Monthly Archives: June 2011

legion

Posted on June 20, 2011 | 1 comment

This past week I spotted a little error in someone else’s text: precancerous legions.

To me, that seems almost fitting. I’ll explain. My first encounter with the word legion was in Exshaw, a small town in Alberta at the entrance to the Rockies. It’s a one-industry town – cement plant – and there was (perhaps still is) only one place in town that served alcoholic beverages: the legion. So when I was a kid in the 1970s, the “leejun” (which is how I first thought it was spelled) was a smoky place where adults went to drink. Precancerous indeed!

My next encounter with the term was in French foreign legion. At that point I still assumed a legion was a drinking establishment. It was therefore a little confusing to see it referring to a lot of guys out in the middle of the desert. But, hey, Frenchmen in the desert? They must be thirsty. (And, as we all know, the French smoke a lot.)

As I read Asterix comics, I became aware of the Roman legion as well. It was clear that it wasn’t a drinking organization. Even if legion never lost its overtone of spilled beer and stale cigarette smoke (what one smelled on the one day in a year that kids were let into the legion – Remembrance Day, November 11), it acquired this military sense with its derivative form legionary.

And then there was the line that I saw first in a Captain Marvel comic, when he was confronted with a demonic villain who was one but many (and thus had to be defeated with a superspeed group smite with the superfist): My name is legion, for we are many. Again, I really didn’t get that. I may have understood by that time that legion could refer to a bunch of army guys, but I still wasn’t quite getting it. After all, in Exshaw, there was (is) only one legion, though I guess many guys went there for beer.

And no, I didn’t at first get the Biblical reference at all. (It’s when Jesus is confronting a demon who has possessed a man, and Jesus asks the demon its name. Subsequently, Jesus drives it – them – into a herd of pigs, which throw themselves into the lake. Lemmings schmemmings.)

And then there was legionnaire’s disease, a deadly lung disease that burst on the scene (at a legion convention) when I still wasn’t completely sorted out on what legionnaires were. It has imparted further senses of baleful sickness to legion.

So now, although I am aware of the word’s origin – it referred to a body of army in Roman times numbering from 3000 to 6000 soldiers (depending on the time), and came from legere, “choose” (as in conscript) – and its current sense, its dominant taste for me is nothing like religion or allegiance or collegiate or belligerant, even though all have some semantic as well as phonetic echoes with it (of the four, only collegiate is etymologically related). It does have some taste of lesion, thanks to puns such as foreign lesions.

But it’s still first of all leejun for me, with its hint of gin and the jaw-jutting “j” and the louche leer in lee. It’s the place with the IITYWYBMAB sign above the bar, the place where I read my Remembrance Day poem to the assembled veterans and other adults, my voice no match for the precancerous miasma of played-out Players and doomed du Mauriers matched with mopped-up Blue and Canadian.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

riddelliine

Posted on June 19, 2011 | 1 comment

This word, with its doubled lines of l’s and i’s, presents a riddle to the eyes. The llii is like a thicket of tall prairie flowers that leave you dazed and confused. Of course, it has the dd as well, but they are earlier, and the two e’s are separated, and it opens with the third i (or the first one, really) and that solitary r.

The ensemble is like one of those photos of a woman altered through vertical doubling to give her two mouths and four eyes – there’s just more to this word that meets the eye than the eye is ready to meet. So the hair stands on end with droplets of anxious sweat flying from the head, as in a cartoon, llii, and the eyes become heavy-lidded e e, and you don’t know what is delineated by it but you want to get rid of it before you become delirious.

Just as well if you avoid riddelliine, anyway. The word may stay on the tip of your tongue when you say it, but you don’t want any actual riddelliine on the tip of your tongue. In sufficient quantity (and it doesn’t take all that much) it will damage your liver and may kill you (if not immediately by liver toxicity, then eventually by liver cancer). It’s a pyrrolizidine alkaloid, you see (and tell me if the sight of pyrrolizidine alkaloid isn’t enough to cause a toxic ocular reaction). It’s found in the plant Senecio riddelli, among some others, hence its name. The solution is simply not to consume any of that plant, which is also known as Riddell’s groundsel and Riddell’s ragwort.

The problem is that this plant, which is a yellow flowering perennial that grows in clusters in the grasslands of the American south and southwest, is sometimes mistaken for other plants. Inexpert herbalists have mistaken it for gordolobo yerba, a herbal tea used for treatment of cough, and sold it as such. Now, gordolobo, there’s a word that just sets four cups of pleasant tea before the eyes, and with a lovely symmetrical dab of dolob. How would you feel if you were expecting that and got riddelliine? Just sick, I’m sure.

But there is one riddle left to solve. Or rather one Riddell. When you see Senecio riddelli, if you know about botanical naming, your first question may well be “Who was Riddell?” because this is obviously the kind of Senecio that is named after someone Riddell.

Mind you, if you’re a major botany geek, you may well think instead “Oh, another Riddell plant.” This is because John Leonard Riddell (1807–1865) was a significant figure in American botany who went about the American south and southwest identifying all sorts of plants. He was for 29 years a professor at Tulane, and he invented the first microscope that allowed binocular viewing through a single objective lens. I don’t know whether he ever put rye under his lens – I mention this just because the family shield of the Clan Riddell, who are a Scottish family (the origin of the name is disputed and may be multiple), has three heads of rye on it (and just perhaps three fingers of Scotch before it).

But most people who read anything about poisonous herbs these days are as likely to read them in Harry Potter books. And those who have read the Harry Potter books have another association with that clan, through the variant spelling Riddle: Tom Marvolo Riddle was who became Voldemort. On the whole, pyrrolizidine alkaloids could not be more baleful than Voldemort, even if Voldemort is easier on the eyes – and on the i’s.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

Ascot

Posted on June 17, 2011 | 2 comments

It’s Royal Ascot week, and today was the Ascot Gold Cup, a.k.a. Ladies’ Day. Apparently a horse race is involved, but nobody really talks about that much; it’s mainly the fillies in the stands who get the attention, with assorted confections fastened to their heads – hats and fascinators galore, in colours from lilac to apricot, some more like mascots than millinery. Have a look at this year’s crop at fashion.telegraph.co.uk/hot-topics/437/royal-ascot-fashion.html. Many a North American might think, “I would never have my Ascot in that.”

Such hats, mind you, are not called Ascot hats. On the other hand, the ladies’ escorts have ascots, for it happens that a type of cravat suitable for wearing with a morning coat – what gentlemen are to wear in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, plus top hat – is now called an Ascot tie, or, particularly in North America, just an ascot (it’s lost the capital A, which actually looks a bit like an ascot).

I should say that various of the wordplays one may give in to the temptation to make on Ascot actually don’t work if you pronounce it the British way. The cot, you see, is reduced entirely (somewhat like the base of a fascinator), making Ascot sound rather like ask it and go nicely with waistcoat (“weskit”). So it’s a tisket, a tasket, a basket worn at Ascot; the lid of it hangs before her bangs, and her head looks like a casket. (How does it stay on? Perhaps with an elastic.) The word comes from east cot, “east cottage”. It is, as it looks, an English word of thoroughbred pedigree.

That pre-empts the more impolite double entendres, which is just as well, as there is a clear code of formality and decorum – and attire – for the Royal Enclosure. (Many in attendance stretch the rules some, exposing more flesh than recommended, perhaps including tattoos and bottle tans, and this year there was something of a dust-up among some of the blokes in one of the enclosures, with a champers bottle being wielded as a weapon. How infra dig.) A race, after all, is an occasion for one’s best behaviour and one’s best attire, as I demonstrated a few years ago: www.flickr.com/photos/sesquiotic/5840900617/in/photostream.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

cortex

Posted on June 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

I remember this record my Dad bought when I was a kid. My brother and I listened to it quite a few times. It was all about the brain – a song for every part (rather amusing, too, as I recall). I can’t remember much of it now, but I do remember one song (musically just a little reminiscent of “Copacabana”), the chorus of which began, “It’s the cortex! The cortex!”

That was, I’m pretty sure, my first encounter with the word cortex. And what sorts of flavours did cortex have for me? Not Gore-Tex, that smart outer layer to wear when you’re encountering nature and its elements – that hadn’t even been invented yet (not for another few years: 1976). No, it would have made me think of Chargex – what VISA cards used to be called in Canada – and similar commercial things and brand names ending in ex. And it would have made me think of core, of course. Which is certainly ironic, since the cortex is not the core but the outer layer of the brain. Your conscious interface with the elements, inner and outer. The part you’re processing this right here right now with.

Other flavours cortex may bring depend on context – and include context. You might get mixed up and think of an escort or perhaps of your oxters (that means “armpits”). You might think of Hernán Cortez, the Spanish conquistador who defeated the Aztex – oops, I mean Aztecs. You might be reminded of Texas by the tex – or even by the size of the cortex, which is really rather expansive: about 2000 square centimetres, around the size of a newspaper page. A wrinkly newspaper page, though: the cerebral cortex has all sorts of wrinkles in it.

But, yes, whatever you think of, whatever new wrinkle, in whatever context, you’re thinking of it with your cortex. And not just history and geography but biology – your biology: the nerves in your oxters connect to your cortex as well.

But how did this crisp word come to be the name of the rind of the mind? You can play with the shapes, see the c come to o, the connection made and circle closed; you can see the crossroads of information at x. You can feel the tongue tap at the back, then (with a little wave motion) the tip, then again at the back and subside into a fricative at the tip, like water rocking in a box. But what has it all to do with the surface of the pond that is your brain?

Well, it’s not really that it’s the surface of a pond. It’s that it’s the bark of the brain tree – consider the ramifications of that. Cortex is Latin for “bark”, you see. Think of the bark of a pine tree, with its wrinkles.

But then think of the wood of that tree being made into a bark, to float on the seas of imagination: the wandering bark that is love, the bark of fantasy… It’s all in the cortex. The cortex!

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

barque

Posted on June 15, 2011 | 6 comments

Can a word that immediately calls forth a harsh, sharp sound (from a dog or other creature) be somehow elegant, lovely, or dreamy?

I don’t see why not. Of course, as soon as you use the que spelling, everything gets a little fancier – barque is what Phydeaux does, perhaps, while bark is what Fido does. The que calls forth French but also Latin – in Latin, que stuck on the end of a word (and fully pronounced) means “and”, as in Senatus Populusque Romanus “the Senate and People of Rome”. So if you had a place called Barbecue Barque perhaps it would mean it had a barbecue and a bar. (And maybe they should go with the alternate spelling Barbeque, which, however, I have a hard time not reading like “barbeck”.)

But the best evidence of the possibility of a little crisp, fresh elegance is the contrast with barge. Barge is a word that brings to mind something quite lumpish and unpleasant – perhaps a garbage barge – and goes with ill-mannered action. “He just barged in! What a bounder – I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole!” On the other hand, embark is what one does on an expensive trip.

And yet barque (bark) and barge most likely come from the same source, by way of barca and barga. There is some dispute as to the origin – Celtic, perhaps, or maybe Greek, but by way of Latin anyway. They were once the same boat, but they’re not really in the same boat now.

Barque and bark rather are in the same boat, on the other hand, although barque can refer specifically to a three-masted ship square-rigged on the foremasts and fore-and-aft rigged on the rear. Bark can name any of quite a variety of mid-small boats – though nothing as small as a birch bark canoe (and no, that’s not the same bark any more than what a dog does is).

Why use the barque spelling when bark will do? Well, for clarity, for one thing. But also for the beautiful balance of the form. Whereas bark bursts a bubble (b > k), barque presents a back half that seems to be made of rotated forms from the front half, sea-changed: b > q (the mast trimmed and turned to make a rudder), a > e (a type a has some resemblance to that rotated e, the schwa ə), r > u (the lost leg grown back). And paradoxically we view inefficient, wasted silent letters as somehow elegant (certainly not in the mathematical sense!).

Still, it’s not the spelling preferred by poets. Well, if Noah released a lark from the ark, we may hark in the stark dark and mark a bark, wandering. Oh, yes, wandering! Shakespeare set down this collocation in his 116th sonnet: it is love that is “the star to every wandering bark.”

And where does the bark wander? In dreamland, surely. I recall again (as I did in my note on virch) “a barca da fantasia” from Madredeus’s O Pastor:

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

“At a distance still burns the barque [or barge] of fantasy, and my dream ends late – waking is what I didn’t want.”

And what do you see on the lovely barque of dreams? Perhaps a world as painted by Georges Braque…

6 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

ctenophore

Posted on June 13, 2011 | 1 comment

We have established, in my note on amphithect, that, as the 1888 Encyclopedia Britannica says, “ctenophores furnish examples of eight-sided emphithect pyramids.” We now know that this means the pyramids are oblong but are symmetrical on two axes. But apparently not everyone knows what ctenophore signifies.

First off, I must affirm that that is the correct spelling. No matter how much your eyes (or your brain) may want it to be so, centophore is incorrect. These things don’t bear hundreds; gracious, that would be macaronic. The phore is from Greek φέρω phero “carry”, and cent is a Latin root. Nope, we want the Greek root χτένα khtena, which came by way of Latin spelling to be cteno here. You could connect it with amphithect by overlap to make a portmanteau, amphithectenophore (not that anyone does). There certainly is something gluey about that ct, anyway – it suggests a tip-and-back coarticulation on the tongue, very sticky (of course, in real life Anglophones simplify the onset).

It stands to reason that, not being Latin in origin, cteno also does not relate to catena, “chain”. Nope, χτένα is “comb”.

So… does that mean your hairdresser is a ctenophore? Hmm, well, I hope not, not in the sense it’s used in English. Actually, the combs of ctenophores are more hair than comb – they are cilia, rows of hair used to propel the squishy beasties.

Yes! Ctenophores are squishy little sea critters (a jelly body with two layers of cells holding it all in) that come in a variety of shapes, amphithect pyramid being but one. Most of them have rows of cilia. They have not brains but nerve nets. And yet they’re not at the bottom of the food chain, either – they eat all sorts of things, even each other, and can eat up to ten times their own mass in a day. They typically catch their prey using glue. (Perhaps they gum them up by asking them to say ctenophore.) Some are a few millimetres wide. Some are up to 1.5 metres wide.

Boy, that really stops the conversation, doesn’t it? A jelly-like thing, reminiscent of some protozoan viewed under a microscope, but large enough to wrap around a child. So, uh, how is it that they’re not much heard of?

That ugly name might have something to do with it. But of course there are various kinds, such as the cydippids and the lobates, and the ctenophores are known more colloquially as comb jellyfish. No, though, they’re not actually jellyfish – real jellyfish are cnidarians.

Yup. Cnidarians. There is it again, that c attaching to the beginning like some sucking (perhaps squishy) sea critter. I’m just gonna have to say that it’s what you get – they’re found under the c.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

amphithect

Posted on June 13, 2011 | 2 comments

On page 844 of volume 16 of the 1888 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will learn that ctenophores furnish examples of eight-sided amphithect pyramids. On reading this, you will of course think “Amphithect?”

You might from there go to a dictionary. If you do, hard luck for you: it’s not even in the Oxford English Dictionary. You might try to guess the meaning; the amphi will lead you to imagine it has to do with double-sidedness or something similar. But what about the thect? What the heck is that? Does it relate to tect as in architect? Nope. And good luck finding it in your handy little Pocket Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary.

You may find yourself down for the count or at least out of the court (the ct), just saying the word again and again, bouncing as it does across the various enunciatory positions – two lips /m/, lips and teeth /f/, tongue and teeth /θ/, back of tongue /k/, and finally tip of tongue on alveolar ridge /t/. Say it repeatedly and you make a neat circuit of your mouth. Pluralize it – amphithects – to get an extra fricative just to lubricate it further.

You can also play with the letters. Amp, hit, he; am, phi, the… match the pi, ham pith etc., at the chimp, hm – pathetic…

And while you’re doing that, perhaps your eyes will coast up the page a bit (page 844, remember? column 1) and see this:

In the highest and most complicated group, the Heterostaura, the basal polygon is no longer regular but amphithect (αμιθηκτος = double-edged). Such a polygon has an even number of sides, and can be divided into symmetrical halves by each of two places intersecting at right angles in the middle point, and thus dividing the whole figure into four congruent polygons.

An amphithect pyramid is thus one that has, for instance, a rhombus as its base. Which you would have learned earlier if you hadn’t gotten on the wrong bus, so to speak. But no wonder it was all Greek…

What? Ctenophores? Oh, yes, I’ll get to those next.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

clerestory

Posted on June 11, 2011 | 5 comments

If you don’t know this word, it’s no great surprise; it is circulated mainly among the clerisy (that is, the literati – people of learning and illumination, and in particular people of learning about illumination, especially architects). I first saw it in an article in The Buffalo News.

No, no, I’m not being silly. The article was on the new terminal for the Buffalo Niagara International Airport, at that time soon to be under construction (it’s been open for several years now), and for whatever reason it mentioned that the terminal was to have clerestories, but didn’t explain what they were.

I knew it had something to do with fenestration, but beyond that I was met with frustration. I also guessed that it was pronounced with four syllables, and wasn’t sure if the stress was on the first (/klɛ/) or the second (/rɛ/). So, of course, at my next chance, I looked it up. And the first thing I learned was that it actually has three syllables and is pronounced like “clear story”.

The second thing I learned, of course, was what a clerestory is: a high window, in this case (as often) a window in a raised section of roof that lets light into interior spaces – not a skylight, which is set into the roof without interruption, but rather one of those windows of which the archetypal image of a factory has many, giving its roof a sawtooth appearance. (In the original sense, it is a set of high windows in a cathedral that allow the centre of the nave to be well illuminated.)

So raise the roof! That shed sufficient light on the matter. But, now, how do we come to have this word in this form? Ah, well, it turns out the story for that is not quite clear. The clere is really an old spelling of clear, in this sense meaning “lit, light-bearing” because the sense “unobstructed” did not exist for clear in the early 1400s when this word was first written down. We would assume that the story is as in a level of a building (what we prefer in Canada to spell storey), but the problem is that that sense of story is otherwise unknown until a couple of hundred years later. So we don’t really know the story here altogether.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I find that the spelling of this word obnubilates or even obfuscates its morphology for me. I keep wanting to treat it like a word like refectory or consistory or conservatory; it makes me think as readily of clerisy and Clerihew as of clear. Habituation to clear and to the various -(t)ory words just makes a “clear story” pronunciation seem wrong, because I’m not really used to this word.

Mind you, the spelling clearstory does exist too. But, now, knowing that the spelling clerestory exists, most English speakers will feel by reflex that clerestory must be the “better” spelling precisely because it is the less expectable – the perverse historical development and present patterns of our spelling make us tend to think “marked” (irregular) forms must be more authentic, formal, better. (Hence, for instance, many people will think an historic must be correct, when in fact for anyone who pronounces the h it’s actually not.)  Such lines of thought make it desirable to have some means of shedding light into the middle of the messy factory floor of English usage.

Or the busy airport, if you will. Actually, as many Torontonians will tell you, Buffalo Niagara International Airport is nice for being considerably less busy than Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. And cheaper to fly out of if you’re going to the US. And even cheaper to get to if you take the bus. None of which has anything to do with clerestory in particular. But should you happen to go there, you will not need to look up clerestory. You can just look up.

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

unctuousness

Posted on June 10, 2011 | 1 comment

Look at the letter forms in this word. Excepting the t, and maybe the e, they slip and slide around – curve up, curve down, curl, make a ring, slither…

The sound of the word, for its part, starts with a thickness and stickiness (that velar nasal and stop and alveopalatal fricative, the tongue pressing softly in the back and then sticking and rolling forward to release finally, gradually, at the tip, the whole experience like stepping forward through mud) and then, after stepping through the open door of the lips and leaving a pucker behind, it slips into a hiss. It makes me think of the stickiness and hissing bubbles of stove-top cream of wheat just when it’s ready, or perhaps of thermal mud pots like Iceland’s Hverarönd (I have some pictures at www.harbeck.ca/James/iceland/iceland3.html).

But this word’s object is not quite like mud, though close, and likewise not quite like cream of wheat, though close. It’s not sticky or viscous, but it’s thick, like fat. Unctuous, from Latin unctum “ointment” (from unguere “anoint”), means “oily” or “greasy”, though it has a rich luxuriousness that you don’t get from oily or greasy. Those are both lighter, more slippery words. This… this is like goose fat, great gobs of goose grease rubbed in loops and rings all over your body, u u u n n c o e s s s (with a little t where two dabs cross over in the middle).

Does that image make you uncomfortable? The object of unctuous may well too, since it’s often used to describe not a substance but, as it were, what we might call a lack of substance – an oily insincerity: you’re more likely to find voice than any other word next to unctuous. You know the voice – it’s smarmy, it’s dulcet but not delicious; it’s the speech of a funeral director, perhaps.

Amusingly, unctuousness, though viewed poorly in English, is seen from the better side in French. The French, as we know, are not afraid of fat; they appreciate rich foods (partly because they don’t eat like starving dogs). So, as Polly-Vous Français notes and I have observed myself, onctueux is often seen in French advertising for smooth, creamy treats, of which of course France has many. (Polly-Vous finds the overriding flavour of unctuous unappealing and unappetizing, which helps her to eat less rich food, she says.)

Still, unctuousness is a thick and rich word, in its way delicious on the tongue – as Jens Wiechers (who suggested this note) says, “it somehow grows on you after a while and you wait for a chance to use it.” But here’s a question: why not unctuosity?

Actually, both unctuousness and unctuosity have been in English since the fourteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a first citation for each from 1398 – because they’re both from the same book. And, over the centuries, there have been times when unctuosity was the more common word. But now unctuousness wins out.

There are linguistic fads, of course, and the figurative uses of this word may figure into the choice: unctuosity has often enough been used to refer particularly to an oily religiosity, and it has a better echo of religiosity. But for the material thickness, unctuousness surely wins in its feel; unctuosity has that longer, wide open vowel in the middle, and a quick tap of a /t/ after that. It’s sort of like the difference between, say, olive oil (unctuosity) and butter (unctuousness). And while I like olive oil, nothing beats butter.

Well, no, I’m not comparing it to Nutella, they’re different kinds of things, even if they both have a certain unctuousness… Ah, zut, et voilà, j’ai faim.

(Translation: Oh, drat, look, now I’m hungry.)

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

plank

Posted on June 8, 2011 | 3 comments

As I was walking down the street, I encountered Marcus Brattle, my adolescent mentee. “Brilliant!” he exclaimed (that’s British for “Great!”). He pulled out a camera. “You came along at just the right time.”

I looked at him warily. “You have plans?” His plans typically translated into disasters or messes, often involving humiliation, sometimes mine.

“I’m the plan king!” He said. “In fact, I’m planking!”

Oh. The faddishness of youth. “Planking?” I said, disingenuously. “Is that short for public wanking?”

“Get over it,” he said. He pointed to one of Toronto’s newly installed racks of Bixi bikes, nearby on the sidewalk. “I’m going to extend myself like a plank across two of those bikes there, and you’re going to photograph it so I can post it.”

“Haven’t people gotten board of that fad yet?”

“It’s planks for the memories,” Marcus said. “People have planked on some remarkable things and in some remarkable places.”

“And fallen to some remarkable deaths,” I said. “It’s all just plankton for the whale of media fads.”

“It’s the exploratory spirit.”

“Sort of like a negative of spelunking,” I observed. “Going up and over instead of down and under. We get a spree of planking followed by spill and plunking. One might come to imagine that plunk is the past tense of plank.”

“Where does that leave plonk, then?”

“Plonk is cheap wine,” I said. “Possibly a play on vin blanc, though people do hear in it the sound of a cork being pulled or a bottle being, well, plonked on a table.”

“Onomatopoeia followed by I’m-a-gotta-pee-a,” Marcus said. It occurred to me that he had learned much from me, but probably not the right things. “And you can plink the glasses.”

“I don’t think anyone actually uses plink that way – for that it’s clink, but tiddly-winks and musical instruments do plink.”

“And where’s plenk?”

“There is no plenk. It’s plink, plank, plonk, plunk.”

“All based on sounds,” Marcus said. “After all, when you drop a plank on the floor, that’s the sound it makes: plank!”

It does, I thought. However… “Actually, the word comes to us by way of various French versions – modern French has planche – originally from Latin, probably related to plana, flat.”

“Well,” Marcus declared, “I’m the planna here, and I plan to be flat. On… those two bikes right there.” He indicated two bikes with about five feet of space between them. “You stand over there and take the photo when I’m ready.” He pointed to the other side of the sidewalk.

I took the camera and walked to where there was a good angle. Marcus grabbed one bike with both hands and swung one leg up onto the other. Then the other leg. “Alright,” Marcus grunted, “have you got it?”

“You’re sagging,” I said.

Just then a woman walked up and asked, “What’s he doing?”

I turned to her. “Planking.”

“Blanketing?”

“No, planking. Like salmon.”

“Sounds fishy to me. Anyway, I want to use one of those bikes.”

Just then I heard another grunt and turned to see Marcus collapsing onto the ground.

“Was that a plunk?” I said. The woman walked over to one of the bikes to take it away.

Marcus started dusting himself off and standing up. “Ow. Did you get a picture while I was holding it rigid?”

“Uh…” I looked at the camera. “Is blank close enough for you?”

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,