Argentine Nights: What You Will

 

Clown: “A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!”

Viola (disguised): “Nay, that’s certain. They that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton.

Twelfth Night, 3.1.11-115

A segment of the movie version of Twelfth Night

Wanton Words

Aren’t words great? You can do so much with them. You can find out so much about other people through them. You don’t have as many as you might think, so when all else fails, you can just make them up.

Words are a lot like the large and small rocks, stones, and pebbles you find along hilly paths or mountain trails, around lakes, on beaches. I picked up some beautiful rocks from the Homer Spit in Alaska. I put some in my suitcase to bring home and then had to get a porter to help me with my luggage.

Words can make you feel dressed for the Ball or bare you down to your birthday suit. Like they did recently to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. Words ultimately will out you along with the truth. 

 

Naked Words

The reason for the dominance of English in the world is the size of its vocabulary. Most estimates, including those in The Story of English, say that German contains 185,000 words and French a mere 100,000 . On June 10, the English language embraced its one-millionth “word.” A controversy ensued, which tells me that you can create a controversy out of anything. Whether it was the 500,000^th or the millionth, English still does the best job at revealing our minds.

The problem I have with this one-millionth word is that first, it’s not a word, and second, you can’t use it in Scrabble. It’s “Web 2.0.” Isn’t it a word plus some numbers? Or am I just out of the loop?

English has so many words because speakers have been not just willing, but eager, to take them in from everywhere and make them our own. And then make them up as needed.

Make-believe

A couple of words I made up a good while ago came to mind recently: refuctious and orificious.

Refuctious seemed just right to define my granddaughter’s “MINE” behavior I talked about in All Mine, All the Time MINE Parts I (June 10) and II (July 9). You can read those by clicking on Grandparents in the right column.

And orificious seemed just right when the Sanford scandal broke. “Officious” means overzealous, especially about petty stuff; self-important, intrusive, meddling. Mostly we know what “orifice” means.

Naked Truth

Those now-public love e-mails sent to Sanford’s Argentine squeeze are gagified (not a certified word yet but should be made the opposite of “beautified”):

You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that is so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light — but hey, that would be going into the sexual details we spoke of at the steakhouse at dinner — and unlike you I would never do that!

Sanford tries to say he loves her “being,” what he calls her rare attribute. “Above all else I love that inner beauty about you.” Bunk. I think “orificious” best suits what suits him.

As for outing himself, he is quoted as saying something like “I’m trying to fall in love with my wife again.” He’s outed as wanton as far as I’m concerned.

Languinerds in Love

Most languinerds agree that Shakespeare made up or re-introduced some 3,000 words into English. They also agree that his vocabulary totals between 25,000 and 29,000 words, depending on how you count different forms of the same word. Amazingly, this number is almost twice what the average college graduate has (12,000-15,000) and four or five times what the average high school graduate has (5,000-7,000).

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night alone (from which the introductory quote is taken), according to Book Scraper, the Bard used ten words he didn’t use in any of his other works. He used 19,710 words to tell this story.

So, here’s the score:

English language 1,000,000

Mark Sanford 0

 

The Story of English, third edition, is available at on-line book sellers.

 

 

 

 

 

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was made into a movie and is available on DVD. It is also on YouTube in segments. See the first segment by clicking on the video above which opens the post.

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Spittin' Grits,Twelfth Night,Shakespeare,English vocabulary,Argentine Nights,one-millioneth English word,refuctious,orificious,gagified,Mark Sanford,The Story of English

The Grits Grammar War in Three Part Hominy – Part III

. . .Continued from Part I, June 14, and Part II, June 29. Those posts can be accessed by clicking on “Grits” in the right column.

Still Tied

The tally on whether grits is or are is even. So, let’s keep going.

First, the Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual, 29^th edition, The Associated Press press, 1994: I’m quoting. “WORDS PLURAL IN FORM, SINGULAR IN MEANING: Some take singular verbs: measles, mumps, news. Others take plural verbs: grits, scissors.

Score one more for are.

Second, The Chicago Manual of Style (14^th edition) tells you to look it up in the dictionary. Well, o.k., cowards.

Dictionaries

Let’s start with Webster’s New World Dictionary for Young Readers, 1976. Grits is starred as being an American English word meaning “coarsely ground wheat or corn.”  They tag it plural.

One more for are.

Then there’s The American Heritage dic tion ar y of the English Language, 4^th edition, 2000: Grits (grits) pl.n. (used with a singular or plural verb)

One more for are and one more for is.

Grammar Books

We’ll start with a really EARLY one: English Grammar, G.P. Quackenbos (I am not making this up), New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871.

The Preface by the author is dated 1862, almost 10 years before publication. I guess the Civil War delayed publication or Quakenbos didn’t want to give the South any free PR:

In offering the present Grammar to the public, the author [never refer to yourself personally was a rule much in vogue in 1871] begs leave to refer to the work itself [his own book] as the best exponent of those peculiarities [his own views of grammar, as stated in the previous paragraph] by which it [this book] is to be approved or condemned. . . .

Oh BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, boring. I’ll put the rest in a footnote.

So, all that said, let’s see what Quackenbos says about grits. On page 43 of the yellowed, fragile pages, he says:

91. Singular Nouns. – The following nouns have no plural: --

3. The names of many articles sold by weight or measure; as, flax, lard, lead, cider, milk, pitch, rye.”

While he does NOT specifically cite grits, we in the South know grits were sold by weight or measure; he was from and lived in New York before the Civil War. If he didn’t even know grits existed, how could he have included them in his list?

Then he lists plural nouns that have no singular. Again, grits is/are not on his list, but greens are.

So, what can we conclude? Oh, hell, nothing. But for fun, we’ll give is a vote.

Finally, I turned to a grammar book that was revised in 1952 by Dr. James B. McMillan, who was my graduate school linguistics professor at The University of Alabama. The UA Press's building  is named for Dr. McMillan. If anyone knew, he knew. It’s Writing and Thinking, published by The Riverside Press in Cambridge. I call that credible.

In the section about subject/verb agreement, p. 111, McMillan says:

Use a singular verb with most nouns which are plural in form but singular in meaning.

Note: Many nouns with a plural form may be either singular or plural in meaning.

Almost always singular: economics, . . . mathematics, . . .measles, mumps, news. . . .

No grits. But, in contradiction to The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, if grits is like news, it’s singular. One more for is.

Is is up by one, I think. Like, who cares. This calls for a recipe.

Cajun Grits

Talk About Good!: Le Livre de la Cuisine de Lafayette (25^th Anniversary edition. Junior League of LaFayette 1992), like many Junior League cookbooks from across America, is an all-around good cookbook and has plenty of grits and hominy recipes for future posts. Here’s one:

Grits Bread (p. 118)

3 c. cooked grits                    4 beaten eggs

1 c. uncooked corn meal           milk as needed

1 Tbsp. baking powder               1 stick butter [Remember this ingredient.]

salt to taste                                       cooked sausage or bacon

Mix cooked grits, corn meal, baking powder, salt and eggs together. Add a small amount of milk, only enough for mixture to be a thick consistency. Cover bottom of baking pan with cooking oil, add mixture. Top with margarine [butter?] and sausage or bacon. Cook one hour at 400 degrees.            Mrs. Richard Williams

Remember the butter? The recipe says to cover the bottom of the baking pan with oil; then it says to top with margarine Where does 1 stick of butter go? One stick is a lot. So here’s my suggestion. Drop the oil and margarine. Use some of the butter for the bottom of the baking pan; then top the bread with butter; then butter the bread for toast with butter. Have we about used it all up?

Now it doesn’t make a damn whether grits IS or ARE. Eat ‘em and the war’s over.

FOOTNOTE: The Quackenbos book. Warning: It’s boring.

“Grammar has hitherto been a dry and hard subject to teach [as is this man’s writing]. It is here sought to make it [grammar] easy and interesting by combining practice with theory, example with precept, on a more liberal scale than has heretofore generally been done. . . .[Now I’m really eager to dig into the book’s details.]

Words are classified as parts of speech solely and exclusively according to their use in the sentence. This course does away with all arbitrary distinctions, and enables the pupil to classify words readily and correctly for himself.” [The italics are Quackenbos’s, not mine-o’s.]

Technorati Tags: Spittin' Grits,grits,AP Style Manual,The Chicago Manual of Style,Webster's New World Dictionary for Young Readers,The American Heritage Dictionary,G.P. Quakenbos,James B. McMillan,Talk About Good,Cajun grits

All Mine, All the Time, MINE – Part II

 

It’s gotten more refuctious. Yes, refuctious – one of the most appropriate words I’ve ever made up. It will be the subject of a later post.

If you remember from the Part I post of June 10, I argued that “MINE!” is a more awful attribute of the Terrible Twos than is “NO!” Now I REALLY stand by that conclusion.

How can anything this cute behave so refuctiously?

After posting that essay, I started looking for information on the question of where the belief that everything is theirs could have come from. Then I mulled over the question of how they put the word “MINE” in front of everything they saw. If she were being brought up by Paris Hilton, I could understand it.

First, I looked in my trusty toddler book What to Expect: The Toddler Years by Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi E. Murkoff, and Sandee E. Hathaway. If you’ve been pregnant, you likely have What to Expect when You’re Pregnant and know about the What To Expect series.

In “The Twenty-Second Month,” the authors have a brief section on Generosity Turned Selfish in response to a question from the mother of a female toddler:

Your daughter, like most children in their second year, has suddenly realized [the concept of ownership.] . . . Now she has a new sense of self and of ownership (These are mine!”).

It’s important to recognize that the impulse to guard what is hers (and occasionally grab what she wants to be hers) reflects not selfishness but a developmental stage. . . A willingness to share with her playmates – at least part of the time – probably won’t be forthcoming for at least a year.”

A YEAR? A Whole YEAR???

I resorted to pulling out my old Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, the 40^th Anniversary Edition revised and updated for the 1980s. The copyright information says that Dr. Spock came out with his first book in 1945. Amazing. He essentially says the same thing: “If your child at 2 doesn’t give up her possessions, she is behaving normally. Amazingly refuctious.

So the answer to the first part of the question sounds like, “It’s a developmental thing.” As they begin to define their sense of self, everything revolves around them. It’s “theirs.” I guess Paris Hilton is still two.

Just the other day I, my husband, and our granddaughter Joanna Leigh, 25 months old, went on an outing to Piggly Wiggly. We needed thick, overnight diapers, bananas, pears, yogurt, flavored water (for her nighttime ba-ba, the subject of yet another post), cat food, and come to think of it, not much for us except a frozen pizza for that night’s supper. There was a time I wouldn’t have considered eating a grocery-store pizza for supper, but toddlers change lives, especially grandparent’s lives when they are parenting that toddler.

We were at the check-out when I realized I needed vacuum cleaner bags. “7-B,” said the clerk. So I high-tailed it to the back left part of the store. Looking, looking, looking. Suddenly I hear high-pitched wails from the front of the store.

“Why doesn’t that mother do something,” I said out loud to the cleaning supplies. No vacuum bags. Anywhere. Crying from the front. Suddenly it hit me. “That’s Joanna Leigh!”

The LOOK

I high-tail it back to the front, just as my husband and the baby were headed to the door. She had real tears in her eyes and was still crying.

“What on Earth?” I asked.

“You won’t believe it,” my husband replied. “When I got the yogurt out of the buggy to put on the scanner, she started screaming ‘MINE, my yogurt. Mine’.”

“NO. Say it’s not so.” I looked back at the check-out clerk. She met my eye, with a LOOK.

It WAS so. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to ALL the mothers out there that I have given LOOKS to when their kids were acting up in public, and believe me, there have been many.

I think I have found the answer to the second part of the question. You have things to do, and I’ll have to study this. I will explain it as best I can in Part III.

Meanwhile, you pronounce refuctious thusly: re-fuc΄-shus.

Photo by Emory Kimbrough

 

Technorati Tags: What to Expect,Dr. Spock,Piggly Wiggly,made-up words,Spittin' Grits