A Translator's Literary Advice

Margaret Jull Costa is described by the New York Times Book Review's "By the Book" interview column (March 7, 2021) as a "prolific translator" of Spanish- and Portuguese-language literature.

In the interview she was asked what book she would recommend be read by everyone before age 21. Her response: "I would say probably read everything you can lay your hands on, then reread it when you're 40 or older to find out whether it was any good and, if so, what it was really about. But," she continued, "if I had to choose one it would be The Great Gatsby, just to see what it's possible to do with the English language."

If I had to choose one book to reread it would probably be A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I first read it when I was 11 or 12. I can still remember certain scenes from it: preadolescent Francie Nolan reading a book on the fire escape; her mother on her hands and knees scrubbing the wood floors; her father's corpse in repose in a casket in the apartment.

A Briticism Used In An American Op-Ed Article

 "Argle-bargle" is a term I've never encountered until I read Jennifer Senior's op-ed piece in The New York Times (September 23, 2020), called "The Ginsburg-Scalia Act Was Not a Farce." The article is about the friendship between Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, who were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Ms. Senior described Justice Scalia as a "hero of the Federalist Society, defender of originalism, dreaded foe of progressive argle-bargle." [Italics mine.]

I looked up "argle-bargle" in my copy of  the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, Second Edition (2004), suspecting the term might be a British import. The closest term in the dictionary is "argy-bargy," identified as of British origin and meaning "a dispute or wrangle."

Consulting one of my two battered copies of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, I found the word "argufy," of no particular origin. It is defined as "to argue or wrangle, esp. over something insignificant." That's about as close to "argle-bargle" as I could get in an American dictionary.

"Argle-bargle" is one of those British expressions that have entered American speech, much like "gobsmacked," "shambolic," and "the full monty."

One clue to the origin of "argle-bargle" is Cockney rhyming slang. Lonely Planet's London guidebook (Lonely Planet Publications, 2012) says that Cockney rhyming slang "may have developed among London's costermongers (street traders) as a code to avoid police attention. This code replaced common nouns and verbs with rhyming phrases." For example, " 'going up the apples and pears' meant going up the stairs, the 'trouble and strife' was the wife, 'telling porky pies' was telling lies and 'would you Adam and Eve it?' was would you believe it?"

In the meantime, maybe I should send a copy of this blog post to Melissa Mohr, who writes the "In a Word" column for The Christian Science Monitor Weekly magazine. Ms. Mohr might be able to shed some light on "argle-bargle." 

Are You A Dogophile Or A Caninophile?

In his 2003 Time magazine essay, "Of Dogs and Men," later reprinted in Things That Matter (Crown Forum, 2013), his essay collection, the late syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer used the word "dogophilia" to describe the close relationship that humans have to their dogs.

A better, more elegant word would have been "caninophilia," the love of dogs. One website calls the word "a bastard mix of Latin and Greek," but it sounds much better than "dogophilia," a word that sounds ugly to my ears and robs such a passion for dogs of its beauty, mutuality, and elevated status. It would be like calling a person who has a deep passion for books a bookaholic or a bookophile instead of a bibliophile or, to use the name of this blog, a book maven.These latter terms are more elegant, celebratory, and respectful.

Some people might say that I'm nitpicking but to me words matter. How they are used conveys one's attitude and view of the world. To me, "dogophilia" trivializes a very important, deeply felt relationship.

As for me, although I've had many dogs in my life, I'm partial to cats. You can call me a felinophile or a cat lover, not a catophile.


Note: Merry Christmas, everyone!

Learning A New Word--"Shambolic"

While reading journalist Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt, 2018), I came across this sentence in the chapter about Donald Trump's former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon: "By default, everybody had to look to the voluble, aphoristic, shambolic, witty, off-the-cuff figure who was both ever present on the premises and who had, in an unlikely attribute, read a book or two." (See page 60.) [Italics mine.]

The word that caught my attention was "shambolic." I'd never seen it before. Being someone who enjoys learning new words, I consulted two of my American dictionaries and I could not find this word. I then went online and learned that "shambolic" is British slang for chaotic, disorganized, or mismanaged.

Looking further, I consulted the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd edition, a book I found, I think, on a street corner almost two years ago. It defines the word as "chaotic, unorganized." Now I have a new word to add to my vocabulary.

Learning About The Human Eye Via A Grammar Textbook

Recently, while browsing through an old English grammar textbook, published in 1958, and designed for ninth-grade students, I learned something very interesting about the human eye--that we actually see the world upside down.

In a ten-sentence sample essay about how the eye sees objects, sentence seven begins, "Do you know that pictures of things around you enter the eye upside down?" The next sentence explains that "Your brain reverses the images for you." I never knew that.

To verify the accuracy of that bit of information, I asked my ophthalmologist about this and he confirmed it. So it is possible to learn something about biology even from an old grammar textbook. And what I learned underscores how amazing an organ the brain is.

Searching For The Word "Upscuttle"

I recently flipped through an old, battered dictionary that I own with the express purpose of looking up the definition of  "gulag." My search was prompted by a radio interview I  had heard that detailed the brutalization of inmates by guards at an upstate New York prison.

That brought to mind the late "Grandpa" Al Lewis, a former cast member of the 1960s sitcom, The Munsters, and his comparing American prisons to gulags, or Soviet prison camps, on his weekly New York-based radio show on WBAI.

While looking up the word, I found a slip of paper tucked inside the dictionary on which I had written the word "upscuttle" and the name of the person I had heard use it, conservative talk show radio host Barry Farber. I probably heard him use the word sometime in the 1980s when he was on the air late nights on New York's WMCA. ("Upscuttle" is not a word you hear every day.) Unfortunately, I neglected to write down how he used the word in a sentence.

I searched for the word in the same battered dictionary, but I couldn't find it. Neither could I find it in five other dictionaries in my apartment, including the Canadian Oxford Dictionary and a huge dictionary that weighs almost as much as a ten-pound bag of sugar.

Here is urbandictionary.com 's definition of "upscuttle": "When everything in a given area seems to go topsy-turvy at once. A sudden capsizing of circumstances and conditions."

A Better Word For Suicide Due To Bullying Is Needed

Whenever I hear or see the word "bullycide," the image that comes to mind is someone killing his or her tormentor, not someone killing themselves because they were bullied. I wish someone would come up with a more precise term for suicides caused by bullying. "Bullycide" is not it.

How I Discovered Wiktionary

Browsing through the Village Voice (March 4-10, 2015 issue), I came upon an article about music journalist Robert Christgau and his memoir Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man (Dey Street Books). I remember proofreading his copy in the early 1980s when he was the music critic at the Village Voice.  (I think it was his sister, Georgia Christgau, who hired me.)

 Not seeing Christgau's age mentioned in the piece, I immediately went to Wikipedia to look up his birth date (It's April 18, 1942) and stumbled upon a link to the word "memoir." That led me to the Wiktionary page, which for me, a language buff, was a fascinating discovery. I learned that Wiktionary, the free dictionary, was "a multilingual, web-based project to create a free-content dictionary of all words in all languages."

 The project is currently available in 158 languages and is, like Wikipedia, its companion site, "written collaboratively by volunteers" called "wiktionarians." The English-language section, at the time that I checked the site, contained 3, 971,737 entries (and counting).

Although I had trouble using the site on my cell phone, I did click on the highlighted word "free" in the phrase "free dictionary." What popped up on the screen was a language lover's delight: there were
word origin and pronunciation guides, a list of synonyms and antonyms, definitions with literary examples, et cetera. For example, here are two definitions of "free" that appeared in a long list of definitions:

"without; not containing (what is specified);exempt;clean, liberated" as in "We had a wholesome, filling meal, free of meat" and "not currently in use; not taken; unoccupied" as in  "You can sit on that chair, it's free."

Once I figure out how to use Wiktionary, it will become a very useful reference tool and I will be consulting it often.

Go to www.wiktionary.org.

Cursing, Shakespeare Style

I found in one of my dictionaries a scrap of paper on which I wrote examples of Shakespearean cursing. Unfortunately, I neglected to indicate the source that I took them from. Here is what I wrote:

"You drone," "You drudge, you clog," "You unbaked and doughty youth," "You tyrant," "You carcass fit for hounds," "You base wretch, you unspeaking sot, you pigeon liver," "You devil incarnate, you child of hell," "A pox on your throats," "Oh, wretched fool. Consumption catch thee. Go shake your ears," "Were I like thee, I'd throw away myself."

When Povertunity Knocks

The New York Times Magazine has a weekly feature called  "That Should Be a Word." Many of the words will never catch on but one I like very much is "povertunity" (see "The One-Page Magazine" column, May 13, 2012). I don't like the definition that was given: "A job that comes with no salary but has the promise of advancement." A better definition: a job that provides a salary and training for the hard-core unemployed, e.g. welfare recipients.

A "Turn of the Century" Problem

Here's a problem for William Safire or Richard Lederer or some other language-usage maven to solve--the proper use of the term "turn of the century." It either means the end of a century or the beginning of one. The writers quoted below clearly don't agree on its meaning:

"At the turn of the last century[that is, at its end], the dot-com collapse made e-commerce a dirty word among investors as headlines proclaimed the death of online business...."--Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth (Knopf, 2006).

"At the turn of the twentieth century [that is, at its beginning], Long Beach [on Long Island in New York State] boasted the largest hotel in the world, a 1,100-foot long behemoth that promptly burned down."--Edward Kosner, It's News to Me (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006).

"When [Hubert Harrison, the Afro-Caribbean orator and thinker] moved to New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, [he] brought a multicultural Crucian* background, reading and writing skills, intellectual curiosity, and a feeling of oneness with the downtrodden--all of which would be important in his future work."-- Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (Columbia University Press, 2009)

Which usage is correct?

*Harrison was born on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands.