Monthly Archives: January 2011

omnibus

Posted on January 12, 2011 | 2 comments

Where to start with this word? I’m not sure I’ll be able to cover everything…

Well, I can’t remember what my first encounter with it was – whether it was in reference to a transit vehicle or in the phrase sol lucet omnibus. I know I learned the Latin phrase (for some reason) when my age was still in the single digits, and I knew it meant “the sun shines everywhere,” though I didn’t actually grasp the figurative value of it, and of course I said it in like English.

I naturally knew the word bus for the vehicle before I knew the word omnibus (which I might have first seen in a Richard Scarry book), and so I inferred not unreasonably that an omnibus might be some special kind of bus – perhaps one of those red double-decker ones I saw in Scarry’s cartoons. It does have a sound of some greater quality. Once I had learned that it was really just the same vehicle, I concluded that it was a fancier, more British way of saying the thing, like motorcar or automobile. And indeed it does have a higher, more archaic (even quaint) tone, and I would say sounds more British to North American ears.

How did this word come about, anyway? Was the omni grandiosely tacked on to the humble bus? Well, no, of course it went the other way: just as automobile became auto (now itself a rather dated-sounding word), omnibus became bus. Actually, a closer analogue would be trimming helicopter to copter. You see, the roots in automobile are indeed auto and mobile, while the roots in helicopter are helico and pter – and as to omnibus, it’s actually the noun root omn(i) with the inflectional ending ibus (as in pax in hominibus, “peace among people”). It means “for all” – it’s the dative plural of omnis.

And what that means is that it’s not a masculine singular, and so it doesn’t pluralize to omnibi. This puts it in the same set as mumpsimus (which comes from an inflected verb), vade mecum (in which mecum is a compound meaning “with me”, so it doesn’t pluralize as meca), and arguably octopus (which is a Latinization of a Greek word wherein the source of pus is pous, meaning “foot”). Although, as Ross Ewage lately tweeted, “If the plural of omnibus were omni-bi, they would take everyone,” it’s not and they don’t. Well, not in the sense he undoubtedly meant, anyway.

They do, of course, take all comers when they’re part of a transit system. And, tangentially, if you ride a bus often, you will likely see people reading from an omnibus every so often. By which I mean the book they are reading is an omnibus edition – not an edition made for reading on the bus, but a volume of collected works by an author. (This is a more British term, generally.) For instance, on my shelf I have The First Rumpole Omnibus, by John Mortimer, which is the first anthology of tales of Rumpole of the Bailey.

I think it quite possible that Mortimer (or whoever named the book) also liked the added legal overtone of omnibus. You see, another common use of omnibus is in omnibus bill, which is not the name of a bus driver or anthology editor but rather a bill submitted to legislative approval that is a collection of unrelated pieces (what Kurt Vonnegut, among others, has termed a blivet: ten pounds of shit in a five-pound sack).

By the way, omnibus has been shortened to bus in another application independently of its use with transit vehicles: a main connector in computer circuitry, originally an omnibus bar, became bus bar, and is now often just called a bus.

Ah, well, this magic bus. More to the point, this magic omnibus. Wherever it goes, it makes people think of busing (which I am careful not to spell bussing), be it in legislature, computers, books, or random bits of Latin such as mottos (Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno – Switzerland; Justitia omnibus – Washington DC; Omnia omnibus ubique – Harrods). It can thus be used for good or ill effect in dog Latin, such as this classic, meant to be understood in light of the English it sounds like:

Caesar adsum jam forte
Brutus et erat
Caesar sic in omnibus
Brutus sic in at

Sol sure don’t lucet on that omnibus (but Caesar did). Oh well, sick transit gloria…

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Are you editor material?

Posted on January 12, 2011 | 20 comments

Editing is not a glamour career. If you want to be famous, it’s not what you can do to get there (though you can be an editor and be famous for something else; I know of examples). Nor is it a career that will make you rich. (In fact, freelance editing is hard to survive at if you’re not married to someone with a good salary. In-house editing jobs can, but don’t always, pay better, but they’re not so easy to find.) Nonetheless, there are many people who want to be editors, including some who offer their editing services to friends or colleagues, sometimes without being asked. So what are the characteristics of a person who could become a good editor?

Well, first of all, if you have a burning desire to fix other people’s prose, if the very sight of a minor grammatical error puts you into a rage, if anytime you see something written you know you could have written it better, if you are often heard to counsel your friends (without being asked) on how to improve their grammar or expressions, if you perhaps carry a marker with which to correct signs in grocery stores, DO NOT BECOME AN EDITOR. At least not until you’ve grown up and changed your personality.

If, on the other hand, you love language and think it’s fun, and you love communication and understand that what’s most important in communication is bringing minds together, and that the results dictate the means, you could become an editor.

If you always have to have things your way, STAY OUT OF EDITING. If making other people happy makes you happy, you may be editor material.

If you are often heard to say things like “That doesn’t matter” and “Why should I care about that?” and “I don’t know about that; it’s not important to me” and “Why do you know all these dumb, useless things,” you will never make any sort of decent editor. On the other hand, if other people often say things like that to you, you very well may! Certainly, if you are more likely to say “I wonder” and “Let’s find out” and “Let me look that up,” and if reading reference works and looking random things up out of sheer interest is something you have always done for fun, you have the right disposition to become an editor.

If you see something that you don’t recognize and don’t know the function of, and you conclude it’s useless, stay out of editing. If you see something that you don’t recognize and don’t know the function of, and it provokes in you an excited desire to find out what it is and what it does, you’re editor material.

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hippopotamus

Posted on January 11, 2011 | 2 comments

The full length of this word rather splutters and pops, doesn’t it? Perhaps like your outboard motor coughing violently as you frantically try to restart it after it has stalled out perilously close to a hippopotamus. Its four-horsepower engine is ceding to the four horsemen of the hippocalypse. You are mere seconds away from having your head bitten off – quite literally (and perhaps littorally, though rather more likely riparially, but not reparably). You can try praying to St. Augustine, but he’s not the patron saint of hippos; he just was from Hippo.

Ah, now, hippo, that’s a word that sounds a bit more apposite for these beasts, doesn’t it? Heavy, round, big in the hips – and everywhere else. It’s a short word, a mere four phonemes, something even Frankenstein’s monster could manage to grunt out of his gullet. But hippos are not thought of as hideous; they seem so big, round, and goofy. Many Canadians will remember a cell phone commercial that made use of the song “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” sung by ten-year-old Gayla Peevey (well, she was ten in 1953, when she sang it), with an endearing hippo waddling around.

Well, I’ve got some bad news for you, sunshine. Hippos are the most murderous animals in all of Africa. They’re huge, they can outrun you, and they are, as an article from Science Digest (November 1974, by George W. Frame and Lory Herbison Frame) puts it, wantonly malicious beasts. Oh, and they like to fling their poo around. Actually. At other hippos and whoever else is in the vicinity. (I’m sure it’s mere coincidence that within hippopotamus you can find letters for several words for excrement.)

There are some redeeming factors, though. Not for actual hippos – to heck with them – but for the word, to start with. It actually comes from Greek hippos “horse” and potamos “river”, Latinized slightly. Yet again we must conclude that early Greek explorers, such as there may have been, were terribly nearsighted. I mean, why not river cow? Then the beast would have been a bopotamus. But thanks to this unpleasant jungle ogre, when we see the Greek word for “horse” now elsewhere (for instance in hippodrome), we think of… yes… the unpleasant jungle ogre. Though we probably think of it as big, fat, and cute.

And then there is T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hippopotamus,” which it would be copyright infringement to reprint here in full, I think, but which I can tell you contrasts the earthly, sluggish, frail hippopotamus with the glorious True Church, and, in an ending that carries the same moral as some well-known parables, sees the hippopotamus take wing and sing with a harp of gold –

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

Well. The hippo may yet be redeemed. It needn’t worry about its image among consumers, meantime; idealized and fictitious hippos can be plenty cute (just like Mickey Mouse isn’t a vermin you want to kill with a spring-loaded trap). Witness, for instance, Hroshi, the sweet hippo created by Elaine Phillips (who suggested today’s word and provided research on the unpleasantness of real hippos). Hroshi is an endearing stuffed sort who has corresponded with an equally endearing, equally stuffed unicorn (see www.harbeck.ca/cww/cww_071128.html – and ebooks.ebookmall.com/ebook/332634-ebook.htm and search.barnesandnoble.com/Hippo-and-the-Unicorn/Lindsie-Haxton/e/9780595436705 for the book).

As to the word hippopotamus, it doesn’t really need redemption; it’s a perfectly fine, fun word, that starts off with a hi, and proceeds into a little game of lacrosse (or is it merely bubble wands?) before finishing off with tamus. It has a nice five-syllable cadence that peaks in the middle. And it’s just itching to be used in a tongue-twister.  Hmmm…

How do you stop an optimistic hippopotamus on the Appomattox? With a copper pot, but take apposite pity: a hippopotamus in captivity is not apt to be optimistic.

How’s that? More of a warm-up than a tongue twister, but ah, it’s a start…

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fervent

Posted on January 10, 2011 | 1 comment

There is a time-honoured unholy trinity of topic areas that one is supposed to be very careful of raising in conversation (and that are banned in some establishments): religion, politics, and sports. In all three, discussion can quickly reach a fever pitch, and those involved can build up quite a head of steam, primed for venting. Indeed, these are the realms of fervent beliefs.

Ah, fervent. My earliest recollection of this word is from a Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoon wherein a man was described as having prayed fervently (OK, yes, fervently, not fervent, but that’s an easy derivation); the illustration was a man with head bowed, lips slightly parted, a look of concentration on his face. I got the sense that fervent was something involving intense murmuring rather than wild shouting, something earnest and motivated from the heart but as quietly hot as, well, a fever. The word felt warm to me like my chest felt when I had a fever; the /v/ vibrates, and the /r/ is close, quietly urging; the nasal /n/ adds to that air.

This is not to say that that is how everyone sees it. But when I look in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, what things do I find most commonly described as fervent? Hope, prayer, belief, wish. The word by far most often seen with fervent actually comes before it: most. As in my most fervent hope and even the most fervent believers – and, yes, many of the most fervent supporters and had always been the most fervent defenders, so fervent can be associated with action as well as with an internal state. But the table tilts towards the internal. The most common types of fervent people are supporters, believers, and admirers.

And where do we get fervent from? Latin fervere, “boil, glow”. It also has a sister word in English meaning about the same, fervid – which, however, takes on a more active aspect, maybe (or maybe not) because of its taste of fevered, vivid, rabid, avid, and so on. We might reckon that fervid is more of the boil and fervent more of the glow. But probably most people who use either word are unaware of the exact Latin meaning of the etymon.

Either way, though, fervent (and fervid too) is a word that has a certain tone of gentility to it, or at least of erudition. That is not to say it is not encountered in the rough-and-tumble of debate on hot topics; in fact, I rather suspect (and see a trend in the search results I’ve seen, but cannot verify persuasively within a sensible amount of time this evening) that it is most often encountered in such contexts (probably less so with sports than with the other two). But even when it is used with a tone that is fevered or urgent, indeed even when used for venting, it bespeaks in its user – rightly or wrongly – a degree of intelligent analysis (something I wish most fervently for more of in such debates).

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thurifer

Posted on January 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

There are some words that are more frank in sense than others. This one, to most eyes, is not exactly a thoroughfare from form to meaning. It’s likely that you’ve never seen the word before, even if you’ve seen its referent (which you may or may not have).

Looking at it, what does it bring to mind? Perhaps it smacks of Lucifer, which is certainly a name that comes with an unpleasant smoky glow. Some might wonder if it relates to Urim and Thummim (what’s that? um, something from the Bible; high priests wore them…). Not exactly. Others might suspect it is some kind of musical instrument, like a theorbo. It is not, though a thurifer may know how to swing.

If you’re a word geek like me, you’ll fix immediately on the ifer. Yes, that’s the same as in Lucifer, which means “light bearer” (remember that Lucifer was chief of the angles angels before his fall); it’s also the same as in crucifer, which means “cross bearer”, and aquifer, which is from “water bearer” (yes, so is aquarius). In short, fer bears the sense “bearer” (and the i is connecting tissue). So, given that, I further wonder what that thur there is. So I look it up and find it’s thus.

Thus? No, not thus, thus. Don’t get incensed; it’s not “therefore”; incense is what it’s there for. You see, Latin for “incense” (in particular frankincense) is thus – which is also an English word, even if almost no one knows it is: the th voiceless, as in thin; the us is either like us or rhyming with goose. The shift from the /s/ to a /r/ in thus > thurifer – which happened by way of /z/ – is due to a phonological transformation called rhotacism: the fricative trips lightly to become a liquid when it’s between vowels (it verily purrs, though rhotacism is not eroticism). We North American English speakers do something similar with /t/ and /d/ in similar environments.

So is a thurifer a thing that carries incense? Hm. Well, a thurifer might be incensed at being called a thing. Actually, the referent of thurifer is the person. (In Medieval Latin they used the longer thuriferarius… probably until the scribes complained. I mean, really, holy smokes.) The incense burner that a thurifer carries (and likely swings on a chain) is in fact a thurible. Another name for a thurifer is thus thuribuler, though that’s rather terribler, I think. The thing is that thurible, like – for instance – chasuble, has that little niblet or dribble of /bl/ at the end, and while that might seem more technical or detail oriented in flavour, it lacks the smoothness of thurifer, with its soft brushing fricatives issuing forth like smoke. True, it also lacks the smack of Lucifer, but with richer flavours come inevitably some dark and contrasting tones. It was ever thus.

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pants

Posted on January 8, 2011 | 1 comment

I was back tutoring young Marcus Brattle again after the Christmas break, planted in the dining room in his house. As usual, he was trying to distract from studying. His sally this time was “Get anything nice for Christmas?”

“Some nice pants,” I said, and stood up to show him.

He recoiled. “Spare me!”

Ah, yes. Young Marcus and his family moved to Canada from England only a couple of years ago. “I mean what you’d call trousers,” I said. “Not what we’d call underpants.”

Marcus let out a little noise of relief. “Funny word, pants,” he said.

I sat back down. “Because you use it to refer to an undergarment when in fact it was originally an outer garment, pantaloons, named after a character from Commedia dell’Arte who wore them?”

“No,” he said. “Like I’d know that.”

“You do now,” I said. “It is funny, though, as many people have remarked, that not only pants but trousers, slacks, shorts, skivvies, gotchies, et cetera, including derivative words such as shorts, undies, panties, and briefs, are all plural, while shirt, jacket, and so on are singular.”

“I would have thought you’d know why that is,” Marcus said.

“I do know,” I said. “The two legs used to be made and donned as separate parts, just like stockings and hose.”

“Hose is singular,” Marcus observed.

“Go figure,” I said. “Actually, oddly, it’s a mass object.” (“I object to some odd masses I see in pantyhose,” Marcus offered while I continued talking.) “Anyway,” I said, “the plural has by long tradition become attached to anything worn below the waist that has separate legs or at least separate leg holes. Even new products will tend to take that on.”

“Not a thong,” Marcus pointed out.

“Well, thong is actually originally a strap, so in the case of the undergarment it’s referring to the butt floss, which is one thing.” (“Classy,” Marcus interjected at “butt floss.”) “When I was a kid, I used to wear thongs to the beach –”

“Naw! Augh!” Marcus waved his hands as if battling cluster flies. “Stop!”

“– by which we meant sandals with strapping that connected to the sole between the first two toes. The strapping being the thong and, in that case too, transferring the name to the whole object.”

“Well,” said Marcus, “there’s many a man who pants at the sight of a thong. On the right person!”

“The verb pant does happen to be cognate with the noun fantasy,” I noted drily.

“Funny word, pants,” Marcus said (again).

“Because of the plurality and all that.”

“No, because in England it’s an insult. ‘That’s just pants, that is!'”

“But you wouldn’t say ‘That’s just knickers’ or ‘That’s just trousers,'” I said.

“No,” Marcus said. “Except for your trousers, maybe.”

I stood up to display them. “You don’t like them?”

“They’re pants,” he said.

“Obviously,” I said. “Welcome to Canada.”

Thanks to Jim Taylor for suggesting today’s theme.

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insolite

Posted on January 7, 2011 | 3 comments

I was looking again today at some of the photos of Francesca Woodman (by of do I mean she was the photographer or subject? In fact, always the former but usually the latter as well). The word that I felt I wanted for describing them was insolite.

This is not an English word, really; wherever it’s used in English, it’s used as a borrowed term, said in the French style. The sense when we do such things is that we don’t have exactly the right word in English, but that this loan word carries the sense we want. Often the loan word is used to describe something pertaining to the culture from which the word comes. But Francesca Woodman was American – a young woman who threw herself out a New York window to her death at the age of 22 in 1981, leaving behind thousands of negatives, only some 120 of which have ever made it to publication. Her parents have the rest, and we may hope that the rest of the world will see more of them. (She was not an unknown amateur who never showed her work around; she was not a Vivian Maier. She was actively pursuing a life as a photographic artist, until she actively pursued a death as one.)

Is insolite the right word? What, in fact, does it mean? Well, to start with, what does it make you think of? Overt loan words will always mean differently in the borrowing language, first of all insofar as they come with the flavour of foreignness, of the strange, the other, but also insofar as they may have echoes of different words in their unaccustomed environs. Certainly some of the echoes in English match French echoes: unsolid is like insolide, isolate like isolé. On the other hand, how about unsullied?

Insolite has, as a dictionary definition, “unusual, strange”. But there are so many things that unusual and strange can mean, so many flavours: positive, negative, derisory, admiring, silly, scary. So which is this word? Ah, well, indeed… Insolite, as it happens, is among that class of loan words that get dropped like croutons into the verbal salads of academics and art critics, and such words can be sprinkled with different seasonings, covered with different dressings – each author has his or her own angle to push.

Insolite is a word often seen in relation to Surrealism and Dadaism. In those contexts, we can see much that is overdone and even risible. But not always; Surrealism often had a certain solemnity to it. And Woodman’s work, influenced by Surrealism, has a similar fantastic but solemn quality. But we should also note that the Surrealists took the term insolite from Symbolism, where it had been used to translate the German unheimlich.

Ah, unheimlich… there’s a word to choke on. It is not a homey word. In fact, what it signifies is more in the way of the eldritch – eerie strange, horripilating. Ethereal, fairy-like, and not necessarily the good kind of fairy. Gothic, even. Woodman was also interested in the Gothic and identified with Victorian heroines. It is convenient that the shape of this word plays into this mood: a person walking along, level, quiet, with a candle i, which burns out s – oh no – and then the hairs on the back of the neck stand up lit at the sight of an eye in the darkness e…

Given this unheimlich manoeuvre, we will find that the unsolid, isolated echoes – and perhaps also the unsullied (too, too unsullied?) – apply well. In the photographs you see a woman who, intentionally or not, was a ghost in training, already estranged, fading, isolated, and so light…

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virch

Posted on January 6, 2011 | 8 comments

A colleague, Rob Tilley, noted that he came across the word virch in Bruce Stirling’s novel Holy Fire: “Why don’t you hang up and virch in through our primary server.”

And what would this virch be? It rather looks like it might be someone’s family name, and in fact it is a surname, but that’s not the source of this word. Nor is it from “Nautron respoc lorni virch,” a phrase which Captain Nemo said every morning on scanning the horizon from the Nautilus in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (and what does nautron respoc lorni virch mean, and in what language? Probably something like “we have nothing in sight,” in language invented by Verne, though nautron makes me think of sodium and respoc anagrams corpse).

Still, a nautilus may have something to do with this word, just glancingly. Hold a nautilus shell (if you have one) to your ear and what do you hear? Where does it take you? I think Jamaica in the moonlight, sandy beaches, drinking rum every night…

Ah, yes, that great song of imaginary travel, “American Dream,” by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. It puts me in mind of another one such, by the Moody Blues: “The Best Way to Travel,” from In Search of the Lost Chord: “And you can fly high as a kite if you want to, faster than light if you want to… Speeding through the universe, thinking is the best way to travel.”

And then there’s “The Inner Light,” by The Beatles: “Without going out of my door, I can know all things on earth; without looking out of my window, I can know the ways of heaven. The farther one travels, the less one knows.” As if to illustrate the point somehow, the song is in a very much Indian musical style and instrumentation (rather charmingly done, a George Harrison special)… while the words, as it happens, are cribbed directly from chapter 47 of the Tao Te Ching, the great (and brief) Chinese classic of Taoism ascribed to Lao Tzu (Laozi).

It gets even better. When I open my visually appealing copy of the translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English to chapter 47, I see that it is illustrated by a view from above of steps down a spiral staircase… looking ever so reminiscent of a chambered nautilus shell. So we have made a tour and returned where we started. Because we never left.*

And how can you do that? Well, virtual reality is one way – like the holodeck in Star Trek, or something a bit less fancy (just put on the hologram headset and it’s like dreaming… careful not to move your body unduly; that would be like singing along with the music on your earphones. In fact, for a little travel within your mind, just put on your earphones and click around the web…). But the trip of the tongue from beginning to end of virtual reality is so long… And we know the tongue is a lazy thing; for example, it takes (or has long since taken) the stop and off-glide (“ty”) in virtual and turns (turned) them into an affricate (“ch”). So it might prefer to leave you in the lurch and stop at “virch”. Which is where this word comes from. It’s not a pretty word, true, and it may sound trendy, but it’s hardly the first truncation ever in English – or the first verbing (just like that, a thing becomes an action!). And it gets you where you want without unnecessary travel.

And so you can canoe off on vacay in your virch barque, perhaps to the tune of “O Pastor” by Madredeus:

Ao largo ainda arde
A barca da fantasia
E o meu sonho acaba tarde
Acordar é que eu não queria

“Afar still burns / the barge of fantasy / my dream ends late / I didn’t want to wake up.” (Thanks to Eliza Mogha for that translation, from comments at the YouTube video I’ve linked to above.)

*There’s a travel agency in Toronto called Zen Travel. My idea of Zen travel is that they tell you that you already are where you want to go.

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milquetoast

Posted on January 6, 2011 | 5 comments

The first time I can recall seeing this word was in an English translation of Peter Handke’s theatre piece Offending the Audience. At the beginning of the piece, the performers come forward gradually, speaking quietly and then more loudly, saying various words just as words, not directed at the audience, and in random order; the words are “You chuckle-heads, you small-timers, you nervous nellies, you fuddy-duddies, you windbags, you sitting ducks, you milquetoasts.”

I figured out pretty readily what the word was intended to mean. After all, milk and toast are two rather bland, safe foods, and the addition of the Frenchified spelling milque makes it even more effete and effiminate. Clearly this was a word for some feckless lily-livered poltroon. Right?

Right, in fact. It has various synonyms and near-synonyms: sissy, namby-pamby, jellyfish, pantywaist, doormat, nebbish, wimp, milksop… They all have their variations of tone, flavour, level, and expected context. Milquetoast, for its part, thanks at least in part to its pseudo-French spelling, seems like the sort of word that should have rococo curlicues on it. In truth, it strikes me as the sort of word that comes from, perhaps, a character in an English comedy of the Restoration era (with its characters named such as Millamant, Dorimant, Pinchwife, Flutter, Fainall, Witwoud, Wishfort, Bellair…). So utterly English and of that era, don’t you think?

Well, it is indeed an eponym; it is from a character named Caspar Milquetoast. (By coincidence, another play by Handke I have in the same volume as Offending the Audience is called Kaspar, but there’s no relation.) But the character is from a newspaper comic (a one-panel comic, not a strip) of the early-to-mid-20th century. An American newspaper comic, at that. The strip was called The Timid Soul; it was drawn by H.T. Webster. As you may guess, Caspar Milquetoast was the aforementioned timid soul, a thin, pale, bespectacled fellow with a white moustache. You can see three examples at john-adcock.blogspot.com/2009/01/timid-soul.html and another at www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=454658&gsub=5381 . We get from these the impression that Milquetoast was something of a flutterbudget, too, in his effete way.

You might have noticed that one of the synonyms for milquetoast is milksop. Its spelling is plainer and more English, but the word has a similar feel when spoken – milk is soft until the /k/, and sop has a /s/ and a voiceless stop like toast, making it whispery and crisp – and a similar limpness. In fact, sop is certainly limper than toast in its imagery and sound, which is compensated for in milquetoast by the Frenchified spelling. In the end, milksop does seem rather like a low-rent, proletarian version of the salaried (or private-income) milquetoast. And what means sop? Why, a piece of bread soaked in liquid. So a milksop is food for babies.

But! Before milksop was ever used to refer literally to food for babies, it was used to refer to a feeble, effete, wimpy person. By Chaucer, in fact, even (from the Monk’s Tale): “Allas …that evere I was shape To wedden a milksop or a coward ape.” The literal reference doesn’t show up in literature until almost a century later. And then, about 535 years after Chaucer, we got Caspar Milquetoast, whose name passed into common usage for the same meaning as milksop within a few years.

Well. Let me now toast H.T. Webster and his character with some milk… or, well, the last of the eggnog, what the heck. Even if Caspar would be too afraid to drink it.

Thanks to Laura, who commented on my blog posting of onychophagia, for suggesting milquetoast.

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Cobb salad

Posted on January 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

It’s not so much the word salad I’m tasting here – that merits its own examination, but it is relevant here for its soft lick as of lettuce, which is the basement of a Cobb salad – as the word Cobb. What does that make you think of?

Although it makes me think of the town of Cobh in Cork, Ireland, it shouldn’t, because I know perfectly well that Cobh in Irish is said like cove in English – and in fact Cobh is just an Irish respelling of the originally English place-name Cove. So stick a cork in that one and look at the more obvious: cob.

You know, not as in cobweb, but as in corn on the cob. It gives a nice image, doesn’t it? Of kernels of roughly even size arranged all in even rows? It does have a blunt name, true, like the sound one may make with a corn cob denuded of its kernels when one strikes it on a table – especially a table in a pub. The sound and gesture of it make me think of a full mouth caught in mid-gobble or clogged with a gobstopper. And of course in its written form it’s double-stopped, too, with its two b’s (like adjoining kernels seen in their adjoining rows, just perhaps).

It happens that Cobb salad is one of the menu items I have come to look for when in a pub. It’s a solid restaurant standard, and is quite flavourful, nutritious, and filling. But I judge them not just on the freshness of their ingredients and the overall flavour and texture of the salad, nor do I add to that only the inventiveness of the ingredients (the basics are tomato, bacon, egg, chicken breast, avocado, and blue cheese, on lettuce, with dressing, but additions and variations are possible and in fact common). No, I look to see how the ingredients are arranged.

Some restaurants toss the ingredients together. This always disappoints me, not horribly but about as much as seeing Ceaser salad rather than Caesar salad on the menu might (unsurprising, but sigh…). Others arrange them separately but in fields arrayed around the centre, splayed perhaps like a cobweb. Some chop them into various-sized pieces; others leave them almost whole. But only rarely do I see a real attempt at the optimal arrangement: neatly and fairly evenly diced, in neat rows.

No, I didn’t decide they should be like that because of corn on the cob. In fact, the Cobb salad is named after Robert Howard Cobb, who was the owner of the Hollywood Brown Derby restaurant, where it was invented (he may have invented it himself) – by one story, he cobbled it together from what was in the cooler. But whatever the origin, it happens that at the Brown Derby, they always diced the ingredients neatly and arranged them in neat rows.

Now, it’s not that I’m a weirdly picky eater who must eat everything in order. And I know that it’s all the same when it gets into my stomach, but folks, it goes past the eyes and through the mouth before it gets there, and that matters to some of us. Might as well toss together my bibimbap or my chirashi sushi. (Coincidentally, just as I judge pubs on their Cobbs, I judge sushi places on their chirashis. But that’s more on the quality and type of the ingredients.) I may even toss it together some before eating it… but I want to get to do that myself!

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