Category Archives: Poems, prose & song

Songs my childhood taught me 4: Ad slogans and jingles

You probably have to have spent a good chunk of your childhood in ’70s England to get the full effect of this Proustian post.

The real age of advertising was born and flourished in New York City in the 50s and 60s, when Don Draper and the Mad Men of Madison Avenue found ingenious ways to turn life’s most prosaic things into necessities using just a few simple words and pithy phrases. As Don himself explained: “Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay.” British advertising enjoyed its heyday about a decade on from these heady, smokey, whiskey-hued days of the swinging sixties; the slick English admen of the 70s produced some of the stickiest slogans in the business. Just read these catchphrases and jingles from that time and place, and you’ll be humming the soundtrack of your youth and transported back to those innocent days of Turkish Delight, Walker’s Crisps and Opal Fruits before you can say “Cookability…”.

“And all because the lady loves …” “Made to make your mouth water” “Any time any place anywhere …” Bet you don’t have any trouble filling in the blanks, but if you do and Google fails you, don’t despair: I’ll fill them in next week.

(One of the following slogans was written by a lowly advertising copywriter who went on to become a very famous writer: Guess which one — and the author — in the comments section below …)

Easy peasy lemon —

Beanz meanz —

Up, up and away with —

— are a minty bit stronger

— … The growing up spread

Clunk click every trip

—- Made to make your mouth water

And all because the lady loves —

Happiness is a cigar called —

Anytime anyplace anywhere … —

Naughty but nice

Let your fingers do the walking

A —. a day helps you work rest and play

M’m! m’m! Good, M’m! m’m! Good, That’s why — is M’m! m’m! Good

— refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach

For mash get —

Just one —, give it to me, Italian ice-cream from Italy

A finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat

Bet you can’t eat just one

Cookability, that’s the beauty of —

Is she or isn’t she?

Songs my childhood taught me 3: Tongue-twisters

Yeah yeah … We all know what sort of vegetable Peter Piper picked, what that clueless lady sold on the seashore, and what was on Bitty Batter’s shopping list. But why are these inane repetitive statements shared with such regularity and delight — especially amongst kids? Because they’re tongue-twisters: the floor exercises of lingual gymnastics, the fun and games of a challenging oral workout. They are phrases or short pieces of prose designed deliberately damned difficult to articulate, and their fun lies not in their poetry or meaning but purely in the sport of pronunciation. Unlike the Freudian slip, in which deepest darkest secrets spill out of minds and mouths on the wings of a subconscious urge to express oneself, these twisters are tongue catnip, messing only with our physiology and not with our ids or superegos; and when the forced errors inevitably occur, our prize is hilarity — sometimes of the vulgar kind. Tangle your tongues with these.

Peter Piper picked a pick of pickled peppers;
a peck of pickled peppers, Peter Piper picked.
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore.
The shells she sells are sea-shells, I’m sure.
For if she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore
Then I’m sure she sells sea-shore shells.

Bitty Batter bought some butter
“But,” said she, “this butter’s bitter.
If I put it in my batter,
It will make my batter bitter.”
So she bought some better butter,
And she put the better butter in the bitter batter,
And made the bitter batter better.

Theophilus Thistle, the successful thistle-sifter,
While sifting a sieve-full of unsifted thistles,
Thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb.
Now if Theophilus Thistle, while sifting a sieve-full of unsifted thistles,
Thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb,
See that thou, while sifting a sieve-full of unsifted thistles,
Thrust not three thousand thistles through the thick of thy thumb.
Success to the successful thistle-sifter!

Red Leather, Yellow Leather

Red lorry, yellow lorry

Cecily thought Sicily less thistly than Thessaly.

Eleven benevolent elephants

Unique New York

Black background, brown background

A skunk sat on a stump, The stump thunk the skunk stunk, The skunk thunk the stump stunk.

Six gray geese grazing gaily into Greece. “What eat ye, gray geese? Green grass, gray geese?”

Five brave maids, sitting on five broad beds, braiding broad braids. I said to those five brave maids, sitting on five broad beds, braiding broad braids, “Braid broad braids, brave maids.”

A cup of proper coffee in a copper coffee pot.

She sawed six slick, sleek, slim, slender saplings.

Cross crossings cautiously.

The seething sea ceaseth, and thus the seething sea sufficeth us.

Now, careful with these, please: not in front of the children …

I’m not the fig plucker,
Nor the fig pluckers’ son,
But I’ll pluck figs
Till the fig plucker comes.

Mrs Puggy Wuggy has a square cut punt.
Not a punt cut square,
Just a square cut punt.
It’s round in the stern and blunt in the front.
Mrs Puggy Wuggy has a square cut punt.

Mrs Hunt had a country cut front in the front of her country cut pettycoat.

Six stick shifts stuck shut.

Songs my childhood taught me 2: Mnemonic phrases

How would we be able to remember all the most essential information of the world — like the colors of the rainbow (in correct order), the planets of our solar system (in the order in which they radiate out from the sun), or what happened to each of Henry VIII’s wives (in chronological order) — without that magical thing called a mnemonic? (The word, whose initial m is silent, is derived from the ancient Greek mnemonikos, meaning “of memory”, and is related to Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory in Greek mythology; both words come from mneme — “remembrance” or memory”.) This strangely named device is created specifically to aid in the retention and memorization of information; it can come in different forms, but is usually verbal, ie. a short poem, an acronym (see Glossophilia’s earlier post on acronyms here), or a word or phrase made memorable by dint of its humor, absurdity or easy rhyme. Our childhoods and especially our classrooms stocked our minds with these memory aids that are more enduring and accessible than Google or any other encyclopedic resource. Who needs an app to remember how many days are in the current month, whether to spell it receive or recieve, and whether to set your clocks an hour later or earlier when we have our mnemonics permanently on tap?

Here’s a selection of those that have stuck around in my cerebellum for decades, bouncing forward like Beatles lyrics when their services are called upon, and then tucked away for safekeeping until the next time a list of England’s monarchs is needed.

Am I forgetting any? …

Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain — colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet)

My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets — planets in the solar system (before Pluto was disqualified)

Spring forward, fall back — how to reset your clocks at the beginning and end of daylight savings time

Every Good Boy Deserves Fun — notes on the lines of the treble clef

FACE — notes in the spaces of the treble clef

Good Bikes Don’t Fall Apart — notes on the lines of the bass clef

All Cows Eat Grass — notes in the spaces of the bass clef

No Plan Like Yours To Study History Wisely — the royal houses of the English monarchy (Norman, Plantagenet, Lancaster, York, Tudor, Stuart, Hanover, Windsor)

Large Elephants Jump Slowly and Sink Rapidly — the seven articles of the US Constitution (legislative, executive, judicial, supremacy, amendment, statehood, ratification)

Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived — the respective fates of Henry VIII’s wives

Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally — the order of operations in mathematics (parentheses, exponents, multiply, divide, add, subtract)

Every Acid Dealer Gets Busted Eventually — notes of standard-tuned guitar strings

I before E, except after C — a spelling reminder

When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking — another spelling aid

HOMES — North America’s great lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior)

Number of days in each month:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one,
Save February, with twenty-eight days clear,
And twenty-nine each leap year.

English monarchs – in chronological order of reign:

Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee,
Harry, Dick, John, Harry three;
One, two, three Neds, Richard two
Harrys four, five, six… then who?
Edwards four, five, Dick the bad,
Harrys twain VII VIII and Ned the Lad;
Mary, Bessie, James the Vain,
Charlie, Charlie, James again…
William and Mary, Anna Gloria,
Four Georges I II III IV, William and Victoria;
Edward seven next, and then
George the fifth in 1910;
Ned the eighth soon abdicated
Then George the sixth was coronated;
After which Elizabeth
And that’s the end until her death.

2012 update:
Now it’s Liz, then we’ll arrive . . .
At Charlie three, then William five.

Songs my childhood taught me 1: Rhymes from the schoolyard

Glossophilia is taking a trip down memory lane with a series of posts on childhood songs and rhymes: when we skipped in the school playground, bounced on our parents’ knees, twisted our tongues around gob-stopping riffs, learned our lessons with nifty mnemonics, and recited — delighted — silly nonsense.

Remember the days of the old schoolyard? If you’re a grown-up boy, you probably just remember the footie and the fisticuffs more than anything else. But we girls will never forget our hours and hours of hand-clapping and skipping-rope sessions, the longer the better, with no-one ever tripping the rope or missing a beat, breathlessly counting, and chanting the rhymes and songs — often pretty rude — that gave it all reason, shape and momentum … Continue reading →

Poetry in Motion: “Voyager” by Mary Ruefle

Seen on the C train, NYC subway.

Writers on writing

Want to become a writer? Need some tips or advice? Check out these words of wisdom from the experts …

Write what should not be forgotten.
— Isabel Allende

Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs–no regular hours, so many temptations!
— Elizabeth Bishop

First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!
— Ray Bradbury

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
— Truman Capote

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
— Anton Chekhov

I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because when two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.
— Agatha Christie

Writing is an adventure.
— Winston Churchill

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

My task…is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see. That – and no more – and it is everything.
— Joseph Conrad

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
— Joseph Conrad

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.
— Michael Crichton

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
— William Faulkner

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

You have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without conscience, you are just one of many thousand journalists.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
— Gustave Flaubert

A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
— E. M. Forster

Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.
— E. M. Forster

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
— Robert Frost

There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.
— Robert Graves

It’s better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.
— L. P. Hartley

Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
— Lillian Helman

Easy writing makes hard reading.
— Ernest Hemingway

The first draft of anything is shit.
— Ernest Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
— Ernest Hemingway

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
— Aldous Huxley

Half my life is an act of revision.
— John Irving

Writing is not primarily escape, but use.
— Henry James

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
— Thomas Jefferson

It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.
— Samuel Johnson

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.
— Jack Kerouac

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
— Stephen King

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
— Stephen King

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
— Barbara Kingsolver

Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
— Rudyard Kipling

When genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.
— D.H. Lawrence

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
— Elmore Leonard

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
— Thomas Mann

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
— W. Somerset Maugham

Stick to the point.
— W. Somerset Maugham

Writing is its own reward.
— Henry Miller

I always do the first line well, but I have trouble with the others.
— Moliere

Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It’s like passing around samples of sputum.
— Vladimir Nabokov

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
— Frederich Nietzsche

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
— George Orwell

All a poet can do is warn.
— Wilfred Owen

There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.
— Terry Pratchett

The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
— Marcel Proust

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that’s how, and you do it the way the old English walnut tree puts forth leaf and fruit every year by the thousands. . . . If you practice an art faithfully, it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.
— William Saroyen

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
— Jean-Paul Sartre

And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.
— William Shakespeare

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.
— George Bernard Shaw

By writing much, one learns to write well.
— Robert Southey

Remarks are not literature.
— Gertrude Stein

In a writer there must always be two people – the writer and the critic.
— Leo Tolstoy

As for the adjective, when in doubt leave it out.
— Mark Twain

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.
— Mark Twain

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
— John Updike

I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
— Gore Vidal

The adjective is the enemy of the noun.
— Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire

I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
— E. B. White

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
— Oscar Wilde

I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.
— P. G. Wodehouse

A woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction.
— Virginia Woolf

Inside every fat book is a thin book trying to get out.
— Unknown

March

“March is the month of expectation,
The things we do not know,
The Persons of Prognostication
Are coming now.
We try to sham becoming firmness,
But pompous joy
Betrays us, as his first betrothal
Betrays a boy.”
— Emily Dickinson, XLVIII

The cock is crowing,
The stream is flowing,
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter,
The green field sleeps in the sun;
The oldest and youngest
Are at work with the strongest;
The cattle are grazing,
Their heads never raising;
There are forty feeding like one!
Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated,
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill;
The Plowboy is whooping-anon-anon:
There’s joy in the mountains;
There’s life in the fountains;
Small clouds are sailing,
The rain is over and gone!
— William Wordsworth, March

Very old are the woods;
And the buds that break
Out of the brier’s boughs,
When March winds wake,
So old with their beauty are—
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.
Very old are the brooks;
And the rills that rise
Where snow sleeps cold beneath
The azure skies
Sing such a history
Of come and gone,
Their every drop is as wise
As Solomon.

Very old are we men;
Our dreams are tales
Told in dim Eden
By Eve’s nightingales;
We wake and whisper awhile,
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields
Of amaranth lie.
— Walter de la Mare, All That’s Past

Where did Gabriel get a lily,
In the month of March,
When the green
Is hardly seen
On the early larch?
Though I know just where they grow,
I have pulled no daffodilly
Where did Gabriel get a lily,
In the month of March?
Could I bring the tardy Spring
Under Her foot’s arch,
Near or far,
The primrose star,
Should bloom with violets, — willy-nilly.
Where did Gabriel get a lily,
In the month of March?
— Grace James, in Country Life

“Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty.”
— William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

“Indoors or out, no one relaxes in March, that month of wind and taxes, the wind will presently disappear, the taxes last us all the year.”
— Ogden Nash

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

The Waters of March

A stick, a stone, it’s the end of the road
It’s the rest of a stump, it’s a little alone

It’s a sliver of glass, it is life, it’s the sun
It is night, it is death, it’s a trap, it’s a gun

The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush
The knot in the wood, the song of a thrush

The wood of the wind, a cliff, a fall
A scratch, a lump, it is nothing at all

It’s the wind blowing free, it’s the end of the slope
It’s a beam, it’s a void, it’s a hunch, it’s a hope

And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It’s the end of the strain, It’s the joy in your heart

The foot, the ground, the flesh and the bone
The beat of the road, a slingshot’s stone

A truckload of bricks in the soft morning light
A shot of a gun in the dead of the night

A mile, a must, a thrust, a bump,
It’s a girl, it’s a rhyme, it’s a cold, it’s the mumps
.
The plan of the house, the body in bed
And the car that got stuck, it’s the mud, it’s the mud

A float, a drift, a flight, a wing
A hawk, a quail, oh, the promise of spring

And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It’s the promise of life, it’s the joy in your heart (repeat)

A point, a grain, a bee, a bite
A blink, a buzzard, a sudden stroke of night

A pin, a needle, a sting, a pain
A snail, a riddle, a wasp, a stain

A snake, a stick, it is John, it is Joe
A fish, a flash, a silvery glow

The bed of the well, the end of the line
The dismay on the face, it’s a loss, it’s a find

A spear, a spike, a point, a nail
A drip, drip, drip, drop, the end of the day

And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It’s the promise of life in your heart, in your heart (repeat)

the end of the road, a little alone

A sliver of glass, a life, the sun
A knife, a death, the end of the run

And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It’s the promise of life, it’s the joy in your heart

The waters of March,

And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It’s the promise of life, it’s the joy in your heart

The waters of March

— a Brazilian song composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrmcSJGvz4s

The odor of mendacity, the kindness of a lie

Deceit is like love: it weaves its way into so much of the drama of our lives, and rare is the writer or thinker who doesn’t have something to say about it, whether in truth or fiction, in jest or with indignation. It lay at the heart of two recent dramatic productions I saw — a play on Broadway and an episode of a TV series. (By the way, isn’t it strange that we tend to watch something on TV but we see something on the stage? And similarly, we only ever tell a lie, but we sometimes speak the truth?)

Mendacity is an overt and powerful theme in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Big Daddy and his favored son, Brick, grapple painfully and eloquently with the lies that underpin and darken their relationships — with each other, with their respective wives, with Brick’s late best friend, all against the backdrop of a grand family deceit concerning Big Daddy’s ill health. “There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity …You can smell it. It smells like death,” Big Daddy growls. “Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.”

Back in a different time and place, between the wars in England’s countryside, where aristocrats and their servants tiptoe around each others’ lives, Downton Abbey‘s latest episode sets the scene for a different kind of lie: from an honest, reluctant and principled doctor in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy. Only a brave untruth from him, it seems, can start to repair the relationship between two grieving parents, and the Dowager Countess (played by the magnificent Maggie Smith) is determined to coax that lie from his lips. “‘Lie’ is so unmusical a word,” she argues calmly in the face of his protestations. And so the kind deceit is spoken, to profoundly moving and harmonious effect.

Here is what some of the great writers and philosophers of our time have said about the act and art of lying.

“History is a set of lies agreed upon.” — Napoleon Bonaparte

“Perhaps we have been guilty of some terminological inexactitudes.” — Winston Churchill

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” — Benjamin Disraeli

“Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky

“No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.” — Abraham Lincoln

“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” — Abraham Lincoln

“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing.
And he vows his passion is,
Infinite, undying.
Lady make note of this —
One of you is lying.”
— Dorothy Parker

“Falsehood is worse in kings than beggars.” — William Shakespeare, Cymbeline

“How subject we old men are to this vice of lying.” — William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part II

“A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies.” — Alfred Tennyson

“Anything is better than lies and deceit!” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” — Mark Twain

“The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.” — Mark Twain, On the Decay of the Art of Lying

“Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.” — Oscar Wilde

“Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.” — Oscar Wilde

Happy Birthday, Pride and Prejudice

200 years ago, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice — one of the most seminal and well-loved books in English literature — was published. The actual date of publication isn’t clear, but the author had her own copy of the novel in her hands on January 27, 1813 and the Morning Chronicle announced that it was “Published this Day” on January 28.

To celebrate the occasion, here are just a few of Austen’s words of timeless wit and wisdom expressed in her most famous work.

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”

“Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride– where these is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation.”

“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

“It is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are about to pass your life.”

“Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.”

“Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.”

“What delight! What felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?”

Spraint and fewmets

Warning: don’t read this over lunch, or any other meal. Save it for the next time you’re playing Balderdash, the Dictionary Game, or any of those parlor games involving obscure words and unlikely definitions.

An earlier post (https://glossophilia.org/?p=1375) examined terms of venery, ie. nouns of multitude used to name groups of particular animals. Now let’s take a look at words used to name the ‘output’ of particular animals. Yes, there are a few, and understandably most of the names describe certain types or categories of animal waste that have been put to good use by humans, ie. as fertilizers or sources of fuel; it stands to reason that anything that man has to use, handle, distribute, clean up or step in on a regular basis is going to get its own name eventually. (There is a claim — now widely disputed — that the Inuit have multiple words for snow, because of the Eskimos’ extensive knowledge and use of this natural product.) But a few of these animal dropping monikers are peculiar. Why would anyone ever need a word to describe the excrement of an otter, or of a leaf beetle?

Here are the names I’ve found so far; please contribute to the comments section below if you know of any others.

General, especially in wild carnivorous animals: scat
Cattle: (bulk material) dung, ordure, (as fertilizer) manure, (of grazing animals, esp. for fertilizers) tath; (individual droppings) cow pats, cowpies, meadow muffins, buffalo chips, (esp. when burned as fuel) bodewash*
Deer (and formerly other quarry animals), or hunted prey: fewmets (an old English word that describes the feces of a hunted animal by which the hunter can identify it; fewmets are the only evidence of an animal’s existence, before it has been seen itself); see also below
Otter: spraint
Seabirds or bats (in large quantity): guano
Herbivorous insects, such as caterpillars and leaf beetles: frass
Earthworms, lugworms: castings
Horses: manure, road apple
Fossils: coprolite
Dragons and other mythical creatures: fewmets

I’ve deliberately avoided the vast and sometimes colorful vocabulary devoted to human waste, since it seems a little crass for this forum. But there’s no shortage of words both formal/medical and colloquial/vulgar to describe it, and if you really feel the need to indulge your curiosity, there’s a whole web site devoted to slang names for both the product and the process: the “Poop Thesaurus” can be found at http://www.heptune.com/poopword.html.

You might also (inexplicably) want to read poetry about it: here’s a short anthology of works on this unseemly subject:
“Ode on the Commode” by Jack Butler
“Excrement” by Alan Ginsberg
“On the Rectum of Peacocks” by Gabriel Gudding
“****: An Essay on Rimbaud” by Thom Gunn
“The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers”
– Ernest Hemingway
“An Epiphany” – X.J. Kennedy
“Holy Shit” – Galway Kinnell
“The Excrement Poem” – Maxine Kumin
“Feces” – J.D. McClatchy
“Yam” – James Merrill
“I Get a Feeling” – Liam Rector
“The Dung Pile” – Peter Streckfus
“The Beautiful Bowel Movement” – John Updike

* Here is an explanation of the origins of the word bodewash on a web site about Canadian words:

http://www.billcasselman.com/canadian_food_words/manitoba_words.htm

“Bodewash” warmed many an early Manitoba settler. This term for dried buffalo dung used as a fuel was borrowed from the Canadian French of fur trappers where it appeared-at first humorously-as bois de vache ‘cow wood’ and also in the more refined phrase bois des prairies ‘prairie wood.’ Buffalo chips or cow chips were both called bodewash, which is a direct Englishing of bois de vache that shows up in the rural Manitoba folk saying “squished flatter ‘n a bodewash chip.” Anyone who could find the chips of buffalo dung used them, since there was little wood available. Dried cattle burns with a heavy odour, while buffalo chips are relatively odourless and were in plentiful supply before the vast herds were slaughtered.”