“Summery” is the cruelest of homonyms
Or non-homographic homophones, to be more precise. That is to say, a word that “Word” will not mark as incorrectly spelled, even though it’s not the word you meant, because you misspelled the word you meant.
The most common of these little buggers, to use a more convenient term, are possessives/plurals, which, I suspect, will eventually lead to the elimination of the apostrophe as the sign of the possessive—which, as I understand it, was originally the case back in the day.
But back to “summery”. A couple of weeks ago I made a reference to a “summery” of something, which, as I happened to reread it, didn’t look quite right. But how often does anyone say that something is “summery” rather than being one? Often enough, obviously, to be captured by Bill Gates’ sieve.
Which led me to think of the last time I had seen the word “summery”, and the only instance I could come up with was in a limerick, part of a collection entitled “Limericks Long After Lear” that had been abstracted in a very largely forgotten compendium that I had read as a child, The Subtreasury of American Humor, compiled by those legendary mainstays of the New Yorker, E.B. and Katherine White.
Well, you can find anything on the Internet, right? Well, no, you can’t. I searched for the fragment of the limerick I could remember, which was everything except the first line, as well as “Limericks Long After Lear”, and came up empty. So there was no way to satisfy my curiosity other than Amazon, which, fortunately, came through, and delivered the tome to my door, or at least my concierge.
“Limericks Long After Lear” were written by Morris Bishop, a professor of French literature at Cornell, who is not at all forgotten on the Internet, getting a very extensive entry on Wikipedia, providing, among other things, synopses of the major reviews of his scholarly works, including biographies of Pascal and Ronsard. His enthusiasm for light verse is mentioned, and several stanzas are quoted, but nothing from “Limericks”, even though we are told that he used to exchange them with Vladimir Nabokov, who, thanks to Bishop, used to teach at Cornell.
Well, to keep you in suspense no longer, here it is:
A lady who rules Fort Montgomery
Says the wearing of clothes is mere mummery;
She has frequently tea’d in
The costume of Eden
Appearing delightfully summery.
A ghoulish old fellow in Kent
Encrusted his wife in cement;
He said, with a sneer,
“I was careful, my dear,”
To follow your natural bent.”
After I had sent away for the Subtreasury, I discovered that if I kept up with “fashion”, “summery” might not have seemed so rare a bird after all, because I saw it in a headline in New York—“best summery looks”. Well, my loss.
