Splendiferously ‘Splainin’ Sockdolagers

From a grandiloquent lexicographer perspective

“What’s all this flamdoodle about ‘Sockdolagers’”? Asked my new editor. “Are you trying to hornswaggle the entire community again? Our burgeoning readership could start a donnybrook, wearing out Wikipedia if you don’t march forth to swiftly explain this bafflegab.”

“March 4^th? That’s the only day that literally means anything, anymore.” I interjected. “Unless you wait seven months to count on Oct. 4 (10-4). But they’re trying to phase that numerical phrase out too, to ‘roger that’”.

The editor took the chair replying, “Don’t ske-daddly-odge my question daddy-o, with your higgledy-piggledy and waspy rigmarole. The Journal has come a long way since collating without electricity on backs of 1881 spud wagons. ‘Banholzerian Hieroglyphics’ simply was not spontaneweous (spontaneous and new) enough to integrate with this newfangled logo font. If Sun Valley were a beach resort town, ‘medicinal porpoises’, with the undiluted lessons animals perpetually try splashing us with, would lend to soft clarion column calling.”

“You’re entirely right Pedro; I shouldn’t ishkabible about some surreptitious meaning hanging over sockdolagers like some darn sword of Damocles. After all, I’m not a carpetbagging rapscallion you know. In fact, I’ve worked on about every avenue off Main St. in this valley. Sometimes laboring on same streets under twice-different names. And 1881! Jumping Jehoshaphat, a new numerical miracle palindrome! One for reading anti-clockwise, while dervishly whirling like a peaceful warrior surrounding Sufi poetry. Not unlike the palindrome that asks from the sky-scraping perspective, ‘Do geese see god?’ Mark Twain banged out a bamboozling column for Saint Louie’s Dispatch back then. Pointing out gubmint boondoggles and whatnot. In this frontier-state, Ezra Pound was still an energetic gleam in his daddy’s eye. I remember now, isn’t 1881 the year when the Warm Springs sphairstrike (tennis) craze first came into court? I have a hot news tip that spans three centuries. Can you give me a landline on my cell phone, while I check it out?”

“Now, that too would be flabber-ghastingly impossible”, he rejoined.

Eventually I elucidated, “Would you believe that ‘socdolager’ was one of the last big-shot words Lincoln ever heard? Watching play-acting from a liberty balcony. Honest Abe. Sockdolager strikingly means ‘a conclusive knock-down punch or something outstanding. A blow so hard that nothing else can follow; a decisive, overwhelming finish, to which no reply is possible.’ When frontiersman Davy Crockett became a snollygoster (political office seeker), he used a whopping sockdolager to brighten Congress’s outlook over a stately issue. That before he perished in an awesome shock called The Alamo”.

Synchronisticly, I had the notion that readers would be interested in ‘serendipitous’ origins. Every Joe and Josephina, who serenely baptizes themselves in renewing rivers, thinks they will start out the year knowing what serendipity is and faithfully march around with heart-stone pocketfuls of it. Well, they are regularly right, even if the Mermaid of the Bigwood isn’t literally splashing sopping sacred sockdolagers in their faces from her beauty-filled fishtail.

The Wood River Valley is filled with more serendipity than you can shake a stick at. Constantly running into somebody you’ve been thinking about on a backcountry trail or over at Atkinson’s. Snowboarding down Bassett Gulch, feeling cordially in your core that the right person will drive by at that ideal time, to give you an energetic chatty ride to the base of Warm Springs. Or, being sucked in by a snowbank, then having some kindly prince stop to help, with whom you’ve been meaning to catch up with on stately scuttlebutt.

The Three Princes of Serendip is a rich Arabian story about three want-to-be- wise-guys from the exotic land of Serendip (now Sri Lanka). The princes are endowed with the gift of casual discovery. That is, they were constantly finding answers to mysteries that they had not even set out for in their search, ending up in better places than they expected. It’s more than coincidence that serene-dipped-pity surrounds everybody. Why, serendipity is a bigger and better virus in Idaho than is West Nile.

Marvelous errors and “accidental discoveries” should not be pish-poshed off so easily. Think about how many folks who have met under circumstances “entirely by luck” that ended in up in happy partnerships with each other –maybe even your own parents. Indeed, I’ve been lucky enough to capture a few sockdolagers from diverse avenues and providence willing, I’ll keep my good eye peeled for a few more, then dip them in and shake them up in punch bowls of philosophical wax –for awakening readers in a sun-ripened valley the perfect dimension for sockdolagers of daily serendipity.

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `

Reference links:

The sesquipedalian septuagenarian - The Boston Globe

http://livingheritage.org/serendipity.htm

http://www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm http://www.soulariumcenter.com/Surrender.htm http://www.rootsweb.com/~genepool/meanings.htm