HAPAX LEGOMANIA OF LOVE

by Steven Steinbock

Nate is now officially a high school student. When he came home on his second day of school I asked if he had any homework. He answered, “Bresheet Un, Deux, Trois.” I found this curious. His answer was half Hebrew and half French. He doesn’t take French and they don’t teach Hebrew in the Yarmouth public schools.

“Seriously?” I asked, silently translating his response as “Genesis one, two, three.”

“Yeah,” he answered. “It’s for social studies.”

“Cool,” I said. Curiouser and curiouser. I thought they’d effectively outlawed using the word “Bible” in public places.

“We have to read it and then make notes of anything it tells us about the culture that wrote it.”

Skipping ahead until after dinner, Nate welcomed the chance to have his father go over the first three chapters of the Bible with him.

He read one passage, “a wind from God hovered over the depths.” “That’s weird,” he said. “Why does it say, ‘wind from God’? Shouldn’t it be ‘spirit of God’?”

I pointed out that translations vary because any translation is at best an approximation of what the original text said, especially when you’re dealing with a three-thousand year-old text. Ancient Israelites didn’t make a distinction between “wind,” “spirit,” and “breath.” The Hebrew word “ru’akh” means all three.

“When a translator comes across a word he hasn’t seen before,” I explained to Nate, “he’ll compare it to other instances of the same word, and try to figure out the meaning from context. Sometimes, however, translators come across words that occur only once in the entire Bible. Then they’re stuck. They guess based on context, and based on similar words from other languages. But they’re really only guessing. You know what that’s called? It’s a hapax legomenon.”

“A what?”

“Hapax Legomenon. A word that only appears once.”

“Cool word. Write that down for me.”

I did.

This was before I read Rob Lopresti’s “Tune It or Die” column from the same day. I always liked the Steve Miller song, “The Joker,” but was frankly so caught up with the “midnight toker” line that I never gave a second thought to the “Pompatus of Love.” Like Rob, I enjoy reading Cecil Adams’ website and I have several of Adam’s books. Little did I know that “pompatus” was a hapax (although Adams didn’t use that term), and that it was based on the mis-hearing of another hapax: “puppetutes.” Put that in your spell-checker and toke it at midnight!

Stranger than Fiction

On the same day that Rob was reading about Steve Miller, I was almost hit by a runaway wheelchair. It’s one of those things that you only expect to see in cartoons or Monty Python sketches, but this was for real! I was going north on Main Street, heading home. Just as I passed Andy’s Handy Store, I happened to glance to the left just in time to see a wheelchair (empty) gliding out of a nursing home parking lot and into the street. I stopped in time. But that’s sure not something you see every day.

To follow up on Jon Breen’s comment to Rob the other day, it is okay for a runaway wheelchair set a complex plot into motion, but it would be a pretty cheap trick to have a runaway wheelchair save our hero by knocking the gun out of a villain’s hand at the climax of a story. Don’t even consider solving a crime with a runaway hapax legomenon.

Speaking of which, the title of my weekly column, Bandersnatches, was, to my knowledge, a hapax legomenon (that is, until I used it again, and by the fourth time I used it, it had become a tetrakis legomenon). If anyone is concerned, “bandersnatch” is not a dirty word. It is a runaway hapax from Lewis Carroll’s poem, “Jabberwocky,” composed of no fewer than two dozen hapax legomena.

So snicker-snack until next week, and until then, keep reading.