camouflage

Posted on March 13, 2026 | Leave a comment

Can you see it? And can you hear it? Maybe it’s right in front of you, and you can’t discern it. Or maybe it’s somewhere you’re not looking… Unless you know to look there. Finding it may be just a matter of knowing how to look. Look, and listen, and all the other senses. And where is it? Generally, we imagine that it will be something that’s in some location, not hidden but hard to distinguish, like a snow leopard on a winter mountainside, but that’s not the only way. Encryption is a kind of camouflage, and that can involve scrambling or distributing and distracting – for example distributing the object in plain sight but in an unexpected way among other things. Do you, for example, see a word in the capital letters of this paragraph… camouflaged?

Acrostics and such like notwithstanding, we have usual expectations of camouflage, of course. Most often we’ll think of a mottled pattern on fabric, designed to make a non-moving person or thing blend in visually with a background. Taken outside of the intended context, such camouflage can be quite the opposite: jungle camo in an arctic environment or vice versa, for instance, or any bit of army camo worn to the grocery store (the Rice Krispies are not going to attack you! and they do not need to be snuck up on!) – especially when the person wears camo pants and a hi-vis jacket (make up your mind!). It becomes a matter of ostentation.

Mind you, ostentation can be camouflage too: if you can dazzle or distract, you can slip some things past unnoticed, or just confuse the opponent enough that they can’t manage to attack. (For example, you may be a huge nerd who would get a major wedgie, but they’re too confused by your hi-vis and camo, or so you hope.) Arisen, indeed, in sundry circumstances often associated with matters fiscal or forensic addressed by prolix pettifoggers or those habitually prone to obfuscation are without a doubt from time to time again thickets of recondite lexis and anfractuous syntax designed to obnubilate, or perhaps inneviate, the intent and – such as one may even say – sense of the sentence. And a barrage of sound, or even just an unexpected or misleading sound, can give cover for movements that might make noises. There’s more to this kind of camouflage, more than just colour and shape. If a sound is indistinct – muffled or overlaid – it might be taken for something else, even something that doesn’t actually exist (who’s going now, into a classiomatic?).

Other kinds of camouflage are used in speech and behaviour, too. Ask an autistic person who is accustomed to “masking” – changing speech and behaviour patterns to match those of neurotypical people, at least for as long as necessary. Ask, for that matter, anyone who behaves in ways that are contrary to their natural sense of self for the purpose of self-preservation or social advantage. Even taking on a different accent counts – and many people find it necessary for career advancement or at least for avoiding annoying stereotypes.

Under the not-so-sheltering skies of nature, camouflage is rife; animal mimicry and background matching can be found throughout the world, in prey and predators alike. Some kinds of functional camouflage may seem accidental or incidental in some contexts, not connected to depredation – a black cat lying in a pile of fashionable fabrics, perhaps, or a firefly in a discotheque. Does it still count if there is no intent to deceive or any special benefit from doing so? Because our word camouflage itself hides things about its nature.

For, yes, camouflage is a noun that is made from a verb – a verb that is actually a noun in disguise. Or perhaps the verb only disguised itself as a noun disguising itself as a verb. Past a certain point, the disguise becomes so successful as to be inscrutable. 

Let’s start with the fact that camouflage is a borrowing into English from French, where it is a noun made from the verb camoufler (just as mirage is made from mirer, and garage is made from garer). But it may be that camoufler is a reconstrual of the noun camouflet, which means ‘affront’ or, more literally, ‘smoke blown maliciously up the nose from a paper cone’ (look, that’s just what Littré says, I think it’s strange too). 

Alternatively, it may well be that a verb that would have been camouffer took on the appearance camoufler in imitation of camouflet. The verb in question came from Italian camuffare, ‘muffle the head’, which does has more resemblance to the sense of camouflage. Camuffare is made from ca-, short for capo ‘head’, plus muffare, ‘muffle’, which is, yes, from the same source as English muffle. 

Guess what is the source of muffare is, this word that came from Romance Italian and French into Germanic English. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing that’s really a sheep in wolf’s clothing in sheep’s clothing (or vice versa): it came into Medieval Latin from Germanic roots, probably meaning ‘soft skin’ or ‘sleeve skin’. But we really can’t say that camouflagecamouflages words meaning ‘soft skin on the head’; the changes from the roots to the present form have been permanent, just as silly does not camouflage sælig, ‘blessed’, because it doesn’t mean that anymore. A modern word will not revert to an earlier form, and would not be recognized if it did. Yes, the camouflage on a snow leopard doesn’t change back when you spot it on the slope, but a snow leopard doesn’t become snow and rocks when it looks like snow and rocks – unlike words that change their meaning as they change their form. 

Even kinds of wordplay such as puns aren’t really camouflage: the word is meant to be discerned in those cases. And malapropisms and eggcorns are accidental and don’t aim to deceive, so they may not count either. More likely cases of camouflage include what are often called “dog whistles”: turns of phrase that have special meanings to in-groups but pass unnoticed by others. And, of course, words that are obscured by other means: word search puzzles, optical illusions, perhaps some clever brand names… But mainly it is not that a word is camouflaged; it is that words are – can be – camouflage, ways of dissembling by resembling. Each word is a leaf on your clothes as you aim to blend into the foliage – or distract by misdirection: a capital caper.

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graffiti

Posted on March 5, 2026 | Leave a comment

Come see my etchings.

Well, not literal etchings. I just mean the epigrammatic epigraphs and autographs not so much engraved as gruffly roughed in on walls and other standing surfaces with spray paint and ink, occasionally chalk, rarely graphite. It depends on the graffitist and the graffito.

You do know, I assume – as you are highly literate and weirdly interested in words and their roots and branches – that graffiti is the Italian word for ‘etchings’. We are accustomed to treating it as a mass object, not just because it is objectionable to the masses but because it tends to come in quantity and variety and expanse – a graffitied wall is covered with paints, yes, but in the sum it is covered with paint; and so, be it scritti politici, be it tutti frutti, it is, like a plate of spaghetti, just so much graffiti. But it can be taken one graffito at a time; the artworks and taggings and plaints and quips and assorted other defacements are all done one at a time, just as posters are posted one at a time. And one piece of graffiti is one graffito.

Why? Because that’s the Italian singular. The verb is graffire, ‘engrave’ (or, yes, ‘graffiti’): io graffisco, tu graffisci, loro graffiscono; the past participle, ‘engraved’, is graffito or, in the feminine, graffita, and in the plural graffiti; and likewise an engraved thing – i.e., an engraving – is a graffito. If you wish to be waggish, take a sip of your martinus and call it a graffitus, but that was never a real word in Latin; Italian took its word from Ancient Greek γρᾰ́φω (grắphō, ‘I write, I draw, I etch’) – root of all those words that contain graph.

OK, but why would we call something that is painted ‘etchings’? Because before there was spray paint, there were things that scratched. First, I should say, ceramicists produced artworks on their pots by scratching through the glaze, and the result was called a graffito; but the various inscriptions on walls in Pompeii and Herculaneum, often sexual or scatological (“APOLLINARIS MEDICVS TITI IMPERATORIS HIC CACAVIT BENE”), were also called graffiti, and the term was also used for similar etchings at other archaeological sites. And so its use for more modern impromptu illicit mural inscriptions followed naturally.

Now, I don’t blame you if you’re not so fond of graffiti. Not all of it is that great to look at, and if you’re the owner of the building affected and you didn’t ask for it to be there, you have a right to be disgruntled. But some graffiti – especially washroom writings – is witty: Nigel Rees put out five books of collected graffiti in the 1980s, and I bought all of them and read each multiple times, and have gotten some of my favourite witticisms from them. And some graffiti is vibrant and lively and a welcome addition to derelict buildings, longstanding hoardings, and sometimes the walls of people who have invited the artists. A few years ago I put together a book of my own photographs of that kind. Here are a few of my favourites.

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eustoma, lisianthus, gentian

Posted on February 27, 2026 | 2 comments

Meet Goodmouth of the Little Red One, Smoothflower, Begetter of the Meadow.

Sounds like a character from Tolkien, doesn’t it? But it’s sitting on the liquor cabinet in my library as I write this. In fact, several of it are. A whole bunch. Literally.

Yes, it’s our friend the economy rose, for when you want a flower that looks pretty and petally but comes with no thorns and no commitments or attachments or overwrought symbolism, a flower that must bring its own poetry. As it does.

A flower does not need words, of course; it is as it is whether or not you have a name for it. In my youth I never took it on myself to learn the names of plants – they don’t come when I call them, and there’s no point in sending them birthday cards, and I can recognize them without needing to stuff them in a lexical box. When I bought flowers or potted plants, their names were “those” and “these.” But here is a flower that is insistent on nomenclature – not just insistent but prodigal, prodigious, prolix: you have three monickers from which to choose.

Well. One of its names is an old taxonomic name, now deprecated, but don’t tell that to the people who sold these, because they came bearing it: lisianthus. It has a soft, smooth, silky sound to it, and it means ‘smoothflower’: via Latin, it is from Greek λισσός (lissós) ‘smooth’ and ἄνθος (ánthos) ‘flower’. As though it were the only smooth flower out there. Well, I guess it’s smoother than most, perhaps a Bing Crosby of botany.

And one of those names is the new taxonomic name, Eustoma russellianum, shortened casually to eustoma, which is not a London railway station for trains to the northwest. It is, in the first part, a no more complex word than the one it supplanted; eustoma is Latin from Greek εὐ- (eu-) ‘good’ and στόμα (stóma) ‘mouth’ (and do you feel good about the embouchure it induces when you say it aloud?). The second part names it after some Russell or other; Russell in its turn is from French, from Latin for ‘little red one’.

The third name is prairie gentian. That might sound like a gentleman from Saskatchewan, but gentian is an old name from Latin gentiana, which is supposedly (though not necessarily truthfully) from Gentius, Greek Γένθιος (Génthios), the last king of Illyria; his name may trace to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘beget’ (the same that gives us various words starting in gen-). Illyria today is Albania and surrounding areas. It is a region not known for prairies, though it certainly does have its meadows. And prairie traces through French back to Latin pratum ‘meadow’ (which, among other things, gave us the name of Barcelona’s airport – El Prat – and, I believe, the name of a family famous for expensive handbags).

Not that any of these things are evident when one beholds the flowers, of course. They’re in a vase, you see, and so they have been separated from their roots. But they are a pleasant sight, smooth and gentle and well placed in a library.

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Pronunciation tip: Denni Xhepa and other Albanian names

Posted on February 11, 2026 | Leave a comment

Here’s yet another pronunciation tip. This time I’m using the name of an Olympic downhill ski racer as an excuse to tell you how to say names in Albanian, which, although it can be disconcerting to look at, is disconcertingly easy to pronounce for English speakers.

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Pronunciation tip: Finnish women’s Olympic hockey team

Posted on February 5, 2026 | 1 comment

Here’s another pronunciation tip. It’s your simple, clear guide to saying Finnish names. Once you know this basic information, all that’s left is to get the hang of it. Which may take some practice. Fortunately, there’s something therapeutic about saying a lot of Finnish names. Try it… with the 23 names of the 2026 women’s Olympic hockey team from Finland: Sanni Ahola, Jenni Hiirikoski, Elisa Holopainen, Sini Karjalainen, Michelle Karvinen, Anni Keisala, Ida Kuoppala, Emilia Kyrkkö, Nelli Laitinen, Julia Liikala, Petra Nieminen, Emma Nuutinen, Jenniina Nylund, Sanni Rantala, Ronja Savolainen, Julia Schalin, Elli Suoranta, Susanna Tapani, Noora Tulus, Viivi Vainikka, Sanni Vanhanen, Emilia Vesa, and Siiri Yrjölä.

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Pronunciation tip: Chinese figure skating team at the 2026 Winter Olympics

Posted on February 1, 2026 | Leave a comment

I’ve finally made another pronunciation tip video. Well, with the Olympics coming around, there are always names that English speakers are going to get confused by. So I’ve taken the occasion to give a quick lesson in what to do when you want to say a Chinese name – specifically one of the names of the Chinese figure skating team for the 2026 Winter Olympics: Jin Boyang, Zhang Ruiyang, Sui Wenjing, Han Cong, Wang Shiyue, and Liu Xinyu.

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berm, snowbank, windrow

Posted on January 29, 2026 | 1 comment

It snowed a fair amount over the weekend, and then the ploughs got busy producing large heaps of snow along the sides of streets, often blocking driveways and pedestrian access points. So, obviously, the question is…

…what do you call this heap of snow?

I surveyed people on Bluesky, and for the most part they didn’t have a specific word for it. But those who did mostly called it one of three things – the same three terms I have used at various times.

The word I most often use for it is berm, though I don’t know whether that’s really common where I live or where I grew up; the Bluesky people who gave that word were from northern parts of the US. Also, I can’t find “long heap of snow left by a plough” as a definition for berm in any dictionary. Per dictionaries, a berm can be an earthen shelf at the top or bottom of a slope, or a raised bank along a canal, or a bank of earth used as a barrier, or the big pile of sand above the high tide level on a beach, or a roadside grass strip – which is what the word means in Dutch, where English got it from. Several of those things resemble these huge piles of snow, but they’re all dirt or sand. However, in snowboardcross, a berm is bank of snow at a corner – transferred from the bank of earth called the same thing in motocross and BMX. Of course the meaning can drift from dirt to snow. Why not?

The next thing I might call this niveous ridge is snowbank. But, speaking of drifts, a snowbank more usually is – as in “a drifted bank,” to quote the song “Jingle Bells.” Still, it may seem reasonable enough to call these heaps snowbanks, since, like other banks, they contain deposits that have been accumulated and saved up. Mind you, they do not get much interest, and everyone is hoping they won’t compound.

What? Oh, the other kind of bank? Like riverbank? Oh, yeah. But say, why do we have bank as in savings bank and bank as in riverbank? The answer is that they both come, ultimately, from a root meaning ‘bench’, a root that is also in fact the source of bench; one bank refers to a landform that’s like a bench, and the other refers to a money-handling business that was originally done at a bench, table, or counter. Which is a farther drift than merely going from a pile of dirt to a pile of snow.

But, to get back to that big pile of snow, there’s the third word, the thing that some Canadians – and only some Canadians – call it: windrow. Canadian cities, after snow storms, after all the ploughing, may talk about “clearing windrows” so people can get out of their driveways. So in the morning you look out your window to see if the windrow has been shoved aside or if you’ll have to shovel it yourself.

OK, but why is it called a windrow? Isn’t that a row of trees that keeps the wind off a field? Hm, that’s usually called a windbreak. Windrow is most often a word for a long heap of mown grass, hay, barley, corn, peat, or such like, that’s sitting being dried out by the wind, in some cases before being gathered into bales and in some cases before being burned. It can also (probably on the basis of conjecture from its form) be a word for loose vegetation that has been blown into long piles by the wind. And by drift from the first sense, a windrow can be any other thing that has been ploughed into long piles: dirt, gravel, or, of course, snow. Yes, there’s a wind there, even though windrows usually don’t get blown away (pity, perhaps), but that’s how things get piled together sometimes. A window is still a window even if it’s not letting wind through. And a shovel is a shovel even if you’re using it to heave snow rather than to shove it around (and yes, shovel is indeed etymologically shove plus a suffix).

Still, why windrow rather than berm or snowbank in these Canadian places? I don’t know for sure, but my suspicion is that it started with farmers, of which we have quite a few in Canada. If you’re used to calling the long heaps of hay and whatnot windrows, then calling long heaps of snow made by the same kind of process windrows seems sensible – certainly at least as sensible as calling them, say, berms.

But, again, that’s if you call them anything. Other than a nuisance or something less polite, that is.

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nimious

Posted on January 22, 2026 | Leave a comment

Some people’s requirements are, in truth, nimious.

Do you know that word, nimious? It’s not in common use, but some of you are exquisitely literate.

If you don’t know it, what does it sound or look like it means? Does it have an echo of minimum? Or inimical? Or numinous? Or ominous?

It’s not well known and not easy to guess. So even though it’s not that large a word, using it casually might seem a bit much.

Which is appropriate. Because “a bit much” is one way of defining it. Another is “excessive.” And perhaps even “way over the top.” Or, as lawyers say, “vexatious.” Here’s a nice example quote from an 1861 Scottish law book, courtesy of Wiktionary:

But instead of that, they raised this prejudicial question, and upon that ensues a litigation, the most nimious I ever saw, even on the part of a corporate body, whose annals generally abound with instances of nimious procedure.

Here’s an 1883 one from the Edinburgh Evening News courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary:

The action was ex facie so nimious and unreasonable as to excite prejudice against it.

You may note that both of those citations are from Scotland. And indeed this word had its heyday – now well past – among the legal trade in Scotland. 

But of course it came from Latin: nimius, ‘excessive, beyond measure’ – the adverbial accusative of which is nimium, ‘excessively’, which seems to my eyes to look a bit too much like minimum. And where does nimius come from? Nimis, also an adverb, also meaning ‘excessively’, from ne- ‘not’ and the Proto-Indo-European root *meh₁-. I’m tempted to say that nimis thus means ‘not meh’, but *meh₁- actually meant ‘measure’, so it means ‘beyond measure’ – in other words, ‘too much’.

Of course we have plenty of ways of expressing that already; the vocabulary of English is itself arguably nimious. But the joy of having many ways of saying the same thing is that we can set different tones and echoes. So if you want to sound as though you’re saying, in an erudite way, that someone is being an ominous ornery inimical big meanie, why not trot out this word? I don’t think it’s altogether over the top or out of hand. Unlike some people’s demands.

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titivate

Posted on January 18, 2026 | Leave a comment

It’s inevitable: after the activity of the holidays (Yuletide and the others, with their themes of nativity and invitation and conviviality with oodles of vittles), in the void of winter, you will look around your living space at the various piled items and feel motivated to titivate. You know, just tidy a bit… spruce it up… satisfy an appetite for prettiness. You have a boost in your attitude. But what about your mid-winter vitality? Are you activated to undertake the titivation? Or will it be vitiated by inertia and the prophylaxis of, say, sitting and writing about it?

Speaking of which. Nice word, titivate, isn’t it? It bespeaks not just a certain activity but a certain context as well. It’s not mere tidying, not mere accessorizing; it’s touching up the finer points of prettiness or aesthetic aptitude. It’s doing les petites choses to a t. So this word, which trips on the tip of the tongue, is quite apt.

And not only in sound. For, you see, just as when titivating you may take little things and match them in new and apposite ways, with titivate the speakers of the English language picked some pretty bits and put them together. But we’re not one hundred percent sure which bits came from where – or just what inspired what.

Here’s the thing. Wiktionary gives the etymology of titivate as “A modification of the earlier spelling tidivate, perhaps based on tidy + -vate, on the pattern of words such as cultivate and renovate.” And the citations you can find in Green’s Dictionary of Slang certainly support that: the first one, from 1823, is from a dictionary that says “Tiddyvated — i.e. made tidy, or neat.” But the reality is not quite so tidy, as you will find if you have access to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Oh, the OED also speculates that its origin is “humorously < tidy adj. + ‑vate (in e.g. cultivate v. and activate v.).” But its first citation is from 1705, and it reads “He says he is shaved enough, and has his Whiskers tittivated to his content.” And its second is from 1785 and reads “I wish I could get a barber to titivate me up a little.” It’s not until an 1834 citation that we see the spelling tidivate. And we may recall that while in American English the pronunciation of titivate and tidivate would typically be indistinguishable, in most British English this is not the case. So it would seem that the derivation is a bit less tidy… or anyway those earlier citations are not timely. (And yes, that’s a pun: tidy originally meant the same as timely, just as tide’s original meaning is ‘time, season’.)

There is a titillating further suggestion in the OED: usages where the sense is evidently “excite or stimulate agreeably or pleasingly.” The influence of titillate can be seen in those – but the earliest among them is from 1833, so it’s more likely a matter of misconstrual of meaning by analogy with a similar-sounding word. There’s no suggestion that titivate started with that.

So what do we do? What can we do? Not everything can be sensibly tidied, at least not without doing damage. It is as when, in a fit of titivating, you spy a tchotchke on a shelf that doesn’t seem to fit its place. You could toss it, perhaps, but why? It’s pretty enough, and you’re kind of attached to it. So you arrange things around it and leave it as it is, and tell your friends, “Not sure where we got that, but it ties the room together.”

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disclass, sunglass, windlass, cutlass

Posted on January 5, 2026 | Leave a comment

You’re sailing past the Hebrides when you unexpectedly hear music from a rocky islet. You look to the source and see several lasses on the shore. One is a deejay. Another one is singing. Next to them is one standing in the breeze, beckoning, ready to… throw you a rope to reel you in, perhaps? It all seems so inviting. But behind the others you see a short-haired, muscular one who appears, maybe, to have a knife of some kind…

Sail away! Do not give in to temptation! You have just encountered the Scottish sirens: the disc lass on the turntables, the sung lass who has sung for you, the wind lass who is ready to see you blown in – or wound in – and the cut lass, who will… need I say?

But let us say you let fascination get the better of you. You close the gap, and then you see that you are sailing not to a disc lass; you are sailing to disclass… to disclass them all, starting with disclass. For this is no lass with discs; it’s not a member of the class of persons at all – it’s a verb, meaning ‘remove from a class’ or ‘declassify’. (It’s been in English since the mid-1800s, but both parts of the word trace back to Latin – though class came by way of French.)

And, having closed the gap and disclassed, you now see not a sung lass but a sunglass. Sunglasses have travelled in pairs since the early 1800s, but from shortly before that, a singular sunglass has been a filter fitted to a telescope to reduce the sun’s intensity. But since the late 1500s, a sunglass has also been something quite opposite: a magnifying glass used to focus the sun’s rays to start fires. You are about to get burned. (Sun and glass, by the way, have come down to us from Old English.)

The wind lass is, you now see, a windlass, which is a kind of winch for pulling in (or letting out) ropes or chains. The source of the word, which first showed up circa 1300, is windas, which derives from the verb wind; the l just got wound in somehow, perhaps under the influence of windle, an old noun for a thing that winds rather like spindle is a noun for a thing that spins. You might think therefore that this should be pronounced with “long i” like the verb wind rather than with “short i” like the noun, but the I ended up short, and since the a is reduced, it is properly said like “windless.” The lass is gone with the wind.

And of course the cut lass is a cutlass – which also, properly, has a reduced a so that it sounds like “cutless” (which it is not). This word came, circa 1600, from French coutelas, which was formed from coutel – the source of couteau, ‘knife’ – and the suffix -as, also spelled -ace and related to others such as Italian -accio: basically, it can mean ‘big’ or it can mean ‘nasty’ or it can mean ‘big nasty’, as the cutlass is a big nasty knife (really a short sword), usually with a curved blade. Since coutelas comes from Latin cultellus, it has no known relation to cut. So both the lass and the cut are cut out – but the blade awaits you.

And now at last you are on the rocks, misled, come to a bad ending. A lass, a lack!

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