One Man's Spelling Is Another Man's Blunder

While reading a news feature on Pitchfork this morning, I came across a word that I've rarely seen in print over the last twenty-five years:

An A-Z of Franz Ferdinand is Helen Chase's searing exposé of the seamy underbelly of the Scottish angle-rockers, a Kitty Kelly-style autobiography that digs up every last speck of dirt on the perpetually scandal-ridden, drug-addled renegades.

Sike! Remember, folks, this is a band whose frontman wrote a book about food. Still, there's plenty to learn about Alex and the lads from the tome. According to NME.com, Chase's A-Z features a series of thematic vignettes and never-before-seen photos, which should school even the biggest Franz Ferdi-fan (yep, went there). Chase conducted a series of lengthy interviews and did extensive research for A-Z, which seeks to serve as a definitive guide to the band's first five years. And beyond, apparently: the author dishes with the dudes about their elusive forthcoming third LP.

Or, rather, I came across what I take to be a word I've rarely seen in print over the last twenty-five years. Given the context, I'm assuming that the writer Paul Thompson means the idiomatic expression that my African-American friends taught me in my fish-out-of-pond purgatory in the sixth grade at Kettering Elementary. But whenever any of us wrote it, we always spelled it -- or at least tried to spell it -- with the letter P: "Psych!" That derivation made sense to me at the time and still makes sense to me today, because it indicates a relationship with all the words with a "psych-" prefix and therefore suggests that the speaker has been messing with the mind of his addressee. For the life of me, I can't think of an equivalent justification for "Sike!", but perhaps I'm just short on ingenuity at the present moment.

The Sounds of Silence

I just looked over at my copy of 501 French Verbs and, though I never made it very far in the language, mused on how cool French conjugations can look. There's something about the ratio of characters to actually spoken phonemes that turns me on. As I was thinking about that, though, I started to hear Bruce Springsteen singing "Thunder Road." Only the lyrics were different: "Their were ghosts in the eyes of all the letters you sent away." The mind works in mysterious ways. Or, to be more precise, mine does.