Monthly Archives: September 2011

chalcedony

Posted on September 14, 2011 | 10 comments

I went out for lunch at a Jack Astor’s with co-workers today. As they do at those restaurants, our waitress wrote her name on the brown paper on the table: CHELC. We thought she had stopped partway through because she was distracted by something, but actually she was just writing Chelsea (or Chelcey or whatever) in a cute way. I added a hyphen before the final C for clarity. And then I thought about chalcedony.

I didn’t think about chalcedony because of any connection with chalk (which CHELC also reminds me of, but which the waitress did not use – she used a crayon – and which is quite different from chalecedony) but just because Chelsea made me think of it, since chalcedony looks like it might be pronounced sort of like “Chelsea doney.” It also makes me think of chalice.

But chalcedony would more reasonably make me think of the French for chalice, câlice (a rude word in Quebec), or of calcium, even though chalcedony doesn’t contain calcium and it would be noteworthy to see a chalice made of it. This is because the opening ch is pronounced /k/. The second c, however, is /s/. And the preferred pronunciation has the stress on the second syllable, like “Cal said an E” (though you can also go with the flow and put stress on the first and third instead, as you probably want to anyway).

The liturgical air that chalice brings is not altogether inappropriate. As I remarked to my lunch companions, chalcedony is one of those minerals I can only recall ever having seen named in the Bible – specifically in its final book (Revelation), as one of the various precious stones of which the New Jerusalem is built: its foundations are made of twelve precious stones, to wit jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, carnelian, chrysolite (not chrysotile!), beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth, and amethyst.

Don’t you love that, when you’re reading something and they just mention some weird thing you’ve never heard of before as though everybody knows what it is, and in fact as though it’s one of the most important or valuable things going? Right there in between sapphire and emerald is chalcedony, and there’s also sardonyx (yeah, right!), carnelian, chrysoprase, jacinth… Not exactly as common as sand. In fact, mentioned nowhere else in the Bible.

It gets better: whatever they were calling chalcedony back then is almost certainly not what we call chalcedony now. (Latin versions of the Bible named the same stone as carbunculus or anthrax – ha, yes, ἄνθραξ anthrax is the Greek word for “carbuncle”.) But, then, although the name seems to clearly indicate that the stone is associated with Chalcedon, a town in Asia Minor (now a district of Istanbul), the OED tells us that this is actually very doubtful. It seems that earlier forms of the name had an r instead of an l, and may have been related to Carthage (Greek Καρχηδών Karkhedón) – but at any rate the name has changed stones since then.

The stone it now names is surely the one J.R.R. Tolkien had in mind. You see, one of those with whom I work, Christina Vasilevski, mentioned that she had seen it in The Lord of the Rings. And indeed it is there, in a song Bilbo Baggins sings at Rivendell about a mariner named Eärendil:

his bow was made of dragon-horn,
his arrows shorn of ebony
of silver was his habergeon,
his scabbard of chalcedony

Well, if a chalice, why not a scabbard, I suppose.  (Oh, by the way: habergeon? Hauberk: a chain-mail tunic.) But what is it, this chalcedony?

Silicon dioxide is what it is. Yup, silica. Same stuff that’s in sand. And in a whole lot of other things too. The way the molecules arrange themselves accounts for quite a lot of variety. Chalcedony is a version with a pearly lustre, and it comes in white, grey, brown, and black, and is translucent.

Oh, and it also comes in an assortment of varieties with different forms and different additions of other elements, and each with its own name: agate, aventurine, carnelian, chrysoprase, heliotrope, jasper, moss agate, mtorolite, onyx, sardonyx… Do some of those look familiar? Yes, nearly half of the foundations of the New Jerusalem are varieties of chalcedony. Which is itself a sort of silica. And silica is used everywhere in all sorts of things.

But, then, what the heck. English has so few letters and so few sounds and yet produces all these words with them…

10 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

Styx, Stygian

Posted on September 12, 2011 | 2 comments

Another choir season has commenced. Tonight we were working on, among other things, Johannes Brahms’s Nänie, a fine piece which begins “Auch das Schöne muss sterben” (“The beautiful, too, must die”). One noun phrase in it caught my attention: des stygischen Zeus, which the English translation (which we are not singing) renders as the Stygian Jove.

The sounds of the two versions of this noun phrase are markedly different. In stygischen the fricatives are alveopalatal (“sh”) and the g is a real /g/ sound, and Zeus is said the German way, “tsoyss” to Anglo ears. Stygian Jove, on the other hand, stays at the tip of the tongue (ending forward of that with /v/) with its pair of munchy voiced affricates (“j”).

But there are a couple of questions the phrase raises. One would be “Why Jove and not Zeus or Jupiter?” I suspect not Zeus because of the assonance of Jove, and not Jupiter because the music calls for a single syllable. (Jove sounds poetic, old-boy-ish, or both; as it happens, it’s from the older Latin name for the top-dog god, Jovus, while Jupiter is formed from Jovus pater, “father Jove”. But I’m not on Jove today, by Jove, so I’m not even going to start on its similarities to names for the godhead in other languages… this time.)

Another question is “Whaddya mean, ‘Stygian Jove’? Zeus is up on Olympus. The lord of the Styx is Hades, a.k.a. Pluto.” And the answer to that is actually “Exactly. Stygian Jove or Stygian Zeus is a cute way of saying Pluto or Hades. Because what would the real Jove be doing down in the sticks? Hardly a very jovial place!”

Yes, by the way, jovial does come from Jove. But when I refer to the sticks, I don’t really mean the boondocks; I mean the Styx. If our recent dip into the Lethe has not erased it from your mind, you likely know that Styx is the name not only of a rock band but of the river that one crosses to enter the Underworld – it is a point of no return (not Point of Know Return, which is an album by not Styx but Kansas), and you must be ferried across by Charon (whom I associate with “Don’t Pay the Ferryman,” by not Styx but Chris de Burgh). In the Greek mythology, everyone ends up there, by contrast with the Christian version (which has actually gained a considerable Greek influence in our imagery), in which a person goes there only if he is unfit for heaven – for instance, if a criminal mind is all he’s ever had. (Oh, sorry, that’s from “Criminal Mind” by Lawrence Gowan, not by – wait! Lawrence Gowan is now the lead singer for Styx… with whom he does perform that song, though it’s from his solo years.)

OK, now, why is that rock group named Styx? Aside from that it’s the kind of name that sticks with you. It smacks of Hell, to be sure; it naturally leads a person to assume that Styx must be a heavy metal group. They have even been mistaken for one (they were accused of having backwards messages in their songs, too, and mocked this in their song “Heavy Metal Poisoning”). But they are not, not at all – what, the band that gave us “Lady,” “Come Sail Away,” “Babe,” “Mr. Roboto,” and “The Best of Times”? They chose the name Styx when, having to rename their band early on, it was (according to James Young a 1979 interview in Circus magazine) “the only one that none of us hated.”

That’s a delicious irony, because Styx is related to the Greek verb στυγεῖν stugein “hate” and adjective στυγνός stugnos “hateful, gloomy”. I don’t know that the word itself seems especially hateful or gloomy – it starts with St, a saint or the street (both things that are not found on the far side), and ends with that rakish pair, yx, a reverse male, an incomplete double-cross. What comes between st and xy, by the way? Just uvw: a set that looks like the waves of a river – and in fact they are all from the same Latin letter. It gets better, though: that y is actually a Latin representation of the Greek letter υ, which is actually also the source of u, v, and w, and which we represent in direct transliteration as u. Hiding in the middle of this word is the river itself, multiplying over time (soon to be legion?), waves getting rougher u v w as you get across.

It’s not exactly stagnant, then. Nope. And stagnant is an unrelated word. But you get from stugein a hint of how we get from Styx to Stygian: Greek has a derivational relation between the g and the x. From a word-tasting perspective, we may note that Styx is short and has a crisp, clean sound, while Stygian seems tighter, more pinched, more congested even. And longer. It makes me think a bit of a stinky pigeon (or was that just a Bat Out of Hell? Oh, wait, that’s an album by Meatloaf, not Styx). And the stigma of astigmatism.

But Stygian is often used to mean “dark” or “gloomy” and astigmatism doesn’t make things darker; it just blurs vision axially. Styes might dim your vision a bit more, if temporarily. But they wouldn’t lead to a truly Stygian darkness either. One needs the shades of Hades. By which I do not mean a pair of D&G or Oakley sunglasses worn by some plutocrat. Well, unless they’re wearing them as Charon takes their carry-on (picture Cerberus as a purse dog) – the beautiful people, too, must die.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , ,

oligarchy

Posted on September 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

This word makes me think of a famous book that doesn’t exist: The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. It’s the seditious book in George Orwell’s 1984. I think it was in that title that I first encountered – well, not the exact word oligarchy, but a mark of its presence.

It’s not really a pretty word, is it, oligarchy? It has resonances of ugly and gawky and gherkin (though it does have a faint echo of olive garden). It makes me think of hold the car key, which is something that, in a family, only parents can do – the local oligarchy. (Well, big brother might get to hold the car key too.) The oli is oily, the lig might bring to mind ligament (and what ties bind a family or state together?), and the garch – well, I find it rather unlikeable, reminiscent of a harsh bird cry or a sound someone makes from deep within the throat just before expectorating.

On the other hand, the archy may seem more open and certainly is more familiar: anarchy, monarchy, and such like. It’s from the Greek root ἀρχός arkhos “ruler”. And the olig? From Greek ὀλίγος oligos, “small, little, few”. So oligarchy means “rule by a small group”.

Unsurprisingly, this is not a new word. It’s been in English at least since the 1500s, but was in Greek back in classical times. Rule by tight little in-groups – families, cabals, and so on – has occurred many times throughout history. Indeed, even in modern democracies, a small group may come to have power and to wield it largely unchecked for quite some time, helping their friends and doing things just the way they want with little or no regard for the main mass of the populace. And how rarely are they held to account – after years of depredations, they get re-elected yet again. And the announcement of the election poll results might as well be an “olly olly oxenfree” – or I should say “oligarchy oxenfree”: “Hey, power people, you made it without being caught out. You get to hold the car keys once again.”

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

swarthy

Posted on September 10, 2011 | 6 comments

My wife and I went to hear the Red Army Choir the other night, and one of the songs they sang was “Smuglyanka,” the title of which they translated as “The Swarthy Girl.”

Swarthy girl. I understood what that meant, of course, but I found it a bit odd, because to me swarthy has something of a masculine air to it, and at the very least it seems to carry a heft (and muscle and perhaps hairiness) unexpected with girl. It may be from the echoes of sword and various swa words such as swashbuckling, swat, swarm, etc. (though note swallow and sway and a few others that may not have such a tone), but I really think it’s from the contexts in which I’ve generally seen it and the particular persons typically described as swarthy.

If we look at the common collocates of swarthy in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, we see some indication: by a fair amount, the most common collocate is man. Men is also common. Skin, hair, and face are all in there, of course; so are bearded, fellow, and guy. And there are various racial groups mentioned. But not any specifically feminine terms.

It’s not that one simply may not use swarthy with a female; Tennyson did – “A queen, with swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes.” But swarthiness seems to hint at a certain swordworthiness and, more to the point, the darkness of skin that it is associated with figured for a long time in English-language fiction as a characteristic of a foreigner either romantic (thus male, because female objects of attraction were long expected to be fair) or threatening (and so again male, typically).

What ethnic groups have been thought of as swarthy, by the way? Generally those surrounding the Mediterranean: Spaniards, (southern) Italians, Greeks, Turks, Arabs. Is it a racist or politically incorrect term? It seems that depends on whom you ask. It has indeed historically often been used as part of racial stereotyping and “othering,” but such usage does not invariably taint a word, especially not if it has enough positive or neutral uses.

We know that among the paler Europeans darkness of complexion was long looked on, um, darkly, and such denigration could be applied surprisingly broadly. Consider this quotation from Ben Franklin: “in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.”

Regardless of whether you find it racist or not, you almost certainly will find it archaic, literary, poetic or old-fashioned. And it is an old word, with long roots in English. It comes from swart, which was the originally more common word in English for “black” – all the other Germanic languages still have cognates of this for their word for “black” (e.g., German schwarz). But English has, as it sometimes does, been a bit perverse and gone with a different word – a word just as old, mind you, but out of step with the neighbours: black, of course.

Only swarthy doesn’t mean “black”, quite. Just dark. When not referring to people, it may describe a swamp or a shaded sward or (as Macaulay did) “bleak Hampstead’s swarthy moor.” When referring to people, it may well also refer to a “swarthy moor” – meaning Muslim. But in any case it means more olive-skinned and dark-haired.

And yet if I say Swarthmore (a name directly related to swarthy moor), you’ll probably think of a college full of rich white girls – and guys.* Go figure. Such small changes can put you into a whole new set of associations…

*Its student body is surely more diverse now. But established images take longer to change.

6 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

rancio

Posted on September 8, 2011 | 14 comments

Wine tasting notes have recourse to a variety of terms that may seem a bit offputting to the uninitiated: pencil shavings (merlot), iodine (cabernet sauvignon, among others), barnyard (chardonnay), wet gravel (cabernet franc), petrol (riesling), cat’s pee (sauvignon blanc)… And all those are actually flavours people seek out! So it’s understandable if a person, on seeing rancio in a description of a wine’s flavour, reads it as a typo for rancid. Mmmm… rancid wine. Why not? Wine is often drunk with cheese, and you know what some cheese smells like. (Fortunately, no one actually says it in tasting notes.)

On seeing the word a few times, the reader will conclude it must not be an error. (Some, more easily cowed, will conclude this right away.) But the next questions follow: What does it mean? And how do you pronounce it?

It seems reasonable enough to think it might be an Italian word, pronounced like “rancho”. Hmmm, if you can have barnyard in chard, why not rancho in… what? Tokay? Okay. Muscat? Better than muskrat. Sherry? Yeah, baby! Cognac? Hmmm… let’s have some more and see. Your rancho will become very relaxo.

But actually, no, it’s pronounced to rhyme with “Nancy O.” Or “fancy o,” or perhaps the beginning of “fancy a wine that tastes a bit of rich, overripe fruit, nuts, and butter?” Hmmm… just as there’s runny cheese, and then there’s cheese that ran out the door, and cheese that’s just rank, and different people prefer different stages of that caseous decomp, there’s also wine that runs with lively fruit and there’s wine that’s rancio, and wine that just ran – see ya!

But no need to worry about wine with rancio flavours being “off.” Cognac is distilled, of course, and the others are generally maderized, which means cooked. Which is not always a thing you want to happen to your wines, but lemme tell ya, it works great for some, and maderized wines keep awfully well! And rancio gives such a nice, natural richness, so much better than added caramel, say.

What produces rancio flavours? Oxidation of fatty acids, actually, producing ketones. Generally food that has this happen to it is called… um… rancid.

Oh. Well, yes. Rancio is in fact the name rancid books its table under when it goes out to the fancy places and wants to sound all foreign and romantic. Rancio comes to English from French, which got it from Spanish; Spanish got it from Latin rancidus “rotten”. But, hey, in wine, even noble rot is actually something good.

And while you may not like your fruit, nuts, or butter rancid, I assure you that in wine that unpleasant edge is taken off. Look, see for yourself: rancid loses that | and is nice, smooth rancio.

14 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

dactylitis

Posted on September 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

Well, this is a swell word, something you can really get your fingers on. And it is, in its way, handy – for one thing, it has some resemblance to a hand: the tyliti really makes me think of a thumb (t) joined (y) to four fingers (liti). I can add that, as it has four syllables, it has three “joints” – just like a finger. Of course, that also means that rhythmically it is not a dactyl: rather, it’s two trochees.

Is this word related to pterodactyl? It is! An experienced word taster (such as you, dear reader, likely are) will know the Greek building blocks involved. Ptero uses the root pter “wing” as in helicopter (helico “spiral” pter “wing”) along with dactyl. And dactyl, also seen in dactylography, syndactyly, and some others, means “finger”. And itis? Why, as in laryngitis and all those other wonderful itises. Oh, geez, they’re swell. Ing. Swelling. So, yup, dactylitis is swollen finger(s). Or, as it happens, toe(s).

Do you reckon you might get dactylitis from typing something like helicopterodactylitis (swelling of the spiral wing finger, what ever that is) or some other sesquipedalian confection? Hmm, well, it’s true that dactylitis does sound somewhat like typing at a keyboard – on a digital computer, as it happens (though it also reminds me of the Lithuanian family name Akalaitis, as in JoAnne Akalaitis, noted New York theatre director and one of Philip Glass’s several ex-wives – hmm, it also sounds a little bit like a Philip Glass piece, dactylitis dactylitis dactylitis dactyli dactyli dactyli etc.). But the condition doesn’t generally come from overuse. Its main connection to helicopterodactylitis is that both stuff too much into one space.

‘Cause let me tell you, when we say swollen finger (or digit), we mean it. The common name for dactylitis is sausage digit(s) or sausage finger(s). No, I’m not joking. When your finger swells up like that, it looks like a sausage. That might sound amusing, but you sure wouldn’t be so tickled if it were your digits. It is a possible effect of psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis (now there’s another one we’ll need to taste), sickle-cell disease, and some infectious conditions, including tuberculosis and leprosy.

And when you have it, the odds of your clacking away on the keyboard are not so high. Your fingers will have a hard time making dactylitis – by typing or writing, or even resemblance, since those letters are fairly thin. Unless you do them in bold Comic Sans: tyliti. Oh, that doesn’t look pleasant either, does it…

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

beg the question, ad hominem

Posted on September 6, 2011 | 6 comments

My annual spree of masochism – setting up a table for the Order of Logogustation at the Frosh Week of my local university – rolled around again this week. I always try to maintain a game face, and I usually get some nibbles, but more often I just gather anecdotes for telling later over alcohol.

Today I was at the table and there was a lean, angular young man standing in front of it, looking over the printed material a bit cagily. A young woman with a certain feline grace strolled up. “Logogustation,” she said, pronouncing it correctly the first time. She looked further at the sign. “Word tasting.”

“Words are delicious,” I offered.

“That kind of begs the question,” she said, “of whether words can be said to have taste at all.”

The young man slapped down the brochure and exclaimed, “No it does not!” I jumped slightly; cat girl just raised an eyebrow. He continued. “It does not beg the question! That’s not what begging the question means!”

“I know a lot of people who use it to mean exactly that,” cat girl said.

“Well, they’re wrong,” he said. “It means assuming the point that’s at issue. Trying to prove X with an argument that only works if X is true. Get it right.”

The young woman drew back slightly and gave him an elevator look (top to toe and back). “You’re using language as a weapon,” she said. “You’re deeply insecure and you feel that you can improve your self-image by belittling others. Actually it just makes you look worse.”

“Oh, great,” said angle boy. “You lose. The best you can muster is an ad hominem. That’s pathetic.”

“That’s not an ad hominem,” I said, doing what I could to suppress a smile at his error.

“She’s attacking my character!” he said. “You’re an idiot! Of course it’s an ad hominem!”

“Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of asserting that a person’s argument is flawed because of a flaw in a person’s character,” I said. “Or, conversely, asserting that a person’s argument is good because of the person’s good character. But she’s not saying you’re wrong because you’re an unpleasant person. Her assertion regarding your character is a different level of analysis. She’s not saying you’re wrong at all. She’s just saying that the way you’re presenting your point reveals something important about your character. And that, pragmatically, your entry into the discourse may be serving a primary goal other than the ostensible one.”

Cat girl considered this momentarily and smiled. “OK.”

“I speak frankly,” angle boy said overtop of her. “I’m just bluntly honest. And –” he turned to cat girl –”you’re just standing there smiling, assassinating my character instead of answering my argument.”

“Actually,” she said, “it was meant as a helpful observation. And your statements about my character – and his –” she nodded in my direction –”are not germane to the argument. In fact, they would meet your definition of ad hominems.”

“You see,” angle boy said to me, “she looks like she’s right because she’s calm. And because I get worked up because it’s important, I look like I’m wrong.”

“It does make people less receptive,” I said. “Of course it would be fallacious to say you’re wrong because you’re upset. Just as it’s fallacious to use righteous indignation as proof of the validity of one’s argument. I’m not sure if there’s a proper name for that fallacy, but I’m inclined to call it argumentum ad passionem. Or argumentum ad affectum. It’s all too common in political discourse.”

“Just by the by,” cat girl said to me, “what do you say about begging the question?”

“We-ell,” I said, “the original meaning is indeed ‘assuming the conclusion’. It’s a bit of a dodgy translation of petitio principii. I prefer to avoid it because those people who are familiar with the original meaning tend to take exception to the more recent use.”

Angle boy made a “you see” gesture with his hands. Cat girl cocked her head. “You taste words,” she said. “So what does begging the question taste like?”

Ah, back on safer ground. “Everyone can taste words. Say it slowly: begging the question. What does it feel like?”

She ran it through her mouth a couple of times. “Blunt and withdrawn at the start. Then dry and thirsty on question.”

“And what other words does it make you think of?”

Cat girl smiled a little. “Big bad bugger bogeyman bagboy… quick quiz quirky quiet quest.”

Angle boy interjected with some asperity, “Petitio principii. Stupidity.”

“Ad hominem,” I said.

“It is not!” he said.

“No,” I said, “I mean taste it.”

“Taste this,” angle boy said and made a rude gesture. He added “What a bunch of bullshit” and walked away.

“Hmmm,” cat girl said, apparently in response to my suggestion of ad hominem. “A dominant, domineering, abominable… humbug.”

I smiled and extended my hand. “James. Pleased to meet you.”

She shook my hand. “Arlene.” Then she picked up a membership brochure, made a little gesture of salutation with it and, putting it in her bag, said “See you later” and moved on.

6 Comments

Posted in language and linguistics, word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , ,

Are you one of the only people bothered by this?

Posted on September 6, 2011 | 40 comments

A while back, a fellow editor encountered an instance where someone “pointed out” that one of the only doesn’t make sense and should be one of the few.

Well, geez, who knew it didn’t make sense? I’ve always understood it. It’s a well-established idiom. But some people find it irksome: to them, only can only mean “one” – they may have that as a feature of their personal version of English, but likely they learned it from someone else “pointing it out” – and so for them one of the only is not just wrong but annoying (as “errors” you just learned can seem to be: a reaction that has much more to do with in-group and out-group than with clarity or effective communication).

What there really is here is a failure of analysis. The same sort of analysis leads some people to say anyways is illogical, when in fact the s isn’t a plural, it’s a survival of the genitive. In the case of one of the only, only means “without anything else.” You can say “there are only three people I know who can do this” and it’s not wrong. To say it must mean “one” flies in the face of established usage.

The difference, therefore, is that one of the few focuses on small quantity, while one of the only focuses on limitation. That’s a subtle difference in focus worth preserving.

So, for instance, a waitress at brunch said to me not long ago “This is one of the only new menu items we have.” My wife and I understood it. And the effect would have been different if she had said “one of the few new menu items” or “one of a few new menu items.”

Now, evidently there are some people who do not have this usage in their repertoire, and are resistant to adding it. This would be one of the factors that ensure many varieties of English usage. If you use one of the only you need to be aware that some people may respond adversely to it.

But the argument often made for replacing one of the only with one of the few, that it’s imprecise, is actually holding that it’s more precise to conflate two senses – one focusing on small numbers, the other on limitation and exclusivity – in one form, and to require every expression to focus not on the limitation and exclusivity but on the small number. That seems to me a little bit like legislating the value of pi to be 22/7 for the sake of precision.

Remember: the moment someone starts in on a common word or expression and says it’s not logical, reach for your references and see what bit of linguistic history or understanding the person is overlooking. Also ask yourself exactly when English became a logical and consistent language. (Hint: it never did.)

40 Comments

Posted in editing

Tagged ,

Kerguelen

Posted on September 6, 2011 | 2 comments

Sometimes, in the middle of what seemed charted waters, an island will appear from nowhere. I will discover in my literary or musical peregrinations a door into a new world, another wing of the house of the world that had theretofore been terra incognita, an unknown unknown.

For instance, in the bargain bins at Disc Diggers near Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts, in the later ’90s, I discovered two languages – and musical forms – previously unknown to me thanks to two CDs I decided to take a chance on. One was the group Ziskakan, from the island of Réunion, near Madagascar; much of their music is sung in Réunionnais, a creole surprisingly similar in many ways to Haitian creole (listen to “Somin paradi”). The other was a project called Dao Dezi, and they were singing sometimes in French and sometimes in a language that seemed altogether unexpected to me and was not identified (listen to “Ti Eliz Iza”).

This was before one could simply Google a few phrases and find the whole answer. I had to do some real digging in Boston-area academic libraries to discover that the language was Breton – a Celtic language still spoken in just that part of northern France where the Asterix comics were set. Unlike Irish, a Celtic language with which I was by then quite familiar, Breton uses the letter k quite a bit, which really makes it stand out in its French surroundings. For those who enjoy discovering languages, I recommend it – you will find that there are even Breton lessons on the web now.

More recently, I stumbled – I can’t even remember how – on a really quite sizeable island that I had never heard of in a corner of the word I did not know had an island in it. Or, rather, it’s an archipelago with one large island and several much smaller ones orbiting it: the Kerguelen islands. They are, like Réunion, in the Indian Ocean (but much farther south), and, like Réunion (and Brittany), they belong to France. And their name is Breton.

Yep. They take their name, in fact, from the man who discovered them in 1772, Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec. He was from Brittany. The name Kerguelen, I learn from a paper by Gary D. German, is Breton for “holly farm” (my little Breton phrasebook tells me that kêr means “city” or “home” or, I guess, “farm” but is silent on the topic of holly).

I don’t imagine there’s any holly growing on Grande Terre (the main island, 6675 square kilometres and with mountains reaching 1850 metres high) or any of the other Kerguelen islands. The flora are limited to grass, lichens, moss, and cabbage. Yes, indigenous cabbage. There are various animals – some of which introduced by humans – but it’s not really very welcoming. There are birds, of course. And in fact the outline of the island even looks a bit like a large, ragged bird diving to the left. And people? Only 70 to 100 people live there, and they’re all researchers.

And how do you pronounce Kerguelen? Well, if you’re speaking French (or Breton), it’s sort of like “care gay len.” If you say in the English way, it rhymes with “gurglin’.” It also reminds me a bit of Coeur d’Alene, the name of a town in Idaho. I’d like to be able to say that Coeur d’Alene is antipodean to the Kerguelen islands, but it’s actually about 400 km off; the Kerguelen islands are right on the other side of the planet from the southeast corner of Alberta. They certainly are antipodean, a terra australis, a real areal discovery – but Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec talked them up rather a bit much to the king of France, and, after coming back empty-handed from a subsequent expedition, was jailed. Oops. (He was freed after the revolution.)

Such an unexpected name, Kerguelen, for such an unexpected island, in such an unexpected place. With a dormant volcano and France’s largest glacier. A name you pronounce with e’s but don’t figure out with ease, and an island that can be reached only by ship. If for some reason you wanted to go there. But it’s there, just 5,000 km due south of the Chagos Islands.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , , , ,

obmutescence

Posted on September 5, 2011 | 1 comment

History and religion have a collection of important silences. Sometimes the silence is a lesson or a clear statement. The Buddha, one day, held up a lotus before his followers and said nothing. Jesus, interrogated by Pontius Pilate, responded to a crucial question with silence.

And, on the other side, many people have remained silent when they should have spoken out. Sometimes silence is like a cancer that grows and eats away meaning, as in Simon and Garfunkel’s song “The Sound of Silence.” But sometimes silence comes from a realization of the inadequacy of the words, as in Simon and Garfunkel’s “Slip Slidin’ Away”: “I know a father who had a son. He longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he’d done. He came a long way just to explain. He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping, then he turned around and headed home again.”

There is a saying, “Silence implies consent.” But sometimes silence is dissent, or uncooperation. Today Americans may “take the fifth” (the Fifth Amendment, which says no one may be forced to self-incriminate); Iago, in Othello, after saying too many of the wrong things, when he is caught finally declares he will never say another word.

What is certain is that all these silences are not empty but full, swollen even: deliberate, and communicating something important thereby.

Intention is an important aspect in silence, to be sure: one may say it is the essence of muteness. But even where there is no person who might be speaking, you may listen to the silence, and thereby add your own intention to it. John Cage composed a piece, 4’33”, which is a tacet in three movements: you hear not nothing (the sound of nothing at all is not no sound either; in an anechoic chamber it feels as though sound has been sucked out of your ears, but you can hear the blood flowing in your veins), but the ambient sound, the auditory collage of your context, all the little bits you typically disattend.

Silence, or the intentional lack of intentional sound, can also be spiritual. Some monks maintain silence as a general rule; Quaker meetings are mainly silent, too. The intent is to listen to what we normally drown out, perhaps to find the crack in everything where the light slips in (to borrow an image from Leonard Cohen). To hear the still small voice that comes after the wind, the earthquake, and the fire, as it did to Elijah. As the Tao Te Ching (Gia-Fu Feng’s translation) says, “Keep your mouth shut, Guard the senses, And life is ever full. Open your mouth, Always be busy, And life is beyond hope.” And, more to the point, “The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”

But, as word taster Tom Priestly points out, we lack a good, common word in English specifically for a silence that is deliberate. Looking for one such, Tom found obmutescence.

My, that’s a bit of a gob-stopper, isn’t it? And a nice little irony that a word for deliberate silence is so long. Admittedly, it has those hisses in it that tend towards silence (not quite as strongly as “Sshh,” but still), and before those it has an obstruction of the mouth /bm/. But we might wish something more concise. Still, its parts at least are clear: ob referring to blocking or being in front, as in obstacle, obstruct, obstreperous, obnubilate, and on and on; mute as in, well, mute; escence meaning tendency towards, as in adolescence, somnolescence, and such like. It is a word stuffed full, as swollen as a pregnant silence.

Swollen? Obtumescent, in fact. Oh, mind the t and m: in obmutescence the order is m t, as silence may seem empty; in obtumescence, it’s the reverse, and the root is as in tumid, tumour, and tumescence. Obtumescence, which I must admit is a long-disused word, refers to swelling or a swollen condition, as in when your eyelid swells and you can’t see, or your throat swells and you can’t speak (or swallow, or perhaps even breathe).

Tom was looking for le mot juste for an intended silence because he was looking for a better translation of the title of Heinrich Böll’s short story, “Dr. Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen,” normally called in English “Murke’s Collected Silences.” It’s a story of a young man, a recent graduate in psychology, who works at a radio station. He begins to collect bits of tape discarded because they contain only the speaker’s silence – those pauses, breaths, what have you. He takes them home and listens to them. He even records his girlfriend being silent in front of a microphone.

There is more to the story than that; Murke finds himself having to edit tapes of a cultural critic who has decided that he wants to replace his use of “God” with something less specific. Murke finds a use for some of the discarded “God”s: a producer who is making a radio play about an atheist who asks God questions but is answered by silences. The producer gives Murke some silence in exchange for the “God”s. You may like the idea of the atheist getting the word that is not the eternal word, while the theist gets the silence that to him is more than just silence.

Still, the silences one cuts out of audio tapes (or edits out of digital files now) are not necessarily obmutescences; they are often simply gaps wherein the person collects thoughts, or inhales, or they may evince a personal sense of pacing that is slower than the editor wants. Yet if you listen to such a collection, you will likely find them obtumescent, or even pregnant, about to give birth. They are not like the stillness of a person sitting by a microphone and not speaking, a silence that you can wrap around you like a blanket. They are… well, listen (and watch, if you can stand it): there’s a video of nothing but Sarah Palin’s breath pauses from a speech at www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9kfcEga0lk (I recommend not reading the comments, which, as is usual on YouTube, are harrowingly puerile).

And after that… well, to quote Hamlet, “The rest is silence.”

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,