`Neologistic Misdemeanor'

Words beget words, the little darlings. They are promiscuous, and you can’t leave them alone. In October, I mentioned Fred Chappell’s book-length poem Midquest and quoted this passage:

“I ride the clashbutt hayrake to the barn,
Which is heaven. Barn is home. Home is heaven.
The barn resounding like a churchbell in
The rain, home, home, home.”

Three words in four lines fail the spell-check, a failure which helpfully distinguishes men from machines, and all to our credit: “clashbutt,” “hayrake” and “churchbell.” The latter two, at least, remind us of the dreary literal-mindedness of computer software. “Clashbutt” is a different case. I noted in October that a Google search of the word turned up nothing, and there’s no mention of it in the Oxford English Dictionary, so I assumed it was Chappell’s amusing neologism. Dave Lull’s resourcefulness has proven me right. Dave wrote to Chappell’s literary agent, asking for an explanation of “clashbutt.” The agent kindly passed along the request to Chappell, who kindly replied to Dave on Monday:

“`Clashbutt’ is my own neologistic misdemeanor, a nonce word, needed to communicate both the sound of an old-fashioned clattery hay rake and the arse-jolting sensation of riding one.”

By the way, the spell-check underlines “neologistic” and “arse” in red, another reason to be grateful for poets and word-salvagers like Chappell who throw away nothing, with the certainty that even the “Arch.” and “Obs.” will come in handy some day. Note his use of “needed,” implying that every verbal situation calls for a unique word-as-tool, encouraging us to think of language as a vast socket set. Consider Chappell’s use of “nonce word,” which showed up recently on the Oxford University Press blog, OUPblog, in a post titled “One-Hit Wonders”:

“Hapax legomenon (plural: hapax legomena; sometimes shortened to hapax) literally means `(a thing) said only once’ in Greek, and it was originally used in Biblical studies to refer to a word that appears uniquely in one place in the Old or New Testament. Biblical hapax legomena present a challenge to translators from the classical source languages of Hebrew and Greek, since they don’t have other examples of a word to use as a point of comparison. It’s especially a problem for the Hebrew Bible, since there are few other Classical Hebrew texts to work from, besides the Dead Sea Scrolls and some other fragments. We’re a bit better off when a hapax is in our own language, but they can sometimes be just as baffling.

“Nonce word is actually a term that Oxford can lay claim to, since it was introduced by the great James Murray when he was overseeing the creation of the New English Dictionary, what would later become the OED. Previously nonce had lingered primarily in the expression for the nonce, meaning `for a particular purpose or occasion.’ If Murray or his editors came across an ad-hoc word that couldn’t be found elsewhere in the texts available to them, it would often be marked `nonce-wd.’ in the dictionary entry. There are thousands of such entries in the pages of the OED, everything from touch-me-not-ishness (from Dickens) to turnipology (`contemptuous term for phrenology’).”

One of Shakespeare’s many hapax legomena is the rather mundane “birthplace,” in Coriolanus (“My birthplace hate I”), but the gem of a nonce word above from Dickens is drawn from the first paragraph of Chapter 8 of The Pickwick Papers:

“The quiet seclusion of Dingley Dell, the presence of so many of the gentler sex, and the solicitude and anxiety they evinced in his behalf, were all favourable to the growth and development of those softer feelings which nature had implanted deep in the bosom of Mr. Tracy Tupman, and which now appeared destined to centre in one lovely object. The young ladies were pretty, their manners winning, their dispositions unexceptionable; but there was a dignity in the air, a touch-me-not-ishness in the walk, a majesty in the eye, of the spinster aunt, to which, at their time of life, they could lay no claim, which distinguished her from any female on whom Mr. Tupman had ever gazed.”

I’ve been reading The Life of Language (2006), by Sol Steinmetz and Barbara Ann Kipfer, who devote a chapter to nonce words. They cite the Dickens creation mentioned above, as well as “trichomaniac” (hair fetishist, courtesy of Robert Graves) and “twi-thought” (a dim thought, from “twilight,” by George Meredith). So, how is a nonce word different from what Chappell called a “neologistic misdemeanor?” Steinmetz and Kipfer write:

“Can we call a nonce word a neologism? Yes and no. Loosely, any nonce word is a new word, though coined for a particular occasion.”

The distinction seems to be that a nonce word is coined for an ad hoc purpose, with no expectation it will assume a permanent place in the language. Time is the judge. Chappell uses them interchangeably. The mother lode of nonce words in Finnegans Wake, and Tuesday morning I heard a physicist blithely speak of “quarks,” almost certainly without having read even Dubliners. “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” There’s a nonce word that morphed quietly into a neologism, and now is an accepted part of the subatomic furniture. Chappell’s poem, too, is dense with both species of new words, a symptom of his verbal restlessness and fecundity. This passage immediately follows the “clashbutt” quatrain that started this digression:

“Upshoot of crickets, butterflies, dust
And grasshoppers precedes the tearing mower
In the field everywhere, the visible
Ascension of a strain of Beethoven,
The hayfield birthing music, music,
A harmony of heat-breath, dark-powered
Green juices of the stalks, the blood
Of snakes and baby rabbits the mower spits
Up and out, a portable fountain
Of dear death-life, a man could
Lose a finger and a foot, lose
All thinking to watch the stalks fall neat
Like tumblers toppling off a shelf . . .
The Little Ones have lost their sky.”

That’s four more, in the nonce.