People often think editors are too finicky when it comes to language. What they’re really saying is: How important is precision? This question is easily answered if you read Neal Whitman’s blog. He is a literal-minded linguist. I was directed to his site by a friend recently. Below is the post that I stumbled onto – it gives a whole new meaning to the question “What’s in a name?”

What’s Your Name Called?

Here’s a passage that always struck me as a little odd:

And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.
(Luke 1:30-33)

Not, Thou shalt call him Jesus, but Thou shalt call his name Jesus. The name of his name is Jesus. Why a name should need a name of its own is not addressed, nor is what Mary’s son’s actual name should be.

OK, so of course we all know that Mary’s son’s name (as well as his name’s name) is going to be Jesus. So it looks like we have a kind of recursive function going on here, such that:

for all X, name-of(name-of(X)) = name-of(X)

In other words, not only is the name of Jesus’s name Jesus, the name of his name of his name of his name is Jesus, too. It’s Jesus all the way down.

Ah, but I’ve glossed over another detail that needs attention. The angel didn’t actually say the name of the name would be Jesus; he said the name would be called Jesus. Often the two mean the same thing, but they don’t have to. At least not in English, though saying I call myself is the standard way of giving your name in French and Spanish (Je m’appelle and Me llamo, respectively) and probably other languages. I’ve always wondered how people make a distinction between what they’re called and their true names in these languages. Can you say something like, Je m’appelle Spiff, mais elle m’appelle Flash, et mon vrai nom c’est Marv?

Evidently Lewis Carroll wondered about these questions, too. In this passage from Through the Looking Glass, he makes a four-way distinction along two dimensions: being vs. being called on the one hand; and one’s name vs. one’s actual self on the other hand:

You are sad, the Knight said in an anxious tone: let me sing you a song to comfort you.... The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes.’
Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it? Alice said, trying to feel interested.
No, you don’t understand, the Knight said, looking a little vexed. That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man.’
Then I ought to have said, ‘That’s what the song is called’? Alice corrected herself.
No, you oughtn’t: that’s another thing. The song is called ‘Ways and Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!
Well, what is the song, then? said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
I was coming to that, the Knight said. The song really is ‘A sitting on a Gate’: and the tune’s my own invention.

Lewis Carroll gets my You’re so literal! seal of approval for the week. If you haven’t read this book or Alice in Wonderland, read them now for even more literal-minded humor!

As an avid KD Lang fan, I’ve heard her sing The Joker an umpteen number of times. I’d sing along, with much gusto, but would shy away from singing a line I never quite understood. It sounded like the pompitous of love. No dictionary listed it. But after some online snooping, I found this incredible investigative article that got right down to the source. The story is so layered, and the origins of the word so obscure and moving that I’ve had to add some new words to my love vocabulary.

“Pompatus” mystified millions when Steve Miller used it in his 1973 hit “The Joker”: “Some people call me the space cowboy. / Yeah! Some call me the gangster of love. / Some people call me Maurice, / Cause I speak of the Pompatus of love.”

“Space cowboy” and “gangster of love” referred to earlier Miller songs. Maurice was from Miller’s 1972 tune “Enter Maurice,” which appeared on the album Recall the Beginning ... A Journey From Eden. “Enter Maurice” had this lyric: “My dearest darling, come closer to Maurice so I can whisper sweet words of epismetology in your ear and speak to you of the pompitous of love.”

Great, now there were two mystery words. What’s more, it appeared even Miller himself was uncertain how pompatus was spelled. It appeared as “pompatus” in at least two books of sheet music but as “pompitous” in the lyrics included with “Recall the Beginning.”

Miller has said little about the P-word over the years. In at least one interview, fans say, he claimed “it doesn’t mean anything--it’s just jive talk.”

Not quite.

Some sharp-eared music fan noticed the “Enter Maurice” lyric above bore a marked resemblance to some lines in a rhythm and blues tune called “The Letter” by the Medallions. The song had been a hit in R & B circles in 1954. J.K. found the record. It had the lines, “Oh my darling, let me whisper sweet words of [something like epismetology] and discuss the [something like pompatus] of love.” J.K. tried to find the sheet music for the song, but came up only with the Box Tops hit (“My baby, she wrote me a letter”).

Then came a stroke of luck. Jon Cryer the movie guy had stumbled onto the secret of pompatus. Eager to reveal it to the world, he sent it to--who, Rolling Stone? The New York Times?

Of course not. He sent it to us.

Speculation about “pompatus” was a recurring motif in the script for The Pompatus of Love. While the movie was in postproduction Cryer heard about “The Letter.” During a TV interview he said that the song had been written and sung by a member of the Medallions named Vernon Green. Green, still very much alive, was dozing in front of the tube when the mention of his name caught his attention. He immediately contacted Cryer.

Green had never heard “The Joker.” Cryer says that when he played it for Green “he laughed his ass off.” Green’s story:

“You have to remember, I was a very lonely guy at the time. I was only 14 years old, I had just run away from home, and I walked with crutches,” Green told Cryer. He scraped by singing songs on the streets of Watts.

One song was “The Letter,” Green’s attempt to conjure up his dream woman. The mystery words, J.K. ascertained after talking with Green, were “puppetutes” and “pizmotality.” (Green wasn’t much for writing things down, so the spellings are approximate.)

“Pizmotality described words of such secrecy that they could only be spoken to the one you loved,” Green told Cryer. And puppetutes? “A term I coined to mean a secret paper-doll fantasy figure [thus puppet], who would be my everything and bear my children.” Not real PC, but look, it was 1954.

- Cecil Adams

I’m very excited about a student linguist’s blog that I just found. It’s very cleverly called Tenser, said the Tensor. It reminded me of my favourite phrase—Never say never. I’ve always found the irony and circularity of that phrase to have a metaphysical echo. It’s an ordinary enough phrase, and quite forgettable, almost a cliché even. But its post-modernity, its meta-critique reminds me of the ouroboros, and of Hindustani classical music—variations on a repetitive cycle that gather and delight the reader or listener as they re-wind themselves.

Another blog I’ve come to like very much is called Language Hat. The author is deeply interested in Russian languages and, it would seem, all things linguistically obscure or amusing. It’s more than clever; it’s intelligent, informed, jaggedly funny and highly arcane. Makes for hours of great reading.

Uneasy confluence of thought and commerce

The growing discontent of universities with journal publishers of monopolistic tendencies has got me intrigued. It makes me realise to what extent academia is an unaligned network of various bodies pushing completely different agendas: government and private funding bodies pump money into universities for research which they believe will somehow better society, academics are driven by a voracious university system to publish or perish to justify receiving large grants, and journal publishers on the far right are busy raking in the money since they get free content which they sell back to the university libraries for astonishing amounts.

The entire system is lopsided. What starts off as a high-minded altruistic exercise quickly degenerates into appalling institutionalised political acts within university departments, turning eventually into an enterprise of right-winged capitalism and greed.

Public funding for research which is supposed to aid society at large somehow leads to arcane and expensive knowledge. Unaligned? Unfair? Damn right.