Monthly Archives: February 2009

zugzwang

Posted on February 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word seems like a comic-strip sound effect for being bent over sharply on a mattress frame or other instrument of torture. Or perhaps a ducking move made with arrows flying over your head. The two z‘s and the mouth shift from puckered at u to wide at a give a clear sense of sharp reversal or turn, like a pull and a push; the first g – especially if you pronounce it properly, as [k] – is a sudden stop, augmented by the mechanical catch of the [ts] sound of the z‘s, and the final ng resonates, even moreso with the aid of the [v] sound from the w. A word like this could only get by, at least in English, with referring to something unpleasant. So what is it? German, unsurprisingly. The zug root means “pull” originally (and still), and from that we get German Zug “train” and also Zug “move,” which is the sense here. (Note that in German nouns are capitalized. But this word has been adopted by English, and as an English noun it is not capped.) The zwang means “compulsion” or “obligation.” A chess player will tell you what you get when you put them together: a forced disadvantageous move. Stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea, between a rock and a hard place, not knowing whether to sh*t or go blind, all roads lead to Hell and you have to take one of them. Imagine zugzwang being the sound of a magician firing a nasty spell in the form of a lightning bolt from his hands. If you’re the chess player putting the other in zugzwang, you get that feeling (suppress evil laugh). If you’re the one being zapped, you may notice a slight resemblance between the first part of the word and sucks…

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gobsmacked

Posted on February 18, 2009 | 1 comment

The sound of this word can take you towards its sense: the gibbering, gaping gob – like one agog, gaga, gobsmacked – and the siffling crack of smacked like the event that produces the state (and then there is the stunned state that can be produced by the drug sometimes called smack).

Such a good sound for a slap, smacked: the s like the hand whipping through the air, the m giving a sense of the might behind the blow, the aggressive, sharp low front vowel, and then not just the crack with the [k] but the echo with the final [t].

Actually, smack was a word for lip-smacking first: you know, when you make a sharp sound with the sudden parting of the lips, as – evidently more in earlier centuries than now – a sign of gustatory eagerness, such that cognates of this onomatopoeic word in other Germanic languages have to do with flavour and relish. So it’s perhaps ironic that it travelled away from the mouth to the “slap” sense only to be brought back to it with this word, adding gob to the adjectival past participle smacked to signify the point of impact.

Gob is of course another buccal word, suspected to come from Gaelic for “beak”; there is another gob that refers to mouthfuls, lumps, masses, and comes from a French word for the same. So gobstopper refers to a ball of candy (which one might call a gob) that stops up your gob – your mouth – but also stops gobs from coming out of it. (And, though you might drool, you can say “gob” with a gobstopper in – it does not require the blade of the tongue.)

And gobsmacked? Just a striking metaphor, of course. If it seems like a grand old British word, it might be, but there are currently no citations for it before the 1980s, so it might sooner be a grand rather new British word. One way or the other, you’re most likely to find it in predicate position: sooner “I was gobsmacked” than “I saw three gobsmacked Englishmen.”

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agnate

Posted on February 17, 2009 | Leave a comment

Does this word look to you like it’s missing an st at the beginning? Or, if you’re thinking of business, say shipping, an m? Or does it seem like a name for a precious stone? Or a girl? Or a theological disposition? All are definite overtones, and you may be led to agonize over the actual meaning of the word. It may not help you to know that this word is not a verb – it’s a noun and an adjective. It comes from Latin ad “to” and gnasci “be born,” which is from gen “beget.” Notice how the e dropped out of the root? This is called the “zero grade” of the gen root. It gives it that blocked-nose gn pairing, a bit of an ugly couple, to my eyes and tongue, anyway. You see it also in cognate, which is not about cognition – cognate words are words that come from the same origin (English hound and German Hund, for instance). Cognate is used outside of linguistics to mean “descended from a common ancestor.” So is agnate, but the difference is that agnate means specifically “descended from a common male ancestor.” So half-siblings sharing the same father are agnate, but half-siblings sharing the same mother aren’t. Agnate is also used in linguistics (and elsewhere) to mean “akin” or “of the same nature”; syntactically, for instance, two sentences are agnates of each other if they say essentially the same thing in different form: Jack saw the dog; The dog was seen by Jack. (By this explanation is your lexical anagnorisis achieved!)

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Among other things, it’s a sentence adverb

Posted on February 17, 2009 | 2 comments

A colleague asked whether “among other things” in a sentence such as the following is a dangler:

Among other things, this book explores the concept of silliness.

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eviscerate

Posted on February 15, 2009 | Leave a comment

A word with echoes of vicious and a sound of slicing across the middle. The taste of evil in front helps set the tone; there is a suggestion of vice in the core, and there may even be a hint of rape at the end. Ask your ears: is the instrument used for the action serrated? The v looks like a knife edge… or its results. Ask your eyes: are its results viscous? They could be, a little, literally, given that the e is Latin “out” (remember e pluribus unum?) and viscera are guts. But this word is not so often used literally these days. More often it’s talking about the effects of some legislation, or effects on some legislation, or an author’s complaint about an edit, or a lambasting that might be better called excoriation than evisceration, or some act that would be better termed eradicate or undermine or emasculate or enervate or hamstring or decimate or… One worries that too-broad usage might etiolate this word’s sense. Which is not to say eviscerate it.

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watercress

Posted on February 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

A word with a refreshing, crisp sound. Of course, anything with water will have a much stronger semantic than phonaesthetic impact, but the cress brings a fresh crunch and crush. Only the c really looks like the object of the word, those little round leaves of a peppery salad green. Peppery? In flavour, anyway. They’re actually Nasturtium officinale (so much nastier a word! but they’re unrelated to the flowers called nasturtiums, which seem only to have in common the ability to provoke being called “nose-twisters” in Latin) and related to mustard. Would these greens be thought light or refreshing if they had mustard or nasturtium in their common name? Or would the edge of their taste be much more emphasized? I think the latter. As it is, they are popular enough, and they – and the word – keep company with two more things with wet s‘s: salad and sandwich – not just any sandwich, but tidy little triangles served with tea, adding to the genteel flavour this word gets from echoes of Waterford, Water Music, and similar cultivated aquatic things. Why not? Watercress itself is cultivated semi-aquatically. If you’re expecting me to say that the water in this word is unrelated to what you drink, I won’t, because it’s the same. This hollow-stemmed cress gets its name from its environment. There are many other cresses, crucifers all (like cabbage and cauliflower), but cress by itself normally refers to this one. Cress, for its part, has meant what it means for a very long time and (variously transformed) in quite a few languages. It may be related to a Germanic root meaning “creep”; it is probably unrelated to Latin crescere “grow,” though they have been popularly associated, since cresses do grow briskly. …And wither quickly too, and so get consumed with reasonable haste. And a cup of Earl Grey.

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dewlap

Posted on February 12, 2009 | Leave a comment

A moist, flapping word for a floppy but dry thing. It laps the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, and the second time you may find it flops right down to the bottom gums. The lips pucker, then slap together. It’s almost as though you were lapping dew. But while the pendulous fold of skin this word signifies may seem like a tongue, this lap is not the one that cats do with milk; rather, it is related to where children may sit. Your lap, you see, is so named because of the fold of fabric that commonly hung there at one time (ere shirts were normally tucked in); this lap is a hanging piece of fabric or similar that is or may be folded over, from Old Germanic lappa. And if fabric, why not skin on a neck? As to the dew, eschew any mind of moistness; it has naught to do with the dew of dawn (except by influence of reanalysis, perhaps). The shape of the morpheme is useful, with the w like the folds of skin on a Brahman bull’s neck. But if you thought sooner of a basset hound, you might be closer to the scent, for in Danish and Norwegian this word is doglæb and doglæp… but though the dogs may have been let out, they are not dogs; the word for “dog” in Scandinavian languages is hund – our word dog has come from uncertain origins (perhaps God wanted anglophones, and no one else, to see the word god reflected in these creatures… while leaving felines to reflect tac).

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forficate

Posted on February 11, 2009 | Leave a comment

A biological word that looks and sounds much ruder than it should. When you see it, you may think of forfeit and fornicate, or perhaps formicate (which could make you even antsier). If bifurcate comes to mind, at least you have something like the right image. If you hear it said, with its unstressed short lax vowel in the last syllable, it could be taken for an expression of exasperation: “ff.. aw, forget [it]” – or perhaps something a bit coarser than that. Esperantists may recognize the rude autocopulation imprecation forfikigi. But again, the overtone of fork will get you farther. There’s no hint of the shape of the signified in the sound; it has those faffing, fluffing [f]s, then two voiceless stops – you need to go to the Latin source, forfex, to see something like shears. In that word you see the scissors at the end, and especially in italics you may be prompted to view the f‘s as tresses recently trimmed. The definitions split in two directions: some sources say “shaped like scissors”; others declare “deeply forked, like a bird’s tail” – such as a scissortail flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus, which sounds like a concupiscent dinosaur or perhaps a play by Seneca).

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solipsism

Posted on February 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

A word that dances with itself, weaving reflected s‘s and i‘s like a house of mirrors. Its object is an existential solecism that takes solace in a schism with existence – or, if not solace, then at least soleness. The form of the word can be seen to reflect that, though not without other overtones. It starts with sol, which could be the sun, but in this system the sun that all revolves around is the solus ipse, no one but the single self. And so the only one my lips will touch is me, for all others are but figments. The snaky s slithers its way through a trinity of times with never a z to face it, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, but this one is saying “the tree is in your mind, and so is that other person, and the garden, and, by the way, so am I.” In the beginning there is nothing, o, and then i comes, and after that – well, it’s i again, and none other. All beyond mirrors the sole I with the mere psittacism of the schizoid psyche. This term emerged from philosophy, suitably enough, for it takes a philosophical bent to think oneself into such a Spiegelhaus. My first-year university philosophy professor told us he had once known a solipsist. Ironically, he added, “He committed suicide.” And yet here we all are (assuming you’re there, and assuming I’m here). And, in the end, this word, too.

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nugatory

Posted on February 9, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word leads off with the n-g pair that tend to mean something bad or sweet: negative, nag, niggle, and an assortment of racial epithets on one hand, but nougat and nog on the other. And then there’s nugget. It ends with that technical- or formal-sounding atory, a highbrow suffix used in fancy adjectives such as laudatory and hortatory and more common nouns such as laboratory and observatory. It must be conservative; it ends in tory. It doesn’t wag the jaw too much, just bouncing and sliding the tongue back and forth. But is it sweet or sour? Heavy or light? In fact, although it has nothing to do with nougat or nog, it does refer to a trifle – not the dessert, but simply a trifling matter, something of no significance, perhaps a futile effort. We get it from Latin nugari, “to trifle.” Still, its use is seldom so sweet. Perhaps by rub-off from the military jargon usage negatory (a flak-suited way to say “no”), it tends to get used as a little verbal grenade to lob at annoyances that aren’t as minor as one wishes to make them.

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