Double Dactyl Poetry

Next week is National Grammar Day once again! In what has become an NGD tradition, grammar lovers have been using Twitter to submit their entries in the annual National Grammar Day haiku contest. Actually, like this podcast, these haiku cover not only grammar, but also word usage, punctuation, pronunciation, and writing style. That’s OK, though; we cast a wide net here, and everything that’s both interesting and language-related is fair game. 

This year, though, I’d like to invite you to work with another short form of poetry, called the double dactyl. 

What’s a Dactyl?

To understand what a double dactyl is, you first need to know what a dactyl is. It’s not an extinct flying reptile; that’s a pterodactyl. However, if you translate the Greek roots that make up pterodactyl, you get “wing finger.” So dactyl means “finger,” but what do fingers have to do with poetry? True, you do use your fingers to write poetry, but that’s true of poetry in general. The more relevant answer is that a dactyl is a sequence of three syllables: a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. For example, the word holiday is a dactyl as are genesis and poetry. Are you getting the rhythm?

And what do fingers have to do with sequences of one stressed syllable and two unstressed syllables? In metrical notation, stressed syllables are often written as a dash, and unstressed syllables as shorter, bent lines. Represented this way, apparently a dactyl reminded someone of a finger: The dash for the stressed syllable is the first, longer knuckle, and the two shorter knuckles are the bent lines for the unstressed syllables. 

What Are the Double Dactyl Poetry Rules?

The form of poem called the double dactyl has two stanzas of four lines each, in which the first three lines each are made up of just two dactyls, and the fourth line has a single dactyl followed by one more stressed syllable. For example, some acceptable fourth lines could be Hullabaloo, or Give me a break!

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Aside from the metrical description, there are three other requirements for a double dactyl. The one that makes National Grammar Day particularly suitable for a double dactyl is that the topic of a double dactyl has to be a two-dactyl proper noun. Not just any proper noun fits this description. Some that do fit include Emily Dickinson, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Ivan the Terrible. And as you may have noticed by now, so does National Grammar Day! So here it is, a double dactyl composed especially for next week’s august occasion:

Holy infinitives,

National Grammar Day!

Grammatomaniacs, 

Time to geek out!

Syntax, semantics, and

Strange ambiguities—

This is the fun stuff that

Grammar’s about.

In case you’d like to try writing your own double dactyl, whether it’s about National Grammar Day or something or someone else, I’ll explain the rest of the requirements. They can be found in the introduction to the book Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, which was edited by John Hollander and Anthony Hecht, the inventor of the double dactyl. That’s right—unlike haiku, limericks, or sonnets, the double dactyl has a known inventor. In the book, Hecht explains that he invented the form in 1951, when he was looking for a poem in which the word Schistosomiasis could take up an entire line all by itself. Schistosomiasis, by the way, is a parasitic disease spread by snails. (SHIS-to-so-MY-a-sis)

In fact, this word brings us to the second requirement for a double dactyl: At least one line must consist of a single, double-dactylic word. Furthermore, just to make things more difficult, Hecht and Hollander declared that no double-dactylic word should be used in more than one double dactyl poem. I won’t bore you with a list of all the no-longer-eligible words I found in the double dactyls in Jiggery Pokery, but I’ll put a list of them on the transcript for anyone who’s interested.  

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As far as I know, the word grammatomaniac has not yet been used in a double dactyl. In fact, I even thought I had invented the word, on the model of grammatological and grammatophobia. Then I searched for it, and found that it was coined by H. L. Mencken in 1922, when he wrote: 

There are fanatics who love and venerate spelling as a tom cat loves and venerates catnip. There are grammatomaniacs; schoolmarms who would rather parse than eat; specialists in an objective case that doesn’t exist in English; strange beings otherwise sane and even intelligent and comely who suffer under a split infinitive as you or I would suffer under gastro-enteritis. (H. Kl. Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series, Volume 3, 1922, pp. 245-246)

To Mencken’s coinage, I would add that grammatomaniacs can also be people who are just plain interested in how languages work. In fact, in an earlier draft of the poem, I called them language enthusiasts instead of grammatomaniacs, but that’s no good. Although language enthusiasts does consist of two dactyls, it’s two words, not one. It has to be one word! The rules are very clear about this. Actually, Hecht and Hollander also specify that the double-dactylic single word should be in the second four lines, and ideally in the second-to-last line, but I just couldn’t make that work.

Here are some tips for finding or inventing your double-dactylic word: 

1. Take advantage of long suffixes. The suffixes –ability and -ological have four syllables all by themselves, so you only need two to turn them into words like irritability and dermatological. 
2. Take advantage of kind of long suffixes, The suffixes -arity, -atical, -ational, -arian, -ality, -istical, -ography, -ology, and -torial are all dactyls, so you just need to find another dactyl that can combine with them.
3. Take advantage of two-syllable suffixes. Don’t forget about suffixes such as -able or -ible, as in terrible, and -ian, as in contrarian. 
4. Remember the suffix -ly. This suffix can turn an adjective into an adverb, and sometimes it can do so without even adding a syllable. The following pairs all have the same number of syllables: unjustifiable, unjustifiably; dermatological, dermatologically.
5. Take advantage of your prefixes, especially two-syllable ones. These prefixes are often borrowed from Latin or Greek, such as hetero-, hyper-, hypo-, meta-, mono-, neo-, and poly-. The negative prefixes non- and un- are useful for putting a stressed syllable at the beginning of a word.
6. Look for Latin or Greek bound roots. What’s a bound root, you ask? Take the double-dactyl word pharmacologically. You may recognize the root pharmaco- and figure, correctly, that this word has something to do with drugs. But on its own, pharmaco- is not a word. Linguists call it a bound root. Similarly, the noun grammar can stand on its own, but the dactylic bound root grammato- has to be part of a longer word.

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In addition to being about a person or thing with a double-dactylic name, and having at least one line that consists of a single, double-dactylic word, there’s one more requirement for a double dactyl: The first line has to be nonsense—for example, jiggery-pokery, the title of Hecht and Hollander’s book. They should have titled the book higgledy-piggledy, because that was by far the most-used piece of double-dactylic nonsense in their poems. They only used jiggery-pokery once. Occasionally they used pattycake, pattycake, and one poem in the book uses pocketa pocketa, which is an allusion to James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” If you’re curious about that allusion, read the story; it’s a classic. I’ve also seen hickory dickory in double dactyls elsewhere. The name Babbitty Rabbitty in J. K. Rowling’s Tales of Beedle the Bard has the distinction of being both a suitable subject for a double dactyl and a piece of double-dactylic nonsense. I bent the rule about starting with a line of nonsense, because I didn’t like completely throwing away a line by not having it carry any meaning. Plus, I was sick of reading higgledy-piggledy. Instead, I figured an exclamation would be close enough to nonsense, and went with Holy infinitives!

So much for the anatomy of a double dactyl. Since I’ve spotlighted syntax and semantics in the fifth line of my double dactyl, this is a good time to give a quick and dirty distinction between the two. Syntax is about the structure of a string of words, and semantics is about the meaning. Sometimes, the same string of words can have different invisible structures, which correspond to different meanings. These are the “strange ambiguities” of the sixth line of my poem. A good example is the ambiguity of Make me a sandwich, the classic grammar joke that was the subject of episode 442. Do I want someone to assemble a sandwich for me or turn me into a sandwich? There are also stranger ambiguities, in which you get multiple meanings even without different structures. For example, there’s the sentence Every year, somebody’s dog gets killed by a deer, which Gretchen McCulloch wrote about in episode 422. It had eight possible meanings! And though opinions can differ, my opinion is that this is the fun stuff about grammar.

Tell us what you think grammar’s all about in your own double dactyl! Leave it in a comment on this page, or tweet a screenshot of it to us at @GrammarGirl and @LiteralMinded with the hashtag #GrammarDay.

Neal Whitman is an independent researcher and writer on language and grammar. He blogs at literalminded.wordpress.com, and tweets @LiteralMinded. 

Single-word double dactyls used in Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls. 

antediluvian
anthropomorphically
balletomania
characteristically
cosmetological
decalcomania
erotogenesis
etymologically
gubernatorial
gynecological
heliocentrically
heterosexual
historiography
hypocoristically
incomprehensible
irritability
Machiavellian
metalinguistically
mythopoetically
Neo-Dravidian
non-navigational
organizational
parachromatically
parliamentarian
parthenogenesis
philolinguistically
plenipotentiary
polysyllabically
practability
propagandistically
psycholinguistical
quasiacceptable
sesquipedalian
uncomplimentary
un-Dostoevskian
ungeriatrically
unjustifiable
unmetaphysically
unsuitability
valedictorian

Hand image courtesy of Shutterstock. Quill image courtesy of Shutterstock.