Donging echoically.

You could go your whole life without using a word, then one day, it seems like the perfect word, and you use it for the first time. That happened to me yesterday, with "echoically": "Trump responds echoically, then darkly...."

Trump dealt with something Musk had said by echoing it, then quickly inserted what he wanted to say, which was quite different. The segue was easily accomplished. Listening to the audio, you might not notice how little he gave back to Musk and how abruptly he changed the subject, but it jumped out at me, reading the transcript.

The first commenter, Mike (MJB Wolf) said, "Dig that word 'echoically' and don't recall ever encountering it before." 

Yeah, I don't recall ever encountering it before either, so why did it strike me as the perfect word? That's odd, no? How often do you use a word and know you're using it for the first time and have no memory of anyone else using it either? 

I checked the NYT archive, to see if the old newspaper had used "echoically" much at all over the years. I found exactly one article, an "On Language" column by William Safire from October 1991, that dealt with the expression "get it" in the context of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. 

"The times they are a-changin'," said Representative Patricia Schroeder, recalling a 1964 Bob Dylan song as she marched on the Senate, "and the boys here don't get it on this issue."

Here's how "echoically" arose in that context:

Several terms lost their taboo as a result of the televised hearings. One was dong, as in "Long Dong Silver," the stage name of a pornographic film "actor" of the late 70's and early 80's....

The penis has been called the dong since the 1920's, first cited by American Speech magazine in 1930; it appeared in John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, "The Grapes of Wrath," with Tom Joad saying to the one-eyed man in the auto junkyard, "Tell 'em ya dong's growed sence you los' your eye." In the 40's, it was used as a mild vulgarism, not as mild as weenie , similar to wang ; dong was considered coarse, but not quite as shocking as other old slang terms. 

The word was coined, though not in this sense, by Edward Lear for a character in an 1877 lyric, "The Dong with a luminous nose." Because the penis (Latin for "tail") can be compared to a tongue of a bell, the ringing of which is echoically expressed as "ding-dong," it has been called both a dingus and a dong.

The only good way to proceed at this point is with Lear's dong, whatever it is: 

Slowly it wander, — pauses, — creeps, —
Anon it sparkles, — flashes and leaps;
And ever as onward it gleaming goes
A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws.
And those who watch at that midnight hour
From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower,
Cry, as the wild light passes along, —
‘The Dong! — the Dong!
‘The wandering Dong through the forest goes!
‘The Dong! the Dong!
‘The Dong with a luminous Nose!’

Many more verses to Lear's poem. You can read it here. 

What possessed William Safire to write "echoically" rather than "onomatopoeically"? Ortographobia? 

But Safire used "onomatopoeically" in a 1987 column about cicadas, and I am delighted because it so happens that cicadas are providing the soundtrack to my life right now. 

Safire wrote:

The Latin name cicada is echoic, which means ''imitative of the sound made by the thing it denotes,'' sometimes called onomatopoeic by the crowd that prefers longer Greek derivations. (Greek-speakers will call the same insect the tettix, because that's the way the call of the cicada or tree cricket sounded to ancient Athenian suburbanites; that ticking sound hardly resembles the whirring buzz of the Latin term. Perhaps an unpopular Brood-10 leader once said: ''Tettix, tettix doesn't attract females for me anymore — what if I try cicada?'') 

I don't know why the word is classified in dictionaries as echoic. Today the noise made by the insect does not sound like si-KAY-da to me; the disturbance squawk sounds like BRA-A-ACK; the congregational song, BUZZ-AYE-EE, and the mating call I am reluctant to commit to print lest the unsuspecting reader say it aloud and be swarmed over....

In the tribe of invertebrate animals called arthropods, there is a class labeled Insecta, within which we find an order called Homoptera. Entomologists know that the key element of this name is pter, from the Greek pteron, meaning ''wing''; this type of winged insect is of an order with sucking mouthparts, which is why thoughtful teen-agers would affix the bumper stickers to their cars as a useful mnemonic. (Entomon is Greek for ''insect''; etymos is Greek for ''true,'' particularly ''the literal meaning according to origin.'' An annoyed etymologist says, ''Buzz off, entomologist,'' when he wants to be onomatopoeically offensive.)

This cicada — a female? — was not annoyed but waiting very patiently on our house yesterday: