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Larry McMurtry, in his NYRB review of Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America, by Mark Perry, quotes Grant’s famous description of meeting the defeated Lee at Appomattox, one paragraph of which reads:

What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly….

(I urge you to read the rest of the quote at the linked article; Grant was a wonderfully vivid writer.) McMurtry then remarks on one word in the passage:

Spelling, in the nineteenth century, was, in the main, a field for creativity; Grant spelled as the spirit moved him. In the passage quoted, from the Library of America edition, there is one word that bears looking at: “impassible,” referring to Robert E. Lee’s face. Jean Edward Smith, in his excellent biography of Grant, corrects this to “impassive,” which is no doubt what was meant; but the word suggests at least a few of the seven types of ambiguity the critic William Empson used to brood over. Was Grant merely saying that Lee had such perfect control over his emotions that no shadow of what he might be feeling could pass across his features? But might the word also have a military shading? The fact, or at least the legend, of Lee’s “impassibility” was a big problem for the Union generals, until Grant came along and started winning battles.

However, Merriam-Webster gives ‘impassive’ as a second meaning of impassible, so I’m not sure why Smith would feel the need to emend it. In any event, I always enjoy such ruminations over the implications of a word.

Addendum. While I’m on the subject of Grant, I should quote the last of the notes he passed to his doctors as he was dying of throat cancer:

I do not sleep though I sometimes doze off a little. If I am up I am talked to and in my efforts to answer cause pain. The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.

No, I don’t mean another warblog, I mean Martialis, a blog devoted to the poet Martial. As Nick says:

This is an insanely ambitious project. On this blog I intend to present the Latin text and an English translation of all the epigrams of the first-century AD poet Marcus Valerius Martialis, better known to the English-speaking world as Martial. By my reckoning there are 1565 epigrams together with the five prose prefaces – which at a rate of one a day will take the better part of four-and-a-half years to cover.
By concentrating on one poem a day I hope to encourage readers to make their own observations in the comments section and develop a discussion to which anyone can contribute on matters of translation and interpretation: some books and some poems are rather better served than others by existing translations and exegetical works.

He’s only three poems into it at the moment, so it’s a good time to start reading. (Via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey.)
Update. Alas, the project seems to have died in March 2005, in the middle of Book III. Ave atque vale!

I just discovered that each major English-speaking region has its own way of pronouncing this word, and apparently (to judge by this WordOrigins thread, where I discovered the situation) each is unaware of the others. I had always assumed everyone pronounced it SODD-er, as we do in the US (short o, no l). Now I find that Australians say SOHL-der (long o, with l), while the OED says “(ˈsɒldə(r), ˈsəʊdə(r)),” which means Brits use a long o (SO) when they omit the l but a short one when they pronounce it (SOL). So what I want to know is, what do Canadians say? Other variants and anecdotes are, of course, welcome.

Update (Dec. 2021). The OED hasn’t revised the entry, but they’ve revised the pronunciation; they now have /ˈsɒldə/, /ˈsəʊldə/, /ˈsəʊdə/ — i.e., they’ve added a version with both long o and l.

The Telegraph has begun a series of excerpts from Port Out, Starboard Home by Michael Quinion, to be published by Penguin at £12.99 on July 1 (in the UK, obviously). The first begins with a good summary of various wrong ideas people get about where words come from and continues with a discussion of the marvelous phrase “all mouth and trousers”

This strange expression comes from the north of England and is used, mainly by women in my experience, as a sharp-tongued and effective putdown of a certain kind of pushy, over-confident male. Proverbial expressions like this are notoriously hard to pin down: we have no idea exactly where it comes from nor when it first appeared, although it is recorded from the latter part of the 19th century onwards. However, we’re fairly sure that it is a pairing of “mouth”, meaning insolence or cheekiness, with “trousers”, a pushy sexual bravado. It’s a wonderful example of metonymy (“a container for the thing contained”).

The phrase seems to have become known, and surprisingly popular, among southern English writers in the last decades of the 20th century, perhaps as a result of the airing of a series of television comedies based in the North, such as the BBC’s Last of the Summer Wine. What is interesting about the saying from a folk etymological point of view is that its opaqueness has led its modern users to reinterpret it as “all mouth and no trousers”.

For example, an article in the Daily Record in 2002 quoted a Scottish politician as saying, “The First Minister is all mouth and no trousers”; a piece in the People newspaper described a pop group in the same terms; the Guardian in June 2002 said: “Bloody men. All mouth and no trousers.” It has reached the stage in which the older, non-negative form is in great danger of vanishing, though Australia and New Zealand seem to be staying with it (when they use it at all, which isn’t often).

Metropolitan writers are trying here to make sense of something obscure that they have not often heard in its native surroundings, and are getting it muddled. They confuse it with other put-downs that are conventionally phrased with a negative, such as “all talk and no action” or “all fur coat and no knickers”. To have no trousers on is not only embarrassing, the argument seems to go, but is a state in which one is not ready for action (outside the bedroom, that is).

It’s a pity it should be changing through ignorance. It’s a lovely phrase, as effective a snub as anyone could want – all the better for being slightly obscure – and it’s one that ought to be preserved pristine.

I look forward to forthcoming excerpts, and to the book. (Via Catalogue Blog.)

Music speaks for itself,
And needs no explanation
Or justification:
Either it is alive, or it is not.

The great soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy passed away yesterday at the painfully early age of 69 (Ben Ratliff has a good obituary in today’s NY Times) [archived]. I can’t communicate to you his keening, inimitable tone or explain how perfectly attuned he was to the oddly-angled music of Thelonious Monk (if you want to give him a try, there’s a list of recommendations here—I’d start with Reflections, whose plangent “Ask Me Now” and “Reflections” make my eyes smart every time); fortunately, as Ratliff says, he “insisted on a literary dimension to his work, incorporating texts by novelists, poets and philosophers,” so I can honor his memory by quoting a couple of poems he set so brilliantly on one of his best records, Owl (1977, available on the Saravah compilation Scratching the Seventies):

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Another new language blog, by Billy McCormac: “Lagomduktig documents my quest to unravel the mysteries of translating the Swedish language.” The title “is a combination of two more or less ‘untranslatable’ words: lagom (just enough, just right) and duktig (clever, smart).” If you have any interest in Swedish, check it out.

Update (June 2023). Lagomduktig gave up the ghost a little over a year later: “Both Paul and I are swamped with writing projects and other work, but we promise to get back to Lagomduktig as soon as possible.” Promises, promises…

I encountered a number of words new to me in an enigmatic post chez l’Eudæmoniste (chez whom there is nil postiche) that is either a riff on the word post itself or a gloomy meditation (or of course both). It consists of words and phrases built around the syllable post, beginning with the hapax postation (OED: ‘The placing of one thing after another’; only in 1607 Schol. Disc. agst. Antichr. i. ii. 95 The postation of the wine doth not preiudice it, therefore the postponing of the Crosse doth not preiudice it neither) and ending with a second hapax, postreme (‘Last, hindmost; absol. one who is last’: 1553 Bale Gardiner’s De vera Obed. G j b, They were counsailed of som bodye not to contende to be called supremes, as longe as they are still postremes), but the word that buttonholed me was postliminy, which turns out to mean ‘In Rom. Law, The right of any person who had been banished or taken captive, to assume his former civic privileges on his return home. Hence, in Internat. Law, The restoration to their former state of persons and things taken in war, when they come again into the power of the nation to which they belonged.’

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The ArtLex Art Dictionary has “definitions for more than 3,600 terms used in discussing visual culture, along with thousands of supporting images, pronunciation notes, great quotations and cross-references.” A sample entry:

Rayonism – A type of abstract or semi-abstract painting characterized by the fragmentation of forms into masses of slanting lines. It was practised from 1912-1914 by Natalya S. Goncharova (Russian-French, 1881-1962), Mikhail Larionov (Russian-French, 1881-1964), and a few other Russian painters. Larionov’s manifesto on Rayonism stated that it is a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism.” Aspects of each of those isms can indeed be seen in Rayonist paintings — Cubism’s breaking up of forms, Futurism’s movement of forms, and Orphism’s rich color. In addition, the Rayonists expounded a theory that objects emitted invisible rays which the painters could manipulate to their own purposes. “The rays which emanate from the objects and cross over one another give rise to rayonist forms. The artist transforms these by bending them to his desire for aesthetic expression.” Goncharova and Larionov often applied the paint in their Rayonist works with palette knives.

Also called “Rayonnism,” “Rayism,” and, in Russian, “Luchism.”

All the significant terms are linked to other entries, and the text is followed by reproductions of five Rayonist paintings. A very useful site. (Via wood s lot.)

Reading a review by A. Alvarez (one of my favorite depressive Brit writers) of a Caroline Moorehead biography of Martha Gellhorn (one of my favorite reporters) in the April 8 NYRB, I came across an excellent little snippet from a youthful letter of hers:

The great temptation is to do what I call “fine writing,” the beautiful mellow phrases and the carefully chosen words. That I must avoid like the plague; only the simple words; only the straight clear sentences. I am terribly frightened of “style.”

Not the final truth, of course, but a useful corrective to one’s florid tendencies.

Mark Liberman has a most interesting series of posts at Language Log, taking off from a querulous comment of mine on a Semantic Compositions entry (“I was disappointed in Mark’s post; I hate to see him joining the bandwagon of people making easy jokes about winetalk”). Anyone at all interested in the topic should read Apologia pro risu suo, Grand Cru Smackdown, and More on winetalk culture. I should say that I did not mean to imply that the exotic descriptions used by so many wine writers are all exact and scientific, or that I do not myself often find them funny as hell. In the immortal words of Theodore Sturgeon, “90% of everything is crud,” and that certainly applies to wine babble. I merely resent the fact that the noble art and science of wine appreciation is so frequently the target of free-floating populist resentment and suffers indignities not often heaped on, say, art historians (who are at least equally given to unverifiable specifications and unsuitable metaphors). I just wish Americans drank wine as routinely as soft drinks so they wouldn’t see it as some sort of Old World boondoggle.

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