciations of existing words. Yet an invention like Chautauquard, which makes perfect sense in the context of the poem, would have been pointless in free verse. The necessity of a rhyme forced creativity and gave us awkward and Chautauquard and, later in the same poem, vestryman and pedestriman.

If rhyming forced creativity like that for Nash, imagine what it must have done for Frost or Wordsworth.

An existential threat to comprehension

"... for here, as in the legal and medical professions the more impenetrable a man's speech, the higher the esteem in which he is held. Nothing would be more injurious to our reputation in this house, than for us to speak intelligibly."

Neal Stephenson, The System of the World

Several of the candidates for the Democrat presidential nomination have used the phrase "existential threat" in reference to climate change. As the word existential has to do with existence, it might seem appropriate in this context, yet it is mainly a philosophical term and is over the heads of most Americans, and I would assume most of the presidential candidates. Were I a reporter covering the campaign I would love to ask any of them what existential means, preferably while a camera is running.

Everyone understands the word threat, but what is an existential threat? Perhaps those lines spoken by a character in the Neal Stephenson novel The System of the World explain why this word is used as much as it is. It makes the speaker sound smart. The "more impenetrable a man's speech, the higher the esteem in which he is held."

Lawyers write in legalese partly to be more precise but also partly because lawyers will be required to interpret it.

For centuries Mass was conducted in Latin even though hardly any worshippers understood Latin. Until the Reformation, Bibles too were in Latin. Only the educated elite knew what was being said.

One reason for the lingo found in virtually every profession is that it separates those on the inside from those on the outside. The same is true of slang.

Because insurance agents, brokers, bankers, doctors and such speak in words we don't understand we tend to believe they are smarter, and thus trustworthy. That may, in fact, be true. But maybe not. If they were really smart they would be able to speak so that we can understand them.

Lost in Shanghai

A young American spy is sent to Shanghai with no more explicit assignment than to learn the language and culture and to wait and see what happens. So begins Charles McCarry's 2013 espionage thriller The Shanghai Factor.

Not much happens other than that some Chinese thugs toss him into a filthy river for no apparent reason. And he has an affair with a beautiful and mysterious young woman, who eventually disappears as suddenly as she appeared in the first place. Then he is offered a job with a big salary and little responsibility by the head of a large Chinese corporation.

Yet soon his job is terminated and our spy is back in the States, still being followed everywhere, as he was in Shanghai, by Chinese stalkers. Then he encounters a woman who is both a wonderful cook and a skilled assassin, a Chinese-American lawyer with whom he attended college and a Chinese spy who wants to recruit him as a double agent.

The tension builds gradually as the reader, like our young American spy, tries to figure out what is going on. And what exactly is his handler, with the unlikely name of Luther Burbank, trying to accomplish?

McCarry has been turning out first-rate spy novels for decades. His readers won't be disappointed with this one.