dyvour

Posted on June 20, 2010 | 1 comment

If you see your money devoured, going down the drain (y), if you feel like a diver – entirely under water – your debts have overwhelmed you, and you aver that the die is cast, this is a word for you. It’s a term from old Scottish law; it means “bankrupt” and can be a noun or adjective.

As it happens, it is pronounced exactly like diver, and some people think it may actually have come from diver – the Oxford English Dictionary has two citations from around 1600 that have it in the context of being “drowned in debt.” The more commonly given etymology derives it from devoir, French for (in this case) “owe”, but there is no clear explanation for the shift of stress or the change of the first vowel.

It’s an odd-looking word, isn’t it? It seems constricted at the start – y isn’t automatically seen as a wide-open vowel – and the yv is a pair of notches (perhaps on a tally stick), or almost even a w with a tail or foot or hook on it. Or an accordion file, stuffed with bills owing. But the sound of it has that wide arc of the [aI]. Meanwhile, the back half looks open, with its two vowel characters, but in fact it barely has a vowel, if at all; many will say it with a syllabic /r/.

For further confusion, consider that when this word was in its heyday, u and v were one character with two sounds, written two ways, but the shape tended to be varied according to position and taste and not according to sound, so one might see it as dyvovr or dyuour. So many things about this word thus seem bivalent, or ambivalent, and anyway deceptive. It almost aims to defeat: if it had been spelled divour, we could see an IOU in it, but instead all we know is that we see you and our but hear I – so again we do not know which is the reality, or if they both are; we cannot tell which is black and which is white, as it were.

Or perhaps we should say yellow and brown. Under Scottish law in the 17th century, debtors were required to wear a coat or upper garment that was half yellow and half brown, along with hose and a cap similarly half yellow and half brown. (No mention of where they would get the money to pay for this new habit.) And so even in clothing we have the same duality and the same paradox. After all, how does it come to be that someone half in yellow and half in brown can be seen to be entirely in the red?

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borborygmus

Posted on June 19, 2010 | 3 comments

A rumbling burbles from a bloated belly nearby. Not to be a boring prig, but what barbarian is plaguing us with their borborygmus?

Well, it’s not really such a social infraction as all that, especially given that it’s often followed by the question, “Was that me?” Hard to get upset at something when it might be you.

And it’s anything but new. The ancient Greeks did it (in spite of their often being presented, as Peter Shaffer’s Mozart put it in Amadeus, as “so lofty they shit marble”). We know they did, because borborygmus is their word (as filtered to us through the Romans, whom we know to have had earthier appetites – panem et circenses, decline and fall, and all that).

Now, to us, borborygmus might sound like a frog. To the Greeks, though, at least to Aristophanes (a very earthy Greek indeed), frogs sounded like brekekekex koax koax. Borborygmus may also sound like the rumbling of boulders (marble bounding through the immaculate colons of Titans, perhaps). But one thing it seemed to sound at least a little like to the Greeks was the speech of foreigners. I say this because the classical Greek word barbaros, from which we get barbarian and its kin, was imitative of their perception of the speech of foreigners – which was also compared with stuttering. And barbaros does have a certain resemblance to borborugmos, the Greek source of our word du jour. Clearly repetition was a common feature in Greek onomatopoeia.

In fact, repetition may have been more to the point than the blunt voiced stops, rounded vowels, and rumbling liquids; bowels rumbling with liquids could as readily sound sharp, as Aristophanes illustrated when comparing (in The Clouds) the rumbling of thunder with flatulence caused by an excess of soup: papax papax and then papappax and up to papapappax.

Now, of course, papax is really a hapax legomenon (a word only found once in recorded literature – another one such, if the OED‘s citations cover the ambit, is borborology, meaning “filthy talk”), but I’m sure most of us recognize the sound. Indeed, other cultures have used similar phonetics to represent the phenomenon. I am put in mind of the Nakoda (Stoney Indian, a branch of the Sioux) word borhborhingen, which, in a somewhat literal translation, means “fart machine”. It’s actually their word for automobile… presumably because of what comes out the tailpipe, though cars do run on gas.

Thanks to Jim Taylor for mentioning this word.

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smark

Posted on June 17, 2010 | 2 comments

In an email discussion on typography, I mistyped smart quotes as smark quotes. One of my colleagues, John Firth, declared it a useful word, “a combination of smart and snarky,” for describing “things that, although worthwhile, are sort of showoff-y, too. Like curly quotation marks.”

Well. I like that. It’s like being smart with a smirk! The mark in it can connect with getting high marks – or with “mark me” in the archaic sense (“look at me”). It might even be a bit smarmy. And surely it’s an attribute of many a shark (of the human kind) – though it sounds rather more like the sound made by a cross between a snake, a duck, and a dog. But, if we’re sticking with animals, I would have to say the key trait of smarkness would be cockiness.

It happens that there is already a word smark in use, though within a limited sphere. That sphere is pro wrestling fandom. In the vocabulary of pro wrestlers, taken right from good old criminal cant that’s been around for more than a quarter millennium, a mark is a gullible person, specifically one who believes that pro wrestling is real, not staged (this would describe me and my brother when we were kids, watching Stampede Wrestling on TV every Saturday – and then my brother would want to try some of those moves out on me… he’s three years older, by the way). This usage comes from mark meaning “target”, which is related to all the other senses of this good old Germanic word (and unrelated to the name Mark). Blend it with smart (another good old Germanic word, meaning first of all “causing pain” – from the verb smart, which we still have – and then proceeding to senses of vigour and acuity and thence to intelligence and looks) and you get a wrestling fan who knows it’s staged, and may in fact pride himself on all his insider knowledge about it (whether he really knows all that much or not), but nonetheless is a fan. A smart mark – a smark. Cocky, perhaps a bit of a pain. Ah, how he may watch the ring with that Weltschmerz of the “in the know,” maybe even a smirk on his face… but let him not forget that, even in the staged fights, there’s a lot of rough-and-tumble and bruising, and a welt (or similar mark) smarts.

So can we use smark to mean “useful but showoffish”? Well, why not, if we can get others to accept it? It rather describes itself, doesn’t it?

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drupe

Posted on June 17, 2010 | 3 comments

“Drupe?” Marica said, proffering a bowl of cherries to her husband, Ronald.

Ronald sighed. “It’s the pits.”

“Oh, come now, a couple of little stones can’t cause so much trouble.”

“Not so much the stones as the stem, of course…” Ronald mumbled.

“But who doesn’t like a cherry?” Marica insisted.

“Cherry!” Ronald snorted. “It’s been years since…” He looked up and focused on the bowl. “Wait. What are we talking about?”

Marica looked at him over the rim of her glasses. “Fruit.”

“I’m not sure how to take that,” Ronald said.

Marica thrust the bowl into his hands, then took one cherry from it and dropped it in her mouth. Two brief chews and she spat the pit expertly into a garbage can with a “ping”; a bit more closed-mouth action and she stuck out her tongue with a knotted stem. She took it off her tongue and tucked it into Ronald’s shirt pocket. “Knots to you,” she said. She turned and went over to the bar, leaving Ronald in his usual state of disjuncture, looking like a dupe.

Having observed at a distance, I came over to Ronald. “Marshalling the drupes?” I said. His face started to muster an outraged and confused look, so I pointed at the bowl. “Cherries are drupes. D-r-u-p-e. A fruit with a single hard stone in the middle. The exocarp, or skin, encloses a mesocarp, the flesh that we eat, in the middle of which is an endocarp, which is the actual seed. Apricots, cherries, peaches, plums, mangoes, all are drupes.”

“Oh,” Ronald said. “I’m not sure I got all of that…”

“You got olive,” I said. “That’s for sure. Overripe olive, to be precise. That’s what the Latin term druppa originally meant; it was taken from a Greek word for ‘olive’, which may have been formed from roots meaning ‘tree’ and ‘ripe’.”

Pause. “You know,” Ronald said, beginning to droop visibly, “I just come to these word tasting things because of Marica.” He looked around for a table and saw none nearby, so he held the bowl out to me. “Mind if I drop these on you? I think I want to go get stoned.” Pause. “Ha ha,” he added drily, and walked off towards Marica.

Maury happened by just then. I held out the bowl. “Drupe?”

“Don’t start,” Maury said. “I don’t mean to be a prude, but I’m not feeling very cherry. I mean cheery.”

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preposterous

Posted on June 16, 2010 | 2 comments

A word that sputters and splutters, especially with the aid of the aspiration we put on /p/ (and /t/ and /k/) at the start of a syllable. Hold your hand in front of your face as you say it and you’ll feel what I mean: that double puff. Say that /p/ with a puff by itself and it’s a quick expression of distaste and derision, the sort of noise I’ve been known to make if someone suggests shopping at Wal-Mart. Hamlet used it: “And smelt so? Pah!” So now put that popping p in position, say, to put some popular poppycock in its place: “Peter Piper? Pick a peck of pickled peppers? Pah! Preposterous! He couldn’t pull a poppy!”

This word is also helped by having a secundus paeon rhythm (like impossible and polygyny), which gives a little step up into the second syllable, where we can stretch out that vowel – the same one we make when someone’s ruined our cake: aww! – and then stumble it into a two-step stop, with that liquid /r/ like wading into a lake. And of course the written shape of it adds to the effect: it’s long, which allows for more expressiveness (as in speech too); it has those holes in the middle o and o; and every letter in it except for t and u shows up twice, and all mixed up and jumbled. (Indeed, from those letters you can make more anagrams than I even see the point of dumping on you here!)

And it’s that out-of-place, out-of-sequence nature that is central to this word. If you look at its bits, you will surely see pre and post, and in this case that’s not accidental. Prae “before” and posterus “later” form the original Latin word, and it meant first “in the wrong order” (or, as we might say, “back-to-front”) – and the associated and metaphorical meanings readily followed. Now we don’t use it to mean “out of sequence”, really; the main thing that’s described as preposterous is an idea or a notion. It may be that it just sounds preposterous or seems preposterous – common collocations – but it may just as readily be absolutely, simply, utterly, or totally preposterous. Ah, listen to the rhythm of those: totally preposterous – two measures of 4/4 with a rest at the end of the second. Simply preposterous – two measures of 3/4. But absolutely preposterous! That’s a 2+3+3 rhythm, if all the beats are the same length, which they might not be. Oh, but what a preposterous path would that take us down?

Well, in fact, sometimes we need the preposterous. Sometimes we need to turn things around! Sometimes we need a bit of Dave Brubeck in the rhythm of our lives. Back when I was a freshly minted PhD, I wrote a letter that was published in TDR, a theatre studies journal, titled “In Praise of Preposterous Propositions.” “Extreme propositions may be virtually indefensible, but they are remarkably provocative,” I wrote. “We implicitly recognize that preposterous statements are the most interesting by returning to them in art and theory (analyzing dadaists, futurists, and so forth), but how rarely do we have the nerve to say something under our own bylines that has a good chance of being outrageously wrong.”

Now, admittedly, I’m not raving around saying insanely inane things just for the heck of it. But it turns out that writing a whole book of poems about grammar and romantic entanglements is so odd that no agent or publisher knows what to do with it, even if they enjoy it. And of course tasting words somewhat as one tastes wines is not everyone’s idea of normal behaviour either. I’m quite sure that some linguists think my fascination with phonaesthetics is preposterous. And that’ll hold me for now.

Thanks to Rosemary Tanner for suggesting preposterous.

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scoundrel

Posted on June 14, 2010 | 1 comment

A word that scowls! You can just hear the sound of the growl, almost like thunder in showering gale in a movie. “What scoundrel wrote this groundless doggerel about a spaniel and a cockerel on the spandrel?! Now I’ll have to scour it and rescumble it!”

And, for that matter, what scoundrel stole this word’s etymology? It’s known from the late 16th century, but the trail goes cold. Its phonetic character, the OED says, suggests a French origin… Those sneaky French, they must have taken away the etymon. Or perhaps they hid it in the mix. The case remains unclosed, the point unscored, even as cries for solution grow louder; the search proceeds not even by ounces, and the milk curdles while we search for clues; proposed origins are scorned; at the very last the pieces will fall together under a colder sun.

But we certainly know how it is, and has been, used. It hits first like a blow to the ear, and in the second syllable echoes back with a growl, and there is nothing nice about it, certainly not the company it keeps. It is often seen near thief (applied to the same person) and very often seen before an exclamation mark. And it is quite often seen in the quote from Samuel Johnson: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

If it seems like a word to associate with pirates, that seems reasonable enough, and you may have first gotten the association in your youth reading (or hearing) Stevenson’s Treasure Island: “If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!”

But it is as likely a word to be associated with the classics of English literature, especially those that involve romances among the nobility, dramatic rises and falls in social status, and such like. Many noted authors have availed themselves of it: Fielding (“My lady! says I, you saucy scoundrel; my lady is meat for no pretenders”; Tom Jones), Dickens (“‘If there is a scoundrel on this earth,’ said Mr. Micawber, suddenly breaking out again with the utmost vehemence, ‘with whom I have already talked too much, that scoundrel’s name is – HEEP!'”; David Copperfield), Eliot (“I believe that scoundrel’s been planning all along to ruin my father,’ said Tom, leaping from the vaguest impressions to a definite conclusion. ‘I’ll make him feel for it when I’m a man. Mind you never speak to Philip again'”; The Mill on the Floss), Austen (“Such a scoundrel of a fellow! such a deceitful dog!”, Sense and Sensibility)… really, scoundrels are the motor of the genre.

Thackeray pretty much defined the type in Vanity Fair: “‘Why did you ask that scoundrel, Rawdon Crawley, to dine?’ said the Rector to his lady, as they were walking home through the park. ‘I don’t want the fellow. He looks down upon us country people as so many blackamoors. He’s never content unless he gets my yellow-sealed wine, which costs me ten shillings a bottle, hang him! Besides, he’s such an infernal character – he’s a gambler – he’s a drunkard – he’s a profligate in every way. He shot a man in a duel – he’s over head and ears in debt, and he’s robbed me and mine of the best part of Miss Crawley’s fortune.'”

But scoundrels can have a certain charm, too, and a certain comedy potential. Witness their presence in recent popular entertainment: the movies Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1998) and School for Scoundrels (2006) and the new comedy-drama TV series Scoundrels. And, after all, the word is such fun to say, like a big bite out of the air, or a lusty, louche “rrowr!”

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polygyny

Posted on June 14, 2010 | 1 comment

This word has a little bit of irony in it. The Y chromosome is the male chromosome, and polygyny has three Y’s, but polygyny means having multiple women – specifically multiple wives. Perhaps it’s because a guy who marries multiple women is sure to find himself saying “Why, why, why?” (It may be because he’s been jailed for it, or it may just be that they all want to go on vacation at the same time to completely different places.) You could see the y‘s as funnels, and the guy’s life is going down the drain – hell hath not too many furies like a woman two-timed, but one of the furies greater might be that of a woman three-timed, four-timed, or what have you.

It may be more appropriate that this word has a bit of an echo of religion, since a man’s practice of polygyny is usually dictated by what religion he adheres to. It also has a bit of a sound of appalling, but no more than any other poly word has. It also rhymes with aborigine, which works OK in that Australian Aborigines have a cultural history (if not present) of polygyny, though of course they’re far from the only ones. It also sounds like pigeon, which again is ironic, as most pigeons bond in pairs for life.

The more common term used for multiple marriage is polygamy, but that actually refers to any multiple marriage – a woman could have multiple husbands and be a polygamist; where the law allows people of the same sex to marry, any combination of sexes would still be polygamy as long as a given person is married to more than one other person. But usually the terms polygamy and polygyny are used in reference to societies where the practice is accepted; in cultures such as ours where it’s illegal, you’re more likely to hear of bigamy, in part because it’s exponentially more difficult to hide each additional marriage, and in part just because of the flavour common usage has given the words.

There is also a word for having multiple husbands, by the way: polyandry. It is less often seen, perhaps because a woman only has so much time and a lot of it is eaten up by cleaning up after even one man, let alone several, but probably more likely for various other biological and cultural factors that deserve more space than I can reasonably give here. William James is credited with one speculative proposal: “Higgamus, hoggamus, woman’s monogamous – hoggamus, higgamus, man is polygamous.”

Polyandry differs from polygyny and polygamy in an important way: while the latter two are secundus paeons, the former is a ditrochee. By which I mean that the latter two have one stress, on the second syllable (like impossible and adorable and impeccable and a Cadillac and so on), whereas polyandry has two, a simple two-beat rhythm, as though it were a woman’s name: “This is Polly Andry, and these are her husbands!”

The g in polygyny, by the way, has the same sound as the g‘s in frigid and rigid and syzygy. That’s a deviation from the source, of course: in Classical Greek, it was always the sound you hear in polygamy. I find the alveopalatal affricate (as in polygyny) has a more delicate sound than the velar stop (as in polygamy), and it does give the word an additional echo of Ginny, which might be the name of the second wife (the first being Polly, of course).

You probably know well enough that the poly in these words means “many”. The gyn, for its part, may look very familiar by itself as the beginning of gynecologist (which has the velar stop [g], just to keep you dizzy). The andr shows up in various references to men, as for instance on a sign you might see in a hospital near the gynecology sign: andrology. (It also appears in android.) The gam just means you’re game. No it doesn’t! Well, it does, but that’s not the origin; it comes from a Greek word, gamos, meaning “marriage”.

As for the newer term polyamory, by the way (which really does sound like a person’s name, and may well be, Amory being a real surname), it’s macaronic: it mixes Greek and Latin, amory coming from the Latin for “love”. The term is generally used by people who want to have multiple boyfriends or girlfriends; it’s not restricted to spouses. The term was first documented in the early 1990s. Polygyny, on the other hand, dates from the 18th century, polyandry from the 16th, and polygamy also from the 16th century. The words, I mean; the practices have been well established in some cultures for rather longer, and only in some cases are fading.

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faze

Posted on June 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

One of my early encounters with Shakespeare was sitting down and trying to read the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew. I was young enough that I didn’t know what the heck a shrew was, so you can imagine my state of comprehension when I read the first words: “I’ll feeze you, in faith.”

Feeze. Well, that beat me. I was fazed.

Right on both counts, in fact. I’ll feeze you at that time could mean “I’ll beat you”; it could also mean more generally “I’ll settle your hash.” Before that, it meant “frighten”; before that, “impel, drive”. It’s a good old Germanic word, attested all the way back to the 9th century.

And feeze appeared in the American dialect, by the 19th century, as faze, meaning “disturb” or “discompose”. We generally use it now in the negative sense: “It didn’t faze him”; “He was unfazed.” By a long measure the most common morpheme immediately preceding faze is n’t – as in didn’t, wasn’t, doesn’t, and so on. Sometimes between the negative and faze will come seem to or seems to: “Nothing seems to faze him” – or, more guardedly, “Hardly anything seems to faze him.”

However, this phrasing is often fazed by misconjecture that puts it out of phase, or should I say puts phase into it. Many people think that this faze is phase (and undoubtedly at least a few think faze is an uneducated misspelling of phase). But phase actually comes from Greek (the ph is a bit of a clue), from phasis meaning “phase of the moon” or, more generally, “appearance”, in turn derived from the verb phanein “show, cause to appear”, which is the root of epiphany as well.

And indeed I wouldn’t mind if those who rendered faze as phase had an epiphany and phased out their misconstrual. But it is true that faze can look, ironically, a little foreign. It puts me in mind of Fhazisi, a Georgian (as in the Caucasus) singing group; it also tickles my sense a little as like a dialectal Italian word, with a distinct taste of Fazi Battaglia, an Italian winemaker best known for their green amphora-shaped bottles of verdicchio. It does have a taste of fuzz, and even, it occurs, slightly of furze (which means “gorse”, of course). It has the hotness of blaze and (in a looser burn sense) raze. But mainly it has that electric razor buzz [z] – and that static hiss [f].

Funny, isn’t it, how a simple voicing of the fricative – [z] rather than [s] – and a difference between a curved c and an angular z can make two words seem so different. Perhaps it’s because when you’re fazed you can lose face. You can be tamed, like a shrew: left to wheeze and perhaps to freeze. And that’s nothing to shake a spear at.

Thanks to “Upstater,” a commenter on this blog, for suggesting faze.

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vuvuzela

Posted on June 12, 2010 | 4 comments

This word was first brought to my attention today. I was assured that if I didn’t know what it meant yet, I would by the time the World Cup was over. That was a bit of a hint. I assumed it wasn’t the name of a star player, and I knew it wasn’t the name of a country (Venezuela does come close). Once I knew it had to do with noise, it seemed possible it might be a sort of ululation with the uvula. But in fact the only body part directly involved is not one the name of which resembles vuvuzela.

I could fantasize that it’s the name of some South African version of Godzilla, and in one way there’s some validity: it has considerable destructive force with its sound (indeed, it is blown to “kill off” the opponents). But that’s the sound in the ensemble, which is that of hundreds or thousands of them being blown full blast in the last quarter of a game. And what is that sound? Well, it’s the sound of a metre-long cheap plastic horn. It’s not like the tooters used in North America for sports and parties, which tend to have reeds embedded; the vuvuzela is simply a horn like other horns in that it channels a Bronx cheer into an ear-splitting blast. Very rapidly, the lips vibrate together-apart-together-apart vuvu, and the noise is like a very loud vuvu indeed.

And will it surprise you that this vuvu is a Zulu vuvu? Vuvuzela means “making a vuvu noise” or, more exactly, “vuvu-ing”. It happens that it also is thought to be related to township slang for “shower”, perhaps because it looks a bit like a shower head, but it may be that the shower head is called what it is because it looks like a vuvuzela. It is apparently coincidence that the Zulu root for the verb “swell” is -vuvuka. Just as well: that’s not the “swell” of “swell toy!” or even of “the music swells”; it’s the “swell” your eye does when someone has hit it.

More likely your ear. But whatever. South Africans from Tutu to Mandela are familiar with the vuvuzela. Some go out of their way to avoid it. It has been suggested that it is rooted in the toot of a kudu horn. But it is not some ancient tribal instrument; it was invented somewhere in the last 40 years, originally made of metal, and really only started to be popular in the 1990s; the now-ubiquitous plastic versions, cheap and not readily weaponizable, made in colours to correspond to one’s preferred team, started being mass-produced in 2001. And now it’s already a dominating presence at South African football matches.

So, kudu or no kudu, the vuvu is a lulu when it comes to its toot-toot-tooting, capable of producing hearing damage. Commentators tend to hate it, as it drowns them out; even the players find it can make communication difficult. But there it is: a brand-new deeply rooted tradition of exuberant communication that makes communication nearly impossible. Welcome to South Africa! Voulez-vous? Ngicela!*

Thanks to Amy Toffelmire for telling me about the vuvuzela. Read more about it at blog.medbroadcast.com/?p=6490 and www.southafrica.info/2010/vuvuzela.htm, among other places.

*Ngicela: “please” in Zulu. The ngi is like the middle of “sing geek” and the c is a click made with the tip of the tongue as in “tsk”. As is usual in Zulu, the vowel in the second-last syllable is longer.

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poop

Posted on June 10, 2010 | Leave a comment

Imagine an open mouth: o. Now imagine a hand in front of it: p. Start with the hand there, take it away, put it back: poop. In place of the hand, just close your lips: closed, open, closed. If you blow out, you make a little blast of a whistle; if you vocalize while the mouth is open, you may a sound like a steam horn. Both of these are sounds associated with ships.

And so is the poop deck. But the poop deck does not take its name from the sounds. Nor does it take its name from the deposits left by seagulls. Rather, that word poop comes, by way of French, from Latin puppis, which means “the stern of a ship” – which is where the poop deck is.

So, for those who were hoping for some more excremental explanation, I hate to be the party pooper, but that’s the real poop on it. That it is the back end of the ship is happenstance, not a relation to other back-end work. But of course there’s lots more poop to give you the scoop on.

For starts, there’s the balcony in the mess hall at West Point Military Academy, which is called the poop deck, and from which important announcements are made. Apparently on the basis of this, the term originating at West Point for an information sheet is poop sheet (which really does sound vulgar in its way, doesn’t it?). And from poop sheet comes poop meaning “information”.

Aside from that, however, other uses of poop tend to trace back to a more imitative source. It can’t be hard to imagine poop being spontaneously used to refer to a passage of wind out not the mouth but the other end of the digestive tract. And this simple origin has had some extended meanings dumped on it. Perhaps most common is that substance that parents of infants must deal with in great quantity (and can’t seem to stop talking about – parent to parent, the down-and-dirty on the down-and-dirty, i.e., the poop on the poop).

Also evidently from that is the term meaning “fool” or “bore”, which might come from nincompoop, but nincompoop appears to get its poop from guess where. This poop lately travels a lot with old, and that phrase no doubt got a boost from On Golden Pond, in which Ethel Thayer (“Thoundth like I’m lithping, doethn’t it?”) – played by Katharine Hepburn – regularly calls her husband Norman (Henry Fonda) you old poop.

And then there is poop meaning “exhaust” (I mean the verb!), usually showing up as a past participle: “I’m pooped.” This poop might be related to poof – so another imitative or expressive usage – or it might be related again to the same poop as shows up near diaper. Or both. And from this poop of exhaust (what an image) may come party pooper – or that may just come straight from the source by the backdoor. As it were.

Naturally, poop shows up all over the place. (Ew.) When I was a kid, we had these little funny rubber figures with parachutes attached, called Poopatroopers. Poop is indeed popular among children, and apparently is not a word for adults; when I try to search it on clusty.com (now called yippy.com), I get the top news stories (the poop of the day!) with the notice “The term ‘poop’ has been removed from your query because the adult filter is on.” How did it know I was an adult?*

OK, well, and are we almost dung? I mean done? Indeed. The evening draws to its perigee, so blow out the candle – and what mouth gesture do you make in doing so? It’s no riddle of the sphincter. I mean sphinx. Nighty-night, toodle-oo, poop-poop-pe-doo.

Thanks to Elaine Freedman for suggesting poop, as in the ship deck.

*It would seem that Yippy, though useful for its clustering (hence the older name Clusty), turns out to be a very overtly conservative service. I find now that it says unabashedly that it censors anything not in line with what are clearly triumphalist neo-conservative values; therefore, I must disendorse it, and although it has been useful for clustering results, I cannot support it. Readers take note: if you disagree with a search engine that states that it censors “anti-Conservative views or opinions” and declares that “conservative values will bring us our victory in the market place,” you may find yourself more than a little conflicted when using Yippy.com. If, on the other hand, you feel that its positions match yours, you will be quite happy using it. Of course you are also still free to read my postings if you so wish, no matter what your views. Some of them probably are not findable through Yippy.com, though. You also may not find this little capper, to finish with a smile: icanhascheezburger.com/2009/04/26/funny-pictures-in-cow-poop/.

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