Posts Tagged ‘Pete Hamill’
“If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent”*…
Resistentialism: The seemingly spiteful behavior shown by inanimate objects
Spermologer: A picker-up of trivia, of current news, a gossip monger, what we would today call a columnist
In keeping with yesterday’s lexicological theme, These (and 16 other) “Obsolete Words That Never Should Have Gone Out of Style.” See also: the book, The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten by Jeffrey Kacirk, and the blog, Obsolete Word of The Day.
[TotH to EWW]
*If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the spoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in the darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the center of the silent Word.
Oh my people, what have I done unto thee.
Where shall the word be found, where shall the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence”
― from “Ash Wednesday,” T.S. Eliot
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As we wax nostalgic, we might send thoughtfully-worded birthday greetings to Pete Hamill; he was born on this date in 1935. A lover of comic books and art, Hamill went to art school and became a graphic artist after a period of drifting and living in Mexico. In 1960, he landed a job at the New York Post, which turned into a writing job and a regular, widely-read column. He subsequently wrote (and edited) for the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and New York Newsday, and contributed articles to magazines like New York, The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, and Rolling Stone. He covered wars, national issues of race and class, and sports (he even wrote the liner notes for Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks); but his central theme was life in “The City.” His memoir A Drinking Life (1995) describes his lifelong relationships with both alcohol and Brooklyn; in addition to that and to his non-fiction works and journalism collections, Hamill has written 10 novels and two books of short stories.
In the beginning there was the word…
(source)
Every word has a story… some of them are funny, some sad; some are perfunctory, some just downright odd. Wordorigins.org is devoted to telling those tales.
Often, popular tales of a word’s origin arise. Sometimes these are true; more often they are not. While it can be disappointing when a neat little tale turns out to be untrue, almost invariably the true origin is just as interesting.
Among their nifty features are regular tours of the words introduced in the Oxford English Dictionary in a particular year, for example in 1911, when 483 words made their first appearances. Among them, some pretty straightforward…
brassiere, n. Borrowed from French in this year. The clipped bra doesn’t make its appearance until 1936.
floozy, n. This word for a disreputable woman first appears in the 1911 edition of Charles Byron Chrysler’s book White Slavery.
Waldorf salad, n. After the Waldorf Hotel in New York where it was first served, it consists of apples, walnuts, celery or lettuce, and mayonaisse.
Zapatista, n. A supporter of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. The Mexican Revolution had begun in 1910.
… And some, not so obvious:
photocopier, n. This one surprised me. I thought the technology came along decades later. Although the actual process nowadays is much different than the one used in 1911.
reefer, n. No not that. This name for refrigerated railcars, trucks, and ships first appears in 1911.
underinsure, v. To take out an inadequate insurance policy, although the adjectival form dates to the 1890s.
More wondrous words at Wordorigins.org.
As we remember that “etymology” is the study of word origins, while “entomology” is the study of insects, we might raise a birthday toast to Pete Hamill, who was born on this date in 1935. A journalist, novelist, essayist, editor, and educator, he is probably best known for the columns he wrote– for almost three decades– for the New York Post, columns that captured (to quote his admiring competitor, the New York Times, “the particular flavors of New York City’s politics and sports and the particular pathos of its crime.”
(source)
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