Monthly Archives: June 2009

dulse

Posted on June 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

What sort of thing is dulse? Is it a pulse? No, that would have been a bean. If you’re not sure, look on the shore. The shape of this word may be short and spiky, but its referent is rather longer, clumpy and stringy, or flaky or chippy when dried. It’s a red seaweed, and an edible one at that. If that sounds to you like the dullest, you may just be mishearing an Irish pronunciation of dulse with a schwa after the [l]. The original Irish Gaelic word is duileasg, the sound of which is approximated by the western Irish English variant dillisk. And many an Irish person finds its object delish as a snack. The attraction perhaps eludes some people, but they may be mixed up; on the other hand, one would be equally mixed up to engage in duels over it. Just grab a bag, or hit the shore and gather some. And then… a Guinness, of course.

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scion

Posted on June 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

When Terry Brooks came out with his book The Scions of Shannara, an installment in his popular Shannara series of fantasy books (not scions fiction!), he really put a cat among the pigeons as far as the pronunciation abilities of fourteen-year-old boys was concerned. I was working in a bookstore at the time, and it was not so common to hear the word scions pronounced correctly by those seeking the book – as though Brooks had blinded them with scions. It seems the rule most anglophones adhere to is “If it looks unfamiliar, it must not be pronounced like familiar words.” So the model of science just didn’t do it. “Skee-ons” was more common, in spite of the fact that [sk] for sc before e or i in English is, as linguists would say, strongly marked (marked is here a polite way of saying odd or weird). Oh well, sigh on, you erudite ones. At least those young men carbuncular had more coins in the piggy bank of their vocabulary, added by one of the icons of fantasy. I wonder what they expected scion to mean before they found out. Something like a scythe or scissors? It does have a knife-like quality, with the steel-hissing [s] at the start written with that slicing pair sc. On the other hand, the shape of the word suggests a sword or a candle (i) set among stones. But what is really rising up in this word’s referent is a shoot, a twig, a graft, an off-spring… or, in the more current metaphor, an offspring, in particular an heir. All things that could be cut off with a sharp shaft of steel.

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What’s up with English spelling?

Posted on June 8, 2009 | 18 comments

Presented at the 30th annual Editors’ Association of Canada conference, Toronto, June 6, 2009

Handout: Why is it spelled that way? A ghotiun expedition (PDF, 156 KB)

Last week, the annual Scripps Spelling Bee was held. Everyone was so impressed at how smart these kids were, at how they could spell all these words.

Remember that song, A-B-C, easy as 1-2-3…? So what the heck is so easy about ABC, at least in English? It gets to be like a bad marriage. Or a boxing match. Continue reading →

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Tagged alphabet, English, English language history, English spelling, Old English, orthography, Roman alphabet, silent e, silent letters, spelling, spelling reform

dehisce

Posted on June 7, 2009 | 2 comments

This word suffers from a surfeit of symbols for sibilants: why wrap it up in sce for a simple [s], especially when the preceding vowel is short? Well, it does come from Latin dehiscere, and the ere is the infinitive ending, which we don’t need in English. But the Romans didn’t say the sc as simple [s]; the c was [k] to the classical tongue. And so from the close, tight alveolar fricative the tongue dropped back to a velar stop and then opened up to a vowel, a trill or tap, a vowel, and the mouth was, by grace of the suffix, at the last agape. Now it simply closes down in a hiss, without taking the risk of ending in isc. How ironic. For dehisce means “open up,” “gape,” “burst open”; botanists use it to refer to what many seed-pods ultimately do. You may have seen it happen in alien horror flicks, sometimes to bits of anatomy that really shouldn’t. But it can also be a fancy term for what ecdysiasts do.

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umami

Posted on June 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

For some people, the heart of this word is the mm its object can produce: that savoury flavour of a rich broth, perhaps a bowl of miso soup. For others, the taste will have them asking “Um, am I tasting monosodium glutamate?” Well, ask your mommy… she probably used to use the stuff, at least in seasoning salt. Many people and products still do. But umami does not require MSG; it can be gotten from quite a few different kinds of food. A good aged Vermont cheddar will give you dose of it, as will nuoc mam (Vietnamese fish sauce). And of course miso paste and soy sauce. The word does come from Japanese, after all, even if it refers to a taste function some say everyone has (the “fifth basic taste” along with sweet, sour, salty, and bitter). Take umai “delicious” and add mi, a suffix that makes abstract nouns of adjectives (but then write the mi like the mi that means “taste” – how rich is that!), and you have a soft, humming word for deliciousness or savour – a lip-smacker, perhaps, though it does present to the eye something more like the teeth behind the lips, m m. There are echoes of Pop Tops (“Ooh, mamy, mamy blue”) and perhaps Al Jolson, but let that not jar your palate; think instead of Maui and stay mum. This is, after all, a word from the land that gave us Zen, and that means mu, ami. Shut up and enjoy your soup.

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bibliography

Posted on June 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word once signified the act of writing books; now it tells you you’ve gotten to the end of a written work. And if you’re the writer, the odds are good that by the time you’re to the end of the bibliography, you’ll be dazed and loopy and halfway to going bibblybibblybibbly too. It may seem all Greek to you, especially with the insistence on including the city of publication (“Honey, let’s go to Harmondsworth, I need to buy some Penguin books”). If it does, well enough; Greek is where this word is from: bibliographía, from biblion, “book” (or “paper” or “papyrus”), and graphé, “writing.” Since the early 19th century we’ve used this word for a list of books for a specific purpose (e.g., a certain topic, or a certain term paper). And this five-syllable Greek word, which sounds rather like a photocopier running off a copy of some reference you need, and which has a taste of Bible (the good “book”) and graphite (the mineral you write with), seems so much more appropriate to a library (bibliotheque) and its scholarly denizens (with their myriad other -ographies) and to antiquarian booksellers, lunettes, foxing and century-old dust than does the businesslike Latinate references or the half-Saxon, half-Latin proletarian works cited (which sounds rather like a way of saying “excited by work”).