"Oh, but they're weird and they're wonderful."

Sang Elton John in "Bennie and the Jets"...



... and I'm just seeing and being surprised that "weird and wonderful" is, officially (according to the OED) a colloquial phrase. A couple posts down, I got embroiled in the subject of what "weird" means and what's up with the people who overuse the word "weird," and I ran into this other subject that needed its own post.

The colloquial phrase "weird and wonderful"  means  — according to the unlinkable OED  — "marvellous in a strange or eccentric way; both remarkable and peculiar or unfathomable; exotic, outlandish. Frequently ironical or derogatory."

1886 O. Wilde in Pall Mall Gaz. 1 Feb. 5/1 There is psychology of a weird and wonderful kind.
1908 T. E. Lawrence Let. 9 Aug. in Home Lett. (1954) 70 Their food is weird and wonderful....
1978 S. Naipaul North of South ii. vi. 227 A weird and wonderful place is Jo'burg.

This is news to me. I don't think it's a colloquial phrase in America. Or maybe it is, and I just hadn't noticed.

From the NYT in just this past year: "a weird and wonderful coincidence," "her weird and wonderful new play," "Weird and wonderful plants are tumbling into gardens," "weird and wonderful obsession with her kids’ effluvia," "weird and wonderful supporting characters, including a sex-crazed elderly woman next-door neighbor,"  "an ordinary childhood that... could only come across as weird and wonderful," "a skin-contact, amphora-aged zibibbo from South Australia that’s as weird and wonderful as wine gets," etc.

That's how I tested colloquialness, and I guess the answer is... well, what makes a colloquial phrase? You can't have separate dictionary entries for every set of words that get put together with some frequency. Is "wild and wonderful" a colloquial phrase? Is "wonder of wonders"? Is "colloquial phrase" a colloquial phrase?

"Charles Krauthammer, who died on June 21, wrote one of the articles about terrorism that has most influenced me..."

"... and possibly one of the most influential articles to me on any topic. It came out when I was 20 years old, in the middle of college, forming my views and writing style. I've read it over and over since then, and it's hard to describe the impact this short piece has had on me. In one paragraph, Krauthammer simply quotes another great writer, V.S. Naipaul, who died on August 11. The quotes are from before September 11. Naipaul later said: 'I saw this calamity coming, but no one was interested.'"

Writes my son John, linking to the Krauthammer article "The Enemy Is Not Islam. It Is Nihilism" (Weekly Standard). From that article, dated October 22, 2001:

The distinguished Indian writer and now Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, who has chronicled the Islamic world in two books ("Among the Believers" and "Beyond Belief"), recently warned (in a public talk in Melbourne before the World Trade Center attack), "We are within reach of great nihilistic forces that have undone civilization." In places like Afghanistan, "religion has been turned by some into a kind of nihilism, where people wish to destroy themselves and destroy their past and their culture . . . to be pure. They are enraged about the world and they wish to pull it down." This kind of fury and fanaticism is unappeasable. It knows no social, economic, or political solution. "You cannot converge with this [position] because it holds that your life is worthless and your beliefs are criminal and should be extirpated."...

This worship of death and destruction is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike any since the Nazis burned books, then art, then whole peoples. Goebbels would have marvelled at the recruitment tape for al Qaeda, a two-hour orgy of blood and death: image after image of brutalized Muslims shown in various poses of victimization, followed by glorious images of desecration of the infidel--mutilated American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the USS Cole, mangled bodies at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Throughout, the soundtrack endlessly repeats the refrain "with blood, with blood, with blood." Bin Laden appears on the tape to counsel that "the love of this world is wrong. You should love the other world... die in the right cause and go to the other world."...

"I felt it as artificial, that sitting down to write a book."

"And that is a feeling that is with me still, all these years later, at the start of a book—I am speaking of an imaginative work. There is no precise theme or story that is with me. Many things are with me; I write the artificial, self-conscious beginnings of many books; until finally some true impulse—the one I have been working toward—possesses me, and I sail away on my year’s labor. And that is mysterious still—that out of artifice one should touch and stir up what is deepest in one’s soul, one’s heart, one’s memory.... Artificial though that novel form is, with its simplifications and distortions, its artificial scenes, and its idea of experience as a crisis that has to be resolved before life resumes its even course. I am describing, very roughly, the feeling of artificiality which was with me at the very beginning, when I was trying to write and wondering what part of my experience could be made to fit the form—wondering, in fact, in the most insidious way, how I could adapt or falsify my experience to make it fit the grand form.... 'I had an impression'—[Somerset Maugham wrote about Thomas Hardy] —'that the real man, to his death unknown and lonely, was a wraith that went a silent way unseen between the writer of his books and the man who led his life, and smiled with ironical detachment at the two puppets….'"

From "On Being a Writer" by V.S. Naipaul from the April 23, 1987 issue of The New York Review of Books. (Naipaul died yesterday.)

"Naipaul’s sympathy for the political and emotional fragility of his characters did not extend, alas, to his wife."

"His brutally fulfilling affair with Margaret Gooding—'I wished to possess her as soon as I saw her,' he tells his biographer—gradually voided a passionless marriage. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, husband and wife began to spend more and more time apart, as Naipaul travelled on ceaseless journalistic assignments. Naipaul’s sister Savi suggests that once [Naipaul's wife] Pat realized that she would not have children, and that her husband was committedly unfaithful, she lost her confidence as a woman. This is an extraordinary biography because Patrick French has had access both to Pat’s diaries and to searching interviews with Naipaul, whose candor is formidable: as always, one feels that while Naipaul may often be wrong, he is rarely untruthful, and, indeed, that he is likely to uncover twenty truths on the path to error. Pat’s diaries make for painful reading: 'I felt assaulted but I could not defend myself.' 'He has been increasingly frenzied and sadly, from my point of view, hating and abusing me.' Pat died of breast cancer in 1996. 'It could be said that I had killed her,' Naipaul tells French. 'It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.'"

From "Wounder And Wounded/V. S. Naipaul’s empire" by James Wood, originally published in The New Yorker in 2008, featured on The New Yorker front page today because Naipaul died yesterday.

ADDED: I'm interested in the notion that a woman has "confidence as a woman." It suggests that there is a special sort of confidence situated in sexuality, fertility, and motherhood and that a woman without that sort of confidence is not much of anything at all or will feel like nothing much and be unable to muster up any alternative reason for being.

"He continued to write novels even after declaring the form a 19th-century relic, no longer able to capture the complexities of the contemporary world...."

"Mr. Naipaul’s writing about Africa drew criticism from many who were unsettled by his portraits of Africans.... He was also criticized for his unflattering portrayals of women.... He visited Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia in the late 1970s, when they were witnessing a rise in political power and Islamic fundamentalism. His first travelogue, 'Among the Believers,' was published in 1981. A sequel, 'Beyond Belief,' followed in 1998. He started his inquiry, he later explained, by asking simple questions: To what extent had 'people who lock themselves away in belief shut themselves away from the active, busy world?' 'To what extent without knowing it' were they 'parasitic on that world'? And why did they have 'no thinkers to point out to them where their thoughts and their passion had led them?' The books are grounded in Mr. Naipaul’s belief that Islamic societies lead to tyranny, which he essentially attributed to a flaw in Islam, that it 'offered no political or practical solution.' 'It offered only the faith,' he wrote. These books were harshly criticized...."

From "V.S. Naipaul, Who Explored Colonialism Through Unsparing Books, Dies at 85" (NYT).