Monthly Archives: April 2011

rampage

Posted on April 17, 2011 | 1 comment

One gets the impression that violent outbursts are rampant. Every time someone goes on a rampage, the news media ramp up their coverage and ram page after page of gory details into our faces. And we know what’s coming when we see the word rampage – in fact, we’ve usually been informed by a preceding adjective: shooting, murderous, deadly, killing, bloody…

The word rampage itself carries a certain flavour that helps give the sense that something big is going on. To start with, it has two syllables but neither is unstressed – the first has more stress, but the second has a “long” vowel. So it’s like a one-two punch. It has this in common with outrage – this and the age too. Add to that the ramped-up amperage of rage and a certain savour of rant. Not to mention the fist-forcefulness of ram.

And it’s something you go on, too – think about some of the other things a person might go on besides a rampage: a tear, a bender, a spree… also a vacation and a walk, of course, but the point is that it denotes a departure from the normal course of things, with a subsequent return but not without consequences.

Is rampage related to rampant and ramp? Yes, in fact. They all trace back to a verb, ramp (Middle French ramper), meaning (among other things) “rear up on the hind legs”. In heraldry, if you see a lion or other critter rearing up (I think first of the logo of the Royal Bank of Canada), it is said to be rampant. It’s from this sense that we get our modern adjective rampant: from rearing up and climbing and so on, and rushing about and raging and such like (other meanings of ramp), we get “widespread and attacking”.

And it’s also from that verb that we get the noun ramp, as in that thing you drive up in the parking garage. That’s right – from the animal inclined upwards we get the thing inclined upwards. And again, from the verb – not the noun – we get rampage. Just add the age suffix that indicates some material manifestation of a thing: an outage due to insufficient wattage, for instance.

But normally that suffix is unstressed. Some cases (e.g., garage in North America) say it as in French (from which it comes), but usually it’s a reduced, unstressed vowel, followed of course by that voiced alveopalatal affricate. It’s only in rampage and outrage that it gets a full accented pronunciation. But, now, tell me: would this word be so forcefully effective if that second syllable were unstressed, as in that word better suited to what is left behind after – wreckage – or that possible spark of the initial spree – umbrage at postage (or, alas, misused language)?

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

spruce

Posted on April 17, 2011 | 4 comments

The other day, I bumped into Maury in a clothing store in the mall. I almost didn’t recognize him; he was wearing black pants and a black shirt and a leather vest.

“Good grief, man,” I said, “have you been spending too much time with Frick and Frack?”

Maury swept his eyes over his own figure and said, “I know not what it shall signify…”

A tall, lean, stylish woman appeared from behind a clothing rack. “I am sprucing him up!” she declared, with what sounded like a German accent.

“James,” Maury said, “this is Lorelei.”

I shook her hand and tried, out of consideration for Maury, not to appear too obviously attracted to her. “How do you do.”

“I may be Lorelei, but I am not from the Rhine,” the goddess declared, smiling. “In fact, I was raised in East Berlin, and my mother was a child refugee from Königsberg. So I am Prussian.”

“Hence the spruce jerkin,” Maury explained, indicating his vest.

“You have said that already and I do not quite understand,” Lorelei said.

“The word spruce actually comes from French Prusse, for ‘Prussia,'” Maury said, “and a few different things imported from Prussia in medieval times came to be called spruce. Spruce fir, for one –”

“Oh, I do not wear fur,” said Lorelei.

“No,” said Maury, “F-I-R, the tree. Fichte. We call it spruce.”

“Oh!” Lorelei looked informed. “This is what I have decorated my apartment with! Only it is from Norway. Do continue!”

“Anyway, fine leather from Prussia was spruce leather, and in particular a jerkin – a sleeveless jacket – made from it was a spruce jerkin. And spruce jerkins were considered very smart looking indeed. Around the time of Shakespeare, spruce came to be an adjective meaning ‘stylish, trim, neat, dapper, smart.’ From which we get the verb spruce, with or without up.”

“So indeed I am sprucing you up!” Lorelei declared. “Only you are already smart. Now I am making you neat and stylish and dapper.” She scanned his not-really-thin figure. “Trim will come.” She smiled again. “Now, I have found you a tie. Come!” She gestured and began to walk away.

As Maury began to move away, I said, “Do you like your new look?”

He leaned close and said confidentially, “I feel like a jerk in it.” Then he straightened up. “But it’s all for a good cause.”

“Or a good effect,” I said, as he trotted off after Lorelei, who shouted back, “Oh, nice to meet you, James.”

The next day, I saw him at the Domus Logogustationis. He looked a bit the worse for the wear. “I must say, you look a little blue,” I said.

“In more ways than one,” he replied. “We went to a gallery party and they were serving International Klein Blue cocktails, which are made with Prussian blue. It retains its colour as it passes through – you may be seeing a bit of it in my skin hue, perhaps.”

“I don’t think that accounts for your overall mien,” I said. “I’m not sure any blue on you might not be a bruise.”

“I think it is,” he said, touching his upper back and wincing. “Well, after the party, she showed me her place.”

“Was it good?” I asked. “Norwegian wood?”

“It was really spruce,” he said. “She’s quite the conversationalist. Did you know Königsberg is a link between Leonhard Euler and the Eagles?”

I paused for a moment. The lightbulb went on. “‘Seven Bridges Road,'” I said.

“Not the only topological problem of the evening,” he said. “We talked until two.”

“She seems quite engaging,” I said. “And then?”

“And then she said, ‘It’s time for bed.'” He sighed. “She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh. I told her I didn’t, and crawled off to sleep in the bath.”

“Hence the bruise,” I said.

“No,” he said. “She turned out to be teasing me. She dragged me back and introduced me to her birch.”

4 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

resveratrol

Posted on April 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Now, look at this word closely, or as closely as your aging eyes will permit. Are all the letters in the right order? Does nothing seem as though it has been displaced?

In fact, it is spelled correctly, but how much more your eye probably wants it to be reversatrol than resveratrol – after all, though it may roll off the tongue (with the lips) in a feasible way, resver doesn’t fit in what we expect in English, while reverse is an English word. And resveratrol is said to reverse aging, you know! In fact, it’s touted as an all-purpose agent of rot reversal. We are led to believe that it helps prevent cancer, reduces inflammation, and lowers blood sugar. No doubt even the lover raters will be kind to you if you are fortified with resveratrol!

It really does have the sound of some mid-20th-century wonder drug or engine cleaner or polishing agent, especially with that -ol ending. And indeed it’s the same -ol ending, originally for oil products (from Latin oleum) but more recently also used with alcohols. The rest of it is from res for resinous and veratr for Veratrum, the genus name of the plant in which it was first discovered.

These Veratrum plants, perennial mountain herbs, often with pretty little flowers, are quite poisonous – your heart will stop quickly if you ingest them. This may sound very unpromising, but extracts of the plant have been used, at very low and carefully managed strength, to help high blood pressure and arrhythmia.

But that’s not the best way to get resveratrol; it is found in other plants. And I should add that its main value appears to be as a result of its presence in Vitis vinifera. The product of Vitis vinifera has been condemned by some as poison, but it is quite widely consumed. And enjoyed. In fact, the greatest benefit in resveratrol as far as I can see is guilt removal. If you can tell yourself that every glass of wine you have is helping you live longer, and so not feel bad about drinking, then resveratrol is doing its job. Never mind that you’d need to consume an awful lot of wine to get its documented positive effects (a lot). It’s sort of like the phenols in maple syrup – come on, just have the stuff because it’s so good. And maybe then the word resveratrol will look normal, too.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

helminth

Posted on April 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

This word has some lovely qualities, with its opening and closing voiceless fricatives and its liquid and nasals in between – all soft and lovely. Its associations add to that feel for me: the /hεlm/ makes me think of actress Katherine Helmond (famous from the TV shows Soap, Coach, Who’s the Boss, and Everybody Loves Raymond), of Helen of Troy, of Hellman’s mayonnaise and perhaps of the playwright Lillian Hellman (who has a lovely name but was perhaps not such a soft and pleasant person as all that). True, it also makes one think of helm, helmet, and Helmand (a province in Afghanistan), but at least those are all nice-sounding words. And the second half of the word, /mɪnθ/, has nice associations as well: echoes of mint, a rhyme with plinth (which may not be soft but at least has classical connotations) and (in English pronunciation) absinthe…

The shape of the word is also notable. I don’t know whether you find it lovely or not, but it is a good collection of humped parts (n, m) and tall parts (l and, a bit shorter, i and t, and, with hump attached, h), like a colonnade with towers, perhaps.

Al together, it makes a word you’re not likely familiar with. It sounds as though it might name something from the Bible, though actually it’s taken from Greek, ἕλμινς helmins, combining form ἑλμινθο- elmintho-, naming pretty much what it names now.

And what it names now is surprisingly common, though much more so in less developed parts of the world. But, say, can’t we just ignore the sense on this one? The meanings of words are generally fairly arbitrarily attached to the forms of the words, though of course there can be interplay, and sometimes I feel like the meaning is really just some other thing that has attached itself to the form. Something that you’d really rather not have to think about.

And believe me, helminths are fairly high on the list of things I don’t like thinking about, let alone seeing pictures of.

Um.

They’re parasitic worms. There. Now I’ve said it. And don’t you wish I hadn’t?

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

Such cases as these

Posted on April 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

A colleague had been discussing the difference between such as X and such X as with some friends, and asked for further insight from the rest of us. I gladly weighed in:

The first thing to note is that it’s actually a choice between X such as Y and such X as Y. But those two constructions are not the same thing, though they can mean similar things. Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in editing, language and linguistics

Tagged , , , ,

moss

Posted on April 13, 2011 | 2 comments

I do have a likin’ for this word. It’s so soft and moist and comfortable, the lips coming together like stacked pillows on the /m/ and then the /s/ at the end refreshes with the coolness of the other side of the pillow. The shape of the word is even and compact, like a little piece of what it refers to. And of course my taste for this word is strongly influenced by what it refers to, that simple plant that forms a sort of green fur coat on rocks and dirt and trees and so forth. I love lush green places, and nothing is as lush and green as moss, especially when you have masses of moist moss, perhaps in the mist in the morning…

Another reason to think of moss as pretty is of course Kate Moss. Actually, she’s a friend of mine. No, not the famous Kate Moss, though she’s pretty too. This Kate Moss is the wife of another friend of mine, a fellow I’ve known for years and met in choir.

And choir is the reason I was thinking of this word tonight. You see, in musical scores you will sometimes see più mosso or meno mosso. I’d like to think that it means “more moss” and “less moss”, but there’s nothing soft, moist, furry, dense, or heavy about what mosso means in music. In fact, it refers not to the moss but to the rolling stone that gathers none; mosso is the past participle of muovere “move” and, in music, means “animated”, “rhythmic”, etc. So più mosso is quite the opposite of peat moss, but meno mosso might mean a bit more moss on the rock (or the classical, as the case more likely is). (The word moss is not related to mosso; it’s an old Germanic word.)

About that proverb, by the way. Today when we say “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” we probably think (aside from the inevitable popular music references from rolling stone) that it means that you won’t get old and mouldy and tied down with unnecessary commitments if you keep in motion – that it’s good to be like a rolling stone. But it was not always thus. “A rolling stone gathers no moss” originally meant that if you never settle down, you never accumulate friends, wealth, etc. Think back even to Bob Dylan: his song is about a person who is “without a home, a complete unknown, like a rolling stone” – the subject of the song is not in a happy state; he’s scrounging for his next meal.

So moss was seen as a good thing. And I think it still is a good thing. It’s not just a soft, likable, lush green thing that grows all over whatever; among the 12,000 species of moss out there are many of the sphagnum sort (ah, sphagnum – there’s another word worth a taste, a word of deep mists or perhaps sounding like a depth charge), which are associated with some rather good things. Sphagnum moss is what peat is made of, and peat makes a decent fuel for fire – especially if the fire is smoking the malt for Scotch. It’s also what keeps those various prehistoric bog men preserved so we can see them in museums. Sphagnum moss, you see, is absorbent and has antibacterial properties, which means it’s also usable as a dressing for wounds. And, incidentally, as a substitute for diapers.

No, seriously. Various North American aboriginal peoples have carried infants in moss bags – the bag is made of leather, and the moss inside it does quite nicely for absorbing baby’s mess, and it’s easily changed (as long as you have more moss available). I don’t know how common this still is, but I know about this because for many years my parents worked for and lived among the Nakoda (Stoney) Indians, and they (my parents) carried their infant second son – me – in a moss bag. It’s not that I remember now what it was like in that bag, but I’m sure I’ve liked moss longer than I’ve liked almost anything.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

kinnikinnick

Posted on April 12, 2011 | 2 comments

If you like the look of this word, consider that an alternative spelling is the perfectly palindromic kinnikinnik. It’s quite a fun-looking thing, isn’t it? It has a certain kinetic kick – sonically and visually reminiscent of a rough start on an engine, perhaps (with each k a little bang, preceded and followed by sparks i and, in between, turns of the pistons nn). Or perhaps more like a hedge… Or, well, look at it and see what else you see in it. It’s a fairly nice abstract pattern, for all that, like a border in art deco wallpaper, perhaps.

Its sound has a nice pattern, too, and a simpler one at that: a simple bounce between a stop at the back and a nasal at the tip of the tongue, as though tracing a w-style zigzag. The sound of it reminds me first of all of a song – a number one hit of the post-Kennedy days by the Belgian nun who went as Sœur Sourire (The Singing Nun, real name Jeanine Deckers), “Dominique,” with its “Dominique -nique -nique” chorus. It rather sounds as though she’s singing “Domini kinnikinnick…”

And what would domini kinnikinnick be? Well, there are two related things kinnikinnick can refer to. It can refer to bearberry, which coincidentally has a similar repetition in sound (compare /kini + kini +k/ with /bEr + bEr + i/). Bearberry is a common berry that has had a wide variety of medicinal uses – a sort of panacea, perhaps not quite as anodyne as “Dominique” was (a cheery song needed after Kennedy was assassinated – couldn’t hurt that the “Dominique -nique -nique” sounded vaguely reminiscent of “Kennedy”, either), but good for bladder problems and similar strains. It’s thanks to this berry that I know this word from my childhood – it grows in southern Alberta and we used to see it often enough when out hiking.

So in relation to that berry, domini kinnikinnick would be the Lord’s bearberry (I wonder if that’s like blessed thistle). But I should say that the berry is not the original referent of kinnikinnick. And, actually, the original form of the word is more like killikinnik. It’s from an Algonquian word meaning “mixture”. Mixture of what? Well, berries, for one thing, but often tobacco for another. Tobacco? Put that in your pipe and smoke it! Literally, in fact. It was a mixture that would be smoked in pipe ceremonies and used for smudging. The smoke would carry the prayers to God. Which makes domini kinnikinnick seem quite coherent all of a sudden, doesn’t it? (Nod and smile.)

Which reminds me of that song. You see, the eponymous Dominique was a real person – Saint Dominic, founder of the Dominican order, a travelling preacher and ascetic (though one more inclined to rosaries than to bearberries). The refrain is:

Dominique -nique -nique s’en allait tout simplement,
Routier, pauvre et chantant.
En tous chemins, en tous lieux,
Il ne parle que du Bon Dieu,
Il ne parle que du Bon Dieu

This translates to

Dominique -nique -nique went about simply,
A poor singing traveller.
On every road, in every place,
he talks only of the Good Lord,
he talks only of the Good Lord.

Sœur Sourire is, by the way, the only Belgian to make a number one hit on the US Billboard charts. “Dominique” was her only big hit, though she continued to sing and record. She gave her profits to her order, and then ran into trouble in England due to owing a lot in taxes on her income, and not having any receipts to show her donations. This played a part in her unfortunate and despairing demise. Asceticism is better, it seems, if you keep receipts.

As a last tangent, I am put in mind of two other great Belgian singers: Plastic Bertrand, who sang (actually, it was sung by his producer, oops) “Ça plane pour moi,” a barely coherent song about a life that is about as opposite to Dominic’s as anyone could imagine, and Jacques Brel, who sang “Ne me quitte pas” – a great song about leaving – and “Le moribond,” a song by a man on the point of death who wants his friends to laugh and dance, not cry. The latter was ruined entirely by an American version, “Seasons in the Sun,” which made it a soppy, whiny self-pity fest… nothing but smoke, and not the kind that carries prayers.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

cnicnode

Posted on April 11, 2011 | 1 comment

Some words look like they were invented just to poke at your eye, perhaps to make some point. This one has that kind of angle – I mean, in English, cn is just not a natural onset. We might accept kn, pronounced /n/, but cn makes me think of that uncomfortable sticky state your soft palate gets in when you’re fighting a cold. And in case you miss it the first time, it’s there a second time in this word – and while you can make the c silent the first time, it’s across a syllable boundary the second, so you have a real /kn/ (without that /k/ it would all stay on the tip of your tongue – inasmuch as this word is likely to be on the tip of your tongue).

But what is this word? What does it mean? Where does it come from? Well, forgive me for not getting right to the point, but I want to say first that it has nothing to do with cinch or with nicky nicky nine doors or with kinnikinnick, which is another name (a rather likeable one) for bearberry. It does have something to do with blessed thistle and safflower, but only because Cnicus is (or rather was, before it was reclassified) the genus of the blessed thistle and is the Latin for “safflower” (taken from a Greek word for a thistle – it’s because it came to us through Latin that it’s cn rather than kn; Latin doesn’t use k, whereas in the original Greek the /k/ was represented by kappa, κ, which is normally transliterated to English as k, reasonably enough).

The node in cnicnode, by the way, is from Latin nodus, “knot” or “node”. So we have something that seems like a thistle node. But actually the word was invented by the noted 19th-century British Mathematician Arthur Cayley. (A nice name, Cayley, no? Makes me think of inverted cones, sort of, with those two y‘s, and perhaps part of the base of a cone with the C.) And what is it? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a point where tangents form a cone of the second order – more to the point, it’s the sharp end of a cone. I know not whether it is coincidence that cnicnode anagrams to conic end.

This word doesn’t really look pointy, does it? To my eyes it’s more reminiscent of a chain. It even looks sort of glued together from opposing bits. You see the cn stuck together (perhaps with cyanoacrylate) and wonder if it’s in code, or is perhaps some nonce word. Or at least if someone left out the o and the space in conic node. Well, whatever it is, once you know it’s math you know it’s something you’ll have to sharpen your pencil for.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

bleep

Posted on April 9, 2011 | 1 comment

OK, what’s the difference between beep and bleep?

Seriously, what’s the beeping difference?

Oh, wait, should that be “what’s the bleeping difference”?

Well, I’m sure you can tell me. Beep refers to what car horns and electronic sensors do. Bleep refers to what electronic censors do.

Not that it’s exclusively so. The word bleep wasn’t invented to refer to the censorship tone. Indeed, it wasn’t used to refer specifically to the beep of censorship on broadcasts until around 1970, but it came into use in the 1950s (two decades after beep showed up) to refer to electronic tones.

Presumably high electronic tones, naturally. The /i/ vowel signifies that. A medium tone would be a “bloop” and a lower tone a “blaap”, or something like that. But you also would expect the tone to have a little inflection of some sort at the beginning – not quite a tweedle, but an alternation of pitch, tone quality, or both. Otherwise, why the /l/? It might as well be beep.

Or, for that matter, oooo. That’s what my brother and I said in our young years when imitating censored speech from television. “Give me that oooo thing or I’ll oooo your oooo, you oooo.” (No need for easy coherence.) Because, really, the bleep of censorship is a simple tone, typically 1000 hertz (in musical terms, an annoyingly flat soprano C), generally a sine wave or something similarly plain, lacking in high and low harmonics.

But never mind. The question is not what everyone can hear; it’s what everyone knows. And everyone knows that when you censor a word, it’s bleep. In fact, you can see it often enough in printed text, when it’s emulating spoken (broadcast) text. “Get your bleeping car out of my bleeping driveway or I’ll cut your bleep off.”

“Cut your bleep off?” Now, what word could coherently go there that’s vulgar enough to merit a bleep? Well, of course, there’s a wide variance in judgment about what is bleepworthy. I remember hearing a mention on TV of the movie The Best Little bleep in Texas. Yes, that’s right, whorehouse merited a bleep on that TV station.

Really, it gets to where you can heighten the effect of vulgarity by bleeping something. Not knowing the word, people will fill in the blank with something more outré than was actually there. Censors really should look before they bleep!

But most of the time, you know well enough what word goes there. “Bleep off, you bleeping motherbleeper! I’ve had enough of putting up with your bullbleep!” It’s rather like the euphemisms we use: “Frack off, you fricking mofo! I’ve had enough of putting up with your BS!” Everybody knows what words are being replaced; they’re often barely masked anyway. And, for that matter, it’s permissible to refer to the same things using other words. We can talk about “sex” and “defecation” and so on, probably not over dinner but certainly on TV. So why bother at all?

One thing that’s fairly obvious is that when the vulgar words are being used, they’re often not being used denotatively at all. If I say “Get your bleeping dog off my lawn,” it’s quite unlikely that I mean that the dog is actually bleeping right there on my lawn. Rather, what we have are words for things that were at one time taboo for discussion in any form in polite company (one might at most advert to them in the most glancing, indirect way imaginable) and acquired a certain taboo force in the utterance as a result. The act of speaking of these things was a transgression.

And so if one wished to express anger or frustration or something else that called for an expression of rupture with politeness, an expression of transgression of social norms as a way of responding to a situation that has in some way transgressed one’s own standards, one could use them without semantic value – as expletives (expletive = “filler”) – simply for their speech act force.

By speech act I mean what you’re doing when you say something. When you utter a taboo expression, you are breaking a taboo; you are transgressing a social norm. Your act is “I transgress!” and thus “I disregard polite norms! I wish to be offensive!” Interestingly, they can have the effect of offending more strongly than expressions that, while not vulgar, are denotatively much more hurtful. If someone on TV says “You’re a stupid, worthless person who never should have been born,” that won’t get bleeped; if you replace “stupid, worthless person who never should have been born” with a reference to the rectal sphincter, it probably will get bleeped. In other words, it’s a matter of pure conventional function, just as much as a word like hello communicates acknowledgement of another person’s presence and please communicates that you don’t have the right to demand something of the other person.

And these vulgarities have retained that speech act force in large measure even after the loss of denotative taboo, though the force is gradually weakening. Indeed, what word is now the most offensive word you can say? Many people would say it’s a word that communicates racial hatred – a word that refers to a member of another race but that communicates contempt in so doing, and draws on a history of contempt, repression, and slavery. Yes, the n-word is supplanting the f-word for the worst thing you can say (perhaps excepting if you’re a member of the race referred to, and even then with limitations). After all, if you say the f-word, you’re a crude vulgarian but not an uncommon one, but if you say the n-word, you’re a bigot, a racist. Which is certainly much worse. It actually hurts people.

And does the n-word get bleeped? I think increasingly it does. I don’t watch enough TV to say for sure, but I know that it’s getting censored in print, not just in quotations in news stories but, famously, in an edition of Huckleberry Finn (wherein the word was not originally used as deliberate transgression in the same was as it is today, but the rationale is that these words have powerful effects on readers’ reflexes), and lately in a book by Joseph Conrad now available under the title The N-Word of the Narcissus.

No, really. It’s true! Don’t say WTF! (Or should that be WTbleep?)

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

“I can do that!”

Posted on April 9, 2011 | 4 comments

This is the text of a presentation I gave at The Writers’ Community of Durham Region’s monthly breakfast on April 9, 2011.

Have you ever seen A Chorus Line? I mean the Broadway musical or the movie that was made from it.

Now, there’s a show for a triple threat. You know, someone who can act, dance, and sing. There’s one great tapdance number in it – you might know it: “I’m watching sis go pit-a-pat, Said, ‘I can do that, I can do that.’”

That’s actually a pretty good guide to becoming a triple threat. In publishing. You know, writing, editing, design. By design I mean layout – desktop publishing. “I can do that” is also a good guide to getting to earn a living doing these things. And there’s a corollary: a good way not to get as far is to say, “I can’t do that. I won’t do that.” Continue reading →

4 Comments

Posted in editing

Tagged , , , , , ,