Monthly Archives: December 2009

theorbo

Posted on December 17, 2009 | 5 comments

This year’s performance of Handel’s Messiah at Roy Thomson Hall is under the able baton of Jean-Marie Zeitouni (no, that’s not a German name, it’s Arabic in origin and he’s French-Canadian, but so many people seem to see the Zeit and just assume…). He is using a baroque orchestra, rather smaller than the usual full-stage cohort. And sticking up among them is something I don’t recall ever seeing in a Toronto Symphony performance before: a theorbo.

“Theorbo?” you think. “O, bother. Is this yet another one of his weird instruments? The boor.” Well, yea and nay. It was very common at one time in England – and, for that matter, on the continent (and perhaps all across the orb – o!); it did originate in Italy (in which part of Europe, then? in her boot!). What it’s doing in the Messiah is playing the basso continuo, not throughout but in parts, including the recitatives. And basso continuo was just the sort of thing it was designed to play.

Well, let’s look at the word first, and then I’ll turn back to the thing. It’s a bit of a strange word, isn’t it? Words that end in o have a way of coming from Romance languages, while words that start with a th that’s actually pronounced as a fricative are typically Germanic or Greek. Because the fricative is voiceless, it doesn’t really seem like the, even if it looks like it; it appears to have more affinity with theo, as in the Greek root referring to god(s), and that may have influenced its English form. I find the orbo to have a certain vibrating feel to it. And the rounded back vowels suggest a larger size.

Well, large it is, anyway. It’s the biggest lute you’ll ever see, big enough that you would expect it to be played by some he-robot. A good-sized theorbo is about two metres long. It has fourteen or more courses of strings – which usually just means fourteen or more strings, but some use double-string courses like on a mandolin. There’s one set of strings that have stops (i.e., frets, like on a guitar); these are the smaller ones, not quite a metre long. Then there’s another set of strings, stretching farther up the neck to a second pegboard, without stops. This is an instrument that can produce some quite low notes, though the tone can still be rather bright. If you want to learn more about it, I suggest Lynda Sayce’s theorbo.com.

Oh, and where does this word theorbo come from? French théorbe or téorbe, which in turn comes from Italian tiorba, the source of which is disputed – some say it’s from a Venetian word for a travelling bag, borrowed from Turkish; others speculate that it was named after its inventor, whoever that may have been.

Well, whatever, wherever. I prefer to take the counsel of Thomas Jordan, a seventeenth-century poet:

Let us drink and be merry, dance, joke, and rejoice,
With claret and sherry, theorbo and voice!

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To be a preposition or not to be a preposition

Posted on December 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

So… is the to before an infinitive a preposition? If you have a sentence, e.g., “He decided to write a blog post on the topic,” is the to a preposition, or is it just a part of the infinitive?

It’s a tricky question, is the short answer. The detailed answer starts with Continue reading →

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crwth

Posted on December 16, 2009 | 1 comment

At first this word may strike one as sort of like “This sentence no verb.” Missing a vowel, innit? Well, of course it’s not. Really, do you still think that letters and sounds are the same thing? How uncouth! Which, by the way, rhymes with crwth. That’s the truth!

What is a crwth? Oh, let’s play a little guessing game. Does it seem like it might be some geek slang, like cruft, perhaps based on a typo and/or an acronym, like zOMG? Is it perhaps the ordinal of some new number, crw? Is it an archaic third person singular present indicative conjugation of crew or crow? Or is it the sound of some bird in the woods, or some utterance by a person with gobstopper in mouth? Or a Welsh way of spelling the last name of Penélope Cruz? It does have the ring of an abstract noun (truth), or anyway a noun of quantity (width, wealth).

I could not say any of these is true; I am not a born liar. A crwth, in fact, is a bowed lyre. (Don’t confuse this with Bowes-Lyon, the maiden name of the old Queen Mum. This is a Welsh instrument!) It has six strings, two of which angle off and aren’t over the finger board. In appearance, well, say you were to get a big piece of wood shaped like a slice of canned meat and decided to make a violin with it, so you carved out holes so you could get your fingers in to finger the strings, but then you decided you were pretty much done. And how does it sound? Um, like a traditional bowed instrument. Search it on YouTube if you want to hear it. You will likely run across the name of Cass Meurig, who seems to be its leading modern exponent.

Now, you might wish that this instrument had a less bunched-up-looking name. If so, join the crowd. By crowd, in this case, I mean the same instrument, as it is named in other parts of the British Isles. Crwth and crowd (not the crowd everyone knows and loves or avoids, mind you) are cognate; they come from a Celtic root meaning “hump” or “hunch” (or “belly”), a reference to the shape of the instrument (not so much anymore, however). If you know someone named Crowder or Crowther, an ancestor of theirs played this instrument.

But crowd is just asking to be misunderstood. And it’s not so pleasant, really. Crwth, on the other hand, along with having those whispery tones, can really spice up a passage – give it a bit of Welsh flavour, and everyone knows that no one’s as “folk” as the Welsh. So, for instance, we see Dylan Thomas, in Under Milk Wood: “He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn.”

Wait, pibgorn? Ah-ha-haa… one word at a time!

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missile

Posted on December 14, 2009 | 1 comment

Pow! A snowball connected with my skull behind my right ear. I turned to see young Marcus Brattle, one of England’s less staid exports, already making another.

“Like a missile!” He said.

“Enough with misconstrued similes,” I said. “Not like one. It was one. Something that’s thrown can be called a missile, though we use the word mostly for rockets these days.”

“No, but like a ballistic missile!”

“It was ballistic. You threw it; its course was not under continuous correction. Ballistic comes ultimately from Greek ballein, to throw” – at this point I ducked his next snowball and he started to scoop snow for another – “and missile comes from the past tense of Latin mittere, to send or throw. So ballistic missile is a tautology – and an etymologically paradoxical name for something that is not thrown but launched under its own power, and that in more recent times may have continuous guidance systems.”

“Yes, well,” said Marcus, hurling his next projectile and forcing another evasive manoeuvre on my part, “every time I miss I’ll make another one. Whereas you, apparently, are stuck hurling prayer books.”

He was referring to my North American pronunciation of missile with a schwa in the second syllable, making it sound like missal. “You know,” I said, “in the nineteenth century British dictionaries also gave my pronunciation as the only one. The ‘long i’ version didn’t crop up until about a century ago.”

“Right,” he said, hurling another, giving me cause, as it cruised past my hat, to consider whether my pacifist approach was really effective here, “we finally got it right. ‘Cause we don’t think hurling and churches necessarily go together.”

I looked for, and did not see, an effective missile shield. I continued to try the disarming power of facts. “Missal comes from the same Latin root as missile, though,” I pointed out, “albeit by a less direct route: the word missa, ‘mass’ as in Catholic, comes from the same verb, perhaps from the sending away of catechumens before the eucharist –” Marcus hurled another with a shout of “Away, catechumen!” – “perhaps –” I leapt aside as it scudded by – “from the dismissal of the congregation at the end: Ite, missa est. That past participle became a noun and from that the adjective missal was formed, which has given many a Canadian Catholic the occasional bellicose pun.”

“Well, I’m aiming for your dis-missal,” Marcus said, hurling on the dis.

“You could be on a sticky wicket, sport,” I said, gradually drawing nearer to him.

“I’ll make this missile whistle – past your ear!” He hurled another and indeed narrowly missed my left ear. “And now –” he started packing one more carefully. I considered my options for missile defense. He held up his ball, which was a rough cube. “The cubin’ missile crisis!” he shouted. I leapt forward, took it in the chest at close range, and promptly put him in a headlock.

“Hey!” he said, as I squeezed my biceps against his cranium. “What’s that got to do with this? You’re changing the topic!”

“It’s a guided muscle,” I replied, and gave him a good grind on the scalp with my knuckles.

Thanks to Ted Witham for suggesting British versus American “missile” conflict.

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tussive

Posted on December 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

There’s something percussive about this word, the way the stop blows out at the start into the voiceless fricative /s/, with a second pulse ending voiced with /v/. It’s a little reminiscent of a tussle or a tossing, but somehow rather more of coughing – that’s coughing the word and coughing the act. And well enough it should be: tussive is the Latinate adjective relating to coughs, from Latin tussis “cough” (which also gives us the rather good but obsolete tussicate for “cough”). You’re more likely to see its antonym, antitussive – on a box of something you’re taking for a cough (could be dextromethorphan, with its name that sounds like a coughing fit, but if you want your cough down, and I mean down on the ground, well, she’s alright, codeine). Of course, you could take tussive as an encrypted suggestion on how to help head off coughs and colds and obviate antitussives: use vits (as in vitamins). On the other hand, we see suggestion of a plurality of Vituses, and no one is saying dancing relates to coughs!

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Mesopotamia

Posted on December 12, 2009 | Leave a comment

“They sure made a mess of Mesopotamia,” Daryl said, blowing steam off his chai. “A hippopota-mess.”

“And traded peace for a mess of pottage,” Jess added, a bit of whipped cream from her polysyllabic latte on her nose.

Daryl, Margot, Jess, and I were discussing Stuff Happens, a play we had just seen by David Hare about the US invasion of Iraq. “Interesting,” I said, “that someone in the play referred to the area as Mesopotamia in the present, as we’re doing. I mean, it’s still there – the area between the rivers, meso ‘middle’ and potamos ‘river’ – but usually you see the word Mesopotamia somewhere near the word ancient. Civilization and years B.C. show up often with it too.”

“Interesting, too,” Margot said, “that everyone says it ‘mess-o,’ even though the same prefix in other places is said differently – mesomorph and Mesozoic, with ‘me-zo,’ for instance.”

“Both of which are said with ‘mess-o’ in England,” Jess pointed out. “And can be said as ‘mez-o’ in North America.”

“Which would seem to be a happy medium,” I chimed in.

“Well, it’s a rare medium that’s well done,” Margot said, which Jess parried with “You speak as though you have a stake in it.”

“Anyway, if we’re going to be particular,” I said, “we can’t forget meson, which can have ‘s’ or ‘z’ and ‘ee,’ ‘eh,’ or ‘ei.'”

“Well,” Daryl said, with a pause for a sip, “there’s sure a whole pot of them.”

“And perhaps that’s a reason that it doesn’t seem to carry a very strong associative effect from word to word,” Jess said. “I mean, Mesopotamia, what does it make you think of? Not mesons or mesomorphs or the even more ancient Mesozoic period, and probably not a hippopotamus either.”

“Since they don’t have them there,” Margot interjected, dunking her teabag.

“A mess of petunias, perhaps,” I said.

“I’d like to tame ya,” Margot replied.

“It makes me think of ancient civilizations, and friezes of battles and bearded kings,” Jess said. “National Geographic kinds of things.”

“Ziggurats,” Daryl added. I pulled out my little black book and made a note to do a tasting of ziggurat.

“Cuneiform,” Jess said, relishing evey phoneme.

“Hittites,” Margot said.

“Et in Akkadia ego,” I added.

“You can’t be Assyrious,” Margot shot back.

“Babylon,” Jess said. “The moment you bring in Babylon you have a huge variety of associations, all the way from hanging gardens to figure skaters.”

Daryl looked up. “Figure skaters?!”

“Tai Babilonia,” Jess explained. It occurred to me that not too many people now would have heard of her; her world championship in pairs skating was in 1979. (But she did get back in the news a couple of weeks ago doing a PETA promo stunt at Rockefeller Rink.)

“But Sumer is icumen in!” I punned.

“In some area” – or did she say “Sumeria”? – “but not here,” Jess replied. “I think Ezra Pound’s parody of ‘Sumer is icumen in’ is more appropriate for today’s weather. ‘Raineth drop and staineth slop, and how the wind doth ramm!'”

Daryl knew the poem too. “‘Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us, an ague hath my ham!'” He raised his coffee to toast the weather.

“Well,” I said, raising my decaf, “we’re a long way from Mesopotamia now. It may not be confined to the impossibly distant past, but it’s nowhere near here.”

“And we’re nowhere near its temperature,” Jess said, raising her fancy coffee. “But I’ll take Canada anyway. And our freezes don’t last as long as their friezes.”

Margot raised her tea. “Stone cold either way.”

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obnubilate

Posted on December 11, 2009 | 8 comments

“I have only the Vegas memory,” Maury said. Or perhaps it was “vaguest.” His eyes were hazing in that way that indicates the beginning of a recounting. “It was late,” he continued, “and she was nubile.”

I felt myself privileged finally to hear Maury tell the tale, so often adumbrated but so rarely revealed, of his brief marriage.

“It was a Lebanese restaurant. No – Algerian; they were playing nuba music. I was nibbling a bit. Through the haze – ob Rauch, ob Nebel – I glimpsed a figure, obnubilated.” (Maury does not limit himself to English in his periphrastic peregrinations; the German he said meant “whether smoke or cloud.”) “I did a belated double-take; she had eluded my gaze. But when I turned back to my libation, I was elated to see her coming my way. I say elated because she was, in this lugubrious tableau, a jubilee, a liberation. I invited her to sit, and introduced myself. She said her name was Luba. I observed that it reminded me of ya vas lyulblyu” – Russian for “I love you,” as Maury knew I knew. “She was bubbly but knowledgeable. We ate, and libated, and debated; it was ennobling. By evening’s end it was indubitable: we did not dabble; we were a couple. We went to the chapel.”

Maury stared off into the near distance. I waited. “Well?” I asked at length.

“It is no coincidence that obnubilate and nubile – and nuptials – sound similar,” he said. “Latin nubere, ‘wed,’ shares a root with nubilum, ‘cloud,’ apparently through the idea of veiling. Indeed, my eyes were veiled metaphorically just as she was veiled – obscured, obnubilated – literally. We had chosen, as our music, Pink Floyd’s Obscured by Clouds; it proved to be apposite, not only because of the obnubilation of thought and vision but because I found myself soon thereafter on the dark side of the moon.”

“How so?”

“She was nobility, and her family, on hearing the news, mobilized. ‘Noblesse oblige!’ It seems a lowly plebe was not suitable. Our ring was no longer a dollar-store bauble; it was the veritable baleful band of the Nibelungen. They saw their world in rubble if I did not enable annullment. Luba and I, in the light of day, saw our position as impossible with their opposition. We abjured, annihilated.”

Another pause followed. After a suitable wait, I asked, “Do you remain in touch?”

“In touch? No, alas. (Did I mention her nubility?) No further touching could be possible. But we have remained in word. We exchange letters every so often.” He held up his French cuffs to display links, Scrabble tiles: L and M. “She sent me these for my birthday.”

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permanganate

Posted on December 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word is typically preceded by potassium or sometimes ammonium, calcium, or even sodium. Does it, perchance, mean there is, for instance, one potassium per manganate? Ah, no, this is a different use of per: it’s the “thoroughly done” sense that has come from the “through” sense of per. We see this in words such as perfect and permute. As to manganate, it is a derived form of manganese, that element word that everyone confuses with magnesium – and the two words do, in fact, come from the same Greek root, magnesia. So anyway, what permanganate is is manganese in its highest oxidation state (thoroughly oxidated) – with four oxygens stuck to each manganese in a neat four-pointed formation reminiscent of a pocket-size tripod.

The sound of this word starts and ends with voiceless stops, but in the middle we have the nasals and the /g/. It seems like something that has a crust but a softer or more malleable inside. Actually, one typically gets permanganates in powdery form, and there’s not much that’s powdery about this word. It kind of lumps up, especially with the stress on the second syllable.

Permanganate has many overtones in its taste: pomegranate, mango, ptarmigan, mongoose, permeate, magnet, permanent, impregnate… But none of them really have the deep purple of its object. And while pomegranates have antioxidant properties, they’re not a match for the strong oxidizing qualities of permanganates, which can make them good aging agents, disinfectants, and – in some uses – explosives. (Which reminds me that grenade comes from the French for pomegranate… but that’s a whole other note.)

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walrus

Posted on December 8, 2009 | 2 comments

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things: of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax – of cabbages – and kings – and why the sea is boiling hot – and whether pigs have wings.” Was he talking to clams? No, to a semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower, who was an elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna. Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe.

That’s very well and all, but who is the Walrus? Well, I am he as you are me as you are he and we are all together. I am the eggman, they are the eggmen – I am the walrus! Goo goo goo joob! And here’s another clue for you all: the walrus was Paul! But no, wait, The Walrus is a Canadian intelligent general interest magazine with nothing in particular to do with walruses aside from their both having a certain Canadian something about them, at least in Canadian eyes. To others, a walrus might look more like an old British colonel with a bushy moustache. And yet, as everyone knows, Wally Walrus was a nemesis of Woody Woodpecker, and the Walrus was a minor villain in Spiderman comics.

Now, how is it that walruses come to have such incoherent, surrealistic associations? And aren’t they walri? This is all less clear than a message in Morse code.

Well, to the second question, no, they’re not, it’s not Latin, it’s from Dutch possibly from Scandinavian and comes from words meaning “horse-whale” transposed to “whale-horse” or perhaps “shore giant” but probably not. And as to the first, blame Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who recite the poem in Through the Looking-Glass, but don’t blame them, because they were written by Lewis Carroll, so blame him, except he was really Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, whose biographical details would be a considerable digression, so I won’t leave you sitting on a cornflake waiting for the van to come.

But also blame John Lennon, because he wrote three false starts on songs that needed a place to be stuck and he took some acid trips and heard that a teacher at his old school was analyzing Beatles lyrics, and so from all of this he made a song that wraps up the A side of Magical Mystery Tour. The second-most-common collocation of walrus, after walrus moustache, is I am the walrus. And the walrus was John in Magical Mystery Tour but then they said it was Paul in the white album song “Glass Onion.” And after two University of Michigan students invented a hoax about Paul McCartney being dead, it became an “everyone knows” thing that the walrus is a symbol of death in some cultures. Which cultures? Well, someone said that the walrus was a harbinger of death in certain Scandinavian countries. Uh-huh, but not in the uncertain ones? Well, we’re not sure. Maybe we should ask Barbara Wallraff. She might know.

The word walrus has a round, fat, woofy or throaty sound to it, enhanced by our English “dark l,” which raises the tongue at the back when the /l/ is in the end of a syllable. It’s not altogether out of line with the grunting sounds walruses make. The w gives a certain visual echo of the moustache as well. We have no idea, of course, whether any of this helped walrus to replace the previous word used in English for the beast, morse (which was borrowed from Slavic languages and is unrelated to the family name Morse). But we may have a clue as to the associated incoherence. The morse being a symbol of death, we turn to the requiem mass and find that mors stupebit. So we may immerse in a morass of more stupid bits without remorse.

Carroll’s walrus eats bivalves in copious quantity. However, in real life, walruses eat bivalves in copious quantity. They do not share them with carpenters. But without walruses, youths and those adults who have not forsaken youthful humour would be bereft of something to do with pairs of straws or breadsticks. You can’t do it with jujubes; they just get gooey. But if you really want a tusk, why don’t you ask him if he’s going to stay? Why don’t you ask him if he’s going away? But answer came there none – and this was scarcely odd, because they’d eaten every one.

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stentorian

Posted on December 7, 2009 | 1 comment

When I was a child, itinerant preachers would sometimes come through the area, set up a tent and have a camp meeting. They would address the hundreds gathered on folding metal chairs in loud voices so God and the neighbours could hear (and no snore would taint the hortatory). Such tent orations take stentorian voices: sonorous, orotund.

O, o, o… How does it come to be that words for loudness so often have these o‘s? We can’t say that they only come from the mouth shape of the letter o. There is a greater sense of echo when the oral cavity is wide open (with the tongue at the back) but the lips are rounded. The narrower opening increases the pressure coming out, too – those who have used Xcelerator hand driers know that a narrower stream of air moves faster and makes much more noise. Add to this the st_nt first syllable, which, whether in stunt, stint, or stent can seem to rear like a lion rampant.

Is such a voice the sound of authority? It can certainly command rotations of the head. But the owner of one may equally be just a loudmouth. Stentorian is applied to a variety of loud things, from singing to jubilation to the bellows of animals. The aesthetics of the word (and perhaps resonances of senator) may aid an air of authority, or perhaps just a sense like that of a trumpet sound – rather than tan-ta-ra it may blow sten-tor. (There is, too, a unicellular trumpet-shaped organism called stentor.)

I’ve known a few people at various times throughout my life who have had truly stentorian voices. They weren’t necessarily the orneriest – nor the ornatest – but they could certainly cut through glass just talking. One such was a neighbour, whose conversational voice sounded like an address to a person in the next room. Another was in a production of Marat/Sade I was in. In moments where crowd shouting was needed, we knew what was in store and I would try not to stand near him. Another is in the choir I sing in. Should there be opportunity to open the throat and roar in oratorio or other entertainment, he is the sort to hurt your ear if you are the next chorister.

But the archetype of them all was Stentor, a Greek warrior – a herald, unsurprisingly – mentioned in the Iliad, who was as loud as fifty men. He is said to have died after losing a shouting match to Hermes. Ironically, the adjective formed from Hermes, hermetic, suggests silence and secrecy. Perhaps silence truly can be deafening.

Thanks to my mother, Mary Anna Harbeck, for suggesting today’s word.

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