Can I Get Another Word for 'Ho-Hum'?

Let's continue on with the "books I'm reading to make me a better author", shall we? Excellent. Today's installation is What in the Word? Wordplay, Word Lore, and Answers to Your Peskiest Questions about Language by Charles Harrington Elster.

In January, I reviewed The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. Read that one. Leave Elster's book on the shelf.

Oh, you probably want something to substantiate those instructions. If that's the way you're going to be, fine. I'll play along just the once.

Elster is a contributor to the "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine. As such, he gets lots of people writing in lots of questions about words, usage, and etymology. As such, this book is written in a question and answer format which makes for some nice natural breaks when reading this book on the shitter. Otherwise, it's just kind of annoying. Now, I will say that, when answering questions based on etymology, usage or "is there a word that..." describes a certain situation, Elster does a stand-up job. However, in several chapters, Elster decides to exercise his "wit" by crafting new words. Sure, creating new words is nice and all, but it was difficult reading these chapters and not imagining some smug motherfucker talking down to you while he creates a word to describe the holes in Swiss cheese or some other useless entity.

Added into these are sidebars where he makes up more stupid words, as well as "Bodacious Brainteasers" which are supposed to be quizzes but end up being impossible to decipher because he will randomly change the rules of the puns that he's using, oftentimes in the middle of the quiz itself. At the bottom of every couplet of pages is a pun in the vein of "I could have been a doctor, but I didn't have the patience". Get it? Laugh, clown, laugh!

I did, however, like the "Unfortunate Eponyms" piece that he wrote, telling stories about people whose lives or actions were so fucked up, we used their names to describe a similar situation. For instance, to "bowdlerize" is to go through and cut out all the "offensive" material from a written document. For instance, if I were to bowdlerize this blog, it'd look something like this:


Hi.


In Elster's defense, some of his best work is in the pronunciation questions (he has a separate book just on mangled pronunciations). Herein he reminds everyone that, yes, there is a /t/ on the beginning of "tsunami," despite the media deciding it was pesky and dropping it back when they covered the one on Phuket Island. Also, he tells us that it's pronounced "homm-edge" and not "oh-mahj" like some self-important cocksnots have decided in recent years *cough*Alex Trebek*cough*. Also, he clears up that whole question of the plural of octopus: it's octopodes. See, the ending "pus" is a Greek derivative of foot, and as it's a Greek word, the proper pluralization is "podes", thus giving us "octopodes." See, the pluralized form of "octopi" is a Latin pluralization, so you're taking a Greek root and forcing a Latin rule on it, despite the fact that they're two different languages. It's kind of like the bastard who decided that we can't have split infinitives in English because they couldn't have split infinitives in Latin...despite the fact that it's impossible to have a split infinitive in Latin. Latin infinitives are all one word (you'll learn that in the upcoming weeks)! Should you think octopodes too silly, octopuses is also acceptable.

The other big reason for reading Bryson's book The Mother Tongue is that Elster cites it constantly (along with Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words), so you're just cutting out the middle man and going to a better written and more enjoyable source. However, if you feel like being talked down to by a book, by all means, read What in the Word?