Wednesday November 23, 2005

It's time to see just how well connected the blogosphere is. If you are a well-connected blogger, I need your help.

Since December of 1991, I have been looking unsuccessfully for an English word whose definition is "any statue of a chicken." I was set on this quest by my friend David Gingold, with whom I was working at Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge, MA. The hunt has cooled considerably over the years, but I'm still quite vexed.

It's all Andre Previn's fault, actually. In 1991, he published his book No Minor Chords -- My Days in Hollywood. The book was reviewed by Peter Schickele in the New York Times Review of Books on December 1st, 1991. The concluding section of Mr. Schickele's review is reproduced here:

"No Minor Chords" does have one near-fatal flaw. Describing a game of Dictionary...at Mike Nichol's house, Mr. Previn recalls: "Mike blew an entire round one night by being totally unable to read with a straight face that the meaning of the given word was 'any statue of a chicken.' He was weeping with laughter, and the fact that this definition turned out to be the true one did not help." It's a good story but what was the word? Good god, I mean, some of us have to know. Perhaps Mr Previn's sin of omission can be corrected in a future edition of this otherwise molto entertaining book.

Well, David and I are two of those people who have to know. I've tried reverse dictionaries, art books, online searches, electronic dictionary searches, and writing to both MM. Previn and Schickele. To no avail.

Please help me get this monkey off my back.