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
Now, this is a mighty impressive word for a mighty, impressive person. Look at it: in the middle is potent – the word of power and prowess – and it’s flanked by torchbearers (i i); surrounding is a plenary session (conference terminology for “everyone attend!”). Three ascenders plus two dots and three descenders: it cuts a profile, and with six syllables and fifteen letters, it has two of many things: two dactyls, metrically; two p‘s, two e‘s, two n‘s, two i‘s, two t‘s. And a residue of l o ary. It bursts off the start with the plosive p spreading its aspiration onto the l, pops again at the second p and taps up the tension with ten. It’s like a drum flourish before a fanfare. But lest the one who is full of power get too full of himself, let it be remembered that this word contains within itself, awaiting the loss of but three letters (representing three phonemes), a nadir to match the zenith: penitentiary.
This word has that food-receiving mouthfeel that comes from corn, plus the bit of acuity that comes from the a. Its object presents images of that squirrel favourite, the tree-seed shaped like the head of a medieval yokel with a pageboy bob (or perhaps Dorothy Hamill). Nothing in the shape of the word readily suggests that, though; the closest is the co, a bit like an acorn on its side. (Scramble it and you get caron, a diacritical mark that looks just a little like an acorn cap turned upside down.) It’s just an unassuming little word, really, but one about which many assumptions have been made. It ought not to have the corn at all, etymologically; it appears to stem from the Gothic aker “field,” originally “open country” – source of acre – by way of the derivative akran, which would have signified “fruit of the open country or forest.” Others trace it to óg, an Indo-European root for “fruit, berry.” Wherever it came from, the sense over time narrowed to refer to the oak’s seed specifically. This led to versions such as oke-corn and oke-horn. Most recently, the misconjecture eggcorn has become a word to refer to such folk-etymological misconjectures generally. When we see acorn out on a date, its Betty and Veronica are squash and woodpecker (an acorn squash is a squash that resembles a huge acorn, and an acorn woodpecker is a type of woodpecker that hoards acorns).
I remember one of my elementary school teachers telling us that on ships, the left side was called port because it was the side towards the port – ships docked on that side – and the right side was called starboard because, as it was away from the port, you could see the stars. In my adult years I have come to realize that many teachers, like many other adults, will often make things up that seem reasonable to them and assert them as fact when explaining things to children. This is one such instance. Actually, the star in this word comes from the word that, on its own, came to be steer in modern English. Old Germanic ships were steered by a steersman who stood on the right side of the vessel with a paddle. (This did force the ship to dock on the left side, so port is port because that’s the side of the ship that had the port – opening – in it for loading and unloading; that side was originally called the larboard.)
But no one thinks of steer now when seeing this word. Steering is not done from the right side and hasn’t been for a long time. And star, well, star is star! It has that éclat that lends fulgurance even to such a baleful thing as a star-chamber. In this word, it is joined to board, which has that rigidity with the hint or threat of splinter, and so you can get a taste of a wooden ship at night, stars above and boards below. Try to ignore the rats running off the left side… the ship is broad and you’re on the right. No mixed-up road brats – or bastard – will steer you wrong. Hard a-starboard!
P.S. There’s a huge amount of etymological rubbish focused on things nautical and naval. Quite a few terms and phrases have baseless – and sometimes breathtakingly inane – stories about nautical origins circulating. Among the most senseless is the assertion that “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” was a reference to cannon balls being stacked on brass plates on a ship’s deck. Whoever made this up knows not enough about a) ships in general, b) naval battles in specific, c) physics, and d) metal. Actually, it came from a host of phrases referring to brass monkeys, the first recorded one being “hot enough to melt the nose off a brass monkey.” (See www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bra1.htm for more details.) Another common fase etymology is for posh, which has for decades been said to stand for “port outward, starboard home.” This is baseless. The term most likely comes from London street slang for “money.” See www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pos1.htm for more details.
Posted in language and linguistics, word tasting notes
Tagged brass monkey, posh, starboard, word tasting notes
I’m taking a little vacation, back around July 5. So don’t fret when you don’t see a word tasting note from me for a couple of weeks!
Posted in Uncategorized
OK, let’s play word association: I say corvette, you say… stingray? Probably. But before this was a brand of car, the most corvettes and stingrays had in common was their medium: the ocean. Corvette was, when the word hit English (from French), the name of a type of flush-decked navy ship with one tier of guns. And it did not get its name from a little crow, even though corvus was Latin for “crow” (time and tide have turned it into modern Spanish cuervo, which may sound curvy and tequila drinkers know will get you bent); corvette may have come from Latin corbis “basket,” which may have been a reference to a basket hoisted on slow Egyptian freighters, but that’s not sure. Now a corvette is neither slow nor a freighter; it’s a fast little escort ship. Which is fitting enough given that the car named after it is a fast little thing that in its days has probably picked up more than its decent share of escorts. It’s amusing that this rather feminine word (it does have the ette ending, after all) is associated with such masculine things as armed ships and muscle cars. But, then, the occupants of each tend to smoke a lot of cigarettes, too. And there is enough about this word that is racy, aside from the races the car gets into: it has that v-neck down the middle, and that ought to rev the octet under the hood.
What difference a phoneme makes. When the tongue is at the ready, tip touching behind the teeth, a hissing slurp of saliva starting, you can say sapid and the sense is savoury, but when the teeth bite the lower lip, the start of a pugnacious grimace or the first gesture of a foul or vile word, and in releasing you give nothing but a dry breath, the taste has evaporated to vapid. Like wine that has exhaled its vapour: that is how the Romans put it, vapidus. And it is now a member of two tribes, words that begin with stressed va (among which are vanish, vandal, and vampire, but also valid and valiant) and words that end with pid (such as stupid and lipid but also rapid and Cupid). The pid sits there like a sidewalk spinner sign, waiting for a dry breeze to disperse its message to passers-by; the v would seem to be like a tooth biting at the lip. But the breeze is dull and the bite is pavid; how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable it all seems now. The thrill of an avid diva is dampened with p. How tasteless.
Look at these little level letters, each one with an opening facing one way or another – left, right, up, down and down, right, down. Ready to receive opportunities as they come, perhaps, whatever is a-comin’ in. Ironically, the letters are without points, unless you accept the ends of the lines – the tines on the m, n and u and the open tips on the c, a and e. No v or w here, though the shape of the u in the original Latin was v. This in spite of the meaning of the Latin: “sharp thing,” from acuere, “sharpen.” Now in English it’s not the acumen that’s the sharp thing but the person who possesses it. The word may sound like some Japanese borrowing (like salaryman, or rather sarariman) to refer to men who are accurate – or who drive Acuras. Or, since it’s a flexible, pragmatic word and allows stress on either the first or the second syllable, it could sound like a Syrian spice plant. But a person with acumen, though he or she may indeed be accurate and spicy, is one whose mind is a sharp instrument. And these days the word’s most constant companion by a long chalk is business (other occasional pals are intellectual – redundant, that – financial and political). Perhaps this is because the word itself reveals its true sharpness when it, like a strong business, is fully capitalized: ACUMEN. (Write it in Latin style, pre-half-uncial, and you get even sharper vision: ACVMEN. All it needs is a K for the C and it’s like a yard of broken glass.)
Perhaps you have a lodger, a pudgy old codger named Roger, grey as a badger, who likes to adjure you to judge his tadger larger than any other gadge’s, and he keeps at you, a real noodge… Not only does he badger, it’s like he has a badge on his forehead: a great big L for “loser.” Do these words, this verb badger and this noun badge, have to do with the critter called badger? You betcher! Badger, badger, badger… it mushrooms! It seems that the animal’s forehead fur looked like a badge, or anyway that’s the best stab etymologists can make at it (but they’re also still burrowing for a source for badge). Is the badger ill-tempered and persistent, constantly bad and generally saying grr, known perhaps to have barged into tea and grabbed a scone unbidden? Well, it was long axiomatic that a badger, once it bit, would not release till its teeth had met. But it’s at least as likely that it was the badger that was being badgered… by people. They weren’t treated, ah, very nicely. But anyway, to the word form before us: note the two ascenders on b and d, rising up like the stripes on a badger from the eyes. It takes more imagination to see the a as a pointy snout and the ger as somehow the rest of the creature. The sound could work: the opening [bæ] is an incipient baring of the teeth, a release of bitterness, and then there’s the tongue-bite of the voiced affricate followed by the growling [r]. But of course there’s not such an impinging tone in, say, budgerigar. Unless the little blighter won’t shut up.
This word blends and clips voices but brings them together as they come out of the mouth. Its first part is lip, a word that, in various variations, has shown up throughout the Indo-European languages: Latin labium, Persian lab, Swedish läpp, Old English lippa… So many lips in so many tongues. It may look as though there are plural lips, but the s turns out to be the start of synch, also spelled sync. The spelling, at odds with the pronunciation, gives a clue to the source of the second part; it may sound like sink but it is without basin – it’s from Greek, though it’s cut off in half-time. The syn is “together,” which is fitting, as it brings together the lip and the ch. The ch is the start of the root chron, referring to time; synch is short for synchronization, a word that many people don’t have time for all of. But if the time is out of joint, then simply disjoint it and adjoin it. Take the tip of this dactyl and touch it to your lips: ssshhhh! Loose lips sink ships!
After all, when you lipsynch, it is not your voice, or at least not then and there; you bring your face, your movement, to be spoken through by the absent breath. You are bound by these vocal cords. Together your vision and the sound form one of those loose lipsynch ships, a raft of blind voice and dumb show. But to be the smokesperson, the mirror to nature, you must do it without mixup or slip. You are like a spy for the voice, the linch pin of the fantasy for the audience. You are the s of this word, the joining of fully present lips (but less there than seems) and the voice spread across time, seemingly together but clipped from another moment. Words come from the fabric, shiny clips chins ply… You are the ventriloquist’s dummy, a warm prosthesis for an absent speaker. It may seem like a fish tied to a fowl, this cooperation of English and Greek, but this love of language is the language of love: it is no sin for lips to come together in – or out of – time.
Buy my books on Lulu.com:
You can also get them on Amazon.com. Please note that I make less than half as much per book if you buy them there, however.
Sesquiotica 