The readies, by bob brown  (Page 2/22)

I operate on words. I gild ’em and then geld ’em (Ref. classical Quatre-arts Ball costume.) it’s my specialty. I’ve been at it twenty-five years and never lost an Upper Case. For 8,890 nights I have lugged bulky, bulgy bundles of words home to dissect by violet ray before I went to bed. I get out my micro and my scope, breathe mystically 26 Abracadabras, one for each letter in the alphabet, and go to it with nothing up my rolled sleeves.

In my laboratory I have found that long-winded maundering words like Pseudepigraphous just go Puff when pricked with a pin, and pompous, prolix, sesquipedalian, Johnsonian inflations like infundibuliform when lightly poked in the bladder instantly inspissate and whortle down the funnel.

View a high-resolution scan of the original page.

Nearly all clearly classical words fray easily, some wooly ones show undeniable traces of cotton and are a scant twenty-seven letters wide. Many make-believe altiloquential words merely shiver, shrivel up and subside when dropped into a specimen jar of alcohol, but most jolly ones expand slightly and agitate the liquor like little ivory-toothed nigger boys diving for pennies. Weevil words bore. Wassail ones make whoopee. The assembled or modernly compiled word which stood the acid test best was the familiar five-legged one OKMNX.

But even for the sake of weariness I will not recount more of my recondite research. I only wanted that you should carry away from this chatty reading tonight the picture of a serious little word-wonderer at work among his retorts and cabalistic paraphernalia (Ref. to Rodin’s The Tinker) dissecting words for you, TeeTerToTTering on Their T-bones, Playing PoPeep with sheePish PPPs, Oozing thrOugh adenOidal OOs, Zipping in Zig-Zags with the Zany Zeds.

Words and I are one. (Formula WW + I =1)

I have only to bend my finger in a beckon and words, birds of words, hop on it, chirping.

There are midwives of the word and word specialists. To perform a Caesarian, a specialist is required. To deliver a norm head-or-foot-first all that’s needed is a midwife.

Only savages and specialists bite off the umbilical cord, midwives invariably hack at it with dull rusty knives at so much the yard-hour.

View a high-resolution scan of the original page.

H o c h a c h t u n g s v o l l is a good Valkyrian German greeting, but it’s long on letters, sort of teratological, like a medieval turtle lubbering along with its hard case carved full of mossy initials. Skoll (Scandinavian) or Ole (Spanish) is preferable, or just Skolle: (Scanspan), quaint and friendly, Volapuckish.

The pidgin English rendering of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be, that is the question”, into “Can do no can do. How fashion?” short-suits me.

I’ll take RSVP at its face value. INRI, YMCA, SPQR, WCTU (deriv. W. C.) and other four-letter words I am willing to leave entirely alone, without any amplification whatsoever.

Shortening words I understand better than dragging them out. Eftsoons”: linking letters in festoons I abhor. Underslung German dachshund, blown-up bumpy blimp, sausage words may be salivary to the starving mind but they’re enough to shatter my meticulous monocle. Temptation to new word-bunglers is to make meaningless mouthings like “Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination…"”; the formula of officialdom used for years on French Railway conductor’s tickets reads: “Decomposition de la Perception par Tarif"”, which is undoubtedly the key to much modern subconscious writing or unconscious humor.