Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Poet: Ogden Nash - All poems of Ogden Nash

Sweet. I have a whacking great book with 650 of Ogden Nash’s poems, so it’s not that so much as poemhunter.com itself. I love sites like this. Ooooh, and you can comment on the poems if you wish.

Tip of the hat to languagehat

and writes a long, but interesting and amusing piece on it in Poetry, but misses the perfect chance to use the word materteral.

I maundered loathly as a clod
that blundered, high, toked to the gills
when all at once I said, My God!
I find I’m smoking daffodils!

Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman discusses the pattern _change my state_ and call me _a name appropriate given the change_, and states

And I’m not sure whether the preposition (up or down in the cited examples) is obligatory or not.

He gives as examples:

…roll me up and call me curly…
…blow me down and call me shorty…
…dress me up and call me Sally…
…grease me up and call me slider…

The answer, as the title of this post demonstrates (7 gh), is that it’s not obligatory. I originally ran into the “pierce my ears” phrase as something that Hank McCoy (the bouncing blue Beast in the X-Men and Avengers comics) said, and fell in love with it. In fact, I see that one of the Google Hits was a post of mine on Foolippic in response to a Language Log post on “Dadburn it.”

Other examples (using the preposition in) are:

• well, roll me in sugar and call me doughy
• well, roll me in corn-flour and call me dinner (attributed to Foghorn Leghorn)
• well, roll me in shit and call me Daisy/stinky
• well, dip me in hot fudge and call me a sundae
• well, dip me in sugar and call me sweet-potato pie
• well, dip me in mucous and call me phlegmatic

And

• well, smack my ass/behind and call me Charley/Shirley/etc
• well, gyrate my pelvis and call me The King
• well, rub my chest and call me Vix

The “well, ” seems to be an important part of the phrase. Or maybe it just makes it easy to Google for.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.

Is that a valid English sentence? Can you parse it if you haven’t had it explained to you before? (if you haven’t, try it with some extra words to help indicate the clauses: Buffalo buffalo that other Buffalo buffalo buffalo themselves buffalo other Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo buffalo. It also helps to know the transitive verb buffalo: to intimidate; to deceive or hoodwink; to confuse.)

There’s something that strikes me as fishy about sentences that are theoretically well-formed according to an analysis of the grammar, but no competent speaker could ever actually produce or parse without aid (such as pencil and paper or a computer program). The Buffalo sentence can actually probably be understood if spoken aloud by someone who understands it and punches it up with strategic pauses and stress. But it’s easy to imagine sentences where that’s impossible.

For instance, it seems to be relatively common to say something like:

Or, if you suffer from sesquipedaliaphobia, you can think of your great-grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, your great-great-great-grandmother, and so on, limited only in practice by the number of generations since Eve. - Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, p. 123

In theory it may be limited only be the number of generations since Eve, but in actual practice I bet it’s limited to no more than will fit comfortably in iconic memory, and more than three is probably somebody deliberately being funny.

A Google search, restricted to English pages, gives:

||”great-(great)+ grand”| 209,000|
||”great-(great)+ grand”| 25,600|
||”great-great-(great)+ grand”| 5,740|
||”great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 933|
||”great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 389|
||”great-great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 269|
||”great-great-great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 196|
||”great-great-great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 131|

Beyond that Google drops terms, because the search string is limited to 10

But do people even read these many iterations of “great”? Can they? Again, my guess is that after a small number that they’re able to visually recognize, they either switch to counting (until they tire of that) or just give up, look for the next non-great and continue reading the sentence happily unconcerned with how many generations they’ve skipped. All competent speakers understand the rule that’s being used to generate these sequences, but I think they also all recognize that there comes a point where the speaker is using the rule correctly but breaking a meta-rule that the sentence be intended to be understandable.

Calacirya | Riddles

It’s cheating if you remember them from the Hobbit.

Websnark asks what do you even call the opposite of selling out. The obvious answer is “buying in”, but somehow that doesn’t seem quite right.

Apropos of hapax logomena, logomacy is one. Or at least it was until a handful of other bloggers used it as the proper name for this blog. As it stands, all google hits on logomacy point to this site or a site referring to this one.

As the subtitle of the blog hints logomachy and logomancy are words you can find in dictionaries: logomachy is arguing or disputing about words or a battle of words, while logomancy is divination by words. And logomacy, which sounds like it ought to mean something, is just a pun on my name that falls lexically between the two.

I just realized that in the previous post I mis-attributed my misheard Flip, Flop, Fly to the songwriters of the original. Obviously they didn’t actually write what I thought I heard, but does that mean my mondegreen ought to be attributed to me? In terms of copyright it’s a derivative work, so I couldn’t actually claim sole ownership of the rights to the “new” version, though it’s not clear to me off the top of my head whether the current owners of the copyright to the song would be able to claim ownership either. The legal situation is made more complicated by the system of compulsory licensing that’s in place for songs: in the US you cannot legally prevent someone from performing a cover version of your song as long as they pay you royalties (except that you do have the “right of first recording”) and do not “substantially alter” your song. What happens if someone did substantially alter the song? I don’t know. What, you expect me to do some real research? I suspect that the compulsory license provisions wouldn’t apply, and you might have to do some genuine negotiation if you could track down the copyright owners; not necessarily an easy task, particularly when the original creator(s) are dead. Oh, and then there’s parody and the First Amendment.

Mothers, don’t let your sons grow up to be IP lawyers…

update: Ok, just for you I did a little research, at least to the extent of googling up this.

An Austrian army, awfully array’d,
Boldly by battery besiege Belgrade;
Cossack commanders cannonading come,
Deal devastation’s dire destructive doom;
Ev’ry endeavour engineers essay,
For fame, for freedom, fight, fierce furious fray.
Gen’rals ‘gainst gen’rals grapple–gracious God!
How honors Heav’n heroic hardihood!
Infuriate, indiscriminate in ill,
Just Jesus, instant innocence instill!
Kinsmen kill kinsmen, kindred kindred kill.
Labour low levels longest, loftiest lines;
Men march ‘midst mounds, motes, mountains, murd’rous mines.
Now noisy, noxious numbers notice nought,
Of outward obstacles o’ercoming ought;
Poor patriots perish, persecution’s pest!
Quite quiet Quakers “Quarter, quarter�? quest;
Reason returns, religion, right, redounds,
Suwarrow stop such sanguinary sounds!
Truce to thee, Turkey, terror to thy train!
Unwise, unjust, unmerciful Ukraine!
Vanish vile vengeance, vanish victory vain!
Why wish we warfare? wherefore welcome won
Xerxes, Xantippus, Xavier, Xenophon?
Yield, ye young Yaghier yeomen, yield your yell!
Zimmerman’s, Zoroaster’s, Zeno’s zeal
Again attract; arts against arms appeal.
All, all ambitious aims, avaunt, away!
Et cætera, et cætera, et cætera.

Bartlett’s has the source as “Miscellaneous,” but at least two other sites attribute it to Alaric Alexander Watts (1797- 1864) without quoting it in full. I first came across it in a slightly different form when I was about eleven in a book about puzzles and word play, and promptly committed it to memory. The version I learned was slightly different, lacking any J’s (I’m pretty sure that it’s not just my faulty memory, since I recall the accompanying text mentioning that J was the only missing letter), and with several other differences, e.g. the line for P being “Poor patriots, partly purchased, partly pressed” The Barlett’s text has a note, which suggests that the versions may have diverged quite early on:

These lines having been incorrectly printed in a London publication, we have been favoured by the author with an authentic copy of them. –Wheeler’s Magazine, vol. i. p. 244. (Winchester, England, 1828.)