Back in June I posted to Facebook as follows:
OK, I need to know what to make of what appears to be a meaningless sentence in Paige Williams’ article on Green-Wood Cemetery at the New Yorker [archived]. Here’s the context:
A hundred and eighty-seven years after its founding, Green-Wood resembles a sculpture garden. There are more than two hundred and fifty thousand monuments and more than five hundred mausolea. Owls, horses, baseballs, clasped hands, winged hourglasses, and empty beds are among the iconography that I have seen incised on the funerary surfaces. The angels (and they are many) weep and sag, but they also look heavenward. Lambs mean children. Broken flower stems and shorn columns symbolize early death. There are sarcophagi and plinths and cenotaphs. Lord at the obelisks.
Can anybody make sense of “Lord at the obelisks”? I thought it might be a typo (“Lord” for “Look”? — but that would be a lousy sentence even if intelligible), but it’s in the online version as well, which has been up for at least a week and a half.
(Don’t ask me why I posted it there rather than here; the past is a foreign country.) I got a bunch of replies but no clarification; I wrote the magazine but never heard back. Today I got this comment from B.J. Wills:
“Lord at the” is a Southernism. “Lord at the obelisks” means wow, *so many* obelisks.
I responded: “Huh! Well, that would certainly explain it, but googling isn’t showing me any other examples. Maybe if I had access to a spoken corpus…” So I thought I’d bring the whole mess here and ask if anyone knows anything about this alleged Southernism.
Well, the author is from Mississippi, and the expression sounds vaguely plausible as a Southernism, to these Yankee ears. But no google search results and Google Ngram isn’t showing any results that would unambiguously support that reading either. It is certainly not a regionalism the New Yorker could reasonably expect a reader to recognize.
Even weirder – your buddy B.J. Willis doesn’t really seem to exist. Or at least their Facebook page seems suspiciously empty of content and friends.
Guess you could try Paige Williams directly?
Wills, not Willis.
I guess I could, and maybe I will. At the moment I’m feeling too lazy. (There seem to be all sorts of entities on Facebook that don’t exist.)
Southerner here. To the extent I’ve heard anything like this, it’s just a variant of “Good lord, the obelisks!” but rendered in such an unnaturally formal language it feels almost alien, or at least tongue-in-cheek. And I wouldn’t necessarily translate it as “so many” obelisks as just “the obelisks are impressive” (maybe in number, maybe in size, maybe for other reasons).
Since the corpus is primarily spoken, you’ll get a few more google hits with “Good lord at the,” “Lawd at the,” and “Good lawd at the”. The version I’m used to hearing LEAST, funny enough, is “Lord at the.”
So it’s actually a thing! Thanks very much for that.
The found-poetry aspect of the wording seemed very vaguely famliar, and upon reflection I think maybe that’s because it somehow echoes this fantastical hippie-adjacent song title from ’69 (just as the band had started using electricity): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT8P1etGYL0
Me, just occasionally a country boy, so who am I to say.
Lord over them, or
Lord, like also angels, among them, or
Lordy, even obelisks.
mausolea
Isn’t that overbearingly pompous in C21st? ‘mausolæa’ anybody?
The mausolea in question mostly reflect a 19th-century sensibility which might seem weird and indeed perhaps pompous to many 21st-century sensibilities.
the green-wood mausoleot are fantastically varied (i favor the pyramids, myself), and certainly of the last-but-one century – though since we seem to be currently having the Even Longer Nineteenth Century*, i’m not sure that the sensibility is so out of step with our times.
.
* or possibly XIX Century II: Faster XIX Furiouser
I vote for the Longest Seventeenth Century — the Thirty Years’ War never actually ended, they just took breathers.
Couldn’t it be a simple typo: “Lord, all the obelisks.”?
“At” in place of “all”?
…just moved to the Congo. And Sudan.
What do you mean by “typo”? T and L are pretty far from each other on the keyboard, and done with different fingers.
Scroll down to Chase F.’s Yelp review of a MacDonald’s in Mississippi, which he gives one star, commenting: “This place is gross. Every table has something on it and under it. Service is average on a good day. Orders are usually wrong. I think they make whatever they feel like making and give it to you. And they have attitudes if you want to fix it. And lord at the flies. Drive thru is the way to go and just hope you get your order.” (Emphasis mine.)
So there’s an example in the wild, from Mississippi where the New Yorker author is from. I just Googled “Lord at the flies” in quotations, figuring if the expression was a thing, somebody might have applied it to flies. But this is a solitary result (for flies). I found one result on Instagram: [Good] “Lord at the junk” [you accumulate on a farm] That account appears to be from Georgia, based on other posts they made.
Excellent finds, and you’ve convinced me it’s an actual expression, not a typo.
“Lord at the flies” is deep poetry
I typed ‘back’ yesterday when I meant ‘bad’ – if that wasn’t a typo, what was it?
(I do that kind of thing all the time, but more often with things which are more similar in sound.)
if that wasn’t a typo, what was it?
Titivillus again. That li’l devil.
Hailey Edwards, a writer from Alabama, at Goodreads: “I bought a Silhouette Cameo a few weeks ago so I could have a relaxing activity to share with my daughter. We both love paper crafts, and we’ve had a blast so far, but lord at the mess! I had so many tools and types of paper and mats. I had to do something. I ended up doing some research and came across the Sauder Sewing Craft Cart […]”
Now I’m curious to know what the intonation is of these phrases.
P.S. The Medical Journal of Australia once published an article called — are you sitting down? — “Lord of the Piles”.
As the author of the New Yorker piece in question, this conversation is thrilling. It saddens me that certain colloquialisms have vanished, or are fading; hence my tiny effort to keep some of them alive. Kudos to Chase F., who unearthed the Yelp review, and to Martin, for the observation that followed: “So there’s an example in the wild, from Mississippi where the New Yorker author is from.” Just fabulous sleuthing. Thank you for discussing language at the granular level, which is every writer’s hope. And thank you for reading The New Yorker.
Paige! Thanks very much for dropping by and confirming your intentions, and I strongly support you in your quest to keep worthy colloquialisms alive. I will try to remember to do my bit by using this one when it seems appropriate.
Latecoming Southerner here (south Georgia born and raised). In the article’s context, I feel it very likely that I would’ve considered it a typo, even though I’m familiar with the idiom!
I believe it’s a combination of the dryness of the presentation–one usually finds a leading “but” and/or a trailing exclamation point with these–and the rarity of obelisks being a thing so numerous as to lord at.
@Robert Hutchinson: What sort of intonation would the phrase have? Stress on “Lord”, I presume, but maybe also on “at”? Or on the “o” of “obelisks”?
@Y: Stress on “Lord” and the “o” would be common, although some speakers would draw out the stress all the way through to the “o”. (At least based on how I can imagine my friends and relations saying it.)