Monthly Archives: February 2009

cœlecanth

Posted on February 8, 2009 | 2 comments

A word that may seem to have surfaced from some eon-old depths, with its odd form and atavistic œ digraph. Faced with it, do you even know what to do with it? Does it come from Greek or Latin? (Greek, in fact, but by way of Latin, hence the c‘s rather than k‘s and the œ rather than oi.) Should the c be [k] or [s]? Choose the latter – it begins with the sound of sea, as does the story of its object. The two c‘s, œ and e may seem like four fins, if the front is the h. One of the c‘s retains the ancient sound, while the other has shifted to the modern (the vowels are all Anglicized). Its object is a large carnivorous fish that had been thought to have been extinct for 100 million years or so. Then, in 1938, an amateur ichthyologist happened to notice one in some by-catch on the South African coast. In fact, Comoros islanders had known about it for years and given it the name gombessa, but they didn’t care much about it because it wasn’t good eating. More recently (1997), a honeymooning marine biologist happened to notice one in an Indonesian market, thousands of kilometres from what had been thought to be the only modern habitat of the cœlecanth. So this deep-blue reclusive troglodytic human-sized fish with very sensitive eyes and a hollow spine (Greek koilos “hollow” and akantha “spine”) not only has made its name a byword for some living fossil but may yet also serve as metaphor for something that shows up when and where you had no reason to expect it (the canth resembling an abruptly aborted can’t happen) – or perhaps for something that the locals shrug off while scientists, if and when they “discover” it, are gobsmacked.

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nunchuck

Posted on February 6, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word seems to have two of each bit: two n‘s, two u‘s, two c‘s – all like a hinged pair of sticks being whirled around – and then there’s the near-pair of h and k (each following a c), the latter looking like a version of the former that has been whacked with something. It brings interesting echoes, too: is it a woodchuck that has taken holy orders, perhaps? But in common speech, the nun often comes out as numb (and you will see this word written numchuck too), perhaps just because of the added heaviness of the [m], perhaps because if you chuck – or strike or whack or some similar sharp act – somebody with the object they may be knocked numb or dumb, i.e., unconscious or possibly dead. Anyway, the vowels are both written u and said as unrounded mid-central vowels, the sound of grunts and thuds and blunt clubs, and while the word starts with the pair of nasals it crunches into the ch and cracks the final [k]. Those who use this instrument – or rather these instruments, as one typically speaks of a pair of nunchucks, even though the original word refers to the whole thing, not one of the joined halves – are at least as likely to use the source Japanese word (itself ultimately derived from Chinese), nunchaku. The final u in Japanese is voiceless and sometimes just plain dropped, and the other two vowels got harmonized into the bluntest of English vowels to make the Anglicized version a pair of syllables, one gripped in the hand and one cracking something – your skull, perhaps.

yex

Posted on February 5, 2009 | 1 comment

Will the object of this word vex you? Yes. But will the word itself? Perhaps not. It has been a boon to many a Scrabble player, but it is also a fun and useful word in its own right. It may look like the code for Saskatoon’s airport, but that’s YXE, and if you have to fly there, you will certainly hope that your seatmate does not yex. This word rhymes with an assortment of words not made for polite company: hex, sex, vex, and Tex-Mex. So we know what one expects. Its form is interesting: curt, to be sure, and made of angles with one curve. The y reaches down, like one starting to clear the throat, while the x is a point of constriction and in form and sound may remind one of the effect at the culmination of the throat-clearing. And the e? Perhaps the unclear throat itself, or an open mouth… Interestingly, this word – a gift from Old English, also spelled yesk to match the two forms it has had through the ages – first referred to sobbing, and then to hiccuping. Now it’s gone decidedly downmarket. But, if anything, it has become ever more onomatopoeic. Big yucks to that.

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catercornered

Posted on February 4, 2009 | 1 comment

Well, to start with, this is a real freight train of a word, visually, with those desultory repetitions of letters like branded boxcars: a c and a c, three e‘s spread about, three r‘s ditto, and an admixture of others. Your eye will spot cater and cornered quickly enough; has this to do with cooking under seige? or serving a niche market? Do cat and corn play into it? Well, cat has its tongue, anyway: it’s pronounced such that you might expect the t to be double. And the cat runs away with it, too; from this form it became catty-corner and, with that ease of colloquiality that leads some to speak fondly where felines are found, it curled up into kittycorner, drawing diminution from the higher harmonics on [I] and [i]. At all times it has retained the zig-zag of the tongue in the mouth: back-front-back-front. So how did this cat horn into a word about criss-crossing? Cater comes from French quatre, “four”; in a way, this is an almost atavistic progression, as we see forms like cater for “four” in other Indo-European languages: catur in Sanskrit, with the c said as we say “ch”; cztery in Polish, with the “ch” sound again; ceathair in Irish Gaelic, with the c hard but the th as we say “h”; and so many others. The Germanic languages are odd ones out in preferring forms like four. And as to corner? A corner is a meeting of lines at an angle, which to Latins looked like a horn, cornu. Fitting enough, especially given the sounds that would greet a cat – or you – cutting catercorner across a congested carfax.

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warfarin

Posted on February 3, 2009 | 1 comment

There’s warfare in this word. The sound of it, of course, brings it to mind right away – along, perhaps, with wafer, waif, wharf, wayfaring, and just maybe Aspirin. The w at the beginning might bring to mind WWI or WWII, and perhaps the f is a fence (or a flare) and the ar and ar the beginnings of artillery – or soldiers hunkered down pointing guns (the r‘s). But there’s also warfare in the use of its object – and between those uses. Warfarin is a chemical substance that wages war against blood coagulation. For this, it is used to help prevent heart attacks, strokes, and rodents. Wait, what was that last one again? Yes, it’s a very common drug (Coumadin is a well-known brand name for it), but it’s also a very common rat poison. The rats bleed to death (internally) from an overdose of it: too much of an otherwise possibly good thing, as it were. So its name came from war? No, it came from WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation; the arin was modelled on another drug name, coumarin. Drug common names come from all sorts of places and are a whole area of tasting all their own, with varied patterns and caprices; most are opaque, such as sildenafil (the common name of Viagra – not mycoxafloppin, as is often joked), but some give a hint of the namer’s thought process or tastes; for instance, there is a drug to help people whose stomachs don’t move food on quickly enough called domperidone. A little wine for thy stomach’s sake, Dom Pérignon?

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kestrel

Posted on February 2, 2009 | 1 comment

Ah, there it is again, that rakish k. It seems to bespeak roughness, or some bucolic gameness, or anyway a jaunty and undainty approach. And at the other end of the word there’s the rel that you see in mongrel and doggerel. Surely an unrefined word – how much difference it can make whether you choose orchestral or kestrel! And yet there it is: the same sounds… What else do you hear? Any hints of kiss, of strudel, of quest or question, of kettle? And an echo of pest? Kestrels have not always been looked on very well, but they won’t pick your garbage or eat your crops. They might dine on your hamster, lizard, or cat, however. And you’ll have enough time to be nervous about their doing so: a few storeys up in the air, there will be this brown raptor, hovering. Not circling, no; they point into the breeze and stay in place, watching and waiting, hence their colloquial name windhover. And they use nests built by other birds rather than using their own. Do they begin to sound like some annoying people you know? A few English authors over the centuries have thought so and have used kestrel as a term of abuse for such types. But are they not also stormy? No, that’s the petrel, a seabird that no more resembles a kestrel than a hamster does a cat. And it won’t try to eat either of them, but watch your fish. But it does have one thing in common with the kestrel: it likes to hover, so close to the waves that its feet almost touch them.