Monthly Archives: November 2008

boffin

Posted on November 30, 2008 | Leave a comment

Not a bird. Not necessarily something so good as to be called “boffo.” Not a buffoon per se. Certainly not a big hairstyle or an overgrown cupcake. Not a marine mammal… well, perhaps: the first known use, in 1941, was for an “older” (over 32) naval officer. Then it came to be used for a person engaged in “back-room” scientific research, for example on radar. Now it refers to an egghead, a nerd, a geek, a wonk – not a mere buff or (as in golfing) duffer, but a guy who knows how to fix the world but still doesn’t get invited to parties. Does the word somehow have the sound of a propeller spinning on a beanie? The b imparts a rosy-cheekedness quite lacking in coffin. There is a definite effect from the off in, but what is it? Perhaps we can’t know. There is much that boffins know that is forever opaque to the world at large. It may be that out there is some boffin who even knows with some certainty where the word boffin comes from. If so, he ought to tell the rest of us. The best we can guess is that it’s somehow an eponym; Boffin is a Welsh surname.

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burdock

Posted on November 28, 2008 | Leave a comment

A rather hard- and bucolic-sounding word for something you may find caught on a bird-dog’s tail. The bur can make one think of a snagging plant, a Scottish accent or a chill lake; burd adds an avian echo; dock is the wood platform on a lake but it’s also chopping, cutting short – what one may do to a paycheck or a tail. Those who know it’s some sort of plant will get a sense of hickory or perhaps something medicinal like myrrh; it may sound like something the village wiccan keeps in her sack. It has three points sticking up, making it like a bed of needles; the different facings of the b, d and k can make it seem almost wily, watchful, like a meerkat triumvirate (or, more locally, prairie dogs looking up from the herb). The plant, in fact, has many of the characteristics the word may seem to suggest. It has a prickly, burry head, looking almost like a spiky brush-cut human head – and its root is used to help maintain and promote healthy hair growth. It is also used as a blood purifier. And it may show up in your sushi – or, in England, in your soft drink. The prickly head inspired the invention of Velcro. So where does the word come from? The mists of Anglo-Saxon and the Germanic languages. Bur is from a word meaning a ring or protective casing – in this case a rather prickly one. The dock refers to a whole family of plants of various names all containing dock; it is unrelated to wharves or short tails.

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album

Posted on November 27, 2008 | 2 comments

This word, which was quite current 30 years ago, now sounds almost quaint to many people, yet it hasn’t lost its usability. Many a person, of course, will fondly recall youthful listening experiences – with their fathers saying “Al, you bum, put away that Beatles record and get studying!” Other people will think more happily of scrapbooking. Certainly the common collocations are all one or the other: photo, wedding; record, cover, White. Ah, the White Album – not its official name, of course (which is The Beatles, and nothing more), but the name it’s known by. It illustrates this word more perfectly than most, because it’s white. You see, there’s a reason album and albumen look similar: they’re family – them and Dumbledore too: the source is Latin albus, white (Dumbledore’s first name, of course). Albumen is egg white, so that one’s easy. An album – just a neuter version of albus – was first of all a blank (i.e., white) tablet on which public notices were written. From that the word came to be used for such things as autograph books and guest books, and from that scrapbooks. All of these had the book format in common (fortuitously hinted at by the book-spine-like gusset between the l and the b in the word), and so when records were brought out in similar presentations, they, too, were albums (at least since 1957). And now, of course, since nearly all CDs are presented in folding presentations, they also can be albums – though the reference has transferred to the medium itself for some people, leading them to mock one who refers to a CD as an album. But I say the mockers are all bums.

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bungle

Posted on November 26, 2008 | Leave a comment

If this word stays in the jungle, it’s alright by me, but it’s more likely heard in a bungalow, perpetrated by some blundering dumb bunny. So where did we get this word from? Well, it seems that it just sounded right. It fits in comfortably with bumble, brangle, boggle, fumble, mumble, stumble, rumble, tumble… The -le could be taken as the frequentive ending heard in such words as suckle, but with the nasal and voiced stop it’s rather more reminiscent of the kindred words just mentioned; finagle comes to mind, too, and especially tangle – all words that involve messes, trips and things getting shaken like marbles or going like a string of Christmas lights all balled up. The vowel in bungle, represented in phonetic transcription by a caret or schwa, is often associated with dullness and dumbness, especially in context with nasals and voiced stops. The bung has that hollow sound you might hear when a cork is jammed into an empty barrel… by the head of somone tripping. There is little resonance from a front-vowel sibling such as tingle – far too bright and sharp. This mid-central unrounded vowel (heard as a mid-high back rounded vowel in some dialects) seems to group with back vowels, such as in bongo – and perhaps Congo, though the influence of other sounds carries Bangalore too close to torpedo. Bugle is hiding in the form of this word, but you might not notice it, while you probably will think of bangle. But one thing’s for sure: when a bungle’s done, you’re left with a shambles.

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ghetto

Posted on November 25, 2008 | 3 comments

A word for a place you probably don’t want to get to. In the sound, it comes across as the beginning of get away, but the final o can give a mournful hollowness fading away like a dying cry echoed among tenements, especially when sung after the words in the. The look is spookier still, with the gh of ghost to start – and that silent h gives a sense of hollowness realized in a context like this (but quite absent in spaghetti, which this word seems little reminiscent of in spite of the commonality in form, due to the great difference of emotional tone in the referents). The tt could be twin tenements. The flavour of this word is strongly inner-city African-American now, as evidenced by the well-known ghetto blaster (now so common a phrase that the ghetto reference is skimmed across with nary a glance) and the newer ghetto fabulous and similar locutions (including descriptions of things as very ghetto, so ghetto, etc.). But any even passing student of European history – anyone who has learned anything at all about the persecution of Jews in Europe – will know this as a word first of all not for a vaguely defined lower-class area into which people (usually of a single disadvantaged ethnic group) slide and try to climb out but for a sharply defined quarter in which Jews were often forced to live. And where was the first one, the one that gave the name to the type? If you spotted this word as Italian, you were right: Venice, 1516 – a city in which also lived many merchants, as Shakespeare noted. The place name predated this assignation, and its origin is uncertain, but it may have come from and industry that had formerly occupied the island: the flames and smoke of a getto, a foundry.

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radish

Posted on November 24, 2008 | 1 comment

This word brings echoes of reddish, radical, even perhaps raffish, laddish and kaddish. Those who have eaten its object may think of burning when they hear the sh and perhaps think of raw or mad (or even bad) when hearing the first syllable. (Those who have seen the word laddish lately might think of that, too.) This word probably will not bring to mind the name Radisson, but the converse is likely often true. Ironically, this word for a root plant has no descenders… Of course, you could think of the x-height as the soil level and the ascenders and dot as the greenery sticking up. The word may also be seen to match the plant in that the rad is like the red outside and the ish is perhaps, in its white noise, like the white inside. This duotonality, while not typically raised in comparison to the Canadian flag, made radish at times a term of abuse for communists who only paid lip service. But while the radish communists may not have been true radicals, the radish certainly is – not because of its peppery flavour (however “rad” that may be, dude), but because radish comes from Latin radix, meaning “root”… which also gives us the word radical. Radical change is change at the very roots. And it’s often rather hot to the taste, too.

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roger

Posted on November 22, 2008 | 1 comment

A word that purrs like a tiger – a big masculine one. Although the visual hint of rogue is weakened by the pronunciation and the sound of Raj is mitigated by the spelling, the r‘s have it here – the same growl we learn as kids from “They’rrrrre grrrrreat!” and produce when imitating race car sounds, with the voiced alveolar affricate in the middle standing in for the gear shift (or any other mechanically connecting working). Nor does the chest hair stop there. The word begins with the raw ro and then the ger could be starting jerk – another quintessentially masculine word – or even German, calling on the Teutonic testosterone. It’s renowned as the rough and ready word of flyboys. It has had a few other senses over the ages, including a ram (male sheep) and a man’s todger. From the lodging of the latter, by 1711, came a still-popular verbal use, a very laddish way of referring summarily to an act that female writers sometimes require whole paragraphs to circumlocute. Look to the collocations for further piss and vinegar: Jolly Roger, the sign of a pirate, yet another archetypally laddish occupation. And what morphemes were mated to make this macho murmur? Germanic hrod “fame” and ger “spear.” Say no more. Say no more! Or, rather: Roger that!

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fatuous

Posted on November 21, 2008 | Leave a comment

You could guess at this word’s meaning by appearance, but that would be silly. It does seem to ask disingenuously, “Who’s fat? You? Us?” And certainly it seems a bit pudgy, with its baggy-cheek u‘s and its o like a hungry mouth. But clap the s on like a hand, Benny or Culkin style, and you know the mouth is agape in daft wonder. And if the uous is a head, the fat is its metaphorical descriptor. This is a lovely word in that it can make the object appear foolish (perhaps in a John Candy kind of way) and the speaker appear pretentious simultaneously. No wonder it’s so useful to academic argument. It is quite promiscuous, though it does have one regular flame – fire. That coupling is really a pair of Latin lovers, however: ignis fatuus is the more standard term for what is also called Will-o’-the-wisp, a spectral mirage caused by, well, swamps farting and lighting it. Does that sound dreadfully inane? Well, fatuus, after all, is Latin for “foolish” or “idiotic.”

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silly place name limericks

Posted on November 20, 2008 | 2 comments

These limericks are all based on dual versions of well-known place names (well, except for one, which uses a disjunction between spelling and pronunciation). You read the one and say the other…

Thanks to Antonia Morton for inspiring me.

A lively young miss from Bombay
Sent a note to her beau to combay.
She said, “Have a look –
I’ve learned how to cook!”
But she burned him while making flumbai.

A man with a flat in Peking
Was forever inclined to reking.
“The bathtub is leijing!
The neighbours are beijing!
This place is all just gilded ceking!”

A teak cutter living in Myanmar
Came down with quite bad sclerodyanmar.
He found it a bon
To lie low in Yangon
Getting rubbed by a tart named Miss Yanmar.

Two newlyweds visited Ho Chi Minh City,
But the bride soon asked, “Where’s my go chi minh city?”
He was found with another.
Quoth she, “I’m gone to mother!
I just can’t let bo chi monh citys be bo chi minh city!”

A young lass who lived in Krung Thep
Went out one fine night for a wep.
She soon happened bhai
Her Thai sweetie-phai
And they stayed up until three o’clep.

A rude dude who visited Kalaallit Nunaat
Declared, “This is such an obsalallit nunaat!
Just come up to Godthab
And have a quick lodthab!
Next time I’ll just go to maralaallit nunaat!”

A Philly lass known to be fruylkill
Was taking a walk by the Schuylkill.
She picked up a dollow
Stashed away in a hollow –
Which she’d found through a map search on Guylkill.

A moocher who hung out in Báile Atha Cliath
Said “I surely don’t mean to be tràile atha cliath;
Begorrah, ’tis true,
I ate all your stew,
But I couldn’t just let it sit dàile atha cliath.”

Late addition: two more on pronunciation:

There once was a fellow from Worcester
Who had slept with a school-friend’s sorcester.
He explained to his mate,
“She’s so saucy and great,
Man, I’m sorry – I couldn’t resorcester!”

A jaunty young fellow from Cirencester
Saw a pretty lass and blew a kirencester,
But the poor silly fool
Was so gobsmacked with drool
That he just managed to spit and hirencester.

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sconce

Posted on November 20, 2008 | Leave a comment

Does this word conceal, inset, or fortify? To hear it is to hear a hiss of hush (or of magician’s steam), in the middle of which – a con? ‘S gone! Sss! But you can only see once. And yet, as secretive, dim or elegant as this word’s reference may be, it carries with it a bread-and-butter overtone. (But butter your scones improperly at Oxford and you may be sconced – oxonian argot for fined an ale). Interestingly, we get this word from more than one source. Best known is the one from Latin absconsus, “hidden,” referring to the shield for a light (and the ab us? absconded with, evidently). But there is also the fortifying earthwork, from Dutch schans, which over time came to refer to protective shields and other things more resembling the sense of the word whose form this one had taken. This word dances most often with wall, but it is much more often seen ensconced (comfortably, safely, firmly, happily) in (always in) ensconced, sitting like the flickering light behind the en and attached to the d.

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