The October 1980 issue of Esquire ran a piece titled “What to Think about Gravity’s Rainbow” by the poet Terrill Shepard Soules. It’s not really a what to think piece, though (the title seems an editorial intervention), but rather a witty glossary.
“WHAT TO THINK ABOUT GRAVITY’S RAINBOW”
by Terrill Shepard Soules
VERY CLEVER.
THOMAS PYNCHON, AUTHOR, KEEPS A LOW PROFILE.
MAIN CHARACTER: TYRONE SLOTHROP.
FIRST LINE: “A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY.” NICE FIRST LINE.
LONG — 760 PAGES IN HARD-COVER.
BUZZWORDS: PIGS, PARANOIA, B MOVIES, SEX, NAZIS.
PUBLISHED 1973; EVERYONE WENT CRAZY.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, OF COURSE. PULITZER JUDGES LOVED IT, PULITZER TRUSTEES THOUGHT OBSCENE. ALSO INCOMPREHENSIBLE. NO PULITZER PRIZE. SOMETHING LIKE ULYSSES THAT WAY. A FREQUENT COMPARISON.
INSIDERS CALL IT RAINBOW. INSIDERS ARE INSIDERS BECAUSE THEY LOVE THE IDEA THAT
SOME RECLUSE (A CORNELL GRAD?) WROTE A 760-PAGE BOOK ABOUT PIGS AND PARANOIA. ALSO BECAUSE THEY KNOW SOME VERY EXTRAORDINARY WORDS FROM RAINBOW, LIKE THE ONES IN THE GLOSSARY BELOW (FROM THE HARD-COVER EDITION).
BOOK 1
Beyond the Zero
NARODNIK [p. 11]
From Russian narod, “people.” Intellectual trying to metamorphose peasant into revolutionaries. The Narodniki flourished in the late 1860s. In the late 1960s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activists were referred to as narodoniks. By show-offs.
PRETERITION, PRETERITE
[p. 15 and throughout]
A passing over. Preterition is the Fluke Cosmic, the doctrine that God in John Calvin’s breast (cf. the Jampere-phrenia in Alien) decreed that you and you and you are heavenbound no questions asked but We’re going to have to think about the rest of you — don’t get your hopes up.
MAFFICK [p. 17]
The founder of the Boy Scouts defended the garrison at Mafeking against the Boers for two hundred seventeen days. When the siege was raised, on May 17, 1900, London went crazy, and the jubilant celebratory maffick — it’s a verb! — was born. Here, part of Lieutenant Oliver “Tantivy” Mucker-Maffick’s moniker.
TANTIVY [p. 17]
Mucker-Maffick’s nickname. Means to gallop along, or a blast on a horn, or that headlong gallop itself.
LOVE-IN-IDLENESS [p. 22]
The perfect word for violet. Pynchon’s choice is dazzling. First, on a map of London there’s a star for each of Slothrop’s women, Slothrop “having evidently the time, in his travels among places of death, to devote to girl-chasing.” Second, the many stars are of many colors. Third, Slothrop gets the idea that the stars look like flowers. Now Viola tricolor, the flower in question, turns out to be a violet with yellow, white, and purple petals and several country names. The name our author finally selects enables him to pull off a genuine rampage-prose triple play: “and all over the place, purple and yellow as hickeys, a prevalence of love-in-idleness.”
CORDWAINERS [p. 27]
Means shoemakers, from Old French cordoanier, which hails from Spanish Cordoba, home of cordovan leather.
LASCAR [p. 34]
/LAS-cur/ An East Indian sailor.
FUMED OAK [p. 42]
Oak given so many whiffs of ammonia that it starts to look attractively weathered.
GILLIE [p. 43]
A gillie likes Scotsmen and deerstalking trips, does the guiding, does the cooking. Jessica is shouting.
DUCKBOARDED [p. 79]
Duckboards are what, in order not to walk in it, you lay across mud (especially mud that flows).
SAMPIRE [p. 80]
A squeeze seashore plant some people pickle. From Middle French (herbe de) Saint Pierre. Saint-Pierre-Saint-Pierre-sampire!
NACELLE [p. 87]
An enclosed structure on an airplane, one that protects crew or engine.
MERKIN [p. 95]
I am indebted to the 1976 OED Supplement for the euphemistic “intimate wig” and to a Random House dictionary for the definitive “false hair for the female pudenda.”
OUDE GENEVER [p. 104]
Old gin, particularly obsolete Dutch. Jenever means juniper, whose berries are what makes gin taste like gin. David Embury, the drinker’s doyen, pronounces Geneva, or Hollands, gin “excellent remedy for humbug” but goes on to acknowledge the quality of the “splendid old Hollands” that bears the name “Oorlam-zeer oude Genever.”
FACONNÉ [p. 107]
Q. What makes the wine-colored velvet Kate is wearing façonné? A. Designs, fancy little weaves.
SNAPHAAN [p. 109]
/SNAP-hahn/ (second syllable rhymes with John). Dutch snap-hammer. A flintlock, newfangled by comparison with a matchlock (in which a match flame, not a flint spark, ignites the charge). Van der Groov kills off the dodo with a snaphaan in the Extinction of the Dodo episode.
GREEN SICKNESS [p. 115]
Also known as chlorosis, the iron-deficiency anemia that turns pubescent girls’ skin green.
TETTER [p. 115]
Ringworm, herpes, eczema, pimples, pustules, blisters, impetigo, and something called milk-blotch.
ALMONDS IN THE EARS [p. 115]
Swollen glands. The almond-shaped then-swollen lymph nodes below the ears, back here the mastars.
AMBROTYPES [p. 115]
A Random House dictionary seems to have etymologically scooped its colleagues, who give ambrotypes Greek for immortal, as the word’s origin. But the Random House: “Named after James Ambrose Cutting (1814–1867), the inventor.” What Cutting invented was “a picture or positive made from a glass negative by combining it with a dark background.”
CAPESKIN [p. 171]
From Cape of Good Hope Province. A fancy leather, light and soft, technically known as hair sheepskin because it is made from the hide of sheep that grow hair, not wool.
CUBEB [p. 118]
The fruit of an East Indian pepper. “Tangy candied cubeb berries” have a sack-on in the Dumbfounding Sweets scene.
FINGER-STALLS [p. 119]
Protection for the banged, the infected finger. Made of horn, cloth, leather, or wood. Just fit right over the digit.
COMPLINE [p. 129]
/KOM-plin/ The hour that completes the canonical day; the service that follows vespers.
MACARONIC [p. 129]
Bit of a misprint, ironically enough, for macaroni. Rainbow being itself a kind of macro-macaroni. A macaroni song mixes foreign (Latin) words with words of the composer’s native tongue. A most joyful form.
WOODSHEDDING [p. 129]
To woodshed is to practice a musical instrument, in Rainbow’s case the voice, and to really work at it. The idea seems to be, ha ha, that a kid getting thrashed in the woodshed sounds like all those scales and hard passages.
CIOÈ [p. 132]
Italian for namely, as in that is. Pynchon uses it perfectly, too.
CAM-KNICKERS [p. 141]
A camisole-panties combination, cut along snugger lines than a chemise. Rainbow’s are black lace.
NOCTILUCA [p. 143]
Latin for moon. Literally, “night + shine.” Pynchon seems to have acquired the word for parts: it appears in a passage where the soul as thermite bomb makes the cold reaches of the night phosphoresce and shine-like noctilucent clouds, which glow in the dark about 275,000 feet up.
SCREEVER’S WOOD BOX [p. 145]
A screever is an artist who draws on sidewalks in chalk — with chalk, I am forced to say presumably, for or she stores in a wooden box.
FOURCHETTES [p. 150]
The strips along the sides of glove fingers, which connect the front sections to the back sections. As in “the fourchettes on a tattered Italian glove.” Quirks?
GYMANFA GANU [p. 171]
/gi: (as in give) MAHN-vah-gunny (as in sack)/ Also spelled cymanfa ganu. A Welsh singing festival, four-part harmony, thousands of voices per part, a rich, powerful, joyful noise. “Some unaccustomed wind… is bringing down the deep choral hum of American bombers in Gymanfa Ganu.”
BOOK 2
Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering
GUICHES [p. 186]
/GESH/ Curls over the ears or, as in Rainbow, on the cheeks. Very French.
FLIMSIES
[p. 201 and throughout]
Exceptionally thin paper to make carbon copies with.
QUARTERSTAFF [p. 207]
Quarterstaffs, or quarterstaves, were those six-(maybe eight-) foot-long poles folks had at one another with in Merry Men movies.
TREWS [p. 212]
Tight tartan trousers worn instead of a kilt. Trews and trousers both derive from the selfsame unpronounceable Scottish Gaelic word triubhas.
COMBROID [p. 217]
In Rainbow, tuna-faced.
GORODKI STICK [p. 226]
/gah-rawd-KEY/ (and trill that r a little)/ According to an old Russian friend, gorodki is the Russian national game, similar to but more elegant than bowling. The projectile is a pole, the bita. Concrete playing field fifteen by twenty-two meters. One to ten people on a team. Two teams. Gorodki sticks are the nine-inch cylinders arranged at the other end of the field in any of thirty-two figures (House, Envelope, Cannon, etc.). Eight sticks form House; fewer form Cannon. At game’s outset there’s a House formation and a House for you, both twelve meters downfield. You’ll throw your five-kilogram bat at the gorodki sticks. If you bust them all up, five points; the sticks are reassembled, and you throw again. With every throw, the figure — or what you must do to it — Gets more difficult. At one point, for example, you must take off only the two ceiling sticks of the House. Later, you must “open” the Envelope. Betting on gorodki is general and heavy. No one has ever thrown a perfect game.
PRANG [pp. 228, 615]
English slang for crash, a blunder by bombing, hit (something or someone) hard. “To nosedive” seems the sense in Rainbow: “If this show prangs, we’re going to see a national crisis.”
ENTRESOL [p. 231]
Mezzanine. From French entre, “between,” and sol, “floor.”
VENTURI [p. 231]
A short tube named for G. B. Venturi, the Italian physicist. Fluid hits the pinched middle of the tube and speeds up, at which point you can measure fluid flow rate. The venturi has a constricted throat; Brigadier Pudding is having trouble breathing. Pynchon needs a metaphor. And so the venturi’s constricted throat becomes Pudding’s.
GENTIAN BRANDY [p. 258]
Drop two ounces yellow gentian root into one quart brandy. Bruise one-half ounce cardamom seed. Add one ounce orange peel (very dry) and the cardamom. Slothrop finds it reminiscent of Moxie.
RÖSTI [p. 258]
Home fries. A Swiss German word from the German for boil, grill, roast.
SÉRACS [p. 258]
White Swiss cheese. Used of ice-pinnacles, sharp towers of ice resembling hunks of white cheese.
BOOK 3
In the Zone
BRASSARD [p. 292]
/BRASS-urd/ An armband designating Slothrop a war correspondent. From the French for arm.
MONEL BAR [p. 309]
/moe-KNELL/ After Ambrose Monell, who was the president of International Nickel. Monel metal is a heavy-on-the-nickel alloy.
SUS. PER COLL. [p. 329]
Family-tree-footnote jargon for hanged. Suspendatur per collum, “Let him (her in Rainbow) be hanged by the neck.”
STVYEHS AND ZNYIS [p. 337]
Russians are sitting around a campfire, singing songs full of plaintive stvyehs and znyis. “There’s no mystery. These are suffixes. (‘Sdravstvuyteh’ means hello, for example; ‘Nebrezhnyeh’ means careless.) Just catch these typical word endings on the wind and you know you’re hearing Russian.
DESSIATINAS [p. 339]
/desh-yuh-TEEN-uhs/“Clouds… sail… above the sweeping dessiatinas of grasses,” cioè, above the 2.7-acre Russian land units.
LEPESHKA [p. 340]
/lay-PYURSH-kuh/ Bread, not cake. Flat. Common in Asian Russia, cioè, among the Kirghiz, the Turkomans, the Kazakhs, and others.
AULS [p. 340]
/OWLS/ Circular felt or hide tents of the nomads of Asian Russia; camps consisting of these tents.
TALION [p. 350]
From the Latin for “the same to you.” Lex talionis exacts an eye for an eye, a runcible-spoon wound for a runciblespoon wound.
ZAPEKANKA [p. 353]
Russian. A kind of pudding, sometimes with raisins in it.
PISSCUTTER CAPS [V368]
Pisscutter: Part of the crackeijack, topnotcher, smooth-article, aceroo crowd; used, according to the late Eric Partridge, “esp. in the Canadian Navy.” Synonymous with pissor pee-warmer, which is a “highly complimentary term for anything cordially approved.” The definition of the entire phrase is an improvisation of my own: Headgear worn by such individuals.
MILONGAS [P.383]
Argentine ballroom dances that were forerunners of the tango early in the twentieth century.
SASTRUGI [P. 420]
/SASS-truh-ghee/ Long grooves in the snow that wind makes. The plural of sastruga, which is Russian for groove.
FAYA [p. 453]
A Canary Islands tree in the wax myrtle, or bayberry, family. GOMERIANS [P.453]
Gomera is one of the western, mountainous Canary Islands. Rainbow’s reference to “Gomerians whistling from the high ravines” is to whistled language. The messages are intelligible for more than a mile.
BUTADIENE [p. 487]
/BEW-tuh-DIE-een/ A hydrocarbon used to make synthetic rubber. The pronunciation’s important here: “Someone said ‘butadiene,’ and I heard beauty dying….”
WHITE-TAILED EAGLE [p. 501]
Haliaeetus albicilla, whose year-round range includes Peenemünde, the Baltic port Pynchon so painstakingly releases it over. A specimen was taken off Nantucket on November 14, 1914. The section the eagle appears in is fourteen pages long. Coincidence? LITTLE MARY [P.533]
Nursery slang from J. M. Barrie’s play of the same name. The stomach, tummy.
OXYRHYNCHUS [P. 537]
A village no longer so named, about one hundred twenty-five miles up the Nile from Cairo, where from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth a scholar’s-lifetime of papyri were found. 86 QP. 556]
Coined for its rhyme with nix. Waiter to Cook: “The trout.” Cook to Waiter: “Eighty-six.” Meaning “We’re outa da trout.” Also bar talk for “Don’t serve him (he’s a deadbeat, he’s a drunk).” Maxwell Smart was Agent 86, you’ll recall. Rainbow makes 86 a verb meaning something like “to eject an undesirable.”
GIRANDOLE [p. 588]
/JIH-run-dole/ A round convex mirror to which candleholders are sometimes attached. You’ve seen them.
RUNCIBLE SPOON [p. 594]
Edward Lear coined runcible spoon in 1871. Sometime after that, the curvedlike-a-spoon single-cutting-edged pickle fork was either invented or rechristened.
BOOK 4
The Counterforce
3-SIGMA [p. 635]
σ (sigma) is the statistician’s symbol for a standard deviation. On a normal distribution, plus or minus sigma on either side of the center describes about half the statistical spectrum; ±2σ more than three fourths of it; if you’re within three standard deviations, you’re talking 99.73 percent.
Context: Phalanxes of girls, each one wearing a dress whose color is very different from every one of the others, “so you can imagine what 3-sigma colors these are to begin with.”
CULLET AND BATCH [p. 651]
To gather up broken glass and mix it, before fusing it into new glass, with raw materials in the right proportions. A cartel called Phoebus wants very much to cullet and batch a character called Byron, who is a light bulb.
C ATWHISKER [p. 711]
A fine wire in a crystal radio set.
“… used a safety pin through a cork for a catwhisker and stayed up listened to the voices coast to coast before I was 10… ”
ADAM AND EVE ROOT [P. 717]
A wild flower whose bulbs look like bodies. Magical properties. Flowers in the buttercup, orchid, and other families have been given this name.
NOSOLOGY [p. 712]
The classification of diseases.
BROCKEN-SPECTER [p. 759]
Brocken, the highest peak in the Harz Mountains of East Germany, has lent its name to the strange sight occasionally seen from it, a phenomenon that in a sense occurs throughout Gravity’s Rainbow. Take it away, Webster’s Third: “An optical phenomenon sometimes seen from the summit of mountains”— Brocken, for example—“or from an aircraft when the observer is between the sun and a mass of cloud”—can you picture this?—“the figures of the observer and surrounding objects being projected on the cloud”—there you are! your giant silhouette!—“much enlarged and often encircled by rainbow colors.”
Biblioklept 