Monthly Archives: January 2009

hermetic

Posted on January 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

These days, this word is found most often with seal. It is as though the joining of the lips at the m is the key enunciation, however brief it may be. It is often also found in reference to mystical, occult, new age or similar ideas and groups (the words Golden Dawn may come up). But, now, how do these come together, an airtight jar (or an envelope at an awards ceremony) and esoteric metaphysics? The form of the word seems to seal this mystery in. Does the her conduct us to the feminine yin of the dark, hidden, and interior? Yet a herm, for scholars of classical Athens, is a very masculine statue indeed. Is this word then hermaphroditic? Is the etic relevant, that word that anthropologists and linguists know as referring to the external expression, as opposed to the internal, paradigmatic, conceptual emic? Should this word be hermemic? What of the metic, sounding just like medic (to North Americans), with the overtones of sickness and guts? The h and m are cupped downwards, containing, and the e‘s have their little lassos, but the c just lets it all out at the end… Resonances of exotic and esoteric seem more concordant. The h must be from hidden, no? In fact, in the original Greek, it is somewhat hidden – or, more exactly, it is not a letter but a mere diacritic, a reverse-apostrophe-like sign of heavy breathing to start Ermes, which is to say Hermes. Wait, that mercurial god of caduceus (ah, medic!) and fleet foot? Well, actually, only to the extent that he was identified by the Neo-Platonists and other devotees of hidden mysteries with the Egyptian god Thoth, author of all mysterious doctrines. Specifically, this Thoth is Hermes Trismegistus, and Trismegistic is a synonym for Hermetic. So the hidden mysteries are hermetic. Things occult, concealed, are hermetic (but perhaps openable through the application of hermeneutic). A container sealed to prevent the passage of air and information is consequently, since the 17th century, also hermetic. Thus is the mystery revealed. So to speak.

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caudate

Posted on January 20, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word may strike the unfamiliar as somehow caustic, or perhaps pertaining to a caul, or the date on which something was caused. To hear it, it’s something the cod ate. But in reality, its object is more likely appended to something that ate the cod. Ah, thereby hangs a tale… If you wish to give the cat a due, here it is: a word for things that have tails. The root is straightforward: Latin cauda, “tail.” Let your cat not bathe it in a bagna càuda. Fans of sound symbolism may wonder how so uncaudal a word could come to signify a tail. What could be curly or sinuous about a word with nothing but stops for consonants – not a liquid anywhere, and little curling of the vowels either? And yet you will find your cat so cuddly as it strokes you caudally…

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thole

Posted on January 19, 2009 | 2 comments

Actually two different words. No, I don’t mean t+hole, though those who know it as a term for an oarlock might wonder whether this is its origin. Rather, it is a noun and a verb, and the two are quite unrelated in sense and source. The form of the word immediately brings hole to the eye, and the word can be pronounced with the lips rounded from start to finish (though it would be more normal to round them after th), making it even more holey, but the noun’s referent is rather what one puts into a hole: a peg. In particular, if there are a pair of them, they may be seen stuck in the side of a boat holding the oar between them. It can be any of a variety of other pegs, too, but most notably one holding shaft to axle in a cart, or the projecting handle on a scythe. The sound also brings sole and soul to mind, but with the softness of lisping. None of this is likely to make one expect the verb to signify two senses that can both be rendered also by suffer: the first “bear, endure,” and the second “allow, give.” One may say small wonder that it’s not much used now, but it’s been recorded in English since the 9th century and was still used often enough in the 19th. Both words come to us from Anglo-Saxon, one from a root relating to trees, the other from a root meaning “bear, suffer” and related to Latin tolerare and tollere. The opening th was once a thorn, but since that glyph has disappeared, we now have an anagram of hotel. Which, unless it’s the sort of hotel you put up with rowing – or scything – at, is also quite excrescent.

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sledgehammer

Posted on January 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

Many who were around in 1986 will hear Peter Gabriel with this word. But with or without his song of the name, this is a word of weight and motion. Hear the rhythm: a slam that holds two full beats, then a second slam with a third on on the last off-beat. Like pounding a large mallet, say, on a surface and bouncing it once… twice thrice. But this compound word does join two different pieces, even if they are both weighty. Both start voiceless, but sledge has that sliding or swooshing sound of sl and then a jamming-in voiced affricate with dge, while hammer has softer consonants (ironic, isn’t it, that hammock, with its harder ending, names such a soft thing while hammer names such a hard one?) but a more aggressive because more open stressed vowel. Sledge has ascenders and a descender spiking it, too, while hammer is flat after the opening ascender. This word’s object is something that pounds home, not just once but again and again, and so it is fitting that this word pounds home twice, not only in form but in sense: one might as well say drillbore or stoveheater. Sledge, you see, in this word, comes from Old English slecg (pronounced just the same as the modern word), and means “large, heavy hammer.” It comes from the same root, way back, as slay, which first meant “smite, strike, beat,” and then just got worse. But there was – and is – another sledge, which comes from Middle Dutch sleedse and refers to a sled or similar conveyance made of a small platform with runners. So to be clear that one is not demolishing a house with a Flexible Flyer (which would be more of a sled jammer), the hammer is added – another Teutonic word that has really always referred to, well, a hammer, and hasn’t changed very much in form over the ages.

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anyways

Posted on January 15, 2009 | 5 comments

Does this word sound wrong, uneducated, perhaps some recently introduced error? In fact, it’s older than its pair anyway, but only slightly. The s is not a plural; like many s’s that show up in odd places, and notably at the ends of family names (Banks, Woods, etc.), it’s a genitive, which is to say a possessive. In this case it’s an adverbial genitive, so meaning “of or by any way.” Compare always, besides, etc. There is no apostrophe because apostrophes on genitives are a newer invention. And the active uses of genitives have reduced somewhat in modern English.

But anyways! None of the preceding changes the fact that for many hearers anyways is slangier, more casual, and so on, and we have to proceed accordingly. Which way to proceed? The multiple ways available can be seen in the y’s, forking like Frost’s roads (though some might see them as the drain they insist the language is going down). In between they are echoed, truncated, by the w. A separate echo effect comes from the two a’s. Ironically for all that, the sounds aren’t repeated: the first a is a lower and laxer vowel than the second, and not a diphthong as the second is either. And the second y is part of that diphthong, whereas the first is [i] (or, for some speakers, more of a lax central vowel). Cap it all off with an alveolar buzz, and you will notice that the whole word is voiced. Not only that, it all happens towards the front of the mouth – except for the raised back of the tongue in the w. So there aren’t so many ways in anyways that you make sounds.

And whence come this compound’s parts? Germanic: the any comes from the same source as one (which one? any one), and way, referring first to a road or path, comes ultimately from an Indo-European root that has evolved to words in a variety of languages from Sanskrit to Icelandic for routes, travel, transporting, and vehicles.

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clobber

Posted on January 14, 2009 | Leave a comment

Ever been hit on the ear? It sounds sort of like this word. (The word may even look like a promised clobbering: the c, holding the l as a club, sneaking up on the two b‘s from behind to beat them…) But of course there are many other words that sound sort of like this word, too: blubber, slobber, clubber, clapboard (pronounced the “old” way), lobster, glibber… Certainly the opening consonant makes some difference: the s in slobber is sloppy while the c in clobber is more percussive. It’s that opening stop that keeps this word from sounding flabby. And the spread of the voicelessness onto the l as we say it could be said to give a sense of motion. Naturally, it sounds rather akin to club, too. Perhaps that’s why, somewhere apparently in the 1940s, this word started being used to refer to beating, defeating, et cetera (bomber pilots seem to have used it first). Before that time clobber had been a word more associated with shoes and clothing: the verb referred to patching up and cobbling, and subsequently to adding enamelled decoration; it in turn may have come from a noun clobber that meant a paste used by cobblers to fill cracks in shoes. Another noun clobber was slang for clothes. All of these showed up in the 19th century, and the clothing one, at least, can still be seen rarely today. And lexicographers aren’t sure where any of them came from. Not the current sense either. Hm!

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pacific

Posted on January 13, 2009 | 1 comment

This word has a sea of collocations, nearly all of which go with the proper noun taken from it (rim, standard time, islander, northwest, and quite a few others, including, of course, Ocean; blockade, on the other hand, can pair with the lower-case version). Many people might easily forget – or never know in the first place – that it is a common adjective, too, and not one to do with water per se. The word seems somewhat soft, thanks to the two fricatives in the middle, but with the stops at either end it gains an acuity – perhaps it seems more specific. All the consonants are voiceless, making a white noise perhaps a bit like a sea sound heard at a distance. It leads off with a p, proper and patrician or popular and pretty, let your taste decide. But the most interesting sight is the palindrome cific. Is this like a wave? Two portholes with a funnel? Or a train engine of the eponymous class? Perhaps the f is a palm tree and the i‘s are islands, all surrounded by open c. And when one thinks of the Pacific Ocean, does one think of a peaceful, calm body of water? Well, Ferdinand Magellan did, as that was how it was when he first got there in 1520, and so the Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish soon came to call it the Mar Pacifico. But how do we get from “peaceful” to pacific or pacifico? Well, Latin for “peaceful” is pacificus, from pax. Ironically, this sea that was a major theatre of the Second World War is an adjectival form and near-twin of pacifism. But have you ever thought of pacifism when seeing the name Pacific? Just what effect do these overtones and echoes have? Well, somewhat more when you think of them, that’s for sure. And what might be the unconscious influences of these unnoticed hints and aftertastes? A very good question indeed.

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chilblain

Posted on January 12, 2009 | Leave a comment

This might seem like a word for the border crossing between BC and Washington where the I-95 and 99 meet: chill to the north, Blaine to the south. Well, the chill is right, and no doubt some people, on knowing what blain means, might think it accurate as well. This is not a word we hear much anymore; we seem able, with the aid of Thinsulate, good sense and central heating, to avoid its object. Yet we still see it in literature, typically used as though everyone were familiar with it (is this a good time to mention that I had also been reading of the disease consumption for years before I realized it was tuberculosis?). Well, what do we have, then? To look at, this word is a forest of ascenders and dots – only three out of nine letters are x-height. Not a descender in the bunch, though. Perhaps, in conjunction with chill, we will see this as iconic of horripilation. And the components of this word? It might lead your eyes to child, and certainly children, with their lesser good sense, are perhaps more likely to get chilblains. The sound carries a small echo of complain, and that’s not inappropriate. But a blain – a word by itself, though good luck trying to find it in use anywhere – is a swelling or sore. Its roots go right back to Teutonic. As do those of chill, which, this may be a good time to say, was used as the word to refer to cold until the 14th century, when it was replaced over time by cold; its noun form then fell into desuetude for two centuries until it was revived as a nominalization of the verb chill, which itself had only been converted from the noun in the 14th century… and not used all that much until two centuries later, when, it seems, the noun and verb together made quite a comeback. And isn’t that just what you had always wanted, for chill to make a comeback? Well, it did. Now mind you don’t get chilblains.

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An historic(al) usage trend: a historical usage trend (part 1)

Posted on January 11, 2009 | 6 comments

Update: I have now posted an HTML version of the full paper, finally. It’s at sesquiotic.wordpress.com/2012/07/03/an-historic/.

This the first part of a longer paper. This part, the introduction, is the most concise introduction to the issue; the second part covers the history; after that it goes into more technical depth with a survey of current attitudes that I conducted. The full text of the paper, with the references, is available as a PDF.

One of the most regular and inflexible rules of English is the one governing which version of the indefinite article to use in a given context. It is a useful thing to have an understanding of the rule, and it would take less than an hour to learn a habit of choosing according to the sound of the following word: a before a consonant, as in habit, but also before a consonant sound written as a vowel, as in useful; an before a vowel, as in understanding, but also before a silent consonant (inevitably h) followed by a vowel, as in hour. Although in some dialects a is used before vowels as well, this usage is considered nonstandard and is generally looked down upon (notwithstanding which it has occasionally been predicted that this will be the ultimate use everywhere – see, for example, the editor’s note following Bolinger 1975). An before a consonant would be considered a mark of a nonnative speaker.

There is, however, a salient exception. Continue reading →

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frabjous

Posted on January 11, 2009 | Leave a comment

A word you can play in Scrabble even though its meaning is less than perfectly agreed upon. It has the merit, at least, of being among that special set of words the origin of which is known exactly: in this case, Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky,” from Through the Looking-Glass (1871). And Carroll has indicated the blend on which he based it. But before I tell you what he thought it should mean, let me ask you to taste it and think of what it seems to you it should mean. In spite of the tone of its use in “Jabberwocky,” we see it used by Rudyard Kipling in phrases such as “frabjous asses” and “frabjously immoral,” and the Oxford English Dictionary has found a 1935 “frabjously late.” Well. The tone of those uses notwithstanding, it almost seems fabulous to me, but with a definite taste of raspberry aided by the French for the same, framboise. The juiciness of jous also comes in, though it might look like joust and sound like just. On the other hand, it has a definite echo of fractious and perhaps hints of frazzle and grab. It may seem slightly odd in form, but those who think the jammed b and j un-English would do best to abjure such ideas. It has a nice incipient spirality by grace of the curved ascender of f and descender of j. And if, like Alice, you find “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are,” I may as well reveal to you that Carroll, it is reported, had fair, fabulous and joyous in mind when he wrote “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy.” Oh, yes, chortled – another of the several words introduced to English by that poem. Only people seem actually to know and agree on what chortle means.

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