Dingle All the Way

Not to Mention an Athletic Supporter

Feb 04, 2024

It should not pass notice that the New York Times, for the first time since the paper was founded in 1851, has embraced, with undeniable reference to its literal meaning, the word dingleberries.

Dwight Garner, last Sunday, in his lively, not to say magisterial, review of a novel by Alvaro Enrigue:

“The Spanish conquistador Herman Cortes has arrived with his troops and an enormous retinue, pesky supernumeraries who've attached themselves to him like remoras, or dingleberries."

I grant you that, according to the Times's archives, this was the fourth appearance in its pages of dingleberry singular or plural. But one of the other three was a sculpto-musical reference:

"Frank Zappa compared his music to Calder's sculptures, describing his cerebral, often atonal songs as 'a multicolored whatchamacalit, dangling in space, that has big blobs of metal connected to pieces of wire, balanced ingeniously against little metal dingleberries on the other end." (Nancy Hass, November 29, 2018)

And the other two were proper (so to speak) names:

"As Baby grown into a Young Man Wearing a Dress (callled, alternately, Daisy Dingleberry, Alexander Nevsky or Rocky), Andrew Horn suggests both ingenuousness and a remarkable resilience." (Alvin Klein, review of Christopher Durang's Baby With the Bathwater, September 6, 1987.
"The Rahway Valley Railroad lists its superintendant as Horatio P. Dingleberry. . . Says Mr. Clark with a twinkle, 'He's down on the track somewhere.' (Mr. Dingleberry is a fiction of the little railroad's corporate structure.)" (Edward C. Burks, a story about small railroads, February 25, 1987.)

Why do I care? What the Times deems fit to print is of autobiographical interest to me. Back in the 70s, I put in a couple of stints as a free-lance sports columnist for the Times. In May of l978, I ran into a taboo. On a Thursday I delivered a column, to run on Monday, about the formerly retired pitcher-writer Jim Bouton's attempt to return to the big leagues. Quaintly, as it seems today, I delivered that column physically, on paper, in a manila envelope, directly to the brick-and-mortar Times. Dropped it off by car, on my way to LaGuardia airport. There, I must have gone to a phone booth. At the time I kept a journal, mostly to keep track of deductible expenses.

“Call Times collect to check on Bouton column. Joe Vecchione says, 'We have a problem. I guess you know what it is.' Thought it might be length. Nope.”

Vecchione, amiable editor of what was then the daily sports page, had agreed not to change anything in my copy without checking with me. In this column Bouton had complained about the Yankees' never inviting him to play in their Old Timers' Game. "They even invited Bill Stafford," Bouton said, "and he couldn't carry my jockstrap."

The change the Times wanted, I had to admit, was sort of magical. It fit into my collection of transubstantiational edits. "To date," I wrote in the journal, "I have had crap changed to baloney (Sports Illustrated); fuck to forget (Esquire); now jockstrap to glove (The Times)."

Living the free-lance life. Keeping track of every penny and playing — within the bounds of professionalism — every angle. I dropped off the column on the way to Laguardia because I was piggybacking my fifteenth college reunion — plus hanging with other old friends, probably till the wee, wee, hours — on doing research for a next-week column about the minor-league team in Nashville. (And I would like to stress that both of the columns mentioned here strike me today as excellent, you could look them up.) The following Thursday I was back home and journaling: "Retype Times col for fourth time and send by express mail, $7.50.” No room in all that for making a principled stand in defense of a male unmentionable. Certainly Bouton, a truth-teller in his book Ball Four, which you could, and should, also look up, never complained.

Turns out, according to the Times archive, jockstrap had made its way into the paper before — as early as 1971, in a letter to the editor from, ahem, Bernard Dick, Associate Professor of English at, ahem, Fairleigh Dickinson University. In a more abstract sense, though: "jockstrap fantasy". Since then there have been any number of jockstrap’s in the Times, for instance within a 1990 review of a basketball book entitled (the book’s title, not the review’s), Loose Balls.

By the way if you google "Mr. Dingleberry," you will find far more citations than I, when I had done it, had expected. Mostly thanks to a villainous character on the animated sitcom, "American Dad."