Monthly Archives: August 2010

elope

Posted on August 19, 2010 | 6 comments

Daryl and I, preparing for the monthly Words, Wines, and Whatever tasting event at Domus Logogustationis, walked into the kitchen, where we happened on Maury, seated at the table, wearing one of his wonted looks of weary beleaguerment. He was eating a melon bitterly.

“Why so low, Joe?” Daryl said.

“My aunt eloped,” Maury said.

“Oh dear,” I said. “Your aunt eloped? To play?”

Maury gave me a look that suggested he was considering uttering some seldom-heard discouraging words.

“Wait,” said Daryl. “Your aunt ran off to get married?”

“Well, yes, she did,” Maury said, “when she was much younger. It was a bit of a family scandal, but only a bit. It saved my grandparents a lot of money, and everyone saw it coming. So when she threw her suitcase out the bedroom window, went downstairs and announced she was going to go buy some milk, her father simply said, ‘Get some flowers while you’re at it,’ and gave her a dollar. My mother said, ‘Good luck,’ and off she went to the waiting car.”

Daryl was momentarily nonplussed. “…And this accounts for your current funk?”

“Well, no,” Maury said. “That was just the first in what has shaped up to be a habit.”

“You can elope more than once?”

“I say,” I said. “I think we must taste elope tonight. You didn’t know that ‘run away to get married’ isn’t the original meaning? That sense has only been around since the nineteenth century.”

“Well, it means ‘run away’, anyway, right?” Daryl said. “The lope is the same one as in lope meaning ‘leap’ and is cognate with German laufen, ‘run’.”

“The oldest sense in English,” Maury said, “was ‘run away from one’s husband with one’s lover’. You can tell that that one comes from the fourteenth century – that was the ideal of romantic love back then: romance didn’t lead to marriage, it led away from it.”

“So your aunt ran away from her husband?” Daryl said.

“More than once,” Maury replied. “As I said, it came to be a habit. And then she’d elope from the lover she’d eloped to. Sometimes she eloped to another lover and sometimes back to her husband. He was a patient man. And not an altogether faithful one.”

“So who’d she elope from this time?”

“The nursing home.”

“You can’t elope from a nursing home!” Daryl exclaimed.

“In fact, she took a cantaloupe when she eloped this time. But, yes, you can elope. It’s the term nursing homes use when one of their inmates goes AWOL.”

I chuckled. “It certainly always gives me an image of seniors running away to get married.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Maury said. “They’ve found her in some interesting places on previous elopements.”

“Well,” said Daryl, “what’s knocked you for a loop this time?”

Maury took a bite of his melon and considered his response.

“Hey,” I said, “where’d you get the cantaloupe, anyway? It’s not on the menu.”

Just then a winsome septuagenarian in a nightdress came out of the pantry. “Lovely place you have here,” she said. “Where do you keep the words?”

“Gentlemen,” Maury said to us, “meet my aunt Susan.”

Thanks to Marie-Lynn Hammond for asking for elope.

6 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

maroon

Posted on August 18, 2010 | 1 comment

This word, I must confess, has a particular inescapable tone for me, given it by Bugs Bunny, who, laughing derisively at one nemesis or another, said “What a maroon!”

Now, we may reasonably conclude that this was a mutation of moron, but for me, a certain shade of mauve has been forever stained with the tarnish of foolishness. As has the fact of being stranded on an island.

To make matters worse, at a more recent point (perhaps a decade and a half ago), reading through a cookbook written by a guy with mob connections who included anecdotes along with his recipes, I found that a favourite expletive among the Italian-American circle of the author was marrone.

So, great. Now not just dumb, but venal, violent, et cetera.

Well you may wonder why I would let such chestnuts flavour a word so strongly. But with this word, one simply can’t escape the flavour of chestnuts. After all, marrone and French marron mean “chestnut,” and it is from them that we get the word for the colour. Yes, yes, I know, chestnuts are a rich brown, not what we would normally call maroon in colour – maroon is, as the OED puts it, more like claret (red Bordeaux), which is to say a deeper, richer red than Burgundy. It can also be brownish-crimson, and that would seem to have been its path from nuts to wine. Meanwhile, through the same connection, it also names a kind of firework that makes a loud bang – because a chestnut tossed on a fire will do the same once it’s heated up enough.

But how does it get from nuts to desert islands? Well, it doesn’t quite. It’s more like being on the island and going nuts. That is to say, the word for the stranded person (which in turn became the verb for stranding) started out as a different word and, through modifications, came to look like the word for the chestnut.

That’s right, no crimson tales of swashbuckling here. Actually, the first maroons were not people left behind or stranded by a storm; rather, they were people who wanted to get away. Slaves. Slaves in the West Indies, specifically. To get away from working on plantations, they escaped to inhospitable regions – not desert islands but rather the mountainous interiors of the islands they were already on (and of Suriname). From this, they got the name cimarróns, from Spanish cima “peak, summit” (compare Spanish cimarra “wild place”). And subsequently, from the idea of isolation and exile, came the verb meaning “leave ashore on a desolate island or coast” (Désolé? Désolé, monsieur, nous allons vous quitter.)

So there you have it. Both sides do have the whiff of gunpowder – the slave rebellions and pirates on one side, and the fireworks on the other side – and the crimson to boot. And actually the influence is mutual: cimarrón may have been clipped to be like marron, but it appears that the island sense was first to move to maroon and the chestnut followed after.

There aren’t too many connections between the sea and trees, certainly; I’m put in mind of Tom Lewis’s song “Marching Inland,” which starts as follows:

Lord Nelson knew the perfect way to cure your “mal-de-mer,”
So if you pay attention, his secret I will share,
To any sea-sick sailor he’d give this advice for free:
“If you’re feeling sea-sick, sit underneath a tree!”

Maroon does have a mer sound at the start, too – as in la marée haute, high tide. And with the nautical connection, how could it escape getting the oon ending? Army and navy, they have their poltroons, dragoons, saloons, typhoons, lagoons… not that oon only shows up in that mileu, of course; it also shows up, for instance, in cartoon. And in cartoons.

Thanks to Elaine Freedman for suggesting maroon.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

cwm

Posted on August 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

Cwm? WTF? Ths wrd hs n vwl! What is it, an initialism for “come with me”?

Well, no, at least not in this case. And it does have a vowel. A double one, in fact: a double u, which is w. Which represents a vowel in Welsh. Remember: a vowel is a sound, not a letter. And when you say this word, /kum/, you undeniably say a vowel. The fact that w does not normally represent a vowel in English is quite immaterial. We stole this word from Welsh fair and square. (Well, OK, we didn’t steal it – Welsh still has it and uses it. We copied it. Without altering it.)

Actually, this word does have an apparent English cognate, coomb (also spelled combe and comb in place names – as in Branscombe, Eastcomb, etc.). I say apparent because while it refers to the same sort of thing as cwm, it has a homonym that is derived from Germanic roots and refers to a cup. And it just happens that what cwm names is rather cuplike.

Well, it can be rather cuplike. In the original sense, it’s a valley; more particularly, it’s a hollow at the head of a valley, shaped like half a cup, dug out by a glacier. We have another word for these in English, a word we stole (copied!) from French: cirque. A coomb, for its part, can be a small cuplike hanging valley, or a deep notch valley, or a valley inlet from the sea, depending on which part of England you’re in.

The word cwm itself has a certain roundness to it in the saying, the tongue making a hollow after touching at the back and the lips closing off the hollow; it’s a bit like how you hold your mouth if you have a hot piece of potato in it. The sense of closedness of the roundness gets an added boost from the spelling. As to the form, we can certainly see a cirque in the c, and perhaps a pair of valleys in the w and a hillside in the m. But, you know, it could just as easily be a lamp with a standing screen and some drapes, or what have you.

This cwm, though it names a glacier-made hollow, nonetheless has an inviting quality. Aside from looking like it says “come with me,” it sounds like a northern English pronunciation of come. But who’s saying “come” to whom? My first reaction is that the addressee is Rhonda. Of “Help Me Rhonda”? Well, yeah, no, I guess not. The person who is doing the guiding and inviting is God, and Cwm Rhondda is the name of a tune to which one of the grand old Protestant hymns is set. The usual text begins “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah.” A more direct translation of the original Welsh would be “Lord, lead me through the wilderness.” The first verse of the Welsh is as follows (just because I love looking at Welsh):

Arglwydd, arwain trwy’r anialwch,
Fi, bererin gwael ei wedd,
Nad oes ynof nerth na bywyd
Fel yn gorwedd yn y bedd:
Hollalluog, Hollalluog,
Ydyw’r Un a’m cwyd i’r lan.
Ydyw’r Un a’m cwyd i’r lan.

Not see cwm rhondda in there? No, there’s no valley of the shadow of Rhonda. Actually Cwm Rhondda is the place the tune is from, the Rhondda valley in Wales. The Rhondda valley, a former coal mining area in south Wales, is actually two valleys (w?), one large and one small, merging at the bottom. Rhondda, for its part, means something on the order of “babbling” as in the sound of a brook – or the Rhondda river. (By the way, the rh stands for a voiceless /r/ and the dd stands for the voiced dental fricative we use at the beginning of the.)

The Rhondda valley has quite an interesting social history, being heavily involved in the changing tides of fortune of industrialization (the coal working men), and passing from a strongly Welsh-speaking area to an English-speaking one just in the past century. Its history is not as short and elegant as cwm, nor as glacial as a cirque. I leave it to the interested to look it up further.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

livery

Posted on August 16, 2010 | Leave a comment

There’s a knock on your door. You open it, and there’s a man in uniform holding a package. It’s some high-end steaks you ordered from Japan. You see behind him there’s a horse.

“You came on a horse?” you ask.

“Yes, it’s all part of our delivery,” he says. “But the stable is nearby,” he adds, leaning a bit closer and glancing over his shoulder, as if letting you in on a secret. “Actually we drive the packages to it in a truck.”

You nod knowingly. “A plain white truck, eh?”

“No,” he says with a teeny smirk. “Kinda silvery, in fact. Actually it has our logo on it.”

“D’you drive the truck?”

“No,” he says. “In fact I don’t even drive. I get to the stable by cab.”

“And where does the truck pick up the steaks?”

“At the airport, of course. They’re flown here, air freight.”

“Huh,” you say, taking out your wallet. “Well, what do I owe you for all of that conveyance?”

“Oh, no,” he says, “it’s free delivery.”

So you take the steaks. You thaw one out and grill it. It’s well marbled, but it tastes kinda… livery.

Well, that can’t be a surprise. After all, there was livery all the way along its delivery – found with everything that had a stake in delivering your steaks. The delivery man was wearing livery; the horse was kept in a livery stable; the truck was in livery; the man took a livery cab to work; and the freight airplane, too, was most surely in livery. Verily, there’s no mix-up here!

But, now, how is this word livery delivered to us? Well, originally from Latin liberare “liberate, set free”; that developed into a French verb livrer meaning “hand over” (so, yes, deliver is cognate); what was handed over in this case was provisions – food and clothes to servants, and food to horses. This became our English noun livery. The clothing given to servants ultimately narrowed the sense of livery to “uniform” – which has since broadened to refer to insignia on vehicles: trucks, airplanes, cabs. Meanwhile, a stable that gives food for horses is still a livery stable. And actually since cabs were first drawn by horses, the term livery cab traces back to that livery. Now, of course, the only livery you’ll find with cabs is the insignia, not the nag.

For quite some time I wondered whether this word – which I saw on occasion but generally didn’t hear – was to be pronounced with a “long i” in the first syllable, i.e., a diphthong as in lie. After all, livery can look quite lively, no? And horses are alive. And why would we want a word for regalia to sound like spots seen on old hands? But “short i” it is, rhyming with slivery; if you say livery livery livery et cetera, it can come to sound like relive relive relive after a couple of repetitions.

Is livery flavourful? Well, it gives you the liquid lick of the /l/ and purr of the /r/ along with the lip-biting buzz of the /v/. Its shape starts high and ends low; perhaps the v in the middle is a feed trough or a formal collar. It’s not necessarily a pretty word, but it gets the job done, so I have no beef with it.

Thanks to David Moody for suggesting livery.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

hick

Posted on August 16, 2010 | Leave a comment

Quick – picture a hick. What’s he look like? Chawin’ on a hickory stick, swiggin’ a jug of moonshine (hic!), somewhere out in the boondocks? Or maybe just another country hayseed, watchin’ cows or gawkin’ at city slickers?

At any rate, it’s probably a he – how likely are you to picture a hick chick? But they must have ’em, to make more hicks, right? Well, now, but tell me, what’s your hick’s name? Is it Jebus, or Billy-Ray, or Cooter? No, I’ll tell you what it must be on his birth certificate: Richard.

Well, if he’s the archetypal hick, anyway, it must be. You see, that’s where hick comes from: an old nickname for Richard – matching similar others, such as Hob for Robert and Hodge for Roger. Taken aback by the phonological transformations? Well, we have Dick for Richard, Harry for Henry, Ted for Edward, and Jack for John, so what’s the big surprise? True, this H set of nicknames has dropped out of use in more recent times, but it was common enough (if perhaps somewhat country-ish) in the 16th century, when its general application to country-types seems to have first come about.

This is certainly not the only name to have come to refer to a type. Those who live in and around Durham in England are called Geordies, for instance, from a nickname for George. Irishmen are sometimes called Paddies (but, unlike Geordie, this is rather rude). Cops in some US cities have in the past been called Shamuses due to how many Irishmen there were in the police force. And on and on. Interestingly, although hick really isn’t used as a personal name anymore or for any other competing designation, many people still find country hick worth saying (or writing).

But still, why hick and not, say, hob? Aside from hob having another use (plus the competing taste of hobknob) and hodge being a family name, I’m sure it doesn’t hurt the effect that hick has a short, rough sound, rhyming with stick (and sick and thick) and has that rough, almost inchoate breathing at the start. It also has some vaguer echoes of a more vulgar word. And if you think about terms that have been used to refer to an unsophisticated rural or smalltown location, there are indeed some that make use of such a vulgar term, and also of course some that use hick – such as hick town (the most common collocation of hick). (Interestingly, the use of hick as an adjective seems to be less than 100 years old.)

It is true, mind you, that Hicks is a family name. And so we have at least two towns named Hicksville, which cannot help but be a bit unflattering, I suppose. At least for the three-thousand-some residents of the one in Ohio, which is a 40-minute, 30-mile drive from the nearest city of any note, Fort Wayne, Indiana. You will see, however, that they have a website; you be the judge of whether it helps or hurts the impression: www.hicksvilleusa.com. The residents of the other one may be less concerned about that image, located as they are in the middle of the suburban mega-sprawl of Long Island, about a 45-minute trip on the commuter train from Penn Station – that’s 30 miles, theoretically a 40-minute drive but closer to an hour and a half in heavy traffic.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

moulder

Posted on August 13, 2010 | 2 comments

Do you know the song “John Brown’s Body”? Well, you know the tune, for sure, because Julia Ward Howe wrote some “good words for that stirring tune”: The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Anyway, the older words in the first verse, the John Brown words, go something like this:

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
His soul’s marching on!

Now, of course, if he had been cremated, he’d be smoldering instead, but either way, ashes to ashes and dust to dust return: we’re made of earth and we return to earth.

Which is actually what mouldering is all about. When this fine (or coarse) clay mould of ours is broken, it will decay – and perhaps there will be mould, but with modern practices, probably not – and it will return to soil, which is to mould.

But didn’t I just say there would be no mould? No, no mould, but there will be mould. Ah, you see, not just bodies but words, too, can over time wear down and become indistinguishable. The mould that means that gross stuff that grows on food in your fridge comes from a verb moulen, which is unrelated to the mould that refers to something used to form things – a hollow shape, a model – which is from modulum (so, yes, it’s related to model), and both are unrelated to the original word mould, which refers to loose earth or soil. But almost no one uses mould in the “dirt” sense now, while the two words that merged with it – very likely under its influence – are quite common. Well, never mind, it all comes together in the end.

And moulder with its er suffix is a frequentative verb like flicker and shudder. It means indeed “decay to dust” or “become dirt” or similar, as it is based on that original mould (the one that now seems broken, but not the kind of mould one speaks of breaking). Its sense has broadened a bit, but it has also been influenced by that new mould that has grown on it, so now we think of not just any old decay but that dank, mildewy kind of rotting.

Doesn’t the very word moulder seem kind of moist and dank, or at least like dark, soft soil? With that soft /m/ and the dark and deep /o/ pulling back into the /l/ – that “dark” /l/ that comes after vowels in English, with the back of the tongue raised. And then, after touching on the /d/, it decays with a slow syllabic /r/. It has a more solid role than mud, and while the m is no louder the move to /o/ can make it longer, as though ruled by om: meditate on these things, find the ur-model of the world. (Perhaps mould is to our world as ylem is to the universe.)

Ah, not such cheery thoughts – dark and deep, but not necessarily lovely. But I have promises to keep, and words to write before I sleep. And whether or not I moulder, I’m older – as are we all.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

ylem

Posted on August 12, 2010 | 3 comments

You know how sometimes when you’re looking at some website there will be an ad showing a female face with four eyes and two mouths and asking you to click to say how many eyes she has? It’s really hard to look at that face, isn’t it – because our minds are made to process faces with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. That’s why we see faces in things that don’t have them.

Well, we may not be biologically programmed to expect certain letters in certain places in words, but we still get used to the way things are in our language, and when an anglophone looks at a word like ylem, the mind may go into the same kind of tizzy as those four-eyed faces cause. Wrong order! Is that supposed to be mely? Or emly? Or what, now?

The proof that this is not inborn is that it was once quite common in English to have words that started with y plus a consonant. The Oxford English Dictionary, not one to remove a word simply because it’s 600 years out of usage, has a decent little list of them. It happens that it was a standard prefix for the past tense: ylent was the word that is now lent (past tense of lend), for instance, and fans of medieval music may know the song Adam lay ybounden (ybounden means bound).

So, in the past, that y signified the past. That rather takes us to the beginning of things, no? Well, no, not for this word, anyway. This word is even older than that old. It comes from classical Greek originally, which was around two millennia before Middle English. The Greek hylé, υλη, originally “wood”, was used by Aristotle to refer to the primordial matter of the universe. And from him came a much more modern English usage: circa 1400, writers also used it to refer to the primordial matter of the universe, the uncreated chaos.

And then, in the middle of the 20th century, some physicists, thinking about what stuff was really made up of before there was stuff – what was in the great cosmic vat of Play-Doh, or rather the tight little ball that blew up into everything there is, me, you, Mahattan, and the Pleiades included – decided they needed a word for it. And what better word to use than the one that the medieval thinkers had already used?

Well, I’ll tell you what better word: the same word, but renewed by a shift in form. In written Greek, that h was actually just a diacritic – the word was ylé, υλη – and later, in Latin, if you took the accusative form, it was hylem. So a bit of historical acceleration gave us ylem. Sort of like the accelerated history in the opening credits of the sitcom Big Bang Theory.

And everything that’s old is new again, but changed in a way that produces a sort of cognitive dissonance. I mean, how do you even say it? (Like “ee lem”.) And does it seem sort of like mêlée? (Well it may – the beginning of things was a bit wild.) Well, one thing is sure: what should be last is seen in the first place, and from that initial constriction the tongue touches for a moment and then opens for another before closing again. Its y beginning also makes it seem strange, maybe even eerie, but also a throwback to a much older time. And so we have the word for the dust that to dust returns, as it is bound, and then expands again to make everything, from Adam on. And maybe next time around four eyes will be normal (he says, adjusting his glasses).

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

ponder

Posted on August 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

In Byron’s Manfred, Nemesis speaks of spending his time

Goading the wise to madness; from the dull
Shaping out oracles to rule the world
Afresh, for they were waxing out of date,
And mortals dared to ponder for themselves,
To weigh kings in the balance, and to speak
Of freedom, the forbidden fruit.

Ah, they pondered – that most human of acts, free thought, the fire of Prometheus: the ability to reflect, to weigh matters and hold them in the balance, pound for pound, ounce for ounce. It’s like gazing in a pond, asking questions – and knowing your reflection will be the responder.

One may certain ponder light matters, but most typically the object of pondering will be ponderous. Not that ponderous means “fit for pondering”; it means “weighty” – it has the same source as pound, as does ponder: the Latin pond root referring to weight, whence pondo “by weight” and ponderare “weigh, appraise”, also related to pendere “hang” (as in suspend judgement). (Our word pond “small lake” actually comes from another word pound: the one in dog pound, from the same Germanic root relating to containment that gives us impound.)

So you ponder a question or a meaning or mysteries – your thoughts wander as you think upon durable matters. You take a proposition p, try it different ways: with bits removed o or n, turned around d, reduced and negated e, stripped down further r… roped in, you long to find an open road; perhaps you stretch out proned, pour a Pernod and watch as melting ice clouds its lucid clarity with a turbid whiteness. You want to get the matter right; you do not want to chicken out, or to lay an egg…

Speaking of which, pondre is French for “lay” (as in an egg). That’s not the source of our word ponder, however, which in French is pondérer. Mais lorsqu’on répond, il faut pondérer et ne pas pondre!

Thanks to Alison Kooistra for suggesting ponder and mentioning pondre.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

abeyance

Posted on August 9, 2010 | 1 comment

It’s a bad day: you’ve got an eye on a buy (perhaps a nice cane) on ebay, but you want to double-check to make sure that you don’t pay more than you would, say, at the Bay. But time’s slipping away – your internet connection won’t obey, the other bidders are like baying hounds, the auction is like a B-52 about to open the bomb bay… and there’s no way to keep it in abeyance. You feel like you’re ready for the sick bay (or an ambulance!).

Well, at the end of the day, perhaps it wasn’t meant to bey. I mean be. But some of the bay/bey similarities above were meant to be – that is to say, they’re cognate (they have a common origin). And I won’t keep an explanation in abeyance any longer.

Abeyance, which is normally preceded by in (or sometimes into) and typically is seen in held in abeyance or, sometimes, put in abeyance or similar other phrases, originated with an image of an open mouth of expectation – it could be a chick awaiting a worm, or perhaps someone cut off in mid-sentence by a “Hang on for a moment – gotta get this call” (or a “Talk to the hand”): Old French abeance “gape, aspire after” came from a plus late Latin badare “open the mouth wide, gape”.

And that gaping mouth also shows up in bay meaning “an opening in the wall”, whence we get bomb bay (but not Bombay) and sick bay – but apparently not the bay in Hudson’s Bay (whence the Bay) and ebay (originally named after San Francisco Bay), which comes from late Latin baia (though badare may have had an influence). It also seems to be a source of keep at bay or hold at bay, but that has also been influenced by bay as in what hounds do, which is from Old French abai “barking”. The other thing hounds will do if trained – obey – comes from Latin ob “towards” and audire “hear”.

The word abeyance actually looks like, say, an ebay username that might be used by a guy named Abe Yancey (actually, the rare synonym abeyancy would suit even better). The act of saying it may be seen just vaguely to illustrate it in the way the glide in the middle (in the International Phonetic Alphabet, [j], which here is written y) holds the vowel in suspension for a moment, keeping the tip of the tongue from reaching the alveolar ridge (in fact, it makes a sort of triphthong, a three-part vowel, that is often heard in southern US pronunciations of words such as bad and mad). French speakers may also note a resemblance in sound to abeille, “bee”, which is one thing you may want to keep in abeyance for as long as possible.

Oh, and your ebay cane? Well, abeyance is a word you may want to keep in stock, but you can’t always keep stock in abeyance. If the auction gets away from you, I know a guy named Llano who can set you up with a nice cane…

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

phthisis

Posted on August 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

Perhaps antique medical terminology entices you. An image of surgeons wearing ties is appealing; you see them gathered around a patient, whose lungs are laboured (his breath sounds like “ph, th, ph, th”). It’s some infection. The gentleman in charge lifts his stethoscope from the chest and pronounces, “This is not staph; this is phthisis.”

But how does he pronounce it? Is this a word like exophthalmic, where the lower lip and the tip of the tongue exchange fricatives against the teeth? That’s one option, yes. But although it’s no great problem to make that sound (stick a little hair on the tip of your tongue and see how many times you make it until the hair is gone), it’s not part of the normal phonotactics of English. So some drop the /f/. Some go further, making the onset a simple /t/. Oh, but what a crisp, delicate touch that is, a tip-of-the-tongue stop, so far removed from the fricatives – and making four letters represent a single short sound.

The back half of the word is agreed on, at least. The remaining two consonants are also voiceless fricatives: it’s pronounced like Isis, the name of the goddess, or like “Aye, sis.” So no matter how you do it, there is ample hissing – or wheezing – for your consumption.

And, indeed, consumption is another word that used to be used to describe the same thing that phthisis was most often used to describe: what now we call tuberculosis. But it has been used to describe other wasting diseases, particularly of the lungs, as it has been ever since it was a Greek word. (One thing’s for sure: if you have phthisis, you’re not just up shit creek, you’re on shit ship.)

There is one kind of phthisis that is not of the lungs, however, and it may be a bit ironic, given the superficial kinship of form between this word and exophthalmic: ophthalmologists may speak of phthisis bulbi (not related to Taras Bulba), which is an atrophy of the eye, involving shrinkage of the eyeball.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,