Yearly Archives: 2011

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 , , ,

nocebo

Posted on September 3, 2011 | 2 comments

You probably know what a placebo is: an inert medication, a “sugar pill”; they’re used in clinical trials to give a basis of comparison with the medicine being studied (the patients don’t know if they’re getting the drug or the placebo, and in the best studies the researchers don’t, either, until after).

A common idea people have is that a placebo is something that simply doesn’t and can’t produce effects, and any perceived effect is all in your head. This is not actually true: the placebo effect is quite real – given the right stimulus, the mind actually can cause real improvements in symptoms, and not just self-reported improvements. The placebo effect typically wears off over time, but, then again, so do a lot of drugs. And of course in order for a drug to be considered effective, it has to produce significantly more benefit than a placebo would. (There’s a nice article on the power of the mind in healing in the August 27, 2011 issue of New Scientist, complete with references to several studies published in journals.)

Now, how about something that, instead of stimulating your mind to help heal you, instead stimulates your mind to help hurt you? That would be no placebo! Instead of the great “yes” of healing it would give the great “no” of decline. What would we call it? Hmmm… how about nocebo?

Does that look like a really stupid English-Latin amalgam, a portmanteau of no and placebo? Do you want to say, “No, that’s out of place”? Well, guess what: just as placebo is Latin for “I will please”, nocebo is Latin for “I will harm”. The noc root shows up in words such as innocent, innocuous, and (mutated) noxious.

But who would create such a thing? And who would take a pill that they are told would harm them? It seems senseless, and yet many people swallow bitter pills every day – figuratively speaking. Nocebo usually shows up followed by effect, for the point, in the main, is that negative expectations tend to produce negative results. A therapy is more likely to fail, or to have weaker effect, if the patient expects it to fail.

Oh, and there are those drug trials – it is not only a drug’s positive effects that are measured against placebo; it is also its adverse effects, commonly called “side effects.” Placebos also produce side effects, just as drugs do (and of course people sometimes ascribe unrelated sensations to treatments too). And if a given side effect is produced no more often by a drug than by a placebo, it can be assumed not actually to be caused by the drug’s active ingredient.

Now, this word nocebo – does it seem especially nocent, nocuous, noxious? It begins with no, and that is indeed a strong effect, as it is such a foundational word. I am put in mind of NoHo, a New York neighbourhood north of Houston street (SoHo is south of Houston): it gains for a me a sense of negativity and inferiority from that No, though of course the reality of the neighbourhood does weigh against that.

But aside from that, the word nocebo has a certain sweetness – it is not itself such a bitter pill. It has that lovely sequence of rings, five in various transformations o c e (bent in) b (with a line) o – it just cries out for modernist typography. Its beginning may make French speakers think of noce (wedding); the bo may bring out beau, or a bow, or a guy named Bo. The /o – i – o/ of the vowels brings forth Romeo, rodeo, Oreo, do-si-do, and perhaps torpedo. It also sounds like it should be the name of a city – it has tastes, perhaps, of Nogales and Toledo, among others (there is a Nødebo in Denmark, but the pronunciation of that is somewhat different).

But of course that’s how it tastes to me. You may get something quite different from it – one person’s food is another’s poison, and, yes, one person’s placebo may be another’s nocebo.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

alethic

Posted on September 3, 2011 | 1 comment

You have reached the river, the lethal river, the river Lethe. All that you have been is behind you, all your memories, the house you have constructed of yourself; ahead is the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind: oblivion. Metempsychosis requires not merely mental lethargy but deletion of the cargo. Be reassured: the erasure is of the chalk, not the board. But you have no choice: you must drink the cup in order to persist; were you not to, you would become nothing but memories.

But what is the real ethic of this? Who is the true you? Is your self the graffiti on your wall, or is it the wall? Are you being turned on the lathe of time in your formation, or are you the hands and instruments that carve? Are the memories mere illusions, a narrative of distraction from being? Or are they the only truth? Are there two mutually exclusive truths? Is a person who has forgotten who they were the same person?

We know, at least, what the ancient Greeks thought: truth and forgetfulness are opposites, just as sleep and intelligence are. “Intelligent” in Greek, after all, is εξυπνος exupnos, “unasleep”. And α a “not” plus λήθη léthé “forgetfulness” gives us ἀλήθεια alétheia, “truth”. And is death forgetfulness? No, lethal comes from Latin lethum “death” and is unrelated. It is rebirth, not death, that requires forgetting.

From alétheia we get (aside from the female name Alethea) our word alethic, a lithe word with its liquid and soft fricative, a word not necessarily for thelemites but one for philosophers and linguists. It refers not to ethical considerations but to questions of truth.

And yet what is truth? How well do your memories truly serve you? You close your eyes only for a moment and the moment’s gone. If someone says you did such-and-such or saw so-and-so last week, past a certain point of specificity you may only say that it probably happened or probably didn’t, or that it must have or couldn’t have. So, too, in reference to things that have not happened, you may talk about whether they could have or could not have; and in reference to determinations of present reality not known from experience, you may talk of what must be the case and what can’t be the case.

All of this is in some sense alethic, but just as we have two parallel universes for the truth of who you are, so too do we have two parallel universes for alethic. You see, in linguistics, the alethic modality is when you make a statement of logical necessity, possibility, or impossibility in relation to the world you are in: “Because every moment of being is an unrepeatable combination of circumstances and time, and change is unceasing, the person you were at time x cannot be the person you will be at time x+y.” “As you may not remain in the past, and as the present instantly becomes the past, you have no choice but to proceed into the future, to be what you were not before.” This is what we know is; by contrast, when you talk of things the way you know they are not or have not been, that is certainly not alethic; it is subjunctive, it is counterfactual.

But in modal logic, the subjunctive mode, the counterfactual mode, is what is called the alethic mode. It is the question not of how things are – they are as they are – but of how things could be, or would have to be, or could not be, if they were otherwise than what they are: “If you could stop becoming, you would never be anything other than what you have been.” “Were you not to drink the cup, you would become nothing but memories.”

So you are at the river, the river Lethe, one of the rivers of Hades, and you have no choice – do you? All your dreams pass before your eyes, a curiosity. Could you make a lithe, graceful, athletic leap, and like Thalia write your own comedy or idyll? Oh, no, your idyll is only an empty idol, an idle fantasy. The truth is what must be, and the truth is that, from where you are now, you must have been what you were, but you must become something you never have been before. You bend to drink from the stream… and then you realize that you are, and always have been, nothing other than a wave in the stream, and your bending is no more than you, the wave, subsiding again, the same water but no more wave, nothing lost but nothing there. The world of the surface versus the world of the substance: parallel universes, Lethe and aletheia. And which is true?

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , ,

venture, adventure, misadventure

Posted on September 1, 2011 | 1 comment

photo by Kerry Williams

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? So you put a bit more on the table in hopes of increasing your return. But be careful you don’t put too much on the table – you may come to ill chance.

That seems a natural enough progression for these three words, doesn’t it – by length? Venture – set forth; adventure – things get wild; misadventure – things turn ugly. Sometimes when you choose to take what comes to you, you end up saying “That it should come to this!”

One’s tolerance for adventure varies, of course; Kerry Williams, who suggested this triad for tasting, recalls hearing an elderly tourist embarking on a whale-watching trip remark that she did not want an adventure. Aw, but who doesn’t want a whale of a time? Heh. Well, it’s good to have a swell time, as long as the timing of the swells does not run against you, and the whale does not whale on you. I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. What looks brilliant to one person may look hellish to another.

These three words – venture, adventure, misadventure – are obviously related, and all three have been in English a long time – since the medieval era, two of them around by 1300 and the other by 1450 – but they have developed different flavours, and have had their own adventures or misadventures over the course of time. Their source is Latin ad “to” and venire “come”; it referred to something about to happen – the future, French avenir. The French word we got our English word from was aventure, and our aventure referred first to something that happens without design, by chance or luck or what have you.

Yes, that’s right: aventure came first. And then two things happened: it lost something, and it gained something. First (around 1450) it lost the a – probably reanalysis: aventure became a venture. But the original form also persisted, and a fad for returning to Latin roots brought in (around 1500) the d that French had dropped, so we got adventure. And misadventure? Actually around nearly as long as adventure, and starting out as misaventure, gaining the d at the same time as adventure did.

And of course the meanings and usages changed over time. Words are known by the company they keep, and these words have come to run with different crowds. The Corpus of Contemporary American English bears this out: joint venture, business venture, venture capital, venture into; a great adventure, sense of adventure, adventure travel, outdoor adventure; tragic misadventure, death by misadventure.

Misadventure is a rather less common word than the other two (and death by misadventure usually means “made a fatally stupid error”); books you’ll find with “misadventure” tend to be in politics, culture, history, and biography – and perhaps mystery. We know very well that venture is now a business word, even the name of a TV show focused on business ventures; no surprise that searching for books with “venture” gets you a lot of business books. Adventure, on the other hand, is not something that provokes the adult business sense, the careful wager; rather, it calls to the kid in us, who really does want to walk on the sun and so much more. And so many of the books that you’ll find with “adventure” are kids’ books, from Mark Twain to Hergé and beyond.

Not that everyone retains their childlikeness (or childishness) to the same extent, as already observed. It’s true that some people are more risk-averse than others. But where would humans be without a sense of adventure? Not humans, really, not as we know humans. All apes have some sense of adventure (it’s required for hunting, for one thing); people just take it farther. How far? To the moon! Indeed – and giant steps are what you take, walking on the moon. But, to continue the song lyric: I hope my legs don’t break, walking on the moon.

Hm. Might as well be walking on the sun. Or walking on sunshine. The latter sounds brilliant; the former, hellishly hot. But perhaps still worth venturing forth for? Kerry Williams, who lives in Alaska, organized an event last New Year’s Day for the Anchorage Adventurers Meetup group called “Walking on the Sun.” Now, obviously, while Alaska is relatively close to the Far East (where the sun rises!), and while the warmth of the sun might seem very welcoming there, it’s not actually all that close to the sun. But, yet again, it’s a matter of perspective – as Kerry’s photo, above, demonstrates. The adventurers, walking on a ridge, photographed from a distance with a long lens, take on a timeless aspect, and seem embarked on a great adventure that might have taken place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

vinculum

Posted on September 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

I like to think of Sesquiotica as a sort of verbal wine bar, a locale of Lucullan delicacies with lexis for liquor and syllables for syllabub. I do not approach words with the conqueror’s mindset – veni, vidi, vici. Nor am I some Dracula who drains the blood out of words one by one. I prefer rather to inculcate appreciation, to cultivate not division but a common bond. For language, after all, is a grand conspiracy, a group-mind phenomenon: a language operates just by common consent and will of all, and since that “all” is constantly in flux and is made of so many diverse parts, language too is in flux. And we all bring different things to add to it, and it assimilates.

This verbal wine bar is also open to bring-your-own, no corkage fee involved. And today’s vin du jour has been brought by Doug Linzey: it is vinculum, a delicious word that uses fricative, nasal, stop, liquid to get the parts of the mouth working in cooperation from front to back and back to the front.

Well, how fitting an addition to our curriculum. As Doug points out, this is indeed a bar with a vin. You see, in math, a vinculum is a bar drawn over two or more terms to indicate that they are to be handled as an ensemble – rather like putting them in parentheses. It is from this function that it gets its name, for it comes from Latin vincire “bind” and the diminutive noun suffix ulum – so it’s a little bond.

But there are also other uses of the vinculum; a plain horizontal line can come in handy. It is used to indicate a repeating decimal, for instance (as over the 7 in the decimal for 7/9), and can signify negation in Boolean algebra. It is also what one calls the line between numerator and denominator in a stacked fraction. Ah, what binds divides – you can’t have one without the other. Good fences make good neighbours, and you need a good problem for a good solution.

A bar is all about solutions, of course: solutions of ethanol, mainly. But we escape such dissolution and dissipation when our consumption is words. The cups we want are the u and u, and we can cap them with the n and m. And then, still able to keep it in civil terms, we get down to the numbers: v, i, c, l – five, one, a hundred, fifty. Put a line in the middle and it’s vi over cl, 6/150, which is a twenty-fifth. Actually there are 26 ounces in a fifth, but 25 thirtieths in a 750, which is what fifths are at today’s bars – 75 cl.

But, really, at today’s bar we can have whatever fraction we want, and repeat. And if we have more than one vinculum? We have vincula or vinculums – seven or nine letters.

Or we can have Seven of Nine, a character in Star Trek: Voyager, a human who had been assimilated by the Borg and partially re-humanized thereafter. She was a repeating character – actually, a regular crew member. She provided insights into the group-mind of the Borg, who assimilated others and added the others’ distinctiveness to their own (a little like an intellectual-cultural incubus – or succubus, perhaps). Not that the Borg are exactly like language, even English: English is too free-for-all and heterogeneous to be Borg. But they are also united by a common bond, and that gets us to the heart of the matter: the heart of a cube-shaped Borg spaceship is also called the vinculum.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

Kalamata

Posted on August 30, 2011 | 1 comment

I was watching my lovely wife eat a Greek salad – something I try to do at least once a week – and as I looked at the olives, I had a thought about the word Kalamata. “Why,” I thought, “it must come from kala ‘fine, beautiful’ and mata ‘eyes.'” But then I thought that couldn’t be quite right.

What’s the matter? The mata is the matter. “Eyes” in Greek is μάτια matia, not mata. (And that’s modern Greek; Classical Greek has ophthalmos for “eye”.) It’s in Malay that mata means “eye” or “eyes”. You might recognize it in the name Mata Hari, which means, figuratively, “sun”, or, more literally, “day’s eye”. Think of it – a woman famed, rightly or wrongly, as a seductress and spy had a name that could be rendered in English as Daisy (yes, daisy comes from day’s eye). Anyway, Mata Hari’s real name was Margaretha, or Grietje for short (just think of how she, as an exotic dancer, might greet ya).

But it turns out that the mata in Kalamata most likely does come from matia. So the olive is like a beautiful eye? Well, it may or may not be, but it’s named after a large city on the south shore of the Peloponnesus, and it’s the city that is – or may be – named after beautiful eyes. It may be a reference to a lovely icon of the Virgin Mary in a local church. Or maybe not.

Well, what can you do but call ’em as you see ’em. And in Kalamata I see a few interesting things. I may see four eyes in it, a a a a – the eyes of a Klimt painting, perhaps – or four olives, without which the word might be farklempt. To hear Kalamata, it’s rather reminiscent of the “good day” Greeks say to greet you, καλη μερα kalé mera (/kali mera/ – some vowels have merged upwards in modern Greek). Perhaps that’s what you’d say to a kathakali master if you met him in a Greek restaurant in Kalamazoo… although, given that kathakali is a south Indian dance-drama form, he might speak only Malayalam. And Kalamazoo comes from a Potawatomi (or perhaps Ojibway) word meaning… um, well, there’s a lot of argument about what it means. The differing views are collimated… by which I mean that they are going in the same direction (like light rays made parallel by a lens) but, as is ever the case with parallel lines, they will never meet. Might as well take olive them.

Well, we may eye these etymological conundra in a daze, but in the end what most people get from Kalamata – aside from a nice black olive – is a sense of exoticism. Kalamata olives must be much more special than ordinary olives. The K gives it a bit of a kick, of course (Calamata looks more like a college in suburban L.A., doesn’t it?), and that set of four canonic syllables, mixing mellifluous and mechanical, with four identical vowels (well, not the way we say it in English, but originally), calls automatically to a sense of the foreign, the exotic, as it dances on your tongue.

Not that it is dancing like the Hindu goddess Kali. Her name may mean “the black one” but it’s not black as in the olive; it also means “death”, “time”, “change” – she is the consort of Shiva. She’s rather more calamity than Kalamata. You might think that to have her on your tongue would be the pits, though of course it’s not all as simple as that. She’s important in tantra, for instance. And change can be good – change in general, but also exact change, when paying for your geek word salad. I mean Greek.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

Nanki-poo

Posted on August 29, 2011 | 4 comments

Some of you who read yesterday’s note on irenic may have followed the link to the video of Nana Mouskouri’s song “Eirene” (“Irene”). That version is sung entirely in the original Greek, though there is an English version also sometimes sung (see www.lyricsvip.com/Harry-Belafonte-and-Nana-Mouskouri/Irene-Lyrics.html for transliterated Greek lyrics and www.uulyrics.com/music/nana-mouskouri/song-erene/ for a questionable transcription of the English version). Listening to it, you may have heard her sing “Irenie-poo, Irenie-poo.”

Well, that seems reasonable enough, doesn’t it? We know -poo as a cutesy diminutive suffix used with children and beloveds – and (perhaps more often nowadays) on certain words that already have the diminutive -ie, as in drinkie-poo (as in “Would you like a little drinkie-poo, Dino?”). Why not with Mouskouri’s heroine? Ah, pity, though, she’s really singing που pou, which is Greek for “where”. But that does lead us to the question of just where that -poo we use comes from.

The Oxford English Dictionary isn’t a world of help on it. “Origin uncertain; probably an arbitrary formation” it says. And its earliest citation is from 1932. But it seems quite reasonable that the name Nanki-poo, one of the characters in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado, is using the same -poo. And The Mikado was first performed in 1885.

So is The Mikado the source of this suffix? Are subsequent users citing W.S. Gilbert? Well, there was probably something of an influence there, but Gilbert’s use of it actually could be evidence that it was already in use. After all, look at the names of some of the other characters: Pish-Tush (two time-honoured words expressing contempt or impatience), Yum-Yum, Peep-Bo (which looks like a reversal of Bo-Peep as in the one who lost her sheep, but is in fact also an old name for peek-a-boo), and Pitti-Sing (baby talk for pretty thing). Very nursery-school, but also using established bits.

But then also look at another name from The Mikado: Pooh-Bah. That name really did get its start there, but pooh and bah are, similar to pish and tush, two very old (pre-Shakespearean) interjections of disappointment, impatience, or contempt (and, yes, that pooh may be related to the excremental one – oh icky-poo – and surely is related to the famous bear of little brain). The poo in Nanki-poo could just be drawing on that pooh along with the cutesy boo that we see in, among other places, peek-a-boo (remember peep-bo?) – which dates from before 1600 – and tickety-boo, a 20th-century formation. (I use it in Licky-boo, a pet name for the LCBO, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which runs the alcoholic beverage stores in these parts.) I must say that Nanki-poo really looks like a child’s nickname for someone named Nancy (but note that Nanki-poo is the male romantic lead in the play). Mind you, it also has a ring of Yankee, skanky, Nanking, and maybe nasty…

Well, pooh. I haven’t been able to sort out for sure which comes first, the -poo or the Nanki. And now I think I need a drinkie-poo. But at least I know where to find Nankipoo.

No, that’s not a typo. Nanki-poo may be a character in The Mikado, but Nankipoo is a very small town in Tennessee, about 60 miles from Memphis (it’s a turn west off route 51 between Ripley and Dyersburg). And if you want a little reminder about folk etymology, no need to sit in solemn silence – there’s a nice little website for Nankipoo (www.nankipoo.com) that will deliver a short, sharp shock:

The name Nankipoo came from the name of an Indian chief that was reportable to have been located in this area. In my flower garden I still can dig up on occasion an arrow head or two. I don’t know any other details of this tribe, if someone does please let me know. Or at least that’s the story I was always told when I was a kid.

Another story of the origin of the name is, a unknown person was working in a local post office and they needed to think of a name for the area. This person had just seen a play and one of the characters was named Nankipoo or maybe Nan-ki-poo.

Well, Larry L. Miller’s Tennessee Place Names confirms the latter suspicion, you will be relieved to know. The guy who set up the general store, Thomas Bomer, applied for a post office, and the first name he requested was rejected because it was already in use. So either Bomer or someone at the post office suggested Nankipoo. Yes, this was in the 1880s, and The Mikado was very popular at the time.

(But let’s not be too hard on those who thought it might be an Indian name. After all, we get Kickapoo Joy Juice from the comic strip Li’l Abner and the Poohawk Indians from the strip Tumbleweeds. And Calgarians over 40 will remember that Canada Olympic Park used to be called Paskapoo.)

4 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,