At the risk of offending members of a variety of religions -- as well as humanists, agnostics, atheists, celebrators of cultural traditions and ethnic anniversaries -- let me present what I still call my annual "Christmas list" of books about language.
An attempt to call the Capitol Christmas Tree the "holiday" tree was cut off at the trunk by the US House of Representatives, which insisted on sticking to the traditional nomenclature. Contrariwise, the Bushes (US first family) adopted the "holiday" word for their cards, also chosen in 1993 by the Clintons. The impetus behind substituting holiday for Christmas was that Christmas was long associated with Jesus of Nazareth as "the Christ," from the Greek christos, "anointed." In Old English, Cristes maesse meant "Christ's festival"; in our time, some felt that this left out all who were not Christian.
But language resists correction by fiat. No Scrooge will appear on a telecast of Dickens' Season's Carol, nor will podcasters edit Bing Crosby's voice into singing "I'm dreamin' of a white holiday." The edging away from the word with "Christ" in it, now justified as church-state separation or as minority sensitivity, may have begun with commercial greeting-card manufacturers coming up with Season's Greetings and Happy Holidays to appeal to non-Christians, as well as to stretch the sales and delivery timetable to include New Year's Day and its aftermath (a 13-day period that used to be called Christmastide). An American Greetings spokeswoman tells me that boxes of their holiday cards now split 50-50 Christmas and holiday greetings.
Here, then, are a few linguistic suggestions to stuff into your holiday stocking, if that's what you want to call it:
EAGERLY AWAITED
The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, by Charles Harrington Elster (Houghton Mifflin, US$15 paperback). An eagerly awaited (is there any other way to await?) new edition of the most readable, sensible and prescriptive guide to the words that trip us up will be available next month; bang your shoe on the bookseller's desk until he orders it. You will find 200 additions to the 1999 version, from al-Qaeda (al-KY-duh, "closer to the Arabic than al-KAY-duh") to a furious disputation with Merriam-Webster about archipelago. (The gutsily opinionated Elster is in the ARK and considers the loosey-goosey ARCH arch.)
Direct your attention to that hardy, inexpensive, red-leafed plant we see all over the place this time of year. I confess to having called it a point setter, confusing it with a crossbred hunting dog. The plant's name is poinsettia and is eponymous: J.R. Poinsett, a US diplomat, brought it home from Mexico in 1828. "There is no point in poinsettia," advises Elster, playing on his other book's title, There Is No Cow in Moscow.
The plant's name is pronounced in four syllables: poyn-SET-ee-uh. Just because most of us think of an operetta about a vendetta against the stony Rosetta, there is no reason to drop the final i in poinsettia; as one pronunciamentor noted: "Setta is common, but wrong. Who says gar-dee-na or mag-no-la?"
In pronunciation poker, you have to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. I used to hold fast to LAMentable and DESpicable until I got tired of being despised and lamented and switched over to accenting the second syllables. On schism, Elster remains on the ramparts with SK, based on Latin and Greek, while I at long last go with the usage flow and drop the K. He says SKIZ-m, I say SIZ-m (let's call the whole thing off).
OFFBEAT
The Thinker's Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words, by Peter E. Meltzer (Marion Street Press, US$30). This is a specialized, offbeat supplement to a general compendium of synonyms. Pessimism, for example, features Weltschmerz, a German word for "world-weariness," and synonyms for pessimist include the unfamiliar catastrophist and the colorful (actually, all black) crepehanger.
My favorite new word-finder is last year's Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus (US$40), which offers far greater range, including "defeatist, doomsayer, Cassandra, killjoy," and the informal "wet blanket, Chicken Little, gloomy Gus"; then to adjectives like "bleak, despairing, despondent, depressed, hopeless," and I cannot go on without sobbing.
It is also chockablock with useful advice: "Novel manages to pack into five positive letters what `unusual,' `unfamiliar,' `unconventional,' `untested,' `untried,' `unknown' and `unorthodox' have to signal with unwieldy and negative un-prefixes."
Give the Lady a Hand: "I have always thought of the word crony to relate only to men," wrote one of my valued Lexicographic Irregulars, "mano a mano stuff ... in traditional good ol' boy fashion." Bob Perna of Seattle responded: "Your correspondent has translated the term mano a mano inaccurately as meaning `man to man,' when in reality it translates as `hand to hand.' I noted the absence of any correction by you." Touche (pronounced too-SHAY).
Plonk! "Ergonomics is the science of designing modern equipment to reduce discomfort," I wrote, unfortunately adding "as we plonk our way painfully through the carpel tunnel of love." Most Gotcha! Gangsters caught my misspelling of carpal, a passageway through the wrist, but a few mistakenly objected to my use of the slang verb plonk. Though wine lovers use the noun to derogate cheap wine, and musicians use it to mean "an abrupt vibratory sound associated with plucking a string," I used the verb sense of "to walk with heavy footsteps," like Mary Shelley's Monster, and intend to continue plonking through.
Worms: In writing recently about computer malware, I attributed the coinage of worm in its modern, destructive sense to John Dunner; wrong. The author's name is John Brunner; his mind-stretching 1975 sci-fi novel was The Shockwave Rider; and he has plenty of fans.
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