A novel with a key -- roman à clef

from www.wordsmith.org

roman à clef (ro-mahn ah KLAY) noun, plural romans à clef
A novel that depicts (usually famous) real people and events under the guise of fiction.
[From French roman à clef, literally, a novel with a key.]

All fiction has a grain of truth, but a roman à clef has it by the bushel. Roman à clef dates back to seventeenth century France. In the beginning, a roman à clef really did have a key that was published separately. In these times, you can simply go on the Internet and search using Google.
An example of roman a clef is Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. These days the term can apply to any work of fiction, for example, a movie, not just a novel. A blend term "faction" has also been used, after "fact"presented as "fiction".

"[Geraldine] Brooks has borrowed details not just from Little Women but from the story of Alcott's own extraordinary father, Bronson Alcott, a man whose free-thinking, utopian views were all downplayed in his daughter's roman à clef."
-- Michelle Griffin; March; Sydney Morning Herald (Australia); Apr 2, 2005.

Ode to Roger Staubach ... Anchors Aweigh

On Saturday Navy beat Notre Dame 46-44 in triple overtime. It was the first time the Midshipmen had beaten the Irish since 1963, when Jolly Roger Staubach was the Navy quarterback.

In honor of the occasion, here are a few words about Navy's ever-stirring fight song.

To "weigh anchor" is to bring an anchor aboard a vessel in preparation for departure. The phrase "anchor's aweigh" is an acknowledgment to the commander that this procedure has been completed.

"Anchors Aweigh" was composed in 1906 by a longtime Naval Academy bandmaster named Charles Zimmerman and Alfred Hart Miles '07. It was first played during the 1906 Army-Navy game at Franklin Field, Philadelphia. There have been many lyrics over the years, but the most commonly heard are from the current verse 2:

Anchors Aweigh my boys
Anchors Aweigh
Farewell to college joys (or "Farewell to foreign shores")
We sail at break of day day day day
Through our last night ashore
Drink to the foam
Until we meet once more
Here's wishing you a happy voyage home!

Click to hear "Anchors Aweigh."

Expression from mythology: dragon's teeth

dragon's teeth (DRAG-uhns teeth) noun
Seeds of discord. Usually used in the form "to sow dragon's teeth": to take an action that leads to future conflict.
[In Greek mythology, the Phoenician prince Cadmus killed a dragon and sowed its teeth. From those teeth sprang an army of men who fought eachother until only five were left.]

"As some would tell it, the Court of Appeals sowed dragon's teeth five years ago in its landmark holding that a cable television provider' late fees were too high."
-- Peter Geier; Despite Negative Image, Class-Action Lawyers Perform Important Job For Clients; The Daily Record (Baltimore, Maryland); Dec 10, 2004.

Acronyms, initialisms, and where those accents came from

We all know that RSVP, the letters at the bottom of invitations, stand for "Répondez, s’il vous plaît," or, "Respond, if you please."
Although this makes it redundant to put "Please RSVP" at the bottom of an invitation, redundancy in the name of politeness can be forgiven.
RSVP is an acronym, which is a word made up of initial letters, as in scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) and laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation).
By the strictest definition, RSVP is an initialism, because the letters are pronounced as letters, as in FBI, not as a word, as in scuba and laser.
Some dictionaries don't draw this distinction, but plainly these are two different kinds of words, and in practical usage the biggest distinction is that initialisms are written as upper case letters (as they are here), while acronyms, once we get used to them, are often written in lower case. (This is why it's funny when Dr. Evil, having been out of circulation in the decades that "laser" became a part of our everyday vocabulary, uses those quotation marks in the air around "laser beam" to indicate that he is using a highly technical acronym.)

The discussion of RSVP brings up two other fossils in our language:

1. Those accents, one over the é and one over the î. What are they for? An amateur linguistic explanation is that they stand for "s"es that were long ago dropped from the French language. This goes back to 1066, when the Normans, a bunch of Vikings who had settled in Normandy and taken up French , sailed over and conquered England. They sounded their "s"es, so the French words in our language have those "s"es in them, like respond, please, forest (forêt), and many others. Back in France, in the centuries after 1066, the French took to dropping their "s"es--perhaps the way Bostonians drop their "r"s (as in "Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd").
2. Why do we call capital letters "upper case" and small letters "lower case"? This is a printing term, from the early days of movable type. The printer kept the big letters in the upper case, and the small letters, which he used much more often, in the lower case, where he didn't have to reach as far. (This is akin to the bartending term "top shelf" for the most expensive liquors. To this day, bartenders keep the priciest brands on the top shelf, where they have to reach less often than for the cheaper brands.)

A word for Smithers and Eddie Haskell -- sycophant

sycophant n. a servile, self-seeking flatterer; a suck-up; a brown-nose; an a**-kisser
From the Greek word sykophantes and Latin word sycophanta for an informer or swindler.
Interesting that these words come down to us virtually unchanged over thousands of years. Perhaps sycophants have pretty much remained the same in different ages and cultures, so the word has remained the same as well.

The character Mr. Burns in The Simpsons would be lost without his trusty sycophant, Smithers.

sycophantic adj. of, relating to, or characteristic of a sycophant: fawning, obsequious

"Is that a new vacuum cleaner, Mrs. Cleaver?" asked the ever-sycophantic Eddie Haskell, adding, "Isn't it wonderful what they're doing with modern conveniences these days?"

Over-use of the hyphenated-adjective rule?

Sunday's New York Times Magazine included the following sentence:
"[Bill] Hybels, founder of the Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, is very possibly the single-most-influential pastor in America . . ."

Are those hyphens necessary or correct per the hyphenated-adjective rule?
They are probably not necessary, since there would be no confusion if they were left out.
But do those three words truly comprise a single adjective? Rather, they are three adjectives modifying one another on their way to the noun.
We saw an example of this in a News Sentinel story about the faithful renovation of a 19th-century home: "John Roske lays brick using a special but expensive mortar most like the mortar found in the 1840s." No hyphens needed.
In the paragraph above, do we really need that hyphen between 19th and century?
In this case we would note the exception to the hyphenated-adjective rule, in which the hyphen is superfluous if the two or more words used before the noun as a single adjective are commonly used together, as in "major league baseball."

The river hardened into rock? Back to Rule No. 1 -- Every sentence gotta make sense!

A year ago we looked at the following sentence from the National Geographic with a portrait of the 3.3-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis baby girl on its cover:

"He doesn't know how the Dikika baby died, but the river must have rapidly buried the body in pebbles and sand, protecting it from scavengers and weather before gradually hardening into rock."

Yes, yes -- we know what the sentence meant to say. But it didn't say it!

We could put another "it" between "hardening" and "into," but that would make the sentence say that the river hardened the body of the Australopithecus afarensis into rock.

It would be better to say, "before it gradually hardened into rock."
But even with that fix, we're saying that the body hardened into rock.. It was just her bones and skull that were fossilized into rock. So why not say, ". . . before her bones were gradually fossilized into rock."?

Harbrace Chapter 1: Sentence Sense, begins with the rule: To think more clearly and write more effectively, understand how sentences work.
Writing a clear, precise sentence is an art, says Harbrace, and you can master that art by developing your awareness of what makes sentences work.

In Ruge Rules, Ferdinand E. Ruge states this as, "Every sentence must lend itself to logical analysis. In other words, every sentence gotta make sense!"

Finally, don't you think the A. afarensis baby looks like aerobics guru Richard (Sweatin' to the Oldies) Simmons?