Joe Ciccone - The ElectroLounge

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precise,” as the writer above put it; another writer mentions Hugh Grant’s “plummy Pimm’s
Cup accent.” Class envy Linguist John Lawler would say so. The second semantic category
he claimed for pr- (after “one-dimensional”) was “class role,” concentrating on “propriety
and privilege” up top but acknowledging the bottom too, prince and pauper alike. Preppies,
patricians, and plutocrats are at the pinnacle of society, up at the very peak of the social pyramid;
while the poor—the people, the public, the plebes, proles, peasants, and peons—root around in
the muck at the bottom. The rich are proud and erect; Spanish pijo ‘prick’ also means ‘rich kid’
and ‘posh’.
If the letter P were a fairy tale, says Margaret Magnus, it would be The Princess and the
Pea. But if the tale’s dainty princess can be deranged by a single dried pea under her mattress,
maybe all that “propriety and privilege” up in the castle is just a bunch of tommyrot. Maybe the
prince himself is just a pompous ass: a pooh-bah, a potentate, a grand panjandrum. A prick, in
fact. That’s an interesting insult. It’s phallic, but it’s pin-like too. Prickish people are narrow and
rigid, but mostly they’re intent on popping other people’s balloons. Euphemisms emphasize the
pointiness: the “pointy-haired boss” in Dilbert, George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals.”
Prigs, spoilsports, and “party-pooping Puritans” are out to stop fun, like the “thought police” who
enforce political correctness. An officious German is “a little Piefke,” an officious Frenchman is
a pète-sec. Minor officials on power trips are mosquitoey: pesky, peevish, particular, persnickety.
Those qualities are the underbelly of exactness. P is “precise,” says Magnus, but it “errs on the
side of pickiness.”
Mind your p’s and q’s, children! Teachers and clergymen hail from the same P camp
as governesses. Schools have principals, provosts, pupils, and pedagogues. Scholars are pedants,
and professors speak “with painstaking precision.” Remember Professor Plum in Clue, or Dav
Pilkey’s mad genius Professor Poopypants Even schools get in on the act. Vanity Fair opens at
“Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies.” The Catcher in the Rye opens at Pencey Prep, where
Holden is visiting his teacher Mr. Spencer. Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall goes one
better: it opens in the office of Oxford bursar Mr. Postlethwaite, and then traces the fortunes of
two teachers named Paul Pennyfeather and Mr. Prendergast.
The second man eventually ends up as Reverend Prendergast, thereby exchanging
one P zone (the School) for another (the Church). John Lawler shrewdly numbered “prophet,
priest, prelate, and prior” among his pr‐ authority figures. Compare pastor, preacher, parson;
plus pew, pulpit, parish, piety, pilgrim, prayer, penance, proselytize, pontiff, pope. The first pope
was St. Peter, and ten of the twenty popes since 1740 have used the names Paul or Pius. The
American poet T. S. Eliot wickedly subverted all these churchly P’s in his little masterpiece
“Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” which distastefully observes “pustular” boys fingering
“piaculative pence” while “sable presbyters” glide toward “the avenue of penitence.” To get us in
the mood, Eliot opens his poem with one P word, polyphiloprogenitive, and reverently closes it
with another, polymath.
T. S. Eliot is the patron saint of the letter P. He called himself Old Possum, and he
adopted a rather donnish appearance to match—”prune-faced,” as a friend of mine put it. I’m
sure Eliot would have agreed, for his self-portrait in “Five-Finger Exercises” gleefully mocks his
own “mouth so prim” and “features of clerical [clergyman’s] cut.” It also mocks his speech, “so
nicely / Restricted to What Precisely / And If and Perhaps and But.” Indeed, the only man more
artfully repressed than Eliot himself is his own creation J. Alfred Prufrock, who famously asks,
“Do I dare to eat a peach” Ever cautious and “politic,” Eliot’s Prufrock wears a modest necktie
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The Cenacle | 84 | April 2013