The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

Reading Aloud

A few years ago I did my first reading. It was at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, under a tent. Several others read, too; we all sat on independent sections of a biomorphic orange modular couch, our heads bowed as we listened, or half listened, to each other. Eventually my turn came, and the words that I had written in silence (an earplug-enhanced silence, as a matter of fact, that amplified the fleeting Chiclety contact of upper and lower incisors, and made audible the inner squirt of an eyeball when I rubbed it roughly, and called to my attention the muffled roar of eyelid muscles when my eyes were squeezed shut in an effort to see, using the infrared of prose, whatever it was that I most wanted at that moment to describe) — these formerly silent words unfolded themselves like lawn chairs in my mouth and emerged one by one wearing large Siberian hats of consonants and long erminous vowels and landed softly, without visible damage, here and there in the audience, and I thought, Gosh, I’m reading aloud, from Chapter Seven!

Things went pretty well until I got to a place near the middle of the last paragraph, where I began to feel that I was going to cry. I wouldn’t have minded crying, or at least pausing to swallow down a discreet silent sob, if what I’d been reading had been in any obvious way sad. When people on TV documentaries tell their stories, and they come to the part where the tragedy happens and they have to say over again what, in silent form, they adjusted to years earlier, and they choke up, that’s fine, they should choke up. And I’ve heard writers read autobiographical accounts of painful childhood events and quaver a little here and there — that’s perfectly justifiable, even desirable. But the sentence that was giving me difficulty was a description of a woman enclosing a breakfast muffin in bakery tissue, placing it in a small bag, and sprinkling it with coffee stirrers and sugar packets and pre-portioned pats of butter. Where was the pathos? And yet by the time I delivered the words “plastic stirrers” to the audience, I was in serious trouble, and I noticed a listening head or two look up with sudden curiosity: Hah, this is interesting, this American is going to weep openly and copiously for us now.

Why that sentence, though? Why did that image of a succession of small white shapes, more stirrers and sugar packets and butter pats than I needed, and in that sense ceremonial and semi-decorative rather than functional, falling, falling over my terrestrial breakfast, grab at my grief-lapels? There were a number of reasons. In college I had once competed for a prize in what was called the “Articulation of the English Language,” for which the contestants had to read aloud from set passages of Milton and Joyce and others. I got to the auditorium late, having bicycled there while drinking proudly from a shot bottle of Smirnoff vodka that I’d bought on an airplane, and, as planned, I read the Milton in a booming fake English accent and read the Joyce excerpt — which was the last paragraph of “The Dead”—first in a broad bad Southern accent, then in a Puerto Rican accent, and then in the Southern accent again, and to my surprise I’d found that the Joyce suddenly seemed, in my amateur TV-actor drawl, extremely moving, so that the last phrase, about the snow “faintly falling … upon all the living and the dead,” was tragic enough to make it unclear whether my rhetorical tremor was genuine or not — and my voice box may have remembered this boozy Joycean precipitation from college as I read aloud from my own sugar-packet snowfall.

Also, a version of the chapter I was reading in Edinburgh had appeared in The New Yorker, and I’d had a slight disagreement, a friendly disagreement, with a fact checker there over the phrase “tissue-protected muffin.” She’d held that the word “tissue” implied something like Kleenex, and that it should be a “paper-wrapped muffin,” and I’d said I didn’t think so. On the way home from work the next day I’d stopped in a bakery and spotted a blue box of the little squares in question and I’d seen the words “bakery tissue” in capital letters on the side; and, exulting, I’d called the manager of the store over, a Greek man who barely spoke English, and offered to buy the entire box, which he sold me for nine dollars, and I called my editor the next day and said, “It’s tissue, it is tissue,” and as a compromise it became in their version a “tissue-wrapped muffin”—but now, reading it aloud in Scotland, I could turn it into a “tissue-protected muffin” all over again; right or wrong, I was able in the end to shield the original wordless memory from alien breakfast guests with this fragile shroud of my own preferred words. It had turned out all right in the end. And that might have been enough to make me cry.

But it wasn’t just that. It was also that this tiny piece of a paragraph had never been one that I’d thought of proudly when I thought over my book after it was published. I’d forgotten it, after writing it down, and now that my orating tongue forced me to pay attention to it I was amazed and moved that it had hung in there for all those months, in fact years, unrewarded but unimpaired, holding its small visual charge without any further encouragement from me, and, like the deaf and dumb kid in rags who, though reviled by the other children, ends up saving his village from some catastrophe, it had become the tearjerker moment that would force me, out of pity for its very unmemorableness, to dissolve in grief right in the midst of all my intended ironies. That was a big part of it.

Contrition, too. Contrition made its contribution to the brimming bowl — for these Edinburgh audience members didn’t know how much pure mean-spirited contempt I had felt back in my rejection-letter days for writers who “gave readings,” how self-congratulatorily neo-primitivist I’d thought it was to repudiate the divine economy of the published page and to require people to gather to hear a reticent man or woman reiterate what had long since been set in type. Ideally, I’d felt, the republic of letters was inhabited by solitary readers in bed with their Itty Bitty Book Lights glowing over their privately owned and operated pages, like the ornate personal lamps that covertly illuminate every music stand in opera pits while the crudest sort of public melodrama rages in heavy makeup overhead. There was something a bit too Pre-Raphaelite about the regression to an audience — I thought of those reaction shots in early Spielberg movies, of family members gazing with softly awestruck faces at the pale-green glow of the beneficent UFO while John Williams flogged yet more Strauss from his string section. And there were the suspect intonation patterns, the I’m-reading-aloud patterns — especially at poetry readings, where talented and untalented alike, understandably wishing in the absence of rhyme to give an audible analogue for the ragged right and left margins in their typed or printed original, resorted to syllable-punching rhythms and studiously unresolved final cadences adapted from Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens, overlaid with Walter Cronkite and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. These handy tonal templates could make anything lyrical:

This — is a Dover — edition—

Designed — for years — of use—

Sturdy stackable — beechwood — bookshelves—

At a price you’d expect — to pay — for plastic—

And yet, despite all this sort of easy, Glenn-Gouldy contempt in my background, there I was physically in Edinburgh, under that tent, among strangers, finishing up my own first reading, and, far from feeling dismissive and contemptuous before my turn came, I’d been simply and sincerely nervous, exceedingly nervous, and now I was almost finished, and I hadn’t done anything too humiliating, and the audience had innocently listened, unaware of my prior disapproval, and they had even tolerantly laughed once or twice — and all this was too much: I was like a crippled unbeliever wheeled in and made whole with a sudden palm blow to the forehead by a preaching charlatan. I’m reading aloud! I’m reading aloud! I was saying, my face streaming with tears — I was cripple and charlatan simultaneously. Evidently I was going to cry, out of pure gratitude to myself for having gotten almost to the end without crying.

And then, as the unthinkable almost happened, and the narcissus bulb in the throat very nearly blossomed, I recognized that if I did break down now, the intensity of my feeling, in this supposedly comic context, would leave the charitable listeners puzzled about my overall mental well-being. At the very least I would be thought of as someone “going through a stressful time,” and it would be this diagnosis they would take home with them, rather than any particular fragment from what I’d read that they liked, and whenever I tried to write something light ’n’ lively thereafter I would remember my moment of shame on the orange couch and to counteract it I’d have to invent something bleak and brooding and wholly out of character. I couldn’t let it happen; I couldn’t let reading aloud distort my future output. I started whispering urgent ringside counsel to myself: Come on, you sack of shit. If you cry, people will assume you’re being moved to tears by your own eloquence, and how do you think that will go over? That was frightening enough, finally, to stabilize the nutation in my Adam’s apple, and I just barely got through to the last word.

Since that afternoon in 1989, I’ve read aloud from my writing a number of times, and each time I’ve been a little more in control, less of a walking cripple, more of a charlatan. I’ve reacquainted myself with my larynx. When I was fourteen I used to feel it each morning at the kitchen table, before I had any cereal. It was large. How could my throat have been retrofitted with this massive service elevator? And what was I going to say with it? What sort of payloads was it fated to carry? First thing in the morning I could sing, in a fairly convincing baritone, the alto-sax solo from Pictures at an Exhibition—and as I went for a low note there was a unique physical pleasure, not to be had later in the day, when the two thick slack vocal cords dropped and closed on a shovelful of sonic peat moss. Sometimes as I sang low, or swung low, it felt as if I were a character actor in a coffee commercial, carelessly scooping glossy beans from deep in a burlap bag and pouring them into a battered scale — the deeper the note I tried to scoop up, the bigger and glossier the beans, until finally I was way down in fava territory. I was Charles Kuralt, I was Tony the Tiger, I was Lloyd Bridges, I was James Earl Jones — I too had a larynx the size of a picnic basket, I felt, and when you heard my voice you wouldn’t even know it was sound, it would be so vibrantly low: you’d think instead that your wheels had strayed over the wake-up rumble strips on the shoulder of a freeway. Just above the mobile prow of the Adam’s apple, just above where there should properly be a hood ornament, was a softer place that became more noticeable to the finger the lower you spoke or sang, and it was directly into this vulnerable opening, this chink in the armor of one’s virility, that I imagined disk jockeys secretly injecting themselves with syringes full of male hormones and small-engine oil, so that they could say “traffic and weather together” with the proper sort of sawtooth bite.

And though my own voice has proved to be — despite my high secondary-sexual expectations, and even though I was pretty tall and tall people often have voice boxes to match — not quite the pebbly, three-dimensional mood machine I’d counted on, I do occasionally now like reading aloud what I’ve written. I get back a little of the adolescent early-morning feeling as I brachiate my way high into the upper canopy of a sentence, tightening the pitch muscles, climbing up, and then dropping on a single word, with that Doppler-effect plunge of sound, so the argument can live out its closing seconds at sea level. I feel all this going on, even if it isn’t audible to anyone else. And sometimes I know that my voice, imperfect medium though it may be, is making what I’ve written seem for the moment better than it is, and I like playing with this dangerous intonational power, and even letting listeners know that I’m playing with it. It’s not called an Adam’s apple for nothing: that relic of temptation, that articulated chunk of upward mobility, that ever-ready dial tone in the throat, whether or not it successfully leads others astray, ends by thoroughly seducing oneself.

(1992)

The History of Punctuation

The nine basic marks of punctuation — comma, dash, hyphen, period, parenthesis, semi-colon, colon, space, and capital letter — seem so apt to us now, so pipe-smokingly Indo-European, so naturally suited in their disjunctive charge and mass to their given sentential offices, that we may forgivably assume that commas have been around for at least as long as electrons, and that while dialects, cursive styles, and typefaces have come and gone, the semi-colon, that supremely self-possessed valet of phraseology, is immutable.

But in fact the semi-colon is relatively modern. Something medieval called a punctus versus, which strongly resembled a semi-colon, though it was often encountered dangling below the written line, had roughly the force of a modern period; another sign that looked (in some scribal hands) exactly like a semi-colon was a widely used abbreviation for several Latin word endings—atque could appear as atq;, and omnibus as omnib;. But the semi-colon that we resort to daily, hourly, entered the picture with the first edition of Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna two years after Columbus reached America, the handiwork of Aldus Manutius the Elder (or someone close to him) and his tasteful punch-cutter, Francesco Griffo. The mark, we are told by Dr. Malcolm Parkes, its historian, took much longer than the parenthesis did to earn the trust of typesetters: shockingly, its use was apparently not fully understood by some of those assigned to work on the first folio of Shakespeare.

And it is of course even now subject to episodes of neglect and derision. Joyce preferred the more Attic colon, at least in Ulysses, and Beckett, as well, gradually rid his prose of what must have seemed to him an emblem of vulgar, high-Victorian applied ornament, a cast-iron flower of mass-produced Ciceronianism: instead of semi-colons, he spliced the phrases of Malone Dies and Molloy together with one-size-fits-all commas, as commonplace as stones on a beach, to achieve that dejected sort of murmured ecphonesis so characteristic of his narrative voice — all part of the general urge, perhaps, that led him to ditch English in favor of French, “pour m’appau-vrir”: to impoverish himself.

Donald Barthelme, too, who said that the example of Beckett was what first “allowed [him] to write,” thought that the semi-colon was “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”—but he allowed that others might feel differently. And still the semicolon survives, far too subtle and useful, as it turns out, to be a casualty of modernism. It even participates in those newer forms of emotional punctuation called “smileys” or “emoticons”—vaguely irritating attempts to supply a sideways facial expression at the close of an E-mail paragraph — e.g., :-) and >%-(. The semi-colon collaborates in the “wink” or “smirk,” thus—;-).

So our familiar and highly serviceable repertoire of punctles was a long time coming; it emerged from swarms of competing and overlapping systems and theories, many of them misapplied or half-forgotten. Petrarch, for example, used a slash with a dot in the middle of it to signal the onset of a parenthetical phrase. A percontativus, or backward question mark, occasionally marked the close of a rhetorical question even into the seventeenth century — Robert Herrick wrote with it. A punctus elevatus, resembling an upside-down semi-colon or, later, a fancy, black-letter s, performed the function of a colon in many medieval texts; when used at the end of a line of poetry, however, it could signal the presence of an enjambment. A nameless figure shaped like a tilted candy-cane served to terminate paragraphs of Augustus’s autobiography (A.D. 14), inscribed on his tomb. Around A.D. 600, Isidore of Seville recommended ending a paragraph with a 7, which he called the positura. He also advocated the placing of a horizontal dash next to a corrupted or questionable text (“so that a kind of arrow may slit the throat of what is superfluous and penetrate to the vitals of what is false”), and he relied on the ancient cryphia, a C turned on its side with a dot in the middle——to be used next to those places in a text where “a hard and obscure question cannot be opened up or solved.”

The upright letter C, for capitulum, developed into the popular medieval paragraph symbol, ¶, called at times a pilcrow or a paraph. Seventh-century Irish scribes were in the habit of using more points when they wanted a longer pause; thus a sentence might end with a colon and a comma (:,), or two periods and a comma (…), or three commas together (,,). At the close of the twelfth century, one of the dictaminists, a man named Buoncompagno, troubled by so much irreconcilable complexity, proposed a pared-down slash-and-dash method: a dash would mark all final pauses, and a slash would mark all lesser pauses. It didn’t take, although the “double virgula” (//) was used to separate sentences in the fifteenth century, and Edmund Spenser and Walter Ralegh sometimes hand-wrote with single slashes, rather than commas. A plus sign (+) stood for a period in a few early printed books; in others, it could set off a quotation.

Printing eventually slowed the pace of makeshift invention, forcing out many quaint superfluities, but novel marks, and surprising adaptations of old marks, may appear at any time. Besides smileys, online services have lately given rise to the ecstatic bracket hug of greeting: {{{{{{{{Shana!!!}}}}}}}}. Legal punctuation continues to thrive — the ™, the ®, and the © are everywhere. (The title of Jurassic Park is not Jurassic Park, but Jurassic Park™ likewise David Feldman’s Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise and Other Imponderables™.)

Especially fashionable now is the ^sm, as in “Forget Something?^sm”—observed not long ago on a plastic notice beside the bathroom sink in a room at a Holiday Inn: a mark that modifies the phrase it follows to mean, “This is not merely a polite question regarding whether you have successfully packed everything you require during your stay, this utterance is part of our current chain-wide marketing campaign, and we are so serious about asking it of you that we hereby offer fair warning that if you or anyone else attempts to extend such a courtesy to another guest anywhere in the hotel industry in printed or published form, either on flyers, placards, signs, pins, or pieces of folded plastic positioned at or beside a sink, vanity, or other bathroom fixture, we, the owner of this service mark, will torment and tease you with legal remedies.” Even the good old comma continues to evolve: it was flipped upside down and turned into the quotation mark circa 1714, and a woman I knew in college punctuated her letters to her high school friends with homemade comma-shapes made out of photographs of side-flopping male genitals that she had cut out of Playgirl.

Until now, readers have had to fulfill their need for the historical particulars of this engrossingly prosaic subject with narrow-gauge works of erudition such as E. Otha Wingo’s sober Latin Punctuation in the Classical Age, or John Lennard’s extraordinary recent monograph on the history of the parenthesis, But I Digress (1991) — a jewel of Oxford University Press scholarship, by the way, gracefully written and full of intelligence, decked out with a complete scholarly apparatus of multiple indices, bibliographies, and notes, whose author, to judge by the startling jacket photo (shaved head with up-sticking central proto-Mohawk tuft, earring on left ear, wilted corduroy jacket, and over-laundered T-shirt bearing some enigmatic insignia underneath), put himself through graduate school by working as a ticket scalper at Elvis Costello concerts. (A discussion of Elvis Costello’s use of the parenthesis in “Let Him Dangle” figures in a late chapter.)

At last, however, we have Pause and Effect, Dr. Malcolm Parkes’s brave overview: “an introduction,” so he unassumingly subtitles it, though it is much more than introductory, “to the history of punctuation in the West.” Not in the East, mind, or elsewhere — Arabic, Greek, and Sanskrit customs await a final fuse-blowing collation. (And according to the MLA index, there is Nanette Twine’s 1984 article on “The Adoption of Punctuation in Japanese Script,” in Visible Language, a journal that has recently done exciting things for the study of the punctuational past, to be absorbed; and, for canon-stretchers, John Duitsman’s “Punctuation in Thirteen West African Languages” and Carol F. Justus’s “Visible Sentences in Cuneiform Hittite.”) Though his punning title promises sprightliness, Dr. Parkes — fellow of Keble College and lecturer in paleography at the University of Oxford — has produced a rich, complex, and decidedly unsprightly book of coffee-table dimensions, with seventy-four illustrative plates, a glossary, and, regrettably, no index rerum.

It is not an easy book to read in bed. Because of the oversized folio format, each line on the page extends an inch or so longer than usual, resulting in eye-sweeps that must take in fourteen words at a time, rather than the more comfortable ten or eleven. As his shoulder muscles tire of supporting the full weight of the open book, the reader, lying on his left side, finally allows it to slump to the mattress and assume an L-position, and he then attempts to process the text with one open eye, which, instead of scanning left to right, reads by focusing outward along a radically foreshortened line of type that is almost parallel with his line of sight, skipping or supplying by guesswork those words that disappear beyond the gentle rise of the page. The gaps between each word narrow, hindering comprehension, although they never achieve that incomprehensible Greek ideal of page-layout called scriptio continua, in which the text is recorded unspaced as solid lines of letters.

And why, in fact, did the Greeks relinquish so sensible a practice as word-spacing, which even the cuneiformists of Minoan Crete apparently used? Lejeune, for one, finds this development “remarquable”; but even more remarquable is the fact that the pragmatic Romans had word-spacing available to them (via the Etruscans), in the form of “interpuncts,” or hovering dots between each word (a practice successfully revived by Wang word-processing software in the 1980s), which they too abandoned in early Christian times. “For this amazing and deplorable regression one can conjecture no reason other than an inept desire to imitate even the worst characteristic of Greek books,” scolds Revilo P. Oliver. Dr. Parkes, on the other hand, theorizes that class differences between readers and scribes may have had something to do with the perseverance of scriptio continua—a scribal slave must not presume to word-space, or otherwise punctuate, because he would thereby be imposing his personal reading of the constitutive letters on his employer. There were also, in monkish contexts, quasi-mystical arguments to be made for unspaced impenetrability: a resistant text, slow to offer up its literal meaning, encouraged meditation and memorization, suggested Cassian (a prominent fifth-century recluse); and the moment when, after much futile staring, the daunting word-search-puzzle of the sacred page finally spaced itself out, coalescing into comprehensible units of the Psalter, might serve to remind the swooning lector of the miracle of the act of reading, which is impossible without God’s loving condescension into human language and human form.

Amid all this phylogeny, Parkes does not mention, nor should he necessarily mention, the more mundane developmental fact that scriptio continua comes naturally to children:

DEARANDREWH

APPYBIRTHDA

YILOVEYOULO

VEALICEXXOX

Children aren’t taught to forgo spacing; all their written models are properly spaced. Occasionally, as a concession to the recipient (or adult onlooker), they will go back and insert a virgule here and there between words for clarity. There is something so exciting about writing, perhaps, that, like barely literate five-year-olds, civilizations in the midst of discovering or rediscovering its pleasures and traditions take a while before they begin to care about casual readability — and consequently their scholars are said to study litterae, “letters,” not words.

In part as a result of the unspaced line, pointing was viewed from the beginning as a form of ornament, as well as a means of what Parkes calls “disambiguation.” Cassiodorus, the first great biblical pointillist, advised sixth-century monks to add punctuation “in order that you may be seen to be adding embellishment.” Alcuin wrote Charlemagne that “Distinctiones or subdistinctiones by points can make embellishment in sentences most beautiful.” Early medieval readers like Dulcitius of Aquino would decorate a work with dots and diples and paragraph marks as they read it and then proudly sign their name on the page: “I, Dulcitius, read this.” Punctuation, like marginal and interlinear commentary, seems at times to have been a ritual of reciprocation, a way of returning something to the text in grateful tribute after it had released its meaning in the reader’s mind.

Somewhat surprisingly, scholastic philosophy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which is, as Francis Bacon uncharitably observed, a vast and intricate cobweb spun from Aristotle, “admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance and profit,” and thus ideally decorative and mannerist rather than functional, pushed by logical and dis-putational energy rather than pulled by truth — the sort of era, then, in which you might expect punctuation to thrive—turns out in fact to be a dark, sad time for subdistinctiones. Parkes explains that the paradigmatic nature of the scholastic manuscript, with its repetitive queriturs and quaestios signaling to the reader precisely where he was in the formal structure of the argument, made a sophisticated punctuational tool-set unnecessary.

On the other hand, it may just be that the schoolmen, spending their days reading awful Latin translations from the Arabic of translations from the Greek, had no ear. Cicero himself disdained punctuation, insisting that the well-cadenced sentence would audibly manifest its own terminus, without the need of any mere “stroke interposed by a copyist”; but those who afterward took punctuation, and took Cicero, seriously — Cassiodorus, Isidore, Bembo, Petrarch — proved their allegiance by their virgulae: like archaizing composers who want to ensure a certain once-standard performance practice and therefore spell out every trill and every ritenuto, though their historical models offer only unadorned notes, these admirers could hear the implied punctuation of Ciceronian rhythm, and could in some cases duplicate his rollaway effects in their own writing, but they didn’t trust their contemporaries to detect a classicizing clausula without the help of visual aids.

Dr. Parkes’s own prose is serviceable and unprecious, if non-passerine. For those of us whose Latin never quite took flight, he has provided translations of every passage he quotes. He takes care from time to time to mention political developments as they impinge on the punctuational sphere: if some depredation or upheaval happens to have brought on “a situation hostile to grammatical culture,” he says so. The puzzling thing, though, is how casual Parkes is — this eagle-eyed paleographer, who has worked so hard to “raise a reader’s consciousness of what punctuation is and does”!—about his commas. Where are they? “Pausing therefore was part of the process of reading not copying.” “Before the advent of printing a text left its author and fell among scribes.” “The printing process not only stabilized the shapes and functions of the symbols it also sustained existing conventions that governed the ways in which they were employed.” And: “This increase in the range of distinctive symbols also promoted new developments in usage since the symbols not only enabled readers to identify more easily the functions of grammatical constituents within a sentence but also made possible more subtle refinements in the communication of the message of a text.”

Were it not for Dr. Parkes’s surefooted employment of the comma elsewhere, one might almost suspect that his was a case reminiscent of those psychotherapists who enter their profession because they sense something deeply amiss within themselves, or of those humorless people who buy joke books and go to comedy clubs to correct internal deficiencies. In a commentary accompanying a fascinating page of Richard Hooker, Parkes, or someone with whom he has shared (as he nicely says in his preface) “the burden of proofs,” flouts even the sacred law of the serial comma: “The notation series for indicating glosses notes and citations in the margins, based on letters of the alphabet in sequence, was also used in the Geneva Bible of 1560.”

Once, however, Parkes surprises us by unconsciously using the old-fashioned, eighteenth-century that-comma. It is the comma of Gibbon—

It has been calculated by the ablest politicians, that no state, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness.

And of Gibbon’s model Montesquieu, in Nugent’s 1750 translation (twice)—

Plato thanked the Gods, that he was born in the same age with Socrates: and for my part, I give thanks to the Almighty, that I was born a subject of that government under which I live; and that it is his pleasure I should obey those, whom he has made me love.

And of Burke (twice)—

Mr. Hume told me, that he had from Rousseau himself the secret of his principles of composition. That acute, though eccentric, observer had perceived, that to strike and interest the public, the marvellous must be produced …

And of Burke’s brilliant adversary, Thomas Paine—

Admitting that Government is a contrivance of human

wisdom

, it must necessarily follow, that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights (as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary.

Parkes writes, “The punctuation of the manuscript has been so freely corrected and adapted by later scribes, that it is not easy to determine whether any of the other ecphonetic signs are also by the original scribe or whether they have been added.” The only other person I can think of who uses old-style that-commas with any consistency is Peter Brown, who, like Parkes, spends his time with Latin quod-clauses that have been punctuated by old German commentators. (A comma is still regularly used before a daβ-clause in German.)

Another rarity in Parkes’s book, perhaps the very first of its kind, is the occurrence of the two halves of semi-colon linked, not by a hyphen, but by a full-scale em-dash: semi — colon. This elongation could be Parkes’s secret way of protesting American trends in copy-editing, which would have the noun-unit spelled without any divisive internal rule at all: semicolon. Truly, American copy-editing has fallen into a state of demoralized confusion over hyphenated and unhyphenated compounds — or at least, I am demoralized and confused, having just gone through the manuscript of a novel in which a very smart and careful and good-natured copy-editor has deleted about two hundred of my innocent tinkertoy hyphens. I wrote “stet hyphen” in the margin so many times that I finally abbreviated it to “SH”—but there was no wicked glee in my intransigence: I didn’t want to be the typical prose prima donna who made her life difficult.

On the other hand, I remembered an earlier manuscript of mine in which an event took place in the back seat of a car: in the bound galleys, the same event occurred in the “backseat.” The backseat. Grateful for hundreds of other fixes, unwilling to seem stubborn, I had agreed without protest to the closing-up, but I stewed about it afterward and finally reinserted a space before publication. (“Backseat” wants to be read as a trochee, BACKseat, like “baseball,” when in reality we habitually give both halves of the compound equal spoken weight.) Therefore, mindful of my near miss with “back seat,” I stetted myself sick over the new manuscript. I stetted re-enter (rather than reenter), post-doc (rather than postdoc), foot-pedal (rather than foot pedal), second-hand (rather than secondhand), twist-tie (rather than twist tie), and pleasure-nubbins (rather than pleasure nubbins).

The copy-editor, because her talents permit her to be undoctrinaire, and because it is, after all, my book, indulged me, for better or worse. In passing, we had a stimulating discussion of the word pantyhose, which she had emended to read panty hose. My feeling was that the word hose is unused now in reference to footwear, and that panty, too, in its singular form, is imaginable only as part of pantywaist or in some hypothetical L. L. Bean catalog: “Bean’s finest chamois-paneled trail panty.” Pantyhose thus constitutes a single, interfused unit of sense, greater than the sum of its parts, which ought to be the criterion for jointure. And yet, though the suggested space seemed to me mistaken, I could just as easily have gone for panty-hose as pantyhose—in fact, normally I would have campaigned for a hyphen in this sort of setting, since the power-crazed policy-makers at Merriam-Webster and Words into Type have been reading too much Joyce in recent years and making condominiums out of terms (especially — like compounds, which can look like transliterated Japanese when closed up) that deserve semi-detachment. (Joyce, one feels, wanted his prose to look different, Irish, strange, not tricked out with fastidious Oxford hyphens that handled uncouth noun-clumps with gloved fingertips: he would have been embarrassed to see his idiosyncratic cuffedge and watchchain and famous scrotumtightening acting to sway US style-shepherds.) A tasteful spandex hyphen would have been, so my confusion whispers to me now, perfectly all right in panty-hose, pulling the phrase together scrotumtighteningly at its crotch.

I offer this personal note merely to illustrate how small the moments are that cumulatively result in punctuational thigmotaxis. Evolution proceeds hyphen by hyphen, and manuscript by manuscript — impelled by the tension between working writers and their copy-editors, and between working copy-editors and their works of reference (“I’ll just go check the big Web,” a magazine editor once said to me cheerfully); by the admiration of ancestors, and by the ever-imminent possibility of paralysis through boredom. Are the marks that we have right now really enough? Don’t you sometimes feel a sudden abdominal cramp of revulsion when you scan down a column of type and see several nice little clauses (only one per sentence, of course: Chic. Man. St. § 5.91) set off by cute little pairs of unadorned dashes?

The nineteenth century didn’t think the dash on its own was nearly enough. Dr. Parkes ends his brief discussion of “The Mimetic Ambitions of the Novelist and the Exploitation of the Pragmatics of the Written Medium” with Virginia Woolf, so he (pardonably) avoids treating the single most momentous change in twentieth-century punctuation, namely the disappearance of the great dash-hybrids. All three of them — the commash, — , the semi-colash ;—, and the colash :— (so I name them, because naming makes analysis possible) — are of profound importance to Victorian prose, and all three are now (except for certain revivalist zoo specimens to be mentioned later) extinct.

Everyone used dash-hybrids. They are in Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Brontë, and George Meredith. They are on practically every page of Trollope—

He was nominally, not only the heir to, but actually the possessor of, a large property;—but he could not touch the principal, and of the income only so much as certain legal curmudgeons would allow him. As Greystock had said, everybody was at law with him, — so successful had been his father, in mismanaging, and mis-controlling, and misappropriating the property.

Rapid writing will no doubt give rise to inaccuracy, — chiefly because the ear, quick and true as may be its operation, will occasionally break down under pressure, and, before a sentence be closed, will forget the nature of the composition with which it commenced.

The novels of a man possessed of so singular a mind must themselves be very strange, — and they are strange.

They are in Thackeray—

[…] the Captain was not only accustomed to tell the truth, — he was unable even to think it — and fact and fiction reeled together in his muzzy, whiskified brain.

And in George Eliot—

The general expectation now was that the “much” would fall to Fred Vincy, but the Vincys themselves were surprised when ten thousand pounds in specified investments were declared to be bequeathed to him — was the land coming too?

The toniest nonfictional Prosicrucians — De Quincey, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Doughty — also make constant use of dashtards, often at rhetorical peaks:

It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;—these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University: I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them; but still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless, — pleasant, alas, and attractive as he shows when decked out in them.

Pater, though he has been charged with over-sonorous purism, and is unquestionably at times a little light in his Capezios (to steal a phrase from Arsenio Hall), depends on punctuational pair-bonding to help him wrap up his terrific essay on style and his “Conclusion” to The Renaissance. Sydney Smith wrote that if Francis Jeffrey were given the solar system to review — Francis Jeffrey being the sour critic who said “This will never do” of Wordsworth’s Excursion—he would pan it: “Bad light — planets too distant — pestered with comets — feeble contrivance;—could make a better with great ease.” Emerson was a huge user of the semi-colash; in fact, of the fifty-two dashes in “The American Scholar,” only four, by my count, appear unaccompanied by either a semi-colon or a comma.

Hybrids become somewhat less common, though they are still easily found, after the turn of the century. Henry James employed a few in his early writing, but revised them out in the édition de luxe that began appearing in 1907. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, a good test bed of Edwardian norms, resorts to them fairly frequently:

A large screw can, however, be roughly examined in the following manner — (1) See whether the surface of the threads has a perfect polish … (2) mount it between the centres of a lathe … (4) Observe whether the short nut runs from end to end of the screw without a wabbling motion when the screw is turned and the nut kept from revolving. If it wabbles the screw is said to be drunk.

And Edmund Gosse’s 1907 Father and Son has a lovely comma-softened dash that can be read as a wistful farewell to a form of punctuation in its twilight:

These rock-basins, fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life, — they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied, and vulgarised.

They pop up here and there in Norman Douglas, early J. B. Priestley, and Cyril Connolly. J. M. Keynes used a scattering of all three forms in his 1920 Economic Consequences of the Peace. For instance:

The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable, — abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if it did not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe.

But hybrid punctuation was doomed by then. Proust used two pre-war semi-colashes in the enormous “bedrooms I have known” sentence in the opening of A la rehash; Scott Moncrieff removed them in his post-war 1922 translation. (Terence Kilmartin, good man, restored the original punctuation in 1981.) The dandiest dandy of them all, Vladimir Nabokov (who, I think, read Father and Son just as closely as he read Proust, drawn to its engaging combination of literature and amateur naturalism), used over sixty excellent comma-dash pairings in his first and quite Edwardian English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). (For example, “ ‘A title,’ said Clare, ‘must convey the colour of the book, — not its subject.’ ”) He used none at all in Speak, Memory: The New Yorker had sweated it out of him. In all of his later work I have noticed only one precious semi-colash: Humbert writes, “I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms;—a salutary storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year!”

More precious still, to the punctuational historian, are the two instances of reversed commashes in Updike’s early novels — one in the Fawcett edition of The Centaur, and one on page 22 of the Fawcett Of the Farm:

As Joan comforted him, my mother, still holding the yardstick — an orange one stamped with the name of an Alton hardware store—, explained that the boy had been “giving her the eye” all morning, and for some time had been planning to “put her to the test.”

This extremely rare variant form hearkens back to forties Mencken—

My father put in a steam-heating plant toward the end of the eighties — the first ever seen in Hollins Street—, but such things were rare until well into the new century.

And again to Proust: “Que nous l’aimons — comme en ce moment j’aimais Françoise—, l’intermédiaire bien intentionné qui” etc.

But Updike, our standard-bearer, never stands up for dashtards now. Even John Barth’s eighteenth-century pastiche, The Sot-Weed Factor, where they would have been right at home, doesn’t use them. (They were everywhere in the eighteenth century, too.) What comet or glacier made them die out? This may be the great literary question of our time. I timidly tried to use a semi-colash in an essay for The Atlantic Monthly in 1983: the associate editor made a strange whirring sound in her throat, denoting inconceivability, and I immediately backed down. Why, why are they gone? Was it — and one always gropes for the McLuhanesque explanation first — the increasing use of the typewriter for final drafts, whose arrangement of comma, colon, and semi-colon keys made a quick reach up to the hyphen key immediately after another punctuation mark physically awkward? Or was it — for one always gropes for the pseudo-scientific explanation just after McLuhan — the triumphant success of quantum mechanics? A comma is indisputably more of a quantum than a commash. Did the point-play of the Dadaists and E. E. Cummings, and the unpunctled last chapter of Ulysses, force a scramble for a simple hegemony against which revolt could be measured?

The style manuals had been somewhat uncomfortable with hybrid punctuation all along — understandably so, since it interferes with systematization. The most influential Victorian antibarbarus, John Wilson’s A Treatise on English Punctuation, which went through something like thirty editions in England and America, tolerated mixed points; indeed, later editions offered pages of exercises, written and oral, intended to help the student refine his dexterity with the commash. But “the unnecessary profusion of straight lines,” Wilson warned, as others had warned before him, “particularly on a printed page, is offensive to good taste, is an index of the dasher’s profound ignorance of the art of punctuation …” In “Stops” or, How to Punctuate, Paul Allardyce, the Edwardian successor to Wilson, was more severe: “There is seldom any reason for the use of double points.” G. V. Carey, in Mind the Stop (1939), was unequivocal: “The combination of other stops with dashes is even less admissible than with brackets.” There was a glimmer of hope in Eric Partridge’s You Have a Point There (1953) — he advised that, yes, compound points should be used with “caution and moderation,” but he had the courage to admit that “occasionally [they] are, in fact, unavoidable.”

But that was 1953, in fault-tolerant England. According to the Chicago Manual of Style (¶ 5.5), dash-hybrids are currently illegal in the U.S. In the name of biodiversity, however, I stuck a few of them in out-of-the-way places in my first novel, over the objections of the copy-editor, in 1988. I thought I was making history. But Salman Rushdie had beaten me to it, as it turned out: The Satanic Verses, which appeared a few months before my book, uses dozens and dozens of dashtards, and uses them aggressively, flauntingly, more in the tradition of Laurence Sterne than of Trollope. Brad Leithauser’s arch, Sebastian Knight-like frame-narrator, in Hence (1989), uses many commashes; and Leithauser discussed Rushdie’s “Emily Dickinsonian onslaught of dashes” in a New Yorker review that same year — although somehow Emily Dickinson doesn’t seem quite right. But we’re just playing at it now, the three of us — we aren’t sincere in our dashtardy;—we can’t be.

It would be nice to see Dr. Parkes or Dr. Lennard (of parenthetical fame) attempt a carefully researched socio-historical explanation of the passing of mixed punctuation. Unfortunately, a full explanation would have to include everything — Gustav Stickley, Henry Ford, Herbert Read, Gertrude Stein, Norbert Weiner, Harold Geneen, James Watson, Saint Strunk, and especially The New Yorker’s Miss Eleanor Gould, whose faint, gray, normative pencil-point still floats above us all. And even then the real microstructure of the shift would elude us. We should give daily thanks, in any case, to Malcolm Parkes, for offering us some sense of the flourishing coralline tide-pools of punctuational pluralism that preceded our own purer, more consistent, more teachably codified, and perhaps more arid century.

(1993)

A Novel by Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst is better at bees than Oscar Wilde. On the opening page of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde has them “shouldering their way through the long unmown grass.” A bee must never be allowed to shoulder. Later that afternoon, Dorian Gray, alarmed by Lord Henry Wotton’s graphic talk of youth’s inevitable degeneration, drops a lilac blossom that he has been “feverishly” sniffing. Bee numero due appears, taking most of a paragraph to “scramble all over the stellated globe of the tiny blossoms” and further interrogate the “stained trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus.” Here again, when you’re talking about bee-legs and their prehensile dealings with plant tissue, “scramble” doesn’t quite do the trick.

In The Folding Star, on the other hand, Alan Hollinghurst’s narrator (who has several traits in common with Wilde’s disillusioned, youth-seducing Lord Henry) describes lying on a bench in the sun, “breathing the seedy vanilla smell of a bush on which half a dozen late bees still dropped and toppled.” “Dropped and toppled,” with its slumping music, is brief and extremely good: avoiding the mention of blossoms altogether, it nicely captures the heavy, dangled, abdominal clumsiness of those end-of-shift pollen-packers.

There are things like this, and better than this, to be grateful for on almost every page of Hollinghurst’s new book — in almost every paragraph, in fact. And yet it isn’t glutting to read because its excellences are so varied and multiplanar. Hollinghurst, it seems, has an entirely sane and unmanic wish to supply seriatim all the pleasures that the novel is capable of supplying. The conversation, especially, is brilliant, but everything — depraved or refined or both — is tuned and compensated for, held forth and plucked away, allusively waved at when there’s no time for a thorough workover, and neatly parsed when there is. The narrator is a sad man, past-besotted, unachieving and “drinky” if not drunken, with moments of misanthropic Larkinism (“Books are a load of crap,” he unconvincingly quotes near the beginning), but his lost-youth mood is the opposite of depressing because he describes whatever suits him with an intelligence that cheers itself up as it goes.

He — Edward Manners — has come to a mythical, silt-choked, fallen Flemish city (Ghentwerp? Brugeselles? some hybrid, anyway) to start fresh by tutoring two boys in English. One is the son of an art historian who has been plugging away at a catalogue raisonné of a minor (and fictional) Burne-Jonesite Symbolist and syphilitic with the wonderful name of Orst — Edgard Orst, that is, depicter of fabric-draped interiors, spare seascapes, and allegorical women with orange hair and racy chokers made of Roman medals. But this first boy has asthma and is plump, so forget him. The other “lad,” Luc Altidore, seventeen, he of the wide shoulders and wondrously puffy upper lip, is the descendant of an eccentric luminary named Anthonis Altidore, a sixteenth-century printer (Christophe Plantin?) who, so we learn, successfully traced his ancestry straight back to the Virgin Mary. (“One imagines some pretty murky areas around, say, the third century,” somebody comments.) Despite the presence of a bewildering array of men and their variously sized and angled organalia in Edward Manners’s gay bar-coded sensibility, young Luc, though he may possibly be a heterosexual (mixed blessing!), and though the thought that he is related to Jesus Christ is “slightly unnerving,” utterly appropriates our likable if occasionally glum hero’s romantic imagination. Luc is no rocket scientist. “I could have impressed him, even gently squashed him with my knowledge,” Manners thinks, but allowances must be made for the language problem, and anyway, as Lord Henry Wotton explains, “Beauty is a form of Genius — is higher, indeed, than Genius as it needs no explanation.” Manners, in a fever of early-thirties infatuation, can’t stop thinking about that cursed “molten trumpeter’s lip” which blows all the available competition away; like some “creepy old hetero,” he finds himself sniffing used lad-undies and crusty lad-hankies, tasting dry toothbrushes and stealing negatives in order to get closer to this unattainable Altidorian Gray, who though he is at his best in white jeans can “ironise” even a pair of khakis, leggy piece of work that he is.

Like Hollinghurst’s great first book, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star has many characters but few women. The author takes pains to greet them and make them feel welcome in a chapter or two, and he clearly bears them no ill-will, but he can’t focus on them for longer than half an hour. It’s too bad that we don’t have a little more time with the charming (and page-boyish) Edie, for example, who is willing to listen to any lurid sketch of gay fetishism with “the open-minded expression of someone on holiday good-naturedly learning the rules of a foreign national game.” But Edward is fundamentally suspicious of, or at least uninterested in, the “never fully plausible world of heterosexual feeling.” An awed or intrigued reference to the male “genital ensemble” occurs every fifteen pages or so, as well it should. (For instance: “sometimes modest and strong, sometimes lolloping and heavy-headed, its only constants an easy foreskin, a certain presence, and a heather-honey beauty”; or, he “pissed fiercely in the bushes; then stood for a while slapping his dick in his palm as a doctor smacks a vein he wants to rise.”) An analogous visual insatiability within the straight world, however, Edward views with fastidious distaste. Presented with some antique dirty pictures of a laundrywoman, he says: “I made my interest scientific, dimly thinking what a prig I was when it came to women and the indignities men demanded of them.”

All this seems both true and funny — there is a deep chasm, no doubt essentially vulval, of reciprocal incomprehensibility that normally separates the gay cosmology from the prevailing straightgeist; we might as well recognize the obvious cleavage and wrest some entertainment out of (for example) our mutually baffling pornography. Manners, with refreshing intolerance, goes so far as to say that “there was always something lacking in those men who had never had a queer phase as boys, it showed in a certain dryness of imagination, a bland tolerance uncoloured by any suppression of their own, a blindness to the spectrum’s violet end.”

Blind and violet-deprived though we few remaining creepy heteros are (and sleep-deprived, as well — Hollinghurst includes a glimpse of a new father, who “yawned like a dog, with a whine too”), we nonetheless do our best to learn as much as we can about our cross-pollinating betters, and we welcome, or ought to welcome, with foot-stamping and cheers and the earnest rattling of our model-airplane kits, the inspired historical verisimilitude that Hollinghurst brings to bear in both his books on the making of an alternative creation-myth of artistic evolution. The retroactive homosexualization of poetic history, and especially of the tradition of pastoral elegy and rustic reflection as it works its way down through Milton, William Collins, Wordsworth, and Shelley all the way to the fictional Georgian poet “Sir Perry Dawlish,” is accomplished with astonishing ease and plausibility in The Folding Star.

In one scene, the adolescent Edward waits outdoors for the evening star to come out and thinks over his phrase-hoard of nature poetry and “becomes a connoisseur of the last lonely gradings of blue into black”; and in doing so somehow leads us to the conviction that all the grunting, groping, and “stubbly frenching” that apparently goes on at dusk between men and boys in decrepit parks and overgrown commons, in ruined abbeys and hermitages and other handy arcadias, has always gone on and is good and worthwhile — is, indeed, the secret triumphant undertheme of all pastoral verse. Edward looks over the trees at that trope of tropes, Hesperus, star of the muse and of poetic attainment, the “folding-star” of Collins’s “Ode to Evening” or (as in Milton’s “Comus”) the “Star that bids the shepherd fold,” and it seems to become for him the winking lure and symbol of all things perseveringly evanescent, immortally short-lived, bravely tearful and impeccably campy. Edward never goes so far as to say that his private muse, his beloved vespertine twinkler, is actually puckered, forthrightly anal, but he is too visually on the ball not to want to allow us to infer that cinctured sense of “folding star,” as well — he refers to Luc (the name is a broken spangle from “Lucinda,” perhaps) as a “star” and as “starlit” and we concede the point. And it’s a star of mourning, too; the AIDSy sadness of so much recent loss, the disappearance of brilliant youths and the disappearance of one’s own youth’s brilliance, and the more general sadness of the unknowable generations of self-stifled and closeted poets that preceded our outspoken time, and then, too, the simple asexual unattainability of much of what we really want and the unretrievability of what we best remember, are some of the emotions toward which Hollinghurst shepherds us.

The Folding Star turns out to be one of the few satisfying books around that treat the relationship between art and life and the secrets they keep from each other. The thirteenth-century English exported wool to Bruges, where Flemish guild-members wove it into cloth and tapestry. Edward Manners here exports himself, his native language, his wool-gathered raw material of educated reading, his sexual appetite, to a Brugesed and battered city that goes to work on him and knots him as we read into a figure in its ancient hieratic carpet. The allegory in the book is thick and ambiguous and un-Jamesian: like a well-hung (shall we say) Flemish tapestry — like the Flemish tapestry, perhaps, that hangs in the childhood room where Dorian Gray secretly stores his horrifying portrait, or like the tapestries Edgard Orst paints behind his mysterious orange-haired models — it’s decorative and plush and fine, exuberantly pictorial but uninsistently in the background.

Given the man-boy theme, we may be forgiven for keeping half an eye out for gender-flipped Lolitanisms. There are at least two: a pointed passage about the pronunciation of “Lucasta” (“the darting buss with which it began, the upward and downward flicker of the tongue against the teeth”); and the Frenchified “dream palindrome” of “Luc” and “cul.” One could conceivably call these defects, but they aren’t — as a matter of fact, the play on “Luc” and “cul” helps dissolve another minuscule potential reproof, which is that there are a few too many uses of the vogue word “clueless.” For “clueless” is only a dream anagram of “Luc-less”—and the pain of Luc-lessness is what this clue-laden book, lucky for us, is all about.

(1994)

Leading with the Grumper

This¹ may be the funniest and best-smelling work of profound lexicographical slang-scholarship ever published. Some may respect the hint of Elmer’s glue in recent printings of Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th ed.), or the faint traces of burlap and cocoa-bean that linger deep in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, or even the fume of indoor swimming-pool that clings to the paper-bound decolletage of Slang!: The Topic-By-Topic Dictionary of Contemporary American Lingoes. But a single deep draught of J. E. Lighter’s magnificent Historical Dictionary of American Slang (Volume I, A — G) is a higher order of experience: it smells like a high-ceilinged bare room freshly painted white — clean and sunlit, full of reverberative promise and proud of its mitered corners, although with a mildly intoxicating or hyperventilational “finish.” Since these one thousand and six pages embrace more concentrated filth, vilification, and depravity than any contiguously printed sequence is likely to contain until Lighter’s Volume II (H — R) appears in the spring of 1996, we may momentarily question the appropriateness of so guileless a fragrance. Yet reading onward (and Lighter really must be read, or at least deeply browsed, rather than consulted — the book belongs on every patriotic coffee table) we begin to acknowledge its aptness, for this work makes us see American slang — a dingy, stuffy, cramped apartment that we’ve lived in for so long now that it bores and irritates us — with sudden latex-based clarity and awe. What a spacious, cheery gallery we now have in which to tour our swear-words! How delightfully chronological and typographically tasteful it all is! How firmly principled, how unchaotic, how waltzable-in!

And mainly, how unexpectedly funny. To judge by his helpful introduction, Mr. Lighter, who has been laboring on this project for twenty-five years, is not himself a wildly comic person, but he is an exact and deliberate and historically minded person, and he has a rare ability for positioning formerly funny words and phrases in settings that allow them to become funny once more. He is slang’s great straight man. I never suspected that I would again laugh aloud at the phrase “broken-dick motherfucker,” having found it inert for some time — but no, reading (on the plane) one of the several citations under “broke-dick adj. worthless. — usu. considered vulgar,” I was suddenly, mystifyingly, pounding the tray-table. So too with the entry for airhole:

airhole

n

. [partly euphem.] ASSHOLE, 1 & 2.

a

1925

in Fauset

Folklore from N.S

134: Mary had a little lamb,/Its face was black as charcoal,/Every time it shook its tail,/He showed his little airhole.

1985

Webster

(ABC-TV): I wear socks with black shoes. A lot of people think I’m an airhole.

And fern:

fern

n. Stu

the buttocks.

Joc

.

1965

N.Y.C. high-school student: How’s your fern [after a fall]?

1965

Adler

Vietnam Letters 99

: You know, the hardest part of all this is the feeling of sitting around on our ferns, doing nothing.

And even:

asshole

n

. [ME

arce-hoole

] Also (

Rare

in U.S.)

arsehole

.—usu. considered vulgar. [See note at ASS,

n

., which is usually considered to be less offensive. Additional phrases in which these words appear interchangeably may be found at ASS.]

1

the anus or rectum [….]

1987

D. Sherman

Main Force

183: when I tell you to do something, I expect to hear your asshole pop, do you understand me?

You enter, while studying this book, the west wing of verbal consciousness — the realm of slangfarbenmelodie, of alliterative near-similarity and drunken lateralism and chiming hostility purged of its face-to-face context and abstracted into music: you are in the presence, at times, of the only good things that a million anonymous bullies and sadistic drill-sergeants and cruel-minded, mean-spirited frat boys or sorority girls have bequeathed to the world:

chicken-fucker

n. a depraved or disgusting fellow. — usu. constr. with

baldheaded

.—usu. considered vulgar.

1953

in Legman

Rationale

20: Suddenly two bald-headed men enter, and the parrot says, “You two chicken-fuckers come out in the henhouse with me.”

1976–79

Duncan & Moore

Green Side Out

276 [ref. to

ca

1960]: All right ya baldheaded chicken-fuckers, I want this area policed the fuck up.

1967–80

McAleer & Dickson

Unit Pride

287 [ref. to Korean War]: Heave in the first shovelful … and run like a baldheaded chicken-fucker.

Of course, nice, gentle people invent slang, too, once in a while. And nice, gentle people can take private satisfaction in slang that they would never more than mutter. In the trance of linguistic close scrutiny that this book induces, terms which would simply be tiresome or embarrassing if actually employed in speech — if used by a winking wall-to-wall-carpeting salesman or an obnoxious dinner guest, say — may without warning deviate your septum here. That we manage to see them as harmless and even possibly charming is entirely to Lighter’s credit; the trick seems to hinge, curiously enough, on the repeated use of a single abbreviated versicle: “usu. considered vulgar.”

A donkey dick, for example, meaning “a frankfurter, salami, or bologna,” is “usu. considered vulgar.” Few observers would disagree. A fartsack, defined as “a sleeping bag, bedroll, bunk, cot, or bed; SACK” is, again justifiably, “usu. considered vulgar.” The morning request to “Drop your cocks and grab your socks!” is “usu. considered vulgar.” To have a bug up (one’s) ass [and vars.] (meaning to “have an unreasonable, esp. obsessive or persistent, idea”) is “usu. considered vulgar.” A come-pad (“mattress”) is “usu. considered vulgar.” Cunt-breath and dicknose are “usu. considered vulgar.” This phrase is probably the one most frequently used in the dictionary, with “usu. considered offensive” a distant second; the introductory material explains that usu. actually means “almost always, though not inevitably,” since “ ‘mainstream standards’ are flexible and are primarily based on situation and speaker-to-speaker relationships.” But the exoticizing Urdic or Swahilian symmetry of “usu.” gives it comic authority, as well: it serves up each livid slangwad neatly displayed on a decorative philological doily.

What is not “usu. considered vulgar” is of some interest, too. The word grumper (buttocks) is not considered vulgar, perhaps because it is relatively rare. (The citation, from 1972, reads: “Some chicks lead with the boobs.… This chick leads with the grumper.”) A Knight of the golden grummet, listed under grommet and meaning, according to a 1935 definition quoted by Lighter, “a male sexual pervert whose complex is boys,” does not rate the “usu.” phrase. To deep-throat is not vulgar. A dingleberry (cross-referenced with the earlier dillberry and fartleberry), painstakingly defined in a 1938 citation as “Tiny globular pieces of solidified excreta which cling to the hirsute region about the anal passage”—or, if you prefer a pithier 1966 definition, as a “piece of crap hanging on a hair”—is not flagged as vulgar, although eagle shit (“the gold ornamentation on the visor of a senior officer’s cap”) is, and dingleberry cluster, meaning a military decoration, does receive a “used derisively.” The English, who sometimes become confused about such things, used dingle-berries to mean “Female breasts: low and raffish,” according to Partridge, a sense that doesn’t, on Lighter’s evidence, seem to have reached these shores — although other unvulgar American meanings Lighter does record (and which illustrate slang’s resourceful opportunism, its indifference to anatomical inconsistency) are “a doltish or contemptible person,” “the testicles,” “the clitoris or vagina,” and “splattered molten particles around a metallic weld on a pipe or vessel.”

Not only is Lighter choosy (a chooser, incidentally, is a neglected vaudevillism meaning “plagiarist”) about what words are truly vulgar, he is also interestingly selective about what words he includes in the book at all. Butt plug only appears by virtue of its derisive sense, meaning a “stupid or contemptible person. — usu. considered vulgar,” where it is followed by a corroborative quotation from Beavis and Butthead. (“Nice try,… butt plug.”) The primary, artifactual usage of butt plug does not appear, apparently because it is (to quote the press release that accompanied review copies of the dictionary) “a descriptive term that cannot be said [i.e., expressed] with any other word.” In Lighter’s system, a word, however informal, that has no convenient synonyms probably isn’t slang—butt plug is jargon, perhaps, a “term of art” in some advanced circles. Slang is by definition gratuitous; slang words most commonly travel in loose packs of unnecessary cognates or rhymes. (Viz., breadhooks, cornstealers, daddles, flappers, flippers, grabbers, and grabhooks for “hands”; or, for “sanatorium,” booby hatch, brain college, bughouse, cackle factory, cracker factory, fool farm, foolish factory, funny factory, funny farm, giggle academy, and so on, all chronicled by Lighter; the bucolic “farm” variants are generally predated by the “factory” variants — idiomatic insanity in America seems to begin as an industrial symptom.) Even stand-alone units like cookie-duster (mustache), crotch rocket (motorcycle), dusty butt (short person), drum snuffer (safe-cracker), blow blood (have a nosebleed), flannel-buzzards (lice), or boom bucket (an aircraft’s ejection seat) are slang by virtue of their appreciable emotional distance from, and yet complete referential synonymy with, a unit of Standard English. Only when our culture evolves at least one other word for a butt plug will the term — if I understand Lighter— merit his definitional attention.

The truth is, though, that I probably don’t understand Lighter and I’m probably not doing justice to the complex algorithms that allow him to discriminate between slang and other kinds of verbal festivity. Why is butt plug out and French tickler in? If a lack of standard English synonyms is one of the tests for exclusion, why is an admittedly fine term like gig-line (meaning “a straight alignment of the buttons of a shirt and jacket, the belt buckle, and the fly of the trousers”) included? Is there really a standard English equivalent for such a disposition of one’s wardrobe? And why is bong, in the sense of a water-filtered pot-smoking mechanism, not to be found, while the related but more recent bong meaning a “device consisting of a funnel attached to a tube for drinking beer quickly” is? Lighter includes fluff (“the usu. passive partner in a lesbian relationship”) and sister words femme and fuckee, and even bender (“a male homosexual who habitually assumes the passive role in anal copulation”—also known as an ankle grabber), but not the related S/M sense of bottom. Fender-bender, in the automotive sense, is in, as is cluster-fuck, fuckhead, and even fenderhead, but gender-bender and genderfuck are out — hardly surprising or scandalous omissions, although both are interesting meldings, part of the steady slanging down of the High Church word gender, which only a few years ago was esteemed by language reformers for its lack of connotative raciness, and which is now quietly de-euphemizing, thanks to the work of gender-fuck pioneers like Kate (née Albert) Bornstein, lesbian trans-sexual author of a play called Hidden: A Gender. In the area of lit-crit and genre studies, fuck-book is here (along with dick-book and cunt book), but friction-fiction is possibly too recent or too technical.

Lighter is at his most severely exclusive regarding authorial or journalistic neologisms. For instance, his entries for bush, crank, and fudge-packer quote lines from a book of my own, being pre-existent words, whereas none of the A-through-G novelties in that same book (bobolinks, candy-corn, clit-cloister, cream horns, frans, etc.) — novelties, may I say, on which I expensed some spirit and wasted some shame — were allowed in. Coinages, Lighter explains, “owe their birth partly to high spirits but chiefly to the coiner’s forgivable desire to impress the public with his or her wit.” He censures earlier works of reference such as Berrey and Van den Bark’s The American Thesaurus of Slang (1942) for including such “ephemera,” contending that

slang differs … from idiosyncratic wordplay and other nonce figuration in that it maintains a currency independent of its creator, the individual writer or speaker.

Lighter’s experience tells him that

Most words and phrases claimed as “slang” are nonce terms or “oncers,” never to be seen or heard of again. Some become true “ghost words,” recorded in slang dictionaries for many years but never encountered in actual usage. We have attempted to exclude such expressions from this dictionary.

(“Ghost words” must never be confused with ghost turds—“accumulations of lint found under furniture. — usu. considered vulgar.”) Occasionally a fetching journalistic invention will prosper — notably the creative work of writers at Variety in the twenties and thirties, who brought us such necessities as turkey, lay an egg, and flop. But Lighter plays down the importance of print in slang’s genesis and dissemination: “although journalism has often encouraged the spread of slang, the chief method of popularization has always been the shifting associational networks among individuals”—particularly, he convincingly asserts, the associational networks within the U.S. armed services. (Lighter’s command of the history of military slang is stunning: the entry for gook has over fifty citations; it is three times longer than the entry for chick.) Real slang just happens: “lexical innovations are traceable only rarely to specific persons; the proportion of slang actually created by identifiable individuals is minute.”

Despite slang’s usually anonymous and often paramilitary origins, hundreds of identifiable individuals have a place in the Dictionary, doing their bit to substantiate the existence of a given piece of loose language. Perhaps the most cheering thing about this awesome project is how seriously it takes the trade paperback. As one would expect, there are crumbs collected from movies, newspapers, TV series, linguistic research interviews, and celebrity profiles — as when Steve McQueen is quoted as saying, “I chickenshitted on the second turn”—but there are also innumerable illustrative quotations drawn from the work of novelists and litterateurs and even poets. Lighter and his colleagues really read books. It is a delight to encounter so many writers through their passing use of some regionalism, obscenity, or malediction. In this snickerer’s OED, William Faulkner appears not for some high-flown word like endure, but for ass-scratcher. Sandburg is immortalized as a user of arky malarky. I also ran into (in alphabetical order by term) Thomas Berger (ass-wipe, dinkum), Cheever (asshole used adjectivally), Sorrentino (banana nose), Eudora Welty (bohunkus), John Sayles (boot in the sense of vomit, dead presidents), Woody Allen (bowels in an uproar), Camille Paglia (breeders), Joseph Mitchell (bums), A. J. Liebling (pain in the butt), Philip Roth (circle-jerker), Harlan Ellison (clock and grease-burger), Northrop Frye (clueless), Barry Hannah (cockhead, dicking off), Henry Miller (crap), Kerouac (crockashit), and Erica Jong (crotch rot).

And there is Joseph Wambaugh (cumbucket, don’t know my dick from a dumplin), Saul Bellow (candy kid, cunt-struck), Bernard Malamud (dead-to-the-neck), Maya Angelou (dickteaser), William Burroughs (doodle, glory hole), Danielle Steele (dumb cunt), Stephen King (el birdo, cock-knocker), Bellow (fart-blossom), Hunter Thompson (big spit), Coover (flagpole meaning penis), Grace Metalious (frig you), John O’Hara (frig), S. J. Perelman (frigged), Edmund Wilson (friggin’), H. L. Mencken (frigging, crap), Dos Passos (frigging, gash), Larry Heinemann (fuck the duck, crapola), Mailer (fuck yourself, cream), Tom Wolfe (go-to-hell as an adj.), Donald Barthelme (grog), and Robert Heinlein (grok, of course, but also go cart for “car”).

Parnassian sources such as The New York Review of Books are not neglected either—corn-holed and do (in the sexual sense) appeared there, per Lighter. The Atlantic Monthly supplies the first citation for doghouse, musician’s slang for “double-bass” (1920). Esquire pops up as a locus for a rare 1976 use of dog water, which, Lighter informs us, means “clear drops of seminal fluid.” The New Yorker makes many appearances, some for nice old words like brads (“cash”), cluckhead, and cheesy. (Lighter’s crew has, by the way, come up with a sentence employing cheesy that predates by over thirty years the first cheesy citation in the Supplement to the OED. In 1863 someone named Massett wrote: “The orchestra consisting of the fiddle — a very cheezy flageolet, played by a gentleman with one eye — a big drum, and a triangle.”) The New Yorker also substantiates the word fucking used adverbially, thanks to its recent explosion of profanity, and it furnishes two separate nuances of asshole dating from 1993.

For obvious reasons, though, the magazine that is most often quoted in The Historical Dictionary of American Slang is The National Lampoon. Lighter and his crew have combed its back issues carefully in quest of elusive flannel-buzzards, and they have not gone unrewarded. Yet here the editors must have had difficulty at times deciding which words were merely “nonce figuration,” to be excluded from the dictionary, and which words had obtained a “currency independent of the speaker.” The fact that The National Lampoon uses cock-locker or flog the dolphin or get your bananas peeled (all with sexual meanings) is taken to be an indication that this recherché vocabulary enjoyed a currency independent of the humorist during the period in question. It may have; Lampoon writers were expert listeners and diligent field-workers. But they were, as well, habitués of the reference room; in some cases at least, one suspects that they simply pulled down a few slang tomes, found a “ghost word” they thought was funny, and resurrected it for the greater good. P. J. O’Rourke recently told a lunch-table that he owns a whole shelf of unconventional lexicography; he and Michael O’Donohue, another Lampoon contributor and professional slangfarber, were particularly fond of one major thesaurus dating from (he thought) the thirties — by which he surely meant Berrey and Van den Bark’s huge “ephemera”-filled collection from the forties. In this way, out of the dried mud-flats of old reference books, to one-time creative placement in a humor magazine, to further climate-controlled stasis in Lighter’s Dictionary, are some words blessed with “currency” after a single recycling. And the language is happier for it.

Using The Historical Dictionary of American Slang will probably have long-term side effects. A three-week self-immersion in Lighter’s initial volume significantly altered this suggestible reader’s curse-patterns. I swore more often and more incomprehensibly while reading it than ever before; the “Captain Haddock syndrome” was especially noticeable while driving. (Captain Haddock is the character in the Tintin series who, when drunk, showers puzzling nonce-abuse on people: Poltroons! Iconoclasts! Bashi-bazouks!) To a slow motorist (with windows closed, of course, so he couldn’t hear), I would call out, “Go, you little scum — jockey!”- or “corn-pad” or “dirt-bonnet.” None of these formulae is to be found in Lighter (at least, there is no reason to expect scum-jockey to appear in Volume III), but reading Volume I made me say them. Furthermore, under Lighter’s fluid spell I spent several hours working on a matrix of related insults:

(An x indicates an existing piece of slang; a question mark indicates a plausible compound, which may or may not appear in the future. Whether there is any linguistic point to building such a predictive matrix is an open question.)

Some of these behavioral aberrations will pass in time, but it is at least possible that by the spring of 1997, when the final installment of this mighty triptych assumes its place in the library, those of us who have been diligently reading and waiting will discover ourselves to be marginally better people, or at least more cheerful and enlightened and tolerant swearers, as a result of what Jonathan Lighter and his cohorts have done for the massive and heretofore unmanageable dirtball of American slang.

(1994)

¹ Historical Dictionary of American Slang (Volume 1, A — G), edited by J. E. Lighter.