Dr. Metablog

The Mayflower Hotel

We're in Washington  D. C., this week and inadvertently wandered by the Mayflower Hotel.  

A memory: in July of 1952, I stayed at the Mayflower for a few days with my father's sister, my peripatetic and eccentric Aunt Mollie. It was a rare and unique event. I came from an automobile-less family, and my parents were not in the slightest bit adventurous. The trip to Washington was the sole occasion in my childhood when I was in a city other than New York (and by New York I mean deepest Brooklyn, with an occasional foray to the Bronx Zoo or to the Museum of Natural History). It's hard to convey the full measure of the naivete with which this schoolyard boy approached a new city. I knew that Washington was smaller than New York and therefore assumed that it would consist of a smaller Brooklyn, a smaller Manhattan, etc. I had no conception that different cities had different geographies -- let alone different characters.

Highlights:  the Lincoln Memorial (I was exhilarated), the Jefferson Memorial, a boat ride to Mount Vernon. My strongest memory is of exciting and down-to-earth Harry Truman addressing a crowd from the base of the Washington Monument on the Fourth of July. The result of this voyage into the unknown was the realization that there were other cities, that they were accessible -- in short, that there was a world elsewhere.

I'm permanently indebted to my Aunt for allowing me the opportunity to grasp such a big idea.

And also that there was such a thing as a restaurant. It might seem incredible, but from birth to college, I didn't enter a restaurant more than a half-a-dozen times at the very most. In our family, there was neither the money nor the inclination toward such extravagance. I still consider it a something of a miracle that a guy like me can walk into a shop, sit down, and that people will generously put food on my plate. All that I have to do in return is fork over a few bucks.  

Exactly thirty-five years later, I stayed at the Mayflower a second time when AGP was honored and celebrated. At this Mayflower reprise, it was not Truman but Ronald Reagan whom we encountered. I remember the dyed hair, the unnatural orange skin, the ventriloquist's-dummy delivery of the speech that was handed him, and the undeniable inference that he was already deeply incapacitated by the Alzheimer's that would eventually kill him. 

William Merritt Chase; Makamah Beach

The American artist most dear to me is the impressionist William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). Chase painted plein air scenes in Brooklyn's Prospect Park and Coney Island and also produced a truly wonderful series of landscapes set in the south fork of eastern Long Island. I knew nothing of these Shinnecock paintings nor of Chase himself until one day in 1987 when I happened upon an exhibition of his work in the National Gallery in Washington. Even though I was much taken with the paintings, I was too frugal to buy the catalog. By virtue of Amazon, I've at last located a copy (D. Scott Atkinson and Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr, "William Merritt Chase, Summers at Shinnecock 1891-1902 [Washington:  National Gallery, 1987]). 

In "At the Seaside" (1892), a group of women and children enjoy a lazy day on an otherwise empty beach. In the distance to the left is a sailboat and to the right, almost at the horizon, a sandy point. The costumes are of the 1890s, but the sea and the surf and the clouds are timeless. It's a busy but very peaceful scene. Similar Chase landcapes depict sea-grasses, scrubby trees, sandy beaches, empty roads. Many of his canvasses are populated by his wife and children. 

Fully as idyllic as Chase's "Summers at Shinnecock" were my own Wordsworthian "Summers at Makamah Beach, 1947-1949." Although Makamah was on the Sound (on the north shore), it was as like as like could be to Shinnecock in the 1890s. My family spent three magical summers there -- the best summers and by far the best times of my otherwise entirely citified, asphalt childhood. We rented a very simple wood-frame beach house. If my memory is correct, the house was mostly deck with a minimal kitchen and a few sleeping rooms. It seemed like a great distance to the nearest neighboring beach house, but, in retrospect, it was probably no more than five hundred or at most a thousand feet. But to a kid from the schoolyard, a thousand feet was more than plenty. I loved the emptiness -- no trolleys, no radios, no people. I remember wandering alone for hours at low tide examining, with the patience of childhood, the crabs, snails, seaweeds and the infinite variety of dead fish. To my vocabulary, I added such novelties as inlet, point, cove, high tide, squall, blowfish, starfish, perch, sea urchin, shiner, sinker, fiddler crab, hermit crab, razorback, softshell, float, outboard and inboard, "sheared a pin," oarlock, dinghy -- words and concepts previously beyond the outer limit of my imagination. There were porpoises almost every day -- once I was all alone on the beach when two of them battled furiously for several minutes right in front of my astonished eyes. No one else saw them, and no one believed me. There was also an abundance of horseshoe crabs-- not crabs at all, as I later discovered, but trilobites left over from the Paleozoic. I think it was the horseshoes that started me reading about paleontology. I remember also old Mr. van Etten, already more than a child when Chase was painting at Shinnecock, who took me out in his rowboat to trawl for bluefish.

Wordsworth wrote about his childhood's "fair seed-time" and that he was "fostered alike by beauty and by fear." While it's easy to exaggerate the amount of fear back in 1950s Brooklyn, it's a fact that there was an almost absolute absence of beauty. Makamah Beach offered not only beauty and variety but also the possibility of different kind of life.         

No Ham in Your Hamburger? It's a Cranwich.

The word "alcohol" originates in Arabic as "al-kuhul" (said to mean "tincture of antimony") and comes into English through Old Spanish. "Alcoholic," as in "possessing the qualities of alcohol," is an old word, but "alcoholic" does not acquire the meaning "addicted to alcohol" until 1880. In recent years, "holic", which had no independent existence, has become detached from its word of origin and appears as an enclitic or suffix to produce such useful coinages as "workaholic," "shopaholic," "chocoholic, ""sexaholic."  Holic is now so well-established as an indicator of compulsive behavior that it's quite permissible to take almost any noun, slap a holic onto it, and invent a decipherable adjective. A vacationer, for example, could be a beachaholic, a swimaholic, or a sandaholic.

A fate similar to that of alcoholic befell the word sandwich. Originally a town in Kent, Sandwich was later the name of a culinary-minded Earl. "Sand" is self-explanatory and "wich" designated a tract of salty land. Wich, like holic, has set out on its own career path and has generated such apparently essential new words as "bagelwich" and "croissantwich." A croissantwich consists of a quantity of something or other between two slices of croissant. If a bagelwich is made of bagel and a croissantwich of croissant, of what is a sandwich made? The obvious answer: bread, which, by a quirk of language, is signified by the morpheme "sand." 

There's no precise linguistic term for words created by the addition of holic and wich, but they are closely related to a group known as "cranberry morphemes." (A morpheme is the smallest unit of sound that carries meaning.) Why cranberry?  Compare the two words "blackberry" and "cranberry."  Blackberry resolves into two free morphemes: black and berry. Cranberry, however, is a horse of another color, because "cran" all by its lonesome has no meaning at all. (It did, once upon a time; cranberries were eaten by cranes.) "Cran" is therefore a "bound morpheme." Unlike the black in blackberry, which functions quite well on its own, "cran" is "bound" because if it were free it would be meaningless. Technically, a cranberry morpheme is a bound morpheme that exists in only one lexeme. Workaholic is a variety of cranberry morpheme because, like cran, holic cannot stand alone; but while cranberry is unique, words containing holic and wich occur in numerous manifestations.    

It's therefore the case that English does not have an adequate word for workaholic, bagelwich and their proliferating analogues. To supply this need, I nominate "cranwich" (a coinage that is less than minute old as this is written and is therefore a neonate neologism). The definition: a "cranwich" is a cranberry morpheme that has gone wild and no longer limits itself to a single appearance (like cran), but proliferates (like holic) -- and is easily proliferable.   

A hamburger was originally from Hamburg. At some point, burger detached itself from hamburger, went wild, and produced such cranwiches as cheeseburger, baconburger, bocaburger, and gardenburger. Along with these new words comes a rather paradoxical phenomenon. Just as the sand in sandwich now means bread, so the ham in hamburger means beef. This linguistic oddity will some day be a thing of the past: more and more, the word hamburger is being replaced by the less amusing but more precise beefburger. (Still beyond the horizon: breadwich.) It's impossible to say why the hamburger yielded burger while the frankfurter (from Frankfort) failed to cranwich: why do we have chicken franks and tofu franks rather than chickenfurters and tofufurters? 

Other cranwiches of note: Dracula has produced blackula and chocula: "ula" seems to mean something both frightening and funny (although not in the case of uvula. A scary uvula would be a uvulula). Godzilla produced hogzilla and bridezilla, coinages which might lead the cranwich-naive to conclude that the god in godzilla means god, which it certainly does not. Marathon, the Greek word for fennel, was also the name of the city where the Athenians defeated the Persians in 490 BC and from which the messenger Phidippides ran twenty-six miles to bring the good news home. "Thon" has now severed its relationship with marathon and, as a suffix, has produced innumerable cranwiches such as as knit-a-thon, jog-a-thon, dance-a-thon, blog-a-thon, and, believe it or not, masturbate-a-thon. The "Mc" in McDonald's has not only generated "mcmansions" and "mcjobs," but has also opened up the possibility that an inferior or sub-standard cranwich could someday be called a mccranwich. A compendious display of mccranwiches would be a mccranwichorama.   

March 24.   We're in Washington D. C.  On a cab ride we passed the Watergate complex, the presence of which reminded me that I'd failed to mention one of the major cranwiches of the last decade. The "gate" in Watergate has become a suffix that denotes a scandal, as in Korea-gate, Iran-gate, Plamegate or, my favorite (I like odd rhymes), debate-gate. Debate-gate, now largely forgotten, occurred during the 1980 presidential campaign, when the fatuous hypocrite and ex-Jesse Helms speechwriter George Will, using a stolen Democratic briefing book, coached Ronald Reagan for his debate with Jimmy Carter, then later went on TV to praise Reagan's "thoroughbred performance."   

What We Read in the Fifties: The Naked and the Dead

I had great hope that I would love to read The Naked and the Dead. Although Norman Mailer is quite a few years older than I, he's a Brooklyn boy who became a somebody. Mailer went to neighborhood schools, then on to Harvard and the Army, and made a quite a splash. (As a matter of fact, he attended P. S. 161 in Crown Heights, a school that we at P. S. 217 regularly trounced in the summer softball league.)  But The Naked and the Dead was less fun than I had hoped. It is 721 exhausting pages long. It has too many words, too many characters, too much flashback, too much repetitive talk. It's not epic; it's just long.

The profusion of detail swallows an exemplary story: on a south Pacific island, a platoon of soldiers is assigned to perform an impossible task. The platoon suffers deaths, injuries, wounds, tensions, and a variety of psychic traumas, even though, unknown to any of its members, by dumb luck and superior numbers, the American forces have long since broken through the Japanese lines and the battle for the island has been won. 

The novel had a huge impact in 1948 and throughout the fifties and it started Norman Mailer on his astonishing and perplexing career. It was much discussed in the P. S. 217 schoolyard not only as a hot book (lots of talk about sex and a superabundance of "fugs") but also as a scary account of life in the United States military.  It certainly frightened me. 

It's hard to believe that fifty years have gone by I last read The Naked and the Dead. I still admire its ambition and I'm impressed that Mailer was just twenty-five years old when it was published, but I'm deeply offended by the want of economy, the lack of discipline, the narrow perspective, the philosophical incoherence, the plot lapses, and especially by the reliance on shallow ethnic stereotypes. I can't help thinking that, if Mailer had had patience and wisdom and, most of all, restraint, The Naked and the Dead might have been not a seven-hundred page monster but a two-hundred page masterpiece.

But I doubt that P. S. 161 put much emphasis on the virtue of restraint.  In storytelling, Brooklyn guys choose hyperbole over litotes.   

A Brush with Greatness

I'm not generally given to boasting, but it's a fact: the great Don Newcombe once spoke to me -- me! He asked me to refrain from conversing with him. This noteworthy event occurred in 1949.

During summer vacation, it was the custom for neighborhood kids to arrive at Ebbets Field early in the morning. The games didn't start until 1:30, so we'd take a half a day's supply of salami sandwiches and stand outside the players' entrance at 10:00 or so in the morning, hoping to catch sight of Robinson, or Cox, or Furillo walking up the ramp to the clubhouse.  After the stakeout, we'd watch a couple of hours of batting practice, and then some fielding practice, and then there would be a long pause while the groundskeepers spruced up the field, and then we'd listen to Gladys Gooding at the organ, and at last, anticlimactically, we'd watch the actual game. I sometimes paid the 60 cents for a seat in the bleachers, but just as often I was admitted with one of the free tickets that were distributed by neighborhood fraternal organizations -- the PAL (Police Athletic League) or the Sons of Italy or the Sons of Norway. What a treat -- you could go to a Dodgers' game and at the same time be Norwegian for a day!

One morning, there I was, loitering among a crowd of kids just as Big Don arrived. He was huge. I can't remember exactly what I shouted to him, but it was probably something like "Hey Don. Are you going to pitch today? How's the arm?  Do you think you'll pinch-hit. Huh. Huh?" Newk turned and looked directly at me and said, and I quote, verbatim, "Shut up, kid."  What a thrill!  I had been noticed by the great man himself. It was a transcendent moment -- even more exciting than the time when, sitting in the left field lower deck, I scrambled for a home-run ball off the bat of third baseman Bobby Morgan (a ball that, to my eternal regret, I later sold for five bucks. But hey, five dollars could take you -- at 60 cents a ticket, two 5 cent subway fares, and another 5 cents for "a big delicious glass of Nedick's tasty orange drink,/ It's cool refreshing flavor you'll adore" -- to five or six games, one of which might be a double-header.)

How can I emphasize this sufficiently?:  Don Newcombe spoke directly, personally, to me.

Here's another event of titanic importance: in the last innings of a game, when the guards who policed the bleachers were too bored to pay attention, kids would sneak down into the good seats. At Ebbets, the Dodgers' bullpen was along the right-field foul line, so it was possible to sit just behind the relievers and try to engage them in intimate conversation. One day I was involved in an exciting unidirectional chat with Hal Gregg, then on the downside of his career (he had won 18 games in 1945) when the frustrated reliever impatiently swung himself around and said to me, and once again I quote absolutely verbatim, "What are you, kid, a magpie?" 

As long as I'm in full bragging mode, I should also boast that I once possessed, on a treasured scrap of paper, the penciled autograph of Bob Ramazzotti, a Dodger infielder, who, in 1949, batted .154 with one home run and three rbi's.

Let me also add that it was considered the utmost pinnacle of schoolyard wit to sit in the front seats of the Ebbets Field upper deck and drizzle sticky orange Nedick's upon the spectators beneath.   

Life versus Art

According to A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax (Bogart [William Morrow, 1997] p. 474), during the filming of Beat the Devil in 1954, legendary tough guy Humphrey Bogart (Duke Mantee, Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe) was beaten three consecutive times in arm-wrestling by legendary limp-wrist Truman Capote. 

Annoying Locutions: "Within"; "Beg the Question"

Why in the living heck do they say that the Nuggets are "within" two points of the Lakers?  "Within" means less than than the proclaimed margin -- 1.9 points perhaps. Why not say that the Nuggets are two points behind? Or trailing by two points?  But not -- goodness gracious -- "within."  It's a perpetually annoying piece of basketball-announcer slang and a good reason to keep the TV sound muted. Moreover, why, given everything that I know about language change and about prescription versus description, does such an ugly locution fill me with grievous indignation?

And by all that's holy, "beg the question" does not mean "raise the question" or "leads to the question." "Beg the question" is a term in logic which means that the conclusion is implicit in the premise. It's a form of circular argumentation. Aristotle first defined petitio principii and his analysis served until a dozen or score of years ago, when, for some reason, "beg" became confused with "beget." Let's try to hold the line on this one-- we need all the logic we can muster in these perilous times. 

What We Read in the Fifties: Lolita

I know that I read Lolita sometime during my senior year in college, which was the last year of the socially-constricted Eisenhower presidency. Nabokov was a celebrity at Cornell and I remember attending a lecture in which he delivered a hilarious destruction of Soviet realism. He was the first novelist whom I ever saw with my own eyes (I had sat next to Tom Pynchon in a course in Eighteenth-Century English literature every day for a semester, but although Pynchon had published a story or two in Epoch, he was just another gangley guy and hardly the artist--or the enigma--that he would soon become).

Lolita had been published in Paris in 1955, so it's just a bit more than fifty years old, and therefore halfway to its centennial, when, it's often asserted, it becomes possible to distinguish between works for the moment and works for the ages. An interim report: Lolita is doing very very well.  It's as impressive now as it was then -- but for different reasons. When I read the novel In 1959, I was dazzled by its verbal surface: the allusions to Poe, to Hamlet, to Joyce (whose Ulysses I had read closely even then). Of course I missed much, especially because at that time I had read almost no continental literature. But I loved being able to decipher some of the novel's playful mysteries: that, for example, "Vivian Darkbloom" -- who is Clare Quilty's accomplice in crime -- was an anagram for "Vladimir Nabokov" and that Lolita's teachers "Miss Horn" and "Miss Cole" spoonerized an obscenity. It pleased me immensely that Charlotte Haze ordered a mattress from "a firm located at 4640 Roosevelt Blvd., Philadelphia," because I had spent three dreadful summers working in the Sears Roebuck warehouse on Utica Avenue, where I might have composed an Anatomy of Boredom. I knew to whom "Brown, Dolores" alluded, and I knew why she squatted outside the gates of the cloister. And then there were Nabokov's extraordinary rhetorical displays. Had there ever been a novelist who cared enough to write a sentence like "the least pressure would suffice to set all paradise loose," where "least" balanced "loose," "paradise" balanced "pressure," and "set" offset "suffice?"

I loved Lolita and I read all that I could find of Nabokov's early works and then all the new ones as they appeared. But it's been a long time since I last read the novel and the sexual abuse of children is no longer, if it ever was, a matter for flippancy. I was worried that Lolita would be insensitive and dated. But it's not so. It's still satirical, and it's still fun, but now it's less comic than it is sad. Humbert is still clever, but he's clearly a madman, and the murder of Quilty is the best apology that he can render to Lolita. Humbert knows he's the blackest of villains, that he's robbed Lolita of her childhood, that he lived in "a world of total evil," and that "even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which... was all I could offer the waif." The novel shocked Eisenhower America because it was thought to be lurid -- but it's no more lurid than Oedipus. It's fully, designedly, and beautifully tragic. 

Hoop Words

Now that "March madness" is nearly upon us, it's appropriate to reflect on basketball jargon, which is distinguished by its many colorful monosyllables: hoops, hops, bigs, stuff, slam, jam, slash, dish, board, glass, dunk, pick, screen, paint, lane, point, wing, trey, rim, post, trap, "D", roll, box, press, tip, swish, bank, brick, feed, stroke, hole, "J", rock, range. 

But down-home slang is not basketball's only linguistic register. Curiously, there's a contrary tendency toward polysyllabic words of Greek and Latin origin. Some teams, for example, are said to be "physical." "Physical" (from Gr. physicos = nature) means, in basketballese, "rough" and does not imply that the other team plays either an ethereal or spiritual game. Until recently, a guard played on the "outside" and the center on the "inside"; nowadays they've become "perimeter" (Gr.) and "interior" (L.) players.  A fast break has become "transition offense." A player doesn't drive to the basket; he "penetrates."  Players no longer jump; they "elevate"; they don't block a shot, they "reject" it.

In an odd linguistic development, a point guard no longer passes the ball; he "distributes" (Latin: distribuere, to allot) it. In its ordinary meaning, to "distribute" a basketball would be to cut it into pieces like a loaf of bread and give each teammate a slice. Only a few years ago, it was still possible to "switch" from guarding one man in order to guard another; now players "rotate."  "Rotate," derived from the Latin word for wheel, means "to turn on an axis, to spin."  A defender who did not switch but rotated would pirouette, and pirouetting is not an effective defensive strategy. (A better classical equivalent for switch would be "revolve.")  Even sillier than rotate: "rotate over" or "rotate around"-- a usage that evokes the grotesquerie of a big guy in a tutu pirouetting across the baseline -- a vision that is all the more picturesque now that traditional basketball shorts have been replaced by big ol' bloomers.

March 5:  Last night I heard a TV announcer say that a seven-foot tall player had "a lot of verticality."  If he fell to the floor, I suppose that he would have "horizonality." March 27: Also, "convert" for score, as in, "they had a transition opportunity  but failed to convert."