Monthly Archives: July 2010

scree

Posted on July 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

Say you’re walking along the side of a mountain, perhaps below a cliff face – let’s say, for example, the Eiger, in Switzerland. Rocks tend to fall off cliffs and accumulate at the base, resulting in a steep slope of loose rocks. Now, because you’re below the cliff, you may think you can’t fall. But you take a step, and some rocks slip. You take another, and more slip, and soon with every stride you are sliding faster and faster down, down, down, unable to stop, and your voyage culminates in a scream that falls away… a lesson learned too hard.

Oo. How unpleasant. Well, that’s scree for you: if the word seems like scream falling away at the end, it’s just fitting. It has that /skr/ onset, too, often used for loose or rough things (scrap, scrabble, scramble, scribble, scratch, scrub). And these loose, rough rocks do tend to slide, which is so well set forth with the /i:/ (“EEEeeeee…”).

Scree isn’t found only at the foot of a cliff – it can also be left behind by glaciers, for instance – but it is very often associated with the word talus, which means “detritus at the foot of a cliff or similar”. It’s loose rocks on a slope. It’s inviting to think of the letters in scree as resembling so much scree, but the truth is that the rocks in scree are often rather angular, having gotten where and how they are by breaking.

Scree is a word that comes to us from Old Norse – specifically skriða “landslide” (of which we can feel sure there are plenty in Norway’s fjords). Most likely it came to English in the plural, and the dental fricative slipped out before the final alveolar fricative (like saying clothes as “cloze”), to make screes, and that backformed to the singular – the /z/ slipped away too. Skriða for its part came from a Germanic word meaning “slide” or “glide” that came through to modern German as schreiten, “stride”.

There are a couple of other common collocations with scree, by the way: scree plot and scree test. This is not the land that scree is on or the act of nudging scree to check its stability; rather, these terms refer to something one can do in statistical analysis: for each eigenvalue, plot its contribution to the overall variance, from greatest to least. The result will look like a steep slope with a point where it becomes a shallow slope, sort of like the foot of a cliff with a scree slope. That’s a scree plot. The scree test is the act of looking at the scree plot and deciding where the slope shallows out (the “elbow”) and declaring the eigenvalues on the steep side to be important and the rest to be relatively unimportant. So, for example, in the factors causing you to go for a slide down the slope, the instability of the slope and your own obliviousness may make a significant contribution, and your clothes and the temperature may not make that much of a difference, perhaps.

And what’s an eigenvalue? Well, aside from saying that eigen is German for “characteristic” (and “own”, as in “my own”) and that it may have an etymological relation to Eiger, I think I would do best to direct the interested to further self-directed explorations. A warning, though: it’s a bit of a steep learning curve.

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chuckwagon

Posted on July 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

Ah, the Calgary Stampede. It has all the things that similar events from county fairs to the Canadian National Exhibition have: various booths set up selling souvenirs and household goods; music performances and variety shows, including dogs doing various clever things; and a midway, whereon, if you are not on one of the rides, you are most likely loading up with food from one of the many portable stands or tents. It might be something deep-fried, or it might be some cheap cut of beef… eat it out of a paper wrapper or off a plate and then chuck the remains in a garbage can.

But the Stampede also has rodeo events. One of its marquee events is the chuckwagon races. Not just any wagons, you understand: chuckwagons. So along with the lumbering, trundling sound of wagon, you get the wooden (woodchuck?), choppy sound of chuck. It has nothing to do with chukker, one of the periods of a polo game, even though chukker comes from Sanskrit for “wheel” and wagons have wheels. And there’s also nothing to do with the act of chucking. To the average Stampede-goer, the chuck in chuckwagon is sort of like Jack – it seems like some guy’s name used just as a meaningless intensifier or filler, or somehow just there and you don’t know why: as in jackknife and jackfruit, the chuck in chukwagon may seem to mean jack squat.

But if you watch the race, you might observe that before the wagons start to go, there are some guys who have to load up a bunch of stuff into the wagon at the beginning (I won’t say they chuck it in, because there’s a penalty for any bit that falls out) and then ride around the course with the wagon. What is that stuff? Well, it’s a tent with poles and a stove. Refugees from the midway? Nope, necessary accoutrements.

You see, a chuckwagon is – or, more generally, was – a food wagon, a chow cart. When you have people travelling, for instance cowboys out on the range, the job of feeding them is an important one, and the guy who drove the wagon with the stove and supplies was a pretty important dude. He would often fill other tasks as well, such as carrying the cash. (My wife tells me that in her days with travelling ice shows, the guy who ran the refreshment cart backstage was a similarly important figure.) The wagon he drove had a tent that would be set up on the end, and a stove that could be loaded and unloaded. And from there he would serve the cowboys their chuck.

So, yes, chuck meant food. And I’m just going to pretend you’re not thinking it got its name from being the reverse of upchuck. In fact, it most likely comes from chock, as in a lump or wedge of something (chocks are used to keep airplane wheels from rolling when the plane is parked, for instance). It may or may not have come by way of chuck meaning the cut of beef between the neck and the shoulder blade, which is modified from chock.

So the wagon with the chuck was the chuck wagon. Now it’s normally written closed up, chuckwagon. And while there are chuckwagon cook-off competitions, the chuckwagons used in the races are not chock full of food. More’s the pity – as already mentioned, the Stampede is a great place for fast food.

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rodeo

Posted on July 14, 2010 | 1 comment

Know what word’s most often seen out with rodeo?

Drive. By a country mile.

Now, if you’re thinking, “Wait, you don’t drive in a rodeo,” well, you’re right. You don’t. You shop. And not in. On. Rodeo Drive.

It’s in Beverly Hills.

They say it “ro-day-o.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Ain’t that the most citified, prettified thing? I mean, OK, yeah, the word rodeo comes from Spanish (from rodear, “go round” – as in “round up”), and in Spanish they pronounce it “ro-day-o.” But come on. Just try saying it that way in Calgary. Or, rather, don’t. It would be like going to the icefields and saying glacier like “gla-zeer.” It’s “roady-o.”

And most of the other things that go with rodeo go with the real kind of rodeo: clown, cowboy, rider, circuit, queen…

Kinda funny, isn’t it, that the one that sounds like road is the one that does not go with drive? But never you mind that. When you say it that way, it rhymes the /o/s, and it gives a kind of yodeling, coyote-howling sonority, a sound that you can hold on the end and trail off as your voice slides down into the gravel. And if it sounds like road, well, it sounds like rode, too, and that’s the past tense of ride, and that’s what you do in a rodeo: ride.

And how ’bout that drive? Well, you could have a cattle drive, that would be something. But most likely you’ll drive to get to the rodeo. Oh yeah, in a pickup truck, and the horse in a trailer, if you’re bringing one. And if you’re going to a great big rodeo like the one at the Calgary Stampede, well, you’re driving into the middle of a city of about a million people, and, y’know, things can get kinda prettified there, too, with those white hats and all that stuff.

But it’s still a “roady-o.” Don’t give me that “ro-day-o.” Not unless you’re singin’ that banana boat song. Or speakin’ Spanish. Y’hear?

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yeehaw

Posted on July 13, 2010 | 11 comments

There’s hardly a better way to say “Things are startin’ to get mighty western” than just to shout “Yeeeeehaww!” And such a good shout it is – it may be strongly reminiscent of the braying of a donkey, but that’s just because donkeys know about it too (but can’t quite get the start of it or the intonation right). Listen, pardner, it’s like one a them oil wells settin’ to blow a gusher an’ then doin’ it. You got the build-up, yee, with the pitch a-risin’ and the strain a-growin’, and then it just goes, haw, wide open as the Alberta prairie, fallin’ steeply like a plunge down the side of a foothill or a buffalo jump, echoin’ across the mountainside. Yep, ya jut yer jaw an’ then ya open yer mouth wide, like you’re darin’ a dentist to take a try. It’s just so much more primal than, say, exultemus.

Of course, though I got to know the term well enough when I was growing up in southern Alberta – especially around Stampede time – the term’s not from Alberta. Oh no, it’s from the States. And it’s from someplace even more western than Alberta. What’s more west than Alberta? Well, Hollywood, for one.

Yep, hate to break this to you, but cowboys of the 19th and early 20th centuries weren’t shouting yeehaw as they rode out after the cattle, and they weren’t shouting yeehaw at the square dance, either. Aside from possible occasions of some long-ago speaker ordering his team of horses to turn left (“Ye haw!” – “right-left” to a team of horses would be gee-haw, but there’s no apparent link with yeehaw), nobody was shouting yeehaw it until some guys in Hollywood invented it in the mid-20th century… just like the fast draw (yep, that too, invented by a Hollywood stuntman… at Knott’s Berry Farm, in fact).

There are a couple of places yeehaw is thought to have cropped up first. One is the 1948 John Wayne movie Red River – see the trailer at www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index/?cid=12520. You can hear the cowboys shouting, though none of them is really making a clear yeehaw. Another possible vector has been suggested by linguist Jonathan Lighter, who notes that when Speedy Gonzales – yes, that cartoon Mexican mouse – goes zipping down the road, along with andale and arriba and yip-a, he shouts yeehah. And Speedy Gonzales has been around since the 1950s, becoming really popular in the 1960s.

No doubt various other popular entertainments jumped on the chuckwagon, I mean bandwagon, as well. I think most of my exposure to yeehaw has been on TV shows. But no matter how you get around it, it’s an entertainment word – came from entertainment, which is always self-conscious, and has passed into culture as a self-conscious westernism. And often enough now as a sarcastic expression feigning enthusiasm (and meaning “ho-hum”): “Well, yee-haw.”

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lasso

Posted on July 11, 2010 | 1 comment

Have you seen that lass, Sue?
That lass who lassoed you?
Lassoed you with her leather and her lace?
The lace that laced her bodice,
And, just ’cuz she was modest,
That lace that hid her pretty little face?

Oh, I’ve seen her, alright –
I saw her just last night,
After a hard day riding on the range.
I was lassoing and roping,
And came back really hoping,
But I found that she was acting kinda strange.

Oh, I hugged her and I kissed her,
And told her that I missed her,
And said I’d go and lasso up some chow,
But she said she’d be alright,
And then she said good night,
And that she felt real tired anyhow.

I said it was a loss,
And I was feeling kind of cross,
But then I heard a noise under the bed.
I looked and saw a man,
And said, “Come out if you can,”
And then I shot that rascal in the head.

So now I’m on the run –
Shoulda used my rope, not gun,
But hindsight, as they say, is no damn use.
The sheriff’s on my tail,
So I’d better hit the trail
’Fore lace and lasso lead me to a noose.

Ah, yep, the old west, where men rode hard with their lassos, and the lasses who lived in the towns snared them with their lace and their laces. But lasso and lace will always lead you to a noose. And that’s not some moralism: it’s etymology.

I won’t keep you in suspense. Lasso comes from Spanish lazo, which, like the word lace, comes from Old French laz, which comes (probably by way of an intermediate lacium) from Latin laqueum, which means “noose”. The connection? Well, it should be obvious enough for lasso, which is a kind of noose you throw. For lace, the kind that’s on your shoes came first, with its loops; the decorative kind with many tiny loops came after. So that rough-and-rugged cowboy tool and that soft feminine accoutrement both use words derived from a word for a rope loop – of the kind that can keep you in a most unpleasant suspense.

The shift from a “lass-oh” pronunciation to a “lass-oo” pronunciation came in the US. The British kept saying it the older way until well into the 20th century. Why did the American cowboys change it to “lass-oo“? Well, I don’t rightly know, but I am entertained by the (probably not accurate) notion that that way of saying it is more like the act of using one: the “lass” like the hissing sound it makes swinging near your ear, and the “oo” like throwing it – we know that that “oo” sound has a certain ballistic flavour, and putting the stress on it matches its being the main muscle thrust and the point of the action. Certainly the American way lends itself better to being shouted.

Also, the British way of saying it makes it identical to the last name of the Renaissance composer Orlando di Lasso. And since, as we know, cowboys like to talk about Renassiance madrigals, there was a real risk of confusion.

Well, come on. We know they like poetry, anyway. Is it really such a stretch?

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rambutan

Posted on July 9, 2010 | 2 comments

Oh, what an impressive-looking word this is. If you meet it never having seen it before, perhaps mentioned on a menu in a Vietnamese restaurant, you may imagine a sound like a taiko drum: a roll into a loud ram, off-beat bu, and sharper tan echoing away. Something aggressive like labdanum!

But if you look it up, you’ll find that the stress is on the second syllable. Well, that changes a lot, especially when you recognize that the last syllable is reduced in English to be like the end of tootin’. But you still have something that sounds like “ram boot in” (or, really, “ram bootin'”) – or, in England, “ram beaut in” – with that ram and, if you say it that way, the kicking sense of boot.

But actually, there’s nothing particularly rammish about a rambutan, nor any bootlikeness. And most people wouldn’t say it’s a beaut. Rather, try the echo of Rasputin (the common anglicized pronunciation). One thing you very likely know about Grigori Rasputin, if you know anything, is that he was hairy. And rambut, as it happens, is Malay for “hair”. In fact, rambutan is Malay for “hairy”. But a rambutan is not a hairy person. Rather, it’s a hairy fruit.

You might have seen them in an East Asian grocery store, perhaps. They’re related to lychees. They’re a couple of inches wide, they’re red, and they’re hairy. (There are also slightly smaller yellow ones.) Not exactly a thunderous, massive, hard, or imposing sight.

But they are a striking sight. They’re red, after all, and they have wild red hair, all around, like bedhead with gel: the hairs are thick ones. They’re reminiscent of Animal from the Muppet Show. You know, the crazy drummer with the wild red hair? Come to think of it, rambutan sounds like one of his crazed utterances – or perhaps even a riff on his drums.

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Streamkeepers of the language

Posted on July 8, 2010 | 4 comments

A few months ago, a fellow editor, Paul Cipywnyk, told me and other members of the Editors’ Association of Canada about something perfectly awful that had happened. Continue reading →

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elfin

Posted on July 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

It’s interesting, really, how a small change in sound can make a large change in meaning. Consider what you would think if I were to say “She had an elfin look.” Now consider what you would think if I were to say “She had an elephant look.” (You might think “Look where?”)

Really, although the spelling of the two words is a bit more different, there’s really no more than a /t/ at the end and an almost-not-there vowel after the /l/ to distinguish them. Well, of course, that vowel also makes a difference in the quality of the /l/ – say the words at normal speed and you’ll see: in elephant the /l/ touches with the tip of the tongue, while the back is not much raised, whereas in elfin the tongue most likely doesn’t touch the tip but it does raise the back. Another effect this has is to make the /f/ feel more like it’s part of the first syllable – as though it’s a snip out of don’t get yourself in trouble.

Well, anyway, this is a compact word with some spindly letters, and that matches two things elves are often thought of as being: spindly – though fat elves have been imagined (Clement Clarke Moore, in his famous poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” a.k.a. “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” calls St. Nick “a right jolly old elf”) – and small. But even apart from Moore’s St. Nick, there has been a trend in envisioning elves as larger types, thanks in large part to J.R.R. Tolkien, whose elves are a long-lived, long and lean humanoid race, suitable for portrayal by Orlando Bloom and Cate Blanchett (man, if there’s not something for you in those two, I don’t know what-all). The result is a bifurcation, as people who aren’t fantasy geeks probably think of Santa’s elves and Disney’s elves, invariably small and with matching voices, while the Tolkien-influenced are more likely to think of them as larger and elegant.

But small or tall, elves have a look, and that look involves angularity of ears, eyes, cheekbones… Call someone elfin and it likely means they have that kind of angular look, perhaps with a bit of impishness and probably a low body-mass index.

Elves also have a certain modus operandi, and that involves sprightliness and spritelikeness, a kind of mischievousness that is a step above kittenishness. All of these qualities would seem to go better with elven than with elfin, given the angularity and vibrancy of the v; the effect of the f is a softening of sound and a featherlike flip of a letter, adding a lesser threat and perhaps greater femininity (ironic if so, since elven was originally the female of elf).

The one thing that is sure about elfin is that it conveys a taste of magic. After all, it can make an elephant disappear with just a slight change in sound… and it can come and go as it pleases: no need to make itself invisible; it can merely switch to Spanish and that’s the end of it: el fin.

Thanks to Elaine Phillips for suggesting elfin.
And thanks to all who send in suggestions. If I haven’t gotten to yours yet, don’t worry, it’s in the queue – I have a backup of several dozen, and of course I like to pick one I have an idea for each day.

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illeist

Posted on July 5, 2010 | 1 comment

Marcus Brattle, my (de)mentee, is at that impressionable, mercurial, protean age where nearly every meeting is a manifestation of some new bent. The latest is hip-hop and dancehall, which sits a bit oddly on his British-accented tongue. At our most recent meeting, as he slouched up to the dining room table in his house wearing an exceedingly baggy T-shirt and idiotically baggy pair of pants, plus a backwards ball cap with – um, yes, I think it indeed is – fake cornrows dangling from it, I had cause to remind myself of the merits of how much his mother is paying me and how good her espresso is.

“Yo yo yo, de Mar-cuss is here.” He flopped down and started rapping through a bit of “Eye Deh A Mi Knee” by Sean Paul: “We keep drilling it and we keep filling it and all this time say we never put a pill in it. The gal them say them love how we still in it, we free willin’ it and we know we can’t stop killin’ it… Ever thrillin’ it, we value and we illin’ it and from we deh ’bout inna them life nothing ill in it…”

“De Mar-cuss has evidently been practising,” I observed drily.

“De Mar-cuss is ill at it. Now he be illin’ it. De Mar-cuss is licensed to ill.”

Cute. A Beastie Boys reference. “De Mar-cuss is certainly a beastly boy,” I said. “He is also become an illeist, I see.”

“De Mar-cuss is de illest!”

“Not illest,” I said. “Illeist. Rhymes with silliest. Resembles it too.” I had a sip of espresso.

Marcus looked at me warily. “Yo, what dat, yo?”

“It’s not yo, and it’s not you. More to the point, it’s not I, it’s he. An illeist is someone who refers to himself – or herself, though guys seem more prone to it in my experience – in the third person. Like Bob Dole, who always said ‘Bob Dole will do this’ and ‘Bob Dole believes that.'”

“Who’s Bob Dole?”

Pause. Mental readjustment on my part. “A guy who ran for president of the US before you were born. Never mind. …It comes from Latin ille, meaning ‘he’. It’s constructed in contrast with egoist, which is formed on ego, meaning ‘I’. It’s a bit ironic, because illeists tend to be egoists, I find.”

“Yo, it sounds important. It sounds famous.”

“It sounds like Bucky Katt from the comic strip Get Fuzzy.”

“Ouch.”

“I actually like that Latin word ille, though,” I said. “The shape of it makes me think of my hair standing on end when I hear an illeist. And if you say it in the proper Latin way, it has a luscious double l – ‘eel lay’.”

“An eel lay? Oh, that’s ill, man.”

“Well, never mind, in English it’s said like ‘illy’.” I knocked back the rest of my espresso.

Marcus smirked. “I have news for you,” he said, back in his usual dialect. “I’m not the illeist. You are.”

I cocked my head skeptically. “How so?”

“That espresso of which you’re so fond. What brand did you think it is?” He gestured towards the kitchen, wherein I could see a can of Illy espresso. “That makes you the Illy-ist.” He launched into a bit of the Beastie Boys: “But I’m chiller with the Miller – cold coolin’ at the bar. I can drink a quart of Monkey and still stand still. What’s the time? – it’s time to get ill.”

I stared at my empty cup. “It is indeed.”

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infrared

Posted on July 5, 2010 | 3 comments

When I was young, I would on occasion see this word, pretty much always in the phrase infrared light. I had the sense that it was a special kind of light that one couldn’t see – light that permeated the dark, even. My feeling of this word was certainly conditioned by how I assumed it was pronounced: as in plus frared, the latter rhyming with flared. It sounded clandestine and hot, and perhaps in some way impaired. Its /r_rd/ had a dark massiveness that reared and roared, the mouth starting pursed, then opening briefly and returning to pursed, like a flash of a searchlight or a glimpse of a star.

And I actually heard of, and knew, infra-red for some time before I realized that this infrared was in fact infra-red written without the hyphen! (How infra dig.) Indeed, the hyphenless spelling generated more heat than light. It was also somewhere around that time that I came to understand that infrared (“below red” – infra being Latin for “below” and red being English for “red”) made a pair with ultraviolet (ultra being Latin for “beyond”).

Indeed, perhaps I should have inferred it sooner. Naturally, the different pronunciation comes with a different feel. It has two syllables in a row with /r/ in the onset, which puts it in the company of such as rarity and rural – but with the /f/ before the /r/ it may be a bit easier to say than rural, since the /r/ after the /f/ can be reduced. As well, the middle syllable is the unstressed one. And it has three short bumps rather than a bump and a flare.

So there is more to this word than meets the eye. And indeed one ought to be careful not to infer too much from the infra. It may be below the visible spectrum, but it’s not a minor thing. You can find it all over the place; it’s anything but rare. You’re emitting it right now. So is the sun; in fact, the majority of the solar radiation that hits the earth is infrared. You can’t see it, but you can feel it. Now, certainly, visible and ultraviolet light also produce heat, but at least visible light generates, for our eyes, more light than heat. But all things that emit heat emit light (in the broad sense referring to all electromagnetic radiation, visible or not) – it just happens that most of the time that light is infrared.

Imagine if we could see infrared with our eyes. No human could lurk in the darkness unseen. We would have an even more clearly defined dichotomy between warm things and cold things. Sunlight would be much brighter. Fevers would be obvious, stoves hard to look at; restaurant servers and coffee cups wouldn’t need to warn you of the heat. And a worthless blaze would be less likely said to give, as Polonius (in Hamlet) says, “more light than heat,” since more heat would of course mean more light.

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