Word: shenker
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Some of the pieces examine various methods of non-verbal communication--smiles, pauses, body language,and the semi-verbal language of the affected stammer (brought to a pitch of eloquence by the English ruling class). Shenker's quest for exotic modes of conveying meaning has led him to Italy, where he compiles a graphic lexicon of the language of gesture ("Sicilians take the Fifth by raising their chins slowly... Fondle the back of your ear and somebody's a pederast.") Venturing even further afield, he travels to the Congo for a first-hand encounter with African drum language, only...
...most part Shenker is content to remain in the province of words--an area he knows like the back of his hand. He seems equally at home conversing with Nabokov and Asimov, I.F. Stone and I.B. Singer, Georges Simenon and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Perhaps he is most comfortable with writers like S.J. Perelman (the subject of three separate interviews) and Brigid Brophy, who share his penchant for groan-inducing puns and shameless plays on words. Parelman, Shenker tells us, has a myna bird, "scion of an ancient mynasty,...and wherever Perelman goes the bird is sure to go; it followed...
...Shenker never lets his light touch get our of hand, and he keeps a firm grip on even the most elusive conversation (Shenker's word games tend to be infectious). Suiting his style to subject, he rises to the sublimity of Vladimir Nabokov ("Q. What struggles these days for pride of trace in your mind?"), and caters to the acidity of Gore Vidal ("Have you read any bad books lately?"). Mark Van Doren's answers "seemed to demand the topography of poetry," and so Shenker has reproduced them in verse form. Only once, in an interview with Eugene Ionesco, does...
...recurring theme, since many of the men and women interviewed are over 65. In fact, younger writers get hardly any representation at all in this collection, and the "radical innovators"--Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, Eugene Ionesco--have all been around for quite a while, Surely Shenker could have made room for some new faces by omitting a few of the more trivial pieces--for instance, "Howlers," a collection of high-school malapropisms only slightly above the level of Kids Say the Darnedest Things...
...Shenker's fascination with words also leads him to delve into the technical aspects of language, and he includes pieces on linguistics and lexicography, linguists and lexicographers. He covers everything from the staid Oxford English Dictionary--where, with true British resistance to modernity, no researcher is allowed near a typewriter--to the bitterly sarcastic Great Society Dictionary, a radical guide to the vocabulary of Vietnam by a professor of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, at the American Heritage Dictionary, and panel of experts bickers over what is acceptable English and what...