Wordcatcher (32 page)

One thing that stands for another
. A
metaphor
is a brief expression that compactly, often surprisingly, describes a thing as if it were something else. The word has survived almost intact from the Latin
metaphora
, a transferring of a word from its literal significance, in the fine definition of Skeats, and before that the Greek
metaphorein
, from
meta
, over, and
pherein
, to carry, bear across; hence, to transfer. The operative word here is
transfer
, whose modern sense dates from 1533, Middle French
metaphore
, to transfer from one context to another in a memorable way. Consider Raymond Chandler’s description in
Farewell, My Lovely
of Moose Malloy, who “looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” Shakespeare’s work fairly explodes with powerful metaphors, such as this one on aging, from Sonnet 73: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet bird sang…” As a kind of scavenger after
metaphors
, I find Jorge Borges’s reflections on “The Dark Night of the Soul,” by Saint John of the Cross, very moving: “After he had an unutterable experience, he had to communicate it somehow in
metaphors
.” In 2004 the new Athens subway, called
Metaphoros,
was completed just in time to carry fans across town to watch the various Olympic competitions. Some of them also used “transfers.”

A mishearing of a song lyric that leads to a fresh new meaning, generally humorous, sometimes poignant.
When she was a little girl the writer Sylvia Wright was listening to a mournful Scottish ballad, “The Bonny Earl of Murray,” when she thought she heard: “Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands / Oh Where hae you been? / They hae slay the Earl of Murray / And Lady
Mondegreen
.” Her mishearing of the last line, which is actually “And laid him on the green,” has spawned a modern generation of malapropisms in its name. Wright became smitten with the common and often witty mishearings in songs, poems, and speeches, and eventually
published
an essay about them in a 1954 article. Common
mondegreens
include “round John Virgin” (for “round yon Virgin,” from “Silent Night”) and “You and Me and Leslie” (for “you and me, endlessly” from the Rascals’ “Groovin’ “). And from the Beatle’s immortal “Michelle,” submitted by my niece of the same name: “A Sunday monkey bored playing piano songs,” her mishearing of the French
“Sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble”
(“These are words that go together well.”) For the record,
mondegreens
and word play do “go together well,” in any language.

“Shush! Silence!”
In Dr. Johnson’s time a
mome
was “a dull, stupid blockhead, a stock, a post,” an insult that derived from French
momon
, a game of dice played in masquerade in strict silence, from which comes
mum
, for silence. Eventually, we arrived at the marvelous injunction “
Mum’s
the word.” Or in Hamlet’s famous
mummery
, “Words, words, words; the rest is silence.” Its origins merge with that mythic Greek
mu
, closed lips, or as Skeats writes beautifully, “to express the least sound made with closed lips.” Roy Blount Jr. adds, “Since it’s not merely a sound,
mmmm
, but a word, to say it we have to move our lips.” Thus, the difference between
mum
and
mmmm
is the effort to break our silence. An imitative word from the gentle sounds
mum
or
mom
, once described as “used by nurses to frighten or amuse children, at the same time pretending to cover their faces.” Remarkably, most words for
mother
from around the world begin with exactly that
mmmm
sound, from a child’s satisfaction with her mother’s
mammary glands
and her earliest effort at baby talk,
mama
. Companion words from this
matrix
of mother-inspired words include
mumble; mummer,
a mask, buffoon, one who goes
a-mumming
; and
mummel
, a German bugbear. Typing all these
m
’s somehow summons “Hey, Baby (They’re Playing Our Song)” by the Buckinghams, a Sixties love song with the infectious chorus “
Mmm-my-my-my
baby,
mmmm-my-my-my
baby, hey, baby, hey, baby…”

To speak softly; to grumble.
One of the perennial favorite words on Top Ten Lists of the English language. Originally, however, it was an “expression of discontent by grumbling.” Slowly it evolved from Old French
murmure
and Latin
murmurare
, a hum, muttering, rushing—which may be marvelously imitative of what’s heard around a crackling fire, as evident in the Sanskrit
murmurah
. If you listen closely to
murmur
, you will hear traces and tones of “mother,” “myth,” “mystery,” and those “crackling fires,” all audible in the lowing sounds of the natural world, a babbling brook, a voice in an adjoining room, or, in the modern medical sense, the beats of an abnormal heart. The modern sense of “softly spoken words” is first recorded in 1674. My own first recollection of catching this word is from reading a book of essays by D. H. Lawrence in a bed-and-breakfast home in Dover, England, in 1980, and feeling the hair rise on my head when I read this: “I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast
murmur
of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.” The savvy English commentator on modern mythology Marina Warner writes, “In an inspired essay on ‘The Translators of
The Arabian Nights,
’ Jorge Luis Borges praises the
murmuring
exchanges of writers across time and cultures, and points out that the more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become.” Companion words include
whisper
, as beautifully expressed in the Talmud: “Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and
whispers
, ‘Grow, grow.’”

Murmur (Grow, Grow)

The personification of inspiration.
According to Greek thought, when a human being felt a sudden infusion of inspiration or sensed a presence, it was the breath of a god or goddess. Every expression in the arts was personified by the
Muses
, one for each of the nine arts. When the first artifacts
and books were collected, their new homes were called
museums
, such as the Alexandrian Library, which housed some 700,000 scrolls in its
Museion
, “The Place of the Muses.” The nine Greek goddesses of the arts were daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, from
mnemon
, mindful, and
mneme
, long memory. This is not so surprising, as Isaac Asimov points out, since all poetry was memorized in ancient times. Companion words include
music
, divinely inspired harmonies of sound, by which virtually all ancient Greek art and drama was accompanied;
mosaic
, pieces of memory; and
mnemonic
, the art of memory—all influenced by the flow of
mneme
, the continuing effect of past experience on an individual or the race. Memory’s shadow words are disturbing, like
amnesia
, not-knowing, forgetting, and the French
oubliette
, a room whose only opening is a ceiling, where a prisoner is immured in order to be forgotten. Also, the
quirky
Forgettery
, an invented word by Carl Sandburg, who recommended we build one so we wouldn’t be plagued with remembering things that are best forgotten.