Many journalists and writers have made their signature line or phrase all their own. Harold Ross would often insert “So, help me God” in much of his correspondence. A.F.S. Talyerkhan would end his columns with the line, ‘Get me, Steve?”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, the American author who died on Wednesday, made the phrase “So it goes” famous.
In his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut wrote:
“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year around was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes. Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”
But his sense of humour and feeling for the word was most obvious in a self-interview he did for Paris Review (No. 69, 1977). In response to one question, Vonnegut said he was once called ’snarf’ because he was caught smelling his armpit absent-mindedly…
“…Technically I wasn’t really a snarf. A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls’ bicycle saddles. I didn’t do that. “Twerp” also had a very specific meaning, which few people know now. Through careless usage, “twerp” is a pretty formless insult now.
Interviewer: What is a “twerp” in the strictest sense, in the original sense?
Vonnegut: It’s a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.
Interviewer: I see.
Vonnegut: I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or her ass. I’m always offending feminists that way.
Interviewer: I don’t quite understand why someone would do that with false teeth?
Vonnegut: In order to bite the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs. That’s the only reason twerps do it. It’s all that turns them on.
16 April 2007 at 4:31 pm
here’s an excerpt from Vonnegut’s book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian:
I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of regards or punishments after I’m dead. My German-American ancestors, the earliest of whom settled in our Middle West about the time of our Civil War, called themselves “Freethinkers,” which is the same sort of thing. My great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut wrote, for example, “If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?”
I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored