The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (62 page)

Z

Zemblanity.
Arms controllers know that the Russians have been setting off non-nuclear explosions at their nuclear test facility on the barren, frigid Arctic island of Nova Zembla, and thereby hangs a new word.

An old word is
serendipity,
“a happy discovery by accident.” It was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, based on the fairy tale of the three princes of Serendip, who “were always making discoveries … of things they were not in quest of.” The Indian Ocean island of Serendip, later known as Ceylon, is now the nation of Sri Lanka.

A
Times Book Review
note about the novel
Armadillo,
by William Boyd, reads, “The novel’s hero … is undone by an outbreak of
zemblanity,
the opposite of
serendipity,
in the multicultural hubbub of Cool Britannia.” Newton Scherl of Englewood, New Jersey, writes, “I have tried without success to find
zemblanity
in any of my dictionaries.” That’s because it is not yet there.

“What is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of spice and warmth?” asks Boyd in his novel. “Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound … Zembla. Ergo:
zemblanity,
the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design.”

Writers from Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope to Jules Verne and Salman Rushdie have used Zembla’s wastes north of Siberia as symbolic of what Charlotte Brontë called “forlorn regions of dreary space.” Now this site of testing of non-nuclear explosives at a nuclear facility has given birth to
zemblanity,
the inexorable discovery of what we don’t want to know.

Zhlub.
A recent
New Yorker
cartoon by David Sipress has an ordinary-looking woman addressing a wimpish man on the other end of a couch with “I want to start dating other
zhlubs
.”

About six months ago, Dennis Murray, a Fox News producer, told the
Washington Post
media reporter Howard Kurtz of his dismay at having to run even a brief shot of a truck caravan carrying ballots from Palm Beach County, Florida, to the state capital to be counted. “It was just funny, looking at it on the screen, like some poor
schlub
just moving something,” he said. “What’s the point? … Who cares?”

Which spelling is correct—the magazine’s
zhlub
or the newspaper’s
schlub
?

In his Yiddish dictionaries, Leo Rosten spelled it
zhlub,
from the Slavic
zhlob,
“coarse fellow.” The sound is better transliterated as
zh
than as
sch
. That’s this maven’s call; in either case, the word rhymes with
rub
.

The senses today range from describing a person who is “ill-mannered” (“he acts like a
zhlub,
that
zhlub
”) to “clumsy” (“Vassar-Shmassar, the girl’s still a
zhlub
”) to “oafish” (“what can you expect from such a
zhlub
?”).

Jerk
and
drip
are long gone;
nerd
and
dork
are passé. Is this the time of the
zhlub
?

Zero Misteaks: The Gotcha! Gang Strikes Again

1/28/2001

“In your pick-apart work on the 2000 census,” writes David Galef of the University of Mississippi’s English Department, “you ruefully noted, ‘Language has its limitations.’Make that
limits
.”

Yeah, right. (Make that “Yeah; right.”) Although both
limit
and
limitation
mean “boundary” and by extension “point beyond which nothing is allowed or possible,”
limitation
has a special sense of “lack of capacity; restrictive condition; handicap.” A
limit
is like a line that marks an end, as in
city limits;
a
limitation
is a restriction that disables or nullifies, as in
statute of limitations
.

In an article about an investigation by Independent Counsel David Bar-rett into political influence in the Internal Revenue Service, I wrote that an immunized IRS employee was “singing like a birdie” and added parenthetically, “(hardly an original metaphor).”

“A
simile
is a figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared,” observes Henry A. Jackson III of Pittsburgh, “often in a phrase introduced by
like
or
as,
as in ‘How like a winter hath my absence been’ or ‘So are you to my thoughts as food to life.’
Singing like a birdie
is not a metaphor, but is a simile.” Right; and in Shakespeare’s sonnet 75, “So are you to my thoughts as food to life” is more of an analogy than a simile.

He has me on the tropes. Both
metaphor
and
simile
compare one thing to another, but
simile
is specific, as in Shakespeare sonnet 97’s “How like a winter,” while
metaphor
is poetic, as in U. S. Grant’s “I am a verb.” Grant could have said, “I am a man of action, like a verb,” which would have been a
simile;
instead, he let the reader take the metaphoric leap. A metaphor is like a fragrance that calls up a beautiful memory (which is a simile), while a simile lets a metaphor be its umbrella. (So I strain for effect. A grammarian’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a metaphor?)

The world’s only best-selling nonagenarian intellectual is Jacques Barzun; he is the kindest member of the Gotcha! Gang, a veritable cavalier of cavil. The author of
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years ofWestern Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
noticed that I wrote, “If the Florida Supremes had named a Gore slate of electors, the Florida Legislature
would
have named its own; some electors in other states
may
then have been seduced into faithlessness.” From San Antonio, the former Columbia University professor writes: “The needed word is not
may,
but
might,
to match the
would
. Write
‘will name its own,’
then you
may
have your
may
.”

Yes; correct.
Might
is iffy, hypothetical, perhaps contrary to fact;
may
introduces a real possibility. Because my opening
if … would
was conditional, it should have been followed by the iffy
might
. Only if I had used the certain
will
should I have followed it with the possibly factual
may
. (It could be that I might get more mail on this, and may well be moved to answer it.)

“While I am at it,” adds Barzun, “I may (or might) as well cavil at an aside in your language column. A
bee in the bonnet
is not quite the same as ‘slightly crack-brained,’ though it may imply it. The primary idea is ‘obsessively intent on one idea.’ It buzzes on one note. You’re the man for fine distinctions: backtrack!”

Gotcha
ed again. My irked gratitude to the Nitpickers’ League knows no limits, because its members force me to learn my
limitations
.

Discussing U. S. Grant’s poetic metaphor “I am a verb” you wrote: “Grant could have said, ‘I am a man of action, like a verb.’ …” But this would not have captured Grant’s meaning. He was dying of throat cancer, in excruciating pain, unable to speak, struggling to complete his memoirs and thereby leave his wife financially secure after his death. He wrote to his doctors: “I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I think I signify all three.” No longer a man of action in the conventional sense, Grant was eloquent to the last
.

Marc Lange

Associate Professor of Philosophy

University ofWashington

Seattle, Washington

6/24/2001

Now about those two dots above a vowel. In an aside that was a sly attempt to boost mail from speakers of German, I wrote that “an
umlaut
—pronounced ‘OOM-lout,’ meaning ‘changed sound’—also separates the sound of a vowel from the different-sounding vowel that follows, as in
reënter,
though in English we tend to replace the umlaut with a hyphen.”

I naïvely confused an
umlaut
with a
dieresis
. An
umlaut
in the German language is a diacritical, or distinguishing, mark placed above a letter to specify the sound. When the umlaut is on a
u,
the vowel is pronounced by pursing the lips to say “OO” and then trying to pronounce “EE.” An umlaut on an
o
gives it the same vowel sound as the
u
in the English
turn
.

Thus, the German name
Müller
is pronounced “Mue-ller,” and in English, we insert an
e
after the
u
to show that it is not pronounced like an ordinary
u
.

A
dieresis
denotes the separated pronunciation in English of two uncomfortably adjacent vowels. As the co-author of the world’s greatest stylebook gently informs me, “It’s ‘reënter,’ not ‘rëenter,’ and accordingly, three words earlier in the sentence, you mean ‘precedes,’ not ‘follows.’”

An
umlaut
changes the sound of a German vowel; a
dieresis
splits two vowels that are pronounced separately in English. When two vowels snuggle together confusingly, a clarifying separation is indicated by the dieresis over the second vowel; in
naïve,
the two dots tell you to pronounce the word “nah-YEEV,” not “knave” or “knive.”

The same separation is needed when the two vowels are the same but are pronounced differently. Examples: with
reënter,
the
e
in
re
is pronounced “EE,” while the first
e
in
enter
is pronounced “EH.” The two dots over the second
e
tell you not to pronounce that as a single syllable, “REEN.” And
zoölogy
is “zoe-ology” not “zoo-logy.” As army recruiters say, please
coöperate
and
reënlist
.

I don’t know about you, but when the vowels are the same, I’m ducking diereses and following
Times
style by switching to hyphens.

Your essay leaves the citizens of Hawaii in a state that can theoretically neither be spelled nor pronounced
.