Monthly Archives: March 2009

wreak

Posted on March 6, 2009 | Leave a comment

A common dancing-partner of havoc, also seen out some evenings with with vengeance and occasionally damage. The word itself wreaks a little bit of havoc when it comes time to say it. Should it be like “reek”? But we don’t want to suggest that there’s a smell involved! Doesn’t “wreck” seem a better sound, given the usual usage? And so you will often hear it the latter way, though the dictionaries all agree it’s supposed to be the former. Many people will also swear that, even with the correct vowel, they say wreak and reek differently. It’s true that you round your lips a bit at the beginning of wreak. However, you also round your lips a bit at the beginning of reek. In North American English, with our retroflex r‘s, there is some labial coarticulation. Ah, who wrought such rot! But there it is. (Note that wrought is actually an old past tense of work, not of wreak: wrought havoc is from work havoc, not much said anymore.) But has this word any relation to wreck or to wrack? I reckon so. They all come from a Teutonic root meaning “drive, press, move,” cognate with the Latin that gave us urge. From that this word came to mean “banish,” then “vent, express,” then “inflict vengeance,” then “inflict damage.” Ah, such an urge, of which a wrong is the waker! But when one goes to wreak on another, which one is the weaker?

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mildew

Posted on March 5, 2009 | Leave a comment

So much less refreshing than dew from the mill – in fact, the very utterance of this word may elicit a mild “ew!” in spite of its mellifluous form. It seems the echoes of mold in the onset, and especially in the common collocation, prevail. As does the awareness of the word’s object, of course. But are mold (a.k.a mould) and mildew related? Possibly – they may both come from the Indo-European base of, wait for it, meal. Eww! But it gets better: the more proximate meaning of the mil is a Germanic word for “honey.” And the dew is in fact the same as our modern English dew. So, wait, this is “honeydew”? The closest its object would normally come to that (as long as your fridge isn’t disgusting) would be an item on a “honeydew list”: “Honey, do the following, please: 1. Clean the mildew off the shower curtain. 2…” However, its original referent was a specific sweet, sticky substance on the leaves of diseased plants, and it just spread from there. So to speak. Other words that mildew is often found with: powdery, rot, smell, walls, and – of course – shower.

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Tonnes of options

Posted on March 4, 2009 | 2 comments

Today’s discussion on the Editors’ Association of Canada listserv has brought forth an ad looking for performers with “tonnes of energy.” Hm! That would be “tons,” right? Boy, give these people 2.5 cm and they’ll take 1.6 km…

Except that there actually is a case to be made for it. Continue reading →

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venial & venal

Posted on March 4, 2009 | Leave a comment

What a pair these are. The difference in form is a mere jot, and both are also alternate forms of venous, but such different blood flows in their veins: sinner’s blood in both cases, but one has a much better chance of making it to Heaven – because someone kept an i on it. The form might incline a reader more towards a negative or sinful tone right off the top; voluptuous Venus vends venery from her v-neck sweater, and vermin envision the venom of such vile vices as they may venture to vent in vengeance… The v even looks like the tooth of crime, or various triangular shapes as may be seen in demimondaine etchings. Other echoes include menial and penal, denial and renal (what’s vile about kidneys? not everyone likes them in their pie, I suppose…). Of course, the al is just an adjectival suffix. The real roots – Latin both, naturally – are venum “that which is for sale or sold” and venia “forgiveness, pardon.” There’s something about that ven in Latin – along with other words mentioned above that came from various Latin ven sources, there’s the famous veni, vidi, vici. But tell me, adventurer: when you came, saw, and conquered (in whatever order), was it forgiveable? Or was it for money?

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pesto

Posted on March 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word comes to us from Italian, of course (Ligurian, to be precise), but it has gradually attained citizenship in our language. Its form still seems Italian, though we might note that if kid can become kiddo and boy can become boyo, then if the kid or boy is being a pest this word could be formed, aside from the dissonance between the tone of pest and the chumminess of the -o suffix. At any rate, this word seems, through the sapidity of its object, to have avoided taking on too much of the negative tone that pest could have given it. One might as soon think of pestle – after all, one could use a mortar and pestle to make pesto. Such a pity the words aren’t related: pesto‘s Latin source is pistum, past participle of pinsere “pound, crush,” whereas pestle‘s Latin forebear is pilum “shaft, stake, javelin.” This word can also call forth the st in taste due to the realm of reference, and of course those Thom(p)son twins of Italian cuisine, pasta and antipasto (which, like Thompson and Thomson – a.k.a. Dupond and Dupont – are not related, in spite of appearances). Other fainter hints include best and pistol. Anagrams include estop and poets. But the object, a sauce of nuts (typically pine nuts), herbs (typically basil), cheese, garlic, and olive oil, can top whatever taste the word may bring.

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mizuna

Posted on March 2, 2009 | Leave a comment

Does this word look like a brand name? Just look at the shape of it: the mi with the row of vertical lines and arches, and the curve repeated and rotated later on with the un, and in between that z… an escalator, a fancy desk, a sidewalk spinner, a lightning bolt… Even the oral locations of the vowels make a neat triangle: high front, high back (plus rounded lips), lower central. A brand designer’s dream! But you’d be thinking of Mizuno, makers of sports gear (an eponym at that – it’s a family name in Japan). It’s the same mizu, which is written with the character that in Mandarin is said shui (“shwhy”) and means the same thing: water. So this mizuna is water what? Hint: you may have some in your fridge, in a bag of mesclun, nestling to a kindred spirit, watercress. The na, you see, means “greens.” And the z may hint a bit at the shape: jagged leaves, a bit like dandelion greens (the taste is a little jagged too, peppery; it’s a mustard green). That z, since it’s from Japanese, is pronounced like an English z, giving the word a vague echo of mizzen, another word found near water. Since it’s Japanese, the zun is even more likely to remind anglophones of that most horridly overused, misused word, zen (a loan to Japanese from Sanskrit dhyana, meaning “meditation”), so often applied to commercial orgies diametrically opposite in spirit to Zen Buddhism. Is mizuna amenable to zen? Well, it is vegetarian. I’ll leave you to meditate on the remainder…

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