Today's word: ort

What a short word ort is, like a fragment of a word left behind after some snorting, logophagic ogre has sloppily eaten all the other letters. It sounds like a line from a Swedish Chef script as he makes a sport of destorying the kitchen.

The Most Amazing David Foster Wallace Resource Since David Foster Wallace

And no, I’m not talking about this blog. (What do you take me for?)

It’s no secret that the vocabulary David Foster Wallace used in Infinite Jest is at a level few authors, and perhaps fewer readers, would ever hope (or want) to achieve. I don’t care who you are — and this includes well-weathered lexicographers — you’ll find words you’ve never seen before in Infinite Jest.

Which is how we ended up with a theme for many of this month’s posts.

In the annals of cliché history, the phrase “wouldn’t it be great if someone” has preceded thousands of great ideas that, for one reason or another, were abandoned and either lost to time or picked up for profit by someone else. (e.g., “Wouldn’t it be great if someone put sleeves in this blanket?”) And certainly someone — probably multiple someones — got about a quarter of the way through the literary jungle that is Infinite Jest and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if someone collected all of David Foster Wallace’s unusual and off-kilter words in one place and defined them?”

Many have thought that, I’m sure. And someone actually did it!

While I was researching online for the upcoming IJ posts, I stumbled upon the David Foster Wallace Wiki, a crowdsourced compendium that offers spoiler-free, page-by-page definitions of some of the more or less esoteric vocabulary found in IJ.

Twelfth-century facepalm. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So in short, you can find all the definitions to all the IJ words at this wiki any time you want instead of spending your time here at Logophilius.

But then you’d miss my clever word play, unexpected connections, and overall sparkling personality.

And my humility.

Tomorrow, then, we begin with the shortest word on my Infinite Jest vocabulary list.

April Expectations and Resolutions

Three months later means that I’m now three months behind on my twelve New Year’s resolutions. I’m a miserable failure.

But this month is going to be different. Yes, I wrote that last month, too, but April is going to be different different. April’s resolution is to post here on this blog at least five times a week for the entire month. How am I going to do it? Three things are different this month:

I Love Language Video

Many thanks to the blog A Walk in the WoRds for finding this video of Simon Taylor's "I Love Language." It's a two-minutes-and-forty-five-second-long monologue of logophilia. It's a moving video of the love of a vibrant, evolving vocabulary, from the vapid and vogue to the venially vulgar. It shows, once again, that words are the best toys.

And thanks, of course, to Simon Taylor himself for creating this.

Three-Word Meta-Wednesday

Three-word Wednesday rolls around once again. This week's words are fragrant, jostle, and remnant.I started tinkering with these words a little, and then I found a thread. That thread led to larger short story idea that I plan to further explore.

Today's word: battology

Anyone who has slogged through Genesis chapter 11 (especially in the King James version) understands battology. A large chunk of that chapter looks something like this:

¹⁰ These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood: ¹¹ And Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. ¹² And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah: ¹³ And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters. ¹⁴ And Salah lived thirty years, and begat Eber: ¹⁵ And Salah lived after he begat Eber four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters. ¹⁶ And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Unicron: ¹⁷ And Eber lived after he begat Unicron four hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters and robots in disguise. ¹⁸ And Unicron lived eight hundred years, and begat Optimus Prime and Megatron. ¹⁹ And Unicron lived after he begat Optimus Prime two hundred and nine years, and begat other transformers, including the Gobots. ²⁰ And the Gobots begat nothing worthwhile. ²¹ And the sixties begat Michael Bay, who lived twenty years before discovering the offspring of Hasbro. ²² And Michael Bay lived after discovering the offspring of Hasbro three and twenty years, and begata horrible monster of a film. ²³ And that horrible monster of a film begat a seemingly endless string of explosive, gratuitous sequels with enormous plot holes.

Evangelists often quickly gloss over Bible verses that mention Optimus Prime. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All those begats, and living so-and-so years and begetting other sons and daughters, over and over again. It's difficult to read because it's so repetitive. And that's battology.

Battology is the repeated (and often annoying) repetition of particular words or phrases in speech or writing. It comes from the Greek battos ("stammerer") + logia ("oral or written expression").

Not all instances of battology are ugly or unwanted. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech is certainly battological. As is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet "How do I love thee?"

But on the whole, we usually notice battologies only when they become intolerably bland.

The Birth of an "Author"

Just in time for World Poetry Day, here's today's three-word Wednesday poem.
Today's words are amateur, diligent, and nurture.

So diligently, though an amateur, she
Worked all through the night on her story.
She had this small notion that set her in motion
Toward what she had hoped would be glory.

Thought she had quite the hook, she nurtured that book,
Didn't eat, didn't sleep, didn't pee.
And when she reached the end, saved the file and clicked Send,
She dreamt what her future might be.

She imagined indeed all the people would read,
And writing would be her new living.
In her mail the next day, they had plenty to say —
And those agents weren't very forgiving.

"What this story has not: Interest, pathos, and plot."
"It's an odious mass of stupidity."
"A complete waste of ink." "Almost drove me to drink."
"Piece of crap!" and some other acidity.

But one guy who read it thought, "Just needs an edit!
And rantings like this are in vogue."
Though the facts were suspect, the text was spellchecked,
And that's how we got Going Rogue.

I'm Sarah Palin, and I endorse this poem.*
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

* No, she doesn't. She really, really doesn't.

Airigami

Today I happened upon the portmanteau word airigami, air + origami. It's a word artist Larry Moss uses to describe "the fine art of folding air." In this case, the air is encased in latex balloons, large and small.

Larry Moss creates some interesting and astounding things with just a little latex and a lot of air — from large animals and full-length gowns to fairy tale scenes and renditions of famous paintings.

Here's the Mona Lisa, though there's a special place in my heart for the Jackson Pollock reproduction

To a nerd like me, this is just so cool! But it got me wondering what other types of "gami"s might still be available for a struggling artist.

If I were, for example, to fold pictures of Ben Stein into mediocre paper animals, would it be bore-igami?

Or if I carve images into spent apples, would the resultant works be called core-igami?

Or if I twist and squeeze and tie fresh intestines, bladders, and other viscera into the shapes of the animals they came from, would it be gore-igami?

Aah, that's enough. We don't need any more-igami.

Today's Word: bunghole

I’ll cop to my ignorance. I thought bunghole was only a euphemism (or dysphemism, depending on your point of view) for anus. It seemed such a close cousin to both butthole and bumhole.

It might even have been coined, I though, by Mike Judge. But it seems I was a victim of the recency illusion. Bunghole is quite bit older than Beavis and Butthead. Older than MTV. Older even than television.

Three-Word Wednesday: The Tiniest Spelling Rule

It's three-word Wednesday, and this week's words are deviant, minuscule, and trivial.

So here's a little limerick that would've fit in quite nicely with my Grammar Day poems from Sunday:

It might seem a trivial rule,
But you should have learned it in school:
Only a deviant
Or careless miscreant
Spells minuscule "miniscule."