Monthly Archives: February 2011

Billy

Posted on February 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

We saw the musical Billy Elliot tonight. It was quite good. We billy enjoyed it.

OK, ha ha. But of course the name Billy provoked an assortment of associations for me. One song that keeps going through my head is “Don’t Lose My Number,” where Phil Collins (there’s another name full of /l/) sings “Billy, don’t you lose my number.” Another is “Waltzing Matilda”: “And he sang as he watched and waited while his billy boiled…”

That second billy is of course not a person named Billy. Nor, on the other hand, is it a euphemism like Johnson or Peter. It’s a thing also called a billycan, a little cylindrical pot with a wire handle; its name may be related to another word in the song, billabong, by way of Wiradjuri billa, “river”.

There are of course other musical references one may cue to, such as punk group Billy Talent, rocker Billy Idol, singer Billy Joel, country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, or actor-who-wants-everyone-to-pretend-his-musical-group’s-success-has-no-relation-to-his-acting-fame Billy Bob Thornton. There are also Billies, such as Billie Holiday and Michael Jackson’s song “Billie Jean.”

There’s also the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, and at the opposite end of things the evangelist Billy Graham; there’s presidential brother Billy Carter, famous criminal Billy the Kid, actor Billy Dee Williams, and tennis player Billie Jean King. (Billy and Billie are among those combining names of the American south, just as Marie is a combining name of Québec. I half expect to see some addiction clinic run by someone called Rhea Billie Tate.)

There are literary connections, too: there’s Melville’s Billy Budd (a good small-cast adaptation of which I saw at the Edmonton Fringe Festival years ago), and Billy Pilgrim, the hero of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. And you can keep them on your Billy bookcase from IKEA.

You could also go to France for a visit to Billy. There are three places in France called Billy and another nine with Billy combined with other things, such as Billy-Berclau, Billy-lès-Chanceaux, and Billy-sur-Ourcq. (Ourcq – now, there’s a word to put on a cracker.) Perhaps while strolling near one of them you’ll see a billy-goat. It may or may not be gruff; in case it is feeling bilious, carry a billy club.

Of course, there are many more billys and Billys than that. There could be a billion of them. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Oh, well, no, if it’s Will, of course, that’s a different way – Billy is a much more laddish, common presentation of the name. The prince is called Wills; we would never call him Billy. Even president Clinton was not Billy Clinton but Bill Clinton. Billy says you’re a boy or you haven’t entirely given up on boyish things. (Billie, of course, suggests you’re a girl, though you may or may not be a boyish girl.)

And of course the word is much blunter with the /b/ than with a /w/. And, on the other hand, the /i/ on the end, aside from having a diminutive effect, also keeps the /l/ from sinking into the back of the mouth as it tends to with Bill. But I do think it gets much of its flavour from its many associations. Words are, after all, known by the company they keep.

So where does Billy come from? The ones in France, of course, are different, as is the Australian one, but mostly they are that perverse English shortening of William, just as Robert becomes Bob, Richard becomes Dick, and John becomes Jack. Well, not just as – actually, evidence suggests that in the case of Billy, there’s a Gaelic influence. Names starting with /w/ borrowed over to Gaelic have tended to get /b/ instead, since in Gaelic the /w/ sound – if it even exists in that particular dialect (some just have /v/) – is thought of as a weakend /b/ or /m/. William may have been cut down to Liam, but Billy has a pair in Builidh (pronounced pretty much like “Billy” – you could say it’s bill-lingual).

And William? Ah, there’s a name that conquered England. It comes from will “will, desire” and helm “helmet, protection”. So either “my will is my helmet” or “I desire some protection here!” Protection from what? Well, there’s always that goat…

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buffalo

Posted on February 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Well, the first question to come out tonight is “How do you buffalo gals?”

And one answer, based on a discussion I had with a few gals today, is with a sentence such as the following:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.

Don’t say “water you talking about.” This is not some frankly incoherent concatenation – not like the excellent “Chicken” PowerPoint. No, this is a grammatically coherent sentence (even if a semantically inane one). And it happens to make use of three different aspects of this word: common noun, proper noun, and verb.

Of course, you may well be buffaloed by being buffeted with so many buffaloes in the buff, but I’m not bluffing. But first, let us look at the several aspects of this word, beginning with the observation that not all buffaloes or Buffaloes are buffaloes.

The original buffalo is what we now often call the water buffalo; it’s recognizable not only by its massiveness but by its horns, which roll off the top of its head and onto the sides and then curl up a bit like a certain 1960s female hair style. It got its name from the Greek βουβαλος boubalos; our version of the word came via Latin and Portuguese. There is also an African buffalo that looks much the same as the water buffalo, though its relation is uncertain, partly because they’re such ornery things that it’s hard to find out.

And then there is what we Canadians and Americans call a buffalo, which is really – as pedants will delight in pointing out – a bison. It looks rather different from the Asian and African buffaloes, with a hump on its back and its horns starting on the sides of its head and curving up. I happen to have grown up in a place where there were a reasonable number of these “buffalo” (note the zero-inflecting plural, which is also available for the real buffalo – or one can use buffaloes in either case).

Contrast that with my dad, who grew up in a place where there were none (save perhaps in a zoo) but that was (and still is) nonetheless called Buffalo. Now, why would that city be called that? Well, it was named after Buffalo Creek. Oh, OK… so how did Buffalo Creek get its name? The most popular answer is that it’s a corruption of French beau fleuve. Alas, this probably isn’t true, not only because Buffalo Creek is too small to be a fleuve but because the story has beau fleuve being a reference to the Niagara River, when in fact it’s suitably well established that the city name comes from the creek. The reason for the name of the creek has not so far been established, alas.

There is, incidentally, another proper noun Buffalo: it refers to a member of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, a British and Australian fraternal organization modelled on the Freemasons. (It is not the organization of which Fred Flintstone is a member; that’s the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes.)

From buffaloes, bison, and Buffaloes, we get several travelling companions for buffalo, notably buffalo grass, buffalo clover, buffalo fly, buffalo chips (which are similar to cow patties), and Buffalo wings (capitalized because this kind of spicy chicken wing was invented at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo).

And then there’s the verb, which means to cow someone – to bully, overpower, or simply befuddle. But whereas the verb cow is originally unrelated to the noun cow, but is often thought of as equating the object of the action with a cow, buffalo equates the subject of the action with a buffalo.

Now back to my eleven-buffalo sentence. It – or the pattern for it, as in theory one can make an effectively unlimited number of variations on it – was invented by William J. Rapaport of the University of Buffalo. It has made the rounds since. Let me spell out how it works in the version presented above.

A key stunt in this sentence is that we can leave out the that in English relative clauses, as in things cat lovers hate instead of things that cat lovers hate. So let’s build this sentence from the basics, using Niagara in place of Buffalo, bison in place of the noun buffalo, and bully in place of the verb. There’s always a main subject, verb, and object as the fundamental framework of a sentence:
Bison bully bison.

What kind of bison?
Niagara bison bully Niagara bison.

Is there something about those Niagara bison you want to add? Yes – they’re bullied by other Niagara bison:
Niagara bison that Niagara bison bully, bully Niagara bison.
This is like “Things that cat lovers hate please dog lovers.” I’ve added the formally improper comma before the verb, as is sometimes done in a case of this complexity.

Oh, and the Niagara bison that are bullied are also, of course, bullied by Niagara bison:
Niagara bison (that Niagara bison bully) bully Niagara bison that Niagara bison bully.

Now, we can write all that without any internal punctuation:
Niagara bison that Niagara bison bully bully Niagara bison that Niagara bison bully.

And then take out the thats, because we can:
Niagara bison Niagara bison bully bully Niagara bison Niagara bison bully.

Already that looks incomprehensible. Swap in buffalo for each word and you have the final treat:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.

Syntax trees can make things like this much easier, but it would be bothersome to do one up just for this word tasting note. If you want to see one, Google buffalo buffalo buffalo.

It happens that it’s possible to extend this sentence indefinitely by nesting relative clauses, but that quickly becomes baffling (even baleful) and would leave all with a beef, so I will not let it befall.

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bugbear

Posted on February 15, 2011 | 2 comments

Ah, those foreign dictators. Such an annoyance they are, a thorn in the flesh of foreign policy. Of course, for their own people, they’re rather more than an annoyance. And when you have a person who lost an election but would not concede, deciding instead to invalidate votes from the regions that most strongly supported his opponent, with the inevitable violence and oppression following, well, he’s not just a bogeyman.

Meanwhile, the opponent, accepting victory, has taken the oath of office. But the defeated dictator has also taken the oath of office. Ah, full stop! How can you have two oaths of office articulated in two different places at the same time? It would be like saying, perhaps, /g/ and /b/ at the same time.

Except, of course, you can say /g/ and /b/ at the same time, and without competing claims. What are a couple of words wherein we do just that? Well, “what are a” (Ouattara) is paired with one of them: Gbagbo. Alassane Ouattara, you see, is the victor in Côte d’Ivoire, and Laurent Gbagbo the man who won’t hand over power. OK, yes, Gbagbo is not an English word, and many people seem to think they can’t say that opening /gb/. But of course they can, just as surely as they can say the middle /gb/. Or as surely as they can say a word that one could apply to Gbagbo: bugbear.

You may object that the /g/ and /b/ in bugbear are not being said at the same time. But actually they often are, even by Anglophones. Try this: say bugbugbugbugbugbug… You will probably find that your lips and the back of your tongue are coming to be closed at about the same time and to release at about the same time, so that as your jaw lowers there’s a sort of suction effect vaguely like the one you use to drink from a straw. So certainly you can say both /gb/ coarticulations in Gbagbo if you want.

But unaccustomed foreign consonant clusters are bugbears for most Anglophones – and speakers of other languages, too; English has in fact many consonant clusters that are simply impossible in other languages, and so loans from English get simplified as readily as loans to English do (sometimes by deletion, as in English strand becoming Finnish ranta; sometimes by insertion of vowels, perhaps along with alteration of consonants not used in the borrowing language, as in Japanese beisuboru “baseball” and Hawai’ian Kalikimaka “Christmas”).

But is it fair to lump consonant clusters in with despots? Can one word bear such a range, or does that bug you too much? Well, bugbear has over time undergone a weakening. It was originally an object of dread – a hobgoblin (hobgoblin – there’s another possible coarticulation!), apparently at first in the form of that feared animal, a bear (so yes, the bear means the critter). The bug is from Welsh bwg “ghost” and may or may not be the origin of bug “insect”. It also plays peak-a-boo in bugaboo.

Now, of course, an imaginary hobgoblin is an object of needless dread. But as bugbear weakened in terror power it strengthened in reality, so that now bugbear often refers to a very real and persistent annoyance – a thorn in the flesh, one might say, or even a bête noire. Which is what foreign dictators may seem to be in foreign policy terms, about as embêtant as an unexpected coarticulation. But for the citizens of their countries who want them to bug off, they can be much more of a big bad bane.

Thanks to Marie-Lynn Hammond for suggesting bugbear.

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sforzando

Posted on February 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

This may have happened to you at some time – it’s happened to many of us: You’re sitting in church (or, for the non-churchy kind, perhaps at a concert), kinda sleepy, and the organ is noodling away… soft tones tweedling, meandering like little mellow beetles through the gardenscape of your mind as your eyelids sink slowly and SFORZ! suddenly the volume of the organ multiplies with a loud crashing chord, your eyelids flip open, your head whips up, your back jerks straight… And then the music eases off again, but you’re awake now, thank you!

Ah, sforzando. It even sounds like a thundering three-chord bar on a massive pipe organ, doesn’t it? It doesn’t look like English, that’s for sure. It’s not sports and not Schwartz; give the average anglophone a name like, say, Sferry or Sfilip and they might not know what to make of it – might even stick an extra vowel sound in between the /s/ and the /f/. And yet /sf/ does exist in English words; no one seems to have trouble with sphere. Why should sforzando require any extra effort?

Well, of course, a sforzando does require extra effort; that’s what it’s about – it’s almost the musical equivalent of a grunt of exertion. Its abbreviation on the musical page is neatly iconic: sfz – like a line of music that might be going along evenly sss, but suddenly you have that f in the middle sticking out abruptly, and after that don’t doubt but your nerves will have a bit of the electric buzz in them z.

The gesture of saying it has a bit of extra air blown out as well: the /sf/ is like what one does to spit out a watermelon seed or a small hair that’s gotten onto one’s tongue; after the tongue recoils momentarily, there’s the /ts/ in the middle, a little crisper; finally it echoes with a more muffled, voiced /ændo/.

You ought to be able to guess where this word comes from, anyway. If for some reason it doesn’t look Italian enough for you, remember that it’s a musical term, and they’re pretty much all Italian: piano, mezzo, forte, allegro, andante, adagio, dal capo, coda, et cetera. And what does it mean in Italian? “Forcing” – the verb sforzare comes from Medieval Latin exfortiare, which, it just happens, is also the source (by way of French) of our noun effort.

But of course effort seems rather prosaic to us, and forcing no more musical (to say nothing of blast or make them jump). Sforzando, to English eyes, carries that lyrical flavour we associate with Italian, and (stereotypes of Italians – and the behaviour of Berlusconi – notwithstanding) seems more elevated, perhaps in some way closer to the divine. Or anyway to some divine awakening, or at least a vaguely spiritual one: whether or not you are associated with an organ-ized religion, the sforz will be with you.

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besom

Posted on February 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

I think the first time I saw this word it was in the context of being a term of contempt – something like the old besom or the little besom or whatnot. I didn’t really know what it meant or where it came from; I thought, “Well, it must be something negative.” I guessed the pronunciation correctly – it’s like “beezum” – and imagined it might be like a sort of busybody who drops abuse in over the transom.

Well, the first thing to know is that if you call someone a besom, that someone has a bosom. Yes, the term, when applied to a person, is a disparaging term for a woman. But literally it’s a word for an implement. It just happens to be an implement associated with women, historically.

No, I don’t mean a distaff. But, though calling a woman a besom is not calling her a witch, you will often see a besom in a picture of a witch. Though women got to spin rockets (originally a word for a spinster’s implement), they didn’t get to ride them; they rode brooms instead – and the brooms you’re most likely to see pictured are besoms: bundles of straw or twigs wrapped around a staff.

Of course, now Harry Potter rides one too, when playing quidditch. But they call them brooms. Never mind; besom just isn’t all that common a word anymore – perhaps partly because we have better kinds of broom. In some Scots dialects, though, besom remains the generic word for a broom. In mainstream English, it has long been little used – see the Google Ngram comparison.

One may imagine that with a broom you sweep a room while with a besom you can just be busy like a bee. The sounds are different, anyway; though they both have the /b/ to start with, broom has the rumbling /br/ that you also get in brush, and then it gets into the even more thundery /um/, while besom has the high front /i/ sound and then a buzz and a bump before at last landing back at the same /m/ as in broom – the nasal version of the stop that began the word. I do think /brum/ is more reminiscent of a sweeping motion than /bizəm/ is, but I don’t know whether that had any influence on their respective popularity.

So where are you most likely to encounter this word, other than nowhere? You will find figurative uses of it in the King James version of the Bible (“I will sweepe it with the besome of destruction”) and in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 2 (“Be it known unto thee by these presence, even the presence of Lord Mortimer, that I am the besom that must sweep the court clean of such filth as thou art”). You will also find literal uses of it in assorted literature, but not much that was written after the mid-1800s.

You may also find it in the company of other words: a besom-head is a blockhead; a besom-rider is a witch; besom-heath is heath used to make besoms (fancy that), and besom-weed is the same thing – or that other similar plant with which besoms may be made. What was that plant called? Oh, yes: broom.

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phlox, phylloxera

Posted on February 10, 2011 | 1 comment

First of all: does or doesn’t phlox seem like it might be a shortening of phylloxera? If we can shorten chrysanthemum to mum, if we can shorten San Francisco to Frisco, surely we can shorten phylloxera to phlox, no?

Well, I suppose we could if the word weren’t already taken. So, yes, phlox and phylloxera are two different things. One is a bug and one is a flower. Now: which is which? If you happen to know at least one of them, then of course there’s no guessing, but tell me anyway: which one sounds like a bug and which a flower?

I have the general sense (I’m not going to dig up stats to support it right now; that would take time) that there are quite a few flower names that are polysyllabic and often ending in a: hydrangea, azalea, calendula, camellia, gardenia, portulaca… On the other hand, a word like phlox seems to me better suited to a bug, like gnat, aphid, midge, cockroach, flea, tsetse fly, wasp…

Even if you don’t know either of these words, you can probably see this coming: phlox is a pretty, bright-coloured flower, and phylloxera is a plant louse that plagues grape vines – it destroyed most of the grape vines in Europe in the later 19th century after having been brought over from the Americas. (The vineyards recovered by means of hybridization.) The pair together (not that they are ever seen together) are not for days of wine and roses; however, at least phlox make a substitute for roses, whereas phylloxera deprive you of the wine altogether.

If you are despairing of any sort of sound-sense link in these words, there is still a straw you may cling to: their Greek origins. Phylloxera is not, after all, Classical Greek for “nasty grape-eating bug”. Look closely at its bits (the word, I mean): does phyllo look like pastry? It actually means “leaf” (well, phyllon is the word for “leaf”), just as phyllo pastry is leafy. And xera? Not a warrior princess; just a copy. A photocopy. It’s the source for Xerox, a printer that uses dry ink (toner). Xéros means “dry”. So this is the dry-leaf bug. Meanwhile, Classical Greek phlox means “flame”. (Phlox your Bic?)

Does the ph on phlox make it seem high-level? Or, paradoxically, argot-y, perhaps nerd argot, like phishing, or something a bit hipper, like phat? Does the x make it seem like a character from Dr. Seuss (like the Lorax) or from Star Trek (that would be – uh, Phlox, actually, from Star Trek: Enterprise)? Does it seem perhaps as though the mouth is fuller with ph than with, say, f? Well, what do you think about the word flocks? Does it feel different? Quite the influence that spelling and context have, isn’t it? Phlox and flocks are pronounced exactly the same, after all.

And what about phylloxera: it’s a very similar vocal gesture to that of phlox, just more drawn out and with a /r/ consonant added (and while you, like me, may automatically put the accent on the third-last syllable, there is also the option of putting it on the second-last). It certainly starts soft; it has the hard /ks/ in the middle, but then it ends soft, too. It has a certain liquidity to it as well – like the soft drink you have to have because the bugs got the wine, perhaps. Well, at least there are the flowers…

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shirr

Posted on February 9, 2011 | 2 comments

Maury had invited a few of us – me, Elisa, and Jess – over for brunch, and was setting before us small dishes with eggs and butter floating in them.

“Mmm! What’s this?” exclaimed Elisa Lively.

“It’s a shirred egg,” said Maury.

“Assured of what?” Elisa asked.

“Proper cooking and no absence of cholesterol,” Maury said.

“But can you tell me what you did to it?”

“Shirr.”

Pause.

“So what did you do to it?”

“Shirr.” Maury was trying to suppress a smile. He has a wicked streak.

“Sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“What are you sure about?”

“The eggs. I assure you, that egg is a shirred egg.”

I gestured at the yellow goodness my egg was swimming in. “Butter you shirr?”

“Always.”

“OK,” said Jess, “stop milking this or I’ll cream you.”

Maury held up a finger, turned on his heel and went to his cookbook shelf. He returned with a copy of the 1977 English printing of the 1960 edition of the Larousse Gastronomique, open to page 338. He handed it to Elisa with a gesture. She read aloud: “‘Eggs sur le plat, or shirred eggs.’ …Oh! …You’re funny. ‘…For two eggs coat the dish with one half tablespoon butter. Heat on the stove. Break the eggs into the dish and pour melted butter on the yolks. Cook in the oven for as long as is liked and when ready, sprinkle with fine salt.'” She handed the book back. “So I gather that to make shirred eggs, you shirr them.”

“You gather correctly,” Maury said. “In fact, if I may say ‘sew,’ when you shirr you always gather.”

“OK, you’ve lost me again,” Elisa said.

“The meaning of shirr is elastic,” I explained.

“You guys!” Jess said. She turned to Elisa. “Shirr also means ‘gather or draw up fabric using parallel threads’, and a shirred garment has elastic threads woven into it. The noun shirr can mean elastic webbing.”

“Oh,” said Elisa. “What’s the connection?”

“The elastic, of course,” Maury said. Elisa swatted him. “Actually,” Maury said, “I don’t know, and the usual reference sources are not forthcoming on the subject. It may have to do with the appearance of the eggs when they are shirred.”

“Well,” said Elisa, determined to get a wordplay into the match, “I guess you’re the shirriff today.”

“No, this is the Shirriff,” said Maury, gesturing to a jar of Shirriff marmalade that was on the sideboard. “And your toast.” He pointed to a plate of toast on the table.

“I’m toast?” Elisa said.

“Don’t egg him on,” Jess said. “Look, I’m eating.” She took a bite. “Why don’t we all?”

“I hope it’s good,” Maury said.

Jess smiled a little. “Shirr.” (Or perhaps she said “it is” in Mandarin. It sounds about the same…)

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What’s the reason to not do it?

Posted on February 9, 2011 | 2 comments

I was wandering around through Twitter, and I read the following tweet from someone called @GrammarMonkeys: “not to participate” — there’s no reason to split that infinitive (others, yes, but not this one)

That’s sort of like saying to a chicken, “There’s no reason to cross that road (other roads, yes, but not this one).” You see, what if the chicken just wants to cross the road? Is there a general rule saying “Don’t cross roads without a special reason to do so”? No, there isn’t.

And is there a rule in English that says “Don’t split infinitives” or even “Don’t split infinitives without a special reason to do so”? Continue reading →

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snuck

Posted on February 8, 2011 | 1 comment

Well, maybe it’s time I snuck in another pocket screed. Today’s will be “why ‘that’s not a word’ is a senseless assertion.” And maybe if I snuck in a bit of linguistic terminology as well… it’s ablaut time.

Let’s start with that ablaut thingy. What is ablaut? It’s a term (pronounced like “ab lout”) linguistics has taken from German to refer to what’s happening in word sets such as shrink, shrank, shrunken, or sing, sang, sung, or drive and drove, or any other set of words where an inflectional change causes the main vowel to move back in the mouth – in particular “strong” verbs.

Now, the thing about “strong” verbs is that, supposedly, they’re not making new ones. New verbs have to get the -ed past tense and past participle endings, supposedly. It would be sloppy and irregular and so on if some verb that didn’t have the “strong” blue blood in its veins were to take on the airs of ablaut.

The problem being that people, goshdarnit, don’t seem to approach language in a purely schematic, consistent way. Things are often done by analogy. And some things begin as “mistakes” but take root. There are quite a lot of fully accepted words and expressions now in use that have come about through “mistakes,” reanalysis, et cetera. And of course there are some that are still resisted vigorously in spite of being in common use for more than a century. One such is snuck.

It’s quite a sensible ablaut alternation, isn’t it? Sneak–snuck, as self-evident as, say, dive–dove. Alas, it was not always thus; the original (and still used, especially outside of North America) past tense of sneak was sneaked. Somehow snuck just snuck in there (like dove – the same people who oppose snuck oppose dove as the past of dive, for the same reason: it’s not an original strong verb).

It’s not as though the ablaut words we have have all kept their original vowels from the beginning, either. Drove would then be drave, for instance. But snuck is a pure interloper! It’s like having one of those people trying to get into your country club. They’re just not our sort. They don’t belong, you see. Why, snuck is not a word!

Well, yes it is. First of all, a word is any unitary lexical item that is used with proper effect to communicate a particular sense. In other words, if I say it as a word, and you understand it as a word, it’s a word for us. And if it’s in general circulation in a given language and used by many people, and those speakers of that language who hear it generally understand it, it’s a word in that language. Doesn’t matter if it’s not in your dictionary; dictionaries are like field guides, not legislation. Birdwatchers don’t say “That can’t be a bird; it’s not in my book,” they say “My book is missing that one.” That’s how it is with dictionaries too. And if you’re arguing against something being a word, it’s surely because you’ve heard it used as a word (otherwise why bother arguing?), so you’re already wrong from the start.

And anyway, snuck is in the dictionary. So there. It’s been in use in American English since at least the late 1800s, and it’s made its way into all sorts of dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary.

Sure, it’s comparatively informal. But the verb sneak isn’t exactly high-flown. And there’s use for informal words. Especially ones that have a suitable mouthfeel and sound, like snuck does. Let’s face it: sneaking is a generally negatively toned act, or at least a rascally one. It’s something done in such a way as to evade detection. There is a certain underhandedness and lack of dignity to it. Under what circumstance could you even think of saying “The Pope snuck into the room”? (Or “The Pope sneaked into the room”?)

So we have a word that has the nose-reminiscent /sn/, which also shows up in words like snip, snicker, snake, and sneer, and then we get that “uck”, which can be a very down-to-earth, informal kind of sound in our language: it might be good luck or a big truck or it might be getting stuck trying to buy a duck (yuck), or it might be any of a variety of other more or less louche words ending with the same rhyme.

This is not to say that sneaked lacks any such tones – it has the same onset, and rhymes with leaked and peeked and tweaked and such like – but it’s a higher, thinner sound (I have the sense that snuck is more appropriate to going under a table and sneaked to going in through a narrow gap), and it has a more complex ending, /kt/ rather than /k/.

So why not have a choice? It’s hardly the first time we’ve had two words for something, and just aesthetic and similar connotative matters to distinguish between them. After all, snuck is a word too.

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patty

Posted on February 8, 2011 | 1 comment

I lately learned of an interesting little episode in bureaucracy thanks to torontoist.com. At Historicist: The Toronto Patty Wars, I found out that in 1985, federal food inspectors from the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs informed sellers of Jamaican beef patties in Toronto that they absolutely could not sell their products under that name.

The inspectors, you see, armed with the federal definition of a beef patty as consisting of only meat, salt, seasonings, and flavour enhancers, and definitely nothing made from grain products, were shocked, appalled, dismayed, etc., to discover that these so-called “beef patties” actually had quite a lot of flour and similar things in them!

Well, of course they did. A Jamaican beef patty is somewhat like an empanada or a Cornish pasty: it has a pastry shell inside which is ground, seasoned meat. And they had been sold in Toronto under the name beef patties since the 1960s (and in Jamaica long before that). So what’s the beef?

In the end, the vendors were allowed to continue calling their products patties, but they could not call them beef patties. Which of course means that if you sell Jamaican patties some of which have beef and some of which have other fillings, you have to use a more convoluted syntax to designate them.

This is clearly a case of putting the cart before the horse, and it’s also a great example of the grand old language game of presenting inferior understanding as superior understanding. The government knew of only one kind of patty, and made its narrow definition on the basis of that, and when it was confronted with other patties, it insisted they could not be patties because they did not fit its definition. This is perhaps the most classic example of a Procrustean bed I have ever seen in real life. It just goes to show how sometimes (often, in fact) pat answers are flat wrong.

The greatest irony of all in this is that the Caribbean sense of patty, “small pie or pastry”, predates the “flattened cake of ground or minced food” sense… by nearly 250 years.

The word patty, and its sibling pasty (pronounced like past with an /i/ on the end), come from an older sense of French pâté, which in turn comes from pâte, which is cognate with pasta and pastry and comes ultimately from Greek παστη pasté, “paste” or “barley porridge”. The English sense, in use by 1660, was first a meat pie. The meaning transferred to the filling – specifically formed and shaped as a disc – by the early 20th century.

And now what do we think when we hear patty? Well, if it’s beef patty and we’re not used to Caribbean food, we’ll think of a hamburger. But if we hear the word patty by itself (and we don’t think we’re hearing paddy as in rice paddy), we’re probably going to think of the female name. We might think of particular people, real or fictional, who have had that name. I’m put in mind of a rather winsome, introverted girl I knew I high school, for instance. (Thanks to Facebook, I know that she is now a university professor.) But I’m also put in mind of Peppermint Patty from Peanuts (a.k.a. Charlie Brown comics), singer Patti Smith, and the song “Cow Patti” by Jim Stafford – and of course cow patties, something I saw many of up close and personal when I was growing up in Alberta. And there are many males also called Patty (or Paddy), short for Patrick (or Pádraig).

You might also think of patty cake (also known as pat-a-cake) and the act of patting something and perhaps even that charming little Christmas song with the line “tu-re-lu-re-lu, pat-a-pat-a-pan.” And perhaps you’ll be put in mind of putty or petty or pretty or potty or pity or maybe even (in the spirit of the Christmas song) piety. It just has such a pleasing little percussivity to it, kind of like the little pats with which one may form a hamburger patty. (That word pat, by the way, most likely is imitative in origin – your hand goes “pat, pat, pat”, so that’s that.)

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