Another year down, and another year without getting a tattoo. I’m aiming for a perfect record in this regard—an unblemished record, if you will. No body art, no body instructions, no body sight gags. No body mottos. No body quips. No body short stories.
I’m not kidding about the last one. A few years back, writer Shelley Jackson set out to inscribe a 2,095-word short story not on the head of a pin but on a head. A few heads. Human heads. 2,095 heads, by tattooing one word of the story on each one. I’ve been staring at this paragraph for about 20 minutes now, trying to resist the “writer’s blockhead” pun, but now that I’ve succumbed to it, let’s move on.
I ran across this project when I recently spotted a web photo slideshow displaying celebrity tattoos, and feeling overwhelmed by popular culture deprivation, I paged through idly. And stopped when I spotted Megan Fox. Not for the reason you suspect (well, not only for the reason you suspect), but because of the Shakespeare misquote she showed off: “We will all laugh at gilded butterflies” (actual quote from King Lear: “we’ll live,/ And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh/ At gilded butterflies”).
This literary skin game, ol’ untattooed me came to learn on further investigation (of literary tattoos, not of Megan Fox), is relatively popular and considerably well-chronicled. Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos brings examples of textual and illustrative body decoration based on books, poetry, songs, and other arts (ranging from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to To Kill a Mockingbird). Yuppie Punk has similar range, with a concentration on book illustrations (ranging from, yup, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Curious George to a portrait of William Faulkner). U.K.’s Guardian reports on the practice, using Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man as a theme—made even more appropriate when you spot one of the tattoos at Yuppie Punk: The original cover art of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
The idea of a Bradbury tat is the closest I’ll come to actually considering permanent body alteration, as Bradbury is one of two writers whose work deeply motivated my love of writing (the other is Thornton Wilder, but in this context, the motivation has no connection to tattoos on The Skin of Our Teeth). But I’ll remain tattoo-free, especially in the light of Shirley Dent’s thoughts in the Guardian:
What we seek to do when we cut literature into our flesh is to make something metaphysical physical. We take tattooed literature into ourselves in the most superficial of ways, inscribing rather than imbibing its significance. Put another way, lit tats really are only skin deep, vainglorious and shallow all at once.
To paraphrase, you can’t judge a book by its cover, and neither can you judge a book by who it covers.
I get bedazzled by online gadgets for their industry, their creativity, their fun, and their potential for wisecrackery. Mostly for the first three items but also for the fourth is my interest in ofaust.com (with a nod to one of the commenters at Language Log for the alert). Submit a bit of writing through the site’s interface, and O’Faust reports whose classic writing the text most closely resembles.
Fearing for the mockery such evaluations would send my way, I first tested O’Faust on the “Late for the Sky” blog perpetrated by my friend and fellow radio comedy writer JohnnyB (his song parodies are superb). JohnnyB’s “Come Fly With Me” installment was gauged to be most like Frank Baum, with 24% similarity. His “I Love LA” entry was gauged, with less confidence at 14%, to be most like Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Note to JohnnyB: my evaluation that you exist in your own fantasy world has been independently confirmed.) Oh, and a song parody. JohnnyB’s “Country (First) Rogue”—political parody of John Wasilla’s . . . um, John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads”—gets a nicely complimentary 65% similarity to Oscar Wilde.
Feeling then safe to apply the test to my own writing in this blog, I submitted “Chile is not chilly, chili is not chilly, and never the twain shall meet,” and was given a 23% nod to Edgar Allen Poe. Chills indeed. (As an aside, for the radio show JohnnyB and I wrote for, I composed an ode to an NFL game in which the Baltimore Ravens dominated the Cincinnati Bengals: “Quoth the Ravens, never score”). My “Slurry up and wait” nudged up to 25%, and pointed to Mark Twain. My “Rerenaming names” slipped again to 23% and named—oh, shit—Frank Baum.
Deciding to conduct the ultimate test, I then submitted:
And, finally, some circular testing—I submit the very blog entry you’re reading at this moment: and . . . sonuvabitch! 68% Poe. I was hoping for Dan Brown.
Today’s instruction: Always use fail as a verb! A thing that fails is a failure!
Always use it as a verb, Mr. Brohaugh?
Yes. Without fail! . . . oops.
I bring this up because of Christopher Beam’s recent Slate coverage of the increasing use of fail as a noun (which I discovered by way of Editrix alert). I suggest that Slate’s shot at the noun was not a complete succeed. For one, modern use of the noun is slangish and a bit distracting, but I’m not sure it’s precisely the “Internet meme” that Slate would have it. Fail as a noun was first recorded near the turn of the 13th century. Chaucer used it, as did Shakespeare and Swift. It has been dubbed “obsolete” by the Oxford English Dictionary, with the exception of the fossil phrase, “without fail.”
Is the modern use a revival, or a new formation? Here’s an excerpt from Slate:
Most Internet memes have the lifespan of fruit flies. But there’s evidence to suggest fail is here to stay. For one thing, it’s easier to say than failure. (Need for brevity might explain why, in Webspeak, the opposite of fail is not success but win.) And there’s a proud tradition in English of chopping off the endings of words for convenience.
Yes, but there are other proud neological traditions, as well, such as verb-to-noun conversion? Both the original noun and the original verb use appear about the same time, both brought in from Old French; one was not—in English, at least—a conversion of the other. In the case of the modern use, I suspect it’s conversion and not shortening, just as the noun convert was converted from the verb convert. Particularly in the light that first recorded use of failure comes just under 350 years after fail the noun.
By the way, Slate points to a good blog recording fails: FAILblog, but fails to note its kin, the English FAIL Blog.
And the title of this piece? Just another excuse to honor Paul Newman:
One of my favorite movies is Steve Martin’s LA Story, a smartly written, mildly surreal love story and a paeon to a wacky city that Shakespeare so loved (you have to see the movie). And let’s not overlook its healthy dose of pre-Sex in the City Sarah Jessica Parker.
At one point, Martin as TV weatherman Harris K. Telemacher speaks of “the interesting word usements I structure.” In that context, I was delighted to findsome interesting word usements in the real story of LA, in an LA Times section displaying reader-submitted photos. Here are some samples:
When discussing false origins, Everything You Know About English Is Wrong concentrates on individual words. I do take a poke at “3 sheets to the wind,” “raining cats and dogs” and a couple of other phrases that have been given false histories. For phrases, allow me to alert you to The Phrase Finder website, one of many interesting sources. There you can look up numerous phrases and their origins (and even find them grouped along such themes as “phrases from Shakespeare”), and sign up for a phrase-a-week newsletter.
Yesterday’s newsletter, for instance, pokes at “chip on your shoulder,” supposedly from placing wood chip on, yes, one’s shoulder as a dare to begin a fight. But site operator Gary Martin writes,
Anyone who might be inclined to doubt that origin can take heart from an alternative theory. This relates to working practices in the British Royal Dockyards in the 18th century. In Day and Lunn’s The History of Work and Labour Relations in the Royal Dockyards, 1999, the authors report that the standing orders of the [Royal] Navy Board for August 1739 included this ruling:
Shipwrights to be allowed to bring [chips] on their shoulders near to the dock gates, there to be inspected by officers.
The permission to remove surplus timber for firewood or building material was a substantial perk of the job for the dock workers.
In readable and interesting analysis, Martin then examines which is the actual origin of the phrase, and if you “knew” that one of the origins was right, well, everything you know about English is wrong, eh?
To read Martin’s analysis and learn the likely true origin, visit here.
By the by, the site is British, so part of the fun of the newsletter is learning about phrases that we Yanks (or at least this particular Yank) haven’t encountered before. Come a cropper? More on that anon.
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, dinosaurs and other thought-to-be extinct creatures have survived on a South American plateau. Look, up there—pterodactyls! Over there—a stegosaurus! And the rarest find of all—a group decended from Elizabethan colonists who still speak perfect Shakespearean English!
Of course, the children of the colonists are not denizens of the Lost World. They actually live in the Appalachian Mountains (or maybe in a holler—a real Elizabethan word, that). Or so goes a myth as old as the dinosaurs and, despite A. Conan Doyle and Michael Crichton, even more persistent. This is one of a number of Shakespeare-related canards discussed by David Crystal in his recent Think On My Words: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language. “Anyone who believes this is, as Thersites says of Agamemnon [in Troylus and Cressida], ‘not so much brain as ear-wax,’” Crystal writes. So much ear-wax that they can’t hear the arguments against the probability of an entire language being preserved like a prehistoric insect encased in amber (which is not a type of hardened ear-wax, by the way). “It’s a myth born of ignorance of the basic facts about the way language changes.” Shakespeare himself, Crystal notes, “even refers at one point to language change taking place within a generation. Mercutio [in Romeo and Juliet] sneeringly describes the way Tybalt speaks; he calls him one of the ‘new tuners of accent.’”
Think of the possibilities: M. Night Shyamalan and Michael Crichton co-script a film in which a secret village of Shakespearean speakers finally surfaces amongst crop circles in a corn field. Coming soon to a theater near someone: The Lost Word!
Lafayette Indiana’s Sameer Mishra, just 13 years old, won the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee in D.C. on Friday, May 30, by spelling guerdon. Which is mostly the correct spelling. The word–meaning “reward, compensation,” primarily in a poetic sense these days–for most of its lifetime has used guerdon as the accepted spelling. Chaucer used it thusly; Shakespeare, as well.
Here’s Chaucer from “The Sompnour’s Tale”:
We have this worlde’s lust all in despight
Lazar and Dives lived diversely,
And diverse guerdon hadde they thereby.
Note: lust means “pleasure” here, and despight–despite its spelling, young Mr. Mishra–means “contempt,” and isn’t it a cool word? (A sompnour, by the further way, is a summoner.)
Of course, guerdon isn’t the only “official” spelling, as official as spelling can be over the history of English. Other recorded forms, my trusty OED.com tells me, include (in alphabetical order) gardon, gardoun, gardwyne, gerdon, gerdonne, gerdoun, geurdone, guardon, guardone, guerdoun, gwerddoun, gwerdon, gwerdone, not to mention the comely Scottish variation, gwairdoun.
I think the time has come for Xtreme Spelling Bee. To win, you must orthograph not only the current spelling, but also every variant spelling over the history of the language.
Well, never mind. The contest is already Xtreme. Here are the other words Mishra spelled correctly on the orthopath to winning: demitasse, quadrat, diener, hyssop, macédoine, basenji, numnah, chorion, nacarat, sinicize, hyphaeresis, taleggio, esclandre.
And what was Sameer Mishra’s guerdon guerdon? $35,000 in cash, a $2,500 U.S. savings bond, and reference books galore, perhaps three of which actually containing the word guerdon.
concentrates on individual words. I do take a poke at “3 sheets to the wind,” “raining cats and dogs” and a couple of other phrases that have been given false histories. For phrases, allow me to alert you to 
. “Anyone who believes this is, as Thersites says of Agamemnon [in Troylus and Cressida], ‘not so much brain as ear-wax,’” Crystal writes. So much ear-wax that they can’t hear the arguments against the probability of an entire language being preserved like a prehistoric insect encased in amber (which is not a type of hardened ear-wax, by the way). “It’s a myth born of ignorance of the basic facts about the way language changes.” Shakespeare himself, Crystal notes, “even refers at one point to language change taking place within a generation. Mercutio [in Romeo and Juliet] sneeringly describes the way Tybalt speaks; he calls him one of the ‘new tuners of accent.’”
, which takes an Everything You Know About English Is Wrong attitude in expressing counterpoint to Lynne Truss’s 
(now with pictures in addition to exclamation points!).
and 
. Feel free to 
