Monthly Archives: December 2008

odious

Posted on December 10, 2008 | Leave a comment

A word for those things that get “oh dears” from us. The opening o is well suited to the moue of disgust most appropriate for this word – accompanied by a contraction of the nostrils (perhaps from looking like d to more like i, as the o‘s of the eyes glare balefully on either side). And, indeed, this word may be said with the nose firmly pinched shut. The hiss at the end adds to the effect. This word has nothing to do with odes (unless bad) or odours (ditto); it is not necessarily onerous, either, but that does seem likely, doesn’t it? Readers of Garfield may think first of a long-necked nitwit dog; users of drugs may be stopped by the first two letters (or, when said, syllables). Students of international law may know odious debt as a theory holding that debt should not be enforceable if incurred by a regime for purposes that don’t serve the nation’s best interests. (Apply that theory to personal debt and many a credit card loaded with booze tabs and impulse shopping binges would be wiped clean.) Fans of clerihews may know the noun from which this word is derived, as the first known clerihew declares “Sir Humphrey Davy / Abominated gravy. / He lived in the odium / Of having discovered sodium.” And what is odium? In Latin, hatred; it comes from the verb odisse, “hate,” which comes from the Indo-European root od-, from which various words of hate have come. If you find this all a bit of an odyssey, well you may; odyssey comes from Odysseus, whose name is said to have come from his being hated by gods and men. And no doubt many an unwilling student of classics has found the Odyssey odious too.

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yule

Posted on December 9, 2008 | 1 comment

Long a quaint, archaic, seasonal word restricted mainly to a narrow set of contexts (although in more general use still in the northern parts of Great Britain), this word got a bit of a boost from J.K. Rowling, who used it rather than, say, Christmas. Most who know this word will likely think of a yule log or or yuletide, or perhaps of the song “Welcome Yule!” Its main use outside of that for many people has likely been seasonal wordplay (“yule love it” as a phrase gets 8750 hits on Google). But it is an evocative word, smooth like a glass of eggnog and just as ready to bring thoughts of the season to mind. The y may help it to maintain its “olde tyme” air, as y‘s tend to show up in faux archaism, not just in silliness like olde tyme but in the well-known ye olde. (The thing about that ye, however, is that it’s not the same as the pronoun in ye shall die; in fact, it’s not really ye at all. Old English had a character, thorn – þ – which was not present in the continental type faces English printers bought, so they used y in its place. Ye olde is really þe olde, i.e., the olde. This is unlike the y in yule, which, if it were a thorn in disguise, would make the word þule, thule – which, one must admit, would at least be appropriate to the wintriness of the season. But it’s a y fair and proper; in Swedish yule is jul.) This is a concise word, four letters, which means three days of partying per letter. Oh, yes: the twelve days of Christmas (which, retail ads notwithstanding, start on December 25 and end with twelfth-night just before Epiphany) were first the twelve days of yule. So what’s the difference? Well, yule was the pagan celebration that the Church co-opted (if you can’t beat ’em…) by making it a celebration of the birth of Christ. Some might complain that if we now call it yule we’re leaving the Christ out of Christmas. Fair enough, although most people seem to do so anyway; but it would at least make it parallel to another pagan celebration co-opted by Christianity, a spring celebration of fertility (eggs, rabbits) that kept its name, mutated by time: originally named after Eostre, the goddess of dawn, we now call it Easter. And speaking of eggs, I fancy a sip of some nog now.

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wassail

Posted on December 8, 2008 | Leave a comment

A word of Christmas, drinking, and song. Most who know it will immediately think of one or more lusty old English yuletide tunes enjoining all to wet their whistles. Those pronouncing it can be forgiven for stressing the second syllable, as though it were some nautical term, since one well-known song does just that, but actually it is stressed on the first syllable, with the second often reduced so much it might sound like Ensign Chekhov referring to a vassal (perhaps one of the vassals drinking to his master’s health in the same song). So what are we looking at? The w could be two cups, and the ss two wisps of steam arising from a warm beverage made with spice and ale (ail?). And when you’ve had too much, you might meet a copper who will say, “Wass all this, then,” and book you as an (w)assailant. After all, the idea was often to go from house to house singing and being rewarded with beverage, and after an evening of full-throated singing followed by full-throated drinking, one might be excessively boisterous – and perhaps a bit green about the gills… ironically, because wassail comes from wæs hæil, “be healthy,” a drinking toast.

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gossip

Posted on December 5, 2008 | Leave a comment

A word like a half-whisper over a cup of coffee. The central hiss, like a snake (or two snakes: ss), seems appropriate, for when gossips go sip coffee to gossip their gossip, we think it a very sordid thing practiced by small-minded people getting little digs in. And surely the faint hint of guess must be relevant, for how often is gossip founded firmly on fact? The image is further backed up by the g, the ugly letter found in gargoyle and goblin and pug: gossips are as unpleasant of face as of voice, no? Well, you tell me – go look in the mirror and report back. For who doesn’t share reported tidbits about others behind their backs? The worst of this is of course destructive, but in the main it serves valuable social functions, negotiating and constructing our worlds. (Besides, there is no other way to talk about celebrities than behind their backs, unless you happen to know them in person – though they all seem so familiar we find them suitable subjects. Note that next to idle and monger among common collocations for this word is columnist.) Gossip the verb comes from gossip the noun, which, before it was anyone who liked to share stories, was a close friend, and before that, specifically a godfather or godmother. The original word was godsibb: the god from god (not from the other Anglo-Saxon god, which became good), and the sibb from sib. Oh, and sib, not much used by itself anymore, means “blood relation.” A diminutive derivation of it is still common: sibling. (Odd, isn’t it, to see a more formal – scientific or bureaucratic-sounding – term coming from Old English rather than from Latin or Greek?) Fair enough: even still you may go and gossip with your sistahs and hear something that makes you say “Oh, brother!” …or possibly words more related to the first half of this word.

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When an “error” isn’t

Posted on December 4, 2008 | 15 comments

This is the text of a presentation I made to the Toronto branch of the Editors’ Association of Canada, Sept. 24, 2007. Certain parts were sung; you can guess which.

It ain’t necessarily so, no,
it ain’t necessarily so,
the things Strunk and White
want to tell you are right,
it just ain’t necessarily so.

Getting pissed off about grammatical errors is a favourite activity of a surprisingly large portion of English speakers. Continue reading →

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Help stop a word-lynching

Posted on December 4, 2008 | 30 comments

Edit: When I wrote this back in 2008, I was less sensitized to the insistent racism and injustice experienced by black people in America, and so I did not take into account why the erroneous account might spread so readily, or the surrounding sentiments; I also used the word lynching too readily in a figurative sense, which can belittle the genuine life-and-death nature of its historical reality.

Nobody likes being called racist, of course, but the fact that it upset me so much is likely because to some extent I really did, in the back of my mind, belittle the concerns of blacks in America and Canada. When your life has been free of certain kinds of harassment, it’s far too easy to think those who complain of it are whiners. I’ve since learned better.

But I’m not going to revise this and pretend I didn’t write it as I wrote it. These are my words the way I wrote them, and I won’t duck and pretend I wasn’t so knee-jerk insensitive.

I still do not accept the inaccurate etymology offered for picnic; the historical data are well established. And I do think that phonetic profiling can have scurrilous effect. But the sounds of words also have effect regardless of etymology. For example, niggardly has nothing to do with the “n-word” etymologically, but it sounds so much like it, it’s more or less impossible to use it without bringing that worse word to mind. I am less convinced of this in regard to picnic, but I would like to know how others hear it (before they are told any accounts of its origins).

I do not, in any event, consider it fair to tell people they are being racist for using a word that has no actual history of racism and that, to them, has no racist overtones or implications. Especially when no one seems to be calling anyone out for using bulldoze, which has a truly awful history – but doesn’t sound like a taboo word.

But now that these stories have been spread, we have to be aware of them, and address them – and the sentiments and experiences behind them.

 

Spread the word and help stop another lynching of a perfectly guiltless word – and the family tradition it refers to. Tell your friends and colleagues that picnic is not a racist word.

You might think that this is a joke or a parody. Unfortunately, it’s not. People with influence over what students learn are maintaining that “picnic” is an offensive word, and that the origin of the “picnic” is in a happy outing to eat out on a lawn while watching a lynching (the term supposedly being from “pick a nic” – “nic,” in this account, is another version of the “n-word” – to string up). Continue reading →

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burglar

Posted on December 4, 2008 | 3 comments

A word that sounds like a security alarm going off. It may have a reflection of a ground meat sandwich, and may even make one think of a bugler; the beginning echoes a German town and the end the glare of security spotlights; but most of us know it well enough… hopefully not by personal experience. Many people say it with three syllables rather than two, backforming a verb burgle (which does have a sort of jumble and tumble and jiggle and boggle sound of a person going through drawers and jewellery boxes looking for goodies) and then construing this as the agentive derivation of it. But the real story of this word is one as much of gain as of loss. It came in the 16th century from the Anglo-Latin burglator (an easy little pocketing of the to there), which in turn came from burgator – and how that l got there we don’t know; perhaps someone sidled in and, having marked the to for later theft, found when outside again that an instrument had been left behind. As to burgator, it is thought that the burg comes from burgh, “castle or fortification.” A man’s home is his castle, after all. Which is why so many install that most common collocation of of burglar: an alarm.

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demesne

Posted on December 3, 2008 | Leave a comment

With the three wheels of e‘s, the linking letters between them and the d sticking a stack up in front, this word looks almost something like a steam train. But unless you happen to possess a steam train, it doesn’t have much to do with one. The de could seem French or lower-class urban; dem could give a whiff of politics; esne, to the historically literate, reminds one of when humans could be chattel. And what would those esnes be working on? Why, their Lord’s demesne. Not to demean it, but dat’s de main ting. On hearing this word spoken, you may mistake it for for demean, in which case you may feel demeaned by the speaker – perhaps justly so, given that the speaker is likely a lawyer – or you may mistake it for domain, and there won’t really be many, if any, contextual clues to tell you otherwise. Demesne, after all, is historically just an alternate spelling of domain – both came into English by way of French, and this version took on an unetymological s to indicate a long vowel and perhaps to indicate a link with mesne lord and mesnie (household establishment). Sound a bit fancy? Well, this is legal language. It was the law clerks who kept this version in ink since medieval times, and its uses are pretty much all legal. And what is it, then, legally? Nine points of the law (to be less cute, possession). It tends to show up in court with other members of the bar: hold in demesne, in his demesne as of fee, in ancient demesne (does that sound like something from the Anglican hymnal?), demesne of the Crown, Royal demesne, or, referring to estate possessed, demesne lands. And if somone attacks you, you fight back, and he complains, your lawyer will insist it was son assault demesne. And, after reading all those, do you still want to pronounce the s? I can’t blame you if you do, but you can’t take it away, say it aloud, or otherwise demean it; it’s not your demesne.

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The Correction of Josef Stalin

Posted on December 2, 2008 | 1 comment

A blast from a few years ago, worth posting now that I remember it…

A colleague noted the following:

The Moscow Times notes, in a review of Robert Service’s Stalin: A Biography, that “not only was [Stalin] an intellectual, he was a compulsive and professional editor who corrected any manuscript that crossed his desk for style and grammar as well as for ideology.”

My response:

Robert Service wrote a biography of Stalin? I must have missed that one…

There are strange things done ‘neath the Soviet sun
By collective and komsomol…
The GULag trails have their secret tales
Of the once-proud kulak’s fall…
The Moscow nights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest my tovarishch knows
Was that night in the air of the great Red Square
That Stalin corrected my prose.

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onomastics

Posted on December 2, 2008 | 2 comments

This word sounds like a name for many things, some of them quite improper. Onanistic gymnastics? With mastication? Is there something about a mast, about tics or other insects, or mass, or sticks, or no-no antics, or John Lennon’s second wife, or… oh, no mas. But, in fact, it is the study of proper names. Visually, this word has two halves with different styles: the rounds and mounds (with combs or fingers) of onom and the snaky shapes and sticks of astics. And in fact in origins it may be disassembled along similar lines: classical Greek onoma, “name,” transmuted into a verb, in past particle was onomastos and that in turn gained an ik for “of or belonging to,” to make onomastikos. The os was dropped to make the English adjective onomastic, which gained an s for the field of study. So when you buy a book of baby names – or wonder “Where the heck did that last name come from?” – there’s a name for that.

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