Eliot did write verse that one can really get one's teeth into, sweet or
otherwise.
Even fangs appear at times.
P.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chokh Raj" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 5:21 AM
Subject: Re: Sweet tooth fairy


What a fascinating discourse on wordplay, Rick! Thanks for sharing it.

I especially like: "Once you meet the sweet tooth fairy, you will see the
touch of her phrase-combining wand everywhere". "The best sweet tooth
fairies take a dramatic turn in the middle, merging wildly divergent things:
magnetic personality disorder, poetic license plate, and victory lap dance.
Some are self-reinforcing: fresh meat market, hard right wing, peer pressure
cooker. Others are self-negating: frugal living large, upwardly mobile home,
remote control freak, uninvited guest list. For word people, these little
phrases offer much the same “aha” satisfaction as that famous optical
illusion known as a Rubin vase, which forces first one interpretation (it’s
a vase!) and then another (it’s two faces!). By putting words into an
unaccustomed double role, they let us see ordinary English words for the
truly versatile actors they are."  "We all know how illogical and
contradictory English can be, but sweet tooth fairies let us turn even the
most
 banal and familiar parts of our language - sweet tooth, tooth fairy - into
something strange and wonderful." Three cheers to Erin McKean !!!

To me Eliot is, indeed, a perfect sweet tooth fairy, a language-phile -- you
can see the touch of his word-virtuosic wand everywhere.
For him, though, as he put it, it is essentially a wrestle with words to
recover meaning -- to force language into meaning -- "a raid on the
inarticulate", "to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and
again".

In that sense, absolutely, Eliot was a Nobel prize fighter !!!

Thanks again and with my best regards,

CR


--- On Wed, 1/27/10, Rickard A. Parker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> During his Harvard years T.S. Eliot
> took up boxing under the tutorledge
> of a man named Sweeney. But we know that Eliot mainly
> fought with his
> demons. It paid off -- he was awarded the Nobel Prize
> for Literature
> in 1948.
>
> I have a question though. Did that make Eliot the
> world's first Nobel
> prize fighter?
>
> What is a sweet tooth fairy?:
>
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/01/24/sweet_tooth_fairies/
>
> Give me a list of 'em:
> http://www.wordnik.com/lists/sweet-tooth-fairy?s=c&d=d&o=-1