A relatively few days ago I put out a call for your points of curiosity on copyeditorial (and related) matters that might inspire from me some fresh thoughts and posts,2 and it’s time to begin to respond to the call that you’ve so generously answered.

One request that particularly piqued3 my imagination was for “three to five words . . . that delight you when you see them and that you’d advise us to work in more often, lest we miss out on their powers.”

To be sure, I can barely clear my throat in three to five words, but hey, let’s do this!

I love words—you might even say, to use a cherished word of mine, that I’m besotted with them—so I’ll present you here with a few of my pets, words that enchant me for their own sake, or that I feel ought to be rescued from, to use a word that’s not on my pick list but is a great favorite of a great friend’s, desuetude, or ones that have simply popped up in my brain today as I’m free-associating.

And the point, I suppose, is not that you should/must necessarily lurch for any of my selections below but simply that it’s fun to be on the lookout, as one gets one’s reading done, for words whose existence might never have occurred to you had you not just in the moment encountered them, and then see whether you want to try them on for size and/or test-drive them yourself.

Now, I often, in these A Word About . . . missives, provide links to various sources to illuminate certain recherché4 words’ definitions and/or etymologies, but I’m going to not do that today, not to be cavalierly5 unhelpful but because I vigorously believe that looking things up is a great joy in life, and knowledge, as we know, leads to more knowledge. So if you see a word here that you don’t know, or wish to know more about, I urge you to google it alongside “definition,” “origin,” or “etymology” and see where you wind up.6

In alphabetical order, then:

amok

Or, if you will, and perhaps are a duck of much daffiness, “amuck.” (I write about these two in Dreyer’s English, so of course you can simply reach over to your nearest bookshelf and pluck your copy on down.)

antepenultimate

In all honesty, it’s not that it’s a great favorite of mine; it’s simply that it’s one of those bizarrely specific words that turn up in the English language from time to time, and I’m always amused by such precise baubles.7 See also “defenestrate” and “semiquincentennial.”

antimacassar

Consider this Exhibit A in “go look it up.” You might possibly know what an antimacassar is, but do you know whence the word derives?

charlatan

Some words imprint themselves on me because I can specifically hear them being uttered. In this case, the imprinting utterer in question is Bette Davis, as the Empress Carlota8 of Mexico, who scathingly shrieks the word at Claude Rains, as Napoleon III, in the generally somnolent, not to say soporific,9 1939 film Juarez, eventually inspiring Pauline Kael to set down a choice morsel of criticism that includes one of my most cherished parentheticals that isn’t (picnic, lightning).

[Davis] gets a chance to show off her best violent spasms when she pleads for help at the Tuileries and frightens the Empress Eugénie (Gale Sondergaard, who doesn’t frighten easy).

feckless

A great word on its own, made greater because it’s the name of one of the Starkadder family’s cows in Stella Gibbons’s uproarious novel Cold Comfort Farm (the others of the herd are Aimless, Graceless, and Pointless). While we’re here, let’s celebrate the words that Gibbons made up out of thin air and then made superb use of: clettering, mollocking, and, especially, sukebind, which for years I thought was the name of an actual plant. Because it sounds like the name of an actual plant.

gouache

In this case the utterer who sparks my joy is Geraldine McEwan in the TV series Mapp and Lucia, taken from E. F. Benson’s novel series. I can never hear the word “gouache” without hearing it in McEwan’s mincingly effete pronunciation. Consider also “calisthenics” and “nougat.” (And for you Nigel Hawthorne–as–Mr. Georgie10 aficionados: “bibelots.”)

ghoul

These days I tend to think of it, if and when I must, in association with Stephen Miller (if and when I must).

haint

And not only because the New York Times Spelling Bee rejected it only yesterday—on Halloween, no less!

havoc

Eloquently, cleverly reconfigured as the adopted surname of the actress June, née Ellen Evangeline Hovick, the baby sister of Gypsy Rose Lee (née Rose Louise Hovick).

instanter

It’s an antique synonym for “immediately,” and I love it dearly, but it’s the sort of word you can get away with it perhaps once a year, maybe once in a lifetime. (For some reason I’m also put in mind here of “soi disant,” “quondam,” erstwhile,” and the astonishing “yclept.”)

milquetoast

See “antimacassar,” above.

mountebank

I first encountered “mountebank” the first time I watched that epochal classic of German silent cinema The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, as it’s used (at least in the English-language title cards) to introduce the eponymous doctor. Some of you may cherish it as well from its brief11 appearance in the Sondheim–Wheeler–via Bond12 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

nertz

I won’t provide a link, but I will urge you to google “Production Code forbidden words” and have a whale of a time.13

oleaginous

See also “smarmy” and “unctuous.”

pantywaist

I should be ashamed of reveling in this word, and I’d certainly never use it (at least not publicly), but it superbly, hilariously sounds like what it means.

shudder

Now that “cringe” has worn out its welcome through cutesy transformation and ruthless overuse, let’s go back to the classics. “Quiver” and “quake” are fun too, however much Quiver & Quake sounds like the name of some Dickensian law firm (whose chief clerk is likely named Cringeworthy).

toadstool

I dunno, I just like it. 🤷🏻‍♂️.

treacle

I’m tossing this one in for today’s grand finale because I certainly recall the first time I encountered it, at the age of ten or so, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but for reasons lost to the mists of time didn’t bother to look it up for decades. I can’t even imagine what meaning, if any, I initially inferred, but all it means, as the Brits among you know well, is “molasses.” In any event: Look things up.

Thank you for dropping by and reading, with particular thanks to those of you who have subscribed, or are about to subscribe, or are considering subscribing, to this A Word About . . . series, which you can do for absolutely free, gratis, and no charge at all or, if you’d like the perk of regular access to the comments section, a relatively unarduous contribution. Either way (truly!), thanks!

Sallie is thankful as well.

Till next time, and more A’s14 to more Q’s,

B.

I’m marching along with time.
I’ll be marching from time to time.
For I’m not gonna let the parade go by.
You know that time marches on, and so do I.

—Irving Berlin, “Marching Along with Time”

I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder.

—Leonard Cohen, “The Future”1

Check out yesterday’s post from our friends at Merriam-Webster:

My first reaction on seeing this was to immediately note that if these versions of standard-issue English-language phrases are to be taken as correct, the implication is that there are incorrect versions, and as the correct/incorrect binary is increasingly out of fashion, it’s pleasing, at least to me, to see it rear its grizzled head from time to time.2

My second reaction was to declare (and watch me hedging my bets here, plus my usual hemming and hawing), “I could be entirely wrong (occasionally I am), but I’d suspect that a plurality of reasonably literate people would get all these correct.”

“Maybe not,” I immediately trimmed3 my hedge, “‘buck naked.’”

One can turn to those very friends at Merriam-Webster for a brief history of the “buck naked”/”butt naked” split, and I urge you to do so, right here.

To make a long story short, if the variations coexist, and have done for quite some time, who is to say that one is any longer exclusively correct and the other entirely in-?

Oh! Before I go much further: A reminder that you don’t have to violently scroll down and up and down and up to see and theoretically enjoy this piece’s numerous footnotes. If you hover over or click on (depending on your particular reading gadget) the superscript numbers, the footnotes will present themselves to you.

And now back to our show.

As to the others, after a bit more consideration:

I can’t say that I’ve ever seen “sleight of hand” misspelled by anyone who had the presence of mind to pull it out of their hat, though I note, as always, that I can’t be everywhere and see everything. (I suppose as well that the relative obscurity of “sleight,” plus its pronunciation—it sounds just like “slight”—might cause some confusion.)

I’ll still, I think, put “bated breath,” “lo and behold,” and “brass tacks” in the “reasonably literate” column: These are things one knows, or learns, or learns when one has set them down incorrectly (there’s that correct/incorrect thing again) and is corrected by someone like, oh, say, me. (A few respondents to the M-W post even wondered what could possibly be the incorrect version of “brass tacks.”4)

I’ve certainly seen “free rein” misrendered in precopyedited manuscripts as “free reign,”5 and “toe the line” as “tow the line,” but I’ve chosen, with perhaps uncharacteristic charity, to chalk these up to hasty typing rather than not-knowing.6

To be sure, there are far more than those seven confusable phrases in the English language. I thought, fairly quickly, of the much-mocked misstatement of “for all intents and purposes”—that is: “for all intensive purposes”—though I’ve never, that I can recall, encountered a “for all intensive purposes” in the wild except in, indeed, much-mocking references to it.

One respondent to the M-W post—wandering, I thought, a bit far afield—leapt in to assert the correctness of, of all things, “cardsharp,” but this, I think, is where things get interesting. Or more interesting, if you’re already interested.

Because in all my years of copyediting, I doubt that I’ve ever encountered, except in works of historical fiction whose writers tend to, rightfully, obsess over these things, a manuscript “cardsharp,” and I suspect that “cardsharp” would appear much less frequently in published texts nowadays than it even does were it not for the bossy persistence of copy editors.

Of course, “cardsharp” (I’m surprised, I confess, to see it lately outperformed by “card sharp”; live and learn), the original version of the concept (dating back to 1840), remains correct. But “card shark” followed barely four decades later (1877ish) and began to pick up serious speed in the early twentieth century (along with its sibling “loan shark”). Can a term that’s been in frequent use for a century and a half be considered, in any way, incorrect?

Well, you tell me.

What about “conversate,” which dates back to the early nineteenth century?7

Or “coronate,” which first appeared in the 1620s?8

When are correct and incorrect things unassailably correct and incorrect, and when are they correct and incorrect (or “nonstandard,” as dictionaries tend politely to put it these days) merely via the whims of copy editors and authors of books about language, or the shouting of censorious mobs?

As to the M-W 7, I’d correct any misrenderings of those without a second thought, without hesitation, without discussion, and I can’t imagine being overruled by a writer. And at any initial manuscript encounter with either a cardsharp or a card sharp or a card shark, I’d simply make a note (to myself, that is) of the author’s first use and keep an eye peeled for inconsistency down the pike.

As to that other pet hobbyhorse, “champing at the bit,” which also reared its head yesterday, well, yes, “champing at the bit” holds the historical edge over the frequently maligned “chomping at the bit,” but alas for “champ” champs, the chomping version . . .

Well, here, see for yourself:

Encountering a “chomping at the bit” in a manuscript, I might politely note in the margin “AU: OK, or traditional version: ‘champ’?” Or I might, increasingly, not.9

I’m not, to be sure, always given to such bouts of laissez-faireness. I will with my final dying breath sputter out “No, ‘nonplussed’ doesn’t mean ‘cool as a cucumber,’” perhaps already having, with my penultimate dying breath, condemned the (mis)use of “bemused” to mean “wryly amused.”

Or perhaps, who knows?, I’ll simply pick a fight with the wallpaper—and duly expire.

Cover painting: Nicholas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time (c. 1634–36) (Wallace Collection, London)

I want to thank everyone who weighed in on my request the other day for fresh topics of copyeditorial interest (today’s missive addresses, at least partially, one of those requests), and I’ll do my best to get to everything sooner or later. Feel free to add to the list—in that column’s open comments, you’ll note—as you’re inclined.

I would also like to thank, as always, subscribers to this A Word About . . . series, and to paying subscribers I extend additional thanks. I quote my friend the great Andrew Moxon:

I do [this] because I love it, and I don’t want people to have to pay to see any of it, even if I do appreciate and rely upon the payment very much.

So why pay? Because while I like doing this, I also think there’s value in it, and while I love the labor, it is significant. And I also think people should be paid for the value of what they create. I believe doing so encourages them to keep creating, and probably makes it a bit easier for them to do so.

Sallie, as always, is grateful as well. Also contemplative.

On this post I’m leaving the comments open to all—subscribers, paying subscribers,1 followers, accidental visitors—so . . .

Lay it on me.

And I’ll follow up as best I can over these next weeks/months/aeons.

B.

Cover painting: Johannes Vermeer, A Lady Writing a Letter, c. 1665

But I had a problem.

In its raw—and, I immediately decided, unpublishable—form, the observation ran thus:

No one would mistake The Great Sebastians, in which Alfred and Lynn play a nightclub mind-reading team tangling with fascists, for a great or even good play, but that it builds inexorably to, for its first-act curtain line, Lynn’s “What do you think I am, a mind reader?” makes it all worthwhile.

I am, copyeditorially, perhaps hypervigilant about the repetition of substantive words in close proximity, but in this case clearly—or at least clearly to me—the fact that “mind-reading team” would have been followed, a couple of handfuls of words later, by “a mind reader” entirely killed (again, for me; but, again again, I’m the writer) the joke about the joke.1

So off I went to google synonyms for “mind reader.”2 Landing on, among others, psychic, spiritualist, clairvoyant, telepath, and mentalist, I immediately plucked up mentalist, which, I think, adroitly conveys not only the mind-reading aspect but the performative mind-reading aspect I was in search of.3

So then I had:

No one would mistake The Great Sebastians, in which Lynn and Alfred play a nightclub mentalist team tangling with fascists, for a great or even good play, but that it builds inexorably to, for its first-act curtain line, Lynn’s “What do you think I am, a mind reader?” makes it all worthwhile.4

Much better, don’t you think?5

Of course I also needed to confirm that I was quoting the play correctly, so I hied myself to my bookcase and went straight to the La section of the L’s to find my copy of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s script, at which point I was immediately reminded that the play was written not by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee but by their alphabetical near neighbors Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, which is as good a reminder as any to always look things up, even things you’re confident about.6

To make a longish story short, I thought you might find this little exercise in self-editing, to say nothing of intense self-consciousness, helpful, and I hope in fact that you do.

Till next time,

B.

Oh yes: Sallie says hello, albeit a bit mopily.

Cover photograph: Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt in The Great Sebastians. (This charming Random House edition sports two other glossy full-page photographs dropped in precisely to illustrate what’s going on in the script at that very moment, which is a lovely little nicety that these days would be prohibitively expensive, oh well.)

Front (featuring the witty design of Jenny Volvovski1):

Back (featuring the best of all possible blurbs from Louis Bayard, Joanna Gleason, Lorna Luft, and Patricia Ward Kelly):

And the first page of the foreword (featuring me):

I do hope you’ll consider preordering a copy (or copies; what a holiday gift this will be!), which you can do right 👉🏻 here.

Bonus view: the title page of the 1942 Random House publication of Sally Benson’s Meet Me in St. Louis, just so you’ll know, as you continue to read the foreword, that I’m telling the truth about the little Random House house labeled “Random House.”

Post-publication addendum: As you’re reading the foreword you’ll also come upon a passage in which I make a bet about this new edition’s readers. I’m agog, and highly amused, to report that within hours of posting this A Word About . . . missive, I’ve already lost the bet. 🤷🏻‍♂️.

A few days ago, for instance, after the death, at the astonishing age of 102, of the actress Eva Marie Saint, I pondered over—I was not the only person pondering over this, to be sure—the surviving leading players of the films of Alfred Hitchcock (Saint, also to be sure, costarred with Cary Grant2 in North by Northwest), and here they are, in alphabetical order:

Julie Andrews (Torn Curtain)

Diane Baker (Marnie)

Veronica Cartwright (The Birds)

Bruce Dern (Family Plot)

William Devane (Family Plot)

Tippi Hedren (The Birds, Marnie)

Shirley MacLaine (The Trouble with Harry)

Jerry Mathers (The Trouble with Harry)

Vera Miles (The Wrong Man, Psycho)

Kim Novak (Vertigo)

Given that Hitch’s last film, Family Plot, was released in 1976 and Hitch himself was released in 1980, some forty-six years ago, that’s a darn strong showing.3 (At seventy-seven and -eight respectively, Cartwright and Mathers, mere slips of things when they worked with Hitchcock, are the pups of the bunch. Devane and Baker are the next youngest, at eighty-seven and -eight. The rest of them, bless them, are nicely marching toward the century mark, and I hope that if they want to get there they do.)

Here, by the way, is a lovely photograph, by Philippe Halsman, of Eva Marie Saint taken around the time of the making of On the Waterfront in 1954:

Additionally, in search of equilibrium and peacefulness, I’ve at long last been making the attempt—I’m all of four days into the attempt, so I’m not yet ready to proselytize at you, like Hickey blowing away pipe dreams in The Iceman Cometh—to keep my phone away from my bedside at bedtime, which mandates, among other things, keeping a book or books handy. Liking, like Alice, books with pictures and/or conversations, I decided that this might be a good time to revisit my fabled collection of Theatre World volumes, which track, with myriad photographs and cast lists and all sorts of statistics, the seasonal openings on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regionally in these United States. I first acquired volume 37 (1980–814), keeping the faith till I bailed at volume 46 (1989–90), when it seemed to me that the brio had gone out of the series; in the meantime I also made my way back, bit by bit, for that obsessive sense of completeness, to volume 1 (1944–45).5

I note—because even in my methodology I’m random, I suppose, and vicey versey—that the volume that I plucked6 from my shelf that first phoneless night was volume 10 (1953–54), and it delighted me, landing on p. 34, to meet up with . . .

. . . Lillian Gish, as Carrie Watts, and Eva Marie Saint, as Thelma, in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful.

Saint appeared on Broadway only twice, and this was her debut.7

What are the odds?

Such a little thing to put a smile on my face, but I smiled.

Thank you for being here, and thank you for reading. Thank you especially if you’ve become (or are about to become) a subscriber to this A Word About . . . series. If you choose to nominate yourself to be a paying subscriber (there’s no paywall on any of my content here, but paying subscribers do enjoy the privilege of commenting in the comments, and I do my best to be attentive/responsive to relevant queries), you have an even more bountiful serving of my gratitude.

Sallie is thankful as well.

7

She returned in October 1972 to play Mary Todd Lincoln, opposite Fred Gwynne, in The Lincoln Mask (nineteen previews, eight performances, and, alas, au revoir).

It was an oddly Mary Todd Lincoln–ful theatrical season. Julie Harris opened in December in the somewhat more successful The Last of Mrs. Lincoln, for which she won the fourth of her five Tonys for Best Actress, and in January 1973 Geraldine Page took her turn in Look Away, which collapsed on its opening night yet managed to earn Page’s costar, Maya Angelou, as Elizabeth Keckley, a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress, and I know that that sounds as if I’m making it up, but it happened.

It’s also interesting—to me, at least—that Angelou had already published her first, and massively successful, memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, three years earlier. This was not a woman who seemed inclined to confine herself.

I was introduced to her once, by the bye, at a New York Public Library gala honoring her longtime editor, the great Bob Loomis. I particularly recall her height (she was six feet tall) and firm handshake. (The other hand held a wee tumbler of whiskey.)

So here you’ll find, conveniently assembled and linked:

Part 1

Part 2

I bid you . . . welcome.

Cover photograph: Lon Chaney and Edna Tichenor in Tod Browning’s London After Midnight (1927), the only known print of which went up in flames in 1965. Browning remade it in 1935 as the gorgeous and spectacularly incoherent Mark of the Vampire (which see, as they say), and it was lovingly resurrected in 2002 via a forty-five-minute assemblage of stills (you can occasionally catch it on TCM).

“Peter Sokolowski’s enthralling1 By Definition is a history of dictionaries, which makes it as well a history of how we think, how we perceive, how we communicate—and, yes, how we spell. A chronicle of the layered attempts to codify and capture the English language—with amusing detours into the languages from which we have usurped much of our own vocabulary—it is absolutely stuffed, page by page, with fascinating nuggets of information, and Sokolowski’s genial wit, including concerning his own illustrious place in modern lexicography, makes this an almost viscerally pleasurable journey. ‘Curiosity is the opposite of ignorance’ is the sentence that stopped me, delighted, in my tracks; curious readers will be rewarded here not only with knowledge but with enlightenment.”

I’m quite sure you’ll enjoy it, and it would be a wonderful thing for it and for Peter if you’d preorder it! (The usual reminder that preorders and first-week sales are crucial to the life of any new book, and early preorders, particularly, signal to the house that there’s tangible interest in a book, which will tend to inspire them to put their foot on the promotion/publicity gas pedal and plump up the first-printing numbers.)

I hope you’re having a good week so far!

Best,

B.

One evening a little over a week ago, I took note (at another venue) that it was about to be the birthday of the illustrator Arthur Rackham,1 and in his honor I posted, from his marvelous 1907 edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,2 this:

Before we press forward, it’s interesting (to me, at least) how Rackham’s depiction of the attack of the playing cards exists in direct conversation, as they say, with Sir John Tenniel’s 1871 original:

It’s as if Rackham had accepted an unspoken-to-the-point-of-nonexistence challenge to explicitly, specifically outdo Tenniel, and though I tip my hat to Sir John’s anxiously scurrying wildlife, Rackham’s sentient face cards are funnier (and spookier). Let’s call it a draw; they’re both dazzling pictures.3

Anyway, a friend responded with this:

Of which I was moved to comment, and I quote: “Almost everyone in the Rackham version looks like they’re dreaming everyone else.”

The problem is that even as I was posting this coruscating observation I knew that it wasn’t true and that I didn’t believe it. It was simply a collection of words that, in the moment, I thought sounded attractive and passably profound.

Yes, you might certainly say of Alice at Rackham’s tea party that she looks dreamy—as she should: The entire Wonderland sojourn is, after all, her dream.4 And possibly the March Hare displays something like somnolent, semiconscious contemplation. But the Hatter? It would be a stretch. (Cool hands, though.) And the Dormouse, barely glimpsed, doesn’t count at all, as he’s out like a light, and what would a Dormouse dream of anyway? No offense.

Certainly no one in these two tableaux below is anything but wide awake:

That I’d lied about an Arthur Rackham illustration truly bugged me, and I’ve been brooding about it for days. I mean, if a person will lie about Arthur Rackham, what won’t they lie about?

I even attempted, a couple of days ago, a blind-item semi-confession:

I recently published a wee aesthetic observation that even as I was publishing it I knew I didn’t quite believe but the words were pretty and passed for thoughtful, and I’ve been feeling weird about it ever since.

(Any and all joking aside, not that I am, I think that’s a dreadful habit to cultivate, and I intend not to cultivate it.)

“Made me feel,” I went on, “like Pauline Kael.”

Now, don’t get me wrong: I have always loved reading La Kael, no matter how much I think that some of her stances are, to put it kindly, deranged, and I honor her for giving us one of the greatest parentheticals in the English language that’s not (picnic, lightning), re the stultifyingly somnolent, speaking of somnolence, Juarez:

[Bette Davis as Carlota] gets a chance to show off her best violent spasms when she pleads for help at the Tuileries and frightens the Empress Eugénie (Gale Sondergaard, who doesn’t frighten easy).

But I do think that Kael had a tendency to go too far in the service of, often, a smirking smack at, often, an actress. Here, on Greer Garson in the 1940 Pride and Prejudice:

She’s effective and has nice diction, though she’s arch and incapable of subtlety, and a viewer can get weary watching that eyebrow that goes up like the gold curtain at the old Met.

On the one hand, I think that’s hilarious, and I’ve been chortling over it for decades; I can recite it from memory. But on the other hand it is rather trying, in at least two senses of the word. And though I can certainly imagine Kael rightfully patting herself on the back for coming up with it, I can’t bring myself to believe that she believed that it was a true and honest observation about Greer Garson’s acting.5

Also, I really need you to read this footnote:6

In any event, I think that it’s crucial, if you’re about to publish malarkey, at least to believe in your malarkey.

Otherwise you might as well give up actual writing and become, I dunno, an op-ed columnist.

Thanks for dropping by. I extend particular thanks to those of you who’ve subscribed to this A Word About . . . series, and if you’ve opted to become a paying subscriber, with no greater practical benefit than the ability to comment in the comments section, I extend even more particular thanks for your support, which means a lot to me on a lot of levels.

Sallie is grateful too!

By the bye: My recently posted Zoe Caldwell story is the absolute truth, every jot and tittle of it. I wouldn’t want you to doubt that.

Oh dear, what damage have I done now.

1

I like to, usually of a morning, check Wikipedia to see whose birthday it is. It amuses me, and it gives me a chance not only to celebrate some cultural figure I admire but to think about people I might not have otherwise thought of, and thoughts, I find, often lead to other thoughts, and thus the day begins.

Funnily enough, given where this missive is about to go, today (September 27) is the birthday of the actress Jayne Meadows, and here she is as the Queen of Hearts in Irwin Allen’s bonkers two-part 1985 TV musical Alice in Wonderland:

3

Interestingly (again, to me), Rackham’s contemporary Harry Rountree opted not to depict the card onslaught at all, choosing instead to illustrate, in his lavish 1908 edition (the Alice copyright expired in 1907, thus the publishing free-for-all that followed), a slightly earlier moment:

I’m put in mind—you needn’t be, but I am—of how the actor Brian Bedford, playing Lady Bracknell in an uproarious 2011 revival of The Importance of Being Earnest, avoided in the interrogation scene what I think of as The Curse of Edith Evans by wringing a huge laugh out of, as I recall, Lady B’s “seaside resort” line, allowing him, moments later, to sail through and past the famous/notorious “A hand-bag?” without a care in the world. Clever Brian Bedford.

But wait, there’s more! You’ll also get some enchanting shot-on-location views of 1950s New York City, including Central Park and the big post office on Eighth Avenue.

If you’ve never seen The Marrying Kind, I urge you not only to watch it but to watch it without reading anything more about it than I’ve just written here. (I’ve found a couple of decent-looking prints online.)

Happy Aldo day.

Till next time,

B.

Cover photograph: Aldo Ray and Judy Holliday as Chet and Florence “Florrie” Keefer3 in The Marrying Kind.

1

“I don’t know the problem with being pretentious if you can follow it up with something.”

As the novelist’s husband was a legendary theater and film director, there were in attendance more than a few noteworthy actors and actresses, so while sweating profusely I was also getting in a lot of happy gawking.

My hostess thoughtfully introduced me to one actress in particular, one of those wonderfully grand theatrical types who seem, onstage, to be eight feet tall and who turn out, more often than not, to be pleasingly compact, as this one was, and surprisingly lovely and delicate-looking for a woman who’d made her reputation playing, for lack of a better word, dragons.

It seemed that the actress had written a book.

“I’ve written a book,” she informed me. A memoir, as it turned out. “And I must tell you that when I was sent the copyedited manuscript and saw it all covered with scrawls and symbols, I was alarmed. ‘No!’ I exclaimed. ‘You don’t understand!’”

By this time she’d taken hold of my wrist, and though her grip was light, I didn’t dare to find out what would happen if I attempted to extricate myself from it.

“But as I continued to study what my copy editor had done,” she went on, in a whisper that might easily have reached a theater’s uppermost seats had she wanted it to, “I began to understand.” She leaned in close, staring holes into my skull, and I was hopelessly enthralled. “‘Tell me more,’ I said.”

Pause for effect.

“Copy editors,” she intoned, and I can still hear every crisp consonant and orotund vowel, all these many years later, “are like priests, safeguarding their faith.”

Now, that’s a benediction.

[taken, nearly verbatim, from the introduction to Dreyer’s English, Random House, 2019]

The actress was Zoe Caldwell (1933–2020)1, and the book in question is a charming, svelte little memoir titled I Will Be Cleopatra, which I think you would find most enjoyable. I certainly did.

And today is her birthday.

❤️

Also, this was the summer of 2001, so not quite, at least not via me (did I even own a cellphone yet?), the era of the selfie. Sigh.

Also, there’s this, which is fun too.

As is always the case in this A Word About . . . series, today’s content is free to all readers. As is not always the case, today I’m leaving the comments, usually a bonus for paid subscribers, open to all. Consider this a Zoe Caldwell–honoring2 gift. If you’re not yet a subscriber, do please consider subscribing, and if you’d like to establish yourself as a paying subscriber, I will be, certainly, hugely appreciative and grateful for your support, which I do not take lightly. Especially not these days.

Sallie will be grateful as well, though she’s too shy right now to say so.

I’m in that dreadful state between utterly enervated and irritatingly antsy, so before I take to my bed and spend the rest of the day reading, alternately, Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, which so far I’m besotted with, and ancient DC comics, I figured I’d drop by here and make myself relatively useful and theoretically enlightening and feel as if I’ve earned my keep on earth for one more day.

Speaking of ancient DC comics (there’s your segue1), I was, yesterday, reading my newly arrived repurchased issue of Adventure Comics no. 350, which is, in the best Legion of Super-Heroes fashion, exceptionally idiotic and mesmerizingly enthralling, and just as Shrinking Violet was about to, for reasons I needn’t go into here, fly up Superboy’s nose . . .

. . . I was stopped short by

Do you see it without my pointing it out? Not everyone has.

. . . I was stopped short by “miniscule.”

Now, the writing/copyediting of my childhood DC mags is, as a rule, impressively tight, give or take an obsession with the word “presently” and, as I passed idly by a few days ago, the odd “hair-brained,”2 so the occasional glitch rather jumps up at one, especially if one is I.3

Before I decided to vent my amused spleen publicly, though, I repaired to the dictionary, because that’s what wise copy editors do, even if they’re 100 percent sure of things: They look things up.

I was happy to make my way to this erudite little lesson provided by our friends at Merriam-Webster:

The minuscule spelling is consistent with the word’s etymology, but that didn’t stop English speakers from adopting the variant spelling miniscule, likely because they associated it with the combining form mini- and such words as minimal and minimum. Usage commentators generally consider the miniscule spelling an error, but it is widely used in reputable and carefully edited publications, and is accepted as a legitimate variant in some dictionaries. (Our own dictionary identifies miniscule as a “disputed spelling variant.”)

That said, our friends at Merriam-Webster have rather a different notion of “reputable and carefully edited” than I do, because where I live, “miniscule” (which, I note, the local spellcheck just threw up at the sight of) is an error. A misspelling. A sin, probably not mortal but certainly venial.4

As I’ve often said: In my experience, writers like to be saved from such venial sins, and will always appreciate having their “miniscule”s (spellcheck just did it again; I’d better get it some Pedialyte) altered to “minuscule”s, their “free reign”s altered to “free rein”s, their past-tense “lead”s altered to “led”s, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth.

Because, as I’ve also often said, if you want to irritate your readers, you should do it for good reasons and very much on purpose, and “miniscule” (yup, it did it again) is not, I’d say, a good reason.

(There are, of course, some folk who assert that pretty much anything an English-writing and/or -speaking writer/speaker writes and/or speaks in English is correct, but those folk, I’d imagine, don’t much believe in copyediting—which is what, you may have noticed, I’ve spent my career doing—any more than they believe in Tinker Bell.)

(Please clap.)

All that said, “miniscule” has been making gruesomely steady process:

And it’s quite possible that some sad day it’ll surpass “minuscule” entirely. Happily for me, I’ll, at this rate, be long dead.

Any and all joking aside, not that I particularly was: Legible, pronounceable combinations of consonants and vowels that people wield as words are words, whether I or you like them or not, so I would never be foolish enough to declare, as some people like to do, that, say, “irregardless” is not a word.

Of course it’s a word. It’s a dreadful word that serves no purpose not efficiently executed by “regardless.” And if you use it, people will roll their eyes at you. Perhaps that sort of thing bothers you; I don’t know your life.

And “unthaw” is a word too. Also dreadful.

Certain words grate on certain ears, not necessarily universally but among significant swaths of the populace.5

Some people, for instance, like to use the verb “impact” as a punching bag; I’ll avoid it as I can (“affect” is an effective word) and will probably take a crack at steering a writer who’s used it in another direction.

Some people—perhaps they’re the same people—go crimson in the face over the disjunct “hopefully,” as in “Hopefully, the weather will improve.” As a writer, knowing quite well that it’s perfectly correct, I use the disjunct “hopefully” as often as I can; that it irritates some people is, for me, purely a bonus.6 As a copy editor I might run up the warning flag for a writer, at least to advise them that it’s not a generally beloved use of the word. But preemptively change it? Nope. That would be giving comfort to the enemy.

Which is not to say that you must use the words-that -are-actual-words that are disdained by the “It’s not a word!” crew. “Conversate” is a word and has been a word since the early nineteenth century; I’d still opt for “converse.” (As would most people; “conversate” barely shows up when I run it through the ngram thingie.)

And “coronate” has been kicking around since 1623, but one might as well, I think, keep one’s head and simply say “crown.”

I have to remind myself that “cohabit” is a word, and a vastly more popular word than its offshoot “cohabitate,” which, for whatever reasons, I gravitate toward. “Cohabit” looks to me as if it’s missing something, not unlike “adaption,” which, yes, you guessed it, is a word. Since 1615.

As well, there’s the longstanding “normalcy”/“normality” brawl, which I wrote up for The Washington Post a few years ago during those sun-dappled days when I was more than delighted to write for The Washington Post. It’s locked up behind a paywall, and I’ll leave it there and at that. Feel free to go off and sherlock on your own.

Some Americans take great pleasure in condemning “orientate” as a nonword, which is unwise of those Americans. It’s certainly a word, and it’s been a word a great long while, and our British cousins prefer it. Which is their right.

In the other direction, though, some of our British cousins are only too eager to mount their high palfreys over the American preference for “aluminum” over their “aluminium,” and to them, and to anyone else who’s interested, I’d suggest that you read up on the capriciously twisted history of both the metal and its naming.

The moral of the story, I suppose, is: In matters of copyeditorial finger pointing, point carefully, lest you lose a key digit.

Also, don’t mistake your taste for the law as handed down from the heavens.

And that’s that for today.

Back to my comic books. (And, oh, yes: Anita Brookner.)

If you’re already a subscriber to this A Word About . . . series, I am, to be sure, hugely grateful. If you’re not, and if you find what I do here interesting/edifying, please consider subscribing. All my posts are free to all readers. That said, if you opt to be a paying subscriber, you will have not only my gratitude for your support but the ability to comment in the comments, and to ask questions that I will do my best to answer, and perhaps you’ll find that worth the price of admission.

Sallie will be grateful as well.

Speaking of Meet Me in St. Louis, I probably haven’t urged you recently to preorder a copy of the University of Chicago Press republication of Sally Benson’s novel, augmented by an enlightening foreword, so consider yourselves urged.

Also, Pittsburgh Review of Books republished my piece from the other day about anti-Semitism/antisemitism, and that pleased me.

Which precipitated a question from a friend about that very term: “anti-Semitism.”

My friend, also a writer, works for a publisher that has, as do many publishers, particularly of magazines with myriad contributors, a unifying house style, and that publisher’s house style, my friend informed me, favors “antisemitism.” (And, to be sure, “antisemitic” rather than “anti-Semitic” and “antisemite” rather than “anti-Semite.”) And he wondered about the “arguments for and against either option,” and I promised that I’d write up the subject, as I’ve been vaguely meaning to for a while.

So here we are.

I—born in 1958, to glue my thoughts and stances down to an actual era—was raised to recognize and write out the terms with the hyphen and the capital S: “anti-Semite” and “anti-Semitic” and “anti-Semitism.” At some point in the last few decades I certainly began to notice that the hyphenless, all-lowercase versions (“antisemite,” “antisemitic,” “antisemitism”; I can’t say that I ever noticed much by way of the fence-sitting “anti-semite,” “anti-semitic,” or “anti-semitism”) were appearing from time to time and here and there, but it was not a thing, for whatever reasons, I was inclined to delve into, and I duly didn’t.

But I did also, in my half-paying-attention way, recognize that there was a lot of passion, and some contentiousness, surrounding the subject.

Happily, for today’s purposes, I’ve found the subject eloquently and thoroughly covered in a 2024 Mother Jones article by Daniel King, which you might want to read in full before proceeding here further.3

[Pause.]

And we’re back.

“Many of the concerns with the capitalized letter still linger in lowercase,” King thoughtfully notes. “The root challenge remains.”

Recognizing that the term in question itself, however it’s styled, was specifically devised as a weapon of hatred, and recognizing that it’s constructed atop a flimsy, specious foundational use of the term “Semitic,” and recognizing, as you can see via King’s article, that many of the organizations and people that focus on combatting the worryingly increasing hatred directed at Jews opt vigorously for “antisemitism” and “antisemitic,”4 I nonetheless find myself stuck on what looks to me like a barely cosmetic course correction. Or as King puts it:

The word is either functionally clear or isn’t, and it becomes no clearer lowercase; we’re still left with the root confusion. Lowercasing enshrines it further, naturalizing the misnomer by turning it into a common noun that conceals, rather than corrects, its constructed origins. At least capitalization has the benefit of calling attention to itself as a construct.

I’m reminded here of the long-standing battle of B.C. and A.D. vs. B.C.E. and C.E.,5 which, yes, I get: Non-Christians may feel non-inclined to, in the setting down of dates, pay semi-tacit homage to Jesus Christ,6 but that the B.C.E./C.E. system still pivots on the traditionally dated birth of Jesus (however much he seems to have been born, prematurely, between 6 B.C. and 4 B.C.) makes it feel to me7 like badly applied concealer.

Though I’m occasionally inclined, as a copy editor with a hefty platform and a big mouth, to put my thumb on the scale and push for some version of a thing over some other version of a thing, in this particular case I find myself hesitant. And whether that’s out of stubbornness (possibly), upbringing/history (certainly), or that “it just doesn’t make sense” thing I tend to keen, my voice soaring up the scale, it’s where I find myself today.

You’re certainly not going to run into trouble/objection if you opt for “antisemitism” and “antisemitic,” and it is reliably reported to me by someone whose veracity I can happily, at this late date, take entirely for granted that in at least one recent case with which she was familiar the use of the older stylings was, angrily, deemed scandalous. As in “This person needs to be fired.”

OK, no.

I do note, at least as best I’m able to discern via the handy-dandy Google Ngram, that the usage issue is far from settled, however much it seems to be in flux:

Copyeditorially, I would, as I do with B.C./A.D. and B.C.E./C.E., follow a writer’s lead, presuming, as I try to do at least some of the time, that the writer has made a conscious and considered choice and doesn’t—at least in this particular instance—need any hectoring from me, with me then simply keeping an eye open for inconsistency.

So, fellow writers: I leave this one to you.

Oh, and: Another friend asked me for my thoughts on the term “Jew-hatred.” My thoughts are: I find it eerily ambiguous,8 and I do not expect to find myself ever using it.

The usual YMMV applies.

Coda, relevant or at least semi-relevant, on the subject of significant, meaningful alterations in terminology style and who’s doing the altering and when:

Three or so years ago I found myself in conversation with a historian of American chattel slavery, and at one point in our conversation I commented that I’d certainly become aware, from my particular perch in trade publishing, of the, as I perceived it, recent shift in usage from the term “slave” to the term “enslaved person.” To which the historian replied (nicely, I note): “Oh, we made that shift decades ago.”

Thank you for reading, thank you for being here, and thank you especially to those of you who have chosen to subscribe to this A Word About . . . series. These missives of mine are always free for all readers, though I note that the one bonus granted paying subscribers is the right to comment in the comments section. And if you have chosen to be a paying subscriber, whether it’s to let me know a thing or two, ask me a thing or two, or simply to be (wonderfully) supportive, I’m beyond grateful.

Sallie is grateful as well.

Cover photograph: Morris Carnovsky as Shylock and Katharine Hepburn as Portia in The Merchant of Venice (Stratford, Conn., 1957)

8

Though it’s not as bad as this:

[Today’s missive will include a number of footnotes, though perhaps not as many as usual, so I remind you that you don’t have to violently scroll down and up and down and up to enjoy them; you can simply, depending on your particular reading gadget, hover over or click on the superscript numbers and the footnotes will make themselves available to you.]

This morning I got up bright and early and corded up dozens of broken-down and folded-up cardboard moving boxes and set them, along with five black plastic bags, nearly as tall as I, full of packing paper, out on the curb beside the standard bins (my first bins-of-my-own!), and the lovely folks from LA Sanitation & Environment duly carted them away, so that was certainly fun.

Meanwhile, to close a loop I laid out when last we met:

I have probably seen the 1954 version of A Star Is Born, which I tend to call “the Cukor1 version” so as to irk the people who tend to refer to it as “the Judy2 version” or, if they’re feeling beneficent, “the Judy and James3 version,” numbers of dozens of times, on screens large and small, both before the 1983 restoration and afterward, and one thing that happens, at least to me, when I obsessively reexperience any sort of work of art is that I tend not only to memorize great swaths of it but to fixate on little details,4 and one of the little details, among myriad little details,5 I, early on, fixated on in this movie was a sound.

A scream.

A highly distinctive scream.

You hear it twice, the first time at more or less the 59:08 mark6 when Esther Blodgett, Vicki Lester–to–be,7 is attempting to make her way through a chaotic studio screening room in which a chaotic Western is being screened, the second time in the spectacular “Someone at Last” sequence, at about the two-hour mark on the nose, give or take, immediately before James Mason’s pleased exclamation “Brazil! I told you!”

And it is, as one can be absolutely certain on one’s, say, twelfth or thirteenth viewing of the film, the precisely same scream, both times.

In any event, it’s a thing I noticed, and a thing I found both curious and amusing, to say nothing of inexplicable,8 until many years later . . .

Oh, before I forget: Here are three screen captures of Bess Flowers, the queen of the extras, in the Star Is Born Academy Award sequence, first looking thrilled with anticipation as the Best Actress award is about to be announced:

Then delighted at Vicki Lester’s win:

Then dismayed and anxious as James Mason, as Norman Maine,9 makes a late and drunken and loud entrance:

And finally calmly, sadly, stoically recognizing that she is present at a tragedy in the making, and bad things are about to get even worse:

In any event, many years later, in 2002 to be specific, I played hooky from work one day to attend a late-morning showing of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers among what turned out to be an exceedingly sparse crowd in an exceedingly large auditorium, which for me is the best way to see a movie. And I’ll be goddamned if, in the middle of the Battle of Helm’s Deep, I didn’t hear, loud and clear, that scream I’d come to know so well. Though no one, that I can recall, exclaimed “Brazil! I told you!” Not even me.

Afterward I toddled home and googled (were we googling then? were we asking Jeeves? I don’t quite recall) “‘Star Is Born’ ‘Two Towers’ scream,” and thus, in a flash, I learned of one of Hollywood’s longest-lived in-jokes, the Wilhelm Scream, which I will leave you to read about on your own because it’s already been documented so well and I can’t even begin to do it justice here in this limited space.

I can, though, say that after recounting my discovery to one of my better friends who I thought might be particularly tickled by it, and who duly was, I received in the mail a few weeks later, from this very said better friend, a homemade DVD he’d compiled of various Wilhelm Screams he’d tracked down labeled:

Dreyer’s I Scream

Because why not.

Two weeks and a day after having moved, I feel as if I truly live here where I live, so it’s time to get back to more serious endeavors than reading old comic books late into the night and then sleeping, this morning notably excluded, till all hours.

So when next we meet, I’m sure I’ll have something profound with which to regale you.

(We’ll see.)

Thank you for reading, thank you for being here, and thank you especially to those of you who have chosen to subscribe to this A Word About . . . series. These missives of mine are always free for all readers, though I note that the one bonus granted paying subscribers is the right to comment in the comments section. And if you have chosen to be a paying subscriber, whether it’s to let me know a thing or two, ask me a thing or two, or simply to be (wonderfully) supportive, I’m beyond grateful.

Sallie is grateful as well.

We’ll have to see how my envisioning jibes with the stock at the local Lowe’s.

Meanwhile, I’m giving free rein to my desire/need to self-soothe, which as is traditional for me encompasses Mexican food, the less elevated the better, episodes of MST3K (last night I took in my absolute favorite, episode 505: The Magic Voyage of Sinbad2; I suspect that episode 521: Santa Claus will be up next), and, as is particularly traditional, the traditional rereading of the ancient DC comics stash.

Once again, I was freshly delighted by the DC writers’ delight in the word “presently,” which they used an awful lot, and always in the sense of “before long,” which is how I always use it, and never in the sense of “now,” which is how I never use it.3

Here are two examples over the course of two pages:

Though, to be sure, the DC crew were not averse to “later,” “moments later,” “the next day,” and the occasional “meanwhile,” my heart always leaps up at the sight of a “presently.”

I was particularly tickled the other evening, rereading for the umpteenth time one of those Imaginary Novels that, back in the day, tended toward what–would–happen–if–Superman–married–Lois Lane–or–Lana Lang?4 fantasizing, to encounter, off in the corner of one panel, an Imaginary Novel dress extra who . . .

Well, surely, I thought, this could be none other than the legendary Bess Flowers . . .

. . . in comic book form.

Bess Flowers, if you do not know of her, was a Hollywood bit player who, we are told, appeared in more than 350 feature films over the course of her career, including twenty-three Academy Award Best Picture nominees and eight winners. I first took note of her, I’m pretty certain, in the 1954 version of A Star Is Born, looking utterly mortified when James Mason shows up drunk for the Oscars and even more mortified when he accidentally backhands poor Judy Garland right in the kisser, and somehow or other (this was well before there was an internet to catalog such things for us) began to notice her distinctively patrician presence in films ranging from Double Indemnity to Laura, from Vertigo to (I don’t have guilty pleasures, I don’t believe in associating pleasure with guilt, but if I did:) 7 Faces of Dr. Lao.

Here’s Bess (far left, natch) in one of her most noteworthy roles: Woman Appreciatively Listening to Anne Baxter’s Utterly Fulsome Gratitude in All About Eve.

Meanwhile, back at the 1954 version of A Star Is Born, that was also the first film in which I took note of, because it’s unmistakably used twice, the legendary Wilhelm Scream, but that’s a story for another day, and that day may well be tomorrow. We’ll see.

And very shortly, I imagine, I’ll be setting aside my yellowing, aromatic, touchingly durable old comic books (hopefully not for the next move; as I said earlier, my current intention is to die in this house5) and reveling in the most trivial of showbiz trivia and returning to the realm of Absolutely Elevated Literature and Deeply Meaningful Copyediting Advice.

Thank you for reading, thank you for being here, and thank you especially to those of you who have chosen to subscribe to this A Word About . . . series. These missives of mine are always free for all readers, though I note that the one bonus granted paying subscribers is the, ahem, privilege of commenting in the comments section. And if you have chosen to be a paying subscriber, whether it’s to let me know a thing or two, ask me a thing or two, or simply to be (wonderfully) supportive, I’m beyond grateful.

As is Sallie, who seems to be quite a bit younger since we moved.

So: Storytime. Then: Dozetime.

When I started at Random House,1 in 1993, and for quite a number of years afterward, until he eventually retired, I worked with, among many delightful people, natch, a marvelously talented book text designer (he designed the book pages, that is, and the book cases,2 not the book jackets) by the name of Jim Lambert.

Next time you’re looking at one of your Random House books from that era or so, take a glance at the copyright page, and if at the bottom of the page you see “Designed by J. K. Lambert” or something similar, that’s our Jim.

One day Jim, who was full of stories, and I was an ardent listener, told me about his involvement with Gloria Swanson’s memoir, Swanson on Swanson, which Random House had published in 1980.

I can only imagine that when the book had first been announced, Jim—if you’ve come these many A Word About . . . months to appreciate my taste in actresses, you pretty much, I’d say, have a grasp on Jim’s taste in actresses—had swiftly claimed it as his own, as many years later I would copyeditorially cry “Mine, mine, mine!” when it was announced that we were publishing a collection of previously uncollected, and some previously unpublished, Shirley Jackson material.

Jim designed the book with what I would come to know as his elegant, classic precision, including making use of the carnation, Miss Swanson’s favorite flower, as a motif.

By the bye, the book’s astoundingly good; you should hunt yourself down a copy. (Slight enticing spoiler alert re the very first chapter in the footnote3 below. Please skip it if you’re so inclined.)

Jim told me of how Miss Swanson had had delivered to Random House boxes of irreplaceable photographs, which he had sorted through to select the images for the book’s three photo inserts.

Thus the book was designed, and thus the book was copyedited and proofread, and thus the book was published and became a big bestseller, bless it.

Oh, I almost forgot:

One afternoon shortly after the publication, he told me, Jim was in his office when his phone rang, and mind you this was back in the day when (a) you had no idea who was calling you when your phone rang, and (b) you answered your phone, because there was none of that avoidant send-straight-to-voicemail we’ve all cultivated lately.

“Mr. Lambert, this is Gloria Swanson.”

(“For a second or two I thought it was one of my friends pranking me,” Jim told me.)

“I want to thank you for the beautiful work you did on my memoir.”

“Miss Swanson, you can’t imagine what an honor it was for me to be able to design your book. I simply—”

“Mr. Lambert, I did not write this book for you.”

Pause.

“I did not write this book for me.”

Pause.

“I wrote this book for—”

And suddenly she became fully . . . she:

“—all those wonderful people out there in the dark.”

“She was having you on, yes?” I asked years later. “A bit?”

“I think so,” Jim said.

I imagine that we were both content not really to be certain.4

Progress is being made, I’m happy to report.

Still a lot of work to be done, but not today.

Till next time,

B.

It’s been a minute, as, I’m told, the young folk say.

I’ve been a bit preoccupied, as we’ve just moved, not yet even a week ago, to what I like to think of as Los Angeles proper, into a sweet little century-old house with, besides the usual rooms one expects to find in a house, a fireplace, a turret, and a wee giardino segreto that Miss Mapp herself might envy.1

The house—this is the first standalone house I’ve lived in in fifty years, imagine that!—also affords me my first-ever dedicated-office-that-doesn’t-need-to-do-double-duty,2 and that moreover features not-one-door-that-closes-but-two-doors-that-close,3 and it is, to be sure, where I’m sitting now.

Anyway, it’s all quite exciting, and the move went off without a hitch, and our new neighborhood is marvelously quiet (which, to be honest, our quadrant of Santa Monica was not particularly), and though, sure, I’ll miss the ocean and the view and my boardwalk constitutionals, life, I’m told, is a tradeoff.

Current expectation: to die in this house.

Noting, in my best Andrew Sachs–as–Manuel4 voice: Eventually.

Boxes continue to be unpacked,5 and to be sure my first priority has been my books.

For the record: discrete sections devoted to George Jean Nathan, E. F. Benson (speaking of Miss Mapp, as we were or at least I was), Charles Dickens, J. M. Barrie, Shirley Jackson (well, of course), and Edith Wharton, my Theatre World collection, my amassed plays (in alphabetical order by author, then alphabetically by title), performing-arts-oriented nonfiction, nonfiction-oriented nonfiction (still to be done), and, in the lower right-hand corner, household-type books (Peg Bracken! Gertrude Berg! Nigella Lawson!) and a few volumes of comics anthologies (settled down there mostly because they’re tall).

Oh, and I’m in there too.

The rest of my fiction is arranging itself, more or less even as we speak, in my office.

Ultimately I’ll be able to find any book in the house in, tops, twelve seconds, plus the walk from whatever other room I’m in.

Back to our semi-usual purpose here: In service to great reading (mine and yours), I’d like to call your attention, if you are not already familiar with it, to Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, which I more or less inhaled over the course of two recent days and which, quite simply, you really, really, really must read.6 It’s the first of Taylor’s books I’ve ever read, and I expect to be doing a lot of catching up. She absolutely rocks.

And it’s short. I do like a short novel. (I like the occasional doorstop too, but I do like a short novel.)

And I’ve just begun my first-ever, as well, Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac, which has captivated me from its first sentences:

From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey. It was to be supposed that beyond the grey garden, which seemed to sprout nothing but the stiffish leaves of some unfamiliar plant, lay the vast grey lake, spreading like an anaesthetic towards the invisible further shore, and beyond that, in imagination only, yet verified by the brochure, the peak of the Dent d’Oche, on which snow might already be slightly and silently falling.

Me being me, I was immediately put in mind of this:

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cookstove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar—except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.

Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.

It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings. Toto was not gray; he was a little black dog, with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny, wee nose. Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly.

Today, however, they were not playing. Uncle Henry sat upon the doorstep and looked anxiously at the sky, which was even grayer than usual. Dorothy stood in the door with Toto in her arms, and looked at the sky too. Aunt Em was washing the dishes.

Three “grey”s from Ms. Brookner in two sentences (and she’ll cross her t’s with a fourth, pointed one toward the end of the next paragraph); nine “gray”s (and a “grayer”) from Mr. Baum in six paragraphs. As a copy editor, I’m always on the lookout for inadvertently repeated/overused words; when the intention is as clear and eloquently executed as here and here, I need only set my green pencil down and applaud.

To be sure, U.S. preference leans toward “gray,” while our cousins across the water favor (or even favour) “grey.”

I feel as if I owe you all an entry on the delicate process of translating U.K. prose into U.S. prose (and have owed you that for quite some time), and I’ll get to that when I have a few more braincells to rub together and some time to concentrate. But in the meantime I’m always happy to note that I’ve been merrily known to make the case that “gray” and “grey” are in fact not simply two different spellings but two different colors.

Gray, to be sure, is on the bright and silvery side, whereas grey is duller, gloomier, and sodden.7

For the record, someone else is also enjoying her newfound quiet.

Thank you, once again, for reading. Thank you particularly to subscribers, and to those of you who have signed on to become paying subscribers with no greater practical benefit than the ability to comment in the comments (today I’m looking forward to fistfights over the whole gray/grey thing), I am especially grateful. Your support of this A Word About . . . endeavor makes a lot of difference to me, on a lot of levels.

The Paradine Case is not especially distinguished, and running just under two hours it feels wearyingly overextended, but it has its virtues: Charles Laughton, pawing virtuous Ann Todd, manages to be almost indescribably repulsive, even by his own lofty standards of repulsiveness, and one is reminded that if Gregory Peck couldn’t act a lick, which at times here he seems eager to prove, he’d have been a worthy movie star simply for the way he catches and reflects light.

Also present, as Laughton’s mentally delicate and, likely not coincidentally, almost certainly abused wife, is Ethel Barrymore, whose birthday, like that of another of my favorite actresses, Wendy Hiller, happens to be today, August 15.

If Ethel is in the film for five minutes total it’s a lot, and I was a bit surprised, reading up on The Paradine Case afterward, to be reminded that she was nominated for it for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Though there isn’t, given the chance, an honor I wouldn’t heap on Miss Barrymore, it’s, to be fair, a pretty teeny tiny performance. Great, no question, but pretty teeny tiny.

It seems, I read (and I find the story reported in a few slightly different fashions, so I’m going to hew to the one that works best for this present narrative till someone swoops in, reliable Hitch bios in hand, to correct the record), that the version of the film first released in Los Angeles and New York, and presumably viewed by Academy voters, was about eighteen minutes longer than the version that eventually went into wide release, and that in cutting The Paradine Case down to size producer David O. Selznick sheared out most of Ethel’s performance, including apparently a corker of a scene in which she flips out in a London museum.

The deleted material, I further read, was lying around in some vault (oh, yay!) till it got taken out for good (oh, boo!) in 1980 not by the usual celluloid-frying flash fire but, in this case, a flood. Or, again, so I read.

So I find myself equally grateful for what remains and frustrated by what’s lost—OK, not equally: far more frustrated than grateful—and put in mind of, from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia:

Thomasina: Oh, Septimus!—can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—thousands of poems—Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by [Cleopatra’s] ancestors. How can we sleep for grief?

Septimus: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we should be at a loss for a corkscrew?

(I quote this a lot. It’s one of my favorite things in all the realm of things.)

But even a fragment of a performance standing in for something fuller and presumably richer yet, alas, utterly lost is a cherishable thing.

Now, if you’d like to watch, in Ethel’s honor, one of her great, greater, greatest film roles, I commend to you the romantic fantasy Portrait of Jennie (1948), in which, playing a self-designated old maid, she is at her most luminous and lovely.

And oh, that voice.

(You’ll get more than your money’s worth.)

I hope that you’re having a fine weekend.

Sallie, also, I think, luminous and lovely, sends her best.

Till next time,

B.

Cover illustration: Ethel Barrymore photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1937

This little passage below so delighted me earlier today—had I not been holding the book in two hands I might have clapped those two hands in glee—that I absolutely had to share it with you all:

His coat was off; his hair was in a tangle, and his hands were gray with dust. He had never met her and did not like her clothes. He did not want to be drawn into a conversation and stood, handsome and sulky, his glances stealing to the maps on the floor. Explained that I was out. Might not be back before. Would not forget to tell that.

“Might not be back before. Would not forget to tell that.”1

How charming! How jaunty!

Till next time,

B.

Cover illustration: a depiction of Rome—a friend informs me that it shows the Castel Sant’Angelo (oh, right, yes, Tosca) and the Piazza San Pietro—that I found by googling “Rome 1900 engraving”

She sensed the fact that there was in her something that a little prevented her making friends, namely, intelligence. The few intelligent people who truly wish to be liked soon learn, among the disappointments of the heart, to conceal their brilliance.

which I think is (a) exquisite, and (b) an awfully good example of the potential ease of pruning a “the fact that” down to a simple “that,” with no harm done.

To be sure, that first sentence could be cut nearly in half without my breaking a copyeditorial sweat to:

She sensed in herself something that prevented her making friends, namely, intelligence.

but there’s a difference between a little judicious copyediting and telling a writer not to write like themself, a difference a lot of copy editors could stand to learn.

My theoretical revised version is certainly shorter, and it certainly gets the job done (if prose is a job, which I think it ain’t); I wouldn’t say that it’s any better.

Also, we’re not (certainly I’m not) in any hurry, so where’s the fire?

Also this morning, for no particular reason, I reacquainted myself with the noun “bourn,” which has one of those odd double derivations, from in this case both Old English (and a bunch of forebears) and French, and which can be used to mean stream, brook, boundary, domain, and destination.

Beyond its use in Hamlet (“The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns”), I’d only encountered it once that I can think of, in the Kurt Weill–Elmer Rice–Langston Hughes1 musical Street Scene:

Now love and death have linked their arms together
And gone away into another bourn
Beyond the far-off sky, beyond forever
They have gone and left us here to mourn.

Though here, also rhyming “mourn” and “bourn,”2 and courtesy of my pal Lawrence Schimel, is a bit of Keats’s “To Autumn”:

Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn.

In any event, I think that it’s a lovely word, this “bourn,” even if I can’t imagine, beyond this musing, making much good modern use of it.

Also, we went to the Hammer yesterday, and I have a new favorite Van Gogh painting.

Here’s my snapshot:

And here’s the entire painting, whose title is The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in the Snow:

Of course I like it: It’s wintry and mournful and ghostly, and, as well, it has, I think, a kind of Caspar David Friedrich thing going on, and CDF is surely one of my top-ten painters.

We also saw a couple of grand Moreau canvases, for those of you who like Moreau (also in my top ten, I daresay):

And here, for those of you who prefer dogs, is a photo of a knowing, patient dog:

My usual—though never, I hope, rote!—thanks to those of you who have chosen to subscribe to this A Word About . . . series, and to those of you who have opted to become paying subscribers, with no greater practical benefit than the right to comment in the comments, I am especially grateful. Your support is meaningful to me on any number of levels.

Till next time,

B.