Monthly Archives: May 2009

fey

Posted on May 20, 2009 | Leave a comment

A word so short, like the brief candle that is life: a waking dream, a magical glimmer, a will-o’-the-wisp in the expanse of eternity. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. Life’s but a waking dream, and then… to sleep, perchance to dream… again. All of existence is perhaps a fevered fantasy of phantasms on a midsummer night. A fata morgana, perhaps. But what has all this to do with fey? ‘Tis fate, surely. To the old English, fæge meant “fated to die,” as fey can still mean today. More often, we use it to refer to a mystical, ethereal, otherworldly, fairy-like quality. This may be because of the giddiness attributed to those near death, but it no doubt is also because of fay, which comes from fae, which means “fairy” and like fairy is descended from faie, “person or place possessed of magical qualities,” which in its turn traces back to Latin fata, “fate.” It was a fated convergence. And the word opens with a puff of breath from teeth and lip and then fades away with a narrowing vowel, and is gone. Many today, on seeing this word, may think first of a famous TV face: Tina Fey. Although an accomplished comedienne with a following a decade long, she burst into the greater limelight by a twist of fate: a surprising resemblance to a politician whose abrupt elevation to high candidacy seemed quite out of the ordinary earthly run of things. But feh! That arctic charwoman (not au fait, just ofay) would pale in comparison to a true fey.

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encomium

Posted on May 18, 2009 | Leave a comment

When you tell me what you think o’ me, um, I’d like it with encomium. I want praise as my income: “Yum!” Let not your apostrophe leave me – or you – in a coma. Ah, encomium. Doesn’t it have a nice, warm feel to it? Like coming home. It also brings to mind a comb, not just in the stressed syllable but in the two m‘s. Perhaps that’s the comb you use on your hair before you go out to greet your adoring fans; perhaps it’s the act of combing, e.g., the net for nice things people have said about you. This word comes by way of Latin, unchanged in form, but they took it from Greek egkómion (the g – gamma, rather – becomes a velar nasal before the k, so the standard modern pronunciation with [n] is farther from the source than an assimilated, more “relaxed” version). There is an alternate version based directly on the Greek, encomion, but who wouldn’t rather receive a “yum” than a “yawn” at the last? For “yum!” is what encomium is all about: it refers to panegyric, also known by a term taken from the Greek for “fine words”: eulogy. Of course, in the spirit of nil nisi bonum, eulogy is typically reserved for those no longer around to hear it. Agh. I’ll take mine while I’m still on the hoof, thanks. Mince no words and make no moue; to make my life eunomic, mm, I need the whole thing, and not just once and then mum: keep it coming in.

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zeaxanthin

Posted on May 15, 2009 | 1 comment

An amazing word to pop the eyes of any Scrabble player. And it certainly has a zinfandel-like zest on the tongue. It appears to be made of a bricolage of bits of fashionable words, and it ends with that grail of fad nutrition, thin. The x, at the crossroads (or crosseyes) of the word, is, as often, a misleader; anglophones, certain they can’t begin a syllable with [ks], say [z] there instead, giving this word a double buzz. But where does this word come from, and what does it signify? If you’re not a Piers Anthony fan, xanth probably has at best faint resonances (xanthan gum, perhaps, spotted on ingredient lists). In fact, it comes from the Greek for “yellow.” As to zea, it’s a little Linnaean lingo: Linnaeus took the Latin for “spelt” (taken respelt from the Greek) and applied it to a different grain, Zea mays, maize. Well, but what breadcrumbs lead us now out of this lexical maze? Never mind – punch your way out, like Popeye; just make sure to have your spinach first. Although zeaxanthins were first isolated in maize, they are also found in spinach and other vegetables, and they protect them from blue light (isn’t that special?). They are a kind of carotenoid. And if you remember that carotene is supposed to be good for your sight, well, it is, and zeaxanthin is. Superfoods may be faddish, true, but it’s not just pop nutrition to protect the eyes.

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brassiere

Posted on May 14, 2009 | 2 comments

On the front of it, this word is as bold as brass – or as the waitress in a brasserie. The sound of it, however, puts it closer to Brazil, a country (coincidentally?) known for the display and enlargement of those things a brassiere supports. But, now, what does a brassiere support? I mean, we know, we know, but francophones may well ask, “What not arms?” French for “arm” is bras, after all. And in fact the term originated in French as a word for a soldier’s arm guard, and then for a military breastplate. Its farewell to arms came with its transference to a type of corset (not corsair, which would have a coarse air; the firearms involved now are not cannons but perhaps bazookas). Its use in English came about in the early 20th century, and the modern object to which it refers was patented in France (as un soutien-gorge) in 1904 by Herminie Cadolle and in America in 1914 by Mary Phelps Jacob. Oh, and Otto Titzling? So sorry. A hoax, a confabulation by one Wallace Rayburn in his 1971 canard Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra. Mr. Rayburn has made boobs of many people, including the devisers of Trivial Pursuit. (They also went for the red herring on Thomas Crapper, but that’s another scoop.) But… ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, bra! (NB the bra in that song is actually a form of brother – the song is about a West Indian immigrant to Britain and ob-la-di, ob-la-da is a Yoruba expression for “life goes on.” Like a brassiere, I suppose.)

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isogloss

Posted on May 13, 2009 | 2 comments

When I must explain to some Americans that by pop I mean soda, there’s a word for the line between the areas using the two words I so gloss: isogloss. It’s even pronounced like “I so gloss,” though it’s not taken from it. Quite reasonably for a scholarly term, it’s a Greek compound borrowed from German scholarship. People who study dialects will map out where people say see-saw and where they will say teeter-totter, for instance, and discernible (if in reality often fuzzy and permeable) boundaries can be drawn. Isoglosses can criss-cross and defeat what one expects from dialects. The word isogloss, for its part, has a certain sheen uncommon in the typically brutish, percussive, or convoluted classically based terminology of scholarship. It slips on the tongue like wet silver, with perhaps a sweetness like icing on a cupcake – or a glass of sherry. When we think of speech, this word’s echoes conjure the mouth speaking it, with gloss on the lips like ice (ah, Rocky Horror fans, do we have you now?). The gl here is not, however, the Germanic gl of gleam, glitter, and other shiny things – that’s the other gloss, a mere coincidence of form with this Greek-derived gloss, with the gl of the mouth, as in glottis. Nor is it akin to glace, French “ice.” There is also no ice in iso. The iso that catches your eye so quickly is not the lonely start of isolated (which is related to island) but the Greek “equal” we see in isotonic, isomorphic, and those isobars you see on weather maps (the bar from Greek for “pressure,” as in barometer, but no, not bar mitzvah, pressure or no). Think of isoglosses as linguistic isobars. And see them in action at www.popvssoda.com.

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If I were using the subjunctive…

Posted on May 12, 2009 | 11 comments

The subject of the subjunctive came up in a recent email discussion. English does have a subjunctive – or, I should say, some versions of English do have a distinct subjunctive. Some people will say “If I was you,” meaning right now, and they’re not using a special subjunctive form. But others (me included) will say “If I were you,” because I couldn’t possibly actually be you, and they are using a special subjunctive form. And I will be addressing the kind of English that does use these forms.

There are actually a variety of places where the subjunctive gets used in English, although rather fewer than there used to be, and I’m not going to go into detail about all of them, but they all involve a posited alternate reality – one that is desired (as in “I ask that he come to see me”) or merely posited as possible (“If music be the food of love, play on”), or one that is  definitely expressed as other than the current state (“If I were a rich man…”).

The discussion began with the sentence “He felt as if he were at a crossroads.” And the question: The character is indeed at a crossroads, so should it be “was”? Continue reading →

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petrichor

Posted on May 12, 2009 | 6 comments

Does this word have the scent of a chorus of rocks? Oh, yes, it does, as the dry ground sings its musty smell when the spring rain hits it. The petr is the same Greek pet(e)r, “rock,” you see everywhere: petroleum, petrified, saltpeter. The ichor actually has naught to do with a chorus, being rather the Greek word for the ethereal fluid that flowed in the veins of the Gods in place of blood; it has in English taken on more practical meanings to do with emanating fluids. But it has been borrowed to blend in today’s word to refer more to the flux of aroma: not the mud made by the spattering rain but the recrudescent redolence that tells our noses the dry spell is done. The enunciation moves backward in the mouth, with the lips starting, then the tip of the tongue touching the alveolar ridge, then the dorsum at the velum, and a subsiding liquid to end it, as though tracing the flow of a fresh flood into your thirsting mouth. On paper, this word has a rich heart, and as the water mixes with the soil, and the earthbound springs to life, we see it ret the roots and leave us with an orchid (the p has risen to d). As the drops lash the ground, engage in that porch rite of watching it from shelter – but where you can still smell it.

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prestidigitation

Posted on May 11, 2009 | Leave a comment

Quick, now! How many i‘s are there in this word? And how many t‘s? Are you sure? They flick by like so many fluttering fingers – do you see, the bump on the d, like a dime peeking out between index and middle – now flicked, flipped, rolled, held out at the g, snapped at the a, and, ah, fingers splayed, i i i i, where is it now? Or how did the i become an a and why is the i over there by the o (or is it there at all – do you hear an i there)? And how fast it all happens – between prest and o! Such quick, nimble feats of the fingers have been pressed on you. Preste – “nimble” in French, related to Italian presto, “quick” – and digit – “finger” of course – have been blended into this rapid-pattering bit of trochaic trickery on the tip of the tongue. Yes, the lips press once, and then the tongue tip touches six times, making a quick change each time: voiceless fricative-stop, voiced stop, voiced affricate, voiceless stop, voiceless fricative, voiced nasal! It’s like the Magical Mr. Mistoffelees! It’s a magical incantation to make a practical alteration in any situation: One-two-three, presti-digi-tation!

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dawdle

Posted on May 9, 2009 | Leave a comment

There’s that frequentative/diminutive le ending again, this time with a d, as we see in dandle and diddle and dwindle and trundle and toddle… In fact, if it seems like a blend of toddle and dodder, well, even though it’s probably not, it gets close enough in sense, especially in its origins. It appears to be a variant of daddle, which means “walk totteringly like a child” (though it’s not directly related to waddle, even if the two words are anagrams) as well as “move slowly” and, from another perspective, “oh, come on, hurry up already!” Consider that one of the most common words to appear right before dawdle is don’t… this is not a word of endorsement. I can only suspect that it’s directed at children a sizable portion of the time. But it could be something a wed lad might do over a lewd ad in his inbox, too. Either way, one lets the time dribble away… Carpe diem? Sure, in a minute… let me just check my email…

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hoosegow

Posted on May 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

Yee-hah! We goin’ stick you in the hoosegow! Git! Oh, yes, this word reeks of horses and gunpowder. And those three o‘s are like bullet holes. (It might be stretching it a bit much to equate the w with the door or bars on a cell in the hoosegow.) It has a hick feel, like a loose moose in your caboose, or anyway a loose cow. It’s where you might end up after a shootout at the hoedown. Hoo-hah! So of course it comes from Latin. Say what? Well, by way of Spanish. From judicatum “judged” came Spanish juzgado “tribunal,” and this word is a respelling of a dialectal version of that. And as to the old west… well, the oldest citation the Oxford English Dictionary has for this word is 1911. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t used for some time before that. But it wasn’t common in print before then. So we’re just guessing that it might have been used at the time, say, of the Pony Express (18 months in the early 1860s) and Wells Fargo stagecoaches (transcontinental to 1869, and local for decades after that).

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