Monthly Archives: October 2011

Fun with find & replace: trailing punctuation

Posted on October 12, 2011 | 2 comments

A colleague found herself faced with a formatting problem: the book she was working on required trailing punctuation (commas, periods) to match the formatting of the word they trailed (bold, italic). This can be hard to spot, and tedious to do by hand. She was working in MS Word. Was there a way to do it in find-and-replace using wild cards?

The answer is yes, and it involves one of my favourite F&R subterfuges, the dummy character.

It’s a bit of a nuisance that Word can specify formatting only over a whole search term, not part of one. But dummy characters help get around that:

1. Replace all bold whole words with the same word plus a special character used nowhere else in the document (a per-thousand sign or a pilcrow or a double dagger or whatever, but it has to be used nowhere else).

The find field will look like this: (<*>)
It will have “Use Wildcards” and “Font: Bold” specified for it.
The < and > mean start and end of word; the * means any number of characters; the ( and ) define it as a single term.

The replace field will be like this if your special character is ξ:  \1ξ
(Replace ξ with whatever character you use.)
The \1 refers to the first (and in this case only) defined term from the Find field.

2. Search all instances of that character followed by a comma or a period (or whatever trailing punctuation you want to change – but only one at a time) and change them to bold.

This is just changing ξ. (or whatever special character and whatever trailing punctuation) to bold, no wild cards needed (make sure to remove the format specification on the Find field). In fact, don’t use wild cards; . is a special character in wild cards (you’d need to make it \.).

3. Delete all instances of the special character.

In other words, find ξ (or whatever your character is) and replace it with nothing – completely empty cell, not even a space. Make sure to remove all formatting specifications.

4. Do the same but with italic rather than bold formatting.

The bolding and italicization should be done as separate steps. Reduces possible confusions, and also handles bold italics neatly.

This can also be used for preceding punctuation, e.g., opening quotes. The variation is trivial and is left as an exercise to the reader. 🙂

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parallax

Posted on October 11, 2011 | 1 comment

I mentioned two days ago that I recall first encountering sidereal in Isaac Asimov’s The Universe: From Flat Earth to Quasar. Another word I’m fairly sure I saw there first was parallax.

When you first see this word, you very likely assume that it has something to do with parallel. Indeed, the form accidentally gives a good clue: both words have the parallel lines ll in the middle (and, by the way, it’s just coincidence that I’m posting this on 2011.10.11), but whereas in parallel there’s a third l running in parallel with the other two, in parallax you end up with two lines x not in parallel but meeting at a certain point. So is parallax a laxity in parallelism?

The two words are not derived quite so simply. Lax is not an ancient Greek word (it comes from Latin laxus), unlike our two parallel words here. Both begin with para, meaning “beside, alongside, etc.”; both have second halves that come from allos “other”. But in parallel it’s allelos “one another”, while in parallax it’s allassein “change”. So one is “beside one another”, while the other is “alternation”.

What has this to do with stars? Well, stars aren’t all the same distance away. How do we know how far away a star is? By parallax. I’ll explain.

Let me give an example. Your eyes are two different viewpoints. Hold your finger halfway between them and the computer screen. Close one eye and look at your finger in front of the screen, or at the screen behind your finger. Now open that eye and close the other and look again. Or, more simply, just focus on the screen and notice how you see two fingers, or focus on the finger and notice how you see two screens. That’s parallax: the difference between the relative positions of two objects that are at different distances (finger, screen) when you see them from different viewpoints (left eye, right eye).

You can use basic geometry to work out the distance of the screen if you know the distance of your finger, or vice-versa, as long as you know the distance between your eyes. You just use the principle of similar triangles. In fact, that principle saved me a bit of money a few years ago. I had – still have – a 1950s-era folding medium-format camera (a Zeiss-Ikon Ikonta), which has no rangefinder and certainly no through-the-lens focusing – you turn the focus dial to the distance desired, but it’s up to you how you know what that distance is. I could have bought a rangefinder for it. Instead I measured the space between my pupils, measured the distance from my eyes to the thumb and forefinger of my outstretched arm, and made marks accordingly on the back of a business card.

(Here’s how that works. Picture a capital A, where the bases of the legs are my eyes, the legs are the lines of sight from them, the point is where the lines of sight meet on the object focused on, and the crossbar is the distance on the business card between where the lines of sight cross it – the parallax. The principle of similar triangles says that if the card, held in my outstretched hand, is halfway to the object – the height of the top part of the A is the same as of the bottom part – the distance on the card will be half the distance between my pupils; if the top part of the A is two-thirds of the total height of the A, the distance on the card will be two-thirds the distance between my pupils; and so on. So I have a bunch of pen marks on the card, and I simply note where the edge, as seen from one eye, overlaps the pencil marks, as seen from the other, when I’m focusing on the object I want to photograph.)

Parallax can be very useful in photography when you’re using a rangefinder camera such as a Leica – it imitates the parallax of the eyes, using a double finder and mirrors to produce the double image and so that the images line up when you’re focused on the right distance. Parallax for the win. But parallax can also be a nuisance if you’re using a viewfinder camera or a twin-lens reflex, if you happen to be focusing on something close enough that the parallax between what you see (through the viewfinder or upper lens) and what the film will see (through the object lens) is significant. (Yes, yes, I know, very few people use such cameras anymore. But there are indeed digital rangefinder cameras, such as the Leica M9, which I would own if I could afford it.)

And, to get to the original point, parallax can also be very useful in knowing the distance of object much farther away, such as stars. You can know the distance to a star by measuring its parallax against some other star the distance of which is known (and which can be assumed not to be moving enough to make a difference). The earth moves around the sun, and so the difference in viewing positions at different times of year produces the same kind of effect as the distance between your eyes, though you can’t see from more than one position at the same time – you have to keep track.

On a more human scale, parallax is also, of course, very useful in avoiding injury and death. Depth perception relies on parallax (and the brain’s interpretation of it). You do not want to be lax in a time of peril: if a tiger or snake – or a swinging ax – is moving towards you, or if you are moving towards a tree, you want to have a good sense of exactly how far you are from danger. You don’t want what you took to be a brobdingnagian peril far away to turn out to be a lilliputian peril much, much closer; at the very least, parallax can save you a pair o’ slacks (impending peril can be a powerful laxative).

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gobbler

Posted on October 10, 2011 | 8 comments

It’s Thanksgiving in Canada, and Columbus Day in the US. Canadian Thanksgiving is a sort of cross between Columbus Day and American Thanksgiving: it’s a long weekend in early October, rather than an awkward Thursday in November; the busiest travel day of the year in Canada is not the day before, though people do travel a lot for Thanskgiving, since it’s a holiday for joining with family; the busiest shopping day of the year in Canada is not the day after. Really, for us in the Great White North, it’s a nice long weekend, more meaningful than Columbus Day but less so than Easter. And, yes, the theme is dominated by gobblers.

When I was at grad school in the Boston area, I found it quite irritating that the holiday was called “Turkey day” at least ten times as often as it was called “Thanksgiving” – sort of like how Canadians keep calling Victoria Day “May two-four.” But even if you choose to eschew the turkey to chew something else, turkeys dominate Thanksgiving the way pumpkins dominate Hallowe’en.

Gobbling has long been associated with turkeys. The sound they make has been described as “gobble” since at least 1680, and within a half century after that (and probably sooner) the bird was being called a gobbler. It’s pure onomatopoeia, and it’s sort of iconic visually, too, with the g with its hanging snood or wattle and the bbl like the tailfeathers. But it’s also ironic, just like calling this entirely American bird a turkey is ironic. The turkey is a symbol of conspicuous consumption precisely because it is conspicuously consumed. The gobbler does not gobble; it, and whatever else is served with it, is gobbled by the collective gobs of those assembled. And yes, by the way, the verb gobble meaning “eat” is likely related to gob meaning “mouth” – or to gob meaning “blob, as of food”. It likely also has a connection to the motion and sound of eating greedily. If the le ending seems familiar, you may recognize it from crackle, crumple, wriggle, giggle, babble, gabble, mumble… all those repetitive little motions… sounds like a family gathering, doesn’t it?

Ah, the good things of the world. We do take them for granted, don’t we? In some ways, Thanksgiving can be a celebration of wanton rapacity and vulgar hedonism. Oh, I’m not a vegetarian, and I like a good feast, too, but I feel that often we aren’t thankful enough for just how lucky we are – or appreciative of how much of that “luck” comes from being on the winning side of a zero-sum game. Consider the extent to which we are gobblers of much more than turkeys.

The conjunction with Columbus Day is a nice reminder that the Americas are as they are now because an assortment of rapacious invaders came in and gobbled it all up. The harvest celebrations that turned into Thanksgiving – brought over from similar celebrations in Europe – certainly were inspired by gratefulness, but mainly gratefulness to God for having given them all this bounty, not so much gratefulness to the people who were already here. The archetypal “first Thanksgiving” image has the Pilgrims sharing bounty with the people who were already there (Wampanoags, as it happens), who had shown them how not to starve. Now you tell me what those people who were already there got in return in the long run.

But I’m not trying to make you feel guilty for what our ancestors did. They did it; we had no choice about being born into the results. We should just appreciate what we have and acknowledge how we come to have it (and do something to help redress the ongoing imbalances created). We should remember, too, that the low prices that allow us to buy so much are aided by people elsewhere in the world being paid awfully poorly for making the stuff. We should be careful not to heedlessly gobble more.

Which is what we seem to do so often. The table groans with goodies; we load up, then lapse into a food coma in front of the TV, and if we’re in the US, the next day we may well go on an buying binge to boggle the gobbling minds (in Canada Thanksgiving is too early for Christmas shopping, and the next day is a work day; we roll on instead to the goblins of Hallowe’en – our buying binge will come, though). We want all the things popular culture tells us we should want – whatever the fashions are now. It’s the state religion: consumerism.

I remember what the good life looked like when I was a kid. Who wouldn’t want a room covered in shag carpet, perhaps a round plush bed – or, better, a waterbed – in the bedroom, and all those nice stone and wood accents that dominated the popular architecture – the turn-key solutions for taste of the time? Today we look on such things with disdain and distaste as the decorative equivalent of gobbledegook, just as in future years we will sneer at what we think is so great now. But it’s what we thought we wanted, and we gobbled it up.

Look now at the epitome of that style: the (now gone) Gobbler motel, bar, and restaurant in Wisconsin, preserved for your visual consumption by the brilliant James Lileks: www.lileks.com/institute/motel/index.html. You must look at it. This word tasting is not complete without a full perusal of this fantastic turkey of a concept motel and restaurant. Snicker now, but when I look at it I experience nostalgia. I remember liking all that. I even remember seeing houses done in much the same decor. We wanted it because it was what we wanted. We gobbled it up.

The Gobbler is now gone, though we gobblers are still here. But we should watch lest again the gobblers become the gobbled. Gobbler makes me think of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s play about a young woman who had grown up having much, and had expensive tastes and overreaching fantasies; those tastes and fantasies owned her and drove her life, and when she would not accept that she couldn’t have it all, those tastes put her in a position of being owned by another. Which she could not live with.

So the gavel falls on the obligations: do not have the head of a gobbler. And now I will gobble no more of your time today with my blogging gabbing.

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sidereal

Posted on October 9, 2011 | 3 comments

When I was a boy genius, I naturally thought it befitting for me to take an interest in science and especially astronomy. It was, as were nearly all my interests, dilettantish and bookish; I did not spend hours at a telescope. But I did spend hours daydreaming. Space is fit fodder for fantasy: humans had walked on the moon; other planets were in reach; could the stars be much farther? As H.G. Wells wrote at the end of The War of the Worlds, “Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space.”

I also spent hours reading and watching movies. I watched the Star Wars movies and others avidly, of course. And I acquired and read (or at least read about two-thirds of, before my attention was seized by something else) Isaac Asimov’s The Universe: From Flat Earth to Quasar. I think it was that book in which I think I first encountered the word sidereal.

I was reminded of sidereal yesterday when making one of my several annual excursions to Collingwood: launching myself (and my wife and her mother) for a day or two on the side to one of the more distant points that are in stationary orbit of the Centre of the Universe, as Torontonians jokingly call their town. The scenic country route we prefer rolls up hill and down under enormous skies (and at times in the later hours the moon hangs low at the horizon). And every so often you cross an intersection with a sideroad: there is a post with a sign reading County Sideroad 10, for instance, or what have you. They are the fixed marks, the meridians crossing the countryside; when you go and return, they are still there, avenues to other places.

It was, as you may have imagined, the word sideroad that made me think of sidereal. Ah, sidereal, a word that can make you think you are veering off into a side reality, a digression, a divergence from the constitutive quotidian, perhaps a launch into orbit and back or perhaps a right turn and off into a different perspective altogether. What if we measured our days not by the sun that is before us but by the distant stars that call to us in their faint celestial choir?

Why, that would be sidereal time, of course. A day as measured from when a given star crosses the meridian to when it again crosses the meridian is a sidereal day. Given that if the star is at its zenith at midnight – thus directly opposite the sun – on, say, the spring equinox, it will be at its zenith at noon – directly behind the sun – a half year later on the fall equinox, we can see that a sidereal day loses half a solar day in half a year. A sidereal day is about 23 hours, 56 minutes long. And this also means you fit in an extra sidereal day every solar year. It’s like having an extra day on the side that no one else gets.

Sidereal isn’t formed from side and real, though, and it isn’t pronounced like side real. It’s a bit more like “sigh deer eel”: /saɪ ‘di ri əl/. It’s from Latin sidereus, from sidus “star, constellation”. So when I see sideroad, I amuse myself by thinking /saɪ ‘di ro æd/ and imagining it’s some sidereal excursion or measure – or right turn to the stars.

But of course my wanderings are entirely planetary (fittingly, planet comes from Greek for “wanderer”). I spend some time with family in that distant detached world two hours north, and then come back to my centre of gravity, my rental vehicle more of a space shuttle than an interstellar ark.

Our interstellar explorations have receded farther into the future since my childhood, too. We content ourselves with fantasies. My dreams of being in the stars, like my later dreams of being a star, seem like messages from beyond that turn out to have been destined for someone else. And I recall that the sentence I quote from Wells above is followed by “But that is a remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.”

But before I throw up my hands and sigh “Deary!” I’ll remember that there are many excursions one may make within ready reach. New things are being discovered every day about the world we live in, and even about the words we live with. Every book is a new world, and every word a new star. And each blog post that goes by marks a sidereal sideroad, a chance to turn the head and look away from the main road of discourse down a lane that leads to a different set of horizons.

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orgeat

Posted on October 7, 2011 | 5 comments

So you decide to make yourself a mai tai. You’re going down the list of ingredients and you see orgeat.

Orgeat? O great! Where am I going to get that? What is it, anyway? Some kind of orangeade? How do you make or get a thing like that anyways? It barely makes sense. What do you have to do, garrote an ogre at an orgy with a Tuareg toe-rag? How do you even say it? It almost makes you want to rage…

But of course you probably found your mai tai recipe online, and you can very quickly find out online what orgeat is too. And, fittingly for something that looks like orangeade (the name does – not the actual thing), it gets its name from barley and is flavoured with almonds.

Ah-yep. Barley in French is orge, from Latin hordeum by way of Occitan (a language of the south of France). Originally the beverage was simple barley water, but its flavour was improved with almonds and sugar. And it turns out that the barley doesn’t really add much of anything to it, so usually now it’s just made with almonds, and perhaps a bit of rose water – or maybe a little orange flower water. In its current form, it’s a syrup with much almond oil, and it makes an emulsion in water. (But it beats the heck out of “almond milk,” which tastes like Play-Doh.)

So, just to run through that again, you’re making a tropical cocktail with rum and orange juice, plus lime and curaçao, and it calls for an ingredient that has a strange name, French as it turns out, a name that looks a bit reminiscent of orange but is named after barley but the barley was supplemented, and then supplanted, by almonds. Why have a cocktail now? Your head is probably already spinning. And of course you could sub in almond extract, but wouldn’t you regret it at least a bit?

Oh, and if you’re wondering how it’s pronounced, well, you could say it in the anglicized “orgy at” way, but really, it’s like a snip from “Eva or Zsa Zsa Gabor,” or perhaps like Borgia without the B, at least the way some people say it.

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Suzanniwana

Posted on October 7, 2011 | 5 comments

When I saw this word, it caught my attention immediately. It seemed like a possible nickname for a girl, sort of like Anna Banana (and it occurs to me it might seem like a rather naughty nickname, for a girl purported to say “I wanna”). But I also immediately thought of the swampy South – way down upon the Swanee River, perhaps, or oh! Susanna, oh don’t you cry for me, I’ve come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee. Or maybe there’s a river, down near which is Suzanne’s place, where she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China.

I admit the image of the swampy South and the river may have been influenced by the picture I was looking at. It’s a triptych – not of the Biblical Susanna being preyed on by some reptilian old men, but of life in a particular place at three sequential times: specifically, before, during, and after the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 56 million years ago in what is now Wyoming. If you have the October 2011 issue of National Geographic, you can see it for yourself.

It’s one of those beautiful reconstructions that seem so vivid, you might not stop to wonder how they managed to figure it all out and put it all together. To the left and to the right are swamps like Okefenokee, someplace near a river. In the middle is a drier, more arid scene. And perched on a tree on the right side of the middle panel is a small mammal with its catch, a lizard dangling from its mouth. The caption explains: “Raccoonlike Chriacus, a Paleocene holdover, preys here on a new arrival from the south.” The creatures are all labelled. The label next to the dangling lizard, soon to be lunch, is Suzanniwana.

Really, isn’t it a pretty, eye-catching name? The lizard, an iguanid, is itself a pleasant enough thing to look at, but its markings don’t quite match the zig-zags of z and w and the visible scales of u nn n. I had to know how it had been put together. By “it” do you wonder whether I mean the lizard or the name? Well, both, really.

You may not be surprised to learn that both were put together by the same person. OK, the lizard itself originally was not assembled by a human, but a human put together the bones that had been found and figured out how they fit together and what sort of a critter they made, and then he named it. It turns out that that human is a fellow named Krister Smith, a California-born vertebrate paleontologist, at the time a grad student at Yale, now at the Senckenburg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt (Germany). You can read all about his findings in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, volume 7, issue 3, in his article “A new lizard assemblage from the earliest Eocene (Zone Wa0) of the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, USA: Biogeography during the warmest interval of the Cenozoic.”

You probably wouldn’t find most of the article your kind of reading. It’s a very detailed exposition of the different reptiles found: the bits of bones (with pictures) and a detailed textual description of the physical characteristics of the fragments in exquisitely technical terms (“The subnarial arterial foramen, from which issues a shallow groove anteriorly, is located near the medial margin of the premaxillary process just lateral to the low crista transversalis,” to give a brief example), plus an overall description going by what other similar creatures it differs from and how:

An iguanid lizard differing from Iguaninae, Hoplocercinae, Crotaphytinae, Oplurinae, Phrynosomatinae and Tropidurinae in having weak to moderate supraorbital flanges variably developed on frontal (rarely in some Phrynosomatinae and Tropidurinae). Differs from foregoing list (except some Iguaninae) plus Polychrus and Leiosaurini (sensu Schulte et al. 2003) in having a Y-shaped parietal table. Differs from foregoing list except Hoplocercinae and some Iguaninae in having a moderate to broad, parallel-sided nasal process on premaxilla.

Et cetera, at length. So from all those bits, somehow a whole came together, and from that textual description an artist managed a nice visual representation. Imagine the same for all the other animals and plants in the illustration. That picture is worth rather more than a thousand words!

And how did the word Suzanniwana come together? From easier bits, to be sure: “After Suzanne Strait – friend of lizards, excavator of the Castle Gardens fauna – who kindly allowed me to study the fossils described herein; and iwana, Caribbean root of Spanish iguana (from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)).” It may not be the origin of species, but it is the origin of the genus name: a bit of linguistic archaeology for the Caribbean word (an older form of the word for an older form of the creature), plus the name of a biological anthropologist and paleomammalogist who teaches at Marshall University and who was named after a young woman from the Bible who was ogled by old men. Smith does given the origin of the species name, too: the lizard is specifically Suzanniwana patriciana, and the eponymous Patricia – a name that glancingly refers to old men in Latin – is “Patricia Holroyd – wordsmith, provocateur, facilitator – in recognition of her contribution to Eocene herpetology.” She’s a paleontologist who teaches at Berkeley. Oh, and note the personal touch: this lizard is not, after all, Straitiwana holroydiana. This suggests that the two were (and presumably are), for Smith, friends, not just colleagues to be dined out on. And, as Smith has confirmed to me in an email, close friends of each other too: “the generic and specific names honor two scientists who also happen to be close friends. Thus, they’re united now for as long as biological taxonomy continues to exist.”

Well. It’s easier to do a dig on modern words than on ancient critters, isn’t it? Although, of course, much etymological research is far more involved, and people are still arguing over the origins of words some of which are hardly a century old. It’s amazing to think of the work required to reconstruct, for instance, Proto-Indo-European roots. And, as Krister Smith said in his email to me, “Linguistic phylogeny is often so like the biological sort, and I delight in finding little cognates between languages, like ‘abide’ (which has no cognate in German that I know) and ‘bo’ (Swedish, to live/dwell, which otherwise seems so ‘out of nowhere’).”

Indeed, the most fascinating part with language is the natural process of it: how we have these bits still in use, though much changed over time, that have come down to us from time immemorial, how we arrange them and rearrange them not just to figure things out but to create entirely new things, and how we determine the sense of our words and concepts by what other words and concepts they’re like and how they differ from them. Every word is like another Suzanniwana… being described by and in terms of still more of these lovely little lizards of language.

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quux

Posted on October 5, 2011 | 2 comments

This word is an eye-catching, if rarely beheld, asterism of graphemes; it seems made for Scrabble, but your chances of getting away with it are variable at best (it’s not in the official dictionary). And yet, in an interesting twist, for all its visual éclat, it is a simple little workhorse word – in fact, one that merely speaks for others, a proxy. But it is not idle speech or just blowing hot air.

Well, you may blow a bit of air, hot or cool, when saying it, given the voiceless stop it opens with and the following aspiration that will whistle through your rounded lips. (Reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European roots suggest quite a lot of velar obstruent–rounded glide pairs, /kw/ and /gw/ and fricated and aspirated versions as well. It may or may not be coincidence that it’s something like the oral gesture infants perform when breast-feeding.)

It also has three amusing orthographical features: on one end, it has a letter that is as a rule only ever seen with the letter following it to indicate a coarticulated/off-glided stop, /kw/ spelled qu; on the other end, it has a letter that actually stands for two sounds in sequence, /ks/ spelled x; at its heart it has two instances of the same letter, but standing for two different sounds, neither of which the original vowel sound it stood for (the u after the q stands for a related glide, /w/, but the second u stands for /ʌ/ or /ə/, as most versions of English shifted it to that sound from /ʊ/ or /u/). In other words, it’s a little salad of orthographic oddities.

But what is quux? Is it an ancient word returned, atavistically? No, actually, just a modern confection on old models. It’s a metasyntactic variable, invented (in youth) by a luminary of American computer programming named Guy L. Steele. What is a metasyntactic variable? It’s like a math variable – a placeholder – but used for programming functions and similar. It can be used in conversation – instead of saying “The title of your blog entry will show in the URL as the final string,” you can say “If your blog entry is titled quux the URL will be http://www.somewebsite.com/blog/quux.&#8221; And instead of “If female person A submits an application,” you can say “If Ms. Quux submits an application.” Normal people do this with terms like “Joe Blow”; nerds, when putting variables in their syntax, prefer something nerdier – say, fake Latin, which this is (Steele came up with a whole declension for it, including the genitive plural quuxuum). It happens that Steele also wrote computer science geek poetry under the name The Great Quux, and that the phrase the quux of the matter is sometimes used in joking contrast to the crux of the matter to mean a non-essential point.

So, then, say you are searching for some word, and this word has a particular property, you could say, “I’m looking for a word quux such that quux is an English word with the letter sequence quu. What lexical values are there for quux?” Admittedly, you could perhaps more perspicuously phrase it (or, to be precise, a closely related question) the way Joe Kessler, @kessling, did today: “I can’t think of any #English words that contain /kwu/ or /kwə/. Is this just due to the strangeness of spelling ‘quu’?”

One answer to Joe’s question is, of course, quux, but only if you accept it as an English word. There are, as it happens, other values for that variable besides quux, but very few, and, in spite of their visual éclat, rarely seen. The one still in common use is really medical Latin: obliquus, a name for several muscles, such as the obliquus externus and obliquus internus, abdominal muscles involved in exhalation and abdominal torsion – blowing hot air and twisting.

Also in the Oxford English Dictionary are ventriloquus, meaning “ventriloquist” (which comes from Latin for “chest speaker”, by the way, though of course everyone uses the chest in speaking, if obliquely; a ventriloquist gets some other thing’s mouth to seem to speak for him or her) and inaniloquus, an obsolete word – in fact, probably a nonce word – meaning “idle or foolish speech”. And that’s all the quuxes in the OED such that quux contains quu (quux itself is not in the OED).

But we may want to allow the name of a constellation as well: Equuleus. This charming name, which I first saw on a bottle of wine (a Bordeaux-style blend made by the Niagara winery Château des Charmes), means “little horse” or “foal”, and it’s a small, faint constellation – the second-smallest of the 88 modern constellations.

And what’s the smallest modern constellation, by the way? One that’s much more visually salient – in fact, it features on a couple of national flags. Or, rather, its dominant asterism does, the Southern Cross. The constellation as a whole is called Crux.

But, of course, while the vagaries of “the stars” (fate) may be variable (even disastrous), and while Equuleus and Crux may seem to move through the skies, we know that, unlike, say, quux, they are not variable: they are firm in the firmament. And that’s the quux of the matter here.

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Chez what?

Posted on October 5, 2011 | 2 comments

A colleague who works on French and English texts was musing lately on French place names such as “Chez Pierre” and how in English we would deal with a place name starting with a preposition – her example was “At Pete’s Place.” Could we say “The party is at At Pete’s Place”?

Part of the issue, of course, is that in English we don’t normally use that kind of prepositional construction in place names. But a parallel could be found in a synopsis of Of Human Bondage or perhaps if you looked into Into the Woods or cast your eyes on On the Waterfront, and perhaps glanced at At Fault (by Kate Chopin)…

You can’t get away from the fact that At is part of the name. If you don’t like the at-at, then rewrite! But short of going out with a chainsaw and cutting the At off the sign (as one colleague suggested), you can’t change the name of the place – articles (a, the) may be dispensable, but articles are specifiers on noun phrase heads, whereas prepositions are heads of prepositional phrases, and you can’t cut off heads so glibly. (An argument may be made as to the role of the prepositional phrase as a case proxy for its complement noun phrase, but we can’t avoid the overt syntactic realization and its entailments.)

And anyway, heads though they be, prepositions are usually unstressed except at the beginning of a name, so it’s not quite so awkward, as we have seen above.

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ill-starred disaster

Posted on October 4, 2011 | 2 comments

Dear word sommelier: I just read the phrase “an ill-starred disaster.” That’s redundant, isn’t it?

Ah, this is a question not simply of linguistics and etymology but, as it happens, of one’s metaphysics and world-view as well.

As you evidently know, but others may not, disaster comes from dis “bad, ill, adverse” plus aster, from Latin astrum, from Greek ἄστρον astron, “star”; a disaster was originally not any old bad accident but specifically one attributed to a bad aspect of a star (although one could contend that pretty much any major mischance was, in the Europe of centuries past, typically attributed to a bad celestial influence; in case you’ve forgotten the extent to which the stars were thought to have a role in everything – not without input from human action, to be sure – go back and look at Shakespeare and his contemporaries, or perhaps read E.M.W. Tillyard’s excellent small book The Elizabethan World Picture; similar views were common throughout the continent). If you look in the OED’s entry on disaster, it suggests that you compare English ill-starred.

So, in origin, a disaster was by definition ill-starred, and vice-versa. But, now, tell me, is that how you use these terms and hear them today?

I could ask first whether you consider all disasters to be due to the operations of the stars. You very likely will say no, since you probably don’t hold so tightly to astrology and you must be honest and admit that disaster is today used to mean “calamity, catastrophe, cluster-f***, etc.” and not specifically “unfortunate occurrence due to adverse celestial effect”. Words often drift from their original meaning, as I mentioned yesterday in rile (see the comments too).

More loosely, since ill-starred could be said to be an allusive way of saying ill-fated, do you consider disasters all to be the operation of fate or acts of God? If you do, there may be a job waiting for you in the claims department of an insurance company. But you likely believe in human error as a cause of many a disaster, and in definable if unpredictable forces – plate tectonics, for instance – as the cause of many others. Given that, specification of a disaster as “ill-starred” would set it apart from disasters that had causes other than ineffable fate.

And you likewise may hold that things may be ill-starred without being disasters per se – for instance, Romeo and Juliet, being star-crossed lovers, were ill-starred, but not everyone would classify adolescent love suicides in the category “disasters” (“bad things”, yes, but disaster, travelling often nowadays with natural, tends to be thought of as involving mass destruction of real estate – or else a really bad outcome for a social event).

However, if you don’t believe in the existence of anything that anyone could in any way call “fate”, then is there still a distinction to be made? If you use ill-starred to mean “a thing that shouldn’t have happened but did”, which is pretty much the meaning available for those who hold no truck with fate or celestial influence, then isn’t a disaster automatically something you’d call ill-starred, like calling water wet?

One could make that argument, but one would risk overlooking all the other effects of lexical entries besides those of paraphrasable definitions. For instance, one might say that a disaster is automatically upsetting, and that dammit expresses being upset, and that therefore “This is a disaster, dammit” should be edited down to “This is a disaster.” Yet can you honestly say that there is no difference in what is expressed about the speaker’s attitude between one and the other?

In truth, even for those who don’t believe in fate or astrology, ill-starred brings an image of either a certain inevitability or a particular conjunction of adverse forces. It also, of course, has the flavour of ill, which can seem a bit green at the gills and which, along with being popular in youthful use lately (ever since the Beastie Boys, really), has rhymes with chill, kill, spill, etc., and a certain similarity to eww. And there is the flavour of star, which has an éclat, a flash and bang, or at least a little twinkle. Don’t miss those double letters in the spelling, either, sort of like the motion lines of a cartoon object entering a collision.

Disaster, for its part, has its own flavour, and although it has similarities with ill-starred (the s t r hint at the fact that aster and star are cognate way back), its sound has more in common with catastrophe (even though that’s not a cognate word). You also get a feel of blast, cast, disturb, and perhaps zaps – less likely sister and Zoroaster, which have resemblances in form but not in sense.

And don’t forget the different effect the length and rhythm of the phrase will have. “This is a disaster” is a simple declaration; “This is an ill-starred disaster” is much more epic and solemn, not only because it’s longer (and more rhythmic) but because it’s more literary-seeming. It says as much about the speaker as about what’s being spoken about. After all, how often do you even hear ill-starred these days? Surely you wouldn’t want to delete it when you actually do see it, would you? That would almost seem to be tempting fate…

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rile

Posted on October 3, 2011 | 4 comments

It’s quite something how some people get riled up about language. (Some people? I’ll bet most people have some usage or other they hate.) An interesting point of general consistency is that these hate-ins usually lack a defensible basis. (See “When an ‘error’ isn’t” for a rundown of some popular bugbears that aren’t the bogeymen they’re made out to be.)

The basis they often do draw on is amusingly opposite to a common trend in some other areas of human behaviour, where change is seen as good: people want to have the latest clothes, the latest electronics, et cetera. Stirring the waters is desirable. And indeed there are fads in language, too, and people may be mocked for using out-of-fashion words. But when it comes to hobby horses, it’s typically a conservative impulse that motivates it – albeit often a misguided one that actually muddies the waters rather than clarifying them. A person learns about some “original” form and decidnes that anyone who uses some changed version is an annoying cockroach and that the usage is a linguistic weed, a dandelion on the lawn of the language, and must be eradicated.

Of course, when talking of language, “original” is nearly always nonsense talk, since there is almost always a form prior to the one cited, and a form prior to that, and it’s turtles all the way down. And, for that matter, change is central to the nature of language. A language that has stopped changing is dead. But typically those calling on some “purer” form are off on some important fact anyway. I am reminded of a fellow student at the University of Calgary (back in about 1986) who “informed” me that Calgary wasn’t really a city because it didn’t have a cathedral. This was based on the idea that in medieval times a city was a city because it had a cathedral. But that was not the first or last definition of a city, and anyway Calgary does – and did – have a cathedral.

But if I seem to have produced a bit of a troubled or turbid tasting here, let me pour some oil on the waters to address what one may see as a mixed-up lie about the word rile. I will quote from the alphaDictionary “What’s the Good Word?” email I got today:

First, let me get this off my chest: “Nothing roils me more than hearing someone pronounce roil [rail] or seeing it spelled rile.” Now, here is a quaint Southernism I just concocted to remind us of the original meaning of today’s verb: “Don’t roil the water where you may have to drink.” It also serves to demonstrate that not all Southerners misspell this verb rile.

It is true that rile is most likely a variant form of roil, which means “make turbid, stir up”, with reference to water. However, it is not some odd American regional aberration, though it has been thought by some to be such, due to a greater use in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation of it is from a 1724 translation of a classical Greek text, published in London; the next is from an 1815 list of Essex dialect words in a magazine. (Note that the OED’s first citation of roil for the sense “make angry” – which is of course what rile means, as I think we all know – is from 1742, and the second from 1818.) So these words first split a quarter of a millennium ago, and rile is quite well established now; indeed, it is much more common than roil (either sense of roil), even in Britain.

“But it came from a mispronunciation!” some may object. “It’s like saying ‘bile’ for boil!” First of all, it is more accurate to say that it came from a dialectal pronunciation, and was respelled, as many words have been over time. But even if it had come from a mispronunciation, so what? It’s established now. It’s far from being the only common word used today that has its present form due to an error or aberration of some kind back in history, and people don’t get riled up about most of them. So never mind whose fault it may be – oh, sorry, should that be faut? tsk – it is as it is now. If we accept a complete reanalysis such as cockroach (from Spanish cucaracha) or dandelion (from French dent de lion), or if we have no problem with cleaving to the cloven pair daft and daffy, or or or (I could spend a lot of time adducing examples), we can certainly accept such a well-established word as rile.

And it does such a nice job, really. It tends to go with some fairly folksy phrases – get all riled up, for instance – but I have seen it in perfectly mainstream contexts. It has that cranked-up /r/ start (I’m put in mind of the sound some people make when imitating someone who’s ranting: “Rarrarrarrarrar”), followed by the biting-down diphthong /aI/, which is part of a rime that rhymes with I’ll, as in “Arrrr, I’ll smite the next person who says ‘rile’ instead of ‘roil’!”

So, yes, rile is a good word – quite a good one, I think. And it’s a nice reminder that, really, we English speakers are living the life of Riley when it comes to our luxuriously replete wordstock and freewheeling usage patterns. Some people may dislike such richness and comfort, but really, I’ll take it.

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