New Color

In a 1985 op-ed in the New York Times, writer Maggie Sullivan proposed some irregular verbs to match go, went, gone:

furlough, furlent, furlon: “All the soldiers were furlon except those the captain furlent last week.”
subdue, subdid, subdone: “Nothing else could have subdone him the way her violet eyes subdid him.”
frisbee, friswas, frisbeen: “Although he had never frisbeen before, after watching the tournament he friswas every day, trying to frisbee as the champions friswere.”
pay, pew, pain: “He had pain for not choosing a wife more carefully.”
conceal, console, consolen: “After the murder, Jake console the weapon.”
seesaw, sawsaw, seensaw: “While the children sawsaw, the old man thought of long ago when he had seensaw.”
fit, fat, fat: “The vest fat Joe, whereas the jacket would have fat a thinner man.”
ensnare, ensnore, ensnorn: “In the ’60s and ’70s, Sominex ads ensnore many who had never been ensnorn by ads before.”
displease, displose, displosen: “By the look on her face, I could tell she was displosen.”

Commemorate could emulate eat: “At the banquet to commemoreat Herbert Hoover, spirits were high, and by the end of the evening many other Republicans had been commemoreaten.”

(Maggie Sullivan, “You, Too, Can Strengthen English, and Write Good,” New York Times, May 4, 1985.)

In a Word

calophantic
adj. pretending or making a show of excellence

velleity
n. a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it

fode
v. to lead on with delusive expectations

magnoperate
v. to magnify the greatness of

Roman diplomat Sidonius Apollinaris describes the hunting skill of Visigoth king Theodoric II:

If the chase is the order of the day, he joins it, but never carries his bow at his side, considering this derogatory to royal state. … He will ask you beforehand what you would like him to transfix; you choose, and he hits. If there is a miss … your vision will mostly be at fault, and not the archer’s skill.

(Quoted in Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms, 2012.)

Why Not?

From a letter from English scholar Walter Raleigh to Mrs. F. Gotch, July 2, 1898:

Doe you lyke my newe phansy in the matere of Spelynge? I have growen wery of Spelynge wordes allwaies in one waye and now affecte diversite. The cheif vertew of my reform is that it makes the spelynge express the moode of the wryter. Frinsns, if yew fealin frenly, ye kin spel frenly-like. Butte if yew wyshe to indicate that thogh nott of hyghe bloode, yew are compleately atte one wyth the aristokrasy you canne double alle youre consonnantts, prollonge mosstte of yourre vowelles, and addde a fynalle ‘e’ wherevverre itte iss reququirred.

A later poem:

Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914

I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one
I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!

Hard of Hearing

In 1979 Auberon Waugh was working as a columnist at Private Eye when his editor offered him a trip to Senegal to help celebrate the anniversary of the magazine’s sister publication. “All I would have to give in exchange was a short discourse in the French language on the subject of breast feeding.”

The assignment struck Waugh as strange but not unaccountable — he’d been writing a regular column in a medical magazine that had touched on that topic.

“So I composed a speech on this subject in French, with considerable labour, only to find when I landed in Dakar that the subject chosen was not breast-feeding but press freedom.” He’d misheard the editor.

“There was no way even to describe the misunderstanding, since la liberté de la Presse bears no resemblance to le nourrisson naturel des bébés.”

(From Waugh’s 1991 autobiography Will This Do?)

In a Word

pluvial
adj. relating to rainfall

A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain.

— Proust, Swann’s Way

Ironically Apt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fukuppy_logo.jpg

In 2013, Japanese refrigeration company Fukushima Industries introduced a new mascot, a happy winged egg:

“I fly around on my awesome wings, patrolling supermarket showcases and kitchen refrigerators. I can talk to vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish and can check on their health! I was born in a Fukushima refrigerator! I love eating and I’m full of curiosity. I think of myself as kind, with a strong sense of justice, but my friends say I’m a bit of a klutz. But I’m always working hard to make myself shine!”

Unfortunately the company named the character “Fukuppy,” a combination of Fukushima and the English word happy.

After the name began to make news in English-speaking countries, Fukushima issued an apology and withdrew it.

Catastrophe

In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1949), William Empson describes a particularly inscrutable English newspaper headline:

ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER

Bomb and plot, you notice, can be either nouns or verbs, and would take kindly to being adjectives, not that they are anything so definite here. One thinks at first that there are two words or sentences, and a semicolon has been left out as in telegrams: ‘I will tell you for your penny about the Italian Assassin and the well-known Bomb Plot Disaster’; but the assassin, as far as I remember, was actually not an Italian; Italian refers to the whole aggregate, and its noun, if any, is disaster. Perhaps, by being so far separated from its noun, it gives the impression that the other words, too, are somehow connected with Italy; that bombs, plots, and disasters belong both to government and rebel in those parts; perhaps Italian Assassin is not wholly separate in one’s mind from the injured Mussolini.

In fact it’s not clear what the intended meaning had been. Empson says that the main rhythm conveys the sense “This is a particularly exciting sort of disaster, the assassin-bomb-plot type they have in Italy.” In The Wordsworth Book of Usage & Abusage (1995), Eric Partridge suggests that the writer may have meant ITALIAN DISASTER ASSASSIN’S BOMB-PLOT, “There has been in Italy a disaster caused by a bomb in an assassin’s plot.” But he agrees that “even after an exasperating amount of cogitation by the reader,” the meaning is unclear.

Tense Trouble

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Simplified_blank_world_map_without_Antartica_(no_borders).svg

Sydney is 14 hours ahead of New York, so when it’s noon in Sydney it’s 10 p.m. the previous day in New York.

Suppose you were broadcasting to the U.S. on a news-service hook-up from Sydney, and wanted to tell the American public about an explosion that occurred at 2:30 A.M. in a factory in Sydney.

Would you say ‘There will be an explosion in the Sydney Boiler Works at 2:30 A.M. tomorrow morning?’

Or would you say ‘There was an explosion in the Sydney Boiler Works at 2:30 A.M. tomorrow morning?’

That’s from Gerald Lynton Kaufman’s It’s About Time, from 1935. For the record, the Associated Press would dateline the story SYDNEY and refer to clock times in that location.