I'll Leave When I'm Good and Ready

[some language on language]

[originally published: May 29, 2024]

So there I was yesterday morning, having the night before finally begun to watch Only Murders in the Building,¹ binged as far as season 2, episode 1, and thinking that I might like to touch on the series’s² use of the term “callback” (which I am about to do, as soon as I catch my breath).

OK, breath caught.

Anyway, on a couple of occasions Martin Short’s character (a theater director fallen on hard times owing to some spectacularly poor decisions on his part, which you already know if you’ve seen the series and don’t especially need to know if you haven’t, but one is supposed to explain things in an essay—the who, the what, the where, the etc.—so I’m trying to do my essayist’s job properly) uses the term “callback”—which I’ve always known to refer to an actor’s being asked to return for a subsequent audition or auditions—to, with great self-consciousness and more than a touch of fourth-wall smashing, identify that something he’s just said is meant to remind you of something he’d said before.

A new one on me, then.

This sense of “callback”—let’s go, as always, to our friends at Merriam-Webster—is defined as “something (such as a comment, image, or character) that evokes an earlier instance.” I subsequently learned, particularly via friends who are theatrical types, that this is a term of art in standup comedy (John Mulaney was mentioned a few times; I was put in mind of Eddie Izzard’s miraculous Dress to Kill) for performers who over the course of their routines/monologues, having planted numerous seeds in the early parts, cause those seeds to blossom and bloom³ in the later parts, punchline-wise. I’d also imagine that the term is accurately applied to what endlessly went on in the beloved series Arrested Development, which was positively founded on investing in jokes in January (metaphorically speaking) and paying them off, with dividends, in November. Metaphorically speaking. One thinks, if one is I, of the notorious loose seal, to say nothing of the yacht known as the Seaward. (Personally, I’d have dubbed the thing a “harkback,” which I think better describes it and is less confusing, but no one asked me.)

The divine Jessica Walter as Lucille Bluth.

Anyway anyway, that was what I was about to write about yesterday, along with some commentary about the tendency in modern English-as-she-is-writ to merge terms that initially show up as, for instance, “call back” or “call-back” into terms like, for instance, “callback,”⁴ but then all hell broke loose.

First, it was revealed that Pope Francis, in a closed-door meeting with some twenty of his bishops, had suggested that the last thing Roman Catholic seminaries need is any more frociaggine than they already possess in spades, hearts, and diamonds, which revelation led to a number of erudite word folk leaping to explain precisely what frociaggine means. In English, that is. And what it means in English, it turns out, is what I might refer to here as f*****ry, the -ry making it clear, I hope, that Francis meant the noun f*****ry and not the adjective f*****y. All I know is that had I been in this closed-door meeting I would have laughed my f****t ass off. To give him credit, His Holiness apologized, though it would have amused me had he simply commented: “Dixi, gaudeo quod dixi, et scitote puellae quid loquor.” But maybe that’s just me.⁵

And then, as if that were not enough, it turns out that a neighbor of Mrs. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito’s, in the midst of all that upside-down flag ruckus and hubbub, had called Martha-Ann⁶ Alito what The New York Times referred to, in their New York Times–ian⁷ way, as a “lewd expression” (and then, for good measure, a “vulgar expression”) and what I might refer to as “a term one can hear more in an hour’s stroll in London’s West End than one is apt to hear in any given five years on the streets of Manhattan and that is popularly known to evoke the arrangement of a friendly, casual social engagement shortly after the weekend, but not on Monday (though not as late as Wednesday).”

In other words, I got distracted.

So, then, more on “callback” and related compounds another time, perhaps the next time, as it’s time for me to leave now, and I am, in the immortal words of the immortal Lucille Bluth, good and ready.

Callback!

(Did I do that right?)

1. In 2021, when the series debuted, I was having what one might politely refer to as a lousy year and wasn’t in the mood for funny business. It’s nice, though, sometimes to have a whole thing to catch up with all at once.

2. The plural of “series” is, as you no doubt already know, not “serieses” (unless, perhaps, one is Gollum) but “series.” As far as I’m concerned, the possessive of the singular is “series’s” and the possessive of the plural is “series’.” I don’t think you’ll find that covered in any stylebooks except perhaps my own, and I’m not even sure it’s in that. Don’t say that I never teach you anything useful.

3. Post-publication addendum: As soon as I wrote “blossom and bloom” yesterday, I knew I was quoting something, and I knew it was a lyric, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I’ve been racking my brains over it since, and only when I stopped thinking about it entirely did it pop into my head: It’s a phrase of Ira Gershwin’s from “It’s a New World,” from the Judy-James A Star Is Born.

P.S. Decades ago, my then boyfriend and I spent the better part of two days trying to remember the name of Suzanne Pleshette’s character on The Bob Newhart Show. (It was no longer on the air, it wasn’t in reruns, and there was no Google because it was only 1980.) We must have recited to each other every female name we could think of, but none of them, we knew, were right. Then at breakfast (at Nookies on Wells Street, for you Chicagoans), I took a bite of my ham-and-cheese omelet, looked up, and commented:

“Emily.”

This entire story is deranged, but I feel much better now.

4. See also, and we will, perhaps in my next little party piece, indeed see also “light bulb,” “light-bulb,” and “lightbulb,” “rest room” and “restroom,” “e-mail” and “email,” and similar others.

5. June 12, 2024, update: Seems that His Holiness has used the word yet again, in yet another meeting. His specific phrase, it is reported, was “aria di frociaggine,” which sounds like something a soprano in trousers would sing in a Cherubini opera. Also, I seem to have, in my mind, evolved frociaggine into frogaccino, which is presumably something you can order at Starbucks, though probably best not to ask what’s in it.

6. I love that hyphen, don’t you? It really adds texture and a spirit of Americana to the whole story. It wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if her name were simply Martha Ann.

7. En dash alert!