Today’s WORD isn’t particularly uncommon, but since I have a bit of an obsession with the linguistic version and will be featuring them occasionally…

WORK

“Ten Ways to Mourn a Dead Language”

1. Intersperse words from the dead language into your speech. When asked the meaning of the dead words say, I never said that.

2. Think of an idea or expression that can only happen in the dead tongue. Repeat it until it becomes a hole. Yell in.

3. Write dead words in sugar or salt inside food. Distribute.

4. Rename the stars with words for body parts in the dead language. Teach neighborhood children to use these names.

5. Nothing stays inside the body forever.

6.  

7. Use dead syntax with alive English words when asking for directions to places you’ll never visit.

8. What is the most popular song right now? Translate it into the dead language. Then, if the song plays in your presence, hold your breath.

9. Borrow some clothes from friends. On each label write one grapheme to spell across bodies touch me here in the dead language.

10. Send me your address. I’ll send you a letter.

—Jennifer Kronovet
—from Bomb #125 (Fall 2013)

WORD(S)

portmanteau. noun or verb. A case or bag, typically for carrying clothes, hinged to open into two equal parts. Figuratively, a mixture of disparate ideas and arguments. In language and linguistics, a word formed by blending the sounds and meanings of two or more distinct words (AKA a blend), such as smog, which is a combination of smoke + fog. The latter usage was instigated by Lewis Carroll, as seen below.

“Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’…You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.” (Lewis Carroll)

“…along with my hot water bottle, Baedeker Guide, Band-aids, codeine, passport and two pounds of instant Postum, I tucked a hundred cigars into my portmanteau.” (Groucho Marx)

“The portmanteau of inanities and false pieties that they unveiled…will lead to nothing more than a few more tons of bureaucracy.” (Insight on the News)

“Blazek went on to publish a Bukowski chapbook of a single prose piece, Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts, a portmanteau of nine short stories…” (Howard Sounes)

WEB

1. After exploring Gorey’s work as a book designer, I searched for a book cover I remembered from my halcyon days—this cover for A Streetcar Name Desire and discovered the designer, Alvin Lustig, was a design superhero in many areas but I’ll focus mostly on books: here is a flickr gallery of book covers, a collection of book jackets and periodicals he designed for many publishers and some postcards you can buy with his designs. After Lustig’s untimely death, his wife Elaine continued his business and became quite a designer herself, as seen in the “Dual Visions” exhibition.

2. The creators of litography describe their project as “the collaborative art of mapping the literary character of a city” using audio, writing and visual arts. Hat-Tip: Reader K.

3. Ingid Sundberg’s color thesaurus. I can imagine people taking this idea in many personal directions very different from things like COLOURlovers, which boasts of having over “7,642,636 user-named colors,” or the (admittedly useful) Color, Name and Hue site which lets you browse thousands of named colors, even if you’re colorblind.

4. Classic first lines of novels in emojis: A quiz.

5. Today in 1692, Giles Corey—who refused to plead guilty or not-guilty to charges of “spooky witchcraft”—died after three days of being pressed beneath more and more rocks and, occasionally, the sheriff standing atop the pile. He was asked three times to plead and each time responded by saying “more weight.” According to a witness, at one point Corey’s tongue was “pressed out of his mouth” and “the Sheriff, with his cane, forced it in again.” The band I Like Trains performs a sonically fitting song called “More Weight.”. Mary Freeman wrote a play about Corey. So did Longfellow. But most will know Corey, if they do at all, from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in which the character, like the real Giles Corey, refuses to plead until he dies because, that way, his estate passes to his children rather than being confiscated.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. writes more about “zugzwang” on his blog.

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