The Meaning of Liff

I recently unearthed a book I've owned for years and needed to remember a word from, The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. Even the gift inscription on the inside cover, written by our friend Miriam, is almost as amusing as the contents. It reads
Please accept this with my compliments:
1. I like your shirt.
2. Dinner was divine.
3. I never knew it could be like this.
4. What practical closets!
5. You dance divinely.
6. What's a nice girl like you...
7. What nifty pillows!
8. You have such excellent taste in pickles.
9. You slink most compellingly.
10. Your flesh has a nice color.
11. I admire the snugness of your cat.
12. I enjoy the fine curly golden hair on your arms.
13. Your teeth, even and white, contrast pleasingly with your alligator boots.
14. You lope with exquisite grace.

The book's preface points out that
"In Life,* there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations, and even objects that we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist.
On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words that spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places.
Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signpost and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.
*And, indeed, in Liff."

One of the best words from this book, as I'm sure any fellow book-lover will agree, is the term for "the way people stand when examining other people's bookshelves," to stand "ahenny." This is the word I wanted to use, and so I had to unearth the book to remind myself of it.

Other words that I wish would come into more general usage include:

Ardslignish (adj) Adjective that describes the behavior of Scotch tape when you are tired.

Baldock (n.) The sharp prong on the top of a tree stump where the tree snapped off before being completely sawed through.

Cranleigh (n.) A mood of irrational irritation with everyone and everything.

Dipple (vb.) to try to remove a sticky something from one hand with the other, thus causing it to get stuck to the other hand and eventually to anything else you try to remove it with.

Ely, (n.) The first, tiniest inkling you get that something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong.

Fraddam (n.) The small awkward-shaped piece of cheese that remains after you grate a large piece of cheese and enables you to cut your fingers.

Golant (adj.) Blank, sly, and faintly embarrassed. Pertaining to the expression seen on the face of someone who has clearly forgotten your name.

Hesperia (n.) Phenomenon that causes Broadway audiences to give a standing ovation to anything that moves.

Lulworth (n.) Measure of conversation: A lulworth defines the amount of the length, loudness, and embarrassment of a statement you make when everyone else in the room unaccountably stops talking at the same moment.
(Note: My father once scored 9 out of 10 lulworths when he shouted the word "circumcision" in a crowded Little Rock, Arkansas restaurant bar.)

Nazeing (participial vb.) The rather unconvincing noises of pretended interest that an adult has to make when brought a small dull object for admiration, by a child.

Pabbay (n., vb.) (Fencing term.) The play, or maneuver, where one swordsman leaps onto the table and pulls the battle-ax off the wall.

Sconser (n.) A person who looks around when talking to you, to see if there's anyone more interesting about.

Sturry (n., vb.) A token run. Pedestrians who have chosen to cross a road immediately in front of an approaching vehicle generally give a little wave and break into a sturry.

Tingrith (n.) The feeling of aluminum foil against your fillings.
(Note: "tingrith" is already becoming archaic as ceramic fillings become more common, but I think it's still a useful word. If you gnaw on foil.)

Ullapool (n.) The spittle that builds up on the floor of the orchestra pit.

Woking (participial vb.) Standing in the kitchen wondering what you came in here for.

Please vote in the comments for which one of these words you would find most useful in daily life.

I must admit that I may have committed "ripon" in this review: Ripon (vb.) (Of literary critics.) To include all the best jokes from the book in review to make it look as if the critic thought of them. I should also admit that the words I selected are ones I can imagine using, and so I've left out many words describing bodily functions and secretions.

And one last word. This one is not a useful word, but I include it because it seems a very good thing to have a word for, even if it's terribly highly specialized:
Goadby Marwood (n.) Someone who stops John Cleese on the street and demands that he do a funny walk.

Interview With the Non-Necromancer

Anna at Diary of An Eccentric was kind enough to interview me about books this week, in the process of passing along the "Interviewing Other Bloggers Meme" (she got her questions from Serena at Savvy Verse and Wit, and she formulated her own questions for me and also Christine at She Reads Books and Marie at Boston Bibliophile).

Anna: Out of all the books you've read, which one affected you the most, and why?
Jeanne: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I read it when it first came out, in 1986, and it made quite an impression on me. I was 26 years old, at the height of my fertility, and an adamant supporter of the pro-choice movement ever since an experience with a high school friend whose "religious" parents would have quite literally kicked her out of the house for being pregnant, except that she had a miscarriage before all of her friends could give her the money we'd pooled to get her an abortion. I had never so clearly connected being forced to carry a baby with women's rights and with what was happening with the Taliban in Afghanistan until I read the passage in which Offred has her picture taken by a group of Japanese tourists and tells them yes, she is "happy" (because she has already had her daughter, husband, mother, and best friend taken away and she has been beaten and terrified into submission). Later I came to appreciate The Handmaid's Tale for its deft weaving of the rights guaranteed by the United States Bill of Rights into the fabric of the fiction, but at first reading, it was the visceral aspect that got me. Offred is a womb with legs, nothing more.

Anna: Everyone always asks for book recommendations, but what is one book you think people should avoid at all costs?
Jeanne: Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. To me, it is the epitome of a novelist's misguided attempt to write nonfiction thinly disguised as fiction. It is an environmentalist argument that she made much better in her (later) nonfiction book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I love most of Kingsolver's novels, but she really needs to guard against her tendency to try to preach in her fiction.

Anna: What is the first book you remember reading?
Jeanne: Happy Birthday to You! by Dr. Seuss. My parents read this to me every year on my birthday--still will, if we're together. So I memorized it very young and could "read" it before anything else. One of my favorite parts was always when the animals would stand on their tiptoes because it was such an honor to be "the tallest of all-est." I have always been taller than almost everyone else, so I liked thinking that was a good thing.

Anna: When I'm browsing books, sometimes I come across a title that hits me. I don't always read the book, but the title amuses me or gets to me in some way. What's your favorite book title? Have you read the book? (Ex: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. I probably won't ever read this book, but I chuckle every time I see the title.)
Jeanne: If I have to pick just one, it will have to be another YA title, one that I chuckle at every time I go to a bookstore: One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies. I haven't read it because my daughter skimmed through it in the store once and told me it wasn't really worth reading. What a great title, though!

Anna: What's the one book you love and wish you'd written?
Jeanne: Whoa! I'm going to take this in the spirit of "what book do you think it's even remotely possible you could have been in the right spirit to be able to write if you were a million times cleverer and more patient than you are?" And the answer is: Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Okay, yeah, I know. It's presumption to even think it. But it's the way I wish I could write, if I could write fiction at all, which I can't. If I had written something like that, I would have just strutted around the rest of my life crowing like Peter Pan: "Oh, the Cleverness of Me!" But really, I'm too earnest.

And that's my interview. If you would like me to interview you about books and what you think of them and all, leave me a comment with your contact information. If you would just like to comment on my opinions, well that's okay, too.

American Gods

We're here in the hurricane aftermath...how did a hurricane (Ike) make it all the way to central Ohio on Sept. 14? We still have no power and American Electric Power is still telling us that it could take until Sept. 21 or even longer. Most of the trees have been cleared off the roads, and we've been hopelessly searching for ice and D batteries since Monday. There's a bad smell coming from the refrigerator, so it's too late for ice. (Yes, we have considered just replacing the refrigerator without opening it, like Dirk Gently in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.)

I'd never been in a hurricane before, and it was really impressive, as is all the damage. The radio kept saying "straight line winds" but there are some big trees that were obviously stirred around in a corkscrew and torn apart three or four different directions at once. Yesterday the road crews got most of the trees off of the major roads. We have four small trees (redbuds and ornamental pear) lying in our front and back yard, one with the cable line wrapped around it where Ron pulled the line off the street. There are a number of big trees down up in our woods. In the next yard the enormous tree trunk that fell on the power line is still lying on the line.

On Sunday it was kind of an adventure. We played cards by candlelight. On Monday it was less of an adventure. Even businesses were closed. McDonald's was closed, which gave Eleanor the unpleasant sensation that we were in one of the post-apocalyptic novels she'd just read. There was no school and the local colleges had to cancel classes.

Today most businesses and schools have power, but many of the residential areas, like mine, are dark and quiet. The motels and restaurants are full. The libraries are full. Most of the schools are open. I'm at the college library, because the public library is so full that it's hard to find a free outlet. And when I find a good book (I found two yesterday), it's hard to find any time to read, because most of my reading time comes in the evening, and I find it hard to concentrate when my book light keeps dimming.

I did finish a book right before the hurricane hit. It was American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. I picked it up because we'd listened to the audiobook of Anansi Boys this summer and found it compelling enough to keep us going through miles and miles of the midwest. American Gods was written before Anansi Boys, though, and I found it more loosely plotted. One character is martyred and then resurrected by a god named "Easter," and another comes back to life by means of unintential necromancy by leprechaun gold. It turns out that (naturally) necromancy doesn't pay:

"'Did you ever figure out how to bring me back from the dead?" she asked.
"I guess," he said. "I know one way, anyway."
"That's good," she said. She squeezed his hand with her cold hand. And then she said, "And the opposite? What about that?"
"The opposite?"
"Yes," she whispered. "I think I must have earned it."
"I don't want to do that."
She said nothing. She simply waited.
Shadow said, "Okay." Then he took his hand from hers and put it to her neck....
He closed his hand around the golden coin that hung around her neck. He tugged, hard, at the chain, which snapped easily. Then he took the gold coin between his finger and thumb, and blew on it, and opened his hand wide.
The coin was gone.
Her eyes were still open, but they did not move."

There are some good parts, but I'm thinking that Gaiman is a writer who got better as he went along. If you're a fan, you'll probably like this book. If you're not, don't start with this one. Start with Anansi Boys, and then read Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul before you read American Gods.

Beginnings

Scott Westerfeld (scottwesterfeld.com) has a recent post about beginnings, and SFP at Pages Turned has a recent post about endings. And they've gotten me thinking about how I choose books. Most often, of course, it's because I read the first paragraph and get hooked. When I started thinking about the beginnings that hooked me most quickly, I decided to share some of my favorites, the ones that stick in my memory:

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

William Goldman, The Princess Bride
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

John Scalzi, Old Man's War
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.

Roald Dahl, Matilda
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.
Well, there is nothing very wrong with all this. It's the way of the world. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring that we start shouting, "Bring us a basin! We're going to be sick!"

Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don't mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle. Dad had been a colonel in the ChronoGuard and kept his work very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we didn't know he had gone rogue at all until his timekeeping buddies raided our house one morning clutching a Seize & Eradication order open-dated at both ends and demanding to know where and when he was.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.

Walker Percy, Love In the Ruins
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won't and I'm crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.

Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden
The best thing about my life up to here is, nobody believes it. I stopped trying to make people hear it long ago, and I'm nothing but a real middle-sized white woman that has kept on going with strong eyes and teeth for fifty-seven years. You can touch me; I answer. But it got to where I felt like the first woman landed from Pluto--people asking how I lasted through all I claimed and could still count to three, me telling the truth with an effort to smile and then watching them doubt it. So I've kept quiet for years.

These are some of my favorites, from memory (although I did look them up to get the words right). Tell me some of your favorite beginnings.

Lobster

The last time we took our kids to Washington, D.C. there was a PETA demonstration in front of the Natural History Museum. One of the people gave Eleanor a flyer, and she gleefully deconstructed its propaganda for the rest of the trip. One of the things she noticed is that the lobster pictured in their vegetarianism section is red. It's already been cooked!

I have loved eating lobster for as far back as I can remember. My family would go to a fancy restaurant in St. Louis and I would order a lobster, and my brother would insist that I turn its face away from him while I ate its insides. Nothing makes me feel more carnivorous than tearing the flesh out of someone's exoskeleton and putting it in my mouth.

My son has also loved eating lobster since he was about two years old. We'd go to Red Lobster, pick one out of the tank, and then split it. He eats his without butter. Over the years, he's become fairly expert at cracking the claws and extracting the meat, and he's added a side order of King crab legs to our shared lobster.

Despite having lived in Rhode Island for a winter, I've never eaten lobster except at a restaurant, and I've never tried to cook one. Like many modern Americans, I'm a little reluctant to kill an animal myself and then eat it. The closest I've ever come is helping to boil some crabs we caught in South Carolina. It's not easy to put them in the pot and hear them trying to get out.

Over the years, I've read about lobsters, trying to decide how cruel it is to boil them alive. Trevor Corson's The Secret Life of Lobsters, while it goes into intricate detail about their nervous systems and how they use their antennules, doesn't end up revealing whether they feel pain in a way humans can understand.

Perhaps that's just our failure of imagination. As David Foster Wallace points out in his essay "Consider the Lobster," the question for lobster eaters is "Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?" That is, as he says, an uncomfortable question. "It's not just that lobsters get boiled alive, it's that you do it yourself--or at least it's done specifically for you, on-site. (Morality-wise, let's concede that this cuts both ways. Lobster-eating is at least not abetted by the system of corporate factory farms that produces most beef, pork, and chicken. Because, if nothing else, of the way they're marketed and packaged for sale, we eat these latter meats without having to consider that they were once conscious, sentient creatures to whom horrible things were done.)" Wallace's imaginary picture of a beef festival where "trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there" is an exaggerated comparison pre-empted by Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where Arthur Dent is so unsophisticated as to be taken aback when a cow who has been bred to be happy about being eaten offers him some of her flesh for his own, personal dinner.

And all the uncomfortableness about eating lobster is further complicated if you've read Neal Stephenson's Zodiac, as I have. The hero of Zodiac is an environmental activist (a friend calls him "the granola James Bond") concerned with finding a source of some serious pollution in the Charles River and Boston harbor. He knows that they're badly polluted because he's been getting tainted lobsters and taking them to be tested. The description of what he finds in one lobster is almost enough to put a person off eating them (warning: do not read on if you're squeamish):

I could smell... an oily, foul odor, mixed in with the marine stench of the lobsters. I recognized it. Some of the lobsters I'd gotten off Gallagher's boat had smelled that way. In fact that was the reason they'd given them to me. Big enough to sell, but they stank too bad. They had come from the entrance to the Inner Harbor....She was about halfway through dissecting one of Gallagher's big stinky lobsters. She'd removed the legs and tail and pried back the shell around the body to expose the liver....There was hardly any liver left. It had necrosed--a fancy word for died. Rotted away, inside the body, leaving just a puddle of black stuff. Surrounded by blobs of yellowy material, vesicles or sacs of something that I'd never seen inside a lobster before. Some kind of toxin that the liver had desperately tried to remove from the lobster's system, killing itself in the process.

Since Zodiac is a novel, the pollution is something that the hero can clean up, in the end. But if, like me, you like to eat Lobster (or catfish), the image of your dinner coping with pollution can be hard to get out of your head. But not impossible. Walker has a soccer game two hours away on Sunday, and we'll stop for dinner in the big city on the way back. If he gets to choose, we'll be going to Red Lobster.

For the flavor of David Foster Wallace's footnotes (rendered here in parentheses), see the comic posted by Bookslut:
http://www.picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=122

Favorite Books

When I go to a party and someone asks what I "do" and I tell them some variation on "I have a PhD in English and try not to waste it entirely," there are two categories of response. One is "oh, I'll have to watch my grammar." I laugh politely at that one. The other is "oh, I never have time to read." I like that one a little better because it gives me a way to say that we make time for what we can't do without.

My favorite response to the what do you "do" answer came when I was still in graduate school. The man who eventually married our friend Miriam said to me "what are you studying in grad school?" I said "English." There was a pause. "Haven't you learned it yet?" he said.

So what do you do when someone asks what your "favorite" book is??? I have various strategies for answering such a question, including picking six off the top of my head, as I did for my blogger profile: Animal Dreams, Love In the Ruins, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Princess Bride.

A strategy that makes more sense is to pick two or three favorites from a specific genre--favorite science fiction books: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Door Into Ocean, Ender's Game.

My favorite way to answer this question now is a strategy I borrowed from my friend Lemming's Christmas letter. She and her husband used to recommend their favorite book of the year. This narrows down the selections to a manageable level, plus you can buy the favorite book of the year for everyone on your list. My favorite book of this past year is Boomsday.

Of course, this strategy necessarily privileges contemporary literature. How can we include favorites from the past? Usually I don't try. There's no need to repeat what thousands of high school English teachers have said before me: To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. One of the purposes of telling other people what your favorite books are is to get them to read those books.

With that purpose in mind, tell me what your favorite books are. I'm the person you know who is most likely to read them.

Weapons

Sandy Mack once told me that he thought there was a Shakespeare play for every era. I think the play for this era is Othello. It's got passion without thought.
There are good movie versions of the play, Oliver Parker's with Kenneth Branagh and Janet Suzman's, and there are wonderful movies based on it or involving issues from it, like O and Stage Beauty. But I have never seen a performance that highlighted one of my favorite speeches in the play, one spoken by Othello after the extent of Iago's treachery has become clear to him:
I have seen the day
That with this little arm and this good sword
I have made my way through more impediments
Than twenty times your stop. But O vain boast!
Who can control his fate? 'Tis not so now.
Be not afraid, though you do see me weaponed.
Here is my journey's end, here is my butt,
And very seamark of my utmost sail.
Do you go back dismayed? 'Tis a lost fear.
Man but a rush against Othello's breast,
And he retires.
Finally the guy realizes that he has been missing something in the way he sees the world, that the way to conquer "impediments" is not always to obliterate them.
It reminds me of the scene in the movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when Arthur, Zaphod and Trillian find the point of view gun, a big gun that forces the targeted person to see the shooter's point of view, and they turn it on Trillian, who says in a tone of deep disgust "It won't work on me. I'm already a woman."