Gianni Rodari’s book The Grammar of Fantasy discusses using prefixes to make up new words

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back in 1972 the Italian author Gianni Rodari (1920 to 1980) published a book titled Grammatica della fantasia. Earlier this year an English translation of it by Jack Zipes was published with the title of The Grammar of Fantasy: An introduction to the art of inventing stories. I particularly enjoyed reading the eighth chapter on pages 70 to 73 which is titled The Arbitrary Prefix:      

 

“One way to make words productive, in a fantastic sense, is to deform them. Children do this for fun, spontaneously, in games, which also have a serious side, because it helps them to explore the possibilities of words, to master them, by pushing them into new variations. Games, that is, stimulate their freedom as ‘speakers,’ with a right to their own personal words (thank you, Monsieur Saussure). Such play encourages nonconformity in children.

 

The arbitrary prefix was developed in keeping with the spirit of these games, and I have frequently made good use of it myself.

 

The prefix un- is enough to transform the word ‘penknife’ – a negligible, everyday object that might yet be dangerous and aggressive – into an ‘unpenknife,’ a fantastic and pacifist object that doesn’t sharpen pencils, but allows their tips to grow back when they wear down. Naturally, this would enrage stationery store owners and the ideological champions of consumerism. There are sexual allusions here, too, that are very well concealed but are nonetheless still perceivable by children, albeit subconsciously.

 

The same prefix gives us ‘coat unhanger,’ the opposite of a ‘coat hanger.’ A ‘coat unhanger’ isn’t used to hang clothes up, but rather drops them off, shedding clothes whenever they are needed. All of this takes place in a country where the shop windows do not have glass, stores do not have cash registers, and coat checks do not require claim tickets. We’ve gone straight from a prefix to utopia itself. But its’s certainly not forbidden to imagine a city in the future where coats are free as water or air. And utopia is just as educational as the critical spirit. All that’s needed is to transfer utopia from the world of the intellect (to which Antonio Gramsci rightly ascribes methodical pessimism) to that of the will (whose principle characteristic, tates Gramsci, must be optimism). In sum, even the coat hanger, as such, is only a ‘paper tiger.’

 

I also invented a country with un- in front of it, where there is an ‘uncannon’ that is used to ‘undo’ war, rather than wage it. The ‘sense of nonsense’ (this expression was coined in Italian by Alfonso Gatto) appears to me to be transparent in this case.

 

The prefix bi- gives us the ‘bipen,’ which writes everything doubly (and perhaps is useful for twin students). There is also the ‘bipipe’ for smokers who want double the pleasure, and the ‘bi-Earth’:

   

     This is a second Earth. We live on this one and that one at the same time.       Everything that stands on its head here is on its feet there. (Science fiction has already made use of similar hypotheses. That alone seems to me a legitimate enough reason to talk about this with children.)  

 

In one of my older stories, I introduced ‘archdogs,’ ‘archbones,’ and ‘trinoculars’ (a product of the prefix tri-, also used in ‘tricow,’ an animal unfortunately unknown to zoology).

 

I keep in my archives an ‘antiumbrella,’ but have not yet figured out a practical use for it.

 

The prefix de- lends itself wonderfully to destruction. Starting from this prefix, we can easily arrive at the word ‘deassignment,’ which refers to an assignment, unlike normal homework, that one does not have to do. Far from it, as the point is for the ‘deassignment’ to be destroyed or torn to pieces.

 

Returning to zoology, to free it from the parentheses in which I left it, let’s take up the ‘vicedog’ and the ‘subcat.’ I offer these animals as gifts to whomever needs them to populate their stories.

 

 In passing, I’ll also offer Italo Calvino, the author of both The Non-Existent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, a ‘semighost’ who is half-human, made of flesh and blood, and half-ghost, clad in sheets and chains, which lends itself wonderfully to stories combining moments of stupendous fear with laughter.

 

‘Superman’ already exists on comics and is a striking example of the application of the ‘fantastic prefix’ (albeit a pure imitation of Nietzsche, poor guy, and his Ubermensch). But of you want a ‘supergoalie’ (idol of the football field) or a ‘supermatch’ (capable of setting the entire Milky Way on fire), all you have to do is make them up yourself.

 

More recent prefixes, such as micro-, mini-, and maxi-, which emerged during the 20 th century seem to me to be particularly productive. Here I offer – still free of charge – a ‘microhippo,’ raised at home in an aquarium; a ‘miniskyscraper,’ which fits into a minidrawer’ and is inhabited only by ‘minibillionaires’; and a ‘maxiblanket.’ Capable of covering in winter all the people who would die of cold.

 

It's probably superfluous to point out, but the ‘fantastic prefix’ is nothing but a particular case of the ‘fantastic binomial,’ with the following components: the prefix, chosen to produce new images; and the usual word, chosen to be enobled through deformation.

 

If I were to suggest an exercise here, it would be to fill in two parallel columns with randomly chosen prefixes and nouns and then ask to randomly join them. I’ve done it myself. Ninety-nine percent of the marriages arranged according to this rite failed, but one percent resulted in happy and productive couplings.”

 

I have blogged about prefixes in a post on April 20, 2018 titled Playing with words: PRO or CON? and on December 20, 2024 in another post titled A comic strip about flipping prefixes from ex- to in-.

 

And there is an article in The New Yorker by Joan Acocella on December 7, 2020 titled The Italian Genius Who Mixed Marxism and Children’s Literature.

 

 

 

 

A recent Savage Chickens cartoon about taking off the pressure on a speaker by releasing a crate of snakes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

What is even worse than having an ‘elephant in the room?’ (a subject that everyone knows about but no one wants to talk about)?

 

Releasing a crate of snakes is way worse than a single elephant. There is a cartoon by Doug Savage at Savage Chickens on November 24, 2025 titled Taking Off the Pressure. And a well-known article by Geoffrey Brewer at Gallup News on March 19, 2001 is titled Snakes Top List of Americans’ Fears. In their 2001 poll snakes were feared by 51% while speaking in front of an audience was feared by 40%. (Another 1998 poll had 56% fearing snakes and 45% fearing public speaking). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More recently the Chapman Survey of American Fears has the broader fear category of reptiles from 2015 to 2024. A bar chart shown above compares fear of reptiles with fear of public speaking. In 2015, 2016, and 2017 more people feared reptiles. More recently more people feared public speaking.

 

 

This blog had yet another huge spike of 17,112 page views on November 29, 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

On November 19, 2025 I blogged about Celebrating a joyful milestone of 3000 blog posts. In that post I mentioned that my overall average was 1,048 page views. But on November 29, 2025, as shown above, I had 17,112 page views, or over 16 times that average! That’s still below my all-time high. On August 25, 2025 I blogged about having 32,316 page views in another post titled This blog had another gigantic spike in page views.

 

 

How Patrick Henry roused a nation to revolution

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

250 years ago Patrick Henry delivered his most famous speech. A version of its text is here. There is an article by Drew Gilpin Faust on pages 22 to 26 of the November 2025 The Atlantic magazine titled No one gave a speech like Patrick Henry. On page 24 he says:

 

“Henry delivered his legendary ‘Liberty or Death’ speech on March 23, 1775, at the meeting of the Second Virginia Convention in Richmond’s Henrico Parish Church. The colonies were already well on their way to war with England, which would begin just a month later at Lexington and Concord. The First Continental Congress had the previous fall created a Continental Association committed to resisting British incursions on American rights, and Virginians were assembling to prepare for the conflict that was coming to seem inevitable. The decision to meet in Richmond, a modest town 50 miles beyond the reach of the royal governor in the capital of Williamsburg, was itself an indication that the representatives recognized the boldness of their actions.

Yet many members of the Virginia gentry remained nervous about what lay ahead and uncertain whether preparation was simply prudent or would in itself esca- late differences and make reconciliation with Britain impossible. These men of status, reputation, and means were not yet ready to risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. It would be Patrick Henry’s job to get them there.

Some 120 Virginians, including such worthies as Jefferson and Washington, gathered on a hill high above the James River, crowding into the pewboxes of the wood-framed church, the largest structure available in a town that had only recently grown to 600 souls. After lengthy discussion ultimately approving the work of the Continental Congress, Henry rose on the fourth day of the convention to ask the clerk to read a set of resolutions proposing that ‘this Colony be immediately put into a posture of defence.’ The time had come for ‘embodying, arming, and disciplining’ a Virginia militia, he maintained. When cautious delegates objected to such a public declaration of military mobilization as unduly provocative, Henry responded with his famous speech.

The text that schoolchildren have declaimed and aspiring orators have studied since the early 19th century was derived from recollections that the distinguished jurist St. George Tucker provided to Wirt, Henry’s biographer, sometime between 1805 and 1815. Tucker was present at the convention to hear Henry speak, and judged that ‘nothing has ever excelled it, and nothing has ever equaled it in its power and effect.’ The version he provided for Wirt and for posterity rests upon the accuracy of his memory of a day more than three decades earlier. Historians have sparred for more than two centuries now over the reliability of this rendering. William Safire, the late journalist, presidential speechwriter, and authority on language and rhetoric, offered the measured assessment of an informed critic: ‘My own judgment is that Patrick Henry made a rousing speech that day that did conclude with the line about liberty or death; that a generation later, to respond to the wishes of his friend writing a biography of the patriot, Judge Tucker recalled what he could and made up the rest. If that is so, Judge Tucker belongs among the ranks of history’s best ghostwriters.’ A unique ghostwriter whose work followed rather than preceded the text.”

There is another article by Harry Kollatz Jr. at Richmond Magazine on March 21, 2025 titled ‘It is what we expect of you’ and subtitled Patrick Henry changed the course of history with a speech – though we’re not sure exactly what he said. Harry said:

“Henry’s rhetoric at Henrico Parish Church wasn’t put to paper by the eyewitness and judge St. George Tucker for more than 40 years. This came in response to frustrated biographer William Wirt, a lawyer and a member of Aaron Burr’s defense team in the former vice president’s Richmond treason trial, a United States attorney general, speechwriter and would-be 19th-century attorney turned novelist.

 Wirt began collecting material for a biography of Henry in 1808. He despaired of finding an accurate record of Henry’s ‘greatest hits’ from the earlier part of his career. Tucker wrote for Wirt his best recollection, although that correspondence went missing around 1904. Thomas Jefferson, who was in the room where the speech happened, also contributed his memory to the 1817 book. This material would form the most familiar version of Henry’s declamation.

 But did Wirt conflate the sentiments with the decades-old recollections of Judge Tucker?

At his Monticello library, Jefferson placed Wirt’s book on the fiction shelves. Perhaps this is also a reflection of his long-simmering dislike of Henry. Yet Jefferson somewhat grudgingly admitted, ‘It is not now easy to say what we should have done without Patrick Henry.’ ”

And on page 23 of his article Mr. Faust also said that:

 

“Henry reminds us of how our inability to hear the past before the advent of audio recording has left us with an incomplete and even distorted understanding of history. He lived in an era when the spoken word had not yet been overtaken by the power and reach of print. This was a time - and Henry was a figure - we can only poorly understand if we do not recognize the centrality of oratory.

An assiduous scholar has located nearly 100 responses by individuals who heard Henry’s speeches, so we at least have secondhand access to the impact of his words. We can’t retrieve his voice, but we can find accounts of how it made audiences feel. As one contemporary explained, there was ‘an irresistible force to his words which no description could make intelligible to one who had never seen him, nor heard him speak.’ On a trip through Virginia as a young man, the future president Andrew Jackson sought out the orator he had heard so much about. ‘No description I had ever heard,’ he reflected, ‘no conception I had ever formed, had given me any just idea of the man’s powers of eloquence.’ Patrick Henry had become a tourist attraction.

We can’t even read Henry’s most important speeches. The potency of his rhetoric derived in no small part from its extemporaneity. He left no texts or notes of his Revolutionary-era addresses, and observers described being so swept up in the moment that they were unable to document his performances. ‘No reporter whatever could take down what he actually said,’ the Virginia judge Spencer Roane remembered. ‘Much of the effect of his eloquence arose from his voice, gesture, etc., which in print is entirely lost.’ Today, Henry’s legacy is left chiefly to schoolchildren tasked with memorizing and reciting a reconstruction of his ‘Liberty or Death’ speech of 1775, pieced together by his biographer William Wirt from witnesses’ testimony two decades after his death.”

A Currier and Ives lithograph came from Wikimedia Commons.

What the heck is a mountweazel?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been looking through a 2025 book by Martha Barnette titled Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland. A mountweazel is a phony entry put into a reference book in order to catch plagiarists. On page 293 Martha says:

 

“Such copyright traps aren’t limited to dictionaries and encyclopedias. Cartographers have been known to insert nonexistent features such as so-called trap streets and paper towns in their maps to catch anyone stealing their work.

 

The word mountweazel derives from a bogus entry in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. The entry describes Lillian Mountweazel, supposedly a promising young photographer from Bangs, Ohio, who met an untimely end. Clearly someone had fun writing it:

 

‘Mountweasel, Lillian Virginia, 1942-73, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio, Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris, and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972). Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.’ “

 

When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, I noticed that the Gulf Oil map of the city contained a trap street in Schenley Park – a bogus connection between Schenley Drive and West Circuit Road.

 

And when I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity printed and sold the student directory. Anyone who tried to use that publication for a mailing list got a cease-and-desist letter from the attorney for Alpha Phi Omega. A friend of mine told me that one mountweazel used his actual home address along with the fictitious name Wadza Duckworth (What’s a duck worth?). Another mountwezel was a phony address for a real person in what now is Wean Hall. It was a room number for the telephone equipment closet in the back of another room.

 

The mountain cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Public Speaking Pointers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One common type of advice for speakers is to give them pointers on what to do. The other type of advice to discuss mistakes, and how to avoid them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a long, excellent article by Paul N. Edwards from October 2014 titled How to Give an Academic Talk, v5.2. It is a 14-page pdf which descended from a 5-page pdf article from 2001 titled How to Give an Academic Talk: Changing the Culture of Public Speaking in the Humanities. He has a table with worse or better rules of thumb, as shown above. There also are six gray boxes with advice on:

 

Preparing Your Talk

About Vocal Technique

About Presentation Software

About Timing

Handling Questions

Murphy’s Law applies directly to you:

  plan for disaster

 

And there is a 7-page pdf article by Christine Blome, Hanno Sondermann, and Matthias Augustin in the GMS Journal for Medical Education on February 15, 2017 titled Accepted standards on how to give a Medical Research Presentation: a systematic review of expert opinion papers. They analyzed 91 articles! Their thirty recommendations and their percentages (shown in their Table 1 and greater than 20%) are to:

 

 1] Keep your slides simple - 62.6%

 2] Know your audience - 52.7%

 3] Make eye contact - 46.2%

 4] Do not read the talk from slides or a manuscript - 44.0%

 5] Rehearse the presentation - 44.0% [also see #11]

 6] Limit the number of lines per slide - 42.9%

 7] Slides should be readable - 42.9%

 8] Stick to the allotted time - 40.7%

 9] Time the presentation beforehand - 38.5%

10] Use simple tables and graphs - 34.1%

11] Rehearse in front of other persons - 33.0% [also see #5]

12] Know your topic ‘like the back of your hand’ - 31.9%

13] Vary your voice - 29.7%

14] Develop an objective when preparing the presentation - 28.6%

15] Limit the number of words per line - 28.6%

16] Choose a light background - 28.6% [also see #20]

17] Do not use too many slides - 27.5%

18] Test all equipment - 27.5%

19] Use animations carefully - 27.5%

20] Choose a dark background - 26.4% [also see #16]

21] Keep the presentation clear and simple (delivery) - 26.4%

22] Summarize at the end of the presentation - 26.4%

23] Do not speak too fast - 24.2%

24] Put phrases, not sentences, on slides - 24.2%

25] Be logical - 23.1%

26] Face the audience - 23.1%

27] Be enthusiastic - 20.9%

28] Be prepared for questions - 20.9%

29] Create visuals with a consistent design - 20.9%

30] Use contrasting colors - 20.9%

 

 

What’s an eggcorn?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Oxford English Dictionary say that an eggcorn, which first appeared in 2003, is:

 

“An alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements as a similar-sounding word.”

 

And the Wikipedia page for it says that:

 

“An eggcorn is the alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements, creating a new phrase that is plausible when used in the same context. Thus an eggcorn is an unexpectedly fitting or creative malapropism.” 

 

There is an article by Merrill Perlman at the Columbia Journalism Review on December 11, 2019 titled ‘Eggcorns,’ and other incorrect homophones. He noted that the eggcorn ‘another thing coming’ had replaced the original ‘another think coming, and the eggcorn ‘hone in’ replaced ‘home in.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another article at The Drum on November 20, 2025 is titled This clever Specsavers campaign tackled hearing loss stigma. They came up with a 7-page pdf article titled The Misheard Manifesto, which has the ten eggcorns shown above in a table.

 

My eggcorn was assembled from an egg and corn at OpenclipArt. I also got an acorn from there.