Monthly Archives: March 2011

prayer

Posted on March 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

“How come the word ‘prayer’ has no ascenders at all?” asks Jim Taylor.

I am immediately put in mind of Claudius’s lines from Hamlet: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” But of course the written form of prayer reaches only to the roots and not to the branches regardless of the sincerity of intention. Not that here is necessarily the right place to debate the up-is-Heaven-down-is-Hell schematization. I do remember that my mother at least used to have a plaque or poster that read “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads,” a quote from Henry David Thoreau. And Laurie Anderson starts and ends her song “Language Is a Virus” with the aphorism (which I have always liked) “Paradise is exactly like where you are right now only much much better.”

Well, in any event, the form of this word is adventitious – regardless of how sincere the prayer of the pray-er, no matter whether, deep in the heart, there is a “why” (a y), no matter whether the prayer contains a ray of hope, and no matter whether the oral gesture of it involves the tongue in a full wave of prostration (“pray-er”) or merely a slight distancing and return (our usual “prer”), it all just happened to be so, the result of accumulated linguistic acts and facts that occurred without reference to this particular word. As with so many things, the karma runs over the dogma.

But, say, now, why is it that the noun for what you make when you pray is prayer? Shouldn’t prayer be the one who prays? Well, in fact, there is also a word prayer – often written pray-er for clarity – that means “one who prays”, but our usual word prayer does not involve the usual er agentive suffix. No, it has simply been polished down by the flowing river of time, over the centuries and by way of French, from post-classical Latin precaria.

Does that word look a little familiar? Prithee consider this situation: You are a king, and you have gained the kingship by offing your brother. Now your nephew knows you did it, and so your position is precarious: you are become prey, and must next prey on him. You will not do so without uttering precations and imprecations, however – though you may find your precations are imprecise and so will proceed unappreciated, and your imprecations simply impotent. So now, pray tell: what words are related?

Prey, that closest, best pun, is not. It’s from a different root altogether (Latin praeda). But precarious and precation – and imprecation – are. We can understand the connection with imprecation – although it’s often used now in phrases such as uttering imprecations to mean “swearing”, that is a bit imprecise. Precaria meant “entreaty, petition, request” (and the general “request” sense has persisted in pray tell and other frozen archaisms), and certainly deities were often the ones being asked. Precation is just prayer. With imprecation, one is asking for evil to come down on another, so “To hell with you!” counts, but “You stupid jerk!” does not.

But, now, what could prayer possibly have to do with a position of poise on the point of a pinnacle? We know, don’t we, that a precarious position is one where one might fall at any time, and that precariously tends to go with balanced? In fact, the original sense of the word would not even have included situations where one is at the whim of forces not susceptible to reason or persuasion. It meant that one was in one’s state at the whim or pleasure of another – that one was a suppliant, entreating the other. To be a tenant at will was to be precarious.

But senses shift, and the sense of uncertainty has been retained while the sense of volitional caprice on the part of another has largely been lost. Still, though, however inhuman the forces, many will appeal to a superhuman other when in a precarious position. And we may feel sure the prayer will be sincere – or at least the desperation will be – whether the word flies up or reaches down, and whether the thoughts should reach out or go within, flail like branches (as they often do) or dig deep for water and strength.

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perigee

Posted on March 20, 2011 | 1 comment

We were driving back from a day of skiing – my wife, my friend Trish, and I – and I looked over and saw the moon rising over the fields and low hills. It was reddish and large, and it rose perceptibly – in a matter of a few minutes it had cleared the horizon. It glowed, pregnant, like a big e: not an o, a blank face, but an e, first because it was bisected by the horizon, but afterward just because its face is not, after all, blank. And of course the moon always looks larger at the horizon, but tonight it had an even better reason for looking like a fat, tawny perogie: it was at its perigee.

Yes, the moon, the moon, the moon, the full full moon, is at a low point in its orbit – a point closer to the earth than usual. You see, our selenic satellite pursues an elliptical path in its peregrination: a Bosc pear, an egg. Imagine the earth at the back of your mouth, and the moon sometimes at your lips /p/ but sometimes at the tip of your tongue. Tonight it swings lower, lowering, closer: it appears fourteen percent wider and thirty percent brighter than average.

And as we looked at it, it was such a ruddy colour, paling only gradually as it rose: a blood moon, bloodthirsty like the one in Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding, or a warm one? Is it serious and noble – has it a peerage and prestige – or is it a parody? It’s not a blue moon, to leave you standing alone. And it is not cold and green; it is ripe at its perigee, appearing as a low-hanging fruit. It may be the focus of many a pagan liturgy; it could perhaps spawn a Persian peri in her imperfect pursuit of paradise. And so many songs have been written of it, perhaps to purge the urge, perhaps in pure ecstasy… And yet still it circles, now closer, now farther, planet of our planet for eternity (more or less).

Note that we are not saying it is at its nadir. Although nadir is commonly used to refer to a low point, it is celestially the point that is diametrically opposite the zenith – and hence under your feet. No, the opposite of perigee is apogee, and in both cases the gee is from Greek γῆ gé or γαῖα gaia, “earth”. The peri means “close” in this context – in others it often means “around”; we may say that the moon at its perigee is hanging around the earth. Yes, swing low at the sweet perigee, as I am being carried home.

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Blarney, baloney, and etymology

Posted on March 18, 2011 | 9 comments

I’m about to tear a strip off a guy who died in 2008. That may not seem fair, but what he did lives on, in his work and in the work of countless others who do the same damn thing. He presented his work as etymology, but it’s just plain baloney – or, as Daniel Cassidy would have said, béal ónna.

Daniel Cassidy would have said that because he was in the habit of saying that all sorts of American slang came from Irish. Slang can be very hard to etymologize, because it tends to originate in oral tradition, and so to show up rather late in print. But Cassidy was sure he had the skeleton key. He wrote a book: How the Irish Invented Slang. In it he looked at a variety of American slang terms, and explained how every last one of them really came from this or that Irish phrase. Stool pigeon was from steallaire béideánach (steall béideán being the related verb phrase), but stoolie was from steall éithigh, jazz was from teas, eighty-six from éiteachas aíochta, bunkum from buanchumadh, spiel from spéal… yes, really.

Cassidy’s method was fairly straightforward. He would seize on some slang expression and toss around for an Irish Gaelic phrase that sounded something like it (as the above do; teas is said rather like our chass, for instance) and had a meaning that could be tortured into supporting the connection – teas means “heat”, steall éithigh means “spout a false oath” – and then he would note that there were Irish immigrants in the area during the time that the phrase seems to have arisen, so it must be true. Never mind if the Irish source was never known to have existed as a stock phrase or cliché; never mind if it includes a rare word or an uncommon usage of the word; never mind if there was no reference made anywhere in history to an Irish origin; never mind if the phonological transformations he posited go beyond the expectable; never mind if there is a persuasive etymology pointing to a different source (as with bunkum, baloney and spiel). It makes a good story, it fits together, so it must be true.

Does this seem like shoddy methodology, nothing but hooey and blarney? Well, it is. A saying among linguists is “Etymology by sound is not sound etymology.” Think of the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding coming up with an etymology for Japanese kimono from Greek kheimon. Pure “below knee”—oops, baloney. Give us a smoking gun: citations. A clear connection.

But why should it matter, if it’s a good story? Well, for one thing, it’s bad history. For another, the real stories are often more interesting. For a third, if you want facts, don’t you want facts? And fourth, sometimes it’s needlessly provocative, as with the claim that picnic and nitty-gritty are racist terms, in spite of more-than-ample evidence to the contrary. (Meanwhile, no one seems bothered by bulldoze…)

So enough with the blarney and baloney. Sound coincidences can be the spark of an investigation, but never more than that.

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balls

Posted on March 17, 2011 | 13 comments

The choice of what word to use is a delicate one; one simply does not wish to make a balls-up of it. Thus one may consult a word sommelier:

Dear word sommelier: If I have a sentence such as “I can’t believe he had the ____ to do it,” do I want gall, nerve, chutzpah, effrontery, balls, or something else?

We have, so far this week, addressed the first four options. Yesterday we looked at the most formal, prim, perhaps even feminine one, effrontery. Today we are at the other end of the scale. I can’t believe he had the balls to do it is not something a politician is likely to say in an interview – you’ll sooner hear it in a sports bar or a garage.

There are, of course, other anatomical references available to express roughly the same concept. Gall is one (a bodily fluid); cheek is another; nerve is a third; guts is slightly different in sense but still in the same general vein. There is even an anatomical reference in effrontery (the forehead). But balls hits below the belt. It is a direct reference to pudenda, and as such is particularly impudent.

Also obviously masculine. Which makes this word undeniably sexist, in that it assigns a certain brashness and nerve to males. This is, of course, a reflection of a general cultural norm; aggressive women have long been described with masculine terms. But at least it’s not a put-down to call a woman ballsy, even if it is an implied put-down of the average member of her sex (let’s see, is there a good way to phrase that without using member and sex? never mind).

Nor is it a put-down of the woman in question to say I can’t believe she had the balls to do it (and it has been said; you can find that very phrase, and others like it, with a simple Google search). Anatomically inaccurate, to be sure, unless the balls in question happen to be some dude’s nuts that she’s squeezing (had having multiple shades of sense available). But aside from the sexism (and, of course, because of cultural sexism), this may be the most admiring of the options. If you use a word like this, it is because you admire courage and confidence and you associate them with masculinity – or at least because you’re willing to make use of a cultural norm that assigns such values.

Now, one might well point out that she had the balls to do it could be a reference to some craft project involving spheres, or perhaps a game of some sort – maybe she just tossed her bat aside and walked to first base. But you know, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, that such reference would have to be specified clearly, and even then the sexual reference would bleed through like pentimento. To give a parallel example, military pilots, referring to flying full throttle, made reference to the dual ball ends on the throttle stick in the phrase balls to the wall, but they clearly did so with a smirk.

Ball, singular, is, true enough, a word that one may use quite innocuously without provoking Beavis-and-Butt-head-type snickerfests. It’s a good old English word with cognates of the same or similar meaning throughout the Germanic languages; it also comes from the same Indo-European root as Latin follis “inflated ball, bellows” and Greek ϕαλλός phallos… yes, that’s right, phallus and balls have the same root. OK, OK… can we continue now?

The point (stop that) is that balls in the plural is by default a reference to balls in the dual, and you know which two balls. The paradoxical association that testicles carry of masculine aggression with vulnerability (and pain!) has led to a few different balls expressions: don’t bust my balls, we’ve got him by the balls, he really made a balls of it, and of course the exclamation Balls!

So, is balls the word you want? If you want to be coarse and admiring and you don’t mind the sexism of it (and you don’t think your audience will mind), then it’s your top choice. It has the same general sonic features as gall, except that it has the /z/ at the end to cap it off; it is a word that is practically made to be bawled loudly. If you want to be even a little proper, however, you’d have to be nuts to use it.

Stop that.

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effrontery

Posted on March 16, 2011 | 4 comments

So, we have been addressing this question:

Dear word sommelier: If I have a sentence such as “I can’t believe he had the ____ to do it,” do I want gall, nerve, chutzpah, effrontery, balls, or something else?

We have so far tasted the first three; now it is time for effrontery. This is the longest of the list above (and in fact one is hard put to find a longer synonym; audacity and impertinence are other four-syllable words in the same set, but other rough synonyms include such as insolence, impudence, and cheek). It pushes forward in its heavy, soft petticoats, ff, and it has the force of a formal, uncommon, polysyllabic word, that forbidding soft stiffness, perhaps, of the schoolmistress or mother superior chastising one for effrontery (or mayhap it’s the sound of the impudent hussy as she goes about whatever it is for which she is chastisable).

And it’s very up-front: the front pushes forward, and, yes, it’s the same front as our word front – well, more accurately, it comes from the same source: Latin frons, meaning “forehead”. It has an overriding echo of affront – in fact, it’s misspelled as affrontery about one time in ten (if a Google poll is to be believed). But affront comes from ad frontem, “to the forehead” or “to the face”, referring to a slap, where as in effrontery in place of the ad is an ex, “from” or “out”.

So does effrontery mean “get outta my face”? Well, no; there is an ongoing argument about the exact sense, but it’s either “pushing the forehead forward” or, using the sense frons also has of “ability to blush”, it may be “unblushing”. I am more inclined to the latter, for what that’s worth; Oxford is too, which is worth a fair bit. Anyway, if it’s “unblushing” it’s rather akin to impudent, from Latin for “shameless”; either way, the forehead forward and the face unreddened, one displays a fair amount of cheek.

This word makes me think of the name Ephron, as in Nora and – perhaps especially – her sister Delia, the author of the pleasingly impertinent How to Eat Like a Child. Also Zac Efron. And, for that matter, Jean Effront, a noted enzymologist (8156–1931), born Isaac Effront. All these names (Jewish family names all) trace to a Biblical character, Ephron, who sold the patriarch Abraham a plot of land in which to bury his wife Sarah – a deal pressed with smoothness rather than effrontery.

The question that remains, in regard to the taste of this word, is whether it has any positive tone, as nerve and especially chutzpah do. I would have to say that it does not carry any particular sense of admiration; it may not be as harsh a put-down as gall (which empties a bladder on the person, whereas this one simply defaces), but it lacks a particular element of praise. Indeed, being the most technical-sounding and formal of the lot, it is the most neutrally toned. Inasmuch as one may speak in neutral tones of such a shameless infraction, of course (most likely a social infraction, incidentally).

Tomorrow we go to the wall with balls!

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chutzpah

Posted on March 15, 2011 | 4 comments

The question of the week:

Dear word sommelier: If I have a sentence such as “I can’t believe he had the ____ to do it,” do I want gall, nerve, chutzpah, effrontery, balls, or something else?

We’re onto chutzpah today, and this word is something special. For starts, it’s special because it’s Yiddish. And that means two things right off the bat: a, you don’t say it like a chutney disaster – the first sound is /h/ or a stronger fricative, like the end of loch, and it rhymes with foot spa (and indeed with chutzpah there’s always something afoot); b, it carries with it very overt tones of Ashkenazi Jewish culture. Those tones are very deep and complex and are received differently by different people, and you need to be aware that how you intend it may be different from how it is received, not only due to the listener’s attitudes but also due to who you are and who your listener is. That’s not to say this is a word to be avoided; in most contexts it will communicate very effectively. But when you use it, you are making a cultural reference.

Yiddish is a Germanic language, but it has a lot of vocabulary items from Hebrew, and this is one. It comes from Hebrew khuspa, a negatively toned word for “insolence, audacity, impudence”. Chutzpah (anglicized a bit from Yiddish khutspe), however, is at least partly positively toned – even if you’re using it to refer to someone whose character you would not advise anyone to emulate, it still carries a grudging admiration, perhaps even a sort of amazement at the audacious effrontery and, probably, shrewdness. Chutzpah has more guts than nerve does, even more than balls does. And neither nerve nor balls conveys the kind of intelligence that chutzpah conveys.

The best definition of something like chutzpah is an example, and the best example I’ve seen is Leo Rosten’s, from The Joys of Yiddish: “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.” No wonder some dictionary definitions include words like “unbelievable gall” – it’s the “unbelievable” that really comes in. More than any of the other choices, this one says “Did he really just do that?!” – and it says it with that kind of laugh that one makes almost involuntarily.

Chutzpah can have more of a business tone to it, too, as well as a natural suitability to the air of a courtroom – famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz titled his 1991 book of essays Chutzpah. Contrast that with some of the other options, such as gall and effrontery, which lean more to the social sphere.

And chutzpah has a bit of electricity in it – that zap in the middle, with the z and the look and sound of tz /ts/. And after the zap… ah. The whole thing sounds a bit like a firework, in fact.

Chutzpah is often defined as “effrontery”. But would you rather use effrontery here? We’ll taste that one next.

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nerve

Posted on March 14, 2011 | 4 comments

Here’s the question:

Dear word sommelier: If I have a sentence such as “I can’t believe he had the ____ to do it,” do I want gall, nerve, chutzpah, effrontery, balls, or something else?

We’ve already tasted gall. Now let’s try nerve.

Nerve has opposing aspects to it. On the one hand, you have the nerve that it takes a lot of – if you have the nerve to do something, it means that you have actually mustered the nerve to do it, an amount of nerve most people wouldn’t have. Even if, as is often the case, it’s a complaint – The nerve of that guy! Where did he get the nerve to do that? – there is at the very least a sense of strength of will, and perhaps even a grudging admiration: “I could never have the nerve to do that!” And if there are two opposing parties each trying to stare the other down, it can come to a war of nerves.

But on the other hand, you have nervous; if you have an attack of nerves, that means (paradoxically!) that you lack the nerve to do something. The same vibration (you can hear it in the /v/, even) that can give verve to nerve can also be the vibration of shivering with anxiety.

And of course there’s also the nerves that someone gets on. If someone has a lot of nerve, it can really get on your nerves, that’s for sure. (The /r/ nucleus in this word, with its straining growl, can be a very good vehicle for expressing this.) And in fact they may do something that touches a nerve – perhaps even touches a raw nerve.

Ah, nerves are electric. There is always some energy, always some vibration, but it can be positive or negative, bold or timorous, admirable or annoying. And all of those flavours are present whenever you use this word, though of course a particular sense will be more forward.

This multiplicity of sense comes in even in the sentence in question. If you say I can’t believe he had the nerve to do it, you could be admiring his courage, or you could be speaking resentfully of his impudence. The intonation will give the clue as much as anything. Is it “Wow, that took a lot of nerve!” or is it “The nerve of that guy!”?

Nerve, by the way, as you might suspect from the form of it and from its related form nervous, comes from Latin: nervus, “sinew, tendon, nerve, penis, etc.” (isn’t that quite a set of things!). The Latin has a cognate in Greek: νεῦρον neuron, meaning (in Greek) the same things as nervus. But while nerve, borrowed into English well before Shakespeare, has become a very common and often figurative word in English, neuron, which was borrowed in just over a century ago, is still rather technical and literal. You couldn’t say I can’t believe he had the neuron to do it, and if you say I can’t believe he had the neurons to do it people will probably assume you thought he was stupid.

Now, speaking of a term that expresses admiration, grudging or even ungrudging, we will look next at chutzpah.

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gall

Posted on March 13, 2011 | 4 comments

Dear word sommelier: If I have a sentence such as “I can’t believe he had the ____ to do it,” do I want gall, nerve, chutzpah, effrontery, balls, or something else?

Ah, now here’s a choice that really brings in the nuances that word tasters learn to discern. We will choose on the basis of the subtle tones a word gets from the various contexts of its usage – words are, after all, known by the company they keep – as well as by other words they have sound echoes of and by other senses of the word. So let’s taste these five words, one at a time, to see which one might fit your need.

First of all, if you feel like using the word unimitigated before the word, then your word is gall. Those two often travel together. But what we need to remember is that the use of gall to mean “impudence” is relatively recent – it showed up in the late 1800s – and particularly American.

Gall, you see, is what the gall bladder squeezes out: bile. And bile is a bitter thing. For most of the history of this old Anglo-Saxon word, figurative references were exclusively to that bitterness. We still use it for that reference, but mainly in the present participle of the verb form: galling. Something that’s galling leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. (Are gall stones galling? Usually one wouldn’t say so – unless, say, you had them when your dissolute uncle who ought to have every disease under the sun is as healthy as a horse, while you’ve been drinking wheatgrass every day for two years. So we can see that galling has the bitterness of envy.)

The bitterness (especially the spiteful or envious bitterness!) of galling is going to flavour the noun gall we’re looking at. If person A has the gall to do thing X, there’s more than a hint that thing X will be galling to some person(s) B (and perhaps C, D…). Person A might do X in spite of B, and B might be spiteful as a result.

One may also think that a thing one has the gall to do is a thing that will make someone else say, “Gaahhhhh!” But the stronger echo, I feel, is from all, with its expansive sweep – gall is likely to carry a tone of greater-than-expected magnitude, even completeness, and in particular an entirely undeserved and impertinent arrogation of that completeness. There’s also the effect of appalling. And probably of balls, too. (Not of small, however!)

Gall has the straightforwardness of being a single syllable, but it is very sustainable. Not only that, the /l/ here is that notably English allophone, where the tongue is raised at the back and the tip just manages to reach up to touch the alveolar ridge; the body of the tongue is thus in a straining U-type curve. And there’s a slight hint of choking in the constriction produced at the back of the tongue.

But, as mentioned, gall often travels with unmitigated. After all, sometimes a single syllable feels insufficient – it needs a nice polysyllabic wind-up to give it more punch.

One thing is certain: there is no great sense of admiration in gall. A recent New York Times editorial that displays it in full asperity (and uses galling too) is “.24 Karat Gall.”

Next up: nerve.

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wh-

Posted on March 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

I was watching World Cup downhill skiing from Kvitfjell, Norway, today, and I thought, “Huh, Kvitfjell. That must mean ‘white mountain’.”

Which, of course, it did. Now, it’s not that I speak Norwegian, but I do know that fjell means “mountain” (cognate with the English noun fell, now uncommon) and I had good reason to expect that kvit was “white”.

You see, although “white” in modern German is weiss, just as “what” is wass and “which” is welcher (or welche or welches), and in Dutch the three are wit, wat, and welk, meaning that in both languages it’s just w now (pronounced /v/ or, in Dutch, something close to it), I knew that in Icelandic, the three are hvítur, hvað, and hver, with the hv pronounced [kv] or [kf]. And I see, looking it up, that “white” is hvid in Danish and hvit in standard Norwegian (yes, the kvit spelling is a different dialect), though the h seems most likely to go unpronounced.

We should also notice that in many of our modern English wh words, there are Latin equivalents in qu: quid means “what” and quis means “which”, for instance. (Latin for “white” comes from a different root.) This is most notably so with question words (note that question also starts with qu), which we refer to as wh words in English (and in fact linguists will often call the set the “wh- words” even in other languages, though I’d rather think “qu- words” would have a more widespread verity).

This is because they all come from the same Proto-Indo-European roots, which had a /kw/ onset – that oral gesture that may be like sucking or like kissing, but either way involves both front and back of the mouth, with a sort of tension between the lips pushing outward and the tongue sticking at the back. As the various Indo-European languages developed, the /kw/ was preserved in some, and in others became /sw/ (as in Sanskrit svetah “white”, Old Church Slavonic svetu “light”, and Lithuanian sviesti “shine”), or reduced to /k/ (as in various words for “who”: Sanskrit ka, Lithuenian ka, Irish cé) or even changed to /p/ or /pw/ (Greek poteros and Welsh pwy for “who”), or – as in Germanic languages – altered to /hw/ and in some cases ultimately reduced to /w/. (And in some Scots English dialects, under the influence of Gaelic phonotactics, the /hw/ has sometimes moved to /f/, as in fit “what” – the voicelessness and labial location are preserved, but the rest is changed.)

This leaves us with two questions particularly relevant to English. First, are white and what and which now /w/ onset words, at least in some versions of English? Second, why do we write them with wh when obviously we say either /w/ or /hw/ but never /wh/?

To look at the first question first: here in Canada, as in much of the United States, you will normally hear them with just /w/. But the odds are pretty good that there’s still a citation form (as linguists call them) with a /hw/. Get someone to say “I saw a wight which saw a white witch” and then have someone ask them to repeat it more clearly, and you have a good chance of hearing the /hw/ on the wh words. For that matter, there are times (say, when addressing an impatient woman briefly) when one might say Which? very clearly so as not to be thought to be saying Witch! And some people will find they are more likely to say /hw/ in some contexts – for instance, Rosemary Tanner (who suggested this exploration) finds that white gets the voiceless onset when referring to snow and freshly washed laundry. At the same time, of course, we have lots of fun with the usual homophony, for instance with Which witch is which? So there’s no question of our not being aware that we usually say it just /w/!

There is, by the way, some question of whether it’s really accurate to say it’s /hw/. Say /h/, as in the start of how. Now say /w/ as in win. Now tack the one onto the other: h-win. Does that seem quite like what you say when you say when? Or maybe a bit too separated? Dollars to doughnuts your lips are already rounded when you start the /h/ sound, in fact. So really it’s a voiceless /w/ (the IPA symbol is /ʍ/, an upside-down w), and it might get some voicing at the end.

But it undoubtedly came from a /hw/, which came from a /kw/. And in fact in Old English it was written hw. So hwat happened? Well, it changed during the Middle English period. Somewhere in the 1200s scribes started using wh, possibly under the influence of some Norman French spellings of some words (that’s how we got our sh and ch spellings for what had up to then been written sc and c). We’re not actually altogether sure why the change was made, in fact.

But it didn’t happen all at once; it was dragged out, and uneven. In fact, the list of different spellings of white in the OED is rather long, starting with the old hwit and moving to such as wit and wyt (yes, at one time we left off the h in spelling) as well as to whit and whyte and so on but also to an assortment of others, such as qwyte, quhyt, and qwyght.

The same pattern holds true for our various wh question words, of course. The interesting case is who, wherein the /w/ has been altogether dropped; it started out as hwa in Old English, but once the sound had moved to be /hwu/, the more natural progression was to /hu/, assimilating the two rounded sounds and keeping the voiceless opener for an onset. Interestingly, this also happened to the Old English hwo, which became hu… and then, in Modern English, how. How do you like that? And who would have thought it, eh? What do you know…

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liqueur

Posted on March 11, 2011 | 1 comment

Oh, dear. Am I in my cups again? Only if you’re talking about the u and u. You may drink liquor alone, with only one cup u, but liqueur is clearly meant for a more social – or romantic – occasion. You can see the smiling person e carrying the little glasses to the table. Perhaps it’s like some Bailey’s commercial: should the gentleman spill some on you, he may have to liqueur dress… or liqueur arm… or liqueur, ah, lips perhaps… Mmmm… there ain’t no cure for love, but there is liqueur for love! (In fact, Marie Brizard makes one called Parfait Amour. It is, so I read, made on a curaçao base. So at least there is a curaçao for love.)

Ah, liqueur, enchanteresse, verse l’ivresse et l’oubli dans mon coeur!* Oh, that’s actually not a love song, it’s from the opera Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas. (You can watch Simon Keenlyside sing it if you want.) But Hamlet’s not drinking liqueur. Actually, he’s drinking wine. Liqueur in French is now used to mean pretty much just what it means in English, but it was formerly used more broadly. After all, it’s the French cognate of the English word liquor.

The root is Latin liquor, which means just “liquid” (and liquor is still used in that sense in some domain-specific applications in English, notably in some food processes). We got licur before 1300 from French, and respelled it later to match the Latin, but then we borrowed (and subsequently repronounced) the modern French form again in the 1700s for those special sweet concoctions which are typically brand-specific and sui generis. We may have “dessert wines,” but we have liqueurs rather than “dessert liquors.”

I do believe, when I first saw this word in my childhood, I thought it was another spelling of liquor – or, with that characteristic logic of English speakers, that perhaps it was the correct spelling, since it looked weirder and less logical. But I came to understand that it had a special pronunciation, and that meant there was something special and classy about what it referred to. And I had the clear sense it was a word my mother was more likely to say than my father was.

I taste a certain fondness in liqueur, and perhaps a feeling that its object should be consumed (not simply drunk) in quiet, civilized occasions with some velvet somewhere in sight. It’s not just liquor, which is said like licker and rhymes with quicker; this one has this cute turn of the vowel in the middle, like the sound of the liquid in a glass as you ting it against another, perhaps. (Of course one may say it the French way, or closer to it; I just happen to have learned it with the “le cure” pronunciation, and that’s what I’m still used to hearing.) It seems to make a U-turn in your mouth as you say it – well, what really happens is that your tongue laps forward and retreats like a wave, while your lips round, making a gesture like a faint, longing, incomplete air kiss, awaiting the enchanter or enchantress, or the perfect love.

*Oh, liquor, enchantress, pour drunkenness and forgetfulness in my heart.

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