This is found art — wordplay that appears by chance.
I was doing a word search in the OED, looking up "bedevil," because it had come up in an article I just blogged. The NYT writer crafted this sentence: "Was [Trump] upset that [Melania] had single-handedly thrust this story that had so bedeviled him back onto front pages around the globe?" (Don't get me started on "thrust" and "globe.")
That blog post ends with a quote from Lord Byron, and I see the OED entry for "bedevil" also has a quote from Lord Byron — worrying about critics of "my poor, gentle, unresisting Muse, whom they have already so be-deviled with their ungodly ribaldry."
Have I been casually summoning up The Devil over the years by using this word that I like? Checking the 22-year blog archive, I see I've quoted it a few times and I've used it twice. Both times came in 2014. Once, in July, on the topic of ObamaCare:
The commenter is female or so I surmise from the name Hannah. The malapropism — "vivacious" for "voracious" — amused me. I guess she got overly enthused that her boy — despite the burden of being a boy — was reading, really reading, reading a lot. It's hard to picture reading being done vivaciously, but I enjoyed trying. And "voracious reading" is trite. We ought to stop saying it. I'm tired of the eating metaphor for reading, and it's not as though I can picture people eating books. Vivacious reading is at least something new.
And please don't try to tell me that "vivacious reader" isn't wrong because Ken Follett is quoted (somewhere) saying "Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer." Follett originally used the old trite expression "voracious reader" and somebody else screwed up copying the quote.
I'm reading Trump, complaining about football, at Truth Social: "I can’t watch the new NFL Kickoff. Like many others, I just turn my head. Who has the right to make such a change? So disparaging to the game! The original was Big Time, Strong, Glamorous, and Exciting. The ridiculous new Kickoff Rule takes away the prestige and power of the game. I hope College Football doesn’t follow suit!"
Glamorous.... the most powerful man in the world cries out for the old-time macho brutal collision of giant male bodies and what he's missing is the glamor.
I'm looking up "glamorous," and I like, for Trump's use of the word, the OED's second definition: "Attractive or appealing in an exciting way, esp. because out of the ordinary or suggestive of a more colourful or thrilling way of life." One of the sample quotes is from the 1960 novel, "The Custard Boys": "The cinema, the newspapers and the war books conditioned us to look upon war as glamorous and exciting."
Perhaps somewhere in Trump's fervid mind there's the notion that MAGA really means "Make America Glamorous Again."
I don't like the expression "let rip." It's too reminiscent of "rip one." But let's read this OED entry for "to let rip." which is defined as "to act or proceed without restraint; (also) to speak violently," which I don't for one minute believe that Kate Winslet did, even as she chided women for — whatever — lip injections and Ozempic.
The first of the historical quotes comes from California in 1857 and gives some insight into the court system:
The OED traces "oomph" — "The quality of being exciting, energetic, or sexually attractive; energy, vigour" — back to 1937: "With actors, the 'it' quality has to do with their visual personality—sex appeal, magnetism, or whatever you care to call it. Back of the camera, we refer to the ingredient as 'umphh.'" The etymology is "An imitative or expressive formation." I presume what it is imitative of is sexual intercourse.
Meanwhile, you know Cy Twombly — pencil-scribbly things like this:
If the collector sensed oomph and the oomph is now gone — it's like the spark gone out of a love affair — how can he convey his anguish to the judge? His anguish, if any. Who's to believe it ever existed? How can you insure something so ineffable?
St. Félix published an article — in The New Yorker — about the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes foofaraw. I'd skipped that article — I was Sweeneyed out by the time it appeared — but I see from the excerpt at Instapundit that it contained lines like "Interestingly, breasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man’s hunger for ass." The desire is the object of desire? That's defective writing, and The New Yorker got its lofty reputation in part because of its punctilious word editing. But St. Félix is in The New Yorker, thus making her statements conspicuous and goofier than they would be somewhere else, like X (or a blog).
Hey! It says "Black man’s hunger for ass" in The New Yorker.
The screencappers of X plunged into St. Félix's X account, homing in on posts with the words "hate" and "white people." Go to the Instapundit link to see what they found.
What calls me is that new word: "tricknological." The adjective is, apparently, formed from the word "Tricknology," which is in the OED and traced back to 1938. It's marked "U.S. disparaging." It means:
"...has been careful to treat it as legitimate precedent since. Gorsuch usually sides with religious litigants but also wrote Bostock, the most important gay rights decision in years, and Roberts raised eyebrows by joining him. Most people who know Barrett and Kavanaugh believe them to have zero appetite for reopening this issue. Trump isn't pushing for it. Granting cert takes four votes, overturning a case five. I don't see [Kim] Davis getting up even to three on the question of whether to overturn Obergefell. Each time I write a version of this prediction I get called rude names, as if I were consciously misleading people for some fell purpose. But as someone with real rights of my own at stake, I'm just trying to give you my honest reading. We'll probably know within three months whether the Court will hear Davis's case and if so on what question presented. Save your anger till then."
Should we "save [our] anger" if we don't want Obergefell overruled? Even if that's unlikely, now might be a good time to demonstrate how much it would hurt, before things escalate.
Meanwhile, I'm interested in Olson's dipping into the archaic to write "I get called rude names, as if I were consciously misleading people for some fell purpose." Fell! Why not "evil" or "nefarious"?
One answer is that he was influenced by the last syllable of "Obergefell." I don't think one would do that consciously.
I'd guess Olson felt motivated to sound deeply literary. Some historical examples of the adjectival "fell" from the OED):
1747
I will risque all consequences, said the fell wretch.
S. Richardson, Clarissa
1812
And earth from fellest foemen purge.
Lord Byron, Childe Harold
1813
His fell design.
W. Scott, Rokeby
1847
Even the fell Furies are appeased.
R. W. Emerson, Poems
"The U2 frontman, who recently celebrated his 65th birthday, has no regrets keeping the award that he received in January for his humanitarian work in spite of claims that he was morally wrong to do so due to the former president’s track record over Gaza."
According to the OED, "plonker" has meant "A foolish, inept, or contemptible person" since 1955. John Lennon muttered it on TV in 1964. "Plonker" also means "penis." Published examples go back to the 1920s: "Last night I lay in bed and pulled my plonker." I was amused to find that in the OED, but there it was. An older meaning of the word is "Something large or substantial of its kind." You can see how one thing leads to another.
Are words constructed out of "-maniac" really deserving of dictionary entries? Perhaps, in the case of "sonnettomaniac," it was valuable to nudge people to spell it the way it was spelled in the time when people really were sonnettomaniacs.
The OED proffers a quote from 2011: "After the decline of the previous century's 'sonnettomania,' the popularity of the sonnet would never scale such lofty heights again in the course of the twentieth century."
"While they are far more fleeting than Trump’s brandishing of grievances, they have at times been unmistakable. 'There has always been this issue of resentment with Biden. He resented [former president Barack] Obama and crew for supplanting him in 2008 and for telling him not to run in [2016], and he has many other resentments,' said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian who recently published a book on the relationship between presidents and CEOs. 'But can you imagine how resentful he is of the shifting narratives and the way he’s been pushed aside and manipulated and not treated fairly. So yeah, I can see him being resentful.'"
Lots to talk about there, but I want to focus on "brandishing" — Trump’s brandishing of grievances. This is an article about Biden, his resentfulness, but Trump must be inserted, and he must be worse. Biden has fleeting flashes of well-founded anger, but Trump has grievances, and he brandishes them. So Biden briefly displays resentment but Trump waves his resentment around like a weapon.
Thoreau published that sentence in 1854 — it's in "Walden" — but somehow, 170 years later, his word/phrase is the official Word of the Year. I'm just going to guess that Thoreau would consider choosing a word of the year to be a rotten-brain activity.
Is this word-of-the-year-choosing "Oxford" really the same as the Oxford English Dictionary? The NYT says it's "the publisher of the august Oxford English Dictionary," but I look up the word in the OED, and I get:
I don't think I've ever used the word "hobby" to refer to anything I do. I don't relate to the idea of a "hobby," even though I like to do what I want, what interests me, and I have almost nothing but free time. I don't think of this blog as a hobby and might be annoyed if someone I knew called it that. But maybe I would be better off if I did something that genuinely deserved the label "hobby." I don't consider walking in the woods a hobby. Or reading. Maybe photographing the sunrise every day is a hobby, but this is the first time I've connected it with that word, which, to my ear, sounds diminishing.
So let's check out these 6 things. 1. Collecting animal figurines, 2. Playing video games (why not count watching TV?!), 3. Paraclimbing (climbing for persons with disabilities (I don't think sports are "hobbies")), 4. Boxing (another sport), 5. Making pizza from scratch (cooking can be a hobby), 6. Walking the dog and paying attention to the plants and animals that interest the dog (I'm intrigued by the idea of paying attention as a hobby).
Well, it's Labor Day, and I like thinking of my own personal freedom from labor. I'm not decrepit enough to deserve the word "retired" — if you want to think about words. That has to do with withdrawing or receding, retreating, or falling back. I'm reading the OED. Maybe paying attention to words and looking them up in the OED is my hobby.
Did you know that the original meaning of "hobby" is "A small or middle-sized horse; an ambling or pacing horse; a pony"? That goes back to the 1400s. The meaning we know — which begins in the early 1800s — comes from the idea of riding a toy horse — a "hobby-horse." It's "A favourite occupation or topic, pursued merely for the amusement or interest that it affords, and which is compared to the riding of a toy horse...; an individual pursuit to which a person is devoted (in the speaker's opinion) out of proportion to its real importance."
When do you look at your own activities and judge your interest in them to be out of proportion to their "real" importance? It seems that if you're going to call something your "hobby," you're embracing the idea that your love of it seems foolish when viewed from the outside. By the same token, if you decline to use the word "hobby" for what you do out of interest and love, you are deprioritizing what other people think.
Wrote W.H. Auden in the poem "Moon Landing," published in The New Yorker September 6, 1969. Here's the facsimile page for subscribers. But anyone can read it here.
I ran across it just now because, writing about a perfectly healthy woman who'd undergone assisted suicide, I'd stumbled across a 2011 piece in The New Yorker that brought up the word "meh," which naturally sent me to the OED.
According to its etymology page, "meh" probably came from the Yiddish word "me" — which means "be it as it may, so-so" — and, we're told, "It is unclear whether there is any direct connection with (earlier) mneh."
The OED's quote for "mneh" was what you see in the post title, W.H. Auden, in 1969, poetically dumping on the trip to the moon.
"Another lifetime of waiting. By 9 a.m., the clouds have broken, and my mother is already dressed, her hair in curlers. She is sitting on the bed, looking at her computer. My sister and I suggest a walk. My mother declines: 'I’m doing emails. Just unsubscribing from Politico.' 'Mom!' We splutter. 'We can do that! It’s your last day on earth!' Which it is, and so we desist. Around noon, we go down to the hotel bar. My mother orders a whiskey-soda, ice cream, and a glass of Barolo. She enjoys the wine so much that I suggest she could just not go through with it and stay in this exact hotel and drink herself into oblivion for the rest of her life. Like Bartleby, she’d prefer not to."
"She focused on exactly where to put her foot, her hand, alongside her fellow climbers. Then, peripherally to her right, she saw an orange flash. 'I see this sunrise that I will never forget as long as I live,' she reflected. 'The colors — it is just red, and then it is orange, and then it is yellow, and then the blue is coming. It was so incredibly spiritual for me, and beautiful.'"
So begins a NYT article that is not about going all the way to the top of Mount Everest or about taking the tiny trouble of gazing at a sunrise. It's about tomorrow's solar eclipse and the elusive human capacity to achieve awe:
“The whole thing is very awe-ful. A-w-e,” she said, meaning full of awe.
Ah, yes. Thanks for the sledgehammering. We might not have figured it out, just as we might not have experienced the spiritual dimension of the sunrise unless we were hanging from a rope on the side of Mt. Everest.
I didn't watch it live for the same reason I didn't watch "Dragnet" when it was on at 9 p.m. on Thursdays in 1954. It was past my bedtime. I was 3.
I'm 73 — 8 years younger than Biden — and I'm in the Central Time Zone. He gave that speech at age 81 at 10 p.m. at night and went on until midnight, and I see he was feisty....
I wasn't feisty. I was lying down in my sleep position — a complicated arrangement involving 4 down pillows — and planning to more or less listen, listen until I entered the world of dreams — a place not necessarily more pleasant that the House chamber (last night I woke up screaming at nonexistent crocodiles) — but a place where I sojourn for 7 hours rebuilding the strength of a body that naturally rises at 4 a.m., maybe 3.
As I say, I am 73. I am not feisty at 9 at night and certainly not at midnight. If something were important enough though — stand here in front of millions and read this teleprompter in a dramatic, masterful style — I'd do it properly. I wouldn't yell irascibly. You wouldn't have to shoot me with drugs. In fact, that would be dangerously risky. I might behave erratically. I might yell irascibly. Yell irascibly for 2 hours? What would people think? Is the press on my side? Give me the drugs then! The press is on my side! They'll say I was "feisty."
Calling an old person "feisty" is like calling an African American person "articulate"....
We know what you mean. You're revealing that you have a stereotype and you're giving this person credit for setting himself apart from it.
But I was embracing the old-person stereotype, embracing my pillows, drifting off to sleep, and not really appreciating the irascible tone of voice. But I got to sleep. I've slept through the night. I did not wake up screaming. I'm well rested and perfectly lucid — I think! — composing these remarks before setting out to commune with the sunrise.
I knew I would have the video of the full speech. What's so special about watching it live? Looking up what was on TV on Thursday at 9 in 1954 — so I could write "Dragnet" in the first sentence of this post — I happened upon this:
Despite hit filmed programs such as I Love Lucy, both William S. Paley of CBS and David Sarnoff of NBC were said to be determined to keep most programming on their networks live. Filmed programs were said to be inferior to the spontaneous nature of live television.
Take away the magic of live television, and what is the State of the Union address? We are perfectly free to watch the entire thing on YouTube the next day. Or never. Or in sliced out snippets — a highlight reel or a collection of verbal slips or biggest applause lines. Or we can just read about it. Did anything happen? Did some grieving mother hear her daughter's name said aloud? Was the name precisely correctly pronounced? Did the President hold up a button? Did he recharge his campaign?
Was he feisty?
***
"Feisty," the OED tells us, is based on the familiar word "fist." It's a punch-in-the-nose concept. Fisty. Definition: "Aggressive, excitable, touchy." We're told it's American slang, originally dialect, and the OED has the quotes to prove it:
1913 Feisty means when a feller's allers wigglin' about, wantin' ever'body to see him, like a kid when the preacher comes.
H. Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders 94
1926
That-there feisty bay mare jumped straight upwards and broke the tongue outen the plow.
E. M. Roberts, Time of Man 152
1965
Luther gets a little feisty after a few drinks, and he began to argue with him.
‘D. Shannon’, Death-bringers (1966) xiii. 162
1968
He couldn't shake her loose—she hung on to his arm, feisty as a terrier.
J. Potts, Trash Stealer xiii. 148
***
Post-sunrise opinion: The morning after, it is possible to see that the SOTU was a campaign speech. Every morning, there was a campaign speech yesterday.
In the comments: I'm getting a lot of pushback on the etymology of "feisty." It's not the fist that is the hand in an aggressive clench? It's a dog, you say? Well, let's go back to the OED. I see I made an assumption. What I was seeing at the OED entry "feisty" was:
I had not clicked on the boldface "fist." But if I had, I would not have gone to the entry for the kind of "fist" that is the clenched hand. I'd have gone to a separate entry, with 3 things together: a fart, a puffball fungus, and a dog:
1. A breaking wind, a foul smell, stink. Obsolete....
2. The fungus usually known as puff-ball.... Obsolete....
3. U.S. dialect. A small dog....
The etymology pointed us to #3, so — no matter how much we might enjoy thinking "feisty" means farty — we must accept that the comparison is to a small dog. Yappy, hopping around, over-excited. Still farty though. You see the connection. It's always the dog.
That article is a decade old. I dyggyd it up this morning because — waiting for the blizzard — I wondered why the past tense of "snow" was not "snown," like the way the past tense of "show" is, at least sometimes, "shown."
"Folk," meaning people in general, goes back to Old English.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces it back as far as 999: "Þa elkede man fram dæge to dæge, & swencte þæt earme folc þe on ðam scipon lagon." Chaucer used it, in Middle English, c1405, that's surprisingly readable: "Vp on thise steedes, grete and whyte Ther seten folk."
And here's Alexander Hamilton, with American terseness: "There were Folks killed in 1723." That made me think of Ilhan Omar's "Some people did something."
IN THE COMMENTS: James K said:
Incidentally, the Alexander Hamilton who said "There were Folks killed in 1723" is not the Alexander Hamilton who co-wrote the Federalist Papers. It was some other guy with the same name.
And I see at the link that the other Alexander Hamilton was not an American, but a Scot. So that must be Scottish terseness. And I am retrospectively less reminded of Ilhan Omar.
ADDED: I was going to create a new tag for Musk's new AI project, but typing in the letters, I saw that I already had a tag "grok" — lower case "g" — so I just used that, even though I knew the existing posts with that tag had to be just about the word "grok." I wasn't going to create a second "grok" tag, with an upper case "G." I don't like tag proliferation, but — more important — I wanted to publish this post with the old tag so I could click on it and see what I'd done in the past.
I see that last January I used "grok" in a post about an article about thinking about thinking:
Hiking offers all the cardiovascular benefits of walking, but the uneven terrain does more to strengthen the leg and core muscles, which in turn boosts balance and stability, said Alicia Filley, a physical therapist outside Houston who helps train clients for outdoor excursions. It also generally burns more calories than walking.
I'm guessing there's no clear line between a walk and a hike, and it's more of a state of mind. Or does it all come down to whether you wear a backpack?
Every hiker should bring the 10 essentials, which include food and drink, first aid supplies, a map and compass and rain gear — all inside a supportive backpack with thick shoulder straps and a waist belt.
I thought I went hiking just about every day, but if it's all about the backpack, I never go hiking.
I liked this comment over there from Kjartan in Oslo:
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