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AWADmail Issue 721

Sponsor’s Message:
One Up! is way faster and funner than Scrabble. No board. No complicated rules. 20 or so wicked fun cutthroat minutes. Rinse (off your brain), and repeat. Congrats to Email of the Week winner, Stephanie Lovett (see below), as well as all AWADers: you get a yuge buy-one-get-one-free brain boost bargain, today only. TWOFER ME UP!

From: Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)
Subject: Interesting stories from the Net

Donald Trump Performs Shakespeare’s Soliloquies
The New Yorker
WebCite

What ‘Inshallah’ Really Means
The New York Times
WebCite

Trump^® Brand Insults
Doonesbury
WebCite

Insult Your Friends, Shakespeare Style
CNN
WebCite

A Quiz! A Quiz! My Kingdom for a Shakespeare Quiz
CNN
WebCite

From: Anne Lane (makeboxes gmail.com)
Subject: Galumph

A couple of months ago, my husband and I attended a performance of a dance / acrobatic / physical comedy team called Galumpha. With only three performers, they lived up to their name, frequently stomping their feet as they evolved through intricate synchronized pileups that resembled animals with multiple feet, or organic machines.

And speaking of the Jabberwock, I used to greet our beagle ‘Enry by throwing my arms wide and saying, “Come to my arms, my beamish boy!” Judging by his response, he was also a fan.

From: Ileana Arroyo (amygdala18 yahoo.com)
Subject: Galumph!

I love this week’s theme. I grew up in a family that used this word all the time. We had a fluffy, black kitty cat that could often be seen galumphing across our backyard. We called him “blump” -- a word first used by my younger brother.

From: Andrea Carag (andrea_carag yahoo.com)
Subject: Chortle

I just had a thought regarding the word chortle. It is used in Brave, the Pixar movie about a medieval Scottish princess. During the scene where Merida’s hawk attacks her father, she starts to laugh and eventually snorts. Her mother is in the background and says, “A princess doesn’t chortle.” (video) I guess Disney didn’t realize the word was not used until centuries later when Lewis Carroll coined it.

Forty-five years ago we bought a 32-foot sailboat which sported a rather pedestrian name. As we intended to sail to exotic and special places, we needed a name to match. By combining words from two lines of the poem, we came up with Frabjous Joy. She took us 15,000 miles around the South Pacific to many exotic and special places.

From: Wendy Pollitt (wcrpollitt gmail.com)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--frabjous

Years ago, when we were sailing around in the South Pacific, we encountered a boat (small, sail) named Frabjous Joy.

From: Jan Smith (forjhsmith verizon.net)
Subject: Jabberwocky

Munro Leaf, who is best known for his 1936 book, The Story of Ferdinand, was invited in the late 1950s by the State Department to participate in a literary exchange group with the Soviet Union. Toward the end of the USSR tour, participants were invited to stand up and recite a bit of their favorite literary piece. Munro Leaf rattled off a few lines of the Jabberwocky, which left the Russian translator nonplussed. He reassured her that there was no translation which could be had.

From: David W. Fischer (dw-mefischer sbcglobal.net)
Subject: Jabberwocky Words

What a frabjous week of Jabberwocky words! After I retired in 2000, I took advantage of free tuition at the nearby community college to brush up on my German and also learn French. For class projects I shared “Der Jammerwoch” and “Le Jaseroque”, magnificent German and French versions of Carroll’s great nonsense poem given in Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice. Like the English original, they fill the head with ideas, even if you don’t know what they are, to paraphrase Alice.

From: Stephanie Lovett (uffish earthlink.net)
Subject: Lewis Carroll

The Lewis Carroll Society of North America just enjoyed a fabulous Spring meeting in the DC/VA/MD area, and as we departed, we loved seeing this week’s theme. Carroll enthusiasts and scholars can join us and the British Lewis Carroll Society.

Two terrific exhibitions are up in the DC area: The Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland is hosting an exhibition celebrating Alice’s 150th anniversary and in Baltimore, Geppi’s Entertainment Museum is hosting items from the Crandall collection of Disney Alice.

Thank you for this week’s words! My seven-year-old and I have loved seeing which new word would appear each day as we have long been fans of the poem, especially the book with Graeme Base’s renderings.

Curious if you have seen this sketch of the Jabberwocky diagrammed? I love it and can’t wait to get it framed!

From: Khay Ooi (khay_ooi moh.govt.nz)
Subject: Words coined by Lewis Carroll

I’m glad you picked words coined by Lewis Carroll, one of my favourite authors. For a very entertaining analysis of the Alice books, I recommend Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice For a fascinating insight into Charles Dogdson, I heartily recommend The White Knight, by A.L Taylor, first published in 1952.

From: Richard Novick (richard.novick med.nyu.edu)
Subject: coined words

Although I have always loved Lewis Carroll, I don’t think he was the inspiration for my single success in word coinage. As a medical student, lo these many years past, I was working in the bacterial genetics lab of one of my professors, Werner Maas, isolating and studying mutations affecting the biosynthesis of the amino acid arginine. Some of my mutants grew very slowly in the absence of arginine, others did not grow at all.

The former had mutations greatly damaging the function of one of the required enzymes. The latter had mutations completely inactivating it and were called auxotrophs. There was no word for the former except the awkward and inaccurate “partial mutations” (awkward because only the effects of the mutations, not the mutations themselves, were partial). So I suggested that they might be called bradytrophs (combining the two Greek roots, bradis for slow and trophos for feeder). Bradytroph is now in wide general usage, referring to growth behavior of higher cells as well as of microbes.

From: Anne Schmitz (annemuryo gmail.com)
Subject: coined words from Jabberwocky

This poem gave rise to the name of a British Columbia homestead I lived on for a few years in the 1970s. Named Brillig by the most practical and organized member of the farm, revealing that she was far more than that. The place is more gardened than farmed now by the geriatric founders. I will travel there from Ontario for a visit in two weeks’ time. Thank you for the gift of coinage, LC and AWAD.

From: Dharam Khalsa (dharamkk2 gmail.com)
Subject: Anagrams of this week’s words

From: Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)
Subject: Limericks

When an elephant’s feeling romantic
The scene that he makes is gigantic.
To his mate he’ll galumph
And let out a harrumph
You can hear from across the Atlantic.
-Steve Benko, New York, New York (stevebenko1 gmail.com)

O Lord, let Ted Cruz never ply thee
With prayers that are hateful and slithy.
Down here we guffaw
That he studied the law
At a school in the league known as Ivy.
-Steve Benko, New York, New York (stevebenko1 gmail.com)

Said “The Donald” as he walked through the portal,
Emitting a snide little chortle,
I’m not such a dork,
I took on New York,
Which proves, as we know, I’m immortal.
-Judith Marks-White, Westport, Connecticut (joodth snet.net)

Said Spielberg, “The role of the bandersnatch
Is perfect for Benedict Cumberbatch.
When I film ‘Jabberwock’
I won’t settle for schlock.
Call his people and set up a kaffeeklatsch.”
-Steve Benko, New York, New York (stevebenko1 gmail.com)

“That Bernie is playing with matches.
In securities fraud he may catch us!”
The idea of his axe
Really scares Goldman Sachs
But the rest of us find it quite frabjous.
-Steve Benko, New York, New York (stevebenko1 gmail.com)

As I galumph ‘cross the lea,
a slithy bloke chortles at me.
His head I detach,
toss to Old Bandersnatch;
then, frabjous, I plunge in the sea.
-Laurence McGilvery, La Jolla, California (laurence mcgilvery.com)

Carroll in his poem, Jabberwocky,
Coined words, that were clever and snarky.
He’s the master of verse,
Using pithy and terse,
And a side order of malarkey.
-Joan Perrin, Port Jefferson Station, New York (perrinjoan aol.com)

From: Phil Graham (pgraham1946 cox.net)
Subject: Hopin’ to Dodgson bullets

Fake caviar often comes from galumphish.

I shall love thee no matter how slithy mayest act.

“I’m gonna do this chortle I’m finished,” said the farmhand.

When you use Bandersnatch’ral ingredients to stop perspiration.

Joab murdered him frabjous had gone too far. 2 Samuel 3:26