Yearly Archives: 2009

cricket

Posted on September 6, 2009 | 2 comments

I was on my way home from poker last night with my friend the Bri guy, and Eglinton near Laird seemed unusually suburban. The streets were almost empty, and we could hear crickets. I observed that I would not be able to hear them from my downtown apartment. Bri quipped that from his he was more likely to hear crackheads than crickets.

Which demonstrated that Bri is a dude with a good taste for words, even if his neighbourhood has its dodgy aspects. The vocal gesture of crackhead has much in common with that of cricket, but it is more open and has a fuller stress – and even an aspiration – in the second syllable, and does not have quite the crispness. And for that reason, among numerous others, it has a somewhat different flavour. Cricket lacks the violence of crackhead – not just in the association with street drugs but in the verbal interpretation, which describes something I’ve done twice in my life, against architecture, resulting in stitches – but it also lacks the echo of cráic, pronounced “crack,” the Irish word for “fun.”

But there is much fun to cricket. A word that often travels with Jiminy – ah, a chirpy insect – and also often in the company of the rhyming wicket, which, appositely, is something involved in the game called cricket. (Which, in its turn, is not the game called croquet and is not related to it in name or style; nor is it related to the critter called cricket, nor to the thing one does to one’s neck if one watches a match from a seat with an awkward angle: crick it. And on the pitch, bats are essential to the existence of cricket, whereas in in the pitch dark, bats may eat crickets.) Then there is the other game called cricket, the one one plays with darts – it is one of many things one may do with darts and a board. Cricket also has a lighter sense. Lighter than an insect? No, cigarette lighter: Cricket is a brand of them. It is also a name of a children’s magazine. And then there is The Cricket on the Hearth, by Charles Dickens, a Christmas favourite.

Most of these (but not the game!) come from the insect, which gets its name onomatopoeically – but not directly; by way of Old French. The insect itself presents a merging of music and math (this may seem trivial, but in fact it is quadrivial) through Dolbear’s law: the snowy tree cricket chirps at a rate directly correlated with temperature, such that 50 plus the number of its chirps in 15 seconds makes the temperature in Fahrenheit. (The reason for this correlation is their cold-bloodedness, which results in a variable energy threshold, which can be expressed by the Arrhenius equation, but I’ll leave that reference exercise to you. We may conclude they stop chirping when it gets down to 50 degrees, which is 10 Celsius.) Note, however, that other species of cricket have different rates, and some do not correlate well to temperature.

And how do crickets make this chirp? Not with their ticker; no, the trick is that they – just the dude crickets, though, not the chick crickets – rub their legs together, or specifically they raise their left and rub it against a scraper on the right; this act is called stridulation. We assume that, in their thicket, wherever they may stick it, they do not raise their leg before a wicket. That would not be cricket.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

chupacabra

Posted on September 3, 2009 | 3 comments

Whatever it is, it sounds macabre. You can almost hear it licking its chops with an evil purr. It seems made, too, for baring fangs: the mouth begins with a pucker but through two lip-smacks the lips draw back, and the tongue tip, which starts in an affricate, lashes back to a liquid. And surely there is something otherworldly about it – it sounds like a dark cousin of abracadabra. Or perhaps some Puerto Rican curse.

Well, it is a sort of curse in Puerto Rico, at least if you ask some people there: a curse of livestock. They find bunches of their creatures dead, drained of blood through puncture wounds. The culprit: the goat sucker, chupacabra – chupar means “suck” and cabra means “goat” (you may be reminded of capricorn, which is from Latin for “goat-horned”). Sightings crop up here and there, not just in Puerto Rico but in Texas, Maine, Russia, the Philippines, the National Enquirer… It looks like a mean hairless coyote, maybe (some dead animals found and reported in as examples turned out to be coyotes with nasty cases of mange), or else a reptilian being with a ridge of sharp spines down its back, a forked tongue, large fangs, a sulfuric smell, an unearthly screech, and perhaps basilisk-like eyes, and a tendency to saltation – jumping up to 20 feet. Well, anyway, whatever it is, it ain’t pleasant.

No actual specimen of this little vampiric demon has been caught and verified yet. But with a creature like this, that only strengthens its ability to terrify, for what is more frightening than the unkown? Especially an unknown that is sort of like a refugee from Jurassic Park with a taste for blood in large quantity. This isn’t like bigfoot; you’re not so likely to hear “Don’t go out; bigfoot might get you.” Bigfoot doesn’t have a reputation for this kind of nastiness. But kids in Puerto Rico and Texas run the risk of being terrified by the threat of chupacabra. Which, on reflection, might put them right off their Chupa Chups.

This isn’t a mythical beast of long standing, though, even if it seems born of ageless tradition. It was first reported within the last two decades (but its franchise spread quickly: soon after the first incidents, reports cropped up in ever widening circles – hmmmm – throughout Latin American and beyond). And the name, which may prima facie seem to have crawled forth from some mediaeval grimoire, was invented shortly thereafter by Silverio Pérez, a Puerto Rican comedian.

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

catharsis

Posted on September 3, 2009 | 1 comment

Purge from your mind the idea that this word may refer to a heretical sibling. Oh, the history of the Cathars is one rooted in catharsis, to be sure: they saw themselves as purged of sin, and so more pure, and they in turn were purged from the church – no one likes a holier-than-thou, and no one likes them less than other holier-than-thous. That engenders a transactional mismatch, each party playing the parent role to the other. But catharsis refers more often in modern English to a purging of the emotions, a release more in line with Freudian theory than with transactional analysis. It can also be used in reference to Aristotelian aesthetic theory, in an interesting contrast: whereas in psychotherapy the catharsis is accomplished by reconnecting the errant emotional reaction to its original impetus, in Aristotle it’s accomplished instead by reacting to a fictional surrogate, a sort of inoculation. And if you think that that is all, er, crap, well, that leads us to the physical sense, of which no more need be spoken here.

But is this word so purgative in its phonaesthetics? The experience of saying it is reminiscent perhaps of spitting a watermelon seed, or rather trying once to spit it and then having to hiss a remaining bit off the tip of the tongue. But all those soft sounds seem so pure, like an alabaster statue of, well, someone named Catherine, perhaps. And fair enough: although the ultimate source of Catherine is Aikateriné, the name of an early Hellenic saint, its form has long been influenced by katharos, Greek for “pure” and the ultimate source of our word du jour. And although catholic and cathedral also have different sources, we can see something so ecclesiastically white and pure in the overtones of cath that even cathode ray tube may seem softened by it. Certainly it sounds so much smoother and nicer than purgation, with that urg in there all too iconic. And the is at the end keeps it classically Greek, all white and pure. Except that the classical Greeks actually painted their temples and statues; they’re white now just because paint comes off. Does that seem like heretical revision? In this case – as in many others, notably including some prescriptivist notions in English – the “return to purity” is the real revision, an imposition to be shed like so many cat’s hairs.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

frosh

Posted on September 1, 2009 | 3 comments

Ah, I remember frosh week. Well, actually, I don’t really, not my own, anyway; as the actress said to the archbishop – or was it the converse? – it was long ago, and I was drunk. With excitement, I mean, of course. But, ah, to see those lively young faces about to embark on what they mistakenly believe is the beginning of adulthood (no, sweeties, not yet, but you do get to pretend and rehearse) – a step up from high school, at that fountain of knowledge where they will gather to drink (ever wonder how many campus bars are called the Pierian Spring? not enough, probably). So I gladly man the Order of Logogustation table at the local university’s frosh week, even though visitors often include (a) speckly social maladepts in whom I uncomfortably recognize an earlier version of myself and (b) entirely typical youth for whom excessive intellectual exercise is likely to elicit blank looks usually gotten from unexceptional canines being addressed in monotonous Esperanto.

Today I was visited by a tidy pair of the latter sort whom I, in a moment of hope, invited to taste the word frosh.

“Frash?” said the female of the pair. “Oh my gad, is this like some kind of tast?”

“Just say it a few times and say what it feels like to say it.”

“Frash… frash, frash, frash. It’s like, fresh. Fraaaaaaash.”

“That’s cuz it’s from ‘fresh,'” her male cohort pointed out. “Like, it’s so obvious: freshman – frosh.”

“Well, yeah, OK, I knew that?”

“But why?” I asked. “Why go from fresh to frosh? Do we go from mesh to mosh?”

“Mosh pit!” the guy replied. “Yeah, like mesh pit, but mosh!”

“Except that comes from mash,” I said.

“Omigad, how d’you know this stuff?” the girl drawled.

I tapped a few keystrokes into my laptop. “The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that frosh has been short for freshman since at least 1915, and it may have gone from fresh to frosh under the influence of the German word Frosch, meaning ‘frog,’ which was also used in some places to refer to elementary-school kids.”

The guy crossed his arms. “So, like, you’re saying we’re German frogs.”

“At a glance,” I replied, “I don’t think so. Though you might be a bit green around the gills after too many Jäger bombs this weekend.”

“Frags don’t have gells,” the girl pointed out. “They’re amphebians.”

“True enough,” I said. “But anyway, nobody thinks of frogs now when someone says frosh, right?”

“Like, more likely fesh?”

“Fish?” the guy said. “Frosh – fish? Frosh – wash, I think.”

“Cuz, like, you don’t?”

“Sure,” I said, “the sound of frosh is sort of like the sound of a washing machine, ‘frosh-frosh frosh-frosh frosh-frosh.’ Then they tumble you, put you through the wringer, and you come out clean.”

“Clean is so nat what frash makes me think. So far.”

“How ’bout, like,” the guy made a bit of head bobbling as he spoke, “frosh-tration?” He made a sideways glance at the girl.

A relevant pun. I was a bit impressed.

“Oh that’s like, so funny? or not?” the girl said.

“It could also be a dog kind of sound,” I offered, and made fat hound sort of noise: “Frosh! Frosh!”

“Dude, OK” – the guy swept his hand to half-pointing – “you know what that really sounds like?” He mimed an act of emesis over an imaginary toilet bowl: “Frosh!”

“Omigad,” the girl said, very equivocally, “that’s so perfact.”

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

sweatxedo

Posted on August 31, 2009 | 3 comments

I had no awareness of seeing or hearing this word before seeing it in a letter reprinted in the September 2009 issue of Harper’s, but it presented a guessable picture:

But it is imperative that we all fight the good fight, get involved now, and resist the urge to become sweatxedo-wearing yuppies who sit on the sidelines in L.L. Bean chairs sipping mocha-latte-half-caf-accinos while discussing reality TV and home decorating with other feeble-minded folks.

Still and all, what a fascinating blend, I thought: sweat from sweatsuit cross-bred with tuxedo. And that tx! An honest attempt to say it as written would give one’s mouth a peanut-butter moment, perhaps producing some sternutatory sound.

I wondered whether the writer of the letter – Michael Kinahan, a girls’ soccer coach who intended it as a bit of dry satire and found it unappreciated – had invented it himself. A Google search turned up mostly references to that letter, which was written in 2009, but also a hit from 2005 and one from 2008. Say what? How does a word just pop up above the surface three times so widely spaced, like Nessie sightings?

The answer is that each one of those instances was an independent misrendering of Sweatsedo, a brand name for a tracksuit (I mean sweatsuit!) company whose togs are certainly aimed largely, if not entirely, at a market that may never work up a real sweat, and if they do wouldn’t want to mess up their nice velour Sweatsedo with it. They call their apparel leisurewear, and it was inspired by the rather baggier velour tracksuits of hip-hop stars. They got a big boost when that icon of taste, Kevin Federline, chose to outfit himself and his groomsmen in white Sweatsedos for his 2005 wedding to Britney Spears. (Is this a time to mention that Federline appears to be an anglicization of German Federlein, “little feather”? I bet he looked like a big plume in his white Sweatsedo – but I wouldn’t call it a display of panache.)

But sweatxedo is not the brand name, and now, thanks to the popularity of the letter (much blogged before Harper’s printed it), it looks to be on its way to a part of the colloquial language. So let’s give it a good tasting.

That tx surely snags the eyes, no? By itself tx often stands for thanks, but here it’s written to be pronounced somehow, and the x seems especially fitting at the point of juxtaposition, like a little cross-stitch at the surgical join. This portmanteau word definitely is something of a blivet (in Vonnegut’s definition: ten pounds of, ah, fertilizer in a five-pound sack). It begins with that unclean, lower-class word, emblem of hard work (by the sweat of one’s brow), an Anglo-Saxon word all the way, but also, in this case, understood as a clipping of another compound, sweatsuit (if they had called it a tracksuit, their brand could have been Traxedo, but sweatsuits have long been called sweats for short whereas tracks is just the plural of track). Married to that in a stranger match than K-Fed to Britney is the back end of tuxedo, commonly seen as emblematic of the utmost in taste and formality.

About which permit me a small digression, as I own two tuxedos and two tailcoats. When I’m wearing white tie with tails, I very often hear others refer to it as a tuxedo. But it’s not: a tuxedo doesn’t have tails – it’s just a decent-length jacket straight across the back – and it’s more commonly worn with black tie, a notch less formal. The tuxedo jacket was first introduced to America as a less formal bit of evening wear at a club in Tuxedo Park, New York. And where did this place name Tuxedo come from? Lenape Indian tucseto, which meant either “place of the bear” or “clear flowing water” (there are still Lenape Indians; perhaps one of them could clear this up, or maybe it’s homonymous – or maybe Lenape has changed too much in the intervening centuries since the place was named). Well, anyway, we know it’s not “place of the bare.”

So here we have a word the etymological trail of which is clear and present. How lovely! And it manages to kick English phonotactics in the teeth with its spelling (though I imagine one would not often hear [tks]!). Not only that, it does so as a reflexive correction of a form that more overtly displays the phonology – since x is phonologically /ks/ and is not truly treated as a single sound like the affricates written ch and j are. The written form truly does influence perception.

This word is a fish-and-fowl conjunction of high and low, something practically born for derision. The brand name – Sweatsedo – has a certain softness to it (like their goods), but sweatxedo has a hard ludicrousness that underlines the inanity of the image presented by Michael Kinahan’s letter – and by K-Fed taking casual formal just that extra step. Ah, no, tx.

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , , , ,

uvula

Posted on August 31, 2009 | Leave a comment

Look in the mirror and say la. Hold it – laaaaa – and open wide. Do you see that thing hanging in the back between the molars, sort of like a v between u and u? Well, OK, the molars are far to the side and all you really see is an arch with a thing hanging down like a single small grape on a vine (in fact, uvu looks more like a plunging neckline, doesn’t it?). But, as you may guess I’m about to say, that thing is called the uvula.

This clearly isn’t an onomatopoeic or haptically iconic word; it would be more like grgrgr if it were, since the uvula is back where one makes gargling sounds. In fact, that choking-on-it stop found in some languages (from the sandy – Arabic – to the snowy – Inuktitut), often transliterated as q (as in Iqaluit), is called a uvular stop. But the two written consonants in this word are up at the front of the mouth, and the glides leading into the vowels are mid-palate, although the repeating vowel – [u] – is indeed the English vowel sound positioned closest to the uvula, and the final vowel is, as we have seen, suited to the display of the same.

No, this word is the diminutive form of Latin uva, which means “grape.” It would have been a fun word to deal with in classical Latin, since in Latin – and in fact in English until the Modern period – u and v were not distinct letters. There was no consonant v; there was u, which was pronounced as a consonant as [w] and as a vowel as [u] and, in Latin, was written V. (“Small” letters came about after the classical Latin period, and u and v were, even in English, for a long time interchangeable shapes of the same letter.) So this word would have been written VVVLA and said [uwula]. Latin consonant shifting and English vowel transformations have long since altered our saying of it, so that now it sounds like a Singaporean imperative to look – perhaps to look at the back of your mouth: “You view lah.”

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

stook

Posted on August 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

Perhaps you mistook this word for stock or shook? If you took it for shock, you’d actually be OK, as shock is also used to refer to the same object. But that object is a stack or stock of sheaves or bales – that is, of grain. If wheat is bundled in sheaves and those sheaves are piled upright together in quasi-conical groups, those groups are called stooks; also, stook can be used to refer to triangular stacks of square hay bales turned on angle. The point of a stook is to let the grain dry and ripen, and thereafter it can be threshed (or thrashed).

So how does this thing get this name? Is it the stool-like shape? No. Are they reminiscent of a spook? No, but the word is. Must you stoop to make them? Irrelevant for etymology. Are they like a nose expecting a snook? Actually, if you think cock a snook, you chould come away from that with the cock as in haycock – which, being unbundled, is not a stook, however it may be mis-stooken. The echoes go on and on, but this word, anyway, is of Germanic stock, though not exactly Germanic stock – rather stûke. It’s a sturdy word, stocky even, quite opposite to the delicacy one gets from the sound of kotos (Japanese stringed instruments). It has a pair of angular letters for voiceless stops guarding the goggling oo, and is strengthened by the sliding in of the /s/. Its vowel sound being that of took rather than of spook, it lacks the length and lunacy of [u]. Rather, its sound is like that of the word stuck as said by a Yorkshireman: “Here! What’s the stuck in the middle of the field?” “That stook in the middle of the field?” “Yes.” “It’s a stook.” “Well, I see it’s stuck there, but what is it?” And so on.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

Christie

Posted on August 28, 2009 | Leave a comment

Torontonians will know this word as a stop on the Bloor line, but let us turn from that. Let us turn also from Agatha and from auctioneers. And how shall we turn? With a wedge – the uphill ski slipping apart at the back so the skis form a piece of pizza, tips angled together rather than parallel, but weight as always on the downhill ski, and then the skis brought back to parallel, like spaghetti, by the end of the turn. Perhaps few people nowadays know this turn by the old-school name: Christie, or, sometimes, stem Christie. It’s a suitable-sounding word for skiing, with its crisp, crusty sound, with a hiss in the middle and a slight echo of ski in the end. One reason for its desuetude is the increasing obsolescence of its object, obviated by the greater ease with which parallel turns may be made now that we have shaped skis. And how did it get called Christie? Not by what they say at Mont-Tremblant if you cut them off while doing one (that’s hostie or any of several other liturgical references). No, Christie is short for Christiania. And who is or was Christiania? Not who: what. The capital of Norway, named after King Christian IV. You may now know it as Oslo. So wouldn’t that have been a better name for the turn? Perhaps more suitable for a full-on snowplow turn, but modified slightly: oh-slow.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

melancholy

Posted on August 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

It’s not a word for a dog with a canteloupe, but it is humorous. You protest? Well, melancholy is, in its first meaning, black bile, one of the four humours (vital fluids of the body) believed to govern temperament: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. Those with an excess of one or another were particularly humorous types, in the words of the 17th century: if you were phlegmatic, you were slow and stodgy; if you were sanguine (too much blood), you were very happy and optimistic; if you were choleric (too much yellow bile), you were too disposed to anger; and if you were melancholic – too much melancholy, black bile – you were, in modern parlance, depressive. The melan comes from Greek for “black” – you will recognize it in melanin, of which Northern European types like me have little, causing us to sunburn more easily and thus be at higher risk for melanoma, the diagnosis of which may surely be cause for melancholy. The choly comes from Greek for “bile.”

This word may have something of a melodious air, with the two liquid l’s and the nasals run between them, but the melody is probably Melancholy Baby or something by Patsy Cline. Or perhaps by Marie-Lynn Hammond, who is herself an avid word taster and has spun out her thoughts on this word:

To me it’s one of those words that sounds like what it means… sort of endless and mostly kind of soft and dreary and amorphous, except for the hard ch – a little edge buried deep in the middle like the thing that might be causing the melancholy… but then there’s holy at the end too, though I know it’s part of choly really, but still, interesting…! Feeling melancholy was kind of a religion for me as an angst-ridden teen. When I was 15, I wrote a typical teen poem called “Poem in Grey” that began “Strongly, harshly, the wild wet wind…” and went on to describe various grey/forlorn nature images, and it ended “The opal of their melancholy is mine/Set forever in the silver darkness of my soul” – Well! Did I ever get flak for that from Sister Emma, my English teacher, for referring to my soul as “dark.” I guess unless I had a mortal sin on it, it shouldn’t have been dark, even silvery dark.

Instead, it seems, Sister Emma’s mood was dark – we may wonder if it, too, was melancholy, as mood is the noun perhaps most commonly modified by melancholy. One is tempted to speculate whether her anatomy was melancholy, too, but only by Anatomy of Melancholy, the 1621 work by Robert Burton. At any rate, she would not have been reading The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya even if it were available then; manga are not favoured reading of humourless, humorous nuns.

Do you have word tasting thoughts you’d like to share? They are welcome!

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

stoic

Posted on August 25, 2009 | 2 comments

The first place I recall seeing this word was in a look at Marlon Brando’s career (which was not over at the time); the phrase was “stoic in On the Waterfront.” Somehow I understood the right pronunciation the first time, though there’s good reason not to; one might on looking at it imagine it sounds like most of the name of that most he-dude of skaters, karate-kicker on ice, the one who managed to hold it together in an Olympic performance in spite of having seriously pulled a muscle, only letting on with a wince when he stopped. But, no, Stojko is not in this one, even if this one has been in him. Who is in it? Zeno. Does that seem paradoxical? Well, let us draw near – to Zeno’s porch, where he sat and lectured. In classical Greek, “porch” is stoa, and so his group of ethically austere philosophers are known as the Stoics. In the simplest sense, the stoic line is: if you feel an emotion, stow it – Vulcanize yourself and be hardened. And, in common usage, it is not as likely that you will be or become stoic as that you will remain stoic, as though stoicism were the natural state. More particularly, your face will remain stoic. Well, there it is: keep that stiff upper lip. If the world says I cost, if you are in India and are beset by marauding dacoits, or if you seek coitus but find it does not involve u, then what is left but to be stoic?

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,