Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 June 15

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June 15

a superlative K

This was a prison barracks where seventy-two unwashed men slept chained to their bunks, and when the individual odors of seventy-two unwashed men finally gather into one pillar of stink you have got a pillar of stink the like of which you cannot conceive; majestic, nonpareil, transcendental, K.

That is the last sentence of the first paragraph of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye by Horace McCoy, published in 1948 but set in April 1933 (the narrator's escape competes for headlines with the loss of USS Akron).

What might this K mean in either 1933 or 1948? My only guess so far is strikeout. —Tamfang (talk) 01:00, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary the use for a strikeout score dates from 1874, so that interpretation is definitely possible for 1933.  --Lambiam 07:17, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Why would the symbol for a strikeout be used in that sentence? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:56, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

The term was used figuratively by Nixon for "failure" (referring to his meeting with Hoover on October 23, 1971, in which he unsuccessfully asked for the FBI director to resign). This seems an obvious extension of the baseball sense. I agree that going from "failure to score" to "big stink" is not very natural.  --Lambiam 09:39, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

And you expect "K" in the use by McCoy, as the last of a sequence of adjectives, to also be an adjective.  --Lambiam 09:56, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Curiously, when the passage is quoted here, we see an ellipsis instead of a "K". And in an earlier edition, bundled with three more McCoy books, the sentence is missing a final period following the "K". This makes me wonder if this isn't a typographical mishap. Perhaps the ellipsis is McCoy's original version.  --Lambiam 09:56, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

That sounds like the most likely explanation. Especially given how the next sentence is "But it never intimidated that early morning." Consider how it would read with the ellipsis instead of the ",K.": "This was a prison barracks where seventy-two unwashed men slept chained to their bunks, and when the individual odors of seventy-two unwashed men finally gather into one pillar of stink you have got a pillar of stink the like of which you cannot conceive; majestic, nonpareil, transcendental... But it never intimidated that early morning." --Khajidha (talk) 13:11, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

My personal interpretation would be that it's a contraction of OK, which might otherwise be written 'kay? I'm more likely mistaken than not, but that at least makes sense to me in the context. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.23.195} 2.123.27.125 (talk) 13:36, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

That would not have been a common form at the time this was originally written and doesn't seem to make any sense in the context of the surrounding text. --Khajidha (talk) 13:38, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Another reason/coincidence indicative of Tamfang's interpretation is the threesomeness of strikes for a strikeout, of the original text's three adjectives ("majestic, nonpareil, transcendental") leading to the strikeout, and of literary tradition (see e.g. rule of three and hendiatris). ---Sluzzelin talk 22:32, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Given that the three words are basically synonymous, that seems rather unlikely to me. If they were three different things, I could see the possibility. --Khajidha (talk) 23:33, 15 June 2020 (UTC)