Jounceling in the Derbiss

A Half Century after Kitty Hawk, one of aviation medicine's major problems – the Transoceanic Syndrome, characterized by paralytic pernicious boredom – remains only partly solved. Neither light reading nor small talk will help on a long flight, for the very adjectives "light" and "small" show that these are petty weapons soon worn out. There is only one escape: sleep. But how to attain it in an upright Z-position which can be changed only to three increasingly excruciating angles? Liquor is cheap aloft and effective for a time, of course, but on a really long jump there comes the inevitable headachy insomnia twice as bad as before. Dramamine was a promising drug, but laboratory-bound chemists worked on it until they produced a "clean" pill without what they thought were undesirable side effects, that is, the tendency to knock the patient out for a few hours of blessed repose.

The air traveler, however, is not completely without resource. For him who must fly, I can recommend any philology book set in small type and replete with passages such as:

The primitive voiceless mutes pass in Gothic into the corresponding aspirates, the primitive voiced mutes into the corresponding voiceless mutes, and the primitive voiced aspirates into the corresponding voiced mutes.

Aided by a moderate nip from the sky lounge, a few learned lines on the laws of language will overcome all but the most stubborn cases of aerial insomnia. Of course, the subject need not be philology. It can be epistemology, eschatology or 19th Century economics. Any abstruse subject will do so long as it fulfills two conditions: (1) it must be written in an almost-but-not-quite incomprehensible jargon; and (2) it must be the kind of science whose mastery you've always promised yourself as soon as you found the time. One precaution: you must not really become interested. To want to be interested is all right, even imperative, but to become truly interested is disastrous. You are then doomed to sleepless hours of watching your feet swell over your shoe tops.

I issue this warning because I myself am in need of a new anodyne. Philology's opiate qualities were destroyed for me by my seatmate on a flight from Paris to New York. He was a GI, homesick for the prairie he had left a year before. He was the chummy type, and from the takeoff he hit the right droning note. Half listening to his monolog and half reading my good gray book, I had passed the evening in intermittent unconsciousness. And then the Lone Ranger brought the science of language to life for me forever by saying: "Finally I managed to get me some good eats in France when I remembered that the French for filet mignon was châteaubriand." I was hooked. Philology is real, and the historical process it studies was hard at work right at my elbow. I became a wakeful witness to the mauling and pummeling that shapes our language.

"When I left camp for home," he said, "on my way through France I vowed to treat myself to the best them foreigners had. I was going to stay at the King George Sank the Fifth Hotel and drink champagne wine all day. But first buck out of the chute, me and the management fell out. I checked in a mite early and the room wasn't even made up yet. They was derbiss every whichaway."

"Derbiss?" I mused. "Derbiss? Ah, yes, (continued on page 102) joun'cel·ing in the der'biss (continued from page 83) the Naturalization of the Loan Word."

Words are generally fitted into the sound pattern of the borrowing language to the point where they cannot be distinguished from native words . . .

and, apparently, debris had undergone a desert change in the Southwestern air.

I had read elsewhere . . .

The formative system of the language has become greatly restricted. If a new word is wanted, instead of producing it from elements already existing in English, we must often go to the Latin or Greek . . .

and, sure enough, the Academician of the Airways continued with: "The manager tried to get smart with me, but I don't Cato to nobody."

An example of borrowing from the classical to make a new word? An allusion to the austere old Roman's hatred of foreign pomp? Hard to say on short inspection. Other speech elements in his later discourse suggest that this formation may owe more to the creative process proposed by Lewis Carroll, the constructing of portmanteau words to combine two meanings in one word – slithy for slimy and lithe; mimsy for miserable and flimsy. Did we have here a case of Cato for cater to and kowtow to? His use of the neologism in the negative supports this latter conclusion. I had to leave the problem for later analysis because he was rushing along, scattering philological derbiss in his wake.

"I was bushed. When I was a dough-foot, I got the very-coarse veins in the legs and so they put me in the mechanized calvary, but all that jounceling around them lousy European roads just swole 'em worse, so as soon as this little frog backed outen the room, I taken off my shoes and I woulda thrun myself in the sack, but I reined up. I remembered I had on my last clean uniform, and I wasn't fixing to go out on no sightseeing in Paris all bed-raggled."

By now I was in a fever. The guy was a regular mine for a philologist. No, not a mine, a spewing volcano. I was frantically scribbling in my notebook.

"Mechanized calvary. . . ." That's more in the province of poetry than of philology. One pictures the painful jounceling (is it onomatopoeia, or a portmanteau of jouncing and mangling?) as the delicate leg veins swell and coarsen in protest. A Golgotha on wheels.

And consider bed-raggled. I could see that I had to do with a master image-maker, one of those daring experimentalists who have not shackled the imagination with nit-picking grammatical purism. Even after a year in Germany, his unfettered spirit rose above the prefix be-as a Germanic morpheme operative in English in lineal descent from Anglo-Saxon. He had not been stationed in Iceland, and so it is unlikely that he had traced the evolution of the Old Norse dralla to its present form of draggle as a frequentative of drag. To him leaped the vision of a last clean uniform all raggled (portamanteau of rag and rumpled) by rolling on a bed. Bed-raggled clothes simply looked as though they had been slept in.

"I coulda had the maid mash out a few clothes for me," he said, "but I ain't never been much for having servant. When somebody waits on me it makes me wreathe inside. Especially a lady. I won't even let my mom lawn the grass when I'm home."

"Lawn the grass" is a refreshing and reassuring sign that among the yeomanry, unbeknownst to Madison Avenue and the Pentagon, the people are still using the potent Functional Change in the hardy old way. When my seatmate, and presumably his kin and friends, want to loss a noun into the verb spot in a sentence, they do it without pretentious piddling. I'm glad his mom doesn't lawnize the grass.

"I wanted to see Paris, but I couldn't walk because the bus from Germany I come in was one of them doom cars, and I had give myself the back evil."

"Smoky visions of a devil's chariot riding through nightmare landscapes came to my mind. "Doom car?" I asked.

"Sure. You know. With a big glass doom. That's how I came to get the back evil, stretching and rubbernecking at the sights."

"Back evil. . . ." Well, what, after all, is mal à la têle . . . mal de mer . . . mal au coeur? I made a note to try to trace this construction back to his ancestor's first impact with the Norman conquerors who probably sprinkled plenty of mal au dos around the English country-side.

"The cab I caught was the most rambleshacky old tub I ever seen."

The image-maker was back at work. Rambleshacky for a French taxicab is worthy of moving into the speechways. There is nothing more like a shack which rambles than an ancient G7 Renault colored the same dull maroon as the abandoned cabins falling apart among the shrinking cotton acres of the Southwest.

"We tawdled along down the Champs till this dame run across in front of us. She bunked her toe on the curb and fell. I shoved a forkful of that funny money at the cabby and humped out to help her up. She had skunt herself up some, so I taken her to one of them little chairs and tables they clumber up the sidewalks with. I told the flunky to fetch us some coe-nee-ack, but he dumbed up on me and so the kid had to get through to him in their talk. I taken a good look at her.

"She was mighty quiet, just sipping the grapejack and smiling at me. Seeing as how I don't speak nothing real good, excusing English. I had to try her on that. She acted like she understood all right, so I started in on the snow job – about my daddy being a rich oilman and me being a big spender just out of Harvard College and only in the Army just for kicks.

"I was making good time, I thought, and just getting to the part about being rich and lonesome in the big city when she laughs and puts her hand on my arm and says, 'Tell me, Daddy, how did you know I was also a college grad?' in this Yankee-type English just as good as you or me. This kid was an American all the time, see?

"We talked some more and drunk a lots more hooch, but somehow my snow job didn't go across." He fell silent, staring glumly at his glittering boots. "She was a sweet kid, but somehow our twains never met."

He shoved his hands into his pants pockets, pushed his overseas cap over his eyes and fell instantly asleep, only mildly troubled by the ache of what might have been.

He fell instantly asleep, but not I. Philology as an opiate was finished. I lived that [light out by sorting my notes till dawn, but I have a flight to Australia coining up. For most of two days I shall be seated in a space smaller than a mop closet. For two days I'll not lie down even for a second, and I'll stand only for a few short moments.

But do not despair. I have found a volume of one of the splinter sects of psychoanalysis, a subject I've always meant to learn more about. My book contains page after page of prose like this:

Reality is revealed as uncoupled with amuialily. . . . The unconscious periodicity of the rliylitmus of certain paradigmatic gestures reveals preoccupation with the gyiieolatry inherent in archaic hicrological practice.

Very promising. I don't think I'll be troubled on the flight, unless, of course. I sit next to a girl whose paradigmatic gestures reveal an unconscious impulse to ritualistic adultery in small crowded places.