Splanchnic!
After I
posted
about the appearance of the wonder word
splanchnic in an article in
Harper's, Kenny Easwaran wrote from
Berkeley to say that he recalled seeing a poster in which
splanchnic appeared among "about
forty generally unfamiliar words, together with little one-frame
cartoons 'defining' the words". His recollection was that the
frame for
splanchnic played
on the Yiddish sound of the word.
Yesterday he wrote to say that he'd tracked it down, and provided a
scanned-in copy for my delight. It's by the
New Yorker's wonderful Roz Chast,
and it came out in 2001 to advertise the first edition of the
New Oxford Dictionary of American English
(the second edition is now out, by the way).
NOAD's editor, Erin McKean, will
supply me with a high-quality image and approach Chast for permission
to link to it here. While I'm waiting for this to happen, here's
a brief description of the
splanchnic
frame:
Frustrated man, at wit's end,
confronting a toaster that is not plugged in, cries out: "Why isn't
this working? Oh, WOE IS ME!!!"
Woman in background thinks to herself: "What a splanchnic."
Note that
splanchnic here is
a noun, while the real
splanchnic
is an adjective. The Yiddish flavor comes in part from the
-nic -- normally spelled -
nik in Yinglish, of course.
For the record, there are 36 frames. Easwaran's memory is pretty
damn good.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 11, 2005 07:53 PM