my clumps, my clumps, my lovely lady clumps

when i get on my internet bully pulpit and tell people to do things, i usually don’t expect that anyone will listen. and yet when i gave you the preposterous assignment of writing a short story with the 19 words of the word summer series, my voice was heard—all the way in ankara, turkey by not one but by two of its most accomplished residents.

there, my former orthodontist (mrs. tragos) and her husband (a senior member of a secret society to which i belong) have each spun intriguing tales using the 19 words from our series

mr. tragos introduces us to oswald the eirmonger,

He was a lobcock if there ever were one. A private busybody, a worrywart tenebrio, a shy schlimazl who spent life in the ville lumière of Escondido mostly sweating gently in the shadows of his trash-strewn foyer. Yes, Oswald left the sythe or sojourn of the soul to others.

mrs. tragos recently went shopping for “walnut encrusted scrumptious clumps of dark apricot delights” and described the entire zany adventure. here is a little taste: 

…Now, I’d had enough of this femme kill-cow-fray, and wanted out of the fray, I waved to the schlimazl and gestured that I was bailing out. He rolled his eyes, grabbed my clumps and couldn’t quite stick the sticker onto the paper bag. I yanked it off his fingers, said “thank you”, “pardon me” and a few other acrylogical improvisations and scurried past the husband and son (both all tenebrio behind the DVD section) back to the queue. 

The whiskerandoed gentleman had begun loading my things onto the conveyor belt and I said “thank you” a lot and hoped Tragos would like the clumps.

both write-ups are (turkishly) delightful and can be found here & here.

__

UPDATE: certain information has come to light man, and this post has been updated to reflect said info.

echo, echo

the echo verse is an ancient form of poetry based on wordplay. in it, a speaker in a quandary shouts out his questions to the nymph echo who then responds by repeating the last few syllables in a way that seems to answer his queries. while many dismiss the form as false wit (at best and nonsense at worst), several of history’s greatest writers have composed echo verses. to namedrop a few: ovid, euripides, erasmus, jonathan swift, and victor hugo. here is swift’s ribald attempt to woo a woman named ann via echo verse.

A Gentle Echo on Woman

Say what will turn that frisking coney
Into the toils of matrimony?
……Money
Has Phoebe not a heavenly brow?
Is it not white as pearl, as snow?
……Ass! no!
Her eyes! Was ever such a pair!
Are the stars brighter than they are?
……They are!
Echo, thou liest but can’t deceive me.
Her eyes eclipse the stars, believe me.
……Leave me
But come, thou saucy, pert romancer,
Who is as fair as Phoebe, answer!
……Ann, sir!

f-word summer hiatus

it’s true. the f-word franchise is starting its summer hiatus with this post. for this last post of the season, i have turned to the omnificent english dictionary in limerick form, an online dictionary where users submit definitions for words entirely as limericks—an ambitious project that rivals the oxford english dictionary itself. though they are only accepting words from aa - di, i was able to gain access to a few choice f-words. here they are. in limerick form:

floccillation
Hey, teacher, I need a vacation
And a wordbook that’s geared to my station.
I looked up carphology.
Without an apology,
It gave me one word: floccillation.

Either word means “plucking at the bedclothes in delirium,” as if picking off the little pellets of fabric that form on blankets.

freeballing
My full house clearly beats your ace high.
Hope you’ve got on some underwear, guy.
“Stop crowing, Fernando,
I’m going commando,”
Was Tom’s quite expansive reply.

To go commando (or freeball) means to not wear underwear beneath one’s outerwear. When women do it, it is called going commanda.

fifty-five fiction
In fifty-five fiction, you write
A short story that’s pithy and tight:
Beginning to middle
To ending—don’t twiddle.
You’ve fifty-five words to delight.

55-fiction is an entire story in exactly 55 words. The limerick above has exactly fifty-five words.

fingers of god
The voyeur in our town, people say,
Is most active at twilight each day.
Comes the dusk, in the gloom,
He’ll peer into your room,
So they call him “Crepuscular Ray.”

Crepuscular means “related to twilight.” Crepuscular rays (or fingers of God) are the rays of sunlight that are seen coming from between the clouds at or near sunset.

fire followers
Though some never see them revive,
After blazes, the burn species thrive.
To germinate, fire
Is what they require;
When they bloom, the burnt hills come alive.

Certain wildflowers have seeds that can stay viable for up to a century. They return to life in the year or two following fires. Heat shock and some chemical components in smoke prompt their hard-coated seeds to germinate in an area that fire has helped to eliminate competition.

fanny pack
With salami I filled my new belly pack,
So I guess I had made it a deli pack.
After riding my bike
And a five-hour hike,
…

it wouldn’t be a proper summer hiatus if it didn’t end on a cliffhanger. therefore, to ensure interest in words that start with f in the fall, i have omitted the final line and will post it with renewed vigor come autumn. after a 5 hour hike, will the narrator’s fanny pack remain intact? and what will happen to the narrator’s salami? you will have to wait and see!

it’s all anglish to me

one of my sixteern recurring fantasies involves a world where, in 1066 harold the second was able to defeat william “the bastard” and those pesky normans had to retreat back to france and bake baguettes with their salty tears. there’s grade-a babes in this fantasy too, but let’s not get into that now.

at any rate, in a world where english never got jiggy with norman french nor any other romance language, how would our mother tongue sound? fortunately for you and i, we don’t need to strain too hard with this thought experiment because sci-fi author poul anderson has done all the work for us. in his short piece “uncleftish beholding,” he rewrites the first few principles of atomic theory using only words of germanic origin. it is—to say the least—a trip. it starts like this:

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

The underlying kinds of stuff are the *firststuffs*, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff…

it’s all greeklish to me

it’s no secret that constrained writing is the magical fertilizer that makes my wood grow. today, we’re going to take a gander at a very clever etymology-related constraint where the only words allowed in the author’s quiver are words derived from a single language.

in 1957, professor xenophon zolotas gave a speech at the end of a meeting of the international bank. it was in english but—with the exception of articles and prepositions—composed entirely in words of greek origin. the way that professor zolotas greekly tiptoes through english is absolutely mesmerizing.

I eulogize the archons of the Panethnic Numismatic Thesaurus and the Ecumenical Trapeza for the orthodoxy of their axioms, methods and policies, although there is an episode of cacophony of the Trapeza with Hellas.

With enthusiasm we dialogue and synagonize at the synods of our didymous Organizations in which polymorphous economic ideas and dogmas are analyzed and synthesized.

Our critical problems such as the numismatic plethora generate some agony and melancholy. This phenomenon is characteristic of our epoch. But, to my thesis, we have the dynamism to program therapeutic practices as a prophylaxis from chaos and catastrophe. In parallel, a panethnic unhypocritical economic synergy andharmonization in a democratic climate is basic.

I apologize for my eccentric monologue. I emphasize my eucharistia to you Kyrie, to the eugenic and generous American Ethnos and to the organizers and protagonists of this Amphictyony and the gastronomic symposia.

zolotas gave a second greeklish speech two years later. it can be found here.

singular pleasures

the final pearl in our pearl necklace of erotica comes from harry matthews’ singular pleasures. mr. matthews has the distinction of being the only american member of the randy group of french oulipo writers. members of this group used wacky constraints (e.g. never using the letter e, starting each sentence with a successive letter of the alphabet, et cetry etcetry) in order to get their literary juices flowing. mr. matthews, like fellow member italo calvino, used constraints but never really elaborated on what they were.

singular pleasures is a collection of vignettes all involving masturbation in one form or another. it is the invisible cities of fapping. here are some good ones:

Masturbating as he lies on a floormat, his head propped on one hand, his eyes on a lighted television set, somewhere in Kyoto, there is a young man of twenty. The screen in front of him shows a young man lying on his side and masturbating while watching a television set on which a young man is lying on his side and masturbating while watching a television set on which a young man is lying on his side and masturbating while watching a television set whose image is too small to decipher.

Somewhere north of the Bering Straits, sitting on the edge of an ice floe, his face impassive, all movement concealed beneath thicknesses of pelt and fur, an Eskimo male of thirty-one is bringing himself to an orgasm of devastating intensity in a slickness of dissolving blubber.

A man of thirty-five is about to experience orgasm in one of the better condominiums in Gaza. He is masturbating, but neither hand nor object touches his taut penis: arranged in a circle, five hairblowers direct their streams of warm air toward that focal point. He has plugged his ears with wax balls.

(roth’s baseball glove, twain’s field, and now matthew’s seal blubber: if you haven’t already guessed—the secret theme of this year’s sexlit day is onanism)

see this list for more.

provincial f-words from the 14th century

bros, i started the f-word series as a way of showcasing some choice morsels from specialised dictionaries. i chose words that start with f partly because of my infantile preoccupation with labiodental fricatives but also because enabling limits on my search meant that i would have more free time to hang out with my buddies at applebee’s and talk about witty hollister t-shirts. this system had been going swell until my good friend orson, dropped this onto my desk and my world shattered.

its full title is: a dictionary of arcahic and provincial words, obsolete phrases, proverbs, and ancient customs, from the fourteenth century (1850)—and it is worthy of a 5 part series within a series.

[part the first: FADGY to FELSH]

• FADGY. Corpulent; unwieldy
• FAEGANG. A gang of beggars
• FAFF. To move violently
• FAIR-TRO-DAYS. Daylight
• FAITOUR. An idle lazy fellow; a scoundrel; a flatterer; Hence, a general term of reproach
• FALDORE. A trap-door
• FALLE. A mouse-trap
• FALLINGS. Dropped fruit
• FALLOWFORTH. A waterfall
• FAMBLE. To stutter, or murmur inarticulately
• FANGAST. Fit for marriage, said of a maid
• FANOM-WATER. The acrimonious discharge from the sores of cattle
• FANTICKLES. Freckles
• FARAND. Used in composition for advancing towards, or being ready. Fighting farand: ready for fighting. Farand-man: a traveller or itinerant merchant
• FARREL. The fourth part of a circular oatcake, the division being made by a cross
• FARTHINGS. Flattened peas
• FASGUNTIDE (1) Trouble; care; anxiety; fatigue (2) The tops of turnips
• FASYL. A flaw in cloth
• FEANT. A fool
• FEATLET. Four pounds of butter
• FEELDY. Grassy
• FEER. to run a little way back for the better advantage of leaping forwards
• FELSH. To renovate a hat