WORDPLAY

Saw Wordplay, the movie about the annual New York Times crossword contest. I can't go as far as the Rolling Stone reviewer Peter Travers, whose blurb screams, "A brain bender! So suspenseful, your palms will be sweating! It will have you howling!" That's why I don't have a job writing movie reviews. But I can say truthfully that it was fun and funny and yes, suspenseful, though my palms did not sweat and I did not howl.

It turns out that musicians and mathematicians tend to be best at word puzzles, not literary types like English majors. They have to be literate, of course, and have broad general knowledge, but mostly they have to be quick at discerning patterns, which explains why the current champ is a young college student, beating out older former winners who presumably know more.

Check out the movie web site for info about the contestants and editor Will Shortz, as well as online crosswords.

SLANG

Black American Lingo

>>> If you could bring yourself to listen to Shirley Q. Liquor on George W., you may remember the line, "He almost lost the election behind that [executions in Texas]," meaning because [of the executions]. I've only heard behind used this way as a colloquial black American expression.

>>> Remember Aretha Franklin's "Respect" where she sings, "Give me my propers when you get home." This too I've heard only from black speakers, although it's been picked up by the media and was used in a McDonald's commercial, when two older black ladies were speaking approvingly about a neighbor boy who got a promotion ~ he got "his propers." Aretha meant "respect" and the TV ad ladies meant official acknowledgement of the boy's accomplishment.

>>> Oprah Winfrey used down low when she interviewed the two stars of Brokeback Mountain, and I thought it was just a variant of "low down" meaning questionable or bad. But http://www.urbandictionary.com/ says it means something secret, and in the black community it also refers to men who hide their homosexual behavior.

Traveling Music

"Motor" as a slangy verb meaning to leave or to go or to drive seems to have entered, or returned, to the language chiefly through Carson Kressley of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Recently I heard it on a craft show where the crafty chick said "Let's motor over to the sewing machine," and then she scooted across the room in her rolling office chair. "Let's motor" dates from the early days of motoring. When lots of people started buying cars, the new technology required new words. What do you do with a car? People used to drive cattle, and an engine might be driven by steam. But this sense of applying some kind of force to create movement doesn't really apply to what a person does in driving a car. The power-house of the engine, the noun motor, became a verb, much as telephone (phone) became a verb, although it was mostly replaced by the shorter call.

Since I was a kid I've been impressed by the cool factor of various other ways to say "Let's go." I remember my late Aunt Nelle, rest in peace, saying "Let's get shut of this burg." Then there was "Let's blow this pop stand" and "Let's get the hell out of Dodge." The hippies used to say "Let's sky" and "Let's book." A former hippy and drug dealer of my acquaintance said he always thought "book" came from the expression booking drugs, sort of like booking a table at a restaurant, making a reservation, or perhaps making book, placing bets with bookies. It was (and is) common to try to conceal dealing in phone conversations, which dealers thought were bugged, by using a sort of code, talking about drugs as books, making books, buying books, reading books, etc. Also, one of the definitions for book in urbandictionary.com is:

1000 hits of acid. Somebody else posted that it was a hundred. That is incorrect. 100 is a sheet or page. 10 is a strip and 10,000 is a bible.

So possibly the expression "Let's book" meaning let's leave evolved on a tortuous path from the drug trade, where rapid exits are often necessary.

The earlier transitive verbs (get out of Dodge) had more of a sense of getting out of an undesirable or even dangerous place, though, while the intransitive verbs (sky, book) had more of a loose sense of moving on to another adventure. Let's motor has the breezy feel of going somewhere, cruising (no pun intended), taking a road trip, especially in a touring car, a runabout, or a roadster. I think it's cute. Let's motor.

POSSESSIVES AND ATTRIBUTIVES

Anne DaBee wrote a couple of weeks ago in response to "wet my appetite" and the eternal apostrophe confusion:

Wine, an Old Fashioned, or a Bloody Mary wet MY appetite just fine; at that time of the day who's thinking about spelling?

Question re apostrophes/possessives ~ I wrote "Dennis' ", it was corrected (by our deputy administrator, who's good on legal stuff, but isn't a word person) to read "Dennis's". After a small, friendly argument/discussion, she said the elimination of the "s" was correct only if there were multiple sibilants as well as the final "s" in the subject noun ~ "Cassius' ". Thus the possessives for James, Charles (and Dennis) would be James's, Charles's, and Dennis's, and one would rarely have occasion to use JUST the apostrophe to denote possession. Goes against MY rules, but I'll try not to have to go against hers! Any input? My 'puter is sleepy this morning and reluctant to get web pages for me, but I'll try again later to get the link PO 180 suggests for apostrophes (The Apostrophe Protection Society). Perhaps he has the answer to how possessives' apostrophes should be used!

The APS has something to say about this, but you can always rely on the Chicago Manual of Style: CMS says add the apostrophe plus another s to names like that end in s like Dennis and James, just as with singular nouns. I usually go along with Anne in informal writing (which most of mine is) and just use the apostrophe because I don't like the look of Dennis's, but of course I say "Dennises".

But, Plural nouns that end in s (like “guys”) don’t add another s to form the possessive (example: the guys' apartment). CMS then talks about attributives:

If you want to make “guys” attributive, you can get away without the apostrophe, but you might test the idea with a plural noun that doesn’t end in s to see whether the attributive actually works: I doubt you’d write "the women apartment," so you shouldn’t write "the guys apartment" either.

There actually is a rule about possessives of words with extra sibilants (ess sounds), which I didn't know but found on the web site of a Texas legal style manual:

If a sibilant occurs before the final syllable, adding an apostrophe and an "s" would make the word awkward to pronounce. To avoid a triple sibilant in pronouncing the possessive form, add only an apostrophe:

Texas' wildlife

Moses' guidance

I still don't get it, though. Does this mean these words are supposed to be pronounced "Texas wildlife" and "Moses guidance" instead of "Texases wildlife" and "Moseses guidance"? If so, I would rather turn the possessive into an attributive, dropping the apostrophe and using the noun like an adjective ~ "Texas wildlife" ~ or reword the phrase ~ "the guidance of Moses".

I think it's drinks time.

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