Monthly Archives: October 2010

nunatak

Posted on October 19, 2010 | 3 comments

This word seems to me suited to some ogre with a spastic temper; can’t say exactly why. It certainly has two aspects to it: one is the rounded letters and nasal sound of nun, and the other is the sharp éclat of atak, the voiceless stops popping and the k looking like a blasting cap cracking a rock wall. And I confess that those two parts together always make me think of Sister Bernice going berserk.

But while this word does signify something that one may say bursts forth from something very staid, there is no actual explosive action involved. The very staid something it bursts forth from is the byword for slowness and cold: a glacier. But the thing that bursts forth – or rather juts out – is itself the acme of immobility: rock, solid cold hard rock. A nunatak is a peak of rock that juts out of a glacier.

And, like various other names for things associated with the great white north, this word comes to us from Inuktitut – you know, what they speak in Nunavut. And, yes, that nuna in nunatak is the same nuna as in Nunavut: it means “land”. And tak? In current Inuktitut spelling, it would be taq; it means “thing pertaining to”.

And should we spell it nunataq? Only if we want to present it as an Inuktitut word we are inserting in English. But that would stick out unnecessarily – it would be pretentious, in fact. We’ve had this word nunatak in the English language for a century and a quarter, rather longer than they’ve been using q in Inuktitut spelling. It’s also been in Swedish and Danish for as long (Denmark has plenty of nunataks – if you consider Greenland part of Denmark, which officially it is, though it is fairly autonomous). So let none attack our orthography.

Oh, and is it actually “noon attack” rather than “nun attack”? Well, in the original, it would be (but in the original the final stop would be uvular, not velar, and the a‘s would be rather as in father). But while these rocky peaks might seem to attack the noonday sun, we must accept that in the English version the pronunciation has gone the usual English way, and none other.

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

One or two things about numbers

Posted on October 19, 2010 | 7 comments

A colleague has encountered a sentence of the type “This will happen in one-to-two months.” She’s wondering about those hyphens.

And well she should be. They have to go. It’s not optional. Otherwise it’s presenting a type of month with the quality of “one-to-two” in the same way as “two-by-four boards” are boards with the quality of being two inches by four inches. A “moderate-to-severe infection” is “an infection that is moderate to severe”; “one to two months” is not “months that are one to two”.

In cases like this, some people are confused by the use of hyphens in something like “a two-month decline”. But this is not that. In a case like that, the head noun is “decline”, and “two-month” is hyphenated because it is part of a compound modifier. In the case of “one to two months”, “months” is the head noun and the numbers are quantifying it – they are not adjectives, they are quantifiers. That’s another point of confusion some people get into: treating numbers as though they were adjectives. (It doesn’t help that CP Style, presumably for reasons of readability in newspaper columns, prescribes, for instance, “two-million” rather than the standard “two million”.)

“One to two months” is not a set of months with the quality “one to two”; it is “one month to two months” with the first “month” removed. (A similar deletion, but of the final “months”, is seen in “a month or two”, which we don’t write “a- month -or-two”.) We can use a dash to replace “to” in, for instance, “1–2”, but we don’t use dashes (or hyphens) and “to” with number ranges.

7 Comments

Posted in editing

Tagged , , , , ,

katabatic

Posted on October 18, 2010 | 2 comments

Oh, this word looks and sounds like being pelted with ice cubes. That opening k is hard, hard… and the word ends with a /k/ as well, softened only in the mind by being written as c. You can hear the chattering teeth and shivering, kkkkkkkkk… And the /t/ and /t/, sounding like icicles snapping and written as two crosses from a graveyard t and t. The only voiced consonant is a stop /b/, not really voiced – just with a minimal voice offset and onset time (especially in English; some other languages do maintain a bit of voice during voiced stops, but in English normally not, unless of course we reduce them to flaps or taps).

The real kicker is what you see this word with: its common collocation is katabatic winds. Ohhh, now, does that not seem chaotic, like something hurled down from a nunatak by an evil tuurngaq – a howling wind, strong and cold enough to send an army of ten thousand into retreat.

But does katabatic sound like a word for a wind to you? It’s so hard-edged, and winds, as ill as they may be, generally buffet but do not cut. Yet I am put in mind of the song “Vihma” by the Finnish group Värttinä,* about being caught in a furious storm, which does not howl but chatters rapidly: “Upa-maita ulkkumasta taromaita tallomasta”; “Vihma silmäni virutti lumi kulmani kulutti”…

So is katabatic a Finnish word? No. Is it an Inuktitut word, like nunatak and tuurngaq? No. This word does not come from a cold country. Here’s a hint: one unusual thing about this word is that the kata is not spelled cata, as it normally is in English: catastrophe, cataplexy, catatonic… Yes, that kata is the Greek kata (κατα) meaning “downward”, coming this time not by way of Latin (which is the reson for those c’s) but straight into English about a century ago. And the batic? It is from batos (βατος), “going”. Katabatic thus means “going down”; its Greek source can also mean “retreating”, and its sibling katabasis or catabasis “retreat” has a particular historical reference: the retreat of the army of ten thousand Greeks described in Xenophon’s Anabasis.

So while the batic is the same one as in acrobatic, it has nothing to do with batik – with katabatic winds, you will not dye a fabric, though you might die a chilly death. In truth, though, you probably won’t. Most katabatic winds aren’t that strong, though some of them do reach hurricane force. It depends on the environment. Many are cold, although California’s Santa Ana winds often get warmed up by the time they hit bottom, for instance. The one thing they all have in common is just this: they are caused by heavy cold air being pulled down a slope by gravity.

Yes, katabatic winds are the air equivalent of a landslide or avalanche, except that they are not so abruptly triggered; air does not build up the kind of friction holding it back that snow or earth does (still, some katabatic winds are sudden, notably the williwaw, which has an ironically unabrupt name). But if you’re in, say, Antarctica or Greenland, with the air getting awfully cold high up on those ice sheets (and nunataks), it is quite heavy and has a long way to slide: at Antarctic McMurdo it batters and desiccates, and the piteraq of Kalaallit Nunaat can rack with a wicked and quick attack as it did to the town of Tasiilaq.

*By the way, in Värttinä the stress is on the first syllable and the ä’s are pronounced like the a in hat.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

agelast

Posted on October 17, 2010 | 7 comments

What can help a person reach old age last, or make their young age last longer? What could keep all those facial muscles that sag elastic? What might keep you in the la-la stage and out of some seniors’ stalag, eh? To my mind, it’s absolutely not being an agelast!

This is no laughing matter. I’ll explain: this word, first of all, has no relation to age and last. The morphemes that formed it in its Greek source were a (α) “not” and gelast (γελαστ), a root to do with laughing (γελαστος, “laughable”; γελαστης, “laugher”). An agelast is someone who doesn’t laugh. The word has three syllables, not two. And a now disused adjectival form is agelastic.

I bet we all know people like that: po-faced sorts who don’t think anything could possibly be funny. The people who piss in the popcorn of life. Sharing the world with those of us who think life is too important to be taken seriously are people of this sort who have no place for laughter. You might say they are the opposite of, say, thelemites.

Well, François Rabelais thought so. He was the one who came up with the term agelast (well, in French, agélaste), to characterize those sorts of people (whom he identifed with the Catholic Church of his time) who were life’s wet blankets – everything he liked least.

This is a nice, light, almost crispy word, like an expensive canapé on the tongue. At the same time, it has an overriding flavour of age and last, make of that what you will. The question is, is this a word we’re likely to keep and use for this? It has a flavour of erudition, certainly, and is suitable for scholarly discourse. Which is where it turns up: those places where one fears one would be looked down on for using a nice, lively, picturesque term like wet blanket – let alone piss in the popcorn. Ah, yes, the world of scholarly writing: the new bastion of the agelastic, and for that reason the place most likely to see the word agelast used…

7 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

croissant

Posted on October 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

Croissants have been with us a long time, of course – their modern form was invented around the middle of the 19th century, though not without forerunners. (They were not invented by Viennese bakers commissioned to create them in commemoration of their having foiled a Moorish attempt at tunneling into the city during a siege; that’s a popular myth, but it is pure myth.) But my recollection is that they had a bit of a surge in the early 1980s, at least in Alberta, when some restaurants started serving not simple croissants but full sandwiches made with them. (The Oxford Companion to Food supports this notion, noting that in the late 1970s such sandwiches came into vogue in France in response to the invading hamburger; it would have taken a few years for the trend to reach Banff.)

The reason I remember the time with some clarity is that in my last year of high school, I wished to conduct a science experiment testing reaction times after intake of successive amounts of alcohol (inspired by an episode of WKRP). My subject, Dave Breisch, a good friend more than a decade older than I, a fellow who was never without his black leather jacket and always wore his hair in a ducktail, recommended one local establishment not simply for the relative ease of performing the test there but for the food – they had great croissants. Which he explained were not just the rolls but full sandwiches made with them. And which he pronounced “croy-sants.”

Well, how the heck do you pronounce this word if you’re an anglophone, anyway? The French way is just not available, not even substituting an English-style /r/: we don’t have /rw/ together in a syllable onset in our phonemic repertoire. (For proof, say Rwanda or ask anyone else to. Odds are very good they’ll add an extra syllable: /ru wan da/.) But, on the other hand, “croy-sant” just sounds, well, you know, uh, déclassé. We may do English-style spelling pronunciations of some loan words, but we all know enough about French to know that’s a bit too distorted. So, if we don’t wish to switch for one word into French phonemics, we will tend to just assimilate the /r/ into the /w/ and say /kwa/ instead of /krwa/. Some people, I believe, merge in the other direction and say /kra/ – especially in that synthetic macaronic word croissandwich, which can get to sound a bit like “crust sandwich” said sloppily.

Ah, crust… There’s a decent crispy taste of crust in croissant, isn’t there? Slightly less, true, if you say it more the French way, with a nasalized vowel followed by a glottal stop rather than the /nt/.

And of course the written form starts with the iconic c. It gets even better than that, though: say it the French way and the mouth goes from puckered to open, a fast dilation that matches the quick crescendo from voiceless to full voice. What has this to do with croissant? Why, croissant means “growing” (even in modern French it’s the present participle of croître “grow”). The source is Latin crescentem, also the source for crescendo and, of course, crescent. And how is a croissant or crescent growing? Is it because a croissant is thick in the middle and tapered at the end? Well, not per se, no. It’s because when the moon is waxing to full, that’s the shape you see. (Originally a waning moon was decrescent, but that’s now excrescent.) And crescent is so much nicer to say than convexo-concave, isn’t it? Which reminds me that the shape of a crescent is the same sort of shape as a cross-section of lenses for hyperopia (farsightedness) – that is to say, glasses one needs for reading.

Which are, of course, different from the glasses one needs for drinking. Which takes me back to Dave Breisch. I had a nice reaction timer ordered in by the school. We went to the pub (actually a hotel bar) and ate those nice croissants, too. But before we did, we ran four drinks through Dave and did the tests. And what I found was what was actually known generally to be the case: reaction times get faster at first (after a drink or so, depending on tolerance), as the person calms down and focuses… and then, with more drinks, the times rapidly get worse. The graph is itself a crescent shape, as the times are first decrescent and then crescent.

You may have noticed the irony of a leather-jacket-and-ducktail-wearing guy talking about how good the croissants were. I’m put in mind of a MAD Magazine parody of the TV show Simon & Simon, in which Rick (the country-style brother) asks A.J. (the citified brother) what he’s having for breakfast. “Espresso… and a croissant,” A.J. says. Rick replies that he doesn’t go for that fancy stuff, and he’ll just have a small cup of strong black coffee and a roll. And, yes, Dave was much more a Rick-style person. But I’m sure my tough-guy greaser-type friend who made a career as a nurse, and who died unexpectedly about a year and a half ago, would appreciate the fitting irony of my dedicating today’s word tasting note to his memory.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

retsina

Posted on October 13, 2010 | 5 comments

Retsina, as Tony Aspler points out, is an anagram of nastier. And, you know, that just about says it all.

OK, OK, millions of Greek people – and some non-Greek people too – like the stuff, even if others among us find it more suited for floor polish. I mean, seriously, wine flavoured with pine resin? It was a try-once thing for me.

But we’re not here to talk about the taste of retsina. We’re here to talk about the taste of retsina (you see, the italics there mean I’m referring to the word qua a word, not to its referent!).

Admittedly, anagrams are a part of the swirl-and-sniff of a word, and if they seem apposite – or even if they seem ironic, like stainer, which doesn’t really go for a white wine like most retsina is – then the taste of the word surely retains them. But there’s so much more. Say it: “re-tsi-na”. See how it stays at the tip of your tongue? If you’re among the many who use a retroflex /r/, then, yes, it starts more in the middle of the mouth, but even then probably towards the tip, in anticipation of the next consonants: /ts/ and then /n/.

Ah, that /ts/: a tasty pair, slightly sternutatory but anyway with a sense of salivation. English speakers usually say it across a syllable boundary, but in many other languages – including Greek – it’s an affricate and is all at the start of the syllable. Does it seem odd to start a syllable with /ts/? We start syllables all the time with just a slight change from that – move the tongue back a bit and you have “ch”.

One common way for an affricate to come about, by the way, is for a stop to occur before a vowel that causes the tongue to peel more slowly away from the palate. This is well-known in the development of Latin: for example, tio, originally /tio/, became over time /tsio/ (and then in some languages that borrowed the words went on and replaces the /tsi/ with a single “sh” fricative). But the same affricate can come about through other means, even from a /z/ or an /s/ in some cases. And that is what makes the etymology of this word a bit sticky.

It’s likely you’ve noticed the resemblance between retsina and resin. It’s for real: the words are cognate. The question is whether Greek retsina was borrowed from Latin resina or developed from ancient Greek ρητινη (rétiné), both of which meant “resin”. (Modern Greek for “resin” is ρητσινι, just one letter different from our word du jour.) The problem with the Latin source is that there isn’t any surviving Latin example of resina referring to resinated wine; the problem with the Greek source is that it would require an unusual morphological development – it would be expected to end in η, not α.

But no need to whine about it. Either way, we know what it is and we generally know what it comes from. And if you’re mixing grapes with sap, well, heck, that seems a bit less natural than some unexpected or unattested derivation, doesn’t it?

You gotta wonder, though, who came up with the idea of adding pine resin to wine. It’s not as though it leaches from the barrel – it’s added in small pieces to the crushed grapes and is filtered out with the skins. Seems to me a smarter thing to do with sap would involve boiling it, skimming it, and pouring it on your pancakes. But I guess if the Greeks don’t have maples… Well, they still don’t have to drink the stuff.

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

abracadabra

Posted on October 13, 2010 | 1 comment

The magician has sawn in half the box in which his lovely assistant lies. Now he turns to the top half, from which her head protrudes, looking on expectantly. A lively tune by Steve Miller bounces and zaps in the background. This rabbit-grabber, who goes by the sinister name of El Maestro del Cadáver, raps his wand on the box and commands it in Spanish to open: “¡Abra!” And open it does, to reveal his assistant’s top half clad in nothing but an amulet with a paper scroll inside it. The assistant surveys her bust, folds her arms and, shooting El Maestro a look that could kill, says icily, “A bra, cad, a bra.”

Well, that’s what today’s word makes me think of. But mostly it makes me think of the Steve Miller song – “Abracadabra” (“Abra, abracadabra… I wanna reach out and grab ya”). And, of course, in the world of Harry Potter, the killing curse: Avada Kedavra.

This word is the quintessential magic word – or, anyway, the quintessential magic-trick word, the word you use to go with a little hocus-pocus. It has a bit of the incantatory quality to it in the rhyming, /æbrə/ and /dæbrə/, with an epenthetic syllable /kə/ giving it a feel in the same vein as thingamabob or tickety-boo with a taste of ka-ching, kaboom, and all those other words that cock before firing. The rolling /r/ gives it the necessary flourish for magic. The shape of it looks a bit like a film strip of a fancy trick with cups and balls. Even the fingers, typing it, may seem to be performing a little magic gesture, a dance that loops around and back with a central epicycle under the left hand – how sinister!

You may be interested to know that this word once was used as an actual charm – to be used in an amulet to drive sickness out of the body, written on a piece of paper in a triangle:

A B R A C A D A B R A
A B R A C A D A B R
A B R A C A D A B
A B R A C A D A
A B R A C A D
A B R A C A
A B R A C
A B R A
A B R
A B
A

It was mentioned by a Roman physician in the 4th century AD. But where did he get it from? A congeries of conjectures have been conjured forth. Some think it comes from the beginning of the alphabet, an abecedarian invention. Some think it’s related to Abraxas, a gnostic name for the supreme god. Various ideas have been put forth about origins from Hebrew, Aramaic, or related languages: perhaps from berakah “blessing” and dabar “speak”, perhaps from ab “father”, ben “son”, and ruakh akadoskh “holy spirit”, perhaps from Chaldean abbada ke dabra “perish like the word” or Aramaic avra kehdabra “I will create as I speak” – certainly J.K. Rowling seems to have been aware of one or both of the latter two. We do, however, run up against the absence of abracadabra from Jewish texts before the middle ages, which is a gap of several centuries.

But, really, if you take a set of basic sounds arranged in a reasonably straightforward way, regardless of where you got them from, you are likely to have many coincidences between your constructed word and plausible phrases in several other languages. You can conjure etymologies out of thin air with a wave of your word-wand… all the while leaving the real origin obscured in the mists of time.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

brouhaha

Posted on October 11, 2010 | 4 comments

You know trouble’s a-brewin’ when there’s a murmur, a rhubarb, a hubbub, a brutish babble… it all builds up to a big brouhaha. Oh, brouhaha, a word that in its triplet time and rough, smeary consonants has a bit of the sound of a hundred clog dancers in Doc Martens all stomping a threatening protest pattern.

But that’s because we know it’s another word for “hubbub”, “commotion”, “to-do”, et cetera. Taken in isolation, what words does it sound like? Think of bwa-ha-ha and mmuuu-ha-ha and similar: always the same gesture of the mouth opening in a moue and spreading like a shock wave from an airburst into a big, wide forest-burning face of laughter, and not laughter of joy but laughter of evil. Sort of like how the devil in a play, uncovering himself for the audience, might voice his anticipated triumph.

Which is, in fact, where we get this word. Brouhaha was, as it happens, a stereotypical laugh of the devil in medieval French religious plays. The sense shifted over the centuries, so that by 1890, when it was borrowed into English, it had the mob rumbling sense.

But where did French get it from? Well, in fact, there’s a minor brouhaha over that question. It has been suggested that it is imitative of Hebrew barukh habba, a phrase meaning “blessed be he who comes” or, more loosely, “welcome”, that would have been heard on some public occasions of Jewish observance. The existence of similar borrowings in other languages certainly makes this plausible (and we already know that Jews were often demonized in medieval and Renaissance times), but it is not a concluded fact; there is no concrete trail, just circumstance and resemblance, and there is also evidence of a French brou root relating to taunting. So, until further detail is unearthed, we are left with a big “maybe” – and, in any case, a usable word that has strayed somewhat from its origins… whatever they may ultimately have been. A bit of linguistic hocus-pocus, as it were (hocus-pocus, for its part, may have come from Latin hoc est corpus – from the Catholic mass).

4 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

posse

Posted on October 11, 2010 | 1 comment

The sound of this word makes me think of Yosemite Sam. Can’t you just hear a hoarse voice with a southwestern American accent coughing it out through a bushy moustache? “Get mah hoss! Round up a posse! Someone stole mah hossenfeffa!” (Side note for the millions who have seen the “hossenfeffer” cartoon: it’s a German word spelled Hasenpfeffer and meaning “rabbit pepper”.)

Oh, this word has a mighty western flavour for me. But it also makes me think of the T-shirts I saw for sale in Tijuana when I was there in, um, 1980 (they probably still have them) that read “Tijuana Pussy Posse” – of course they were illustrated with cats. And then there’s the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse, which reminds us that posse is now used commonly in hip hop circles – the posse has taken on a gangsta air, quite contrary to the spontaneous law-enforcement idea of the old west posse. But, then, Jamaican posses are actual criminal gangs, so that takes it even a step further.

No matter how you slice it, posse is a word that has a wild edge. The puff of air in the first syllable also brings a taste of fur and claws with its “paw” sound; the “see” in the second might suggest that you set down your coffee and have a look-see. But, now, we know where a posse comes from – it’s who of the local able-bodied men the sheriff can round up to pursue a miscreant – but do we know where posse comes from?

We could say it comes from England, because that’s where posses first came from (though they’re obsolete in English common law). But the word itself is Latin. And I don’t mean Spanish; I mean Latin. It’s short for posse comitatus, which means “force of the county”. Comitatus, meaning “county” (or “of the county”), comes from a word for “companion” because a count was a companion of the king (and, as it happens, posse comitatus could be said to mean “force of companions”). Posse is translated here as “force” but could also come through as “power” or “ability” or, infinitive, “be able”; it is also related to potent, potency, potential, and so on.

So… posse can be translated as “be able”. One could from that say that someone who is being pursed by a posse has a “can” on his tail… and they aim to have him end up in the can. They’ll do whatever they must to possess him; they’ll even lasso him if necessary.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

glad

Posted on October 10, 2010 | 2 comments

My mother is in town, and we drove up to Collingwood today to spend a day with my wife’s side of the family; I, like a good lad, was the driver. Across the back window was a bunch of glads, their bases wrapped in a plastic bag (not a Glad bag, just a smaller one); in the trunk were two pumpkin pies my mom made last night, each covered with a square of Glad Wrap. Also along in the trunk were some glad rags: my wife’s exceptionally fetching cocktail dress from a recent reunion of professional figure skaters in France, for showing off but not for wearing all day.

The weather was beautiful, for which we were glad; the sun was shining, and the driving was smooth. All the family was happily gathered, which gladdened us even further. It was just an immediate-family do, no cater-cousins to glad-hand over cocktail shrimp. A half dozen children were playing in a toy-strewn lower room, the most noisy toy of which was one that kept playing Christmas songs – a bit out of season; Thanksgiving may have its own glad tidings of great joy, but they aren’t the ones spoken of in the Bible.

In short, it was a glad day (by which I do not mean it was Canada’s first, and North America’s oldest, gay and lesbian bookstore, Glad Day, which is on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto). And the sight of those gladioli had me thinking of Sir Hubert Parry’s coronation anthem, “I was glad,” which I have sung a few times with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. (I might also have thought of “Gladsome Radiance,” the English translation of “Svyetye Tikhiy,” part of Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil.)

Ah, glad. Such a bright word, with its low front /æ/ vowel (the word itself was originally spelled glæd back when we had æ in use for English words and not just Latin loans), and its shiny, smooth /gl/ onset, one of the great English phonaesthemes, as in glimmer, gleam, glamour, glow, et cetera. Indeed, though glad has meant “happy, joyful” for as long as it has been in English, its sense evolved from “bright” and even “smooth”.

Ah, now, what bright, smooth thing might one picture with such a word form as glad? Well, to ancient Romans, it would be a sword. The Latin for “sword” was gladius (not related to English glad). From this we get gladiator and, yes, gladiolus – those pretty flowers have sword-shaped leaves, after all. My, my… glad the impaler? Well, there was a Glad who is said to have ruled Hungary for a time around AD 900. And there was a horse called Glad that was ridden by Norse gods gong to their daily judgements at Yggdrasil. But now one is more likely to think of the shiny white Man from Glad and his plastic bags.

But even if Glad bags are strong, glad has gotten weaker. At the time of the writing of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662, “I was glad” could be used to transate Latin “Lætatus sum”, which we would more likely now render as “I was joyful”. Now glad can be used, certainly, for a strong positive feeling, especially if preceded by really, but think how you feel when you use any of the following most common glad phrases:

glad to see you
glad you did
glad to hear it
glad you came
glad you asked
glad to (finally) meet you
glad I caught you
glad you caught it

It’s seldom insincere, but I’m glad you liked it is not as strong as I rejoice in your liking it. Still, it’s nice to have a word that means about the same as happy but that has a bit more shine, sturdiness, and brevity to it – and rhymes with mad and sad and bad. Aren’t you glad we have it?

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,