Astounding Quakebuttock

I know that I'm not supposed to notice these things, but I do: Last night I returned to the low glow of my computer following two hours of delicious So You Think You Can Dance (yes, those dancers, those choreographers, that gorgeous-but-never-haughty Cat Deeley make me cry) to discover that my blog had had, shall we say, a swarm of visitors.

What in the world?, I wondered.

It became clear, upon further investigation, that a single term, "quakebuttock," had brought the masses to me. Quakebuttock, you read that right. Clearly somewhere out in the universe (not on MY TV show, mind you) the term had been used, and as I'd once and playfully written a post about the word (in a Roy Blount Jr. inspired entry called "Superior Persons"), I suddenly had people knocking at my door.

For a nanosecond, then, it's quakebuttock, a term which Peter Bowler has defined as "a nicely scornful word for coward," that puts me on the map. Not my books. Not my poems. Not my writing process entries. Not my photographs. Not my dancing. Not my thoughts. Nothing of the sort. What, indeed, have I been thinking all this time? What have I been doing?

My considered advice of the day is then this: Want to move from beneath the veil of the literarily obscure? Use quakebuttock freely in whatever you write. Mutter it under your breath. Erect a cathedral in its name. Prepare the cheese and crackers.

For the record: The photograph here was taken on a cold winter day at the New Jersey shore, just ahead of a lemmings moment. None of these people are quakebuttocks, for sure. Today's photo-type pairing is about opposites, not similars.

On another note: I'll be at the Doylestown Bookshop tomorrow night. I will say the word thrice in a row, if you come.

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Superior Persons

Since 3:30 AM this morning (with one bloggable exception), I have been amusing myself with Roy Blount Jr.'s Alphabet Juice, the subtitle for which begins (but does not end) with: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof...

(Other Blount subtitle words include but are not limited to "innards," "pips," "tinctures," and "savory.")

I'm up to the letter "G," and already I have been willingly barraged by a Gertrude Stein quote with actual purchase ("It is not clarity that is desirable but force."), a top Urbandictionary.com definition for book ("an object used as a coaster, increase the height of small children, or increase the stability of poorly built furniture"), and an admonition (well, I took it that way): "Babble is the precursor to speech, babel the collapse of it. Full circle."

In short, I've been delighted.

I love these books-about-words books and the cunning outsized witticisms of their authors. Take Karen Elizabeth Gordon, who parses frequently confused words with fashionable fantasy. Here, for example, we are given the lowdown on unconscious versus unconscionable:

The sandman, sure of Miranda's unconscious condition and his powers of somnolent seduction, was less successful than he assumed as he tiptoed from her bedside: she was merely faking sleep before returning to The Hunted Reticule and its glittering denouement.

Come on. You needed that. I know you did.

Finally, may I share with you a favorite word from The Superior Person's Book of Words? Which would be "procellous," meaning, "stormy, tempetuous." If you don't like that, I yield to you "quakebuttock," which is, according to author Peter Bowler, "a nicely scornful word for a coward."

Earlier this week, another outsized wit suggested that I could do with a tad more "harsh."

Do you think he was calling me a quakebuttock?

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