putterings 486 < 487 > 488 index
some later instances and adjacences, inadequate gestures, some obsolete
puttering with his “philosophical language” ₁
for example, puttering with
the doorjamb ₂
apart from the subject matter before them; nor did they allow themselves to become putterers in a blind alley of professional abstraction into which the layman cannot enter.
I remember one evening ₃
not in real-time or movie-time, but in old-man-puttering-about time... ₄
He goes on to say, “In this unsettled period” ₅
as if. “I have stood on the bridge at midnight,” ₆
But language does not stand still. ₇
sources
- final years of his life were devoted to promoting and puttering with his “philosophical language.” As gossipist John Aubrey
ex Gary Jennings, presumably on John Wilkins, in his Personalities of Language (1965) : 235 : link (google books preview) - from Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds., Poems for the Millennium : (vol 2?; 1995) : 677
google preview snippet : link
being Charles Bernstein, The Sophist (1987) : 29
google books preview snippet : link - F. B. Housser, A Canadian Art Movement : The Story of the Group of Seven
(1926) : 152
Stanford copy/scan (via google books) : link - Jo Ann Wasserman, review of Laird Hunt, Indiana, Indiana (The Dark and Lovely Potions of the Night), (2003)
in The Poetry Project Newsletter 197 (December-January, 2003-2004) : 28
link (pdf)
see lairdhunt.org, and the Coffeehouse Press page for the book : link
aside —
now reading Hunt’s novel Zorrie (2022), which puts me in mind of Susan Glaspell her fiction (and yes too of Marilynne Robinson, as the dustjacket mentions). - ...as harmless as retired pensioners puttering in their gardens.” He goes on to say, “In this unsettled period...”
— something by Herbert Leibowitz, his introduction of the 15th anniversary issue of the journal Parnassus cited in note 23 (to something in pages 150-156) of Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose : The Crisis in American Verse (1990) : 188 : link (google books preview) - ...as if English-language poets all spent their childhoods puttering around in Venice. “I have stood on the bridge at midnight,”...
— David Orr, wondering about the the plethora of bridges — and the relative paucity of tunnels, their sulfuric underworlds and cranial interiorities — in poetry, in his You, Too, Could Write a Poem (2017) : 151 : link (google books preview) - Penelope Eckert. “The Limits of Meaning: Social Indexicality, Variation, and the Cline of Interiority” (2019) : 769
pdf via her Third Wave Variation Studies : link
It was Carla Harryman (I think) who, in her presentation at Other Influences: A Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry Reading (Cambridge; October 10, 2024), mentioned Akilah Oliver (1961-2011), her The Putterer’s Notebook (Belladonna; 2006, 2011). No putterings therein — explicitly, but implicitly everwhere — “a dissociation between forms... abstractions in my teeth... inadequate gesture[s].”
Harryman also quoted from her own “Gardener of Stars / Book Report by the Author” —
“Her habitation is designed with low productivity in mind: this is what she’s chosen after the world has fallen apart. One must keep in mind that Gardener’s habitat is predicated on catastrophe, which appears to have motivated her both to invent a community and to leave it.”
from The Grand Piano : An Experiment in Collective Autobiography; San Francisco, 1975-1980, Part 5 (Detroit; 2007) : 117 : link (google preview snippet)
This was all new to me. And led to some searches for “language poets” + “puttering,” by which some results (and their surrounds) are included here.
pudge / podge ‘short and thick person’, putter / potter...
However, not all of the words exist in the same synchronic plane, as the list shows. Some are obsolete. A few are dialect variants of StE forms with a vowel or slightly different acoustic qualities (cf putter/potter...)
— “Word-coining through ablaut modification,” in
Hans Marchand, The categories and types of present-day English word-formation; a synchronic-diachronic approach (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1960) : 342
a pdf of its chapter on Phonetic Symbolism can be found here (as of 20241020)
stashed there by linguist Penelope Eckert; see her (interesting to me) portal page, from which instance #7 above is taken.
Hans Marchand (1907-1978), linguist
wikipedia : link
The puttering/pottering divergence is probably other than is discussed by Marchand, as it aligns with U.S. / British English usage well into the 20th century; I suspect that puttering owes to Dutch (poking).