Your Resident Verbivore Reporting from Word Land

Recently, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson delivered a resignation speech in which he said, “I’m sad to be giving up the best job in the world, but them’s the breaks.”

You may be shocked by “them’s the breaks,” which appears to be a grammar gaffe. But Johnson was consciously employing an ancient Greek figure of rhetoric called enallage, an effective mistake in grammar that drives home an argument.

On the night of June 21, 1932, in Madison Square Garden, Joe Jacobs, the manager for boxer Max Schmeling, heard the judges award a decision to Schmeling’s opponent, Jack Sharkey. Enraged, Jacobs seized the announcer’s microphone and shouted to the world this immortal enallage: “We was robbed!

To those who complain that “We was robbed!” is a grammatical atrocity I say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” another enallage and one considerably more effective than “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” In the immortal words of a Duke Ellington song, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

My favorite Greek figure of rhetoric is paraprosdokia. Derived from two Greek roots that mean “an unexpected outcome,” this figure of speech is characterized by a surprising left turn at the end of a statement that produces a humorous or dramatic effect, as in

• “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.” –Groucho Marx
• “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” -Irina Dunn
• “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” -Jim Brewer

• “He is a humble man, with much to be humble about..” –Winston Churchill
• “Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.” –Robert C. Gallagher

• “I can’t think of anything worse after a night of drinking than waking up next to someone and not being able to remember their name, or how you met, or why they’re dead.” –Laura Knightlinger

• Always remember that you are absolutely unique — just like everybody else –Margaret Mead

• “I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, We had an enormous feast; and then I killed them and took their land.” –Jon Stewart
• “When I die, I want to die like my grandfather did — peacefully in his sleep, not screaming like the passengers in the car he was driving.” –Bob Monkhouse

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California has the lowest English-language literacy rate in our nation. New York, Florida, Texas, and New Jersey follow. Back in 1450, in Mainz, Germany, Johannes Guttenberg, using moveable type, invented the printing press. Now that books could be mass produced, reading was no longer the sole purview of clergy and other scholars. Books became available to a vast public. Yet our great state stands at only 77 percent literacy. Nearly one quarter of us are unable to read this newspaper.

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Word is an autological word, one that expresses a property that it also possesses itself. That is, word is itself a word. Most words aren’t what they signify. For example, book isn’t a book, and there isn’t anything especially happy about happy. Preposition isn’t a preposition, and sentence isn’t a sentence.

Words such as big and monosyllabic turn out to be the opposite of what they mean. Big isn’t big at all, and, although monosyllabic refers to words of but a single syllable, monosyllabic is composed of five syllables. But pentasyllabic, also made of five syllables, is autological. as is oxymoron, composed of two Greek roots that mean “a sharp dullness,” which is itself an oxymoron.

Here’s a line-up of more of my favorite autological words. Can you identify why each one is self-referential?:

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On Thursday, September 22, starting at 1 pm, I’ll be presenting An Afternoon of Language & Laughter at the Rancho Bernardo Library, 17110 Bernardo Center Drive, 858 538 8163. Free and worth every penny. I’d love to meet you there.