HOW IT ALL BEGAN

Once upon a time, in a kingdom 'cross the seas, a troop of language
lovers marched merrily along. Some of them, waving their cedillas,
headed south toward Spain. Others, hefting their umlauts, lumbered off
toward Germany. A sizable contingent, waving mystic banners, headed
for the diacritical swamps of Sweden ...
Still others, the most adventurous of them all, crossed a raging
channel and stumbled through the forests of primitive Anglo-Saxon
speech. They tripped over roots. They gathered great baskets of
consonants. You would not believe what they did with vowels. Never
mind! They left us with the glorious inheritance of English spelling.
Thus these pilgrims picked up whole hampers of letters that had fallen
by the way. Four of the discarded letters clung together as o-u-g-h.
"What an ugly syllable!" they cried. "But how do you pronounce it?"
"Obviously," said one, "o-u-g-h is the sound of -uff, as in rough,
tough and that's enough."
"No," said another, "it must be the sound of -ow. As in plough, bough
and the slough of despond."
"Not so!" protested a third pilgrim. "Clearly, that interesting tangle
is an -ooo, as in through, slough and frou-frou. Or an -off, as in a
very bad cough."
Thus the fathers and mothers of English orthography marched into
swamps of indefensible spelling. There they vanquished such stout foes
as Col. Bertie McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and George Bernard
Shaw of "Pygmalion" fame. Left to their orderly devices, those
missionary fathers would have spelled "through" as "thru." Such an
apocalyptic moment may come with our children's children's children.
The millennium does not approach.
Meanwhile, let us explore such lovely agglomerations as "p," "u" and
"m." The only noun that emerges from that array is "puma," the cougar.
If we assemble the fallen letters as "pmu" or "mpu," inspiration does
not strike. But consider the possibilities that spring from the
configuration of u-m-p. Vistas open.
"Bump!" The combination is perfect. The derivative "bumper" and
"bumper sticker" splendidly serve a useful purpose. Chump! Clump!
Crumple! You could stay up all night and not discover words more
suited to the occasion. Dump, the verb! Dump, the noun! In 1817 some
inspired English writer came up with "frump," aptly defined as "a
dowdy, unattractive girl or woman; a staid, drab, old-fashioned
person."
One of Disney's all-time great characters was Grumpy the dwarf. Memory
falters. The Gumps? Weren't there a whole family of Gumps? And "hump,"
as in Victor Hugo's "Humpback of Notre Dame." Are you skeptical? Well,
humph! You can lump it!
The possibilities are not yet exhausted. Mumps! I remember them well.
And the lords of baseball -- they are the umps, and we enjoy a First
Amendment right to boo them. Literally or metaphorically, we prime a
pump -- even a sump pump. We plump up a pillow. We haul off a stump or
speak upon it. When the market flags, it's a slump.
There are the -ump words that rhyme with The Donald. There are things
that go thump in the night. Rump, the roast! Rump, the fanny! Rump,
the Parliament. Oliver Cromwell! Rumpelstiltskin! And let us conclude
with a salute to the mugwump, the candidate who sits upon a fence with
his mug on one side and his wump on the other. The riches of American
speech will never be fully explored.

--
Gaurav Shukla