Monthly Archives: July 2009

schlimazel

Posted on July 19, 2009 | 5 comments

You may have heard of Yiddish stories of three blunderers: Schmendrik, Schlemiel, and Schlimazel. All three characters are named for types of people; the first two are actually apparently eponyms – the common noun is based on the name of a person, in this case a character in a story. The third, schlimazel, is a a well-formed Yiddish word, as will see. All three have that sch (or sh) beginning that one often gets in Yiddish words and quite notably in derisory usage in the onset substitution schm: “Doctor, schmoctor. He’s a dentist.” It shows up on other derisory words too, notably schmuck (a word for a male body part, now applied to persons) and schmo (a euphemism for schmuck) as well as schmutz (junk, filth, undesirable stuff). Schlimazel doesn’t have the m but it does have a slippery sound that might to some ears have a sleazy side, or at least a messy, fuzzy buzz.

But a schlimazel is not a sleazebag or a fuzzball. One common definition is that if a waiter spills soup on a customer, the waiter is a schlemiel and the customer is a schlimazel. If you recognize the mazel in this word from mazel tov, you’re right on: it’s the word for “luck” and comes from Hebrew, as do many words in Yiddish. But Yiddish is not a Semitic language any more than English is a Romance language; no matter how many loan words a language takes from a source, its language type is determined by the source of the grammar and will generally be manifested in the sources of many of the basic words and affixes too. And for Yiddish, that source is German – it’s a dialect of Low German with Hebrew influence, long written with the Hebrew alphabet but now usually rendered with the Latin alphabet. (Low German is not “low-grade” German; the Low/High distinction in German is geographical.) We see this in the schlim (the double m in schlim mazel became a single one), which is from Middle High German slim “crooked” (yes, it’s the source of Modern English slim). This is emblematic of Yiddish in its mixing and also in its palatalization of the [s] initially.

So while Schlimazel’s companions are a naive fool (Schmedrik) and a clumsy oaf (Schlemiel), our hero du jour is just plain unlucky. How unlucky is he? Well, the word seems to have even had the bad luck to have been borrowed and mutated into a word for a messy situation, a complication, a quarrel, a row: shemozzle. This luckless lunk is being accused of causing the trouble – and they can’t even get his name right!

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escutcheon

Posted on July 17, 2009 | 4 comments

Lord Floppington: “Would you care to come up and see my escutcheon?” Miss Primsley: “Good heavens! Do I look like a tropical disease specialist?”

This word’s object is not actually so objectionable. But it does have a scratchy sound, doesn’t it? Or perhaps something metallic and scrapey, like a ratchety flivver or, more to the point, a sword against a shield. Ah, a shield! But not just any shield. This one goes with not a suit of armor but a coat of arms. An escutcheon is an object for discussion (perhaps at a luncheon), and has as little function in its ostensible design as a Freemason’s trowel. In short, it is a skeuomorph. And if you have a blot on your escutcheon, it is not so likely the blood of your enemies as the ichor of your wounded reputation.

Escutcheon is such an ungraceful word (if not the roughest you’ve lately heard) – escaped from the chat of retired captains, or sworn by sailors agrunt at capstans – where could it come from, this word of the bench, the musket, the whiskers, but from the French? Yes, of course, this ornament of fights came from the land of gallant knights. In Old French it was escuchon, and that in turn comes from the Latin for “shield”: scutum. Now, there’s an unpretty word (one could have a ball with puns, but I’ll let that hang)! But if you’ve ever wondered why in heck anyone would name a line of high-end rain coats Aquascutum, you now have your answer: they are not merely water shield but escutcheon, an emblem of membership in the plutocracy (as endorsed by generations of royalty).

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kerf

Posted on July 16, 2009 | 4 comments

A noun that sounds rather like a sandbag hitting gravel, or a fisticuff in a scuffle, or your dad’s hand whacking the side of your head for your part in the kerfuffle. Or like the half-stifled cough you make after inhaling a bit of sawdust, which is closer to the meaning. It has a variety of resonances: curve, kerchief, cuff, carafe, kerb, even mirror suggestions of freak and maybe firkin. There’s that rough-and ready k with its notch, and on the other end the two bent-over letters, rf, like wheat stalks in a crop circle. One might even discern a trough down the middle, cut out between the k and the f down to the tops of the e and r. If that trough were a notch made by a circular saw, say, then it would be a kerf. Kerf can also refer to the cut end of a tree or branch, or even the bit that was cut off. Or should I say carved off… since carve is not only another resonance for this word but in fact a close cousin. Kerf comes from Old English cyrf, which comes from an ablaut version (thus probably a past-tense form) of the stem that also produced ceorfan, now known to us as carve. So they are cut from the same branch! But where carve starts with a curve, kerf has the straight cut. And what word comes most often before this one? That toothy saw.

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oyster

Posted on July 14, 2009 | Leave a comment

Complete this sentence: “The world is my ___.” How about the phrase “cultured ____”? Ah, this word gives us a fair few pearls. It may sound a bit like waster but it’s not one (well, perhaps of money). Its object is a mollusc eaten in the raw, reputed to encourage other things done in the raw. It’s a funny word, though – it starts with that oy, so often followed by vey, and recalling oil and Brooklyn accents (eva hoid one?), and caps it with ster, like in lobster and mobster, huckster and spinster, youngster and punster… a sturdy, serviceable, often jokey-sounding agentive suffix… that you are not actually seeing in this word. Oh, no doubt the existence of the suffix influenced the current English form of this word, but the word is not attributing plaintiveness to its bivalve object. (They’re not very loquacious, anyway, oysters; ask them how they are and they clam up.) It comes to us from Latin ostrea, which in turn comes from Greek ostreon, which is related to the Greek root osteo, signifying bones. So, yes, it has a bone to pick, but in silence, with hoarse- – I mean horseradish. And perhaps it will get you to yes, and even to the second storey (where you will find toys and the rest). But if the oyster on the half-shell doesn’t make an impression, some may notice that other famous Oyster, the Rolex Oyster. That plus pearls and the world is your oyster – though if the oyster going down doesn’t make you queasy, your bank balance going down might.

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malarkey

Posted on July 13, 2009 | 1 comment

Holy mackerel, what a lark! What, a lark? Sure, the lark in the morning sings a great song in any key, but don’t believe it. Ah, this is a fine word for blarney, blather, meretricious persiflage… and so Irish in the sound! Well, Mullarkey is an Irish family name. And other early versions of this word have also had an Irish sound to them, for instance Malachy (the form of our first known use). But we have no solid tie to the Irish with this one, as luck would have it. Oh, that doesn’t mean there’s no connection. But the word arose in the United States; its first known user (in other words, the first one to publish it somewhere we can find it) was a cartoonist in 1922. Our malarkeyology doesn’t dig deeper. But it was pretty popular by 1930. And why not? It just flips over the tongue like a flapjack, starting at the lips and then touching the tip with the liquid /l/, rolling through the retroflex /r/ and kicking the back with the /k/ before finally releasing to the /i/, for which the tongue is already bent. It has the same rhythm and general gestural trend as baloney, which is like unto blarney. And malarkey has that corny, fleering /r/, as in “har har.” It’s even kind of like the gobbledegook you get from some turkey – or tell to him to make him go away. But one way or another, whether you’re the monkey or the one on the make, the palaver this word stands for, the name’s nuances notwithstanding, is neither fish nor fowl.

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dishevelled

Posted on July 12, 2009 | Leave a comment

Here’s an adjective for looking like something the cat dragged in, unravelled, half-shrivelled, perhaps shivering… The strongest echoes are of dish and shovel, but the dish would be dirty and a fortiori the shovel too. Negative notes abound in this word: the opening dis, part of dish but still there to see; the sh that could go both ways but is under bad influence here; and chiefly the vell, the same sound as in the ends of evil, shrivel, snivel – yes, as well as swivel, level, and gravel, but just as flashing lights can mean a disco or a cop car depending on context, the negative tone here draws in the bad side of the family all around. The various ascenders and especially the ll (lacking in the single-l American version) may bring wrinkles to mind… or disarrayed hair.

And it is the messy hair more than the messy clothes that gave form to this word: it may seem like it comes from déshabillé, but it is not undress but untress – Old French deschevelé (des+chevel), “de-haired,” which is to say, first of all, shaven! How dis-tressing (and perhaps distressing, but distress is unrelated to tresses or anything to do with hair, etymologically). But also, pretty much from the beginning, with the hair not on the floor but flung about in disorder – hat or scarf off and looking like something frightened as carved by Bernini. And fair enough – even today hair is among the most likely words to be seen with this word. Others include appearance, slightly, and looking. And perhaps, for blog followers, perfectly. Which suggests a sort of raffish redemption for this unsavory word.

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soccer

Posted on July 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

The look of this word is great for its object: it’s like a ball being kicked between the s and the r. To my eyes, it looks like the r has kicked it, as the cce look like leftward motion of the ball we now see at the o. And clearly the r is like a foot upside-down, suggesting that the kick was one of those backflip-type kicks that Brazilians seem to like especially. The sound is good, too, with that quick-impact “sock” (how Andy Cappish) followed by the the echoing rebound “er.” It may sound similar to sucker and succour, but the broadness of the vowel here gives it a much more sportive tone. It has a sonic affinity to saw kerf, too, but only carpenters are likely to carry any flavour of that – or, probably, know what the heck it is. (Hint: saw blades have actual thickness that must be figured into your measurements.)

But this word has the added element of only being used, really, in the United States and Canada – to refer to a game that is much more popular practically everywhere else, and that is everywhere else called football (or fútbol or similar). We can’t call it football here because we have a game that, although it involves mostly hand contact with the ball, is called football. If we talk about it being played elsewhere, we may want, for accuracy, to say football, but then we have to add (soccer) to clarify.

So where did we get this word soccer? From the same blokes what gave us rugger (for rugby) and champers (for champagne) and preggers (need I explain) and those various other laddish -er nicknames. You see, the game thus named was – is – specifically Association Football. And association may be abbreviated assoc. And if you take the stressed syllable of that, drop off the upbeat schwa and add that er, you get soccer – not pronounced “so-sher” because it’s based on the printed form. It was only a nickname in Blighty, but in the colonies we needed a name other than football, and this one was suitably catchy… You could see it if it were coming over today: those lifestyle reporters starting their little segments with “It’s called ‘soccer.'”*

And when I go to the Corpus of Contemporary American English to check what common collocations of soccer are, the top two play pals are the two kinds of people most often associated (socced?) with it, the one from England and the other from America, the one with their beer bottles and the other with their minivans: hooligans and moms.

* If you hear that “It’s called…” introduction, don’t take it on faith that it actually is called that by much of anyone. Phenylpropanolamine was never listed as “PPA” on any drug labels, but that was all the reporters wanted to call it because they didn’t want to have to deal with phenylphophylphipplprapplhoosywhatshuh. “It’s called ‘PPA,'” they said, but it wasn’t.

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zen

Posted on July 9, 2009 | Leave a comment

This is one of the most overused and persistently misused words in English marketing today. It is typically used to evoke some balanced or focused state of mind, or anyway something to do with enlightenment or bamboo or all that Asian stuff that’s, you know, so wise and calming and all that. The sound of one hand clapping, you know? Hm. How about the sound of one finger raising, specifically the middle one. Given that Zen Buddhism teaches you to eschew attachments, anyone who uses zen to sell anything has already earned a nice, fat fail.

But it is a calming word, isn’t it? That buzz at the start and the sonorous [n] at the end, and the [E] neither broad and brassy like an [a] nor high and tight and sharp like an [i], yet forthright and bright rather than withdrawn and hollow like an [o]. The lips need not move at all; the tongue is resting, with the tip doing all the work, caressing and touching the alveolar ridge. Hours of om could tire your lip muscles, but hours of zen would be no problem – and hours of zen would be even less so, as one does not recite a mantra out loud in zazen.

In what? Zazen is the sitting meditation of zen. In fact, that’s what zazen means: “sitting meditation.” Zen is “meditation,” Japanese, from the Chinese chan (written in Japanese kanji with the same character as used in Chinese), which is turn is taken from Sanskrit dhyana, “meditation.” Yes, this stereotypically mystical Eastern word is a loan from an Indo-European language, mutatis mutandis.

But of course zen is not generally used to refer to meditation specifically. In fact, it’s usually treated as a proper noun when it’s not being used to sell beauty treatments and sports equipment; Zen Buddhism is a sect of Buddhism that focuses on achieving enlightenment through meditation. There are several schools of Zen Buddhism, the two most important being Rinzai, which focuses on meditating on puzzles meant to push the mind towards a sudden attainment of enlightenment, and Soto, which focuses on simple breath meditation and gradual enlightenment.

But this is not a religious studies tasting note. This is a taste of a bit of verbal sushi – a neatly constructed little word that gives a delicate flavour. This set of letters shows up in words such as frozen and mizzen, but those words don’t start with z and they don’t give full value to the vowel – it’s reduced to a schwa. For them, the zen is a buzz, something less than pleasant, whereas when you start with the z you get something exotic, and the associations of this word keep it calming.

And then there’s the sight of it in all capitals: ZEN. Nothing but angles, so sharp. But there’s more: the ending letter, N, is the starting letter turned 90 degrees counterclockwise. Turn your paper 90 degrees clockwise and start the word again. Do this again, and then turn it one more time and you have just the E to make a square. And you have come back to where you started and realized the difference between end and beginning was just a matter of turning your head.

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obnoxious

Posted on July 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

Just how this word communicates its sense is likely to rely to some extent on the accent of the speaker. The rounder vowels of Received Pronunciation give a starchier, rigid, turned-up-nose approach, like the objection to the object; the flat, farther-front sounds of a Northeastern US accent (say, Buffalo) practically epitomize the offensive object itself, like a motor scooter by your bedroom window at 3 AM or a nose full of vinegar.

Speaking of noses, doesn’t that bnox seem like a box on the nose (or, worse, a stop in the Bronx)? And o, o, o, look at the visual rhythm of the word: three o‘s, each followed by two other letters; and the heart – with four letters before and four after – is that x, sign of proscription and, in cartoons, of queasiness or unconsciousness. This word is tightly constructed, but just to annoy you.

Like so many of our most expensive words (including many of those with x), this word comes from Latin: ob “towards, in front of, etc.” plus noxius “harmful” equals obnoxious “exposed to harm, liable to punishment.” Oh, wait, what? Yeah, originally to be obnoxious was to be exposed to harm. The sense shifted, though, and didn’t take all that long to do so, probably under the influence of the noxious part, and I’m sure the obstinate ob of obstacle, objection, and other things that get in your way played into that.

And what is most often obnoxious these days? Behaviour. And things that are obnoxious are often rude and/or loud. But, interestingly, they are often not actually harmful – just annoying. But deliberately so!

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Overwrought about overweight

Posted on July 8, 2009 | 1 comment

Overweight, known to most of us as an adjective, also has a medical use as a noun to refer to the condition of having a body mass index of at least 25 (above normal) but below 30 (obese). I don’t altogether enjoy that usage, aesthetically, but I recognize why it’s used.

A fellow editor mentioned needing to stifle a scream whenever seeing overweight as a noun and having to let it stand. Stifle a scream? Continue reading →

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