Word of the day: obbligato

The word of the day, or of my day, because I just learned all about the word’s origins, is obbligato.

As an adjective, used as a direction in music: “not to be omitted : obligatory.” As a noun: “an elaborate especially melodic part accompanying a solo or principal melody and usually played by a single instrument.” The adjective came first, in 1740: “borrowed from Italian, ‘obligatory, essential to a musical composition,’ from past participle of obbligare “to require (someone to do something), oblige,” going back to the Latin obligāre. The noun came along in 1825.

An obbligato is not ad libitum, “omissible according to a performer's wishes.” A performer has an obligation to the obbligato. And who knew that ad lib is a short form of ad libitum, an adverb (1606) and adjective (1786) meaning (as it did in medieval Latin) “in accordance with one’s wishes.” The idea of spontaneous performance came later, in the adjective ad-lib (1819) and the verb ad lib (1910).

Not all obbligatos are a matter of obedience to notation. In improvised music, an obbligato — say, a Lester Young obbligato behind Bille Holiday — might very well be ad libbed. And beautiful.

[Definitions and etymologies from Merriam-Webster. “A Sailboat in the Moonlight” (Carmen Lombardo–John Jacob Loeb): Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra: Buck Clayton, trumpet; Edmond Hall, clarinet; Lester Young, tenor sax; James Sherman, piano; Freddie Green, guitar; Walter Page, bass; Jo Jones, drums. Recorded in New York, June 15, 1937.]

Pocket notebook sighting

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From “Chapter Four: The Sauna Test,” the fourth episode of the new third season of Stranger Things. Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) consults her pocket notebook as she and Jim Hopper (David Harbour) check out several properties. No spoiler in that sentence, honest.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Time Table : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once

Chock full o’Things

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Maxwell House, sure. But a can of Chock full o’Nuts in small-town Indiana? In 1985? Well, maybe. This can appears in “Chapter One: Suzie, Do You Copy,” the opening episode of the new (third) season of Stranger Things. The can sits on a shelf in Joyce Byers’s house.

Stranger Things is Chock full o’Things. It is utterly satisfying television — that is, if a streaming series counts as “television.”

Previously on Stranger Things: the World Book Encyclopedia.

Puzzled about nepenthe

An answer in this morning’s Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle, “Power of the Pen,” started me thinking. Will Shortz’s puzzle asked for words containing the accented syllable pen. Terrific? StuPENdous. Got it.

The word that started me thinking: nepenthe, which Shortz clued as “drug of forgetfulness in the Odyssey.” The word in the Odyssey is νηπενθής [nēpenthes] which means “banishing pain and sorrow.” The word joins νη- [nē-], meaning “not,” and πένθος [penthos], meaning “grief, sorrow.” The word νηπενθής appears in Odyssey 4, line 221, where it describes a substance that Helen places in the wine as her husband Menelaus, Odysseus’s son Telemachus, and Nestor’s son Peisistratus weep for the lives lost in the Trojan War. What Helen places in the wine though is a drug: a φάρμακον [pharmakon].

Today’s contestant, who said he’d read the Odyssey, did not know nepenthe. Nor did it come to my mind as the name of a substance. The drugs named in the Odyssey are magical plants: lotus and moly. None of the Big Four translations of the Odyssey include nepenthe as a name:

Robert Fitzgerald (1961): Helen drops into the wine “an anodyne, mild magic of forgetfulness.”

Richmond Lattimore (1967): Helen casts into the wine “a medicine / of heartsease, free of gall, to make one forget all sorrows.” (Hearts ease, or heart’s ease, is a traditional medicinal flower.)

Robert Fagles (1996): Helen slips in “a drug, heart’s-ease, dissolving anger, / magic to make us forget all our pains.”

Stanley Lombardo (2000): Helen throws into the wine “a drug / That stilled all pain, quieted all anger, / And brought forgetfulness of every ill.”

How did nepenthe make its way into today’s Sunday Puzzle? My guess is that Will Shortz has many lists of words, searchable in many ways, and thus found this word. I suspect that what’s at work here is the kind of out-of-one’s-element moment that turned Mel Tormé into a “cool jazz pioneer.” I doubt that someone better acquainted with the Odyssey would have chosen nepenthe for today’s puzzle. But I could be wrong.

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

[The Big Four: my term for recent American translators of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. I’ll add that nepenthe does not appear in Peter Green’s and Emily Wilson’s 2018 translations of the Odyssey. In writing this post I relied upon the Perseus Digital Library’s text of Lidell and Scott’s A Greek–English Lexicon.]

João Gilberto (1931–2019)

João Gilberto, composer, singer, guitarist, architect of bossa nova, has died at the age of eighty-eight. The Washington Post has an obituary. From 2008, here is a São Paolo concert, just voice and guitar.

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The New York Times now has an obituary.

Eva Kor (1934–2019)

Eva Kor died this past Thursday at the age of eighty-five. Eva and her twin sister Miriam (d. 1993) were survivors of Auschwitz, where they were subjected to Josef Mengele’s “experiments” on twins. Eva founded a small museum In Terre Haute, Indiana, CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center, and devoted her later years to teaching forgiveness as a way to help heal from trauma. Eva died in Poland, one day after speaking to a CANDLES group at Auschwitz.

I remember vividly something Eva said to a group of east-central Illinoisans visiting her museum: “Never give up.” That was the vow she made to herself as a child in Auschwitz. Such a vow might not save you, she said, but without it, you’re certainly lost.

Elaine met Eva in 1994 at our university’s radio station and was close to her for many years. In 1995 Elaine’s string quartet played for the opening of CANDLES. When the museum reopened in 2005 after being firebombed two years earlier, Elaine and I played traditional Jewish songs on violin and National guitar. Elaine has written about Eva in this blog post.

More: stories from the BBC and NPR, and an obituary from Terre Haute’s Tribune Star.

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The New York Times now has an obituary.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Erik Agard and Wyna Liu, felt more difficult at first than it turned out to be. I got 6-D, four letters, “It can be a lot,” which gave me 15-A, six letters, “Rather sour.” Then I dropped down to 43-A, three letters, “Non-PC,” and 45-A, eight letters, “Bar babble.” The babble yielded a few more answers, the most helpful of which was for 41-D, seven letters, “Italian who mentored Beethoven.” And then I was happy to see 58-A, six letters, “Their work might drive them up the wall.” Yes, been there, done that, at least for a summer with my dad. After getting those answers, I wandered around for quite a while looking for doors marked ENTER. Here and there, I found them.

So many clues in this puzzle had a wonderful dash of indirection or vagueness. Some that I especially liked: 5-D, seven letters, “Draw on the floor.” 16-A, eight letters, “Getting captured.” 18-A, eight letters, “Poster selection.” No, BLACKLIGHT doesn’t fit. And 30-D, nine letters, “Match box of pro sports.” (What?)

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Randing the ramparts

The hashtags #RevolutionaryWarAirports and #RevolutionaryWarAirportStories will provide a short-lived diversion. What interests me more is a possible explanation of Trump’s mistake.

My best guess as to what he said: “Our army [manned?] the [?], it rand the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do.”

What I think he was supposed to say: “Our army manned the ramparts, it took over the port, it did everything it had to do.” The port would be that of Baltimore. And, yes, he’s conflating the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Details!

This morning Trump blamed his airport incoherence on a teleprompter going out right in the middle of that sentence: “I knew the speech very well, so I was able to do it without a teleprompter but, ahh, the teleprompter did go out, and it was actually hard to look at anyway, because there was rain all over it.”

A more plausible explanation: Trump was reading words written for him, words that he didn’t really understand and hadn’t bothered to work on. See also “Douglass, you know, Frederick Douglass, the great Frederick Douglass” and all the syntactically awkward pauses in his delivery. (Watch at C-SPAN.)

Frederick Douglass, too, had something to say about the Fourth of July.

I wanted to check my transcription against the official text, but whitehouse.gov so far has nothing.

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4:26 p.m.: Now there’s an official text, but it’s a transcript, complete with indications of applause. Here’s what the White House has Trump saying: “Our Army manned the air [inaudible], it rammed the ramparts. It took over the airports. It did everything it had to do.”

“Just around the corner”

The “woman-killer” Christian Moosbrugger has a new admirer, Rachel, maid to Section Chief Tuzzi and his wife Diotima. It’s “no great distance” from the Tuzzi apartment to the court building:


Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Mossbrugger’s crime, his trial, and his fate (to be determined) float over the novel. Everyone has ideas about Moosbrugger. I have no idea what his presence in the novel will amount to: I’ve read only 655 pages and have 475 pages to go, not counting material in omitted chapters and drafts.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)

[Naming in the novel is highly stylized: it’s always Section Chief Tuzzi, no first name, and Diotima, no Tuzzi. Rachel is just Rachel. Tuzzi’s first names are mentioned just twice: he was christened Hans, “stylishly rechristened” Giovanni, and still goes by Hans.]

How to improve writing (no. 83)

In The New York Times tonight:

Speaking to a rain-soaked audience behind bulletproof glass, Mr. Trump spent most of his time recounting the history of the armed forces.

An added preposition makes things right:

Speaking to a rain-soaked audience from behind bulletproof glass, Mr. Trump spent most of his time recounting the history of the armed forces.

See the difference?

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 83 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]