Quote of the Day: Sarah Palin

"If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?”

That, according to a number of sources, including the Los Angeles Times and The Atlantic Monthly, is the wisdom of "rogue" ex-governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.

She apparently posed the question in her new book, "Going Rogue: An American Life".

I think I have the answer to Ms. Palin's question. I've been thinking about this for some time, and I really think I've got it: God obviously intended for us to eat animals, which are made of meat, because he made vegetables out of vegetation. I mean, it's like how people aren't made of meat. Because we don't eat people, right?

Take that, haters.

Fake AP Stylebook on Twitter

Usually, the twits who tweet on Twitter seem less like super-networked representatives of tomorrow's technology today and more like a small group of middle-aged ego-maniacs endlessly updating each other on daily minutiae while a story-starved media "reports" on the finer bits.

But, as in poetry, there are occasional gems. Like the Fake AP Stylebook. As a writer reluctantly bound to follow the Associated Press's thin and vague style guide, I found this quite helpful. Here are some choice examples:

Avoid the archaic term "lunatic." Specify whether the subject suffers from Hulkamania or Macho Madness.

Replace "situation deteriorated/worsened" with "shit [just] got real." Ex: On day three of the hostage crisis, shit got real.

While it’s tempting to call them ‘baristi’ because of the Italian roots, the plural of ‘barista’ is ‘journalism majors.’

Use ‘student’ to refer to college attendees, and ‘coed’ to refer to really hot students.

Robots should only be referred to by gender-neutral pronouns, no matter how sexy they may be.

If you cannot find the source of a quote, make one up. Nobody's reading your story anyway. Get over yourself.

When describing the subject of a story's "assets," be sure to make the next sentence, "You know what I'm talkin' about."

The plural of "vagina" is "vaginas." The plural of "penis" is gross, nobody wants to read about that.

Always capitalize 'Bible.' You don't want to get letters from those people.

Dates should be formated as MM/DD/YY except for the years 1990 through 1992, which should be denoted in 'Hammer Time.'

Use the quintuple vowel to transcribe the utterances of small children, "Daaaaaddy, I waaaant a Pooooony!"

Since the 1986 edition, the plural of McDonald's is officially McDonaldses.

The word "boner” is not capitalized, regardless of size.

Use quotation marks to express skepticism: Cher’s “Farewell Tour,” Creed’s “Best Album,” Jay Leno’s “comedy.”

Quote of the Day: Composer Max Reger

"Sir: I am seated in the smallest room in the house. Your review is before me. Shortly it will be behind me."

That perfectly composed letter is attributed to the German composer Max Reger (1873-1916), in response to a critic. It's been cited by two British newspapers this month, The Telegraph and The Times, both in summaries of writer Alain de Botton's outraged responses to Caleb Crain's negative review in The New York Times.

Crain, in his review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, writes that de Botton mocks working people, and calls his treatment of one of his book's subjects mean-spirited. He concludes:

"'The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work' succeeds as entertainment, if not as ­analysis, when de Botton allows himself to geek out, as when he flies to the Maldives to follow a tuna’s journey to a dinner table in Bristol, traipses after a painter who has devoted years to an oak in East Anglia or rummages through a graveyard of mothballed airplanes in the Mojave Desert. The misfires seem to come when he steps into an office. Whether that means he desperately wants to work in one or couldn’t abide to is for him and a career counselor to determine."

De Botton went ballistic. One response came in the comments of Crain's blog. Part of it reads:

"You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as 'nice' in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It's only fair for your readers (nice people like [other commenters] Joe Linker and trusting souls like PAB) to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude."

It gets even more interesting from there. One commenter expresses shock at de Botton's immaturity. Another questions whether or not authors should stay silent about bad reviews, given the possibilities of the Internet.

Another still points to a recent article on Salon.com called Hey, authors, don't tweet in anger! Author Alice Hoffman used Twitter to call Boston Globe reviewer Roberta Silman a moron and an idiot. And then she tweated the reviewer's phone number and e-mail address, urging her followers to harrass Silman.

There are more great stories about authors going nuts. Salon mentions Stanley Crouch's encounter with reviewer Dale Peck in a NY restaurant. As fellow author ZZ Packer recalls, Crouch shook Peck's hand and...

"Then Stanley, who was still holding Peck’s hand in a frozen handshake, slapped Peck with his other hand, TWICE, on both cheeks, and said, 'Don’t you ever do that again. If you do you’ll get much worse.' Stanley let loose Peck’s hand and pointed at him, 'I should spit on you. Now, we can settle this outside . . . '

A moment later, he said he regretted it.

And then there's the time that Richard Ford spat on Colson Whitehead.

Quote of the Day: Raymond Chandler

"Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. ... He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before."

Raymond Chandler wrote that in an essay called "The Simple Art of Murder," published in the Atlantic Monthly in December 1944.

Chandler uses part of the essay to pick apart A.A. Milne's (of Pooh fame) novel The Red House Mystery from 1922. Chandler lists the author's oversights, pointing out for example that the local police in the book don't make the obvious connection between a missing man and an unidentified corpse.

But it's Chandler's his praise for fellow crime fiction writer Dashiell Hammett and his defense of the genre that are best remembered. Chandler lashes out at Dorothy Sayers, who once wrote that detective fiction can never be great. Here's Chandler:

"In her introduction to the first Omnibus of Crime, Dorothy Sayers wrote: 'It (the detective story) does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement.' And she suggested somewhere else that this is because it is a 'literature of escape' and not 'a literature of expression.' I do not know what the loftiest level of literary achievement is: neither did Aeschylus or Shakespeare; neither does Miss Sayers."

Despite the gripping subject matter, "Some very dull books have been written about God," Chandler adds. He argues that it isn't the genre, but the writer:

"It is always a matter of who writes the stuff, and what he has in him to write it with. ... Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds."

That last part bears repeating, because its application is universal: Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.

And that's where Chandler's interest in Hammett comes in. When writers write about real people, great things can happen. But "When they did unreal things, they ceased to be real themselves." Hammett, Chandler said, took the keen observastions and literary skill found in writers like Dreiser, Lardner, and Sherwood Anderson, and "applied it to the detective story."

Ultimately, Chandler is remembered along with Hammett as one of the best mystery writers ever, and both have managed to transcend the genre.

Quote of the Day: Donald Barthelme

"Had I decided to go into the conceptual-art business, I could turn out railroad cars of that stuff every day."

That's the late avant garde writer Donald Barthelme (1931-1989). Louis Menand profiles him in the New Yorker on the occasion of a new biography, a profile that serves as an excellent introduction to postmodernism.

While Barthelme's anti-conceptual art sentiment may be familiar to many (isn't the "I could do that" reaction the most common one to contemporary art? My father and I had it when we saw an Arman exhibit at a museum; we entertained fleeting fantasies of becoming famous for half-assed assemblages), his own work may elicit the same response.

Barthelme used sentences to form collages, which made for stories that bounced around and didn't flow like a normal narrative. Louis Menand writes in the New Yorker:

"The illogic, the apparent absurdity, of a Rauschenberg collage or a Barthelme story makes people impatient, because it seems to violate ordinary habits of perception and understanding. But we experience the arbitrary juxtaposition of radically disparate materials every day, when we look at the front page of a newspaper."

But how does a writer create such collages using only sentences? The visual artist, Menand points out, has many more materials at his or her disposal.

One has to wonder at Barthelme's process. Some of his stories were mercifully short. One, called Wrote a Letter... (about 525 words) has just that quality of done-in-rail-road-car-sized-quantities aspect that Barthelme hated so much in conceptual visual art. What was he thinking? At least this one's coherent. Others are deliberately messy. He said once,

"The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude. As when you attend a funeral and notice, against your will, that it's being poorly done."

But how do you read this shit then? Where's the reward? Do you treat it like poetry and concentrate on the way it's written and the words that are chosen? Do you focus on the overall structure and let the bits and parts go blurry? Is there any understanding one can expect to reach if one were to really give it a lot of attention?

Take his story The Rise of Capitalism. Go ahead and click through, read it, it's 1,500 words long. For the impatient, here's a passage I chose arbitrarily:

Meanwhile Marta is getting angry. "Rupert," she says, "you are no better than a damn dawg! A plain dawg has more sensibility than you, when it comes to a woman's heart!" I try to explain that it is not my fault but capitalism's. She will have none of it. "I stand behind the capitalistic system," Martha says. "It has given us everything we have -- the streets, the parks, the great avenues and boulevards, the promenades and malls -- and other things, too, that I can't think of right now." But what has the market been doing? I scan the list of the fifteen Most Loved Stocks:

Occident Pet 983,100 28 5/8 + 3 ¾ 
Natomas 912,300 58 3/8 + 18 ½

What chagrin! Why wasn't I into Natomas, as into a fine garment, that will win you social credit when you wear it to the ball? I am not rich again this morning! I put my head between Marta's breasts, to hide my shame.

For some of it, it's as if someone were reading to me from random pieces of paper lying on my desk. Reading to me in funny voices with dramatic pauses. It can be entertaining when I recognize a voice or a snippet or a way of talking. But then I hear a cliche and he loses me for the next 100 words. It's not like the sound collage of great free jazz, where you're so disoriented that every note keeps your mind alert, keeps you wondering what sound you'll hear next and how you can attach to the previous and the next. But maybe that's what it's supposed to be. (Barthelme loved jazz.)

Would watching more or less television help me understand, or at least follow, these stories better? (Barthelme hated television.)

I don't trust some of the phrases in the stories after I read from Menand that Barthelme would insert tiny bits of, say, Hemingway into them. I did an internet search for the following suspect phrase and came up empty:

"Well, Azalea," I say, sitting in the best chair, "what has happened to you since my last visit?"

Art like this -- be it music, painting, or fiction -- can be alienating. It can make smart people secretly wonder if they're as smart as they thought they were. It can be, for some, an exclusive club that you may as well just join, faking it. "Sure I like jazz, doesn't everyone?"

I don't know about you, but I get much more out of reading about Donald Barthelme than I do from reading Donald Barthelme. This is because art like Barthelme's takes the ideas behind art to their logical and then absurd ends. They are self-conscious critiques of mediums and ways of looking, and not pretty pictures.

But this is an argument that has been going on for decades, and will probably continue for more. Some critics attack the sort of experimental fiction that Barthelme practiced by pitting it against the mighty television: writers should make their fiction accessible because they are losing audience share to TV, and that isn't good. This argument is a fallacy. Don't compare vegetables to cake.

Jess Row summed up the debate as waged between Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus in Slate in 2005:

Writers like Gaddis, Franzen argues, are "Status" authors, who see themselves (again, in the modernist mold) as obligated only to their art, and who for the most part ignore the interests and desires of the reader. With some reluctance, Franzen places himself in an opposing camp: "Contract" authors, who place a high value on the relationship between narrator and reader, who primarily see the novel as a device for social and cultural communication, and who take human life (rather than, say, language or ideas per se) as the ultimate subject of their fiction.

At least that's Franzen's side of it. I would reluctantly put myself in the Franzen camp, and then take the typical liberal out by saying, "Hey, isn't there room for all of us here?"

Quote of the Day: Gossip Columnist Liz Smith

“I figure that without having to pay my salary, The Post will immediately go into the black.”

Liz Smith, the New York Post's gossip columnist and a fixture in City papers for 33 years, is out of a job. The 86-year-old Smith earned $125,000 a year.

Quote of the Day: John Mortimer

“Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn’t ready to appear ridiculous.”

That's barrister and novelist John Mortimer in a book published in 2000 called “The Summer of a Dormouse: A Year of Growing Old Disgracefully,” as quoted by the New York Times. Mortimer is most famous for his character of books and television, Horace Rumpole. For all his talk of dying, Mortimer lived nearly another decade; he died in January at his home in Oxfordshire, England. He was 85.

Mortimer was a crusading sort of barrister, maybe a little like America's William Kunstler. His last Rumpole book, Rumpole and the Reign of Terror, has his protagonist defending a Pakistani doctor who the British government charged with terrorism. Below is a short interview with an 83-year-old Mortimer upon the release of the book.

The Porn Bailout and its Associated Puns

The original press release, sent out by Hustler's Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild's Joe Francis, contained contradictory statements by the two porn peddlers.

Joe Francis:

"Congress seems willing to help shore up our nation's most important businesses, we feel we deserve the same consideration. In difficult economic times, Americans turn to entertainment for relief. More and more, the kind of entertainment they turn to is adult entertainment."

If that were true, you wouldn't be asking the government for $5 billion. Larry Flynt's quote came next:

"People are too depressed to be sexually active. This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex."

He continued,

"With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It's time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly."

Flynt claims that porn DVD rentals are down 22 percent. But New York strip clubs have claimed to do better as the economy tanked. “Since the market has been going down, our business has been going up — it’s unbelievable,”said the V.I.P. Club's Sam Zherka, quoted by the New York Times Blogs in October. With his business up 20 percent, he introduced a new $1,000 lap dance (20 minutes, private room, a bottle of Dom Pérignon, and a souvenir g-string).

“A lot of people are coming in and spending $2,000 and $5,000 and $10,000,” Zherka added. “They are spending like they are making millions and millions of dollars. I don’t know if they are depressed or what.”

Pathetic. This porn bingeing is apparently isolated to New York, maybe to Zherka's club. Everywhere else, Americans handle their depression by forgetting about porn.

Back to the bailout. The headlines should have been exciting, but no journalist came up with a "Headless Body in a Topless Bar"-style turn of phrase.

The most descriptive headline I saw was from an Australian source, ABC Online: "Americans 'too depressed' for sex, porn barons seek US bailout." The best headlines about the porn bailout weren't stellar. It's too easy and obvious a target. Here are some good ones:

"How Many 'Xs' in Bailout?" L.A. Times

"Porn industry seeks own stimulus ... package" MSNBC

"Mr. Smut Goes To Washington" Forbes

"Porn Tries to Get a Rise Out of Congress" Minyanville.com

"Flaccid industry sparks porn bailout bid" Cape Times (South Africa)

Hmm. Those aren't even that good. The L.A. Times' piece had a pun about the softness of the porn market that was so earnest, I hardly noticed it. Most of the headlines were variations on hard and soft or straight information, like "Porn Industry Seeks Bailout."

Some headlines were indignant, like The New York Daily News: "Porn kings Larry Flint and Joe Francis go begging for a bailout."

The New York Times Blogs headline, "Bailouts Gone Wild! Porn Chiefs Seek $5 Billion," was so different it was refreshing. But this too is predictable.

Shouldn't TMZ and LAist do better than "Joe Francis to Uncle Sam: We're Comin'" and "Flynt and Francis: Flaccid Porn Biz Needs Gov't Pumping"?

Quote of the Day: Kenan Malik

Here's Kenan Malik writing in Spiked:

"In 1989 even the Ayatollah’s death sentence could not stop the publication of The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was forced into hiding for almost a decade. Translators and publishers were killed, bookshops bombed and Penguin staff forced to wear bomb-proof vests. Yet Penguin never wavered in its commitment to keep it published.

"Today, all it takes for a publisher to run for cover is a letter from an outraged academic. In the 20 years between the publication of The Satanic Verses and the withdrawal of The Jewel of Medina, the fatwa has in effect become internalised."

Malik is the author of the upcoming book From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy. The passage above is from the transcript of a talk he gave in November. [via Arts and Letters Daily.]

Oxford's Ten Most Irritating Phrases

To the following list of the ten most irritating phrases, compiled by Oxford University, I would add: It is what it is.

1 - At the end of the day

2 - Fairly unique

3 - I personally

4 - At this moment in time

5 - With all due respect

6 - Absolutely

7 - It's a nightmare

8 - Shouldn't of

9 - 24/7

10 - It's not rocket science

Any other candidates?

UPDATE: I would add the phrases "that said" and "I myself." Commenters have nominated "Frankly" (especially when uttered by politicians), "It's all good" and "Back in the day," and finally, the oh-so-grating academic cliche "What I find striking."

Quote of the Day: Ted Nugent

“Free-range chicken ain’t free and that ain’t no range. Venison is free-range. Pheasant is free-range. The almighty Ruffed Grouse is free-range. I’m free-range. Chickens are incarcerated. . . . If it can’t get away, it ain’t free-range and I ain’t interested.”

That's Ted Nugent, aka 'The Motor City Madman,' in his 2002 game cookbook Kill It and Grill It (as quoted in the New York Times Book Review last week. Nugent has a new book out, Ted, White, and Blue, which was at number eight on the nonfiction bestseller list.


While the always colorful (and, interestingly, life-long drug- and alcohol-free) guitarist Ted Nugent never sang on the first (and best) albums bearing his name, he has a way with words. "Praise and braise the flesh!" he writes in the introduction to KIll It and Grill It. "Wild game meat has no equal. Tribe Nuge has not bought domestic flesh since 1969, and the quality of our average meal is nothing short of awe-inspiring."

Most Convoluted Sentence of the Week: Will Self

"Foula – which is pronounced 'Foola' – to me, the very name sounds romantic; but then I love an island, and the smaller and remoter the better, within reason."

--British novelist Will Self, in a guest column in the New York Times.

Quote of the Day: Terrellita Maverick

“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick."

So said Terrellita Maverick, an 82-year-old descendent of Samuel Augustus Maverick, to the New York Times last week.

As frequent readers will recall, Maverick was my word of the day in mid-September. Maverick came into the English language in the late-nineteenth century, a coinage after the Texas rancher, the aforementioned Samuel Augustus. He was not like other ranchers; he would not brand his calves.

According to the Times, the Maverick family has a history of liberal politics that goes back to the 1600s. And maverick isn't the only word the family has coined. Here's the Times:

Sam Maverick’s grandson, Fontaine Maury Maverick, was a two-term congressman and a mayor of San Antonio who lost his mayoral re-election bid when conservatives labeled him a Communist. He served in the Roosevelt administration on the Smaller War Plants Corporation and is best known for another coinage. He came up with the term “gobbledygook” in frustration at the convoluted language of bureaucrats.

Fontaine's son Maury Jr., who died at 82 in 2003, was a crusading lawyer in the tradition of William Kunstler. He served in the Tecxas legislature in the 50s, and when his colleagues invited Senator Joseph McCarthy to speak, he authored a counter-amendment inviting Mickey Mouse as a substitute. “If we’re going to invite a rat to visit our state,” he said at the time, “why not invite a good rat?”

With a legacy like that, it's no wonder Mavericks are in an uproar over McCain's adoption of the word. A columnist in the San Antonio Express-News, the paper that published Maury Maverick's column for years, wrote an indignant piece in September saying in part:

Unfortunately for McCain, a maverick is not someone who before 2008 occasionally broke with the status quo within his own party by acknowledging the clear threat of climate change and championing the need to give unauthorized immigrants a path to legal residency.

"By definition," the columnist Jan Jarboe Russell continues, "the leader of any political party is not a maverick. Mavericks are loners and more often than not are defined by lost, principled battles."

Terrellita Maverick, the author of the quote of the day, is Maury's sister. She's even more indignant:

“It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’

“He’s a Republican. He’s branded.”

Word of the Day: Maverick

The word maverick entered the English language in the late-nineteenth century. It was the name of a Texas cattle rancher -- Samuel A. Maverick -- who did not brand his calves. Merriam-Webster defines it as "an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party." It also means "an unbranded calf."

Samuel Maverick was born in South Carolina in 1803 and moved to Texas in 1835. He served two terms as mayor of San Antonio, amassed a huge amount of land, and died in 1870.

The Handbook of Texas Online describes his ranching legacy

When he returned permanently to San Antonio with his family, Maverick left a small herd of cattle originally purchased in 1847 on Matagorda Peninsula with slave caretakers. It was this herd that was allowed to wander and gave rise to the term maverick, which denotes an unbranded calf. In 1854 Maverick and his two eldest sons rounded up the cattle and drove them to their Conquista Ranch near the site of present Floresville before selling them in 1856. During the years between Maverick's return to San Antonio and his death, he expanded his West Texas landholdings, which in 1851 totaled almost 140,000 acres. By 1864 they had burgeoned to more than 278,000 acres, and at his death they topped 300,000 acres. Maverick gained land primarily by buying such land certificates as headright certificates and bounty and donation certificates. In the 1850s and 1860s he was one of the two biggest investors in West Texas acreage, and Maverick County was named in his honor.

Word of the Day: Sphairistike

My eyes lit upon a genuine old Sphairistike racquet. I couldn't block my involuntary exclamation. Jane looked puzzled.

'That? I thought it was an old tennis racquet--'

I sighed. People really hurt my feelings sometimes. 'Once upon a time, love, a retired major invented a game for playing on the croquet lawn. He invented a name, too. Sphairistike. It's called tennis now.'

That's a passage from "The Firefly Gadroon," one of Jonathan Gash's (the pen name of the English doctor John Grant) Lovejoy novels, a series about a crooked, womanizing antique dealer in East Anglia, England. It was also a BBC series starring Ian McShane (that's him on the cover above).

According to Michael Quinion's World Wide Words, Major Walter Wingfield patented the game that used "the net from badminton, the ball from fives, and the scoring from racquets" in 1874. The name came from an ancient Greek ball game.

"However," Quinion writes,

"in his patent, Major Wingfield also called it lawn tennis, chosen to distinguish it from the much older indoor game often called court tennis. A modified version of his game immediately became hugely popular under that name, though it was soon abbreviated just to tennis, so that the aficionados of the older game in snobbish retaliation started to call theirs real tennis, a term later mistakenly converted to royal tennis in Britain and some other countries."

Word of the Day: Hooch

I was watching the first episode of Jeeves & Wooster, the superb British television adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse's series of comic novels starring Hugh Laurie (Bertie Wooster) and Stephen Fry (his valet Jeeves) last night when I heard a bit of etymology. Wooster is singing at the piano... in fact, I've found the very scene on YouTube:



Wooster encourages Jeeves to join in the call-and-response part of the song he's trying to learn, Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher." The 1931 song features Calloway's trademark "Hi De Hi De Hi De Ho" scat, which is of course the part that Bertie Wooster wants his buttoned-up valet Jeeves to repeat. The inimitable Jeeves complies, adding "sir" to the end of it every time until instructed not to.

But the interesting part for me was Jeeves' reciting the origin of the word Hooch. The poor fop Bertie Wooster, learning the song from sheet music in his deluxe London flat, is having trouble understanding the words:

"What do you suppose a 'hootchie cootcher' is exactly?" asks Wooster.

"It's difficult to say, sir," Jeeves replies. "Unless it's in connection with one of the demotic American words for ardent spirits. I'm thinking of 'hooch,' a word of Eskimo origin, I'm informed."

Jeeves is more or less right, according to Merriam-Webster, which says the word dates back to 1897: "short for hoochinoo, a distilled liquor made by the Hoochinoo (Hutsnuwu) Indians, a Tlingit tribe."

From what I can gather, the Tlinglit are not Eskimo or Inuit, but an Alaskan group that live around the coasts (not on the tundra). Hooch is one of dozens of English words that came from American Indian sources, more still if you count place names.

Here is one version of the song's lyrics:

Folks, now here's the story 'bout Minnie the Moocher,
She was a red-hot hootchie-cootcher,
She was the roughest, toughest frail,
But Minnie had a heart as big as a whale.

[Call and response scat chorus differs every time. The following is simplified:]
Hi-de-hi-de-hi-di-hi!
Ho-de-ho-de-ho-de-ho!
He-de-he-de-he-de-he!
Ho-de-ho-de-ho!

Now, she messed around with a bloke named Smoky,
She loved him though he was cokie,
He took her down to Chinatown,
He showed her how to kick the gong around.

Now, she had a dream about the king of Sweden,
He gave her things that she was needin',
He gave her a home built of gold and steel,
A diamond car with a platinum wheel.

Now, he gave her his townhouse and his racing horses,
Each meal she ate was a dozen courses;
She had a million dollars worth of nickels and dimes,
And she sat around and counted them all a billion times.

Poor Min, poor Min, poor Min.

Note that Bertie skips over some of the more sordid bits. The "cokie" is apparently a reference to cocaine and the "nickels and dimes" phrase may be a reference to small bags of marijuana. Racy song.

But was hooch the real origin of hoochie coochie? According to Steve Bekes, writing on the etymology site Logoi.com, the hoochie coochie was a "muscle dance" performed by women -- in other words, some sort of burlesque. There was much hoochie coochie-ing at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the first big public performance of the type of dance.

Bekes is vague on the source of the dance, and he doesn't make any mention of Cab Calloway. He's more concerned with the Willie Dixon song "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man," which was recorded by Muddy Waters in 1954.



Here are the lyrics to that song:

The gypsy woman told my mother
Before I was born
I got a boy child's comin'
He's gonna be a son of a gun
He gonna make pretty womens
Jump and shout
Then the world wanna know
What this all about
But you know I'm him
Everybody knows I'm him
Well you know I'm the hoochie coochie man
Everybody knows I'm him

I got a black cat bone
I got a mojo too
I got the Johnny conkeroo
I'm gonna mess with you
I'm gonna make you girls
Lead me by my hand
Then the world will know
The hoochie coochie man
But you know I'm him
Everybody knows I'm him
Oh you know I'm the hoochie coochie man
Everybody knows I'm him

On the seventh hours
On the seventh day
On the seventh month
The seven doctors say
He was born for good luck
And that you'll see
I got seven hundred dollars
Don't you mess with me
But you know I'm him
Everybody knows I'm him
Well you know I'm the hoochie coochie man
Everybody knows I'm him

The site Harry's Blues Lyrics Online cites the word hooch as Jeeves did, and adds the suspicion that coochie is some sort of slang for female genitals. Sounds plausible, but at what point did the word come to mean that? Is it as a result of the name of the dance?

Someone else points out that the 1904 song "Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis" (which can be heard here as an Edison wax cylinder recording) contains the term. Here are the lyrics to the chorus:

Meet me in St. Louis, Louis,
Meet me at the Fair
Don't tell me the lights are shining
Anyplace but there
We will dance the "Hoochie-Koochie"
I will be your "Tootsie-Wootsie"
If you will meet me in St. Louis, Louis,
Meet me at the Fair.

The song was written by Kerry Mills (music) and Andrew B. Sterling (lyrics). It refers to the St. Louis World's Fair and was later part of a Judy Garland musical.

As an aside, the word hoochie got into the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1991, meaning "a sexually promiscuous young woman."

If anyone has any other clues, let me know.

The Wapatui

When a colleague asked me if I had ever made jungle juice in high school or college, I had no idea what she was talking about -- until she told me what it was: enough grain alcohol to fill a trash can mixed with a lot of fruit.

Where I'm from, we called it a wapatui, or as in this reference from an article in Newsweek about John Kerry, a wapatooey:

“His speeches can be a hash of proposals and exhortations--a 'wapatooey,' as pour-it-all-in-the-punchbowl drinks are known on some college campuses.”

The Urban Dictionary says alternate spellings/pronunciations include: wapatuli, wapatooly, wapatoolie, hairy buffalo, Jesus juice, trashcan punch and Tequila punch. The submitted recipe goes as follows:

Each guest to the party brings a bottle of alcohol. All the alcohol is mixed in a large garbage can or other suitable container. Several different kinds of juice are added along with sliced apples, oranges, kiwi, pineapple, papaya. Just about any kind of fruit will work. It is best served over ice in a plastic cup. There are several different recipes.

Standard Wapatuli
3 bottle 750 ml Blts each Gin Rum Vodka
5 Gallons Apple Cider
5 Gallons Lemonade
5 Gallons Orange Juice
1 Case Beer
30 Lbs Ice
Chop Up Pineapple, Oranges, Melons, or Your Choice of Fruit

Why you'd add a case of beer to that mix, I don't know. As far as I know, the wapatuis in the Twin Cities area tended to be vodka or everclear, plus lots of fresh fruit in a large tub or trash can. Most people called it a wop.

The Urban Dictionary's entry for jungle juice has a similar recipe, but with kool-aid mix (and no beer). Google has many more references for jungle juice than for wapatuis.

Anyone know of any other regional variations?

I wrote about other regional terms like whipping shitties two years ago. For a totally foreign term to Midwesterners, as someone from Brooklyn what saloogi is. Or ask them what a cugine is.

Obituary: The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, Complete Text Reproduced Micrographically

I had a race last week with the editor I sit next at work: I swiped my paperback Oxford Dictionary of Current English off the shelf to see if I could find a definition in print before she could retrieve it online. She won.

It reminded me of my favorite Tall Tale from childhood, the story of John Henry, the steel-driving man who died trying to to out-work a steam drill. As a Minnesotan, I should have preferred Paul Bunyan to the railroad laborer who was replaced by a machine, but I like anachronisms.

This is why I'm so upset that the The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, Complete Text Reproduced Micrographically is going out of print.

I know it's easier to read and quicker to use online. And I know my argument about surprise power outages during word emergencies is weak. But I prefer paper. When I'm working on the computer, whether I'm at work or at home, I use a paper dictionary to look up words.

The CEOED is still for sale ($399.95). It's "not an abridgement, but a direct photoreduction of the entire 20-volume set, with nine pages of the original on every nine-by-twelve page of the Compact." It's one 15-pound volume of 2402 pages, and it comes with a magnifying glass.

It's so big because: "The OED records not only words and meanings currently in use but also those that have long been considered obsolete." Like Boeotian (pronounced bee-ocean), a word I discovered browsing a three-volume edition of the OED. It refers to the ancient Greek culture and means "exceptionally dull or stupid."

But this soon-to-be obsolete edition is, in my estimation, inferior to the earlier, three-volume set, which condensed a mere four or so pages to every page. It can be read without a magnifying glass if your eyes are good.

And if you want the electronic version of the OED, you have to get it online. It costs $295 per year for a subscription. So while Oxford University Press is saving money by going out of print, we are not.

Why Don't Liberals Talk This Way?

The word pusillanimous is Wordsmith.org's word of the day today, and who used it better than that eloquent font of conservative wisdom, the disgraced former Vice President Spiro Agnew:

"Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order."

According to Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations, Agnew said that at an Illinois Republican meeting in 1970.

Pusillanimous, according to Wordsmith.org, is derived from the Latin pusillus, meaning weak or very small, and animus, meaning spirit or mind. It means "Lacking courage; timid."

Mr. Agnew starred in my Quote of the Day back in February 2007 for his "effete corps of impudent snobs" comment (refering to the media). He was full of fun turns of phrase like that, but they all came from one of the two Nixon White House speech writers, William Safire and Patrick Buchanan.

It was Buchanan who wrote the "pusillanimous pussyfooting" speech, according to the September 19, 1996 New York Times obituary for Agnew. (Safire was responsible for the "nattering nabobs of negativism" speech.) Ironically, Buchanan has been known for his conservative isolationism.

As a side note, the Wikipedia entry for Agnew says that comedian Dave Berry has pointed out that the "Spiro Agnew" is an anagram for "Grow A Penis."

Quote of the Day: Christopher Hitchens

"It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It used to be that thinking people would say, with at least a shred of pride, that their own convictions would not shrink to fit on a label or on a bumper sticker. But now it seems that the more vapid and vacuous the logo, the more charm (or should that be "charisma"?) it exerts. Take "Yes We Can," for example. It's the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake."

That's Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate this week. He's responding to Clinton's plagiarism accusations against Obama, accusations that mostly fell flat.

How Hitchens, who wrote a book on George Orwell, managed to talk about cliches and politics without mentioning Orwell baffles me. How can you talk about meaningless political slogans (Clinton: "Big Challenges, Real Solutions"; "Working for Change, Working for You"; "Ready for Change, Ready To Lead"; and "Solutions for America." Obama: "Change We Can Believe In;" Yes We Can.") without invoking Orwell's timeless essay "Politics and the English Language"?

Politics is no longer When was politics ever about issues and words? It's about feelings and electability. Demanding our candidates speak clearly and expand upon the empty potentials invoked by their pithy slogans would do us a lot of good.

In other Hitchens news, Vanity Fair has a new feature on its website called Hitch Bitch, which lets readers complain about Hitchens:

"No V.F. contributing editor arouses more reader ire than our tireless columnist Christopher Hitchens," says the magazine. The new Hitch Bitch section will help to "accommodate the overflow of outraged letters and e-mails sent to the magazine."