Resistentialism also has a long history in our literature. In his Ode (Inscribed to W.H. Channing) (1846), Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the resistentialist writing on the wall and proclaimed that "Things are in the saddle,/And ride mankind." In his autobiography, published posthumously in 1924, Mark Twain relates an anecdote about a recalcitrant burglar alarm in his ornate mansion in Hartford, Connecticut. It "led a gay and careless life, and had no principles," he says. "We quickly found out that it was fooling us and that it was buzzing its bloodcurdling alarm merely for its own amusement."
In his 1995 novel The Information, Martin Amis evokes our frustration at being constantly picked on and pushed around by things: "... the dumb insolence of inanimate objects! He could never understand what was in it for inanimate objects, behaving as they did. What was in it for the doorknob that hooked your jacket pocket as you passed? What was in it for the jacket pocket?"
Reports of resistentialism abound in ephemeral literature as well. The Peter Tamony Collection at the University of Missouri, Columbia, contains dozens of newspaper clippings documenting the phenomenon of resistentialism in everyday life. Tamony (1902 to 1985), a noted San Francisco etymologist, apparently was a jelly-side-down kind of guy and as fascinated as I am by the wiliness of things and by the word Jennings coined for it.
Among Tamony's clippings is a story about a lady in London whose telephone rang every time she tried to take a bath. No matter what time she drew the bath, day or night, the phone always rang -- and when she'd answer it, nobody was there. Things eventually got so bad that she stopped bathing altogether, which prompted her husband to investigate the problem pronto. The cause, he discovered, was a bizarre, electronically telepathic conspiracy between their water heater and the phone.
In the great scheme of things (think about that one!), Jennings tells us, we are no-Thing, and Things always win. This is true, I believe, even in the ostensibly placid world of words -- for, after all, words are themselves things that in turn signify Things.
Charles Harrington Elster is the author of Verbal Advantage and other books on language.
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