Yearly Archives: 2009

comptroller

Posted on October 23, 2009 | Leave a comment

Here’s one for the “it looks funny so it must be right” types. This is a word for someone who checks (audits, oversees) an organization’s accounts. Clearly controller couldn’t be a proper term for that; after all, control is an ordinary term, and is just used for mechanical devices and psychological dominators. Comptroller means someone who counts – well, count is from the Latin root compt, and, really, don’t we want our words to display the glorious Latin etymological heritage rather than this debased Anglic corruption?

That was the idea, anyway, when, circa 1500, comptroller was introduced as a respelling of controller. It was a mistaken idea, not just because all words change and it’s silly to partially change the spelling of a word to manifest some point of its etymology (like that inserted b in debt), but because count – and compt – has no relation to this word.

The word controller comes from counter-roller, and counter is from Latin contra, “against”; the original reference was to someone who kept a counter-roll – a copy of a roll or document – for checking. In fact, all our modern English usages of control trace back to this administrative and auditing function. From double-check to keep in check is not such a far step, and the exercise of influence may extend to all kinds of guidance. But comptroller stays closer to origins, as evidenced by words most commonly found near it: office, state (in the US, of course), and currency.

The form of comptroller is suggestive of nobility (comte, i.e., count) to go with the royalties, and also perhaps of tidiness (kempt), but where there is coin to be counted you find, as so often, a troll hoping for a comp (better to keep your coins in a roller). The two o‘s could be eyes or rolls, the two l‘s the rolls unrolled for cross-checking. But that central consonant cluster, mptr, pounds itself right in the middle, like a muddle of arbitrary bureaucracy (I am put in mind of French dompter, which means “to tame” and is cognate with English daunt). And why not? Its presence is, after all, arbitrary and misguided – at least the mp part (oh, those MPs!).

Oxford lists just one pronunciation for comptroller, identical to that of controller. The American Heritage Dictionary, however, tells us that a spelling pronunciation – with [mp] instead of [n] – may be the more common pronunciation now. And why not? This word isn’t controller, after all, you know! It’s different! And it’s spelled differently! And so, even though comptroller and controller are the same word – dictionaries insistently list comptroller as a variant of controller – they’re different just because they are. It manifests the association between markèdness (funny-looking-ness) and formality and correctness: in English, we have this frequent assumption that something that seems odd but is used with an air of authority must be not only correct but more correct and, of course, more formal. I cannot but lament that this fact is quite beyond my control. But at least I can double-check the results.

dormouse

Posted on October 23, 2009 | 4 comments

Remember what the dormouse said?

Wait… what dormouse, where? Oh, wasn’t it something about treacle?

Well, he’s dead now, isn’t he?

And is that spelled correctly, anyway?

Your response to the sight of this word will help place you in a cultural context. Do you think first of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, wherein a narcoleptic Dormouse with a treacle fixation is seen at the tea party with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare? Do you think first of the Alice-inspired drug trip song “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane? (Do you then think of the scene in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when Thompson, in the tub with the song on his tape player, instructs his lawyer to hurl the player into the water at the climax of the song – but the lawyer instead hurls an orange? Or do you think of the philosophical polar opposite, the invented “true story” drug-scare book Go Ask Alice?)

Do you think “dead as a dormouse”? (The original expression is dead as a doornail, by the way; that phrase existed already in 1350.) Do you think it should be doormouse, a sort of rodent version of a doorman, perhaps a Disney character?

Do you think “What the heck is a dormouse, and why is it called that?”

To answer the last question, a dormouse is a somewhat cute rodent (in some pictures even adorable), larger than a mouse. Dormice have a reputation for somnolence, perhaps because of their lengthy hibernation, and perhaps because of their name, too. The dorm is thought to be from Latin dormire or French dormir, “sleep” (think dormitory, normally called dorm now). But it’s not certain that it is. Even if it’s not, it may have to do with sleep.

And, on the other hand, it may be the mouse that’s the misconjecture; the rodent may have been called dormous – inclined to sleep – and the mous mistaken, for obvious reasons, for mouse. So this word may well be an eggcorn – a misrendering of a word or phrase on the basis of a mistaken etymological conjecture that happens to “make sense.” And doormouse for dormouse is in its turn an eggcorn too: people change it because it seems sensible for it to be door plus mouse. Aside from that they have nothing to do with doors. But if you never actually see them in real life, how would you know?

This dorm, now. Does is seem a somnolent sound to you? Nasals often bring sleep to mind, and the /or/ is like a yawn – and has a sound of snore (until morning), too. But those of us who have lived in dorms probably don’t associate them with sleep. More likely with the period of our lives when we got the least sleep!

As to mouse, it’s one of those words that are so common they don’t so much have echoes as they are echoes in other words. But it has travelling companions. By rhyming, mouse tends to go with house. By collocation, with computer (and field and a number of other things, and especially – by a wide margin – Mickey).

I’m getting sleepy now. I hope this is enough for you to… feed your head. (Which is, according to Grace Slick, what the dormouse said. Remember?)

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forty-two

Posted on October 22, 2009 | 3 comments

“Let me buy you a drink,” Maury said, and ambled off to the modestly stocked bar at the Order of Logogustation’s Sporadic and Unpredictable Meeting.

Elisa Lively, who was nearby, came over and asked, “Why is he buying you a drink?”

“Because of my age,” I said.

“I’m forty. Will he buy me one?” she asked, half-hopefully.

“Probably not. I’m forty-two.”

“Oh, we’re both forty, then! So he should buy us both drinks!”

“No, I’m one more than forty-one and one less than forty-three,” I explained. “I was in my prime last year and will again be in my prime next year, but now I’m at sixes and sevens.”

There was a pause, as though all the air around Elisa stopped moving for two seconds. “…Oh, you’re forty-two, not forty, too. So that’s worth a drink?”

“Just because I was forty-one yesterday,” I said.

Very slight pause. “Oh, happy birthday!” she squealed, attracting the attention of Jess and Daryl, who were chatting nearby. They came over.

“Happy birthday, dude,” Jess said.

“Yeah, so what is it?” Daryl asked.

“The product of three of the first four prime numbers,” I said. I knew Daryl knew that one is not a prime number. He also knew I was older than 30 and younger than 70 – or 105. But so did Jess, and she was evidently slightly quicker at arithmetic.

“The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything,” Jess said. Of course she had read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Elisa, however, hadn’t. “Wait. That’s the answer? Forty-two? What’s the question?”

“That’s the problem,” Daryl said. “They know the answer, but not the question. But Douglas Adams wasn’t the only person to make use of forty-two in popular culture. In A Clockwork Orange, the movie, Alex browses through some records and one is by Level 42. Who didn’t exist as a real-world musical group until about a decade later.”

“Oh, I know Level 42!” Elisa said, and started to sing their biggest hit: “There is something about you, baby, so right…” She bopped around and waved her arms in the air, narrowly missing Maury, who was returning with two glasses of Scotch. Handing me one, he said, “Happy Jackie Robinson’s jersey.”

“Apparently it’s also the meaning of life,” Elisa said.

“Well,” Maury said, “it is the number with which God creates the universe, in the Qabbalistic tradition. On the other hand, God also sent a bear to maul forty-two youths who mocked Elisha for his baldness. That’s in the Good Book itself.”

“And forty-two generations in the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew,” I said, having dug up a few little facts in advance for the show-off session I knew would happen. “And – this is a good one – the eight digits of pi starting at the 242,422nd decimal place are 42424242.”

Jess had written it on a cocktail napkin. “It’s one of that set of English words that have two entirely different and equally legitimate ways of writing them.”

“Also known as numbers,” Daryl said.

“For the most part,” Jess said. She held up her 42 on the napkin. “Doesn’t it look like the mainsails on a ship, with the one on the right filled with wind and the one on the left not?”

“It looks somewhat like AZ,” I said. “The beginning and the end. Back to the whole meaning of life thing. And creation.”

“The spelled form has those two o‘s,” Daryl said. “Looking at at you. Plus two t‘s, like a double-cross. And those angular letters y and w. And the hyphen, which is not something we often look at in our word tastings. And that unphonetic spelling of two.”

“There’s something else,” Jess said. “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

“Oh, can I help you guess?” Elisa said.

“No, I mean it’s on the tip of yours too,” Jess said. “It starts at the lips and teeth, and goes through the /r/, but then it’s the two t‘s on the tongue tip.”

“And that’s tutti,” I said.

“You can whistle at the end of it,” Jess added.

“That would take some forty-two’d,” I said.

“Intestinal fortitude, perhaps, as they say in the army,” Maury said. “And your intestines seem to be increasing in fortitude,” he said, looking at my gut.

I looked at his girth, somewhat greater than mine, and raised an eyebrow. Elisa disrupted my moment by poking me like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

“Well,” I said, “thanks for the Scotch. You could have gotten me a forty, too.”

“Have we missed any tricks?” Jess asked.

“There’s the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Station,” Maury said.

“What,” Jess said, “do you have an edifice complex?”

“And Times Square.”

Elisa twigged and took the occasion to be Lively once again and burst into song: “It’s the song I love, sweet melody of… Forty-second Street.”

I raised my glass and intoned lightly, to “Tea for Two,” “For-ty-two, and two for tea…”

“OK,” Daryl said, “eighty-six the singing.”

“I’ll Scotch it,” I replied, and drank mine.

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myopic

Posted on October 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

Myopia is not exactly my opiate, but myopic is my kind of optics: when I make forays, I must not forget I’m a four-eyes, for I will otherwise have to squint, and all around will be a mite more mysterious. Get the pic? This word is one of that classically derived sort that have an at least equally common Anglo-Saxon equivalent, in this case shortsighted. Ironically, the Greek-rooted word is the shorter one this time. It does get used, as often metaphorically as literally – view and focus often travel with it, typically in reference to politics or academics (the phrase myopic foreign policy alone shows up on more than 22,000 web pages). And while the sound of it might seem to admonish me to keep my eyes open, it really does come from a squinting reference: a myopic person is, in classical Greek and also, if rarely, in English, a myops. OK, well, in the Greek it’s muops – the upsilon gets transliterated as a y because at the time the Latins were transliterating Greek the sound had shifted to a front rounded vowel, what even today the International Phonetic Alphabet renders as [y]. You’ll recognize the ops, anyway – not as in special ops but as in cyclops (which comes from words meaning not “one-eyed” but “round-eyed”). As to the my, it’s not a personal appurtenance (well, it is for me, but that’s not our focus); it comes from muein, meaning “shut the eyes” (or “close the lips”). Muein is also the ultimate source of mystery, but that’s a history that would take us too long to see through.

eldritch

Posted on October 18, 2009 | 5 comments

For a long time, there was a restaurant on the outskirts of Fredonia, New York, called Aldrich’s. Their sign advertised to those who drove by on highway 60 that they were a “beef and ice cream parlor.” I ate there at least once, and I seem to recall that their beef and ice cream were both pretty good. But I guess they couldn’t handle the competition from the big boxes that sprouted like mushrooms a mile or so closer to the Thruway; they closed down in September 2007. Now the place sits there empty, unoccupied, getting just a little spookier every time I go by. Like the sort of place where a group of teens decide, on some windy October night, to break in and explore, but when they go into the kitchen and open the old walk-in freezer, they hear an otherworldly moan and they see…

Well, never mind. The fact is that the name Aldrich will forever have a strong taste of beef and ice cream for me, and the rich in it just amplifies that. And no matter how eerie, spooky, unearthly the place may ever get – no matter how eldritch – I will always have that taste of beef and ice cream, every time I see the word Aldrich – or the word eldritch. Which just goes to show how subjective word tastes can be.

Undoubtedly whatever association you have with Aldrich, if any (say, Aldrich Ames, who spied for the USSR while working for the CIA), will affect your perception of eldritch, unless you happen to see eldritch much more often than Aldrich. But other things naturally impinge as well: elder – perhaps as in the “elder gods” (such as Cthulhu, as seen in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories), or perhaps as in a church or simply as in old – and rich, and itch, and probably ditch too.

I do like how the various ascenders on this word may recall horripilation – i.e., your hair standing on end. And the whole word is focused on the tip of the tongue; the farthest back it goes in enunciation is during the /r/ – the rest is at the alveolar ridge. Nothing at the velum: you don’t want to go back there…

Whence comes this word? Old English, certainly, but the trail is misty. It seems reasonable that it comes from el “strange, other” and rice (pronounced “reach a”) “realm,” but there is a gap in the trail of evidence, and one must cross it… (don’t pay the ferryman until he gets you to the other side!)

Serve this word with spooky tales, of the sort that naturally go not only with Victorian houses but with lower-frequency, higher-register – but not scholarly – words such as this one.

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four very long words

Posted on October 18, 2009 | 6 comments

The Order of Logogustation does know how to party… polysyllabically. One popular event is Night of the Long Words. Its unofficial theme song is “Excellent Birds” (also called “This Is the Picture”) by Laurie Anderson and Peter Gabriel, which has the line “Long words. Excellent words. I can hear them now.”

We like to bring out some of the old favourites – words and debates. Which word to count as the longest word, for instance.

“I am of the opinion that in normal circumstances one may count antidisestablishmentarianism as the longest word in the English language as it is spoken today among those words not deliberately coined solely for the sake of being long,” opined Raoul Carter at a recent instance of the meeting.

“You’ve managed to produce a sentence as agglutinative as that word,” I noted approvingly.

“Moreso,” Raoul said. “There are only seven morphemes in antidisestablishmentarianism, not as many as I had modifying phrases.” He was right, too, by one way of counting them anyway: anti+dis+establish+ment+ari+an+ism. One cannot decompose establish, the stable root of the word, further; it comes, by way of former French establir (now établir), from Latin stabilire, which derives from stabilis “stable.” Add to it in the following sequence: disestablishment (meaning, in this case, separation of church from state), disestablishmentary (an adjective form), antidisestablishmentary (meaning opposed to this doctrine of disestablishment), antidisestablishmentarian (of an antidisestablishmentary nature), and finally, as the noun for the belief in this opposition to disestablishment, antidisestablishmentarianism.

“The problem,” my old friend Philippe chipped in, “is that the word really only exists in the language now – only surivived, and perhaps really was motivated in the first place – because of its length. And if you are of the sesquipedalian disposition, then absolutely, without question, undeniably, obviously, floccinaucinihilipilification is a longer word on paper.”

“Cute,” I said. “Another syntax-morphology match-up.” Philippe made a small bow of acknowledgement. The first four morphemes of floccinaucinihilipilification – flocci, nauci, nihili, and pili – all denote insignificant things or nothing and come from phrases (in the Eton Latin Grammar) meaning “don’t care” – each of the words plus facere, “make” (e.g., flocci facere). The word as a whole, invented fancifully for the sake of length, refers to the act or habit of estimating something as worthless.

“However, it has one less phoneme,” Raoul noted correctly (it has two cases where two letters represent one phoneme – au and ti – whereas Raoul’s word has but one, sh).

“And, on the other hand, one more syllable,” Philippe parried.

“But if we’re to allow words that have been invented to be long,” I said, “then you both know that a longer words stalks the lexicon: open your dictionaries to pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.” I did not try to mirror the morphology with my syntax.

“Ick,” Raoul said. “It’s not even very well formed. There’s no especially good reason to have it joined between microscopic and silico. It’s like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It’s simply not normal in English to put an ic in the middle of a word without so much as a hyphen.”

“Besides,” Philippe added, dogpiling on, “it’s just a surgically enhanced version of silicosis. There isn’t another single word that expresses either of our words; you need a phrase for each of them.”

“If perhaps a shorter phrase,” I pointed out.

At this point Jess walked up. “Gents,” she said, “there is a word of goodly length that was coined entirely in earnest.”

“Oh, not that bloody chemical name that requires a paperback book,” Raoul said, rolling his eyes.

“No,” Jess said, “that’s in no dictionary, and if that word exists then one need merely posit a slightly more complex chemical and come up with an even longer ‘word’ for this hypothetical substance. No, I mean pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism. Every bit of it has a reason to be there, even both pseudos.” True: pseudohypoparathyroidism is a condition that seems like hypoparathyroidism – a parathyroid deficiency – but isn’t, and pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism in turn resembles that condition but isn’t it.

“Oh, that’s just a technical term,” Raul said with a wave of his hand.

“Meaning someone actually uses it,” Jess countered.

“Funny, though,” said Philippe, “nobody ever talks about that one.”

“People do tend to shy away from inherited metabolic disorders,” I said. “But also, it’s not really in the game, as it were. It wasn’t coined to be long; it’s an accidental competitor.”

Raoul, meanwhile, had been silently enunciating while counting on his fingers. “Not if you count phonemes or syllables it doesn’t,” he said.

“I believe he’s floccinaucinihilipilificating your word,” Philippe said to Jess.

“It’s still a word that is actually used in earnest,” Jess said. “And it’s smooth and rhythmic.”

She had a point. And I leave the further tasting of these words – their mouthfeel and echoes in particular – to the reader as an exercise. Quite a bit of exercise, I’d say.

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Tagged antidisestablishmentarianism, English words, floccinaucinihilipilification, long words, longest word, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism

qawwal

Posted on October 16, 2009 | 1 comment

This is not how Elmer Fudd says corral. Well, OK, it may be that too, but he probably doesn’t make the uvular stop at the beginning. No, its object is a singer of a popular form of Sufi (Islamic) devotional music. A qawwal is someone who sings qawwali music. What is qawwali music? What a qawwal sings. Actually, though, you’re not likely to hear just one guy and his lonely harmonium doing this; you’ll see a whole stage full of guys, all sitting, with one lead singer, at least one harmonium, which is a kind of bellows-driven reed organ (a bit like an accordion), and of course a percussionist or two – the beat, which kind of swings, is omnipresent.

The word qawwal, which is Urdu, Farsi, and Arabic for “singer” or “reciter,” doesn’t sound like the percussion, and it doesn’t sound like the harmonium (but it looks like one a bit, with the ww as the bellows), but it sounds well enough like what the singer sings. It’s a word that can be launched into a long melisma, leaping off from that initial stop and singing through open and glide and on to liquid – and that double w is clear licence to hold that glide as long as you want, to express your devotion and yearning for the divine. The very act of saying this word is like a course of life: starting way back at the separation, it passes through clear and open to dark and tense to clear and open again, and finally comes to sustained reunion at the very tip.

It’s quite an ornament to the eyes, too, this word, looking like arabesque geometrics and using a combination of letters that is clearly not simply illegal in English but nearly a capital offence. A double w? Why not add one more and look it up online? And the initial q not followed by a u… archetypally “other.” Of course, if you’re from the Punjab, and perhaps one of the millions of fans of the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or one of the other great popular qawwals, there’s nothing “other” about it. But then for you English is the “other.” And is this word an English word? Well, it’s in Oxford. But – and this is the irritating thing – it’s not in the Scrabble dictionary.

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kiwi

Posted on October 15, 2009 | 3 comments

There were four of us at lunch, and Maury was talking: “I had a kiwi for supper the other day, and—”

Elisa and I interrupted him simultaneously. “You ate an apteryx?” I asked. “That’s not very much,” Elisa declared. Then Elisa turned to me and said, “An apteryx? A-pte-ryx. I like that word. What does it mean? Another word for kiwi?”

“Have you ever been a reader of the comic strip B.C.?” Jess asked Elisa. “There’s an apteryx in it from time to time, and the first thing it always does is explain what it is: ‘a wingless bird with hairy feathers.’ It’s from Greek a ‘not’ and pterux ‘wing.’ So it is another word for kiwi, yes. But probably not the kind you have in mind, and James is being disingenuous.”

“Knowing Maury, it seems entirely possible,” I said, forestalling another bite of my Cobb salad. “Nor did he say kiwifruit, which he probably would for the sake of precision.”

Elisa furrowed her brow and looked at her tropical salad. “But kiwifruit is just a long way to say kiwi, isn’t it? Like this.” She held up a piece of kiwifruit on her fork.

“Rather,” Maury said, “it’s a short way to say Chinese gooseberry. Like that.” He gestured at Elisa’s fork.

“This isn’t a gooseberry!” Elisa protested.

“No,” Jess said, “it’s a Macaque peach.” She smiled just slightly with the right corner of her mouth. She did have a slight sadistic side underneath all that pleasantness.

“Okay, now I’m lost,” Elisa declared, and attacked her salad with renewed vigour.

“Kiwifruits come originally from China,” I explained. “When they were introduced to New Zealand, the New Zealanders thought they tasted somewhat like gooseberries, so they called them Chinese gooseberries, although they had previously been called a number of other things, including, as Jess says, Macaque peach. And several things in different dialects of Chinese.”

Elisa swallowed. “So why did they get called kiwi? After the New Zealanders?”

“After the bird,” Maury said.

“The bird you had for supper?” Jess asked with feigned innocence. She took another bite of her grilled cheese and bacon sandwich.

“She was one of them, yes, in a manner of speaking,” Maury said, and picked at the third row of his Cobb salad. (I toss mine together; he keeps his in rows and he objects if it arrives tossed.)

“You guys! Stop it!” Elisa exclaimed. “I feel like I’m the only one not in on the joke!”

Jess took pity. “The apteryx,” she explained, “a wingless bird with hairy feathers, is indigenous to New Zealand; in fact, it’s the national symbol. The word for it in Maori, the Polynesian language of New Zealand, is kiwi, apparently an imitation of its call. New Zealanders are called kiwis after the bird. The fruit is called kiwifruit perhaps because it looks like the bird – round, brown and hairy – but certainly because it comes from New Zealand. Well, now it does.”

“When they started exporting them to America,” I added, “China was not seen very favourably. Kiwifruit was good marketing.”

“But with the ascendancy of the fruit in North America,” Maury noted, “the apteryx has become more of an asterisk.”

“Where did you guys learn this stuff,” Elisa asked, “Kiwipedia?” She smiled at her joke, then licked her lips. “Kiwi. Ki-wi. Sounds kinda like peewee. Or—” she speared another piece and took it on a roller-coaster ride through the air— “wheee!”

“Or QE2,” I said, “a cruise ship. Or QEW, a highway on which cruise control is largely out of the question. Or maybe key lime.”

“It looks nice on paper, too,” Jess said, “the k and w all angular at a 90-degree rotation, and the two i‘s. And it’s velum to lips when you say it, almost like a wee kiss.”

“Yeah,” Elisa said, all happy. She paused. “But wait. You had one for supper? A kiwi bird?” She looked at Maury.

“Yes,” he said, “she was from Auckland. Just flew in.”

“Well, at least auks fly, unlike kiwis,” I said. “But I hope it wasn’t awkward.”

“No, she was quite pleasant,” he declared. “Charming accent. Very happy not to be mistaken for an Aussie.”

“Bird is New Zealand slang for ‘girl,'” Jess explained to Elisa. “Also Australian and British.”

The penny dropped. “You had a girl from New Zealand over for supper!” Elisa beamed. “So what did you serve her?”

Maury speared the last piece of his salad and paused it in midair. “Chinese goose.”

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tocsin

Posted on October 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

I’m not making this up: as I write this, I can hear sirens out on the street. Ah, the sounds of alarm – so hard on the ears! They’re like cancer drugs, which are (for the most part) poisons that are aimed to hurt the cancer more than they hurt the rest of your body. Targeted toxins, as it were. Similarly, sirens hurt my ears, but it’s for a good cause. The same goes with alarm bells – targeted toxins for the ears.

Or should I say tocsins. Yes, the noxious overtones are ever-present in the word tocsin, although it’s not related to toxin. Rather, it comes (via French) from Latin for “touch” and “sign,” and has been used to refer to bell signals – especially alarm bells – since at least the 16th century in English and somewhat earlier than that in French.

No surprise that the word most often found near this one is sound – the verb. And if you can hear them over the din, there are familiar rings other than toxin in this word, too: klaxon (originally a brand name, apparently based on Greek for “roar”), referring to a loud horn (though the word sounds too metallic and percussive for that to my ears, but certainly it is harsh); moccasin, which has exactly nothing to do with tocsins whatsoever unless you happen to be wearing them when the alarm bells go off; in hoc signo, a reference to a divine vision that was a call to the alarums of victory for Constantine (and the first tocsins were church bells, too); Tonkin, as in the Gulf of, which is where incidents took place (or didn’t but were said to have) that precipitated large-scale American military involvement in Viet Nam; talk sin, which may be like thought crime (call the police!) or may be like a 1-900 line (police the calls!); and perhaps syntax, which may sometimes make an editor say “Hell’s bells!” but is generally no real cause for alarm.

Today’s tasting was suggested by Roberto De Vido.

transhumant

Posted on October 12, 2009 | 2 comments

Wow, is this a word from Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Doesn’t it even look like the top of a spooky gate, or some sinister altarpiece, with pikes or candles at each end and another rising higher in the middle? Such balance, too: t – 4 letters – h – 4 letters – t. Yeeeesssss, someone who has gone beyond the human: trans plus human, and then the t on the end to give it that active ending, and a feel like revenant but so much farther…

Actually, it’s more like a word from Zorba the Greek. Well, if Zorba happened to be a member of the Sarakatsani. Oooh, who are they? A mystical sect with secret knowledge of the migration of souls? Well, ah, the migration of soles. Specifically the soles of their feet and their sheep’s feet. They’re Balkan shepherds, and, like various other peoples in many countries around the world, they herd their animals from one area to another (often far away) to follow the changes of the seasons, grazing where and when the grazing is good. This is called transhumance and they are transhumant. The shape of our word is thus not so much altarpiece or gate as route profile (from t to t) or perhaps three shepherds and eight sheep (or seven plus a dog).

The migration, like the mystic rites, is trans-inducing: Latin trans meaning “across.” But human comes from humanus “of, or relating to, people,” from homo “man, human,” whereas humant is derived ultimately from humus, “soil.” They both do trace back to the Indo-European root dhghem, so the resemblance is not coincidence. But though we all return to dust (well, transhumans may not), transhumants do it annually.

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting this word.

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Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged transhumant, word tasting notes