Monthly Archives: June 2010

drupe

Posted on June 17, 2010 | 3 comments

“Drupe?” Marica said, proffering a bowl of cherries to her husband, Ronald.

Ronald sighed. “It’s the pits.”

“Oh, come now, a couple of little stones can’t cause so much trouble.”

“Not so much the stones as the stem, of course…” Ronald mumbled.

“But who doesn’t like a cherry?” Marica insisted.

“Cherry!” Ronald snorted. “It’s been years since…” He looked up and focused on the bowl. “Wait. What are we talking about?”

Marica looked at him over the rim of her glasses. “Fruit.”

“I’m not sure how to take that,” Ronald said.

Marica thrust the bowl into his hands, then took one cherry from it and dropped it in her mouth. Two brief chews and she spat the pit expertly into a garbage can with a “ping”; a bit more closed-mouth action and she stuck out her tongue with a knotted stem. She took it off her tongue and tucked it into Ronald’s shirt pocket. “Knots to you,” she said. She turned and went over to the bar, leaving Ronald in his usual state of disjuncture, looking like a dupe.

Having observed at a distance, I came over to Ronald. “Marshalling the drupes?” I said. His face started to muster an outraged and confused look, so I pointed at the bowl. “Cherries are drupes. D-r-u-p-e. A fruit with a single hard stone in the middle. The exocarp, or skin, encloses a mesocarp, the flesh that we eat, in the middle of which is an endocarp, which is the actual seed. Apricots, cherries, peaches, plums, mangoes, all are drupes.”

“Oh,” Ronald said. “I’m not sure I got all of that…”

“You got olive,” I said. “That’s for sure. Overripe olive, to be precise. That’s what the Latin term druppa originally meant; it was taken from a Greek word for ‘olive’, which may have been formed from roots meaning ‘tree’ and ‘ripe’.”

Pause. “You know,” Ronald said, beginning to droop visibly, “I just come to these word tasting things because of Marica.” He looked around for a table and saw none nearby, so he held the bowl out to me. “Mind if I drop these on you? I think I want to go get stoned.” Pause. “Ha ha,” he added drily, and walked off towards Marica.

Maury happened by just then. I held out the bowl. “Drupe?”

“Don’t start,” Maury said. “I don’t mean to be a prude, but I’m not feeling very cherry. I mean cheery.”

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preposterous

Posted on June 16, 2010 | 2 comments

A word that sputters and splutters, especially with the aid of the aspiration we put on /p/ (and /t/ and /k/) at the start of a syllable. Hold your hand in front of your face as you say it and you’ll feel what I mean: that double puff. Say that /p/ with a puff by itself and it’s a quick expression of distaste and derision, the sort of noise I’ve been known to make if someone suggests shopping at Wal-Mart. Hamlet used it: “And smelt so? Pah!” So now put that popping p in position, say, to put some popular poppycock in its place: “Peter Piper? Pick a peck of pickled peppers? Pah! Preposterous! He couldn’t pull a poppy!”

This word is also helped by having a secundus paeon rhythm (like impossible and polygyny), which gives a little step up into the second syllable, where we can stretch out that vowel – the same one we make when someone’s ruined our cake: aww! – and then stumble it into a two-step stop, with that liquid /r/ like wading into a lake. And of course the written shape of it adds to the effect: it’s long, which allows for more expressiveness (as in speech too); it has those holes in the middle o and o; and every letter in it except for t and u shows up twice, and all mixed up and jumbled. (Indeed, from those letters you can make more anagrams than I even see the point of dumping on you here!)

And it’s that out-of-place, out-of-sequence nature that is central to this word. If you look at its bits, you will surely see pre and post, and in this case that’s not accidental. Prae “before” and posterus “later” form the original Latin word, and it meant first “in the wrong order” (or, as we might say, “back-to-front”) – and the associated and metaphorical meanings readily followed. Now we don’t use it to mean “out of sequence”, really; the main thing that’s described as preposterous is an idea or a notion. It may be that it just sounds preposterous or seems preposterous – common collocations – but it may just as readily be absolutely, simply, utterly, or totally preposterous. Ah, listen to the rhythm of those: totally preposterous – two measures of 4/4 with a rest at the end of the second. Simply preposterous – two measures of 3/4. But absolutely preposterous! That’s a 2+3+3 rhythm, if all the beats are the same length, which they might not be. Oh, but what a preposterous path would that take us down?

Well, in fact, sometimes we need the preposterous. Sometimes we need to turn things around! Sometimes we need a bit of Dave Brubeck in the rhythm of our lives. Back when I was a freshly minted PhD, I wrote a letter that was published in TDR, a theatre studies journal, titled “In Praise of Preposterous Propositions.” “Extreme propositions may be virtually indefensible, but they are remarkably provocative,” I wrote. “We implicitly recognize that preposterous statements are the most interesting by returning to them in art and theory (analyzing dadaists, futurists, and so forth), but how rarely do we have the nerve to say something under our own bylines that has a good chance of being outrageously wrong.”

Now, admittedly, I’m not raving around saying insanely inane things just for the heck of it. But it turns out that writing a whole book of poems about grammar and romantic entanglements is so odd that no agent or publisher knows what to do with it, even if they enjoy it. And of course tasting words somewhat as one tastes wines is not everyone’s idea of normal behaviour either. I’m quite sure that some linguists think my fascination with phonaesthetics is preposterous. And that’ll hold me for now.

Thanks to Rosemary Tanner for suggesting preposterous.

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scoundrel

Posted on June 14, 2010 | 1 comment

A word that scowls! You can just hear the sound of the growl, almost like thunder in showering gale in a movie. “What scoundrel wrote this groundless doggerel about a spaniel and a cockerel on the spandrel?! Now I’ll have to scour it and rescumble it!”

And, for that matter, what scoundrel stole this word’s etymology? It’s known from the late 16th century, but the trail goes cold. Its phonetic character, the OED says, suggests a French origin… Those sneaky French, they must have taken away the etymon. Or perhaps they hid it in the mix. The case remains unclosed, the point unscored, even as cries for solution grow louder; the search proceeds not even by ounces, and the milk curdles while we search for clues; proposed origins are scorned; at the very last the pieces will fall together under a colder sun.

But we certainly know how it is, and has been, used. It hits first like a blow to the ear, and in the second syllable echoes back with a growl, and there is nothing nice about it, certainly not the company it keeps. It is often seen near thief (applied to the same person) and very often seen before an exclamation mark. And it is quite often seen in the quote from Samuel Johnson: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

If it seems like a word to associate with pirates, that seems reasonable enough, and you may have first gotten the association in your youth reading (or hearing) Stevenson’s Treasure Island: “If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!”

But it is as likely a word to be associated with the classics of English literature, especially those that involve romances among the nobility, dramatic rises and falls in social status, and such like. Many noted authors have availed themselves of it: Fielding (“My lady! says I, you saucy scoundrel; my lady is meat for no pretenders”; Tom Jones), Dickens (“‘If there is a scoundrel on this earth,’ said Mr. Micawber, suddenly breaking out again with the utmost vehemence, ‘with whom I have already talked too much, that scoundrel’s name is – HEEP!'”; David Copperfield), Eliot (“I believe that scoundrel’s been planning all along to ruin my father,’ said Tom, leaping from the vaguest impressions to a definite conclusion. ‘I’ll make him feel for it when I’m a man. Mind you never speak to Philip again'”; The Mill on the Floss), Austen (“Such a scoundrel of a fellow! such a deceitful dog!”, Sense and Sensibility)… really, scoundrels are the motor of the genre.

Thackeray pretty much defined the type in Vanity Fair: “‘Why did you ask that scoundrel, Rawdon Crawley, to dine?’ said the Rector to his lady, as they were walking home through the park. ‘I don’t want the fellow. He looks down upon us country people as so many blackamoors. He’s never content unless he gets my yellow-sealed wine, which costs me ten shillings a bottle, hang him! Besides, he’s such an infernal character – he’s a gambler – he’s a drunkard – he’s a profligate in every way. He shot a man in a duel – he’s over head and ears in debt, and he’s robbed me and mine of the best part of Miss Crawley’s fortune.'”

But scoundrels can have a certain charm, too, and a certain comedy potential. Witness their presence in recent popular entertainment: the movies Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1998) and School for Scoundrels (2006) and the new comedy-drama TV series Scoundrels. And, after all, the word is such fun to say, like a big bite out of the air, or a lusty, louche “rrowr!”

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polygyny

Posted on June 14, 2010 | 1 comment

This word has a little bit of irony in it. The Y chromosome is the male chromosome, and polygyny has three Y’s, but polygyny means having multiple women – specifically multiple wives. Perhaps it’s because a guy who marries multiple women is sure to find himself saying “Why, why, why?” (It may be because he’s been jailed for it, or it may just be that they all want to go on vacation at the same time to completely different places.) You could see the y‘s as funnels, and the guy’s life is going down the drain – hell hath not too many furies like a woman two-timed, but one of the furies greater might be that of a woman three-timed, four-timed, or what have you.

It may be more appropriate that this word has a bit of an echo of religion, since a man’s practice of polygyny is usually dictated by what religion he adheres to. It also has a bit of a sound of appalling, but no more than any other poly word has. It also rhymes with aborigine, which works OK in that Australian Aborigines have a cultural history (if not present) of polygyny, though of course they’re far from the only ones. It also sounds like pigeon, which again is ironic, as most pigeons bond in pairs for life.

The more common term used for multiple marriage is polygamy, but that actually refers to any multiple marriage – a woman could have multiple husbands and be a polygamist; where the law allows people of the same sex to marry, any combination of sexes would still be polygamy as long as a given person is married to more than one other person. But usually the terms polygamy and polygyny are used in reference to societies where the practice is accepted; in cultures such as ours where it’s illegal, you’re more likely to hear of bigamy, in part because it’s exponentially more difficult to hide each additional marriage, and in part just because of the flavour common usage has given the words.

There is also a word for having multiple husbands, by the way: polyandry. It is less often seen, perhaps because a woman only has so much time and a lot of it is eaten up by cleaning up after even one man, let alone several, but probably more likely for various other biological and cultural factors that deserve more space than I can reasonably give here. William James is credited with one speculative proposal: “Higgamus, hoggamus, woman’s monogamous – hoggamus, higgamus, man is polygamous.”

Polyandry differs from polygyny and polygamy in an important way: while the latter two are secundus paeons, the former is a ditrochee. By which I mean that the latter two have one stress, on the second syllable (like impossible and adorable and impeccable and a Cadillac and so on), whereas polyandry has two, a simple two-beat rhythm, as though it were a woman’s name: “This is Polly Andry, and these are her husbands!”

The g in polygyny, by the way, has the same sound as the g‘s in frigid and rigid and syzygy. That’s a deviation from the source, of course: in Classical Greek, it was always the sound you hear in polygamy. I find the alveopalatal affricate (as in polygyny) has a more delicate sound than the velar stop (as in polygamy), and it does give the word an additional echo of Ginny, which might be the name of the second wife (the first being Polly, of course).

You probably know well enough that the poly in these words means “many”. The gyn, for its part, may look very familiar by itself as the beginning of gynecologist (which has the velar stop [g], just to keep you dizzy). The andr shows up in various references to men, as for instance on a sign you might see in a hospital near the gynecology sign: andrology. (It also appears in android.) The gam just means you’re game. No it doesn’t! Well, it does, but that’s not the origin; it comes from a Greek word, gamos, meaning “marriage”.

As for the newer term polyamory, by the way (which really does sound like a person’s name, and may well be, Amory being a real surname), it’s macaronic: it mixes Greek and Latin, amory coming from the Latin for “love”. The term is generally used by people who want to have multiple boyfriends or girlfriends; it’s not restricted to spouses. The term was first documented in the early 1990s. Polygyny, on the other hand, dates from the 18th century, polyandry from the 16th, and polygamy also from the 16th century. The words, I mean; the practices have been well established in some cultures for rather longer, and only in some cases are fading.

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faze

Posted on June 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

One of my early encounters with Shakespeare was sitting down and trying to read the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew. I was young enough that I didn’t know what the heck a shrew was, so you can imagine my state of comprehension when I read the first words: “I’ll feeze you, in faith.”

Feeze. Well, that beat me. I was fazed.

Right on both counts, in fact. I’ll feeze you at that time could mean “I’ll beat you”; it could also mean more generally “I’ll settle your hash.” Before that, it meant “frighten”; before that, “impel, drive”. It’s a good old Germanic word, attested all the way back to the 9th century.

And feeze appeared in the American dialect, by the 19th century, as faze, meaning “disturb” or “discompose”. We generally use it now in the negative sense: “It didn’t faze him”; “He was unfazed.” By a long measure the most common morpheme immediately preceding faze is n’t – as in didn’t, wasn’t, doesn’t, and so on. Sometimes between the negative and faze will come seem to or seems to: “Nothing seems to faze him” – or, more guardedly, “Hardly anything seems to faze him.”

However, this phrasing is often fazed by misconjecture that puts it out of phase, or should I say puts phase into it. Many people think that this faze is phase (and undoubtedly at least a few think faze is an uneducated misspelling of phase). But phase actually comes from Greek (the ph is a bit of a clue), from phasis meaning “phase of the moon” or, more generally, “appearance”, in turn derived from the verb phanein “show, cause to appear”, which is the root of epiphany as well.

And indeed I wouldn’t mind if those who rendered faze as phase had an epiphany and phased out their misconstrual. But it is true that faze can look, ironically, a little foreign. It puts me in mind of Fhazisi, a Georgian (as in the Caucasus) singing group; it also tickles my sense a little as like a dialectal Italian word, with a distinct taste of Fazi Battaglia, an Italian winemaker best known for their green amphora-shaped bottles of verdicchio. It does have a taste of fuzz, and even, it occurs, slightly of furze (which means “gorse”, of course). It has the hotness of blaze and (in a looser burn sense) raze. But mainly it has that electric razor buzz [z] – and that static hiss [f].

Funny, isn’t it, how a simple voicing of the fricative – [z] rather than [s] – and a difference between a curved c and an angular z can make two words seem so different. Perhaps it’s because when you’re fazed you can lose face. You can be tamed, like a shrew: left to wheeze and perhaps to freeze. And that’s nothing to shake a spear at.

Thanks to “Upstater,” a commenter on this blog, for suggesting faze.

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vuvuzela

Posted on June 12, 2010 | 4 comments

This word was first brought to my attention today. I was assured that if I didn’t know what it meant yet, I would by the time the World Cup was over. That was a bit of a hint. I assumed it wasn’t the name of a star player, and I knew it wasn’t the name of a country (Venezuela does come close). Once I knew it had to do with noise, it seemed possible it might be a sort of ululation with the uvula. But in fact the only body part directly involved is not one the name of which resembles vuvuzela.

I could fantasize that it’s the name of some South African version of Godzilla, and in one way there’s some validity: it has considerable destructive force with its sound (indeed, it is blown to “kill off” the opponents). But that’s the sound in the ensemble, which is that of hundreds or thousands of them being blown full blast in the last quarter of a game. And what is that sound? Well, it’s the sound of a metre-long cheap plastic horn. It’s not like the tooters used in North America for sports and parties, which tend to have reeds embedded; the vuvuzela is simply a horn like other horns in that it channels a Bronx cheer into an ear-splitting blast. Very rapidly, the lips vibrate together-apart-together-apart vuvu, and the noise is like a very loud vuvu indeed.

And will it surprise you that this vuvu is a Zulu vuvu? Vuvuzela means “making a vuvu noise” or, more exactly, “vuvu-ing”. It happens that it also is thought to be related to township slang for “shower”, perhaps because it looks a bit like a shower head, but it may be that the shower head is called what it is because it looks like a vuvuzela. It is apparently coincidence that the Zulu root for the verb “swell” is -vuvuka. Just as well: that’s not the “swell” of “swell toy!” or even of “the music swells”; it’s the “swell” your eye does when someone has hit it.

More likely your ear. But whatever. South Africans from Tutu to Mandela are familiar with the vuvuzela. Some go out of their way to avoid it. It has been suggested that it is rooted in the toot of a kudu horn. But it is not some ancient tribal instrument; it was invented somewhere in the last 40 years, originally made of metal, and really only started to be popular in the 1990s; the now-ubiquitous plastic versions, cheap and not readily weaponizable, made in colours to correspond to one’s preferred team, started being mass-produced in 2001. And now it’s already a dominating presence at South African football matches.

So, kudu or no kudu, the vuvu is a lulu when it comes to its toot-toot-tooting, capable of producing hearing damage. Commentators tend to hate it, as it drowns them out; even the players find it can make communication difficult. But there it is: a brand-new deeply rooted tradition of exuberant communication that makes communication nearly impossible. Welcome to South Africa! Voulez-vous? Ngicela!*

Thanks to Amy Toffelmire for telling me about the vuvuzela. Read more about it at blog.medbroadcast.com/?p=6490 and www.southafrica.info/2010/vuvuzela.htm, among other places.

*Ngicela: “please” in Zulu. The ngi is like the middle of “sing geek” and the c is a click made with the tip of the tongue as in “tsk”. As is usual in Zulu, the vowel in the second-last syllable is longer.

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poop

Posted on June 10, 2010 | Leave a comment

Imagine an open mouth: o. Now imagine a hand in front of it: p. Start with the hand there, take it away, put it back: poop. In place of the hand, just close your lips: closed, open, closed. If you blow out, you make a little blast of a whistle; if you vocalize while the mouth is open, you may a sound like a steam horn. Both of these are sounds associated with ships.

And so is the poop deck. But the poop deck does not take its name from the sounds. Nor does it take its name from the deposits left by seagulls. Rather, that word poop comes, by way of French, from Latin puppis, which means “the stern of a ship” – which is where the poop deck is.

So, for those who were hoping for some more excremental explanation, I hate to be the party pooper, but that’s the real poop on it. That it is the back end of the ship is happenstance, not a relation to other back-end work. But of course there’s lots more poop to give you the scoop on.

For starts, there’s the balcony in the mess hall at West Point Military Academy, which is called the poop deck, and from which important announcements are made. Apparently on the basis of this, the term originating at West Point for an information sheet is poop sheet (which really does sound vulgar in its way, doesn’t it?). And from poop sheet comes poop meaning “information”.

Aside from that, however, other uses of poop tend to trace back to a more imitative source. It can’t be hard to imagine poop being spontaneously used to refer to a passage of wind out not the mouth but the other end of the digestive tract. And this simple origin has had some extended meanings dumped on it. Perhaps most common is that substance that parents of infants must deal with in great quantity (and can’t seem to stop talking about – parent to parent, the down-and-dirty on the down-and-dirty, i.e., the poop on the poop).

Also evidently from that is the term meaning “fool” or “bore”, which might come from nincompoop, but nincompoop appears to get its poop from guess where. This poop lately travels a lot with old, and that phrase no doubt got a boost from On Golden Pond, in which Ethel Thayer (“Thoundth like I’m lithping, doethn’t it?”) – played by Katharine Hepburn – regularly calls her husband Norman (Henry Fonda) you old poop.

And then there is poop meaning “exhaust” (I mean the verb!), usually showing up as a past participle: “I’m pooped.” This poop might be related to poof – so another imitative or expressive usage – or it might be related again to the same poop as shows up near diaper. Or both. And from this poop of exhaust (what an image) may come party pooper – or that may just come straight from the source by the backdoor. As it were.

Naturally, poop shows up all over the place. (Ew.) When I was a kid, we had these little funny rubber figures with parachutes attached, called Poopatroopers. Poop is indeed popular among children, and apparently is not a word for adults; when I try to search it on clusty.com (now called yippy.com), I get the top news stories (the poop of the day!) with the notice “The term ‘poop’ has been removed from your query because the adult filter is on.” How did it know I was an adult?*

OK, well, and are we almost dung? I mean done? Indeed. The evening draws to its perigee, so blow out the candle – and what mouth gesture do you make in doing so? It’s no riddle of the sphincter. I mean sphinx. Nighty-night, toodle-oo, poop-poop-pe-doo.

Thanks to Elaine Freedman for suggesting poop, as in the ship deck.

*It would seem that Yippy, though useful for its clustering (hence the older name Clusty), turns out to be a very overtly conservative service. I find now that it says unabashedly that it censors anything not in line with what are clearly triumphalist neo-conservative values; therefore, I must disendorse it, and although it has been useful for clustering results, I cannot support it. Readers take note: if you disagree with a search engine that states that it censors “anti-Conservative views or opinions” and declares that “conservative values will bring us our victory in the market place,” you may find yourself more than a little conflicted when using Yippy.com. If, on the other hand, you feel that its positions match yours, you will be quite happy using it. Of course you are also still free to read my postings if you so wish, no matter what your views. Some of them probably are not findable through Yippy.com, though. You also may not find this little capper, to finish with a smile: icanhascheezburger.com/2009/04/26/funny-pictures-in-cow-poop/.

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delphin

Posted on June 10, 2010 | 3 comments

How does a dauphin deftly move a delphinium from Delft to Delphi? On a dolphin, of course.

OK, no, this is not some bizarre form of delf-punishment. (Or perhaps it is, but still…) And it is not without porpoise. I mean purpose. It just happens that delphin is one word that has swum around quite a bit.

Delphin? Indeed. No, it’s not a dolphin with its eye half-closed (e rather than o). Or, well, it is, but it’s also one with its eyes open, or both closed, or… Delphin is simply the original form of dolphin; it’s the Greek etymon as well as an uncommon English word, and it means, yes, that famous cetacean, the marine mammal family that includes bottlenoses and orcas (yes, that’s right, “killer whales” are dolphins). Flipper.

And just as the family of dolphins includes quite a variety of flipping critters, so, too, does the family of delphin involve quite a flippin’ few words. Delphinium, the flower also known as larkspur, apparently appears like a dolphin when the flower is opening. The dauphin, the eldest son of the king of France, took his designation from what was originally the given name of one person – who was named after the critter. Delphi, home of the Greek oracle, may have been named after the dolphin form in which Apollo first arrived at the place (quite the task given that it’s in the mountains), and/or it may have taken its name from the Greek for “womb”, delphys, which in its turn is also the source for Greek delphin (it was seen as a fish with a womb, it seems). And Delft? Ah, sorry, had to delve elsewhere for that one: it’s from the Dutch for “canal”, which comes from a word for “dig” cognate with, yes, delve.

I may as well also say that dolphins are not related to Philadephia (though undoubtedly this resemblance is why the word delphin causes me to think of cream cheese). Oh, there is an etymological relation; the adelph in the city name comes from Greek adelphos “brother”, which is formed from morphemes for “same” and “womb”. But don’t go to Philly looking for dolphins. May I suggest Miami for that purpose.

There are several other words that begin with delphin, too: delphinate, a salt of delphinic acid, and also a variant of dauphinate, the jurisdiction of a dauphin; delphinic acid, inactive valeric acid, discovered in dolphin-oil; delphine, another word for delphinium, for delphin, or for delphinine; delphinine, adjective, belonging to the dolphin family, or noun, a highly poisonous alkaloid derived from the delphinium; delphinestrian, one who rides a dolphin (of course); delphinidin, an anthocyanidin antioxidant that is an important pigment in cranberries, concord grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, pomegranates, and flowers, including larkspur (naturally); delphinite, an obsolete name for the mineral epidote; delphinoid, like a dolphin; delphinoidine, an alkaloid derived from (what else) the larkspur (you do remember that larkspur equals delphinium, yes?); and Delphinus, a Latin name for a dolphin-shaped constellation.

So, then, you may be wondering what’s with this move from delphin to dolphin. Was the word just too stuffed full? Well, the Latin delphinus (the Greek plus an us) came over time to be dalphinus (an unsurprising vowel shift that I hear even now from young Canadian women, among others), and this led to French daulphin, whence both dauphin and the English daulphyne, which simplified in spelling to modern dolphin. All English’s delphin forms have simply gone straight back to the Greek.

But do the different words, delphin and dolphin, give you a different aesthetic sense of this animal? I feel dolphin as colder and harder, and it brings echoes of doll, golf, and Adolph; delphin is softer and smoother for me (and spreadable, of course), and echoes elfin and self and perhaps Delsey (makers of suitcases), an may be echoed in assorted names, even perhaps Elaine Phillips, who just happens to have suggested tasting this word in the first place.

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chum

Posted on June 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

Heading towards the kitchen in Domus Logogustationis, I spied Maury sitting with his head in his hands. “Why so glum, chum?”

Maury looked up. Actually, he looked rather down, but he looked up at me when I spoke.

“I had an old chum for lunch.”

Normally I would launch into the obvious pun, but Maury looked like such a chump, I let it slide. “An old school chum?”

“Oh, I think this chum was old school, yes, probably. Whatever school it belonged to would have been rather old, I’m sure.”

Pause. “I… You what?” I looked again at Maury, and realized that he looked perhaps a little more peaked than piqued. “Oh. Some dodgy salmon?”

“I am wondering,” Maury said, “whether, when the menu said chum, it actually meant fish refuse, shark bait.”

“Well, where did you have it?”

“The Spa Diner.”

“Oh, yes, west on Queens Quay, isn’t it. I ate there once. The staff seemed friendly.”

“Oh,” Maury said wanly, “my waiter was certainly chumming around. It actually seemed a bit much as a chumbled my chunks of chum.” (Chumble means “nibble” or perhaps “munch” – Maury did not say chunder, but he looked as though that might be next.) “The atmosphere was less than elegant. They had CHUM on the radio.” (That’s a venerable Toronto hit radio station.)

“You should have gone to the Cambodian place,” I said. “Then you might have heard Chum Ngek.” (A master of Cambodian classical music: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoMc4BJAoho)

“And not eaten yecchy chum neck.” Maury pulled a little face and looked a whiter shade of pale. “An evil coincidence it was that a nice food fish came to have the same name as a rather variegated mess of fish trash.”

“Coincidence indeed,” I said, “especially given that chum meaning ‘fish refuse’ or ‘shark bait’ may have come from Scots chum meaning ‘food’, while chum meaning ‘spotted salmon’ comes from a Chinook word meaning ‘spotted’ or ‘variegated’.”

“At least I didn’t eat an old chamber-mate,” Maury said, adverting to the origin of the chum that means “friend”.

“Well,” I said, turning towards the fridge, wherein a bottle of fizzy awaited my attention, “would you like some champers?”

Maury made a faint wave. “In a bit, perhaps. At the moment I have a chummy ache.”

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rue

Posted on June 8, 2010 | 6 comments

There’s fennel for you, and columbines:
there’s rue for you; and here’s some for me:
we may call it herb-grace o’ Sundays:
O you must wear your rue with a difference…

So said Ophelia, expressing a rueful madness not long before she drowned herself, an act that Hamlet in turn rued.

Ah, indeed, one does rue pain, and rue may cause pain, too: I don’t mean the rue that is the rarely used noun form of the verb, but the rue that refers to the evergreen shrub of which Ophelia spoke. It may have been used for medicinal purposes, but consumption of rue oil can cause stomach cramping, convulsions, even death, and its application to the skin can cause blistering in the sun.

I also refer to the rue and pain one may find in France and western Switzerland. I was walking down the street in Montreux once when a couple of American tourists asked me where they could find “grand rue,” said just as if they meant a great sorrow, a pronunciation that caused me some pain. I asked them, for clarity, “Grande Rue?” saying it as French, and they repeated again – as though correcting me – in their nasal American way, “grand rue.” I indicated the direction and walked on down my own rue to procure some of the more agreeable pain – the sort made in a boulangerie (or at the very least to find a nice gravy made with a roux of flour and butter). Indeed, I wanted to make like a grand ’roo and hop away from the scene of mispronunciation as fast as I could. Or call in Lash LaRue, a mid-century actor in westerns known for his skill with the bullwhip. I would even have settled for Rue McClanahan, though she is not the most violent of femmes.

One way or the other, I would have liked to see them covered with rue – not necessarily for a blister in the sun; simple regret would have been sufficient. For one may be covered with rue, as Jim Taylor (who requested this tasting) recently said to an acquaintance. If one is thus well rued, one may well have rued it, but it will at least not be rude, will it? But may one become inured to being in rue?

Well, not in the Rue Morgue, I’m sure – a common collocate of rue, but obviously of the French rue. Let us take a different route: one to the past. This word rue meaning “regret, feel remorse, pity” is a grand old Germanic word, manifest in Old English as hréow (noun) and hréowan (verb). It was at first an impersonal verb: in modern English, that would be of the sort it rues me (seem is still one such – it seems to me – and think‘s impersonal origin survives in methinks). But what could be more personal, really, than rue? So now we say not it rues me but rather I rue it. But, then, what do I rue? Likely, I rue the day or rue the hour. (Rue day? Rude, eh?) One may even simply rue, intransitively.

To get back on route, the other rue, for the plant, comes from Latin ruta, from Greek ruté. But in English the plant has long been associated with the sense of the Germanic rue. In Lithuania, on the other hand, where it is the national herb, it is associated with young girls and maidenhood. Ah, it seems almost to rue maidenhood itself, for one half-kisses empty air when saying it. And so may a young lady go regretfully to an early, if herbal, end: if she miss a kiss, then “there’s rue for you, and here’s some for me.”

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