rubberneck

rubberneck
noun
1. a tourist who is visiting sights of interest [syn: sightseer]
2. a person who stares inquisitively

rubberneck
verb
1. strain to watch; stare curiously;

"The cars slowed down and the drivers rubbernecked after the accident."
--WordNet 3.0, 2006 by Princeton University.

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Put another way, rubberneck is a collocation that asks us to imagine a human head atop a rubberized neck that's able to stretch, crane, turn, twist, (loop ?) and swerve with ease, all in service of the brain and its interfacing portals (the eyes) to focus and dwell upon an ongoing event. In short, rubbernecking is gauking; staring intently; or—if we make an anatomical shift upward—eyeballing (1901).

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IN USE:
ƒ. OED Online



I stood around there on one foot kind o' rubber-neckin to find an openin.--1896

Recent slang has coined the word ‘rubber~neck’ for a gaping fellow in the street, who turns his head this way and that.-1902

Here's a great sight going on that hundreds of rubber-necking tourists would pay anything to see.--1927

The long, vaulted central hall..was crowded with chairs for invited guests with probably five times as many more people standing behind them. Londoners love to rubberneck on tiptoe.--1946

Wisconsin motorists may never see a purple cow, but they are rubbernecking at an enormous piebald blue one emblazoned on Farmer Hilbert Schneider's 75-year-old barn at Johnson Creek.--1977

Large rubberneck buses from travel agencies drive through, packed with sightseers from various States of the Union.--1949 Chicago Daily News 13 Aug. 5/6
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Early 20th Century Brits, loath bend knee or neck before Americans to borrow a term, especially the crude rubberneck wagon, to describe the newest form of tourist transport, sidled, instead, over to the French, who offered char-a-banc— "a carriage with benches, so called because the original horse-drawn charabancs in France had rows of crosswise seats looking forward." The English eschewed rubberneck wagon embracing char-a-banc.

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H. L. MENCKEN'S THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

A useful book to peer into for the early history of "rubber-neck" is H. L. Mencken's
The American Language (1937), a land-mark record of the birth and growth of
English in America. The book is filled with examples of American slang, with all of its sophistication, wit, and social significance. Note the brazen confidence Mencken shows in himself and in his native language in the title of the book: The American Language. There was no room in Mencken's vocabulary for such deferential epithets "American English" or "English in America"

Editors at Bartlbey.com note that The American Language "was written to clarify the discrepancies between British and American English and to define the distinguishing characteristics of American English. Mencken’s groundbreaking study was undoubtedly the most scientific linguistic work on the American language to date."

We might note in passing the praise Mencken has earned as a stylist from past and present critics (this writer included). The eminent 20th Century American critic and essayist Joseph Wood Krutch--who critiqued movies for The Nation; wrote thirty-five books, including biographies of Samuel Johnson and Henry David Thoreau; and taught at Columbia University for sixteen years--referred to Mencken as "the greatest prose stylist of the twentieth century."

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H. L. MENCKEN
ON THE AMERICAN
SLANG TERM, rubberneck:

Mencken observes that rubber-neck entered the American Language in a wave of American compound words invented during the late 1800s and the early 1900s:

"The old American faculty [read skill] for making picturesque compounds shows no sign of abating today [1937]. Many of them come in on the attitude of slang, e.g., road-louse, glad-hand, hop-head, rahrah-boy, coffin-nail (cigarette), hot-spot, bug-house, hang-out, and pin-head, and never attain to polite usage. . . . [B]ut others are taken into the language almost as soon as they appear, e.g., college-widow, (1887), sky-scraper and rubberneck* (c. 1890), loan-shark (c. 1900), highbrow and low brow (c. 1905), hot-dog (1905), joy-ride (1908), love-nest, and jay-walker (c 1890), and brain-trust (1932)".

prose stylist of the twentieth century."
Mencken tells us that the word glowed with no little cachet according to the Scottish philologian, Professor J. Y. T. Greig, who praised rubbernecking in Breaking Priscian's Head (1929) as "one of best words ever coined" (186).--H. L. Mencken. The American Language. New York: Knopf, 1937.
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IT'S ONLY ROCK 'N' ROLL

Rubberneck eventually took a turn (yes, a pun) toward rock 'n' roll. According to reviewer Mike Davis King in a piece written for Amazon.com, "'Rubberneckin' was the hit song from Elvis Presley's last feature film, 'Change Of Habit.' As the B-side of 'Don't Cry Daddy,' it reached #11 on the charts way back in December of 1969." The song was remixed in 2003 and has enjoyed renewed popularity, both as song-qua-song and as a popular cell-phone ringtone. Here are the lyrics of "Rubbernecking," made famous by a rocker known equally for his singing but also for his on-stage "rubber-leggin'."

"Rubbernecking"

Stop, look and listen baby
that's my philosophy
If your rubberneckin' baby
well that's all right with me
Stop, look and listen baby
that's my philosophy
It's called rubberneckin' baby
but that's all right with me
Some people say I'm wasting time
but they don't really know
I like what I see I see what I like
it gives me such a glow
First thing in the morning, last thing at night
I look, stare everywhere and see everything insight
Stop, look and listen baby
that's my philosophy
If your rubberneckin' baby
well that's all right with me
Some people say I'm wasting time
but they don't really know
I like what I see I see what I like
yer, it gives me such a glow
Sittin' on the back porch all by myself
Along came Mary Jane and I'm with somebody else
Stop, look and listen baby
that's my philosophy
If your rubberneckin' baby
well that's all right with me
Stop, look and listen baby
that's my philosophy
It's called rubberneckin' baby
but that's all right with me
Stop look and listen baby
that's my philosophy
yes it is now

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The following may be a bit of a stretch, but rocker Leon Russell uses the catch phrase "rubber neck," not precisely in the sense that we have been considering the solo word "rubberneck" but close enough for my sensibilities.

In The All-Music Guide to Rock (1995), Rick Clark, comments that Leon Russell's third album "Carney" (1973) became Russell's highest charting album with the aid of the oddball #11 hit "Tightrope," which includes a line aptly perceived as "oddball"— "I'm falling / Like a rubber neck giraffe."

TIGHT ROPE
Leon Russell

I'm up on the tightrope , one sides hate and one is hope
It's a circus game with you and me.
I'm up on the tightwire , linked by life and the funeral pyre
But the tophat on my head is all you see.

And the wire seems to be the only place for me
A comedy of errors and I'm falling
Like a rubber neck giraffe, you look into my past
Well, baby you're just to blind to see.

I'm up in the spotlight, oh does it feel right
The altitude seems to really get to me.
I'm up on the tightwire linked by life and the funeral pyre
Putting on a show for you to see.
Copyright 1972 by Skyhill Publishing Co.

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ON THE ROAD

Finally, rubbernecking is not limited to the ambits of sightseeing and rock 'n' roll. We are now talking about a much more sober signification of the term as we look at how rubbernecking can precipitate roadway accidents.

Following are the conclusions reached in a study made for The Implementation Research Center of the U.S. DOT University Transportation Center, titled

AN ANALYSIS ON THE IMPACT OF RUBBERNECKING ON URBAN FREEWAY TRAFFIC.

Although the modeling of incident traffic in the same direction is important, it deals with only half of the traffic problem. Accidents also have an impact on the opposite direction of traffic. Even though there are no lane blockages in the opposite direction of an accident, there are reasons to believe that an impact exists on traffic. This impact is due to rubbernecking. According to the Webster Dictionary “rubbernecking” means to look about, stare, or listen with exaggerated curiosity. Individuals driving in the opposite direction of an accident are often distracted by the incident. It is the curiosity of the event that leads to distraction, and then causes a reduction in vehicle speeds. This reduction in vehicle speeds begins to create congestion. Although a significant part of rubbernecking is attributed to various human factors, there are other factors such as presence of barriers that influence the form of rubbernecking.

It is also necessary to investigate the role of human factor on rubbernecking. As indicated in the analysis of this study, motorists in peak period tended to create less rubbernecking than in other periods. It seems that human factors were playing roles in the causes of rubbernecking impacts. By understanding the impact of human factors, the rubbernecking issue may be better addressed.--Dr. Hualiang (Harry) Teng Jonathan P. Masinick Principal Investigators Final report of ITS Center project: Rubbernecking impact of incidents A Research Project Report For the National ITS Implementation Research Center, A U.S. DOT University Transportation Center (ImpactofRubbernecking.htm)
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Parmigianino:
Madonna with
the Long Neck
(1534-40)

Admirers rubberneck
Madonna and Child.

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skosh

skosh n. [skohsh] "a little, a small amount; frequently used adverbially [as] in the expression "a skosh [more room]," "slightly," "somewhat."—OED Online.
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PRONUCIATION:

Say skosh with a long o, as in gauche [gohsh].
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ETYMOLOGY:

U.S. slang, from the Japanese word sukoshi, meaning a little, somewhat.—OED Online.

•

Skosh comes from the World War II military experience, making its first print appearance in A Dictionary of Forces’ Slang, 1939-45 by Eric Partridge with Wilfred Granville and Frank Roberts. London: Secker & Warburg, 1948.

•

[Along with] everyday greetings, Bamboo English[1] employs sukoshi (‘few, some’) and its antonym takusan[2] (‘plenty’), both of which are forthwith made into two-syllable words, dispensing with the voiceless Japanese "u": [skosh and taksan].—1955 Amer. Speech XXX. 44;—OED Online.

-

[1] Bamboo English is a pidgin English. And "a pidgin is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups who do not share a common language, in situations such as trade. Pidgins usually have no native speakers, but are learned as second languages,and they usually have low prestige with respect to other languages. Not all simplified or "broken" forms of language are pidgins. Pidgins have their own norms of usage which must be learned to speak the pidgin well."—Bakker, Peter (1994). "Pidgins", in Jacques Arends, Pieter Muysken, Norval Smithh: Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction. 25, 27.Cf. Wikipedia, pidgin.

[2] Sukoshi's antonym—takusan (meaning "plenty")—unfortunately didn't make the trip from Japanese into English. Had the word landed here, the "u" between the "s" and "k," would have—bowing to custom, as is the Japanese wont—been eliminated, and, thus, the word would have been spelled "taksan" and pronounced "tahk-sahn."
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Skosh IN USE:

‘Just a skosh,’ he said. When I asked him what he meant he said he had picked the word up in Korea. It means ‘a little bit’. ‘Just a little bit left’ was his meaning.—1959 (recorded by Prof. A. L. Hench, Univ. of Virginia) 10 May.

•

In the ad, a slightly out-of-breath jogger laments middle-
age body bulge and tells how glad he is that a new line of Levis for men is constructed with ‘a skosh more room where I need it’.—1977 Detroit Free Press 19 Dec. 4-C/1.

mmmmmm•

The GSX-R's seat is more comfortable than the Yamaha's thinly padded perch, and its bars are a skosh higher.
—1988 Cycle World Sept. 37.
—Citations from OED Online
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ON taksan: AN ANONYM LOST IN ACTION

It seems to me the orphaned taksan would bring to the idea of "being big" a weighty, sonic thump (built as it is upon a brace of rhyming, stressed syllables), unlike the lilting, perky iamb of "plenty," which ends on the thin unstressed tone of "eee" in "-ty"—all of this coming from (where else?) the French, in particular from the Middle French plenté, plentee.)—OED Online.

Gravel Salesman: "Well, want some?"
Buyer: "Yeah! But not just some. Taksan!"

Yes, I know. The buyer could have said, with just as much punch: "Yeah! But not just some. Lots!" Or "a bunch!"

But I wanted to have some fun with plenty. Just imagine the mischief idling away in plenitude, or plentitude, or

plenitudinous!
Or plenteousness,
plentifulness,
plentiness, or
plenity!
Or, best yet:
plenteouste!

Wow! What a list! Taksan!

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A GLOSS on skosh:

"For all my extra work, the boss merely gave his hat a tip, and me a skosh of pocket change."—Bloggin' John

mmmmmmmmmmmm•

Skosh is one of those words that is—I hesitate to say it—cute, because as newsprint philosopher Garfield has said: "Cute rots the intellect." Precious is worse. Let's call it appealing or likable or engaging. Maybe catchy. Certainly, welcome. At any rate, skosh deserves wider use.

To do my part, I've decided to bring skosh immediately into the ambit of my current idiolect [3]. In other words: I'm gonna start using skosh, taksan!

[3] idiolect: the linguistic system of
one person, differing in some
details from that of all otherm]
speakers of the same dialect]]
or language.—OED Online.mm]]

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skosh

The United States of America One Cent Coin is available for purchase
at
United States Mint;
320 W Colfax Ave.;
Denver, CO 80204-2605.
(http://catalog.usmint).

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penumbra

penumbra n.
1. A partial shadow, as in an eclipse, between regions of complete shadow and complete illumination.

2. The grayish outer part of a sunspot.

3. An area in which something exists to a lesser or uncertain degree:
“The First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion” (Joseph A. Califano, Jr.).

4. An outlying surrounding region; a periphery:
“Downtown Chicago and its penumbra also stand rejuvenated” (John McCormick).

INFLECTED FORMS:
pl. pe·num·brae (-bre) or pe·num·bras
--The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.
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umbra / penumbra

An 'umbra' is a region of shadow caused by the total obscuring of a light source by an opaque body [i.e., one impervious to the rays of visible light]. . . . A 'penumbra' is a partial shadow cast in the same way but obscuring the light source. . . . 'Umbra' is simply Latin for 'shadow'; the 'pen-' of 'penumbra' means 'almost (Latin paene), in the same way as for a 'peninsula', which is 'almost an island.'

--A Dictionary of Contrasting Pairs. Adrian Room. New York: Routledge, 1988 (258).
--Image from (http://www.schorsch.com/kbase/glossary/penumbra.
html).
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GLOSS

The word penumbra caught my attention while reading the story of the annihilation of the volcano-island Krakatoa and the huge ensuing tsunami that killed nearly forth thousand people in Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1888 by Simon Winchester, a meticulous researcher and superb stylist.

In the chapter titled "Close Encounters on the Wallace Line," Wincester claims (with convincing evidence) that geographer "Alfred Russel Wallace [ pictured at right ], along side Charles Darwin but always as his satellite, is the other true but largely unremembered pioneer of the science of evolution" (56). In this chapter Winchester uses three metaphors to highlight Wallace's significant discoveries and unfortunate rare recognition for them. The most striking of the metaphors makes use of penumbra.

The first metaphor you've already read above, in which Wallace is likened to a satellite within the gravitational pull of Darwin, the planet. The second metaphor is of a higher rank, I'd suggest, because it is attached to a statement of Wallace's independent development of two of the key principles of evolutionary theory. Here we have a penumbral image of diminishing shadow, in which Fame, which is likened to a beacon, casts its bright favor directly upon Darwin, leaving Wallace to stand in the penumbra:

[Wallace's] keen conviction remained, for all of the eight years he spent there [the East Indies], that evidence could be found in this archipelago would substantiate his two growing beliefs: that geography was highly influential in the development of biology, and that species originated by the natural selection of favored types from within the variations of any population. He spent the better part of his life seeking to prove both points--and by and large (and in the penumbra of Charles Darwin) he succeeded magnificently (58).

(A quirky thought in passing: What if Wallace had somehow landed within Darwin's umbra? As I investigate the metaphor more closely in terms of its etiology (the study of causation), I . . . well . . . I suppose there would be no Alfred Russel Wallace to write or read about. Nevermind.)

The third metaphor involves Winchester's use of punctuation and has nothing directly to do with penumbra. So skip this paragraph and the next if you like. Or read on: The third metaphor likens life to the syntax of a sentence, with Darwin written into choice places, Wallace into less choice places. Notice how Winchester locates Wallace not only metaphorically within the "penumbra of Charles Darwin" but also, grammatically, within the shadows of reductive punctuation, namely, the enclosures of parentheses, suggesting, thereby, symbolically (so to speak) that history presents Darwin "writ large," but Wallace only parenthetically. (A few pages later, Winchester repeats the trope of parentheses, this time drawing the reader's attention to it: "Darwin's discoveries (along with those of Wallace, naturally--these very parentheses serving to remind us how simple it is still to overlook the dyer's son from Usk) had overturned so much of man's own certainty about his own beginnings." (68)

The final metaphor involves Winchester speaking directly to the reader, speaking openly about a second deliberate use of parenthesis as a metaphor for Wallace's secondary status: whereas history presents Darwin writ large, Wallace has to settle with parenthetical status.
--Simon Winchester. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded August 27, 1883. New York: HarperCollins. 2003.
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If you skipped the last two paragraph, welcome back.

The penumbra as metaphor has been put to use not only in literature, as we've seen, but also in other realms of human experience. Following are two of them.
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THE PENUMBRA FONT

The designer of Penumbra (1994)--Lance Hidy--describes it as "an ‘androgynous’ letterform which morphs between the worlds of sans serif and serif" and between the extremes "of contemporary and traditional qualities." Both the concept of morphing between extremes and the state of androgyny work on the analogy of the "unbra to penumbra to light" continuum.

Penumbra was chosen as the signature font for the film "The Da Vinci Code," a world of characters struggling, each in his or her own way, within the penumbric world between the darkness of deception and the light of truth.
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Primula polyanthus 'Penumbra'
SILVER LACED PRIMROSE

Lest you think that everything touched by the word penumbra finds itself cast in shadow, consider the bright image of the Penumbra (Primula polyanthus).

Penumbra as the name of a flower springs from one of the definitions of the word we have not been considering--

" . . . the curious slim edge of cool light that shows around the moon during an eclipse.

•

"The first silver laced primula to be commercially available, ‘Penumbra’ is a dramatic companion for the old fashioned gold laced primrose that has been available for centuries.

"Named for the curious slim edge of cool light that shows around the moon during an eclipse, ‘Penumbra’ grows to 10" and is heavenly in woodland gardens. Fragrant ‘Penumbra’ flowers from February to June and is hardy to zone 4."
--www.loghouseplants.com/ Plant%20Curiosities.htm

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bloviate

bloviate v. To talk at length, esp. using inflated or empty rhetoric; to speechify or ‘sound off’--OED Online.
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ETYMOLOGY

The OED suggests that bloviate is probably a conjoining (or collocation, as eytmologists prefer) of the verb blow and the affix -viate (as in e.g. deviate., abbreviate), where blow is the "motion or action of the wind, or of an aerial current, as in 'it blows hard,' 'it blew a gale, a hurricane,' to blow great guns: to blow a violent gale; to blow up; to rise, increase in force of blowing."

Within the word "bloviate," blow becomes a root signifying nothing more than an empty conceptual or emotional space that is aflow with currents, each current devoid of anything substantial, i.e., of words in syntax making meaning.

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WORD IN USE:

"Occasionally a candidate makes some great pronouncement or
drastic shift of position in such an oration, but more often
he merely talks, or, as [Warren G.] Harding [picture at right] put it, ‘bloviates’, being concerned more with the political effect of his remarks than with their meaning."--1957 Amer. Hist. Rev. 62 1014.

Chávez seems enamored of the sound of his own voice, and he has an unpopular habit of taking over Venezuela's TV and radio stations to bloviate about his reforms.-- 2002 Mother Jones May-June 82/2.

--Note: definition, etymology, and quotations above come from OED Online.
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BLOVIATE (ab ovo):

The story is that President Warren G. Harding, a notoriously flawed public speaker, coined the words normalcy and bloviate. Though he simply revived an erstwhile dying version of the word "normality" (no small feat), he probably did invent the devilishly clever word "bloviate." Those distinctions aside, Harding's public career is remembered best for his bad speeches, oversight (in both senses) of rampant corruption, and well-known philandering.

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W. G. HARDING AS INSPIRATION
FOR A POEM BY JOHN ASHBURY:

John Ashbery uses "bloviate" in his poem "Qualm" about Warren G. Harding. The poem speaks of Harding's final moments in the arms of his long-suffering wife, following an arduous train trip to Alaska. Here are the opening stanzas:

Qualm

By John Ashbury

Warren G. Harding invented the word "normalcy,"
Also the lesser-known "bloviate," meaning, one imagines,
To spout, to spew aimless verbiage. He never wanted to be President.
The "Ohio Gang" made him. He died in the Palace

Hotel in San Francisco, coming back from Alaska,
As his wife was reading to him, about him,
From The Saturday Evening Post. Poor Warren. He wasn't a bad egg,
Just weak. He loved women and Ohio

--Yahoo Education page (http://education.yahoo.com/reference/
quotations/quote
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HARDING'S REPUTATION
AS WORDSMITH AND
PUBLIC SPEAKER:

In his thoroughly encompassing scorching style, Social Critic and etymologist H. L. Mencken had this to say about Harding's oratorical infelicities [in- = "not-" + felix = "happy"]:

That is to say, he [Warren G. Harding] writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

--http://education.yahoo.com/reference/quotations
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"HOW TO BLOVIATE WITH
ONE'S FOOT IN ONE'S MOUTH"

By BLOGGIN' JOHN

Back in April of 1998, I had already collected a fair number of word-books, thesauri, and dictionaries. But I did not have the Random House Webster's College Dictionary (keep this in mind). Being interested in the word bloviate, I checked all of my main stream dictionaries (mostly, from the houses of Merriam-Webster and American Heritage), but could find nary a reference to the word. Blithely assuming (but without checking) that Random House had also ignored the word, I sent a smirky question about the apparently lost and wandering bloviate to Jesse Sheidlower, who at the time--before his present work as Editor-at-Large for the Oxford English Dictionary--was working for Random House as the keeper of the interactive website "Jesse's Word of the Day."
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JOHN'S QUESTION & JESSE'S ANSWER

April 10, 1998



bloviate

John . . . writes: The word "bloviate" is now more evident on the Web (put it into a search engine sometime), in discussion groups (check out NYT's "Etymology"), and in specialty dictionaries than it is in mainstream lexicons. How much of a current presence does a word need to appear in a modern dictionary?

[Jesse Sheidlower answers:] What, like the Random House Webster's College Dictionary, which has an entry for bloviate with the definition 'to speak pompously'? It doesn't need any more currency, since the word has quite a bit and it's already in this dictionary. If you're using one of those other dictionaries, with generally poorer coverage of current vocabulary, well, that I can't help you with.

There has been quite a vogue in recent years for bloviate, particularly in political discourse. Rush Limbaugh, according to one source, "chortles, crows, bloviates and denounces; but there is always an undercurrent of self-deprecating humor that makes his elephantine egotism bearable." Uh-huh. "In Washington," another source tells us, men "talk too much. Everywhere you look, there are men talking. It's like a giant Bloviation Bee."

Bloviate is not, however, a recent creation. It was apparently coined in the mid-nineteenth century and was found in slang dictionaries by the end of the nineteenth century. Some of the early examples still strike the modern ear as contemporary sounding; the Literary Digest in 1909 derided a proposal to create a state of Los Angeles, "which would rid California of a maximum of bluster and bloviation and a minimum of territory." Hmm, still sounds viable. But bloviate was chiefly popularized by President Warren G. Harding in the early 1920s, and current examples often mention him as the inspiration for the word.
The word bloviate is, of course, an Americanism. It is a pseudo-Latin alteration of blow, in its slang sense 'to boast', also the inspiration for the early-nineteenth-century blowhard. This type of word-formation--adding Latinate affixes to English words--was popular at the time; some of the words that still have some currency is [Sic] absquatulate [1] 'to run away; flee' from abscond and squat, and obfusticated, for 'confused; obfuscated.'
--Words @ Random, "The Mavin's Word of the Day"(http://www.randomhouse.com/words).
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[1] For more about absquatulate, see Words Worthy's posting on it for February 14, 2007.
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POSTSCRIPTUM I

"Thank You!" to Sean for noting that on every FoxNews broadcast of the eponymous "O'Reilly Factor," host Bill O'Reilly* uses the word bloviate as one of his signature words.

*Aka "Billo" to his vexatious time-slot competitor, Kieth Olbermann, at MSNBC's "Countdown."
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POSTSCRIPTUM II

A PROVERB FOR BLOVIATION-AFFLICTED SOULS

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say,
abstains from giving worldly evidence of the fact.

George Eliot (1819-1880)

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