Yearly Archives: 2011

irenic

Posted on August 28, 2011 | 2 comments

This word may make you think of Irene, which is fitting, as it’s an adjectival form of the name. But Irene will surely make you think of a hurricane, and that’s ironic. And I don’t mean ironic in the senses in Alanis Morissette’s song, none of which are actually ironic – although a hurricane is indeed “like ra-i-ain… on your wedding day.” No, I mean that Irene, also rendered in English as Eirene, from Greek Εἰρήνη Eiréné, was the goddess of peace, and irenic means “peaceful”. Its main sense is not in reference to weather, true – it’s rather political or interpersonal: “tending towards conciliation and lack of conflict” would be a longer way of putting it. Irene’s opposite number was Polemos, “War”, from which we get polemic, so you get the idea. But still…

And yet within peace is the memory and possibility of conflict. I say this not just because irenic starts with ire, and not because of the words “to secure peace is to prepare for war” from Metallica’s “Don’t Tread on Me,” nor even because of how close Eirene is to Erinye. But in Erinye – which is a rather better name for a hurricane – we see a demonstration of the principle: the Erinyes were the Furies, the goddesses of vengeance, born out of the spilled blood of a Titan (how about I don’t say what part of Uranus was cut off that led to the spilling of the blood). They pursued Orestes and, after losing a court case against him, were pacified by Athena by being made the Eumenides, “the kindly ones.” It’s kind of like that bit in Fantasia where, after Night on Bald Mountain, everything is peaceful. The tempest has passed. (There are a fair few other bits of classical music with that theme too.)

True, Irene (Eirene) has no such questionable origins, aside from being a daughter of Zeus (that thunderbolt-hurling lecher) and Themis (the Titaness who represented divine law). There is another Eirene in Greek mythology, a daughter of Poseidon, god of the sea, and you could draw a thematic connection between her and hurricanes, I suppose, but she just shares a name with the goddess behind irenic, nothing more.

Although irenic doesn’t specifically refer to calm weather, it may still bring to mind the peaceful pastures of Arcadia, with shepherds playing their Pan pipes: scenic, lyrical. It will certainly always bring to mind music for me, because of the various musical Irenes I can think of. The first Irene I ever met or heard of was the wife of a teacher (Don Pinay) who was a colleague of my mother. Don Pinay had a band, and, if I recall correctly, Irene would at least sometimes sing with it.

But many more people will first think of Dexys Midnight Runners and their song “Come On, Irene.” Except, as many people are rushing to point out (with their knuckle-rapping rulers ready!), the song is actually “Come On Eileen.” Well, never mind. Even CNN is in on the act – it’s the theme song for the hurricane (yes, hurricanes have theme songs now). I’m partial to the version of the refrain that Lauren Ackerman (@VerbingNouns) tweeted: “Come on, Irene! Oh, I swear you’re so mean: at this moment you scare everything. With your arrival now, my thoughts I avow, verge on terror. Ah, come on Irene!”

There’s also the Nana Mouskouri song about a girl who keeps chasing after boys. (You can see her perform it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktz1kiAMsNE if you don’t know it.) But the song that many on the east coast of North America will be glad to sing is the American folksong “Goodnight, Irene” – though not because of its tale of despondence over a marital breakup, and especially not because of its line “Sometimes I take a great notion to jump in the river and drown,” but they might appreciate the line “I’m gonna take a little stroll downtown,” which New Yorkers will be eager to do again. (Actually, some of them were out jogging in Battery Park while the water was still a foot or two deep.)

Probably they won’t be thinking of Alanis Morissette, though. But there’s one more ironic thing about irenic to do with this hurricane. Hurricanes are an Atlantic thing – in the Pacific they’re called typhoons, and in the Indian Ocean cyclones. (Cyclone is also the name of a roller coaster at Coney Island, closed during Irene of course.) But a rough synonym for irenic is pacific.

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kaolin

Posted on August 26, 2011 | 3 comments

So in this dream, Kato Kaelin is a Shaolin master who mixes it up with Nikola Mirotic and Nikola Vucevic, but the hoops they’re playing are on a clay court on a high hill, and Kaelin is hurling teacups and toothpaste and glossy paper. And he has pica, so he’s eating the court, and when he expectorates it’s Kaopectate. He’s advanced in years, but he totally KO’s them!

Oh my, musta eaten too much kaolin before bedtime. Wait – eat kaolin? The stuff is clay, right? Indeed: a silicate (and alkaline? sometimes, it seems). But geophagy is more common than you might think, and not just among people with pica. But never mind that – you’ve probably had some in your mouth sometime; they use it in toothpaste, for one thing. If in your childhood you ever chewed on a bit of glossy paper (to make a spitball, say), that would be another occasion. Of course, you (probably) don’t swallow your porcelain, but you may put it in your mouth, and that’s mainly kaolin too. And if you’ve ever taken Kaopectate… well, actually, they don’t make that with kaolin and pectin anymore. In the US it’s bismuth subsalicylate now, though in Canada they still use attapulgite, another kind of clay.

Kaolin, pronounced “KAY-a-lin” as it is in our English spelling pronunciation, seems like a very American word to me just because of associations with K-Tel, Kato Kaelin, Kmart, and such like. But my eyes look at it and think “Chinese” too. Now, admittedly, I’m the sort of guy who sees “STOP PEDESTRIAN XING” and thinks it looks like a title of a Mao-era play about an evil capitalist who walks everywhere. But kaolin really does come from Chinese, and even (unlike many Chinese borrowings) from Mandarin.

So if you pull out your Chinese-English dictionary (you do have one, right? I have something like five and I keep wanting another), you may see kao meaning “give or take a test”, “bake, roast”, “flog, beat, torture”, “handcuffs”, “lean against”, “knock”, and “reward with food and drink”, and lin “carry”, “choose”, “phosphorus”, “woods”, “drench”, and “face, overlook”. Clear as mud, eh? The trick is that kaolin comes to us through French, and Mandarin now uses Pinyin transliteration. What you should be looking for in the dictionary is actually gao “tall, high” and ling “hill”, the name of a hill outside Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province, where kaolin was first found. The gao is pronounced like a cross between cow and gow (closer to gow). Incidentally, this gaoling is homophonous (down to the tones) with a term meaning “advanced in years”. But Kato Kaelin is actually only 52 now.

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travesty

Posted on August 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

What word would you most likely expect to hear after travesty? How about of? OK, of what?

I’m reckoning you thought of the same word as I did, and it’s the top result in the Corpus of Contemporary American English: justice. Yup, the world may be full of travesties, but the phrase that it goes around most often in now is travesty of justice.

Not that that’s the only way it’s seen. Indeed, more often than that you’ll see it without further description: “This is a travesty.” “What a travesty.” “Those jeans are a travesty.”

Actually, this word came up a couple of days ago when I was talking with my wife about people’s clothing. I said that people who buy jeans should get to see themselves from behind in them before buying them, because there are a lot of jeans that look fine from the front but are utter travesties from the back.

Is that a reasonable use, though? Was I being unduly influenced by transvestite (not what I had in mind) or tragedy (I wasn’t saying that they were sad, just risible) or travertine (light limestone? really, no) or some phonaesthetic influence from the /tr/ (which has a gripping sound and also heads up words such as treachery and traitor) and the aggressiveness (viciousness perhaps?) of /v/? Had I simply heard it recently and so it was fresh in my mind (not that I recall)?

More likely I had it in mind that they did an injustice to the figure and made something of a mockery of it. After all, a travesty is a satire, a parody, a mockery of something: a literary satire that debases the original, for instance. It’s sometimes used for ludicrous female (or male) impersonators (there’s that transvestite again). In any event, there’s typically a theatrical association in the literal usage, which makes me want to see travest like a curtain suspended from a trave, parting in the middle at v to be pulled aside so some ranting actor may rave (and what about the y? either a codpiece or the drain the whole thing is going down).

But, then, there’s also that old adjectival sense, “dressed so as to be made ridiculous” (to quote Oxford). Not that we use it that way now… or maybe we do. The French source, travestie, however, originally meant just “disguise”; it came from a verb se travestir, “disguise oneself as someone else”. That came to French by way of Italian, from the Latin trans “across” and vestire “clothe” – literally “cross-dressing”, and of course the source of transvestite.

Really, though, I’m not saying that bad jeans make your butt look like a transvestite’s. Most transvestites I’ve ever seen are very sharp dressers and would never let their butts look like these jeans make them look. It simply wouldn’t do them justice.

win

Posted on August 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

In standard usage, the antonym of win is lose, just as the antonym of fail is pass or succeed. But in the version of the English language that commonly sees win preceded by epic, its antonym is fail. This comes from a gamer’s mindset; every endeavour is a contest, but often against a machine, not another person. So if you succeed, it’s a win, but if you don’t, it’s not a loss – you haven’t necessarily been defeated by another person, and you haven’t necessarily lost any money or assets – let alone a lose, a word which has not to my knowledge been nouned yet; it’s a fail because it’s all about you and your worth as a person.

Of these three words, epic, fail, and win, you likely have the impression of seeing win the most often in normal contexts (as opposed to the hyperventilations of adolescents and those who are, at least momentarily, reliving their adolescence). On wordcount.org, fail is in 2,895th place, epic in 10,098th place, and win in 962nd place; in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, there are about twice as many instances of fail as of epic, and more than three times as many instances of win as of the other two combined.

Historically in books, however, if Google ngrams are to be believed, fail has shown up the most, though it has been declining and win increasing steadily to near-convergence. Epic has been fairly steady in third place. But if I search on Amazon.com for books with the keyword epic, I get 24,893 results, many of which focus on history or sports and/or are fiction (and I note with interest that one of the top results is co-authored by someone I know, Arlene Prunkl). If I search fail, I get a mere 4,142 results, tending towards sociology, economics, and epic fails (the top result is from failblog.org). If I search for win, I get 24,341 results, leaning strongly towards business and personal improvement.

And what words do they tend to show up with, respectively? The Corpus of Contemporary American English gives me proportions, poem, battle, story, struggle, tale, and journey to go with… guess? Epic, of course. Fail is most often seen after often, and also after without, and is frequently followed by to recognize, to understand, and to meet (standards, a challenge, obligations, et cetera). And win? Win over is very common, and going to win quite common too – of course won and winning are evaluated separately. What do you win? A war, a game, an election, a championship… you know, the usual stuff.

But win is the most versatile of the three. It is well established as both a noun and a verb (both for as long as there has been an English language). It comes from a word meaning “work, labour, strive, obtain”. It shows up in assorted terms and phrases, from winsome to you win some, you lose some. The particular perversity of English phonology and orthography have led to its having a stronger flavour of when than of wind (/wɪnd/, “moving atmosphere”), and no real taste anymore of wind (/waɪnd/, “increase torsion by turning”). There are a few names that smack of it, including Winston, Winnifred, Ashwin, and especially the family name Wynn – which, among other things, is the name of a casino hotel in Las Vegas.

But what really makes win special for an English language geek like me is that wynn is also the name of a letter that English used to have – a runic letter (ƿ) used in Old English to represent the first sound in win. It’s no great surprise that wynn went out of use when w became available; it looked too much like p and y and thorn (þ, another runic borrowing we used to represent a sound we now spell th; Icelandic still uses it). Ha – orthography fail. Well, the chances of winning have improved with the change: they used to look thin, but now the word declares, “double you in”! Win FTW! (FTW = “for the win”.)

fail

Posted on August 24, 2011 | 4 comments

This is a common word – quite common lately, indeed. We are all used to it from school, the bugbear of all students: whether a course is pass/fail or graded, there is always a chance to fail, and if you are flailing and grasping at straws you will be standing a strong chance of slipping into that pail. Fail means losing (amusingly, the Irish word fáil means “getting”).

In the adult world, fail often appears with an infinitive following: I fail to see your point; If you fail to appear, you will face a fine. We have fewer tests, and fail without an infinitive complement is something one does on a test, mainly (although banks, structures, and engines can do it too). If you take part in a track meet, say, you might win or place, and you might lose, but no one would say you failed. Likewise in a hockey game you could chalk up a win, but the opposite is a loss. If you go for a job interview, or an audition, you might say you didn’t get it, but in spite of their being tests of a sort, you probably won’t talk about failing.

But in a variety of non-test circumstances, you may now, in colloquial parlance, be said to fail if you acquit yourself poorly. Or, more to the point, the act of making an idiot of yourself – of convincingly demonstrating your fallibility – is called not failing or failure but a fail. (If you do so spectacularly, it is an epic fail. Of course, adolescents, wanting everything to be the coolest and most important and awesomest and most memorable ever, and generally believing their own press releases, are likely to label an amazing variety of minor mishaps epic fails. But, then, they will also sometimes call things fails just because they don’t understand them. Adolescents will be adolescents…)

Oh, but now the crusty curmudgeons emerge without fail. “The noun,” they point out with asperity, “is failure.” And indeed they can call a dictionary to back them up – after all, according to Oxford it’s been some three centuries since fail was regularly used to mean “failure”, though it was common enough for several centuries and was used readily by Chaucer and Shakespeare. Oh, there is a modern exception: the phrase without fail. But that’s fixed enough in usage it might as well be a single word. You can feel sure that fail as a free-associating noun has not over the past few centuries persisted in standard usage; if it had, it would not have the popularity it now has.

Of course! The entire point of its popularity is that it is a new usage: a quick trimming, perhaps a quotational noun (similar to “That’s a go” or “I got the OK”: a noun formed in reference to an instance of effective utterance of the word – “Go!” or “OK” or, on a report card, “Fail”). It is fun precisely because it is like cheating; it seems ungrammatical yet comprehensible and so has a sort of novelty. And it is a shibboleth, a password into that (rather large) in-group of people who share in the cultural meme, who have this in-joke going.

After all, as I point out in “An appreciation of English: A language in motion,” there are two main reasons people change their language, or participate in language changes:

One: To make their lives easier.

Two: To make themselves feel better.

Fail succeeds on both points. It takes less effort to say – it’s a nice, tidy conversion, just like a meet (as in track meet), a win, a test, and the verbs face, chalk, interview, and audition, among many, many others. And, as it has a sense of novelty (fun) and participates in a cultural in-group reference (arising most likely in computer game circles originally, but now carrying images epitomized by the treasure trove on failblog.org), it certainly makes the users feel better. The fact that it (without fail!) irritates the old and inflexible puts the sprinkles on top of it all.

And how does it feel, this fail, which has fallen into our palaver from Latin via French? Aside from fun, that is. Well, one thing to note is that in the faddish use, it is very often rendered in all caps, FAIL, like a rubber stamp or old-style computer typing. Aside from that, it has a feel of flail and fall (common occurrences in fails), and of fill (less so), and you may get effects from ail and all the other rhymes (ale, sail, pail, hail, and so on). It starts with that softest of fricatives, /f/, and ends with a licking liquid /l/; there seems to be nothing about its sound to lead one inevitably to a sense of catastrophe and humiliation. And yet it does not fail to do so.

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epic

Posted on August 22, 2011 | 4 comments

I was giving Montgomery Starling-Byrd, international president of the Order of Logogustation, and Grace Sherman, a noteworthy member from Mobile, Alabama, a tour around the Canadian National Exhibition. We had just entered the centre of deep-fried gravity, the Food Building, and I was pointing out some of the traditions and some of the splashy newcomers.

Montgomery read off the sign on one establishment that had a long line in front of it. “Epic Burgers and Waffles.” He smirked. “I’m sure there’s a long story behind that one.” (An epic being, originally, a long verse form recounting heroic exploits – The Iliad and The Odyssey are two. From Greek ἔπος epos “word, story, poem”.)

“Ah’m not cehtain ah can discern any rhyme or reason to it,” Grace said, “although Ah must admit it looks vaguely familiah. We have burgers, and we have Krispy Kreme doughnuts, though Ah don’t think Ah’ve seen anyone put them togethah befoah.”

“Nor waffles and hamburgers, I think,” Montgomery said. “Is this really an epic, or is it a comedy?”

“A farce, I think,” I said, “since after eating it you will be, as the French say, farci” (stuffed). I did not mention that I had already eaten one of their donut burgers with egg and bacon. “I don’t know whether this place has an official affiliation with Epic Meal Time, but they’re certainly trading on the idea.”

Montgomery arched an eyebrow. “Epic Meal Time? Is this a program whereon one watches heroes dine? Perhaps Odysseus’s men making pigs of themselves at the table of Circe, or being eaten in turn by Polyphemus? Or Grendel crashing Hrothgar’s feast?”

“It’s a YouTube series wherein a band of antiheroes from Montreal make massive masculine meals of meat replete with endless quantities of bacon strips and large doses of Jack Daniels,” I said. “The calorie count never fails to reach five digits.”

“Ah wondah whethah Bertolt Brecht would have seen that as a worthy subject,” Grace said. Brecht was a creator of what he called epic theatre, which aimed to focus more on actions and ideas and less on provoking the audience’s emotional response. Massive overeating might have been a social reality worthy of his study, I mused.

Just then I saw something that made me flinch involuntarily.

Coming away from the counter at Epic Burgers was Marcus Brattle, my mentee, a stroppy 15-year-old of British extraction.

Not by himself. He was accompanied by a friend who appeared to have lately lost fights with a nail gun and a lawnmower. The friend was carrying a portable stereo and a video camera.

Marcus was carrying, under one arm, a skateboard, and in the other hand, an épée. The épée had, skewered on it, what appeared to be one of every deep-fried thing sold in the building – peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, mac and cheese, Oreos, Mars bar, fudge, and a variety of other things you didn’t even think anyone could deep-fry – along with a donut burger, a Behemoth burger, and an American smashburger freshly bought.

I hesitated for a moment, caught between wanting to keep him from meeting Montgomery and Grace and a morbid fascination with what youthful idiocy he was embarked upon. The latter held sway long enough for him to see me. “Oh, hullo, Mentor!” he shouted.

“Well,” said Montgomery to me, “it seems that you, too, are a character from an epic. And this must be your Telemachus.”

I glanced at the video camera. “Tele-masochist, perhaps,” I said. I turned to Marcus. “Marcus, this is Montgomery Starling-Byrd and Grace Sherman.”

Marcus waggled the épée towards his accomplice. “This is Jason.”

“Anothah epic hero,” Grace observed.

“This will totally be epic!” Jason proclaimed.

“Well,” Montgomery observed drily, “at least today’s youth are focused on enterprises of great pith and moment. So much better than those who wanted to be ‘radical,’ or ‘wicked,’ or merely ‘sick.'”

“If he’s planning to eat all that,” Grace said, “Ah do believe he will be sick.”

“I am not only going to eat this,” Marcus said, “I am going to do so while riding my skateboard. I am going to start right there –” he gestured at the nearby east door of the building – “and go down the steps and then career my way through the midway, not stopping until all is consumed.”

Montgomery, Grace, and I all looked at each other. None of us could resist watching what was bound to become a crashing feast of its own. We followed him to the door.

“Cue epic music!” Marcus shouted. Jason pressed a button on the portable stereo and the opening of Orff’s Carmina Burana, that archetypal music to declare the occurrence of an event for the ages, poured forth: “O! For! tu! naaa!.” Marcus started off.

To our amazement, he cleared the steps on his skateboard without crashing, Jason running after him. He then proceeded off the sidewalk and started eating the donut burger while attempting to weave between the people. I ran after, while Grace and Montgomery maintained a more stately pace.

After about 20 metres, an execution flaw made itself evident: the bottom half of the donut burger fell off. Marcus, in trying to reach for it as it went, batted it down under the wheels of his skateboard. This resulted in abrupt loss of control, which sent him careering not down the midway but into a carnival game featuring bowling balls and more Smurfs than you have ever seen. The momentum carried Marcus through the players and into the Smurfs, and he flailed to a rest with a small Smurf stuffed in his mouth, his épée piercing a large Smurf, and nearly a hundred dollars’ worth of fat and starch redecorating the surrounding Smurfs.

I am happy to report that Jason caught it all on video.

Quite the accomplishment, as he was laughing his head off.

“Epic fail, sir!” Jason shouted between howls of laughter.

“Épée flail,” I countered.

Marcus spat out the small Smurf. “Epic? It’s a tragedy!”

Grace and Montgomery had arrived at a trot. “Now, that,” Grace declared, “is not a tragedy. He may have hubris and hamartia, but that is a farce!” She gestured at the stuffed creatures.

“But how the mighty have fallen,” Montgomery said, his smirk displaying an unseemly schadenfreude. “If in something of a shorter time than it took Beowulf.”

“O fortuna,” I said.

“Tuna,” Jason gasped between laughs, “may be the only thing that Grandpa Smurf is not wearing now.”

Marcus grabbed the remains of a burger and took a bite. “Mentor,” he said, eyeing the game operator, who was finally beginning to stop laughing, “I spent all my money on the food. I think I may need to borrow some.”

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Eccles

Posted on August 21, 2011 | 6 comments

The first time I saw this name it was in a mention of the Goon Show – probably in one of Spike Milligan’s books, but perhaps some other place; I believe it was in a bit of script, probably something like the following bit (from www.thegoonshow.net/quotes.asp):

Bluebottle: Why are you not wearing any trousers?
Eccles: Well, it’s lunchtime.
Bluebottle: Oh! What did you have for lunch?
Eccles: My trousers.

I read it as though it were short for ecclesiastical or Ecclesiastes: /ikliz/. It certainly seemed odd to me: who was this ecclesiastical character and why were they abbreviating his name?

I did subsequently learn that it actually rhymes with heckles and freckles and is not an abbreviation. I also got a good taste of the character when, during rehearsal for Stoppard’s After Magritte, we listened to a Goon Show episode or two; Eccles happened to be similar in various ways to the character I was playing (a rather stupid cop called Holmes – not the only big stupid character I ever played; I seemed to have a knack for them, somehow). I remember this bit (which I have copied from www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?
title=s06e09_the_international_christmas_pudding):

MINNIE
Helppp, Eccles!

HENRY:
Help, Eccles, help!

FX:
Loud banging.

ECCLES:
(off) You two down there! Stop that naughty noise! I’m trying to get some sleep, I’m a brain-worker!

HENRY:
I’m sorry Eccles. Not so loud, Min, quietly.

MINNIE and HENRY:
(quietly) Help, Eccles, help.

But it’s not just the feckless Eccles and his reckless pickles that tickle my ears and my tongue. There are also Eccles cakes, which are yummy round flaky pastries filled with currants (so much tastier than trousers). It’s true that I can’t see, let alone eat, an Eccles cake without thinking of Eccles from the Goon Show and his rather stupid, daft voice (hear an example at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSSGiA4f5cs). But it doesn’t override the enjoyment (and anyway, they’re both flaky). In fact, I also can’t see the name Eccles now without thinking of Eccles cakes.

Well and good, Eccles has those echoes, but where does the name come from anyway? The cakes are named after their place of origin, a town near Manchester. That may not be the famous Eccles (as the character Eccles often says, “I’m the famous Eccles!”), but it’s evidently the original Eccles (there are ickle Eccles all over the place – little cc‘s, as it were). And where does it get its name?

It’s not entirely sure, but the indications are that it comes from Celtic egles “church”, which comes from Latin ecclesia (which in turn comes from Greek). Which is of course the source of ecclesiastical and Ecclesiastes – the latter being a book of the Bible, often abbreviated Eccles, known for its quotable stoic world-weariness:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (ix:11)

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. (xi:1)

And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. (xii:12)

Well, doesn’t that take the cake. Or, if it doesn’t, Eccles will:

Interviewer: Get out, you idiot!
Eccles: Wait a minute! Wait a minute! But you ain’t even heard me speak yet!
Interviewer: We’ll write to you.
Eccles: Well, that’s no good, I can’t read.

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cataplectic

Posted on August 19, 2011 | 2 comments

Some years ago, I was thinking about tongue-twisters and the features that could make them particularly tricky. I decided that a bunch of voiceless stops moving around in the mouth and switching back and forth, interspersed with some /l/s, could make a pretty tricky one. But why settle for hard to say? Add an extra level by making it hard to understand – the mental disorientation could only add to the difficulty, yes? So here’s what I came up with:

Pat, a pickled cataplectic klepto, takes Platonic plate tectonics.

Admittedly, the words are generally well known, even if their juxtaposition is odd: what the heck is Platonic plate tectonics? (Indeed, when I made the tongue twister, I was assuming that it didn’t actually exist. But in fact there was a paper titled “Platonic plate tectonics: On the regularity of the distribution of triple points on the earth’s surface” published in 1981 by A.J. Arnold and A.F. Siegel, using models based on Platonic solids to examine regularities in plate movement.) And pickled in its figurative sense of “drunk” is normally used as a predicate: “You’re pickled”; “Jane is a bit tipsy, but Jill is completely pickled.” It’s odd to see it in the modifier position.

But cataplectic is the one word that might not be familiar to many readers. Some will recognize that it must be cata+plect-ic and thus has a root in common with apoplectic, which would also mean that the related noun is cataplexy. All of this is in fact true. And the cata is the same one as in catacomb, catapult, catastrophe, catalogue, and catabasis – but no relation to caterpillar. It means “down”, and it’s from Greek κατά kata. The plexy and plectic come from πλήσσειν pléssein “strike”. Is there a connection to complex, simplex, and multiplex? Nope – that plex relates to Latin plectere, “intertwine, weave, braid”.

So… “strike down”. That doesn’t really help all that much, does it? You can guess (again by analogy with apoplexy) that cataplexy is a medical condition, and you’ll be right. But what? It had better be something impressive. Cataplectic sounds like a house of cards – of credit cards and ID cards and other plastic cards – collapsing, perhaps because the cat batted it. It carries a variety of resonances leading in different directions: electric catapult plectrum complexion clap apocalyptic… And it’s a long word, 11 letters standing for 11 phonemes in four syllables, the sort of thing that can make some people go all weak at the knees.

Which would be just the right effect. When someone goes all weak at the knees, that’s cataplexy. So is any other sudden transient loss of muscle tone, typically caused by strong emotion. If you find this word jaw-dropping, that, too, may be cataplexy. There are many other muscles that can be affected – indeed, the whole body can be affected. The awareness is not; you can watch yourself drop like a sack of potatoes. If you happen to be wearing plastic body armour at the time, you, too, may make the sound “Cataplectic!”

I don’t mean to make fun of it, really, though. It’s not exactly pleasant. And while it’s comparatively rare as a diagnosable condition, it affects most narcoleptics and it can also affect people who are in withdrawal from some antidepressants (it is typically treated with antidepressants too).

And, yes, in theory it could affect a klepto who is taking platonic plate tectonics. Even, or perhaps especially, if he (or she) is pickled.

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Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged cataplectic, cataplexy, word tasting notes

apostrophe

Posted on August 18, 2011 | 5 comments

Apparently it is Apostrophe Day. Who knew? Aside from half of Twitter, I mean. Well, obviously, that means one thing to me: Healey Willan.

Oh, is there something missing there? I mean his luminous choral piece, written originally for the Toronto Mendlessohn Choir (with whom I have – more recently – sung it), “An Apostrophe to the Heavenly Hosts.” (Listen to a performance of it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RCNyXDsEFE.)

No, he doesnt mean that hes going to write it “Heavenly Host’s” – its not a greengrocers apostrophe (indeed, the entire text of the piece does not contain a single apostrophe of the punctuation kind!). Its that other kind of apostrophe: a rhetorical device wherein one turns away from the flow of what one is saying to make a direct address to some person(s) present or absent. (Good grief, I thought they knew this. What is this world coming to?)

So, in the middle of whatever service or occasion the piece is sung in, the choir declares, “Invoking the thrice threefold company of the Heavenly Hosts, sing we:” and then it addresses a whole bunch of them by group and by name. And of course after that everyone turns back to the regularly scheduled ritual and on we go. So its just a little extra something stuffed in: a brief turning away. Thats Greek ἀπό apo “away” and στροϕή strophé “turning”.

But lets turn away from that to what Apostrophe Day is really about: those little jots that bedevil many Anglophones world wide. It seems more people get them wrong than get them right. This is because their “proper” uses in English are no longer confined to the necessary or even the consistent. An apostrophe, the mark, originally existed just to mark an apostrophe in the now-disused sense of “elision” – dropping something out rather than adding something in. We do use it a lot that way still, in contractions. But we also use it in places that are not and never have been contractions.

The big point of confusion is plurals versus possessives. It just happens that in Modern English we use an s ending for both (as well as for third-person singular conjugations), but we use an apostrophe only for possessives, not including possessive pronouns. It was not always so. In Old English, the forms differed quite a bit. Often there would be vowel changes rather than a suffix to signify possessive, plural, or both for a word; sometimes the suffix would have an n rather than an s; in words that had an s on both, the singular possessive ended in es, the plural in as, and the plural possessive in a, typically. But English inflections collapsed together and simplified quite a bit over time. And at a certain point some people incorrectly decided that the s in the possessive was short for his and so added an apostrophe to indicate the deletion of hi from his.

But speakers of Modern English certainly dont think of it that way. More to the point, we dont speak it that way. When we speak, in fact, we dont say apostrophes at all. Theyre silent! Where theres any possible ambiguity (as there seldom is), context nearly always clarifies it. So, lacking a natural, consistent, intuitive, inevitable basis for the apostrophe, people get confused.

Could we just do away with the apostrophe? I often remark provocatively that Id like to do just that. After all, George Bernard Shaw showed how easily they may be dispensed with without affecting clarity, just as Im doing here. But of course I know that thats actually a non-starter – it would never really happen. And, in truth, there are places in writing where an apostrophe adds clarity (partly because writing doesnt have the added cues intonation gives, and partly because we often phrase things differently in writing).

Still, Id rather lose the apostrophe altogether than put up with those apostles of the apostrophe, out on their Mission: Apostrophe with their pens correcting grocery signs and monument plaques, stroking away where they should be turned away. I think its quite apposite how apostrophe splutters like impossible and preposterous (though, amusingly, Oxford points out that the derivation of the word for the punctuation mark, coming by way of French, ought to have only three syllables, but “has been ignorantly confused with” the other apostrophe). It sure is a much longer word than the little mark would suggest. Might we make it more poetic and a bit briefer if we turned away some of the crowd and set it as ’postr’phe or ’postroph’?

Oh, yes, theres that other value of the apostrophe – because poetry often uses elisions to make the metre (Ive always looked on that as cheating, but there it is), nonce apostrophes have become a mark of poetic gravitas. My friend and colleague Carolyn Bishop suggested a special punctuation mark for this purpose a few years ago, and I wrote a poem on it, which will be in my book of salacious verse on English usage, Songs of Love and Grammar:

The gravitastrophe

Had I it in my pow’r
e’en for a wond’rous hour
to let words solemn hark’d
in print be plainly mark’d,
the mark I’d use would be
the gravitastrophe!

Momentous situations
oft call for syncopations;
howe’er, a plain contraction
is plebeian detraction.
To keep solemnity,
use gravitastrophe!

Take ink plash’d from a fount
on ’Lympus’ heavn’ly mount;
’scribe it with quill-pen gain’d
from phoenix wing detain’d;
’gainst alabaster be
writ gravitastrophe!

Like cherub’s down, the curl
shall clockwise-turn’d unfurl
’til, widdershins returning
(profan’d convention spurning),
with circlet tipp’d shall be
the gravitastrophe!

This stroke shall through the ages
be ’grav’d on scepter’d pages
so humbl’d reader knows
that whilom mundane prose
is rebirth’d poesy
with gravitastrophe!

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Posted in language and linguistics, word tasting notes

Tagged apostrophe, word tasting notes

It is not I, it’s me

Posted on August 18, 2011 | 10 comments

There’s an old joke: St. Peter hears a knock at the Pearly Gates. He says, “Who goes there?” A voice replies, “It is I.” St. Peter says, “Go away! We don’t need any more English teachers.”

For who other than a hard-core grammatical prescriptivist would say “It is I?” And would even the driest English teacher (not that that many are that dry anymore), arriving with others (I was about to type “friends,” but it’s hard to think that such a person could have any left), say “It is we”? Or, on the other side, answering the door, say “It is they”? I have seen “It is he,” it’s true, but…

But no one in normal English speaks that way. Not even the well-respected, highly educated people. So we’re all wrong, then? What’s with this, anyway?

This “rule” is obviously not organic to English, since it seems so awkward to pretty much every native English speaker (except the ones who have had “It is I” drummed into them and so accept it – a linguistic perversion that can be accomplished with any irregular usage if you can get people to think it’s more formal, polite, and correct, since English is capricious that way; see An historic(al) usage trend: a historical usage trend (part 1)). The idea behind it is that the is there is a copula: it equates two things. A=B. Identity means identity, so both must be the subjects: “I am he.” (If you recognize that as the first three words of “I Am the Walrus,” remember that the next four are “as you are me.” It’s not a grammar lesson from The Beatles.)

There are some problems with this reasoning. First of all, when you draw up the rules for a language, it helps if they actually describe what the language actually does, as opposed to enforcing practices that are quite different from what established usage is. If you get an idea about language and make a theory and it turns out not to be an accurate description, you shouldn’t bend the subject, you should change the theory. Otherwise you have linguistic phlogiston, a mumpsimus. And something unfortunately all too common.

Second, language is not math. Or, more precisely (since one may construct a mathematical language), English is not math. Why this isn’t incredibly obvious I don’t even know. Try performing a mathematical operation on a sentence. Give me the square root of “To be or not to be.” Language is waaaaay less tidy than math, but it’s a lot of fun. You don’t get to derive new equations and results, but linguists are discovering a lot of really fascinating weirdness. Grammatical prescriptivists, on the other hand, if they applied their thinking to the realm of math, would insist on only using certain equations in certain ways and would argue that some solutions are unacceptable because they involved, for instance, irrational numbers. They would be like the lawmakers who legislated the value of pi to be exactly 3.

And incidentally, even in math, if you establish that in this instance of an equation a=3 and b=3, you don’t necessarily change all b to a. But anyway, syntax is sequence and form; identity is semantics. Two different areas of grammar.

Third, English is not Latin. Many of prescriptivists’ ideas, such as this one, are derived from and/or supported by appeals to Latin grammar. You might as well use a barbecue to bake a cake, or dress patterns to make shoes. Each language has its own set of rules, its own parameters, its own ways of handling this and that. French is descended from Latin but you could never say “C’est je” in French, so why would we insist that English use “It is I” just because Latin, which English is not based on, does similarly?

The real ace in all of this is that “It is I” is supposedly equating “It” and “I”. OK, what’s the “It” here? If I say “I am he,” then there’s a “he” we were talking about who turns out to be me. But where’s this “it”? There’s no object I’m claiming is me. The it is actually empty. The only reason it’s there is because in English we require every finite verb to have something in the subject position. Not every language does. In Chinese you can say you shu, “have book”, to mean “There’s a book”; you can say shi wo, “is I/me”, to mean “It’s me” (or “It is I” if you’re one of those people). But we have to put in these empty its and theres in English for it to be a complete sentence. (We may say, casually, Got it, but even casually we don’t say Is me instead of It’s me.)

So it’s is really an existential predicate. But it’s bootless to argue that since there’s only one real thing there (me), it must be the subject. The point is precisely that it’s not the subject because that’s not how English syntax works. A thing can’t be both subject and predicate. We can’t say I am to mean It’s me, because it means something else, so we have an existential verb and an empty subject, and make me the predicate.

Which leads us to another fact of English syntax: the case filter. Put simply, English nouns and pronouns are by default in the objective (accusative). For each finite (conjugated) verb, there has to be one subject, which means one noun phrase in the subject (nominative) case, and that noun phrase is the one that is specifying the verb – it’s in the “subject” position. We don’t do this with non-finite verbs: I want him to go, I want to see him going. Those hims are the subjects of an infinitive and a participle, but they’re still objective. But if the verb is finite, one noun phrase and one only is treated as its subject: I desire that he go. The one you want is him. (Note that there can be inversions: What fools are we! Sam I am!)

And that is a real rule of English. One that we all use all the time without having someone tell us, one that guides our comprehension and usage. Not phlogiston. There is no cake batter dripping from the grill. So if someone at your door says “It is I,” you’re fully enfranchised to say “Go to hell!” (You probably don’t want them at your party anyway.)

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Posted in language and linguistics

Tagged conjugation, English grammar, English syntax, first person singular nominative, it is I, it's me, nouns, pronouns, syntax, verbs