Just two days ago, it was (piecrust) crumblies. Now, Benita Bendon Campbell has sent me e-mail connecting crumblies to (garment) greeblies — which, as it turns out, I posted about on this blog way back in 2012. My personal experience with the two terms dates to the 1960s, and is bound up with my history with my late wife, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (1937 – 1985); Bonnie (BBC) was Ann’s best friend (and has been a close friend of mine since 1960).
Piecrust crumblies. From my 7/24 posting “What shall we do with the leftover pie dough?”:
Now we sing, to the tune of “Drunken Sailor”:
What shall we do with the leftover pie dough? … …
Cut it into slabs and then you bake them.Do that, and you get the yummy stuff that Ann Daingerfield Zwicky called piecrust crumblies (a family term whose origin was lost to her)
Little greeblies. From my 12/23/12 posting “greeblies”:
A story from almost 50 years ago, in Cambridge MA, in which a young woman talks with exasperation about the slapdash housekeeping skills of some male friends of hers sharing an apartment in Cambridge. One of them had done a load of laundry, washing, along with a lot of dark clothes, a brand-new fuzzy yellow garment, with the predictable unfortunate outcome that, as she put it:
*Everything* was covered with little yellow greeblies
Ann and I hadn’t heard the word greeblies before, but from the context and the word’s sound, it was clear what the greeblies were: little bits of fluff (which attached themselves unwelcomely to other things). And when we told the story to others, no one had any problem dealing with the unfamiliar word.
… it seems that people have invented this noun (and the similar noun greeble [with final /-ǝl/ rather than /-li/]), independently, many times, using the phonosemantic resources of English to craft a new word that vividly suggests the image they have in mind.
Phonetic and phonosemantic details in the posting. But the bottom line is that greeblies and greebles are both small, and also annoying (or even nasty).
This is the greeblies story as I recalled it (long after the occasion) and re-told back in 2012. Bonnie’s recollection of the story is signficantly different in crucial details; I’ll give it below (edited only to conceal the identity of one of the characters), but first some notes on memory, in particular memory for family stories (something I spent some time investigating back in the 1980s) — to prepare you for juxtaposing my story and Bonnie’s.
Recollecting family stories. All memory is fragile and undependable. It starts with our original perception, which actively selects things to attend to, and interprets those things in the light of our prior experiences, beliefs, interests, and expectations. Then, what is held in memory is constantly in flux; memory tends to decay over time, but it can also amplify and elaborate (for a number of reasons), or simply shift under a variety of influences (including hearing about the scenes or events from others and, oh alas, how people frame questions about what we remember).
As a result of all of this, if you ask people in a family to tell the story of some significant family event, you will get notably different stories from everyone, diverging in details big and small. Then if you go back to them a year later with the same request, each of the stories will have changed. And then again after another year. Each story is always shifting. If you have some independent source of facts about the event, it will almost always turn out that nobody has it all right, and, sadly, how strong any person’s conviction is that they have remembered accurately is no gauge of the actual accuracy of their story.
It’s not a complete disaster, not at all. But, like most human things, it’s something of a mess. That’s pretty much guaranteed by the nature of perception and memory. But for most purposes, a bit of a mess is good enough. For some purposes, strict accuracy isn’t even especially important; many of our personal stories are intended to bond with, move, entertain, or amuse our listeners, not primarily to convey information to them.
Bonnie’s e-mail. Now to compare hers to mine. From BBC on 7/26:
I remember the piecrust crumblies from a visit to Urbana [AMZ: where Ann and I and the baby Elizabeth lived from September 1965 to August 1969, four academic years at UIUC].
The name also called to mind “greeblies.” You may have addressed greeblies in the past. [NN, the then-wife of a Princeton friend of mine, Ann’s, and Bonnie’s] washed your socks and a yellow wash cloth sneaked into the dryer with them, thus covering your socks with what NN apologetically called “many many little yellow greeblies.”
I give you the yellow greeblies as a pre-birthday present.
Notably, Bonnie’s story is about me, while my story is about a (male) friend of mine from Cambridge days.
I will grant Bonnie “many, many little yellow greeblies”; yes, that sounds right. But all the rest is just baffling to me. Why, in particular, would NN have been doing my laundry? (In Cambridge, where Ann and I used a laundromat not far from the apartment we rented.)
In any case, little yellow greeblies makes a fine story core, however it’s woven into the narrative.
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