Monthly Archives: March 2010

prognathous

Posted on March 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

Does this word seem pugnacious? Well, if your prognosis for pugnacity involves lots of jutting jaws, you just might have it. But you gneed gnot gnash your teeth… prognathous really describes a kind of facial physiognomy. And, yes, the g is pronounced as written, which means your tongue does a one-two back-front touch that might make you think of a stuffed-up nose but won’t necessarily make you jut your jaw much.

And it’s the jutting jaw that is the essence here: Greek pro “forward” and gnathos “jaw”. This word always makes me think of Philip IV of Spain – take a little time to look at any of the several portraits of him at various ages all made by Diego Velázquez. But others might sooner think of, say, Jay Leno. For the clinical sense, however, the jaw need not be as long as all that; it just needs to jut at a sharper-than-average angle.

There is something about this word that feels right to me for a big jaw. The gn seems to have the right feel, but it’s not just that. While magnum may seem jaw-y, cognition doesn’t really. The visual effect, even when the g is not said, may be a bit of a cue, but while gnash has a similar mandibularity, gnat has not. So it’s hard to separate out true phonaesthetic effect from simple awareness of the sense filtering through.

Still and all, tell me how, for instance, the name Gnaeus Naevius strikes you. Does it seem rather growly and toothy or otherwise pugnacious, perhaps like Gnasher, the nasty dog of that nasty British boy Dennis the Menace (no, not the American one drawn by Hank Ketcham; this one, started on the other side of the pond and appearing first a mere three days after the American one hit the presses in 1951, is unrelated). Gnasher has been know to chuckle gneh-heh, so why might he not, when gnawing on a bone, growl Gnaeus Naevius? Well, in fact, Gnaeus Naevius was a Roman satirical playwright, known for making the patricians gnash their teeth. There is no evidence that he was prognathous. But doesn’t his name have that feel?

On the other hand, there is also no evidence that he was opisthognathous. There is nothing at all to tell us about his gnathic index, in fact.

OK, what and what? Gnathic index: an indicator of how relatively far forward the jaw does or doesn’t jut. Opisthognathous: why, the opposite of prognathous, of course, and a word just made for lisping weak-jawed sorts to say.

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apoplectic

Posted on March 17, 2010 | 1 comment

What! Apoplectic! Apoplectic!! APOPLECTIC!!! Aaaghkx…

Oh, isn’t this just the perfect word for a sputtering fit? Four voiceless plosives, at least two of which are typically aspirated – and in one of which the aspiration spreads onto the following liquid like flames onto a puddle of gasoline: listen to the /pl/ as you say it, and think of the last time you lit a gas barbecue. And then in the next, the /kt/, the back and tip of the tongue are touching the top of the mouth simultaneously, which can make for extra pressure in the release – even a pop, or at least a tic. It’s a one-two punch: hold your hand in front of your mouth as you say this word. You’ll feel one puff (or two in close sequence) of air towards the top of the hand, and then one down by the bottom or on the wrist, thanks to the different tongue positions at release. Vocal fireworks! And the possibility of a little release of spit! It even has a suitable look to it, with those p p like ballons on sticks popped at the c c, perhaps.

These days, this word is used pretty much entirely for “bustin’-a-vein furious.” But it – or rather apoplexy, the word from which it derives – was once a standard medical diagnosis. And a common one: it was credited with laying low people from Al Capone to the Dowager Empress Cixi, from Louisa May Alcott to William Lyon Mackenzie, from Felix Mendelssohn to Catherine the Great, and two US presidents too: Wilson and Harding (that’s another one-two: Harding was right after Wilson). And what did it refer to? Why, bustin’ a vein. Or, more generally, any death following on sudden loss of consciousness – typically due to a ruptured aneurysm, but also possibly due to some ischemia, even heart attack.

The term is not used now in medicine, but it remains useful for states of extreme fury or similar. There aren’t really suitable adjectives formed from heart attack or stroke, after all, and they remain too potentially literal; this word is known to be figurative, it’s a nice direct adjective, and it has such a perfect sound. It is often followed by fit, which is a perfect fit, sound-wise; it can also be followed by rage. On the other hand, perhaps with a nod to its literal sense, it is often preceded by practically or nearly.

I learned this word in my childhood, but first I learned apoplexy, and in an unusual instance that gave it a different tone for me: the classical Greek painter Zeuxis was said to have laughed so hard at a painting of an ugly woman that he died of apoplexy. So apoplexy and paroxysm have always seemed kindred to me. But, pace apoplectic Zeuxis, apoplectic has ever had the capillary-popping rage association, especially since it was often applicable to me in my childhood: I had a terrible temper. I might have taken the word as an admonition of sorts, since at least one of my ancestors died of an aneurysm (thereby leaving a constant little worry at the back of my mind).

You probably have figured out that this word comes from the Greek, with its apo at the beginning. Apo can mean “off” but it can also, as a prefix, mean “completely”. The rest of the word comes from the verb plessein, “strike”. So to be apoplectic is to be struck down – felled by a stroke.

Thanks to Rosemary Tanner for suggesting apoplectic.

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vacay

Posted on March 17, 2010 | 5 comments

Hey, vacay, it’s like a playday and a soirée… What do you say? Oh, extra syllables are soooo last whatever. No need to “shun,” just let it trail off at the end into that creaky city-girl growl. It’s a lay-back-and-check-your-nail-polish kind of sound. You just, kind of, vacate that last syllable, y’know? And that [eI] diphthong ending may be catching on. Oprah decided to name a certain organ the va-jay-jay, for instance.

Vacay also looks like a place to go on vacay. There’s Rum Cay, Sandy Cay, Mira por vos Cay, why not Va Cay? (Or, with the pronunciation, Vay Cay? Maybe it’s off Miami Beach – Oy Vay Cay!) Or it could be on some Spanish island: vaca y… “cow and ” what?

The word is almost neatly symmetrical; the v shapes are like martinis or upside-down umbrellas or swaying palm trees or deck chairs seen from above, the c like a glass of beverage or a table seen from above… the tail of the y gives it that extra sway, or perhaps it’s draining away something: stress, rain from a storm, final syllables…

If the word seems to engender an empty stare or an empty desk chair, or if it bespeaks an empty mind or an empty wallet, well, it is from vacation, which is ultimately from Latin vacare, verb, “be empty” – or (I like this better) “be free”. Free as a bird! Vacay? Okay…

And how did this relaxed, quasi-urbane, Paris-Hilton-sounding word come our way? Its primary vector seems to have been the ciné: Legally Blonde, starring Reese Witherspoon. “You mean, like on vacay? Road trip!” Give the girl a standing ovay…

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pasticcio, pastiche

Posted on March 15, 2010 | 1 comment

I remember very clearly my first part in a mainstage production as a university drama student. The play was Sheridan’s The Critic, of 1779. I strode on as an Italian gentleman of the time, accompanied by a daughter whose singing I wished to promote and by an interpreter, and declared briskly to the English lady of the house, “Ah, vossignoria, noi vi preghiamo di favorirci colla vostra protezione.” The interpreter leapt in to ease communication: “Madame, me interpret. C’est à dire – in English – qu’ils vous prient de leur faire l’honneur –” This macaronic mash-up, of course, didn’t help the poor lady at all.

My character’s name? Pasticcio Ritornello. Rather fitting, naturally, given the linguistic pasticcio accompanying him. If language were the food of love, this scene would be, well, a pasticcio, perhaps: a pie made of a mixture of meat and pasta. Or pastistio, which is the Greek version of the same thing (no crust, just pasta, meat, tomatoes, and white sauce). One could wash it down with a glass of pastis (ouzo to the Greeks among us). Or drink the pastis as an appetizer – as Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, “what’s pastis prologue.”

Of course, pasticcio and pastiche – one might call them my character’s version and the interpreter’s version of the same word – are more often used to refer to an assemblage of disparate elements, a paste-up job, as it were (en français on dirait une collage). And how fitting that is! Paste comes from pasta, meaning “dough” and then later “noodles” (you did know that noodles are made from a tough dough, didn’t you?); it in turn comes from a Greek word for porridge. Pasticcio comes not from pasta as in noodles (though pasticcio contains them) but directly from the Latin pasticium “pie, pastry”, also from pasta of course. Pastiche comes from pasticcio, and both of them spread to things in music and art that have divers ingredients, pasted, stitched, or stuck together. The same past root also made its way into French as a word for “hodgepodge, mess”: pastis. That word was applied to a beverage that, though clear, turns murky white when water is added: ouzo, sambuca… pastis.

These days, pastiche and pasticcio seem to be things of the past; the preferred term currently is the rather lumpy Anglo-Saxon mash-up. It does happen to be the case that mash was first of all a word for the mixture of water and barley malt used in brewing, so we have come full circle to the barley recognizable origins. But when it comes to linguistic medleys, I prefer a term drawn from a a dish made with a type of hollow pasta, which in turn may originally have taken its name from a Greek word for barley broth. The pasta and the dish (which is the pasta plus butter and cheese) are called macaroni (or maccheroni or a few other spellings), and a mixture of languages – as one finds in some medieval music, where Latin and the local vernacular are mixed – is described as macaronic.

Thanks to Elaine Phillips for suggesting pastiche.

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tone

Posted on March 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

John Keats, on leaving some friends at an early hour, wrote, “Let me write down a line of glorious tone.” But one line of glorious tone – ! Why, this short word could merit much more than that!

The tone of Keats’s poetry was, of course, lofty, but, poor lad, the tone of his muscles – and his general health – was not. His days of late consumption were cut short by early consumption (and by the doctor who treated it – the TB, I mean – with a starvation diet and bloodletting); he did leave his friends at an early hour. But I do wonder if, when he was meditating on his Grecian urn (a tacit urn, we might note: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, / Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone” – no tone? no, not one), he might have observed the origin of this word. Or would that be a stretch?

Actually, it would be a stretch. Greek tenein, verb, “stretch”, gave birth to tonos, “tension, stretching, taut string”, and from that high-strung origin came the further musical sense (also in Greek, and then in Latin and on). You can still hear the plucking of a string when you say it: tone. But also harking back to the original came (as of the later 17th century) the muscle condition sense. This is also relevant to music, of course; a trombonist with dystonia would not tunefully intone diatonics. So, as they may say in Shropshire, what’s for the tone is for the tother.

Well, that version of tone is shortened from the one, of course, as in John Heywood’s “Went in at the tone eare and out at the tother” – but doesn’t that describe tone deafness? That and the inability to carry a tune. Of course, if you can’t handle a tone, you can’t handle a tune, not just because a note is a tone seen another way, but because tune is really tone as passed through Scots dialect. Yes, this tone has split into two words (tone and tune) in harmony with each other: if not a chord, then at least accord.

And so our accordion has tones, and tunes, but also the tone of the accordion is reedy, and its body may be painted with metallic tones, and the singer may sing words with a lively or sarcastic tone. This word has spread explosively, you see, as though detonated (which is not a cognate, by the way): it has denotated senses in not only music and muscles but meaning, colour, mood, the general elevation of society… what are the bon ton reading, and looking at, and listening to, after all?

And what are they speaking? In Toronto, cultural crossroads that it is, the speech may have not only different tones but different tones as well. Chinese, a very common language in Toronto, is well known to have tones – each syllable has a level or contour (changing-pitch) tone that identifies it just as much as its phonemes do. But the majority of the world’s tone languages are in fact in Africa, where lexical and grammatical tone can also be more mobile, shifting and altering across syllables according to context but still necessary for denotation. And why shouldn’t the tone be moving, when so many African tones get people moving, source as Africa is of so much music you want to dance to?

Of course, not everyone wants to get their Eton jacket dusty and sweaty. So be it: the tone may be more subdued, as you like. Let the bon ton pass the baton, then, to the ones who will tap the toe. Skin tone ought to be no bar (especially since skin tone is one of the most common collocations for this word); one need not tone down whether uptown or downtown. (Perhaps some worry that the tune will be taken to the whole-tone whole-notes of ring tones.)

Those of Eton, incidentally, were not attuned to young John Keats; he was seen by the upper-crust critics as too uncouth, too Cockney. One John Wilson Croker croaked, “He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds.” The association of sounds! Why, it seems like a good name for an orchestra, no?

But also, why ought not sounds associate freely, to speak the truth as they may? If lie detectors may sense mendacious tension in one’s intonation, surely a link between tone and truth may be made, be that tone one of sound, or of colour, or of emotion, be it tone poem, or tone of poem, or flesh tone, conversational tone, moral tone, the gravelly tones of Tone Loc or the girly tones of Tone Damli Aaberge, the hortatory tone of the speeches of Wolfe Tone (martyred for Irish nationalism when Keats was 3 years old), or a sepia tone photograph of Franchot Tone or even the deconstructed “noise music” of Yasunao Tone? Why ought not the tone of one’s speech to signify its verity as well as its mellifluity? Or the colour tone of one’s hair be a truth or lie? Let us remember Keats’s Grecian formula: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ – that is all / you know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The tone is the tother; they are tethered, “And full of many wonders of the spheres.”

This one is for Bill Aide, who suggested this word and whose tunes, tones, and notes on the piano encouraged my writing.

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creole

Posted on March 13, 2010 | 5 comments

This word, with its crisp start and liquid body taking the lips from pulled to puckered, probably brings to mind something mixed and spicy, something with old-world and new-world influences. It may make you think of cooking, most likely Louisiana Creole cookery, which comes from the adaptation of upper-class French cuisine to the exigencies, available foodstuffs, and local influences (including Native American) prevailing in Louisiana.

It may also make you think of a language, most likely Haitian Creole (Kreyòl), which has a vocabulary largely taken from French (with alterations) and grammar mainly taken from a few West African languages, mainly Fongbe, which was the native language of many of the slaves brought to Haiti by the French. Those following the news of the recent earthquake in Haiti may have noticed such things as posters advising people to wash their hands to prevent the spread of disease, with content such as the following (from emergency.cdc.gov):

Pi bon bagay ou ka fè se lave men w ak dlo e ak savon pandan 20 segonn. Sepandan, si w paka jwenn dlo, ou ka sèvi ak pwodui ki gen baz alkòl pou lave men w (dezenfektan).

This translates to

It is best to wash your hands with soap and clean running water for 20 seconds. However, if soap and clean water are not available, use an alcohol-based product to clean your hands.

If you know French, reading the Kreyòl aloud (pronouncing all letters) will sound somewhat familiar (lave = laver and dlo = de l’eau, for instance), and yet still markedly different in ways. The language, like the cuisine, is a mixture of influences, imported and local, and an interesting blend of the familiar and the seemingly exotic – imported and nativized.

Which is where creole comes from. It referred first not to food or to language but to people: specifically, people of European (or, in some places, African) descent who had been born and raised in the colony. French créole comes from Spanish criollo, which means “native to the locality” and comes from creado “bred, reared”, which is cognate with our word create. And because of the various European adventures in colonialism, there are creole peoples around the world, and with them creole languages. There are in fact a great many creole languages around the world, most but not all of them having substantial influence (typically in vocabulary) from a European language. Haitian Creole is the most widely spoken one, and the one with the most speakers (over 7 million).

The usual basic picture presented for the origin of creole languages is that in a contact situation between different cultures, a pidgin develops, and when the pidgin becomes more firmly rooted and gains native speakers (as for instance the children of parents of different cultural backgrounds), the vocabulary and syntax develop further (although the syntax and morphology typically remain simpler than in most languages) and the language becomes a creole. Not everyone agrees with this picture, although there are cases (for example, Tok Pisin) where it appears to be accurate. Some have argued, for instance, that creoles do not require a pidgin basis but instead may arise naturally in situations where two different languages are present continuously in a culture.

Consider a situation such as the following: control of a country where one language is spoken is taken over by people from another country where another language is spoken. That other language becomes the language of officialdom, record-keeping, law, and the more privileged classes. The common people continue to speak their original language, but in the absence of an official standard, it shifts, among other things taking on much vocabulary from the prestige language and also simplifying some grammatical details. By the time the foreign rulers are pushed out, the local language is a mixture of a simplified base and core of its earlier self and a large vocabulary influence (and some grammatical influence) from the former prestige language. Add to that mixture influences from other trading partners and occasional invaders over time. Is that language a creole?

Well, in fact, some people say it is. Others disagree. Whatever your opinion, it’s the language you’re reading right now.

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pidgin

Posted on March 12, 2010 | 1 comment

Let me try a few sentences from a foreign language on you (from tpi.wikipedia.org):

Kanada emi wanpela kantri long Not Amerika. Em i stap long noten sait bilong Yunaitet Stets. Em i gat 10 provins, na 32 milien manmeri. Kapitol bilong kantri emi Ottawa na ol bikpela taun i Toronto, Montreal na Vancouver. Kantri igat tupela tokples bilong gavman: Tok Inglis na Tok Pranis.

Here’s a translation:

Canada is a country in North America. It is on the northern side of the United States. It has 10 provinces and a population of 32 million. The country’s capitol is Ottawa and its large cities are Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. It has two official languages: English and French.

Now look at this:

Canada him is one fella country along North America. Him is stop along northern side belong United States. Him is got 10 province, and 32 million man Mary. Capitol belong country him he Ottawa and all bigfella town is Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Country he got two fella talk place belong government: Talk English and Talk French.

And look back at the first passage. See the connection?

So what is that first passage? Tok Pisin, also known as Pidgin or Pidgin English.

But that’s misleading for a few reasons. First of all, there are many pidgins in many places in the world, and Tok Pisin isn’t even the first one so to be called – that credit goes to Chinese Pidgin English, about which more below. Second, though it appears to be a version of English, that’s not quite accurate. Third, Tok Pisin, for many of its speakers, isn’t even a pidgin anymore.

First things first. What is a pidgin? The word pidgin comes from the pronunciation of the word business in Chinese Pidgin English, and not because it’s for the birds or because it’s a carrier of meaning. A pidgin is a trade language that has come into being in a situation where speakers of two or more different languages are in regular contact for a limited set of purposes (generally business, naturally) but do not have a common language to communicate in: there is not enough contact to give reason for general fluency in one of the groups’ languages, and there is not another language in common use (as, for instance, English is often today used for commerce between speakers of two other languages).

So they communicate with a simplified grammar – typically based mainly on one of the languages – and a simplified sound system that both sides can pronounce well enough (since one language may have various sounds that are not used in the other), and words are taken often more from one language (if there are two languages involved, one will typically supply grammar and the other – often the more prestigious one – will supply vocabulary), but generally every language spoken in that commercial context will pitch in at least a bit. Which means it’s not simply a variety of one language. It’s a language of its own, albeit a comparatively basic one.

A pidgin is thus inevitably something with a limited vocabulary and a fairly simple structure, basically meant for functional purposes. Think about what kind of exchanges you have with people on the other side of the counter in the mall, after all! And it has no native speakers.

Which is why Tok Pisin, for many speakers, is not a pidgin anymore. There are now more than a million first-language speakers of it. And it’s not so limited anymore. Have a look at its section on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website.

Of course, if a pidgin is to be used for all the things of general life, it inevitably develops more detailed grammar and vocabulary, and becomes what is called a creole.

Not all pidgins involve English, either. There are, around the world, various ones involving Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic… you will notice that all of these have in common being colonial powers. There’s a reason for that!

Pidgins have also supplied English with some phrases now in common use. Chinese Pidgin English, spoken from the 17th to the 19th centuries in southern China, produced a number of phrases that are basically calques of Chinese phrases – Chinese idiom, Chinese word order, English words: for instance, long time no see, look-see, lose face, no can do. Hawai’ian Pidgin has also given a few words and phrases. For instance, the word quick changed to its onset and reduplicated to make wiki-wiki, which has reappeared in English unreduplicated as wiki, for a website that allows open collaboration. As in Wikipedia.

For linguists, pidgin thus has a clear technical sense and a developed sphere of reference, and many linguists find pidgins fascinating. For most other English speakers, however, pidgin goes very often with English and is thought of as a debased sort of English, the pidgin being thought of perhaps as a misspelling of pigeon (by which it may have been influenced – bidgin might have been the first form of the word), and “pigeon English” like dog Latin – and perhaps lolcat speak – an animalized version, or a deformity like being pigeon-toed.

One suspects there may even be an undercurrent of thinking of the speakers as being bird-brained. In fact, the generally low view of Chinese Pidgin English and its speakers is why Cantonese traders finally decided to just use English. Why didn’t they before? Well, they had a low opinion of English and disdained kowtowing to an English standard (didja notice the Chinese loan word there?). And of course Cantonese was just too difficult for the English traders to learn. So that set the tone… until, in the end, business won out over pidgin.

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mentor

Posted on March 10, 2010 | 2 comments

“Well,” I said to young Marcus Brattle with a touch of trepidation, “I am to be your mentor.” I picked up the cup of tea his mother had poured for me just before she disapparated to another part of the house.

Marcus, relishing the lankiness of early adolescence, had strewn himself along and across the chesterfield, a bottle of Coke in arm’s reach. “Mum wants to cement our relationship, does she? Tell me, are you to be commentor, implementor, or tormentor?”

The last role’s likely yours, I thought. I looked around to see if his mother seemed to be anywhere in earshot, and saw no evidence. “Think of me as just the sort of bad influence you need,” I said.

“A dementor, then,” he said then, almost looking interested. “But is that what you meant, or…”

“Well, more like staving off dementia, now that demention it. Not to worry; you are no hirsute ceramicist, and I will not eat your soul. No, you are to play the part of Telemachus.”

“Who’s he?”

“The student of Mentor. From the Odyssey. And, more recently, the lead character in Mothe-Fénelon’s 1699 book Les Aventures de Télémaque, from which the persona of Mentor came to be popularly known. Our word came up as a reference as much to that book as to the Odyssey.”

“And here I thought it had to do with mental,” Marcus said. “If you’re no good, like, that would make me mentor-ly handicapped.”

“Well, there is a sense of mentation, ” I said, and thought, Probably a little mentition (lying) too, as occasion demands.

“So who was this Telemetry bloke, anyway?”

“The son of Odysseus and Penelope. No doubt you’ve read James Joyce’s Ulysses,” I said, hoping that he certainly had not, because after all he was only in grade 9. “Stephen Dedalus was the Telemachus type in that. In the Odyssey, Mentor was Telemachus’s tutor, but actually Mentor was Athena in disguise.”

“Athena!” Marcus got up and dumped himself into a chair at the table, setting his Coke next to my tea. “Athena was a female. (I think I knew a girl called Athena…) Are you saying this Mentor was really a Womentor?”

“Better that than a Minotaur, anyway.”

“Oh, with a nice girl, you always want more than a minotaur two,” Marcus said, and had a slug of his Coke. “So what you’re saying is that mentee is not a real word.”

“It’s a real word,” I said, “because people use it and understand it, but it’s a backformation. Like tase from Taser.”

“Shocking. So you’re the minotaur and I’m the manatee. Oh, the huge manatee!” He threw his arms in the air in mock tragedy.

“Well, at least you’ll have mentee-fresh breath,” I said.

This seemed to provoke a recollection of something; Marcus started checking his pockets. As he did so, he asked, “And where, then, did this name Mentor come from?”

“It seems it came from the Greek word for ‘intent, spirit, purpose, action,’ that sort of thing: mentos.”

“Marvellous!” Marcus said with an evil little smile, producing something from his pocket that I only too late identified as a roll of Mentos. Before I could stop him, he emptied it into his still-mostly-full bottle of Coke. A geyser of foam shot towards the ceiling. As it drenched me and my tea, he shouted, “A fountain of knowledge!”

Thanks to David Moody for suggesting mentor.

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crazy, insane

Posted on March 8, 2010 | 3 comments

The Daryl-and-Margot Show was at it again, back at the table in the food court overlooking Yonge Street.

“Here,” Daryl said, proffering an article from the New York Times on his iPhone. “This is emblematic. New York Assemblyman Keith Wright, speaking of the chaos in the state government in Albany, says ‘Our forefathers in their infinite wisdom planned for crazy. But this week we moved to insane.'”

“But that’s just nonsense!” Margot protested. “He’s simply inarticulate. Obviously crazy and insane mean the same thing exactly. One is simply a more colloquial, less respectful version of the other.”

“You mean,” I interjected, “one’s from Anglo-Saxon and one’s from Latin.”

“You’re crazy,” Daryl said (in Margot’s direction). “Or perhaps insane. But above all you’re inattentive.”

“I do not take my lead from the myriad of popular abuses,” Margot replied.

“Riiight. And you’re the only one in the orchestra who’s not off beat,” Daryl said. “Meaning is by common agreement, forged through usage. And these two have different usage patterns.”

Margot was rummaging through her bag. Evidently she had been tutoring someone who was learning English as a foreign language, as she had the Oxford Collocations Dictionary with her. She flipped a few pages and read out. “Crazy: be, seem, sound; go; drive somebody; really, absolutely, completely, totally…” The she flipped some more. “Insane: be, look, become, go; drive; certify somebody, declare somebody; completely, totally…” She looked up. “The main difference is that there are technical uses with insane: certify, declare, also criminally, clinically, et cetera.”

“So it’s OK to say insane like a fox?” Daryl asked with a disingenuous smile.

“That’s a cliché,” Margot replied. “You can’t just play around with clichés.”

“Clichés give words flavour,” I said. “As do popular titles and other common uses.”

Daryl had been pulling up some web results on his iPhone while Margot had been rummaging. “Like Crazy Train,” he said, “Crazy Horse, Crazy for You, crazy quilt, crazy eights, a wild and crazy guy, dig that crazy cat, man dat some crazy sh—”

Margot cut him off. “Yes, but those all could have been insane except for matters of euphony and formality.”

“Insane Train?” I chuckled.

“Insane for You?” Daryl added, arching an eyebrow. “Insane eights?”

“There’s no question,” I said, “that crazy is less formal. After all, aside from being Anglo-Saxon, it originally meant ‘cracked.’ We still talk about crazing in pottery and glasses. There’s even a French cognate, écraser – a gift from the Normans, who knew crazy. But the point is that the greater formality and clinicality give insane a tone of respect, or awe, or fear, that also gives it a greater degree of severity if one puts one word against the other.”

“Insane is also unhealthy,” Daryl said. “Latin in ‘not’ plus sanus ‘healthy.’ And…” He was tapping on his iPhone as he spoke: “insane asylum, insane rage… Insane Clown Posse!”

“As opposed to crazy clown, which is what that coyote is really,” I said. At long last all those Saturday mornings of cartoons were paying off. “The coyote isn’t dangerous. Is dangerously insane in your collocations dictionary?”

Margot flipped back. “…Yes… But that’s because law enforcement officials don’t use the word crazy, I’d say.”

“Right, insane is trouble with the law, whereas crazy is not; it’s just stressful.” I abruptly burst into a Billy Joel rendition: “You may be right, I may be crazy, but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for…”

Margot waved her hand as though to dispel smoke. “OK, fine, never mind, stop. You’re driving me nuts.”

Daryl and I looked at each other and smiled.

“Nuts. Lesser degree than crazy?” I said.

“Yes, I think so…” Daryl said.

Margot winced. “My afternoon headache has arrived.”

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horseshoer

Posted on March 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

Have fun looking at this word, and then have fun saying it.

If it snags your eyes, it’s with good reason: the second half of it is just the first half rearranged… in the spelling, that is. The pronunciation is almost completely different – /r/ is the only phoneme the two halves have in common, and it’s a mere glide in the first half and a full syllable in the second.

In the first half, the o is made with the tongue lower than with, say, over, and higher than with, say, on. The s is voiceless, as indicated by the e, which is not pronounced and is just there to keep the word looking like a plural of hor and having the s said [z] – originally there was no e written on horse.

In the second half, neither s nor h is said with individual value; although we have, and have always had, the “sh” sound in English, classical Latin didn’t have the sound, and so our alphabet didn’t come with a symbol for it. In Old English it was written sc; now it’s sh. The o has always been there in this word, and used to be said [o]; the e has not always been there, though in shoer it would be there anyway as part of the er suffix. And again the e is not said; we just go straight to the r (if you’re British and glide the r, you’re still not saying the e as you would if giving it normal value; you’re saying a sound reserved for er, farther back in the mouth).

If you’re just learning English, you may well think that this word was invented by the devil, or at any rate, its referent notwithstanding, that it is quite unlucky. It stands as evidence against the silly assertion that English is a logical language. It also forces you to make a sound remarkably like that of a dishwasher in action (and nothing at all like the clank of a horseshoe). But, better still, it forces the speaker to do something rather unusual: follow an alveolar fricative with an alveopalatal fricative – you start with that [s] and then immediately have to slide the tongue back a little off the ridge. It’s just screaming for the first sound to be assimilated into the second. And it probably would come to be thus if it were a common word.

Now, it is made of two common words, both great old Anglo-Saxon words emerging from the mists of time little altered. And its referent is nothing new – someone who makes horseshoes or shoes horses. But even though there is still work (if less of it) for such tradespeople, they are not commonly called by the plain (if horse-whispering) word we have here. No, fittingly for a line of work that persists mainly in rather upscale milieux, it gets a Latinate denomination: farrier.

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