Eye. Over 100 uses of this common word, but one use is quite uncommon:
- 05.117 Not even our clever eyeses will notice him;
Egg
It’s not an uncommon word – but we include it because of how Gollum pronounces the plural! It’s a sound-play word!
- 05.045 teaching his grandmother to suck – ‘Eggses!’ he hissed.
- 05.045 Eggses it is!’ Then he asked:
I look forward to the day when I can add all the eggs in the work, not just the uncommonly spelled ones.
2016.03.25 – and that happy day has come! Eggs seems to be evenly distributed, as closely as such non-robust things can be.
- 01.057 Put on a few eggs,
- 01.141 I like six eggs with my ham,
- 05.002 He thought of himself frying bacon and eggs
- 08.074 and eggs
- 15.014 since I came out of the egg,
- 16.047 he was dreaming of eggs and bacon.
Creepsy
Tolkien added a -y to “creep” in parallel construction to “tricksy”. The “-y” suffix indicates “characterized or full of” and in Old English was spelled “ig”. “Creepsy” is Tolkien’s own original word constructed from his deep understanding of the roots of our language. I’m giving it the onomatopoeia tag for adding an ‘s’ to Gollum’s words where there was none.
- 05.117 and he’ll come creepsy
“-y, suffix1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 14 July 2015.
Bitsy
“Bitsy” is an adjective all by itself in the OED. The “-y” suffix indicates “characterized or full of” and in Old English was spelled “ig”. Tolkien uses it uniquely adverbially, replacing “for a bit”, constructed from his deep understanding of the roots of our language. I’m giving it the onomatopoeia tag for adding an ‘s’ to Gollum’s words where there was none.
- 05.022 and chats with it a bitsy
“-y, suffix1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 14 July 2015.
“bitsy, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 14 July 2015.
Be
Trolls and Gollum – messing with the copula since the Third Age.
- 02.087 We ain’t got no water,
- 05.018 What iss he,
- 05.091 Where iss it?
- 05.091 Where iss it?
Update 2015.09.02: Now, the verb “to be” is very common – the most common verb in English. For this Concordance, we’re only listing the uncommon uses of it. I will tag it as “10K” for now. I may change my mind.
Some Plain Concordance Entries
Word Fans, you yourselves can easily do the work of a concordance if you have an electronic copy of The Hobbit and a particular word in your head. That’s why I have tried to jazz up the entries with some trivia, some etymology, some observations on the distribution of the particular word before we look at the distributions of grand classes of words. What if you don’t happen to have an electronic copy? Or what if you’d just like to stroll through the garden of lovely words and see what strikes your fancy?
My advisor, for example, looked at the Concordance page and said, “Manflesh? I don’t recall the goblins referring to… (click).. Oh, of course! The trolls!” On his advice, although we are wending our way toward my finish date for the project and I won’t have time for thoughtful posts about every word, I’m going to try to make a classic brief concordance entry for each of them so you can look at the distributions. Someday perhaps I’ll have time and encouragement to fill out these entries with thoughtful observations.
Tonight I’m going to enter all of Gollum’s sibilance words since we’ve been talking about them. The sounds indicated by “ss” (up to five Ss) are already listed under “hiss”.
Another Proofreading Day
Today I ran through all the “Home” blog posts again for spelling, formatting, errors. I had an inspiring and encouraging advisor meeting yesterday with The Tolkien Professor! With all the exciting bits and pieces it’s easy to become scattered and his broad perspective helped me step back and get a better focus. Let’s not lose sight of one very practical outcome: a working, useful concordance with helpful tidbits about each entry.
He has encouraged me to delve into our Lexos analyses – what makes that peak in uncommon words in Chapter 5? We see it from the whole-book perspective and from the one-word-at a time perspective. Now, can we name the classes of words which make it happen? Our onomatopoeia words are a big driver – what else?
I’m looking forward to the journey. For this evening, however, I think I’ve earned my cold chicken and pickles, porter, and seed-cakes.
Non-Intersection of 1937 and 1951
I’m still intrigued by the uncommon words which are only in the 1937 Chapter 5 and not the 1951 and vice-versa. What else can we see?
- 1937: 1811 words, 152 uncommon words, 8.4% uncommon words
- 1951: 3571 words, 347 uncommon words, 9.7% uncommon words
So – about the same percentage of uncommon words, about 2.2 times as many in the newer as the elder. Good. Now, what about our special categories of words?
Food Words?
- 1937 – none
- 1951 – none – excellent, I’m down with 0 = 0.
Archaic words?
- 1937: durstn’t – [1937.05.095] “Here’s the passage,” he whispered. “It musst squeeze in and sneak down. We durstn’t go with it, my precious, no we durstn’t, gollum!”
- 1951: dursn’t – [05.124] He peered in, and shrank back. ‘But we dursn’t go in, precious, no we dursn’t. Goblinses down there. Lots of goblinses. We smells them. Ssss!’
One word in each edition, different spellings of the same word in the same spot in the story, although additions in 1951 give the paragraph a higher number. Very well, then, I will continue to be intrigued by the disappearing T from “durstn’t” and call this “almost no change”. By the way, “leapt” and “smelt” do not qualify as archaic, but I would like to give them a nice shout-out for being older, less-common forms, and in particular “leapt” for its strong-verb status.
What about sound play words?
- 1937: croaking flip-flap fuss spluttering squeeze
- 1951: cracking flapped gurgling hiss hissed hissing screech shriek shrieked shrieking sniffed squeaked squeaker squeaking ssss
Five in ’37 to fifteen in ’51, all of those are called onomatopoeic or echoic or imitative by the OED. Let’s add to that, shall we? What about Gollum’s sibilance, which has made uncommon words out of some common ones?
- 1951: creepsy eyeses goblinses guesses hates iss losst musst nassty pocketses ssorry tricksy (“guesses” and “hates” qualify when gollum-wise-agreeing with “we” as the pronoun!)
Eleven more sound play words. But not all the added Ss are mis-spoken by Gollum; some are spoken correctly by him and some are outside of direct speech.
- cursing guesses noser nosey shambling sharpened sharper sheathed shiver shivering shriek shrieked shrieking side-passages slide slimy sloping smells smelt snag sneaking softer splayed squeezes stab stiffened swayed unlost
Twenty-eight new words with Ss, most of which begin with S. My, my, my.
Once upon a time, I thought of tagging words which bespoke violence or danger, but that proved fruitless.
‘But you speak of him as if he was a friend. I thought Fangorn was dangerous.’
‘Dangerous!’ cried Gandalf. ‘And so am I, very dangerous: more dangerous than anything you will ever meet, unless you are brought alive before the seat of the Dark Lord. And Aragorn is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli son of Glóin; for you are dangerous yourself, in your own fashion. Certainly the forest of Fangorn is perilous…’
However, as an exercise, I would like to point out how many of the non-intersecting 1937 vs 1951 words speak to me of peril or just makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up?
- 1937 – recklessly slipping
- 1951 – blindly blood-curdling bowstring crawling creepsy crouched cursing gnaw goblin-imp goblinses groping gurgling hates hiss hissed hissing jagged maddened menacing menacingly nassty noser nosey orcs palely pang panted pinch screech shambling sharpened sharper sheathed shiver shivering shriek shrieked shrieking slimy smells smelt snag sneaking sniffed splayed squeaked squeaker squeaking squeezes stab stiffened swayed tense tricksy tripping tunnels unmarked
Alert readers may notice that some words like “slimy” are listed as non-intersecting although they can be found in both versions. Remember that we analyzed only those paragraphs which differ. “Slimy” is found in paragraphs 11 and 13 in both versions and is added to paragraph 12 and 77 in descriptions of Gollum.
“crack, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 19 June 2015.
“fuss, n.2.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 19 June 2015.
“leap, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 19 June 2015.
“smell, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 19 June 2015.
Tolkien, J.R.R. (2012-02-15). The Lord of the Rings: One Volume (p. 499). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
footnote: there’s a word for the hair on one’s skin standing up – horripilation. I didn’t want to put cool jargon in the the way of comprehension, but wanted to be sure my Word Fans have this delightful word in their back pocketses!
1937 words
Only an observation today to satisfy our curiosity. Details and conclusions and error-checking will come in the weeks ahead. These words appear in the 1937 Chapter 5 of The Hobbit and do not appear in the 1951 edition, the one with which we are most familiar:
croaking daresay durstn’t findings flip-flap funnily fuss good-bye jags politely recklessly shuddered slipping sneak sometime spluttering squeeze unsuspecting
My goodness! “Funnily” and “good-bye” and “politely”! what a different feeling. Here follow those words which were added in our 1951 edition. I have included links for those which have entries in the Concordance or other posts:
back-door backwards Baggins betterment birthday-present blindly blood-curdling bowstring brooded cracking crawling creepsy crouched cursing dursn’t eyeses flapped flattened forefinger galled gleamed gnaw goblin-imp goblinses groping guesses gurgling hates hiding-place hiss hissed hissing humped iss jagged leapt losst maddened menacing menacingly mouse musst nassty noser nosey oddments orcs paddling palely pang panted peered pinch pocketses pouch pricked quicker screech shambling sharpened sharper sheathed shiver shivering shriek shrieked shrieking side-passages slide slimy sloping smells smelt snag sneaking sniffed softer splayed squeaked squeaker squeaking squeezes ssorry ssss stab stiffened swayed tense tricksy tripping tunnel-wall tunnels unlost unmarked
Please do note that both editions have “ss”, “sss”, and “sssss” in them – it’s just four esses, “ssss” which is unique to the 1951. So many things to say about these words, but I had better save it for another day, in the morning after coffee when I’m fresh.
Dare
Today’s tidbit is that the 1937 Hobbit has “durstn’t” and the 1951 has “dursn’t“. I am not finding any reference at all on the negative contraction, but “durst” is given as the current past form, alongside “dared”. Google’s Ngram Viewer tells us that both “durstn’t” and “dursn’t” fist appear in their corpus in the early 1800s, at first about equal in frequency but by 1925, “dursn’t” about twice as frequent as “durstn’t”. “Did not dare” overwhelms these forms by an order of magnitude, and is a much older phrase than these contractions are. Present forms “dassn’t” and “dare not” are more common than all those others, the latter much more popular of the two.
See more our earlier discussion of Gollum’s speech.
“Dare” is uncommon as are the contractions.
- 05.124 ‘But we dursn’t go in
- 05.124 no we dursn’t.
“dare, v.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 18 June 2015.
words that you were saying 