Today's Word I'll Be Lucky to Use before I Die

Rictus (RICK tus), "a gaping grin or grimace," "an open mouth," primarily used (according to Merriam-Webster) for the gape of a bird's mouth. From Latin ringi, "to open the mouth."

Roger Ebert managed to find a use for it in his review of the new Phantom of the Opera movie. I have to admit the movie looks execrable to me, but the word is well used by Ebert to describe Lon Chaney's character in the original film version of the tale:

"Lon Chaney's Phantom in the 1925 silent had a hideously damaged face, his mouth a lipless rictus, his eyes off-center in gouged-out sockets. When Christine tore off his mask, she was horrified, and so was the audience."

The word's cursory morphological similarity to "rectum," which actually has no etymological relation to "rictus," imparts a usefully distasteful undertone to the word.

"Rectum" instead is a truncation of intestinum rectum, or "straight intestine," so named in contrast to the convolution of the rest of the intestinal tract.

"Gape" is from Old Norse gapa, "to open the mouth," and has cognates in other West Germanic languages.

"Execrable," I am surprised to learn, comes from Latin execrari, "to curse, to hate," instead of being related to "excrement" as I had erroneously presumed. Merriam-Webster reports the spelling of this etymon as exsecrari, while the Online Etymology Dictionary spells it execrari. I couldn't find a preference one way or the other in an online search, and some sources listed both spellings. I'll have to burrow into my sister's Latin dictionaries over the Holiday and look it up, but as the Online Etymology Dictionary notes, the word comes from ex–, "out of," and secrari, "to consecrate, to make holy."

NOTE: Ebert also uses the word "Neurasthenic" in the review. Perhaps he, too, is a reader of Incongruous Juxtaposition Between Adjective & Noun.

RANDOM OBSERVATION:Holy cow did Lon Chaney make a lot of movies in a 17-year career.

Why Is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?

According to the rec.arts.books FAQ, Lewis Carroll had no specific answer in mind for the riddle when he wrote Alice in Wonderland. As Cecil Adams at The Straight Dope points out, the joke is that there is no answer.

Ah, that Victorian wit, so very daft. The laudanum must have been kicking in about then, no?

Nevertheless, the power of riddles is such that the mind can't let go until some solution is found. And so, people have ventured and sought satisfactory answers to the riddle for some 140 years. Carroll himself, in the preface to the 1896 edition of Alice, wrote:

"Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar [sic] put with the wrong end in front!"

Note that "nevar" is "raven" backwards. Later editions have "corrected" the spelling, mainly because editing is a humorless process, as I know too well from experience.

Writer Aldous Huxley instead answered the riddle with, "Because there is a 'b' in 'both' and an 'n' in 'neither,'" which I find a much more satisfactory answer, especially in context of the scene and the character who delivers the line—that favorite of Victorian children and 60's acid-trippers alike, the Mad Hatter.

Unfortunately Huxley had to become dreary and follow this charming bit of nonsense with the observation that:

Such metaphysical questions as: "Does God exist?" "Do we have free will?" and, "Why is there suffering?" are as meaningless as the Mad Hatter's question—nonsensical riddles, questions not about reality but about words.

It can be such a burden to be clever, sometimes, eh Aldie? Too bad there wasn't any laudanum left for you.

Cyril Pearson suggests, in the 1907 Twentieth Century Standard Puzzle Book, that a raven is like a writing desk, "Because it slopes with a flap." Sam Loyd postulated two fine answers—"Because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes," and, "Because Poe wrote on both." The rec.arts.books FAQ ascribes to David B. Jodrey, Jr. the answer, "Both have quills dipped in ink," which The Straight Dope reports as, "Because both have inky quills," a superior rendering of the idea. Stephen King, of all people (do we really need a link for Stephen King? How small exactly is that box in which you live?), answers the riddle thus in The Shining: "The higher the fewer, of course! Have another cup of tea!" Clever indeed.

And I do like the anonymous solution from The Straight Dope: "Because you cannot ride either one of them like a bicycle."

"Riddle," by the by, comes from the Old English rædels, meaning "opinion, counsel, conjecture, riddle," related to rædan, "to explain, rule, read, advise," from the root ræd–, meaning "advice." Rædan is also the root of the modern word "read."

Interestingly, the word "riddle" in the sense of "to perforate with many holes" comes from the Old English hridder meaning "sieve," and is related to the Proto-Germanic root *khrid–, meaning "to shake," and likely related (via Proto-Indo-European) to Latin cribrum meaning "sieve" and Greek krinein meaning "to separate, distinguish, decide." Krinein gives us the word "crisis."

Interesting Art Project

Check out the Free Words project. New York artist Sal Randolph had 3000 copies of a small book made, and volunteers are placing them on shelves in libraries and book stores. The book is marked "free" and it is up to the person finding it what they will do next--take the book, move it somewhere else, leave it in place, etc.

I am intrigued by the concept of "viral art," though doubtless it could become tiresome quickly.

Melodic Spam

I never know what to make of spam emails that merely contain long strings of unrelated words. They almost seem like textual Rorschach patterns. There is a distinct poetry, a melody even, to the following sequence, which arrived in my inbox this evening:

Camelback impoverish conceptual filmstrip dolce marquee booky lang catlike continued normalcy agreeable cold denton consultant cinderella gerund riggs authentic infinitive desmond fortran visitation acetic climate derail orchid tsar corrosive dickcissel bedtime provocative glycerin winery hi trinket amos emphysematous codebreak wesleyan enquiry layton shareown Tibet port tartary matroid omitted artifice goldstine torpid snowball alb pasadena bikini angry kilohm wharves dagger boastful banjo arginine ribosome diamagnetism anhydrous bolster intercept bandpass invalidate chart delaney hereford halstead dogtooth irreconcilable indelicate confront fiske centigrade complement lowboy lap fun miasma adjective consonantal oldster brought bentham hid persistent mycobacteria newel flintlock stupor kidnap burlesque circus abed dynamo dihedral adverse fruit balustrade boyish carborundum imagery luminosity sieglinda peppy ascent dorchester brazil crotch compact wheat cradle coiffure ababa supervene prominent bitten delphine bowman dusty corpse rap find partner oblong toroid monetarist controller grate bryant bitten infima glee!

I couldn't resist adding the exclamation mark.

Today's Useful Word You Will Nearly Always Have to Define when You Use It

Labile. Prone to rapid and/or unpredictable change of emotional state. LAY bile.

There is also a chemical definition that seems to mean "changeable" within a specific context, though I don't understand some of the details.

(Okay, I don't actually understand any of the details.)

Today's Blogging Lesson

When deleting a blog, always be sure you have chosen to delete the correct blog.

Fortunately, I had the page open in a different window and could go back and recreate my posts.

Some days...

Speech Accent Archive

Someone passed me a link to the speech accent archive. Interesting stuff. Essentially, people from different nations and regions are asked to read the same (English) paragraph. Another cool site.

What Did Great-Grandma Say?

This link has audio clips of spoken English pronunciation as it developed from Middle English through Early Modern English. Very cool.

Today's Word I Was Always Too Lazy to Look Up Before

Calumny, to maliciously and falsely accuse another of wrongdoing in order to cause harm to their reputation. CAL um nee.

I've read this word dozens of times over the years and never really got around to looking it up. I have always known it was an accusation of some sort, but was too lazy or disinterested to chase down the definition until recently. A useful word indeed.

Today's Word I Can Never Remember When I Want It

Neurasthenic: relating to or characteristic of a nervous breakdown.