Monthly Archives: October 2010

morpheme

Posted on October 8, 2010 | 1 comment

“I celebrate myself;” so says Walt Whitman, beginning Leaves of Grass, “And what I assume you shall assume; / For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.”

Ah, atom to atom: a shape-shifter! A form that can become another form, taking only the barest bits from one to the other. Later in the same, Whitman writes

I am exposed, cut by bitter and angry hail – I lose my breath,
Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death;
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call BEING.

Ah, she’s alright, morphine… but it is only when it lets up, when one sees again not the peace but the piece, the piece in the puzzle, that we can find being: the concrete bits come together and reality takes shape.

So, too, is it with words: they are made of bits, linguistic pieces, shapes that in many cases can only take real form when combined with other forms. What can you say is -ed, or -y, or -s, or -th by itself? And what of bits that change shape all by themselves – anger to angr, long to leng? What shape shall they assume, and what bits belong to what?

Do I blaspheme against the language, the sanctity of our words? Ah, but one who sees a language as being but one way is a veritable Polyphemus: a name that speaks of many words, but designates one who is but half seeing.

The pheme in blaspheme and Polyphemus, you see, is from Greek phemos “speaking”. But the pheme in morpheme is not. It is not a morpheme, not productively or even historically, even though morphemes undeniably have to do with words and speech.

Morpheme, as it happens, is modelled on phoneme. And what is phoneme? An anglicization of phonema, Greek, “sound”; it refers to a sound that is accepted as being an identifiable sound in a given language. Phonemics is the study of the sounds that languages identify as discrete sounds. Phonetics is its counterpart: the study of actual speech sounds, which are rather more in number. For instance, the /n/ in Banff is not exactly the same sound as the /n/ in Toronto, nor is the /l/ in Calgary just the same as the one in Halifax, but we perceive them as the same sound nonetheless, local variation notwithstanding.

This distinction is the emic/etic distinction: the codified (culture-internal) versus the objectively actual. Dizzying? Emetic? It is relevant. For there are morphemics, but no morphetics – words, and parts of words, have only a culturally determined reality, not any objective form at all. A piece from which a word is made up is called a morpheme – morph for shape, and eme as we have just said.

So steeped is the morpheme steep plus the morpheme ed; windpipe is a compound made of two morphemes that make whole words unto themselves. And then there are the morphemes that are not functioning separate bits now but historically were bits that made up the words: throttle is from throat (shifted in shape) plus le (a frequentative suffix), but one may not make a similar word now from chest or tweet or what have you plus le. Oh, and as just seen, a morpheme may shift shape all of its own: anger to angr, historically, for instance, but also lose to los plus ed to t to make lost, and crazy to crazi (note the change in pronunciation! pronunciation is primary!) plus ly to make crazily.

Oh, dizzying it is, but not emetic: intoxicating. One may be entranced, set into a reverie, as by the god of dreams, Morpheus, so called because he could take on the shape of any person (why? because he was none other than they, in the mind of the dreamer). And it is after him that morphine was named: the principal alkaloid of opium. Inhale your words, and dream; but it is only when they take solid form that they arise from their slumber, come together as pieces of a puzzle, and are fit to come forth through the windpipe as words.

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Tag-teaming without coordination

Posted on October 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

I read the following in a New York Times article, “Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery“: “A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem.”

Does that sentence read a bit funny to you? It should. The fact that there are two things acting together does not automatically make them a compound subject – don’t mistake semantics for syntax. The phrase tag-teaming with is not a syntactic equivalent of and. It is not a conjunction; it is a non-finite verb phrase headed by a present participle. It has as a complement a prepositional phrase headed by with, and the complement of that prepositional phrase is the noun phrase a virus:

[_NP A fungus {_VP tag-teaming [_PP with {_NP a virus}]}]

The structure is the same as, for instance, An archbishop speaking to an actress or A dog barking at a car. Everything after the first noun is modifying the first noun, not coordinating with it. (Here’s a big tip: any time you see a preposition before a noun, you know that the noun and preposition modify what’s before them – meaning that they are not the main noun in town!)

Would you write An archbishop speaking to an actress have fallen down the stairs, or A dog barking at a car have run into a hydrant? Nope. So you don’t write A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have interacted. The fact that the fungus and the virus are working together doesn’t change the syntactic structure, which, at its core, is subject fungus and verb has interacted. I’ll say it again: never confuse semantics with syntax.

(And never look to newspapers for grammatical guidance. They make all sorts of silly mistakes. Sometimes it’s because they’re on tight timelines and sometimes it’s because they’re inappropriately applying rules they haven’t thought through well enough.)

thrum

Posted on October 6, 2010 | 1 comment

You have a bundle of multicoloured threads, let’s say, and as you walk down a crowded sidewalk you absent-mindedly pull a few out with your left hand and run your right thumb across them, making a bit of a casual hum in the throng. You look up and see a friend approaching and, in your distraction, you thump your elbow on a post as you pass, snapping a string. You don’t notice until your friend says, “What’s that blue thing on your thumb?” You reply, catching yourself as you look: “It’s a thr— um…”

Thrum, thrum, thrum. You have thrummed on a thrum with your thumb as a thrum thrummed about you, and with a thump you thrummed your thumb; now your thumb makes no thrum but has a thrum. All together now, one, two, three: Um… what?

There are three thrums (a trithrumvirate?), each with a different meaning, each a native English word (i.e., not adopted from another language), each thrum from a different source, and each having both noun and verb form. Ain’t that thrumthing!

The one we all know now is what one does on a guitar or similar instrument: you may thrum it or produce a thrum. This is onomatopoeia, the /r/ giving the rolled sound and the /m/ the sustained hum, with the voiceless fricative to start with simply giving a soft start, softer than in strum. It is also the newest of the three thrums, appearing first in the 1500s. And I should add that in some dialects it also refers to the purring of a cat… Can’t you just hear it?

The other thrum still in some form of use is the one referring to a loose end of thread, a bit too small to be of much use. But not no use at all: one may make a thrum cap or thrum mop. And thrum also gets (or, in the main, got) use in such pairings as thrum beard and thrum-chinned, which give a picture of a sort of scraggly long stubble. As a verb it means “decorate with thrums” (as opposed to “make a thrum”). It comes from an Old German word meaning “end-piece” or “remnant”; trace it back to Indo-European and up into Latin and you will find terminus at the end of your thread.

And then there is the thrum that means “crowd”, “throng”, or “bunch” or, as a verb, “crowd” or “cram”; it has been out of use for half a millennium. I know you’re wondering whether it’s related to throng and its source thring. Well, it doesn’t seem to be; thring comes from a verb focusing on the agitation of a crowd, and had forms þring, þrang, þrong, whereas thrum’s source focused on multitude and magnitude and strength, and got to us by way of þrymm. (That þ letter is thorn, the old way we represented the voiceless “th” sound.)

The sounds of thrum have a sort of soft warmth, and perhaps a bit of heaviness, no? It is in the same general set, aesthetically, and throb and hum but not so much as thrust or thrash or thrill. And in the act of saying it, your tongue strokes back from your teeth across your alveolar ridge, culminating with the lips closing – not altogether unlike the gesture of a hand thrumming just once on a guitar… or perhaps, better, a theorbo.

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting thrum… a year and a half ago. You see, I do get to them all eventually…

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ptosis

Posted on October 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

Ptosis? Ptui! When you spot it, what you want it to do is stop… but no staples or Post-Its will put a stop to ptosis.

Does this word seem perky, with its paired stops, voiceless and voiceless, appropriate for popping or pipping? If one posits such a link, one will be disappointed: it’s quite the opposite. Anyway, the sound of the p has dropped off – the Greeks may have said it (and not just here – another root you’ll know is pter, which drops the /p/ in pterodactyl but keeps it in helicopter), but we get floppy about such things in English.

And its meaning is likewise anything but perky. Greek ptosis meant “falling” or “fall”, from the verb piptein. And what is falling? Perhaps your eyelid – drooping eyelid is blepharoptosis, also called just ptosis. Or perhaps your breasts: breast ptosis is what happens to mammaries as Cooper’s ligaments relax with age (Betty Cooper’s? don’t be so arch). We assume there must be something in the line of butt ptosis as well (perhaps by another name).

It could be worse, though. Another word that comes from the same Greek root is ptomaine, which comes from ptoma, “fallen body” (i.e., “corpse”). And then there’s apoptosis, which is the “falling away” of cells in your body – more to the point, their death. Sounds apocalyptic? It happens all the time: old cells self-destruct to make way for new ones.

But if you have some incidence of ptosis, at least you have a nice, clean-sounding word to dress it up. I think it will be generally agreed that droop sounds rather droopy; so much nicer to have the toasty ptosis, even if the result is the same toast.

bolero

Posted on October 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

Slow, hot, steamy, gradually building in intensity, insistent, turning and turning again, as though flying in circles, until at last it bowls you over, or you are bolted by Cupid’s bow and arrow… Ravel ravels and you are unravelled; it is unrivalled…

Oh, Boléro, the now-archetypal classical music of sex, with its repeating phrases and steady 3/4 rhythm with 16th-note triplets: dum, dadada dum, dadada dum, dum; dum, dadada dum, dadada dadada dadada… On and on and on… (There’s a story that at the premiere, a woman shouted that Ravel was mad, and Ravel, hearing of this, smiled and remarked that she had understood the piece.)

Ravel’s piece is not the only or the original bolero, of course. The dance had been around more than a century before Ravel wrote his version. It came about as a cross between a contradanza and a sevillana (there is a Cuban dance of the same name that has no relation). The origin of the word bolero may have to do with balls (I mean the kind you throw or swing – the word itself seems decorated with them, o e o plus the one on the b), but it’s not certain – nor is it entirely sure how that relates to the short jacket also called bolero. But when you follow the bouncing ball, the rhythm is the same one as Ravel used, those two bars with their eighth-note/triplet-sixteenth rhythms.

It’s a rhythm quite similar to that of a fandango, as it happens. And in fact when Ravel was first writing his piece on commission from the Russian ballerina Ida Rubinstein, he called it Fandango. Well, that might have turned it a whiter shade of pale – or it might have been just fine and dandy. But bolero is a more bullish word, and Spanish speakers may hear echoes of volar “fly” and volver “turn” (the v is said the same as b).

And English speakers may hear echoes of Bo Derek. In fact, anyone who was around in 1979, even if they never saw the movie 10, probably has an image of her cornrow braids, utterly iconic. The movie thrust her to stardom, made a sex anthem of the song… and did quite well for Dudley Moore, too, who, for some reason, is not so often thought of in this context even though it was he who was getting it on to Ravel’s dirty dance. (And who, besides Bo, did he do it with in the movie? Julie Andrews. The hills are alive indeed…)

Five years after 10, the tune’s vigour was still fresh and further freshened by the highest-scoring ice dance routine in Olympic history (6.0s across the board for artistic interpretation), Nottingham’s Torvill and Dean skating an erotic adventure in flowing purple culminating in collapse (if they had skated for the full quarter hour of Ravel’s music, they surely would have collapsed for real!). Needless to say, other skaters have used the music, but there was only one Torvill and Dean Boléro (just as there was only one Katarina Witt Carmen).

Not that everyone is a figure skating fan, of course. But most people who now think of Boléro as the erotic classical piece probably haven’t seen 10, either, and many of them may not have heard of it. (Even fewer will know of the 1984 movie Bo Derek produced and starred in, Bolero, a film that was released unrated because it was too explicit but still won six Golden Raspberry awards.) Boléro = sex is just part of the common currency of culture now… at least for those who don’t find it boring and repetitive (find which boring and repetitive, Boléro or sex? um, either).

ravel

Posted on October 3, 2010 | 3 comments

Imagine a piece of music like a long thread being slowly unwound from an article of knitted clothing – just a little variation, but again the same, around and around, though you may feel a sense of tension building as the clothing disappears before your eyes. Revel in the tension! Why not? Did I not mention someone was wearing it? More and more is revealed, until at last it falls away abruptly…

Ah, yes, Boléro, by Maurice Ravel: in the musical canon unrivalled, like a garment being ravelled…

Wait – do I not mean unravelled? Well, ravelled, unravelled, either may be used. You see, unravel is not the antonym of ravel; actually, knit would be a better choice for that – as Shakespeare knew, and had his Macbeth say: “Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.”

Now, how did these two apparently contradictory forms get tangled so, and the usual sense of opposition get undone? We may find some enlightenment in the origin of the word, which is no less entangled: in fact, early modern Dutch ravelen or rafelen meant “tangle, become confused” and “fray, come undone”.

How could it mean both – how could these senses cleave together rather than cleave apart? Not like the two senses of cleave, which come from two different origins that converged on one form. No, rather, the two meanings come from the tangled mess that threads that come undone or fray tend to end up in. In short, this is a word for the entropy of strings, threads, and fabric.

And why not have a fraying sense with a word that sounds rather like raffle and ruffle and riffle? But why add the un? Well, as an intensifier, perhaps – a redundancy of form seen in unloose, which, redundant though it may be, has been in the language consistently since the 1300s, or the more modern unthaw, first seen only around 1600. Or from the “tangle” sense of ravel gaining un, even as ravel had likewise the “come undone” sense. Either way, unravel has been in English almost as long as ravel has; ravel appeared in the mid-1500s, unravel in the early 1600s.

Anyway, why not have a paradox in a word that anagrams velar but has no velar sounds in it? And why not have a word relating to strings that resembles (it’s not the same; the pronunciations and origins are different) the name of an orchestral composer? True, Boléro wasn’t Ravel’s magnum opus (he once called it “a piece for orchestra without music”), but it may be his best known, and it resembles not only an unravelling but also another form of entropy: swirling around and circling into a centre of gravity (perhaps a black hole) until finally crashing into it. And, to quote athome.harvard.edu/programs/sst/, “strings and black holes have been found to be inextricably intertwined.” (They mean string theory, of course…)

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panini, Paganini, pagan

Posted on October 2, 2010 | 2 comments

“And I’ll have the panino with ham and cheese,” Jess said, handing her menu to the waitress.

“Ham and cheese panini,” the waitress said, writing. She took the menu – “Thank you” – and headed off to the kitchen.

“If I’d wanted more than one,” Jess said sotto voce, eyebrow half-raised in half-amusement, “I would have said so.”

“Well, she doesn’t speak Italian,” Daryl pointed out unnecessarily.

“Just as well,” I said. “If she were Italian, she might have thought you wanted a little bun, rather than a grilled sandwich.”

“True!” said Jess. “Pane, bread; panino, little bread. The name of the bread transfers to the name of the sandwich… Didn’t you do one of your notes on another such?”

“Muffuletta,” I said.

“Don’t speak with your mouth full,” Daryl japed.

“The waitress probably thought you were being capricious,” I said.

“Well, if I’d asked for Panini,” Jess said, “I would have been requesting the founder of Sanskrit grammar and the forerunner of linguistics.”

“Only you would have had to say it with a lengthened and stressed first vowel and a retroflex first n.” I demonstrated.

“Then she might have thought I was possessed,” Jess said.

“You say panini, I say Paanini,” Daryl half-sang. “Actually, I’d rather have Paganini.”

Jess turned and looked at him. “Speaking of capricious! I thought you preferred heavy metal.”

“I’m not narrow, you know. Anyway, Niccolò Paganini has had an important influence on metal music.”

“Because he was pretty much the first real violin solo superstar and helped shift the focus from bowing to fast fingerwork and technical pyrotechnics? Thereby setting the stage for the very similar phenomenon in metal?”

“Yup, that’s surely part of it,” Daryl said. “And his music in specific has been quite popular among some of the metal guitar gods.” He was flipping through some files on his iPhone as he spoke. “Here we go. Yngwie Malmsteen – big fan of Paganini and one of the greatest gutarists of all time, including future times.”

“Not a fan of moderation, are you?” Jess said. “Actually, I’ll moderate that. You seem normal enough when you’re not talking about stuff like this.”

“Look, here, have a listen, he uses Paganini’s Caprice number 24 as the solo in ‘Prophet of Doom.'”

Jess held up her hand. “Email me a link. …‘Prophet of Doom’? Do you suppose Paganini would be flattered?”

“I think that Paganini would have been a metal guitar god if he’d been living today,” Daryl said. “Anyway, he lived a wild life and, just like some metal musicians, he was accused of having sold his soul to the devil – or even of being possessed.”

“Well,” I said, “he was, in a way, a little bit of a pagan.”

“He wasn’t a pagan, ninny,” Daryl said. “The Church just wouldn’t let him be buried properly because he died before he could have last rites.”

“It’s just that Paganini and pagan are, the evidence suggests, related,” I said. “Paganini is a family name formed on a genitive of Paganino, which is a diminutive of Pagano.”

“Just like panino is a diminutive of pane,” Jess said. “A little bread, a little pagan.”

“But his forebears may not have been declared heathens,” I said. “They could have just been villagers or country folk. Latin pagus meant ‘village’ or ‘country district’, and so pagano means someone from the country. Which was of course that heathen area, away from the enlightened, Christianized towns, hence the developed sense of pagan.”

“Anyway,” Daryl said, “the point is that he played a little role in the development of metal music. Sort of like Panini did for linguistics.”

“He played a little roll?” Jess said. “I thought it was a violin. Now you’re telling me he was fiddling with a panino.”

Just then the waitress passed back by. “Your sandwiches and panini will be ready in a couple of minutes,” she said. “Can I get you anything else while you’re waiting?”

Jess made a mischievous smile. “I’d like a martino, please…”

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