Monthly Archives: March 2011

privacist

Posted on March 9, 2011 | 1 comment

There are those among us for whom there is no such thing as bad publicity, for whom the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, who would view any lapse from the public oculus as an unbearable privation. There are those among us who would at least like to have to put up with the burden of fame for a while (and who wouldn’t mind the chance to prove that being rich wouldn’t spoil them, but that’s another matter). And then there are those who would really rather not be so well known, thank you.

This latter type we may also bifurcate as the former: one the one hand those who have never been well known and who do not wish to become well known; on the other those who have been famous (and perhaps still are) and who want to be alone, or anyway could do with a bit less attention.

Into this last camp, it seems, falls – at least to a modest degree – Ken Jennings, who won at Jeopardy! 74 times. In his really quite entertaining question-and-answer session on reddit, he says, “I don’t want to be famous. I keep getting asked who my publicist is. Why would I have a publicist?!? I’m just a guy on a game show. I got mine. I need a privacist.”

Not that Jennings scorns what his fame brings altogether, of course; he has a book and his fame helps him sell it (though he rates someone else’s book on the topic more highly – he really is refreshingly frank). But I’m here to taste words, not to taste the sweet bitterness of fame (well, OK, I wouldn’t mind that, either, but a Campari and soda will hold me for the moment), and the word du jour is, of course, privacist.

As Wilson Fowlie, who drew my attention to Jennings’s reddit session, put it, quoting  me, “Regarding the subject of ‘He used it, you understood it, it’s a word’…” So, yes, privacist is in fact a word. No, you won’t find it in a dictionary, yet. And Jennings may or may not have heard it before he used it. But he’s not the first to use it. It’s a natural enough coinage for the purpose.

Until recently, it didn’t really seem needful to have someone (theoretical or actual) who could help ensure privacy. Publicity, yes, sure, and still today those are needed, but privacy was something one could usually lapse into with no more than a little bit of effort unless one were enormously famous. But now the digital revolution and social media have made our personal information very widely and easily available indeed. Not so long ago, the idea of seeing an apparently public ad, from some company you’re not on close terms with (or any terms at all), that was tailored to you personally might have seemed unsettlingly creepy. Actually, it may still seem unsettlingly creepy, but now it’s not an idea, it’s something that peeks up at you from your web browser all the time. And occasionally calls you on the phone.

And of course some of those who gather your information may want not to sell to you but to pretend to be you. Impersonation is not exactly new, but it has now evolved into a category of crime called identity theft. Privacy is getting to look rather appealing. And so there are privacists. They do exist already. Their role, mind you, is more the protection of personal information than helping people evade unwanted fame, though I’d imagine you could find someone to help with that too.

But, now, why privacist? Is it morphologically well formed? And for that matter, why is it privacy but publicity? Why not privacity or publicy?

To answer the last question first, the roots are not analogous: private is from the Latin past participle privatus, nominalized to privatia, of which the modern analogue is privacy, while public is from the Latin adjective publicus and the ity suffix is from the Latin suffix (i)tas which replaced the us ending. This also leads us to the answer to the question of whether privacist is morphologically well formed: no. Privatist would be the morphologically “proper” formation.

So we should use privatist then, right? No, actually. There’s nothing wrong with neologizing by blending; we do it all the time. If we can have, for instance, chocoholic from chocolate and alcoholic, we can have privacist from private and publicist. Besides, privatist sounds too much like privatest. And, it might be added, those wanting the services of a privacist want not to be private but to have privacy (there is a difference), so it makes sense to form it with the c of privacy.

Anyway, what else could we call them, given that privatist could be mistaken? Privateer is already taken. And in fact it is often from privateers and other profiteers with their omnipresent ears that those who want privacists want privacy. They do not want to be deprived of all the furniture of modern life, but they want someone to assist them in controlling their info outflow. At the very least, they don’t want to give it away. Let the privateers pay a private eye to pry, if it’s worth it to them.

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turpitude

Posted on March 8, 2011 | 1 comment

Well, perhaps the sheen is coming off Charlie. He’s been dumped, Warner Brothers citing a clause that lets them off the hook if he commits “a felony offense involving moral turpitude.”

Ah, turpitude. This is not some mere dotting of the tease and crossing of the eyes (that would be Ben Turpin-tude); this is a high-toned vituperation, one that fairly spits from its three voiceless stops (though, from the charming side, it does sound like a tapdance at the Cotton Club). Turpitude is at the other end of the scale from a friend of mine who, when chastising herself for some oversight, says “Toopid, toopid, toopid!” (onset cluster reduction being an easy index of intellectual insufficiency). But turpitude is not per se undue stupidity, nor is it a sort of torpor. It is a rupture with prudity and piety, an impertinent attitude that may lead to pruritus and penitentiaries. It is a sort of moral turpentine, stripping the thin coating of respectability to show the true colours beneath.

Oh, yes, moral. You almost always see moral before turpitude, even though it’s quite redundant; turpitude comes from Latin turpis, “base” (as in “low”), and if baseness is not a moral character (or lack thereof), what is? Indeed, one may say those of base character, those who lie, are of the character of lye, a base, and are abased by the corrosion as they try to whitewash their dirty deeds. But that leaves us nowhere with turpentine, which is not acid or base, though it is corrosive, as of course (and of coarseness) is turpitude.

One may also, mind you, say that turpitude is wickedness (another moral judgment), and that will put us in mind of other things that are wicked, such as lamp oil and candles – oh, and to wax poetic, the great quatrain of that wonderful wanton poet of turpitude, Edna St. Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light.

Well, one doesn’t always want to make light of turpitude, even if it may involve a spectacular flame-out (and even if turpentine is flammable – oh, by the way, turpentine is not actually related to turpitude; it comes from terebinth, the Greek name for the kind of tree whose sap was originally distilled to make it). No, we must remember that it tends to take the sheen off things – and, if rests on your skin, you may experience excoriation.

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rocococity

Posted on March 8, 2011 | 1 comment

Imagine a cacophony of curves and curls, a kind of rocaille quincaillerie a-go-go, not so much baroque as going for broke… a rather cuckoo occurrence. Imagine a whole city, squirrelly with coquilles and asymmetrical curves, like a pile of wood shavings from a carpenter’s plane growing quickly into vines… look, and oh, see, oh, see, oh, see… an atrocity? Rocococity!

Ah, the ferocity of rocococity. For some people, “oc oc oc” might be the sound of gagging at the sight, but for others the curls (ocococ) will spur excited curiosity. Oh, the rococo – a late development of the baroque, just as rococo may also be playfully built on baroque and rocaille (shellwork, grotto-esque and perhaps grotesque) and coquille (a scallop shell) and no doubt something fun or diminutive about the repetition. The doubled /k/ gives a nice kick, with a wind-up from the /r/ and a slide into home with city.

Originally the term rococo was used dismissively to say the style was old-fashioned, but over time what was old can become, if not new, then at least charming again. There are rococo rooms in palaces, and even entire rococo churches, but your best bet is to look in the theme rooms in museums – try the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston or the Victoria and Albert in London, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I think the Louvre has some too, though one might after all randomly bump into rocococity out and about in Paris.

If rococo rooms may daze your eyes, though, surely rocococity will too. How many c’s and o’s are there? Three of each, but it’s ro-co-co-city really. And though rococo puts the stress in the middle on the second syllable, rocococity puts the stress on the middle in the third syllable, to echo ferocity, precocity, and so on. This may be the only symmetrical thing about rococo and rocococity! The baroque was tidy and mannered, the rococo rather less so… it’s what happens to a decorative art when the gardener goes on vacation and doesn’t come back.

But of course rocococity can spread beyond the decorative arts. It infected painting. But more than that: the property of rocococity may be attributed to things not artificially contrived at all, just curly and wanton and asymmetrical: “electromagnetism behaves in essentially the same simple way on all scales, varying only in its general strength, whereas gravity becomes increasingly rococo as you zoom into microscopic scales – signaling that the theory eventually gives way to a deeper one such as string theory or loop quantum gravity. But ‘eventually’ is so far off that physicists can usually neglect the rocococity.” Gravity? And microscopic rocococity? Yes, indeed, and we are reminded of the infectiousness of rocococity: “The rocococity of gravity should infect the other forces.” And who said that? George Musser, in Scientific American (Forces to Reckon with: Does Gravity Muck Up Electromagnetism?).

So here we may have thought of rocococity as some mere frivolity, and we have failed to consider the gravity of the situation! But is it string theory or loop quantum gravity? Well, what do you see in rocococity… strings or loops?

Thanks to Stan Backs for mentioning rocococity and the Scientific American article.

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jackdaw

Posted on March 6, 2011 | 5 comments

When I was in elementary school, one of the kinds of instructional materials I found most fascinating was something called a Jackdaw. I capitalize it because – though I didn’t know it at the time – it’s a brand name, the name of the publisher, in fact. Jackdaws were – still are, I’m sure, as they’re still in business (www.jackdaw.com) – fascinating collections of facsimiles of primary source materials about the various historical events they covered.

I had no idea at the time why they were called that. When one is six years old (and even much older), one may tend to accept the arbitrary nature of new names, assuming that there must be a good reason and perhaps eventually the reason will be revealed. Perhaps it was because they were in a jacket, like a Duo-Tang, and chock-full?

More likely, of course, is that they were acquisitive and loquacious. Jackdaws, like magpies, are known for stealing all manner of things and hoarding them; they are also know to be, well, not so much loquacious as garrulous – they chatter on and on, and can also be taught to say words.

So if you call a person a jackdaw, that means you think him or her to be kleptomanical, garrulous, a hoarder, or some combination of the preceding. And thus a folder that has collected a variety of items pertinent to a topic might fittingly be called a Jackdaw, overlooking the foolish connotations. It occurs to me that it also wouldn’t be such a bad name for the sentences known as pangrams, which have collected all twenty-six letters of the alphabet (e.g., Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz – my, doesn’t that sound a little, ah, you know). And Cambridge University calls its administrative database Jackdaw. It seems there’s a bit of a collection of jackdaws out there.

There is, mind you, a much larger collection of jack words – a veritable jackpot. Jack – from the name – has long since been a byword for the common fellow, and a name to be applied generically. Who leaves frost on your window? Jack Frost. Whose glowing eyes and crazed grin greet you on Hallowe’en? Jack-o’-lantern. Who can fix your broken Jack-in-the-box? Perhaps a Jack-of-all-trades. “Did the ship go down with all hands?” “Every man Jack.” “But doesn’t that bother you?” “I’m all right, Jack.” And there are several jack animals, including jackrabbit, jackass, jack salmon, Jack Russell terriers (OK, that’s an eponym), and of course jackdaw.

Jack is such a square, sturdy name to my taste, with a bit of a kick or a hack, sounding not unlike the call of the jackdaw. It begins with that first letter of so many first names, J, and ends with the open-beaked, angular k. It may have come from Jacques – although that’s French for James while Jack is a nickname for John – but it may have come from Jankin and Jackin, pet forms of the Dutch Jan.

And why jackdaw? Well, for the same reason as jackass, more or less, I suppose. That is to say, we could always just say daw. That’s the older, simpler name for the bird. It’s a Germanic-derived word – it’s first recorded in English in the 1400s, and almost before you could say “Jack Robinson” there was a jack on it.

And what, by the way, is the bird? A little black thing, Corvus monedula – related to crows and ravens (and why not, if it’s known for crowin’ and ravin’ like it’s stark mad?). It’s very gregarious, mates for life, and has flocks with a strict pecking order.

So the name itself is put together of two bits, this old daw and this generic jack of all sorts of trading. And it’s such a quintessentially English thing. Not just because of its origins, but because English is a jackdaw of a language if ever there was one: swiping bits from all over, learning to mimic new words, and generally not shutting up.

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Apparently ignorance is in vogue at Slate

Posted on March 4, 2011 | 13 comments

Yesterday I had a little asterisked mini-rant about some sloppy thinking in an article on Slate. Well, today I discover that they’ve printed an article from someone who thinks that editors are narcissistic megalomaniacs who deserve no credit or consideration. I won’t name him (I’ll say why below), but I will say he knows Jack Sh…itt about editors and editing. Continue reading →

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Gewürztraminer

Posted on March 4, 2011 | 6 comments

You will surely find it unsurprising that I like tasting wine. It may indeed be more surprising that I haven’t tasted that many wine words in my notes. I have tasted merlot, certainly, and xynomavro, but no white grape varieties yet; I have also tasted retsina and claret; but I really am overdue to taste Gewürztraminer.

Wines, when well made, are full of character and layers, nuances, overtones, and other delights.* Some are more complex, and some are simpler. Words, of course, can have a fair amount in common with wines in that respect. But many wine words don’t present a whole lot up front. It takes getting to know merlot before you really appreciate it, for instance.

On the other hand, just as there are some wines that practically grab you by the neck and press your nose into their bosoms, there are some wine words that have a rather similar effect. By an interesting coincidence, three of the wines that are most up-front happen to have three of the names that are most up-front – and all three are written with the letter z.

The wine that will most aggressively throw you on the bed and cover you with red lipstick is zinfandel, and rest assured that I will one day taste zinfandel. Another very popular and friendly red wine is Shiraz (its more demure version, if just slightly, is called syrah). But the most in-your-face white (true white, not “white zinfandel,” which is a red wine with the skins taken out before fermentation), with what is also the most in-your-face name, is Gewürztraminer. You might say it’s the Measha Brueggergosman of wine words (and perhaps of wines, too).

First of all, it’s a freakin’ long word. Which is actually fitting, given that it’s a German word; German words can be long, and so can German wine names – you’ll get bottles that say things like Riesling Kabinett Erbacher Marcobrunn Domänenweingut Schloss Schönborn Rheingau (I did not make that up).

Of course, like most German sesquipedalia, Gewürztraminer is a compound; it comes from Gewürz, which means “spice” or “perfume”, and Traminer, which means “from Tramin” (Tramin being actually the Tyrolean town of Termeno, in northern Italy). It rather looks like two big pieces joined together with hitches and some kind of electric bond right at the rztr (just hear that jolt!).

And you can see the perfumy nose wafting up from the glass at the ü if you want. You might want to proceed both ways from the centre, in fact, and see that on the one side, past the centre join and its flanking vowels, you have w, and on the other m, which is like the w all emptied and inverted. Or perhaps it’s the whole min that transforms the w, for on the outside of either is an e.

There’s no reason to expect Anglophones to say this word just as though they were speaking German (though they can if they want), but it’s generally thought poor form to say the w as /w/ rather than /v/. The ü, of course, signifies a sound we no longer have in English, so you can either make the ür the same way as you say the end of Bloor (Toronto reference there) or you can slip the bonds of English phonotactics. If you say r the English way, you will thereafter find yourself with a rare double treat, two affricates in tight sequence – because /ts/ is an affricate (a stop that releases to a fricative), and the /t/ before /r/ palatalizes to be like what we say at the beginning and end of church. The German pronunciation – either one, the trilled or the guttural – deprives you of the second affricate, but, ah, frick it. Have another glass.

And then the word ends in irony. Irony? Yes, and not just because it’s a German name for a grape now thought of as quintessentially German but taken from a Italian place name (well, Italy now includes it). It’s that you finally get to the kinder part of the word and it’s “meaner”.

And what is wine itself like? It presents a golden hue to the eye, although its grapes are actually a shade of pink. Your nose and your palate will give you a full serving of such flavours and aromas as lychee and rose petals, and perhaps some peach as well. If you’re picking a wine to drink with pad thai, this is it. If you’re looking for good Gewürz, two of the best regions are Alsace and Ontario. Yes, that’s right, neither is in Germany – oh, Germany makes good Gewürz too, but really, some of the best I’ve ever had is made an hour’s drive from where I live. I have bottles from Calamus and Featherstone sitting less than a metre from the computer where I type this. (They’re not open, though. Ironically, I’m drinking Bordeaux as I write.)

*A person who should know better who wrote an otherwise interesting article for Slate recently (http://www.slate.com/id/2285723/) declared that since mass spectrometers can’t “pick apart differentiating flavors of specific spices or flavors of earth in any wine,” such discerned differences must be imaginary – the critics who talk about “butterscotch” or “boysenberry” must just be imagining it on the basis of expectation. Aside from being frankly rude, condescending, and belittling, this discards a very large amount of suggestive data without taking a proper scientific look at it. Experts in blind tastings without indication of the various price levels of the wines can detect different levels of depth, nuance, and structure with considerable consistency, even as personal factors also of course come into play – wine being an aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience being individual. It doesn’t even take much acquaintance with wine to be able to distinguish wines that develop and have nuances from ones that don’t and don’t. If I can taste a red wine and identify, on the basis of flavour nuances this author thinks are imaginary, the different grapes that have gone into it – something I have done successfully, and I’m not even an expert – it stands to reason that her reasoning is a bit wanting. She draws conclusions on the basis of what she thinks reasonable, but without taking a truly scientific approach, which would involve experiments with blind tastings – not exactly even an innovative approach with wines.

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Unpacking the Grey Owl

Posted on March 3, 2011 | 1 comment

A colleague – Adrienne Montgomerie – was recently reading to her child from a story by Grey Owl when she came across this rather large sentence (From the second-last paragraph of “How the Queen and I spent the Winter” as published in the collection Great Canadian Animal Stories,
Whitaker, 1978):

This creature comported itself as a person, of a kind, and she busied herself at tasks that I could, without loss of dignity, have occupied myself at; she made camp, procured and carried in supplies, could lay plans and carry them out and stood robustly and resolutely on her own hind legs, metaphorically and actually, and had an independence of spirit that measured up well with my own, seeming to look on me as a contemporary, accepting me as an equal and no more.

We certainly don’t write like that so much anymore. I must say that I enjoyed reading that sentence, but some people may wonder whether all those commas are necessary and whether the whole thing is even grammatical.

So let’s have some fun and take it apart. Continue reading →

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farthingale

Posted on March 2, 2011 | 1 comment

I know when I first encountered this word: it was in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. I was in early twenties and auditioning around, trying vainly to get some acting work, and one of the stock audition pieces I was using was a comic monologue (well, it was intended to be comic) wherein the clownish character Launce is remonstrating with his dog. The end of the monologue goes thus:

Nay, I remember the
trick you served me when I took my leave of Madam
Silvia: did not I bid thee still mark me and do as I
do? when didst thou see me heave up my leg and make
water against a gentlewoman’s farthingale? didst
thou ever see me do such a trick?

You can guess from that that a farthingale is something a woman wears that sits, or extends, below the knee; beyond that, it’s not obvious.

Certainly the form of the word itself is no great help. It looks like a name for a cheap bird (do I mean a cheep bird? well, it may cheep, but a farthing, being a quarter of a penny – farthing is related to fourth – was not much money even then). Or it could be a kind of craft beer, farthing ale – incidentally, farthingale is often misspelled (and misanalyzed) as farthing ale. But it has nothing to do with farthings or with ales, and the g is pronounced, so the last syllable is gale.

Not that it has anything to do with gales either, and I wouldn’t recommend wearing a farthingale in a gale, lest it become a sail or a yard sale (or an assailant). As to the opening fart, of course that’s not etymologically related – I won’t say a farthingale is a far thing from one (though that’s how the syllables divide), but, etymologically, hereby hangs quite a tale. (Whereby hangs a tail? Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know of… Oh, wrong play.)

It is understandable if you think farthingale is related to martingale, or to nightingale, but in fact all three have deviated from their disparate origins towards a common pattern. Nightingale is the oldest of the three by centuries; it comes from night plus an old verb gale “sing” with an extra in stuck in probably for euphony. Martingale – which merits a word tasting note all its own, but not today – is from a French word for a resident of the southeastern French town of Martigues. (What is a martingale? Several things… as I said, it merits a note of its own.) It arrived in English in the 1500s.

Oh, and farthingale? It comes by way of French verdugalle from Spanish verdugado, which comes from verdugo, “stick”. So, yes, it’s a thing made of sticks, sort of. In fact, it’s one of those hoop arrangements that women used to wear to make their skirts stick way the heck out (more recently called hoop skirts – a farthingale is in particular a conical one). Talk about bearing fardels! They were usually made of whalebones sewn into a fabric matrix, which gives me the opportunity to note how the vocal gesture of saying farthingale is similar to the action of a sewing machine (say it several times, picturing your tongue as the needle and the fabric being at your lips). Not that they had sewing machines when farthingales were popular.

Chairs designed to accommodate them were called farthingale chairs, which you will find bothersomely often referred to as farthing ale chairs or farthing-ale chairs, which, as I’ve said, is both etymological and pronunciational reanalysis – folk etymology, as it’s often called.

But how do you get from verdugalle to farthingale? Seems like it would take jumping through some hoops, eh? Well, in fact, it’s more folk etymology (so there). But it didn’t seem to happen in one jump; the earliest English form of the word the OED has (from 1552) is verdynggale, which is a closer borrowing but with a prenasalization of the /g/. After that it was easy enough for it to be reanalyzed as farthingale, like nightingale but with a farthing (influence from martingale is possible, as that word was becoming current at the same time, but of course nightingale was even then the better-established word by far). Now, isn’t that a trick?

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phlogiston

Posted on March 2, 2011 | 2 comments

There’s something about this word that makes me think a bit of a stuffed-up nose – probably the taste of plug (in spelling but not in pronunciation) and the way phl makes me think of someone blowing their nose. But it has nothing to do with catarrh.

On the other hand, like catarrh, it also has a strong flavour for me of the scientific fancies of a bygone age, and the ph aids that too. I could picture some Chitty Chitty Bang Bang refugee called Phineas Pharnsworthy’s Marbhellous Phlogiston Steam Machine, all gears and flogging pistons and puffs of smoke, a combination jalopy and calliope.

Mind you, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was set in 1910, putting it a century and a half after the heyday of phlogiston. But from our perspective, there’s something of a quaintness to those Victorian (and just-post-Victorian) inventions, and there’s a sort of quaintness to phlogiston.

But it seemed quite reasonable to 18th-century scientists. Here’s the idea: all flammable substances contain an element called phlogiston (from Greek for “burning up”) which is liberated during combustion. When wood is burnt, for instance, the flame is that part of it that is phlogiston – and it is liberated into the air – and the charred remains and ashes left behind are that part of the wood that is other than phlogiston, called the calx (sounds a bit like a dusty death cough, doesn’t it? or perhaps some mineral, or the beginning of a word – say, caloric – interrupted by death). Air can only hold so much phlogiston, however; if you burn something in a sealed vessel, it will burn out before it is all burnt, because the air has become saturated with phlogiston, and phlogiston will flow just in quantities that can be absorbed.

Well, yes, we all know better now. But the things we all have learned in school about molecular vibration and reactions and so on are really much advanced beyond the state of understanding of the 1700s. And even through the 1700s, the state of understanding was advancing; by 1800, pretty much no one still believed in phlogiston. No, heat was obviously a completely massless substance called caloric…

A lot of us won’t even know how to pronounce phlogiston now –  it’s like “flow jist on” (if you want to say it like “floggy ston,” well, for shame! that would be closer to how the ancient Greeks said it, and what did they know?). But we will all get the fact that the ph is really a /f/. That matches a pattern of adding h to the letter for a stop to indicate a fricative near the stop: th for the fricative closest to /t/, and kh or ch to indicate one close to /k/. We also use it to shift the fricative /s/ towards the palate, sh. But there are two questions: a) why only those letters, and b) why bother with ph when we have f ?

Indeed, we note that we don’t use bh to spell /v/. Well, actually we do, in a few names borrowed from Gaelic, notably Siobhan; Gaelic doesn’t have the letter v. We also don’t use dh to spell the voiced pair of th; we use th for both. In fact, we used to have two completely different letters, eth (ð) and thorn (þ), which came to be used interchangeably to stand for either sound, and then were discarded under European (especially French) influence, especially when the English started buying their moveable type from Europe. The available replacement orthography in European style was th only. Most European languages don’t even have the voiced dental fricative (as in the); Classical Greek didn’t, though modern Greek does (in place of /d/). As to gh, well, we no longer make that sound anyway… but, ironically, we do still write gh where we used to make it.

And why not just write f ? Italians do – philosophy in Italian is filosofia – and in the earlier 20th century the New York Times took it upon itself to lead the charge for a similar change, writing, for example, filosofy. It obviously didn’t take. But the Latins, who also had f, used ph when transliterating the letter phi (φ) from Greek (there are plenty of Greek loan words in Latin). That was because in the Greek of the time it was like a /p/ followed by a bit of /h/ – actually the same sound we say at the beginning of pit (compare with spit, where the light puff of /h/ is absent). Now we retain it as a sort of charming archaism, smacking of science – or sometimes of what used to be thought of as science. Or, of course, of pseudo-scientific satire and other hip (or should I say phat) things.

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Tantric

Posted on March 1, 2011 | 2 comments

You’ve probably seen this word before somewhere. Tell me what word you expect to see come right after it.

Odds are pretty good you’re thinking of sex. Tantric sex is this word’s most common collocation in English. The second-most-common is Tantric yoga.

So now tell me what you know about Tantric – or about Tantra, which is what Tantric is an adjectival form of. What images do you have? Perhaps teal polyarticulated deities intricately entwined – or some concupiscent sadhu and his tan trick – performing a kind of contortionist coitus, with nimbi concentric around their entangled genitalia? Some wild Kama Sutra thing involving incense, curtains, beads, chanting? A climax that lasts an uncertain eternity?

Well. Those sorts of antics are not exactly the point. Images of throes of passion notwithstanding, Tantra is not a plural of Tantrum. It’s the Sanskrit word for “loom” (as in weaving) and by extension for “system” or “doctrine”.

Tantra is an approach that is found in several religions that have arisen from the Indian subcontinental area, most notably Hinduism and Buddhism. And the approach does not aim at ultimate physical fulfillment; rather, the physical energies are used as the means of their own transcendence. It is like a martial (or marital?) art, wherein one does not simply push force against force but rather uses the opposing force to one’s own ends.

Let me quote from Harold Coward, one of my professors at the University of Calgary (from his book Jung and Eastern Thought):

In contrast to the approach of the Sankhya-Yoga system of Patañjali, in which the aim is to circumvent and crush the passions within, the Tantric hero (víra) goes directly through the sphere of the passions to the spiritual goal. This is accomplished not by indulging in the passions, as one might be led to think, but rather by shifting attention from the object of passion to the inner energy of passion – without trying either to prolong or suppress the energy. Rather than being puritanically avoided, the passions themselves are used as the very means (sádhana) by which self-realization may be achieved. . . . The Tantric hero triumphs by way of the passions themselves, riding them the way a cowboy rides a wild bronco to obedience.

I recall one class in which Dr. Coward recalled with relish breaking the news to a colleague who had a statuette of a Tantric sexual position. “You know, it’s not about the sex…”

Of course Tantra has to do with much more, and other, than sex; indeed, for the most part, actual sexual activity is not even part of the practice – it is more a metaphor for divine mystical union. Tantra is a spiritual and ritual practice. But the racier mystical connotations of the word are entangled in its English usage patterns, and the related concept of kundalini – also generally poorly understood but rather wild-sounding – adds to it. And the mixture of crispness and liquidity and warm nasal /n/ of the word, with its various echoes and overtones – explored above – can certainly play into that.

But the point is to get beyond the word: use it, enjoy it, taste it, feel it, read it, but let its curling type be the trebuchet that launches you beyond.

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