'The Deference We Pay to Harsh Choice'

“It’s not a showy word but a worker word, a syntactic functionary; and yet, for all its organizational aplomb, it secretly delights in nuance and ambiguity.”

 

The poet and Islamic scholar Eric Ormsby is a voluptuary of language. He revels in words like a kid does ice cream. Ormsby took part in a parlor game, “One Word,” sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. Simple: pick a favorite word. In his poetry and essays, Ormsby’s vocabulary is often lush. In his review of Recollected Poems, he celebrates the Canadian poet Daryl Hine’s assault on linguistic anemia:

 

“Others will balk at his sometimes extravagant vocabulary; words such as ‘amphisbaenic’ or ‘labarum’ or ‘ithyphallic’ will send them ‘scurrying’ to their dictionaries (why do they always ‘scurry’ or even ‘scuttle’? A new word, rightly used, should be an occasion for festive processions).”

And yet Ormsby celebrates a humbler favorite word, one that every English-speaker knows: or. “[It] stands like a squat bouncer,” he writes, “at the revolving door of the disjunction. It bears the yoke of alternatives—'to be or not to be’—with all the robust orotundity of an ox.”

 

The OED offer up twenty principal meanings for or, starting with the first and most familiar, which entered the language in the twelfth century: “in general use, coordinating noun phrases, adjectival phrases, adverbial phrases, verbs, and clauses.” Ormsby notes of a twentieth-century adaptation of the word: “it serves ‘the Boolean function of a variable,’ whatever that may mean.” Don’t get me started on Boolean math. For Ormsby, words are meant for mastication. He chews them and relishes the flavor:

 

“It’s pleasure to enunciate an or. The broad o demands a certain preparatory embouchure which alerts the lips and musters the mouth. It has, as I said before, a sturdy orotundity: it is ore rotundo (as Horace puts it), a syllable spoken ‘with round mouth.’ The vowel can expand; it muses, ponders, hovers before closing on the r, most diffident of American consonants. In a Mediterranean mouth, of course, that r positively clatters like an angry castanet when prolonged for dramatic effect: o-r-r-r-r-r! We refrain from such oratorical flourishes. Our r is the deference we pay to harsh choice; it bridles its brash o in exculpatory velvet.”

 

I’m reminded of the interview Vladimir Nabokov gave in 1965 and later collected in Strong Opinions (1973). The interviewer asked for the proper pronunciation of his surname. Nabokov replied:

 

“Englishmen say Nab okov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo -kov. A heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘Knickerbocker.’ My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle ‘o’ of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your own choice now. Incidentally, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer -- rhyming with ‘redeemer’ -- not Vladimir rhyming with Faddimere (a place in England, I think).”