"How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!" (Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory, revised edition, 1967, p. 13).

"Not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.  In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me.  It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors." —Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"Remove yourself from the word. Depend on the letter, depend on the phoneme. It is the particles that matter. Particulate." —Geof Huth

Do blurbs sell books?  With a blurb like this one, how could Prof. Oddfellow refuse?


(That's Prof. Oddfellow's catnip mouse enjoying the Swiss cheese on the dust jacket.  Thanks in a roundabout way to Hilary's mom for the tip!)

William Keckler quips:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Types of Keyboards

by William Keckler

You have to start with the keyboard with individual letters.  Then you graduate to the keyboard with concepts.  Later, they give you this horrifying keyboard with the concepts grouped into ethical, jurisprudential, scientific and historic categories.  You are horrified to find—to give just one example—"mass murder" and "the common good" sharing a single key.  "Progress" and "calculated limited extinctions" are also key-mates.

And they tell you that's not even your final keyboard.

Graduation still looms.  All the elders are getting excited for you.

The most horrible betrayal arrives, disguised as a graduation present.

We recently stumbled upon a surprising tip involving one-letter words: someone suggested using them as commands to keep a dog from barking.  (The logic seems to be that dogs can't understand sentences.)

We happily note that in Shakespeare’s time, R was called littera canina, "the dog’s letter," because it sounded like a dog's growl.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Happily ever after is so once upon a time.

(via Frog Blog)

Our artsy friend Rana Adams surprised us today with the ultimate in minimalism: bare bookshelves save for our Dictionary of One-Letter Words.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

We were struck by Jonathan Caws-Elwitt's witty proposal that a clique is "a cliché turned on its . . . side?"  So we set out to prove it.

"Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning."
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

From our Magic Words outpost at Blogger:

In his novel The Book of Jokes (2009), Momus' narrator lives in a preposterous world governed by the laws of bad jokes and dirty jokes. But the narrator has a revelation concerning the magic of words:

I have discovered that there is a way to escape this grim fate—the misfortune of joke dharma. The solution, I believe, is that I should assume, myself, the responsibility of telling the very jokes which constrain and define me, and to make, each time, a small alteration in their telling, an alteration which restores a few shreds of dignity, human decency, beauty and sensuality to the tale.

It might begin by embroidery; I add a few details which are not normally included in the rush to the punchline. I must ensure that the story is so well-told that my audience loses interest in the farcical pay-off, the money-shot. I tell the tale several times, from different angles and with different emphases, forcing my listeners to pay attention to small formal questions, adverbs rather than verbs, hows rather than whats.

By these methods, little by little, I believe I can improve my world. Even if you are not in the same grim situation as me, you might want to try this technique for yourself. (51-52)

Dr. Awkward writes:


I'll share my secrets.  When quotation marks and punctuation become awkward, the most elegant solution is to paraphrase and avoid directly quoting.  Contrariwise, quote generously enough to offset and thereby avoid quotation marks altogether.  For example:

"If the right word doesn't come to you, leave a blank."
—The Little, Brown Handbook, 1995

Thanks to the New Straits Times for recommending our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary and noting that it features "More than 1,000 surprising — and revealing — definitions of each singular letter in the English alphabet; everything from 'a per se' to 'a hypothetical explosive.'"

Is There an "X" in "Especially"?

(our guest post for The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar)

Jeff Stone is perfectly correct in colorfully noting that "there's no freakin' X in the word 'especially.'"  Yet we can't help fondly remembering those centuries when the word "expecial" meant "singular" or "exceptional," as in the context of accessories designed "to meet the expecial needs of the physician" (Brooklyn Medical Journal, Vol. 8, 1894) or European colonists in the Potomac being advised not to expose themselves to the danger of the Tuscarora War of 1711 "without expecial necessity" (James Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country, 2009). 

Our favorite context for the word "expecial" is, of course, the world of algebra!  Back in 1919, a textbook entitled First Course in Algebra embodied "an expecial effort to connect the elements of algebra in a clear and forcible manner with the affairs of every-day life."  If any field is qualified to put an X in "especially," it's algebra!

"Any word can be the right word, if used in the right place."
—X. J. Kennedy, An Introduction to Poetry