Spunk & Bite Page 3

  “. . . a fatal freeway pileup of random metaphors, a grisly shooting spree of meaningless analogies.” [on the prose style of Sarah, Duchess of York] (—Mark Steyn, Wall Street Journal)

  “Steinbrenner has littered the Major Deegan with the road kill of managers past.” (—Claire Smith, The New York Times)

  “[H]is thoughts churned like . . . the sea lung: a heavy sludge of ice under fog.” (—E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News)

  “It was Arnaud Clément again, the [tennis player] . . . who stands the size of hotel soap.” (—Selena Roberts, The New York Times)

  “Prince Charles referred to it [London’s Millennium Dome] as a ‘monstrous blanc-mange.’ ” (—Michael Specter, The New Yorker)

  “[John Daly’s] backswing is longer than Tolstoy.” (—Rick Reilly, Who’s Your Caddy?)

  “[The film Fahrenheit 9/11] is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture.” (—Christopher Hitchens, Slate)

  “[H]e circles the globe like a ship carrying nuclear waste.” (—Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

  “[T]he author manages to deploy all the standard missiles of postmodernism.” (—Will Blythe, Esquire)

  “The universe poured down in a bombing onslaught of heavenly vomit.” (—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated)

  “Opponents [in boxing] are not merely defeated as in a game, but are ‘decked,’ ‘stiffed,’ ‘starched,’ ‘iced,’ . . . ‘annihilated.’ ” (—Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing)

  * * *

  OTHER FIXES

  Writing is about force, about driving home an idea. And extreme imagery is one good means to that end—but only one. For reducing or enlarging a subject, there are other devices—among them the affixes (attachments to words) that mean “greater” or “lesser” in a figurative way.

  Consider, for example, the diminishing suffixes used in the following sentence: Factoids from sourcelings get little respect in serious writing; fiction editors look for characters, not characterettes; for thoughts, not thoughtsies.

  Augmenting devices include such prefixes as hyper- and ultra-, though these can become as tiresome as a locution I overheard in a Florida dockside restaurant: “See that white boat? That’s a multi-, multi-, multi-, multi-million-dollar boat.”

  Understatement, which frees readers to blow a hint out of all proportion, is another powerful augmenter. “Oh, it’s nothing,” said Mom. (Better call an ambulance.)

  And even a miniphor can indicate great force or size when used in a contrasting analogy. Describing a river gorge in Montana, Peter Martin wrote in Esquire: “The sick waterflow here (which makes the Grand Canyon look like Thomas Kinkade’s backyard stream) creates huge standing waves.”

  From sweetly painted rills to stretch Hummers, the world keeps churning out new phenomena—personalities, deeds, follies, scandals, harms, calamities, physical frontiers—to be referenced in extreme metaphors, brooking no return to those whimpers of disbelief. Novelist William Gass once said, “I love metaphor the way some people love junk food.” So the next time you’re describing the extraordinary, why not reach for a Whopper?

  FOUR

  WRITERS’ WORDS, DROP BY DOTTLE

  As every writer comes to learn, producing a crop after crop of oeuvres exhausts the loam of expression. Words become sapped by overuse. Sentences, descriptive passages, and lines of poetry go limp. Creative roots cry for infusion.

  Have I told you the parable of my potted grapefruit? The plant, which I proudly grew from seed, flourished until the day its foliage sulked, drooped, and entered a state of lassitude. Drenchings and fresh soil prompted only deathbed twitches. Finally, abandoning delusions of having a gardener’s thumb, I brought home a sea-blue slosh of nutrients to be administered drop-by-drop—a mere seven drops with each watering. And, lo, within a day the leaf blades snapped to. Jessant shoots erupted like virescent starbursts. An attar of citrus spiced the air, and perfumes it even now. And so might it be with those who write—those who would invigorate vocabularies gone creachy:Vitalization by the drop.

  Many a writer has resolved to master the dictionary A to Z, or bulk up the brain with vocabulary-building tomes. But such enterprises tend to fizzle, which for readers may not be a bad thing; an inundation of new words can create a garden of monstrous locutions. Eyedropper enrichment—say, at the rate of about seven new words a week—allows one to savor and test each word, to integrate it into one’s style before sounding like Buckley-meets Pynchon on Miracle-Gro.

  WRITERS’ WORDS

  The planet groans with word resources, many of them aimed at language hobbyists, or logophiles. In his Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused & Mispronounced Words, lexicographer Laurence Urdang wisecracks—and who could disagree?—that an “enchiridion of arcane and recondite sesquipedalian items will appeal to the oniomania of an eximious Gemeinschaft.” Translation: Certain exceptional types like to buy collections of big, unusual words.

  Writers appreciate recondite words as much as the next language junkie, but they don’t want readers gagging on them. After all, an asphyxiating vocabulary flirts with what novelist Jonathan Franzen calls the “status model” of authorship, in which the artiste disdains popularity and holds that “difficulty tends to signal excellence.” In Franzen’s opposing “contract model,” a novelist promises to connect with readers in exchange for their investment of time and attention and to be accountable should any reader “crack a tooth on a hard word.” (“Mr. Difficult,” The New Yorker)

  Those who want to connect, then, stock their journals with writers’ words—not always the plainest or best-known words, but those somehow rewarding to the reader. Franzen himself uses words such as solipsistic (self-absorbed) and pemmican (a kind of meat loaf) in his argument, but they turn out to be pretty good chaws in context.

  For special purposes, a writers’ word can be anything from firkin to floccinaucinihilipilification. But to earn a place in an author’s working vocabulary, a word should be at least one of the following:

  • Precise: tor (hilltop rock heap)

  • Concise: mulct (defraud, as of money)

  • Euphonious: fanfaronade (bluster)

  • Onomatopoetic: williwaw (violent squall)

  • Forceful: fulgent (dazzlingly bright)

  • Evocative: mojo (charmed object)

  • Fun: cachinnate (laugh immoderately)

  • Fresh: nimiety (an abundance instead of, say, stale plethora)

  What if a word is likely to be outside the reader’s active or half-known vocabulary? Then even undefined, it should lend some special aura, some majesty or exoticism, to the context. Perhaps the unknown word reveals itself by sound or placement—steam purled (flowed in curls) up from the pavement—or begs to be looked up, like scumble (to soften brilliant color). In my grapefruit parable, I planted what seemed to be three such words: jessant (shooting upward), virescent (tending toward green), and attar (a perfume obtained from flowers). Did they add a certain flavor, or merely squirt in your eye?

  FINDING FRESH DROPS

  Where does one find writers’ words not yet squeezed to death? Self-help compilations such as the Word Smart series (Princeton Review) can provide a few, but such big lists—many of them geared toward readers preparing for SAT tests—can be daunting. And although word-a-day desk calendars deliver a manageable dosage, the few winners among their 365 offerings often get lost as desks pile up and days fly by. Instead, I favor collections that include droll, well-informed discourse to slow things down; for example, Word Watch (Holt), which features Anne H. Soukhanov’s riffs on emerging words such as mamou (something big and important). Another recent favorite is The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, rich in word commentary by silver-tongued authors. New resources keep appearing on word-and-language shelves; one simply has to browse the shelves to see just which slosh of nutrients will perk up the old vocabulary.

  Some writers like to go looking for words in all
the wrong (but of course right) places: pop-culture media, technical handbooks and glossaries, collections of malediction. Compilations of obscure and antiquated words, including old slang dictionaries, house quaint or cocky “foundlings”—forgotten terms ready to trampoose through modern contexts. And with Internet sites like the Rap Dictionary, www.rapdict.org, y’all gon be glemmin’ (shining up) ya sentences wit dope words, yo.

  The freshest items, however, are most likely to surface in the world’s active flow of expression—literary, journalistic, ethnic, and subcultural. Prize specimens swim by regularly. And if Sunday pundits and other word mavens seize a few of them, so what? Individual writers with keen eyes, notebooks, and the patience to look up words will still net their share. Anyone is free to snatch isolated words from what they read and hear. Outside of trademarked names, no one owns a word—not even poets associated with, say, darkling or diverged.

  My recent pickings from literature include flense (to skin a whale, or figuratively, to flay) from Michael Chabon; peridot (green, transparent gemstone) from Sandra McPherson; and camorra (secret society) from Anne Fadiman. I’ll keep them handy for some inspired use.

  * * *

  INTERNET WORD-A-DAY SOURCES: A SAMPLING

  Vocabulary sort of spavined (broken down)? You can find revitalizing words each day on sites likes these, some of which (as of this writing) will send word features to your E-mail by free subscription. Sample words (in italics) are from the referenced sites; I’ve shortened the definitions.

  THE WORD SPY [www.wordspy.com]. Paul McFedries’ sharp-eyed collection of recent coinages. Includes context, background, sightings, and quotes. Indexed archives.

  Invacuate: to hold people in a building for safety.

  A DEFINITION A DAY [vocabula.com]. From The Vocabula Review. Selects words with “an aura of fun or majesty.” Stellar columns, quizzes, and random words.

  Weanling: a newly weaned child or animal.

  WORD OF THE DAY FROM LEXICO PUBLISHING [dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday ]. Well organized; includes archives and quotes. Free E-mail delivery.

  Wayworn: travel-weary.

  WORTHLESS WORD FOR THE DAY [home.mn.rr.com/wwftd]. Anything but worthless. Features “obscure, abstruse, and/or recondite words” that are often writers’ words. Archive. Free E-mail delivery.

  Muzzy: muddled, confused.

  A.WORD.A.DAY [wordsmith. org/awad]. [See description elsewhere in this chapter.] Free E-mail delivery.

  Hobbledehoy: an awkward young fellow.

  MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S WORD OF THE DAY [www.m-w.com]. Solid, informative. Features etymology and usage examples. Archive. Free E-mail delivery.

  Quidnunc: a busybody.

  SPIZZERINCTUM: The Quiz of Breaking News & Obscure Words (www.spizzquiz.net/index.html). Cool site that retrieves juicy forgotten words, lets you guess meanings from three choices, then uses the words in a rewrite of current (linked) news. Free E-mail delivery. Archive.

  Creachy: dilapidated, sickly.

  * * *

  WEB OF WORDS

  Perhaps the most dynamic—if messy—word source these days is the Internet, where some sites offer useful vocabulary in delayed- release doses (see sidebar, “Internet Word-a-Day Sources: A Sampling”) and others overwhelm the frontal lobes with Scrabble-babble, bloggerese, and link madness.

  Of the sites offering daily infusions of new words, the most renowned is A.Word.A.Day (www.wordsmith.org/awad ). Bubbling with features and claiming some half million devotees, it has generated a best-selling book from its word archives (Aru Garg’s A Word A Day, published by Wiley) and a follow-up collection. At no cost, subscribers receive a daily selected word and commentary by E-mail.

  In most word-a-day services, many selections will be technical, silly, arcane, or ordinary (though often with eccentric histories).One service taught me the word dottle, which refers to the bit of charred pipe tobacco remaining in a pipe bowl. The source calls all its terms “worthless,” but one never knows when so genial a word might animate a metaphor—or even a chapter title.

  Realistically, only a few of the daily words received each month from Internet sources will be writers’ words; but here’s the point: You will see them, and see them at a reasonable pace for vocabulary- building. When eager for more, you can dive into the sites’ archives of prior words and swim among the momes (boors) and bonces (heads). Should you need to see the words in other contexts, additional usages can usually be found through search engines like Google.

  But once again, the big-mamou question: Should you use a word you fear will stump your readers? Absolutely—if you adore it, haven’t used too many puzzlers elsewhere, and believe it to be what Mark Twain would call the “intensely right word.” After all, what sweeter lagniappe for readers than a new mot juste for their delectation?

  FIVE

  UPGRADING YOUR COLORS

  Maybe it has to do with the blue and yellow rings in the crib, or the red walls we painted in our student apartments. But for both writer and reader, color is memory, color is mood, color is meaning. With color, we can strike the mind’s eye dead center.

  The trouble is, most color imagery consists of worn metaphors: as blue as the sky; as red as a ruby. These colors have lost their charge. You can call a sky “steel-gray” or “ashen,” but such clichés will not distinguish the feeling of a particular sky from that of all other gray skies. When you want the power of precision, you must stop and fashion your own hues. In his novel Yellow Dog, Martin Amis created just the shade of gray he wanted, writing that “[the] motorway was a seething, sizzling mess of drenched metal and rubber, under skies the colour of dog’s lips.”

  Color need be no more than a brushstroke to evoke a mood—unless you happen to be Vincent van Gogh. With Vincent’s feel for color, concision could go the way of his earlobe, as in this letter to his brother:

  The sky . . . not white, but a lilac which can hardly be deciphered, white shimmering with red, blue, and yellow in which everything is reflected, and which one feels everywhere above one, which is vaporous and merges into the mist below—harmonizing everything in a gamut of delicate gray.

  (Drenthe, Netherlands, 1883)

  Vincents we are not, and modern audiences won’t sit still for fifty-word rhapsodies. But color is ours—ours to use in ways that capture experiences and stir readers.

  With all the associations it triggers, one color can be worth a yard of paragraphs. Writers create special colors for special meanings, but sometimes even a basic hue can speak buckets: purple house, red fur, blue teeth. In fact, Alexander Theroux finds blue, red, and yellow worth 268 charming pages in his Primary Colors, a compendium of color occurrences in myth, science, literature, and so on—required browsing for any serious colorist, along with Secondary Colors, a 312-page companion volume about orange, purple, and green.

  But sometimes standard colors are off-target. Sometimes you want readers not only to see an exact shade, but to enter it. You want to create an aura, reveal a point of view. When John Updike describes a street of “old asphalt sidings the tint of bruise and dung,” he underscores the sad ambience of Rabbit at Rest.

  Clichéd metaphors like green as grass or emerald green not only look lazy, but are too exhausted to flash color across a page. “We need to boost our range of greens,” said Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses, “to describe the almost squash-yellow green of late winter grass, the achingly fluorescent green of the leaves of high summer.” And a little surprise and whimsy in the spectrum might not hurt: In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J. K. Rowling boosted the range of eye colors with the line, “His eyes are as green as a fresh pickled toad.”

  * * *

  A LITERARY PAINT SET

  Writers have long created imaginative hues to describe their worlds. Although “new” colors fade quickly in literature, literary minds can generate more tints than a shelf of graphic software. Here’s a ten-color starter set for inspiration.

  Red. “. . . blood t
he color of autumn dahlias bubbling from the nose and mouth.”

  (—Sandra Cisneros)

  Pink. “. . . a face pink like St. Nicholas.”

  (—Ralph Ellison)

  Gray. “T-shirts of . . . narcolepsy gray . . .”

  (—Gary Shteyngart)

  Brown. “. . . a counter spread with hams as brown as violins.”

  (—Alain De Botton)

  Turquoise. “. . . [a foster parents’ house] the color of a tropical lagoon on a postcard thirty years out of date, a Gauguin syphilitic nightmare.”

  (—Janet Fitch)

  Red-brown. “. . . [A] mustache . . . the color of a turned slice of apple.”

  (—Michael Chabon)

  Yellow-brown. “The Downs are yellow-brown, like the flanks of lions.”

  (—Helen Dunmore)

  Yellow. “. . . one bird or two—and they were the yellow of all yellows, the kind of yellow that every other yellow secretly wishes to be.”

  (—Redmond O’Hanlon)

  Orange. “. . . an orange dress the color of a mussel’s lip.”