"Carl said lugubriously..."
Odd words pop up in odd places. While I was building the Carl & Jerry story index, I read all 119 of the stories in the space of a couple of weeks. The text was not fantastic, and I decided not to soften its quirky nature except to eliminate genuine typos or gross grammatical errors. The stories are told in the ordinary language spoken in central Indiana, complete with what I assume are genuine colloquialisms of the 1950s:
Jerry ignored this nasty remark. “Don’t you think it would be real George if every time our swords touched fire would fly?”
"Real George" is a phrase I've never heard before; perhaps it was common among teenagers in 1956. Today they'd probably say, "Wouldn't it be da bomb if every time our swords touched fire would fly?" (Alas, the techie trick in question-connecting a neon-sign transformer to their swords for a sword fight in a school play-would now get them thrown out of school.)
Carl & Jerry's late creator John T. Frye really took me by surprise in only one respect: He loved the words "lugubrious" and "lugubriously." The word (in its various forms) is used six or seven times in the Carl & Jerry canon. Here are some examples:
Carl slumped against the doorjamb and said lugubriously, "I've been afraid of this. The mad genius has finally flipped his lid. That's what comes of reading physics texts and tube manuals instead of comic books like any other red-blooded American boy. I'm a little disappointed, though, in the lack of originality. Old Diogenes used that carrying-a-light-in-the-daytime routine several centuries ago."
"Guess I'm the one guy in ten for whom it won't work," Jerry said with a lugubrious sigh as he shut off the equipment and removed the earphones.
Jerry flipped off the switch on the recorder control, and the voice slowly coasted to a stop. "There goes the sku-n--n----n-----nk!" it said lugubriously.
I'm not sure I've seen the word since I was in college 35 years ago, and I know I've never heard it spoken aloud. The oddness is amplified by the fact that Frye did not have the polished articulation that his contemporary John Daly of "What's My Line?" had. Fifty-dollar words like "lugubriously" don't often travel alone. I would have expected to see "tergiversation" or "contumaciousness" on its arm now and then, but no. All the rest of the text is strikingly ordinary.
No conclusions can be drawn here, except for the obvious: Personalities are reflected in their writing. If I've learned anything in 25 years as an editor I've learned that. I would like to have known John T. Frye, or at least spent an hour or two with him to get his short-form bio. He may have known a lot of cool words, and kept them all out of his fiction except for "lugubrious." Maybe he thought it was ordinary. (Perhaps they used it a lot in central Indiana.) Maybe it was an inside joke with one of his editors, as the word "cerate" was between me and the man who edited Turbo Pascal Solutions. (It was an easy typo for "create," and he asked me once, "You really did want to tell the reader to coat that linked list with wax, didn't you?") Or maybe, like a lot of techies, he was simply an eccentric who liked certain words more than others. Alas, (Jeff thought lugubriously) I suspect that we will never know.