Yearly Archives: 2009

whiffle

Posted on August 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

Now, here’s a word that communicates by sound. You can hear the the little whiffs of air blowing through leaves or perhaps puffing a piece of paper along. It’s fortuitous that the le suffix, a frequentative, turns the single action and single sound of whiff into the multiple action and multiple-sounding whiffle. It also gives it the air of whistle, which no doubt works well with Wiffle, as in the perforated projectiles. You can see the effect of the puffs of air on the ff as though through tufts of foxtail, and that dot on the i might be a holey ball on the way from h to l. Any word ending in ffle, be it sniffle or kerfuffle, of course carries a feeling of paper men wrestling in corduroys, or of similar frantic, furtive, or simply frequent puffs, buffeting, or susurrus, but this one does so more wilfully than most. One horsey person of my acquaintance has advocated the application of this word to that raspberry sound horses often make. The standard term for this act is blow, but that’s not really very good, is it? Nothing like nicker, for instance. Consider this the inception of a campaign for adoption of this usage. When you see a horse, simply say, “You do know how to whiffle, don’t you? You just put your lips together… and blow.”

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suffer

Posted on August 23, 2009 | Leave a comment

It’s a soft word, with a whiffling of sound like passing in flannel through whispering wheat, but it refers to such a hard thing. Your will is a wick subject to suffocation under fate’s snuffer – what could be tougher? But you have no choice: you must suffer. The sounds begins to take on the aspect of the last wheezes of a person whose chest is being crushed.

Oh, it has not always been used to mean “endure something unpleasant”; it had a half-millennium of use to refer to simply allowing something that may not be so bad: Suffer the little children to come unto me. (Note, however, that suffrage comes not from suffer but straight from Latin suffragium, which meant what modern suffrage means.) But before, during, and after that period, suffer was also used to mean what we still use it to mean. And this verb can be intransitive or transitive – we typically now speak of suffering from something, but we can also suffer something. It is, suitably, taken from Latin sub “from below” plus ferre “bear” (noun). Yes, you’re going to carry that load, and we all have our crosses to bear, even as we can see two crosses in this word bent from bearing: f and f again.

And yet do all those crosses need to be borne? The most likely word to follow this one is needlessly – which, however, suggests that there is needed suffering too, or it would be a tautology. Disproportionately also comes up often, indicating that there’s a sense that suffering should be evenly distributed. Greatly, terribly, and financially also show up. The transitive version often brings in casualties. But more often it brings in fools – often with gladly, but we know that before it comes does not or something similar. And does not suffer fools gladly is usually code for “crusty, impatient, uncritical of self and hypercritical of others” – in other words, that sort of person we find we must on occasion suffer. But not gladly.

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Iqaluit

Posted on August 23, 2009 | 4 comments

I haven’t done proper nouns before, but this one’s by request, and there’s no reason not to, really. And this is a good one. I think Canadians generally take pride in having a language like Inuktitut bopping around as part of the cultural landscape, with its geometrical syllabary orthography, its three vowels, its agglutinating morphology, and its frequently percussive consonants – especially that q that keeps cropping up without a u, like a usually respectable married person who appears at nightclubs sans spouse and on the arm of some fleeting fancy.

But what do you do with that q? Well, if you don’t want to sound like some clueless Yank, you sure don’t say it as though it were qu. That’s fine for Qantas, which comes from Queensland and Northern Territories Air Service and so has a u hiding anyway, but you wouldn’t do it with al Qaeda, so why do it here? Especially when it stands for the same sound, a voiceless uvular stop. This isn’t the Q of Quebec, said just like [k] – well, it is for most Anglophones, because the experience of saying [q] can for the neophyte seem reminiscent of having a tongue depresser stuck well back in your mouth, and it is not an English phoneme. But if you want to be precise – and perhaps seem pretentious, if you’re a white person doing this in casual conversation in Therestavut (i.e., that of Canada that is not Nunavut)* – make the first i more like [e] (as in eh), stick the back of your tongue right back against the back of your throat for the [q], and then do the rest as three syllables with pure monophthongs: [a lu it]. And, again, whatever you do, don’t stick a u after the q. Iqaluit means “many fish.” Iqualuit, which would have an extra syllable, means “people with unwiped bums.” I am not in a position to dissect the morphology to make it clear how this happens to be.

The word also benefits in appearance from the q, which seems more reminiscent than the other letters of the forms of the Inuktitut syllabics (though in fact the syllabary has forms that look like b, d, and p but none like q). The u also resembles a syllabic a little (but, again, there are three other orientations for the shape but not that one). The remainder have their linear verticality in common, which in its transgression of the x-height is as un-Inuit as its treelike disruption of the horizon.

Anyway, this word sounds so – well, not exotic, since it’s from this land – shall I invent endotic, then. It’s that internal other, the one that belongs more than we do, the culture we want to claim by association. Witness the inukshuk that is the symbol of the Vancouver Olympics (now, why wouldn’t they have used some west coast Indian motif?) and the one that I run by a few times a week near Ontario Place. Iqaluit may have been called Frobisher Bay from 1942 to 1987, but why should it be named after a 16th-century European (yes, before the Mayflower) who thought the bay was a strait and, though he landed, didn’t stop in Iqaluit for some fish? Huh. The dirty bum. No wonder they wiped him off their town signs.

*That’s a pun, not a real Inuktitut word.

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lightning

Posted on August 21, 2009 | 4 comments

Once, when I was learning Spanish from a book, I came across the following translation: hace lampara – “it is lightning.” I made a note to myself: Spanish has three existential predicates, to wit a) ser “to be” (essential), b) estar “to be” (transient), c) hacer lampara “to be (lightning).”

But, oh, to be lightning! And yet such a word for such a thing. This word, lightning, is a long word, a word that takes rather longer to say than lightning takes to strike. We could have named it zap! This word, too, has such an intricate arrangement of shapes – that dance of the i‘s, g‘s, n‘s and h and l and t – but none of them are jagged. And it’s such a, well, light word – shortened from lightening, as you may have guessed, and starting off all on the tip of the tongue, with that unavoidable effect of light, for something that might better have been named blam! Oh, the echo of frightening is there, certainly, and one might feel that with it Thor is smite-ening someone for their temerity (say, in going jogging in the thrashing rain). But would not a more perfect word for this thing have been shock?

German has it better: Blitz. And we see what combining power that has: Blitzkrieg. The American equivalent was not lightning war but shock and awe. See? Latin called it fulmen – brought to English as fulminate, which sounds more like smouldering. In French, one may call it éclair – oh, dear, just a little puffy dessert – or foudre, which bears a strong resemblance to an impolite verb suggestive of what lightning will do to you if you don’t get out of the way. The Hebrew word for it – you will like this – is barak. (Hebrew for thunder is not obama, but doesn’t that sound like thunder?) The Mandarin is diàn, which is also used to mean “electric” and the character for which looks a bit like a kite – but the Chinese characterized lightning as coming up from the earth two millennia before Ben Franklin did.

Still, because of its object, this word has quite a presence in our language, showing up in well-known phrases such as white lightning, greased lightning, lightning quick, lightning chess, lightning rod, and Tampa Bay Lightning. Of course, flash, strike, and bolt are often seen next to it, all nice, short, shocking words. And yet lightning can cross a kilometre in about 1/300,000 of a second (and thunder can cross one in about 3 seconds), while Bolt still needs more than 9 seconds to go 100 metres.

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grizzled

Posted on August 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word may have been formed from French gris and now-obsolete grisellé, but simply saying “it means ‘grey'” doesn’t begin to cut it. You can see a gristly old sea salt, as grisly a sight as a buzzard or grizzly, his face frazzled and his muzzle drizzled with hoary stubble… Not someone you’d want to nuzzle, not a sizzler, but perhaps a bit of a puzzle.

Oh, we can see that buzz-saw zz cuts both ways: sometimes a dazzle and sometimes a fizzle – could be lightning, could be a short circuit, as it shifts from the alveolar buzz of the /z/ to the steady-state, almost guttural hum of the syllabic dark /l/ (not the light one, made with just the tongue tip in action, but that English syllable-ender with both back and tip of tongue raised, as though cupping and containing the sound in its central hollow). And likewise the growling gr, which greets with great or a grunt, can be grand or gross, bright green or dull grey… Join the gr and the zzle and the result, with all its echoes, is the grey not of shiny silver but of sooty snow.

Some people will write of a gray, grizzled something or say a thing is grizzled grey – evidently envisioning grizzling as an act with greyness as a possible result. (Could you have something grizzled pink? But even some noted literary magazines have printed an instance or two of this double coating.) But inasmuch as there is a verb grizzle, it’s backformed from this adjective, which has the ed suffix not of verbal past tense but of noun association and effect. And what is grizzled? Most often, beard, hair, face, head; the type of person is old, a man, perhaps a veteran.

What we have here, then, is a word that drags itself in from the awful weather, sits grimly at the counter, drinks a cup of burnt black coffee and, with a voice like wet rocks grinding, speaks of the battles of a life scraped from the bottom. The grey that got that way the hard way.

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munch

Posted on August 18, 2009 | 1 comment

I’ve long wanted to write a satire of restaurant reviewing called “Munching Thick, Crusty Slabs.” Except that treading through the emetically hackneyed clichés of kitchen hacks would really be too much for me very quickly: a world where every slice of bread is a slab, as many things are thick or crusty as you can possibly imagine, and one can munch eggs… or squash? I could just scream. But munch really does seem to get used ever more widely, and not just in restaurant reviewing. Apparently not everyone finds this jarring, as not everyone has a present sense of the onomatopoeic origin of this word.

Oh, it’s a word for eating, alright, with the teeth involved and the jaw visibly moving, and making a perceptible noise or at least a clear sensation of crushing; it carries the sense easily in the saying (and one may, if one will, discern some hints of teeth in the shape of the word, but of course that’s adventitious). Since the class of food most marked for its munchiness is that on which we snack, however, the sense has extended to other snackable things. Munching is apposite for snacks: the satisfaction of the crunching amplifies the effect of the food, bringing suitable satiety with less quantity. But the notion of noshing seems to supersede the sound in some quarters, so that one may be said to munch a canapé even sans crepitation.

The rhyme with lunch is unavoidable; bunch can enter in, and even hunch, but somehow punch seems to have less influence. But what words is this one seen around? Ah. Well, a look in the Corpus of Contemporary American English gives us such as Oslo, painting, museum, Edvard, and Scream. Hm! That’s the painter, Munch, whose name is not even said the same way. But he does come to mind when one sees this word. Especially if one is seeing a restaurant reviewer speak of, say, munching ice cream.

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sybaritic

Posted on August 18, 2009 | 2 comments

This word has a different feel from its near-synonym voluptuary – that word erupts like cleavage out of a tight V-neck, where as this one seems somehow softer, more insidious, but also perhaps more subtly negative in tone, and more feminine. Does it not lead to visions of, perhaps, some barrister’s parasitic sibling named Sibyl, living in the lap of luxury and soon to be a candidate for bariatric surgery?

She’d be borrowing her reputation from a sort of Sodom of southern Italy, a former Greek colony named Sybaris (the y stands for an upsilon in the original), a prosperous place with a lot of money and a lot of luxury too. Its citizens were known for fine clothing and, supposedly, effeminate manners. But a dispute between Sybaris and a neighbouring town, Crotona, in 510 BC turned more than just ugly; the Crotoniats trashed the city, put inhabitants to the sword, and diverted the course of the local river to inundate and erase the city. Now archeologists can’t find anything there.

Crotona, for its part, is now called Crotone and has about 60,000 people. Its name comes from Greek kroton, which names both a tick and a castor-oil plant, the latter of which has lent its name to croton oil, derivatives of which are called crotonic (e.g., crotonic acid, C4H6O2). Croton oil is not something you’d want to eat; small doses can cause diarrhea. If you rub it on your skin it causes irritation and swelling. So we may well say that it is anti-sybaritic!

But let’s go one better. Crotona seems similar to Croatoan, the word found carved on a tree at the Roanoake colony in Virginia, AD 1590. The colony had been thriving when last seen three years earlier, but when a ship finally got back by to check on them, there was nothing left of it, just Croatoan on a tree. Was Roanoake a New World Sybaris? Actually, Croatoan was a name of an island nearby to the Roanoake colony and a modification of Croatan, a local indian tribe that was on good terms with the colonists. So what happened? Well, we don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing for certain: a colony in West Virginia in the late 16th century was no place you could be sybaritic.

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naïve

Posted on August 17, 2009 | Leave a comment

Oh, look at that diaeresis on the i, two dots like two eyes goggling at the sights – someone from a backwater in the big city, with nothing to rely on but native wit: a real diamond in the rough. Backwater? Of course by now just about everyone knows Evian spelled backwards is naive. Native wit? Well, naïve is from the French feminine form of naïf, which came from Latin nativus to mean “without artifice; imitating nature.” In the diamond biz, naïf refers to a flawless diamond in its natural state, or to a part of the natural surface of a diamond deliberately left so during cutting and polishing. (Remember that a diamond in the rough means “in the rough form,” not “in rough surroundings.”) We might even find it is a diamond of the first water, on its way from the vein to the vain. But just as the diamond will have its world turned upside down, cut and polished, so might the naïve person; certainly in the word the n is turned and cut to v, and the a to e. Well, that’s reality – or is it naïve realism, a perspective that in philosophy makes you a rube (and not a ruby)? Other words that are often seen showing naïve around include reader and optimism (why does no one ever speak of naïve pessimism? there’s far too much of it, pretending to be realism), and it brings with it hopelessly, incredibly, totally, somewhat, and politically. The sound of the word can be fun – that break from the /a/ to the /i/ may remind one of the Cajun version of “whee!” (as heard in a TV car commercial). But don’t forget that this once anglicized word has been refrenchified, as evidenced by the double dot; say it as one syllable and it’s you who will be the knave.

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bitch

Posted on August 15, 2009 | Leave a comment

Ouch! What a nasty word this is! Of course, it’s originally, and still, a word for a female dog – any female dog, not just an ill-tempered one. But one can’t use it naïvely; the human reference barks out at every turn. One may see a poster in the window of a store that sells clothing for dogs: one prettily primped Pekinese says to another, “Nice dress, bitch.”

The sound doesn’t resemble barking (though there are a few small pooches that make sounds like this), but the final voiceless alveopalatal affricate carries a taste you get in kvetch, retch, snatch, botch, itch, snitch, and other burrs on the pant-leg of daily life. The [b], with its burst, bark or bite, is the sound most suited to a pugnacious mug: hold your lips as though about to say [b], but build up air pressure behind them until they pucker a bit, and you will find your face becomes bitter. And the shape of the word? Three ascenders and a dot are a bit like horripilated fur on a furious pooch.

This word has come down to us from somewhat murky Anglo-Saxon origins; the oldest spellings we have of it are bicce and bigce. The exact historical nature of its connection to French biche is uncertain, but it doesn’t come from the French; more likely from Nordic roots.

It does not keep the best of company, of course. Although its most common collocation is with the phrase son of a, and it has shown up in sewing circles (including magazines) in a rhyming phrase with stitch, it is frequently found with an assortment of words that I simply don’t think I should include here. And then, of course, there is D.H. Lawrence’s classic phrase from Lady Chatterly’s Lover: the bitch-goddess of success. But is success really so bad? Can I just find out firsthand, please?

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mercaptan

Posted on August 13, 2009 | 2 comments

This word might seem to have a nautical air to it, with its resonances of mermaid, capstan, and captain, but the nose of its object tends more towards the mephitic – or Stygian. Indeed, it names a whole family of chemicals that have in common an SH (sulphur-hydrogen) group. The ugliest sister of the family is surely ethyl mercaptan, which sounds like a name for a singer but is actually C2H5SH, which is coming up not roses but rotten eggs. It has been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the foulest-smelling substance in the world. Other mercaptans are generally also noted for their pungency, but they are not necessarily all as noisome.

This is not a word one hears often, but I did hear it once on CBC Radio 2: Jurgen Gothe (a man with a fine palate for words – and wines) spoke of the “faint whiff of mercaptans” one gets when opening a new CD. He could have said “faint whiff of thiols” and meant the same thing, but the two words do taste quite different, don’t they? Thiol comes from the Greek theion, “sulphur,” while mercaptan is a portmanteau word distilled from corpus mercurium captans, “body that seizes mercury,” so named because the SH group binds tightly to the element mercury.

But where mercaptan has the sea sound (“Oh captain, mercaptan!”) and the ripply shape and those crisp stops bookended by the nasals and padded with short vowels, thiol has letters that stand up and the sound gives just a lisp and a liquid and swivels on a long central tripartite vowel movement: a floppy, arch word that sounds of sigh and thigh and vile, and less of sea and more of, say, seat of pants. Which may be more fitting given its referent. But would you really want to say ethane thiol instead of ethyl mercaptan?

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