Yearly Archives: 2011

key, crucial, pivotal

Posted on August 17, 2011 | 3 comments

Dear word sommelier: Today @BloombergStyle tweeted, “Key is vague as a modifier. Adjectives such as crucial and pivotal are more precise.” My question is just, “What?”

A valid question. Why is key supposed to be vague? What would make crucial and pivotal more precise? Have I missed something somehow all these years of being a professional word person? Or am I encountering yet another hoary prejudice of which I have heretofore managed to remain innocent? Or what?

Certainly key seems more popular right now as a modifier, especially in business writing (and we know how many language sticklers have a hate-on for business English – not without some justification, assuredly). It’s a nice, short word, and it carries an image of a key that opens a door – perhaps a golden key, something of value, something shiny. You readily read of a key role, a key question, key players, key issues, key elements, key factors, and so on (I’m getting these frequent collocations from the Corpus of Contemporary American English). The keystone is the most important stone, and when you “set the tone” for something you “set the key.” Plus it’s a short word, two sounds and three letters, an explosion of air from the tongue tight at the palate.

So it’s easy to see why key would be popular, and overuse can dilute effect; we also see it a lot in more workaday terms like keyword. But that doesn’t make the word itself imprecise; it just means that it is sometimes used imprecisely. One may as readily use crucial and pivotal imprecisely. Perhaps @BloombergStyle dislikes it in part because it’s in origin a noun, not a “proper” adjective. I’m also tempted to wonder whether its plain Anglo-Saxon source counts against it.

Crucial certainly seems more dramatic, and if greater drama is what you want then it will be more precise (but if it’s not then it won’t be). The mouth screws up tight and puckers out as you say it, the tongue crushing air against the palate, and you can almost express excruciation just with the sound and vocal gesture. Its sense comes from Latin crucem “cross” with the idea of being at a crossroads, a decision point: something that’s crucial is deciding. Nowadays we would probably view it more as meaning “absolutely necessary” – something you can’t do without, as opposed to being merely important. We may speak of a crucial role, a crucial question, a crucial part, a crucial point, a crucial moment, a crucial factor – notice more singulars than for key: this indicates that crucial signifies greater importance. Key things may be multiple; crucial ones are more likely to be singular.

Pivotal has a clearer image because its original reference is still plain in the word: pivot, a word we got from French and French got from we’re not entirely sure where. This is a tidier word, starting and ending with stops, and with a possibly ambisyllabic /v/ right in the middle – which, in written form, even looks like it could be a pivot. Something that is pivotal is clearly something on which everything turns: a pivotal role (seriously, role is the most common collocation for each of these words in the COCA), a pivotal moment, a pivotal point, a pivotal player, a pivotal figure. Again, singular: pivots always come one at a time.

So key may seem vaguer to @BloombergStyle, but that may just be because it indicates something important but not as important. But that’s not the same thing as vague. It’s not at all precise to say something was hot when it was just warm, for instance.

I wanted more feedback on this, so I asked some of my colleagues in the Editors’ Association of Canada for their off-the-top-of-the-head evaluation of the differences between these three words, leaving the dictionary on the shelf. Here are some of their responses:

crucial: very very important all by itself.
key:  the most important of a bunch of important ones.
pivotal: similar to key, except the less important concepts surround it; “key” they seem more like they’re in a hierarchy.
—Rosemary Tanner

key = it matters; this is important but not necessarily as much as the following
crucial  = it matters especially, it is critical to (for example) something happening or not happening
pivotal = crucial/critical but using the image of the pivot point, it is the factor/concept/assertion/etc. that could cause a change in direction, taking this path over that path, etc.
—Laura Edlund

“Key” and “crucial” are the most synonymous – both meaning “essential” – but “pivotal” of course also implies a moment of change or a feature that changes the way the entire context can be understood.
—Aaron Dalton

Key: important, but could be one of many. A key concept, another key concept… A key piece of evidence is important, but you wouldn’t lose the case by mucking it up.
Crucial: stronger than key and bordering on unique. An entire case may rest on a crucial piece of evidence.
Pivotal: something that changes the game/situation/direction.
—Paul Cipywnyk

key – one of the most important items
crucial – not to be overlooked, above all others
pivotal – having a bearing on outcome, associated with desired results
—Carolyn Wilker

We see some general trends here, especially as regards the hierarchy of importance and the imagery of pivotal, but on the other hand there’s not complete agreement either. And these are highly literate people who work with words all the time. So consider the effect the choice will have on the average reader (who will most certainly not be looking at a dictionary either): probably a fairly impressionistic one, determined in part by prosodic and phonaesthetic factors and strongly by current patterns of use. (As I’ve said many times, words are known by the company they keep.) I’m not arguing against maintaining certain distinctions of sense, but always be aware of what your readers will be aware of.

And, now, is key less precise? Or is it just more often used imprecisely? It does seem a little milder in tone, but that’s a different matter. I’d say @BloombergStyle is a little off-key here, myself.

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cepstrum, quefrency, rahmonic

Posted on August 16, 2011 | 5 comments

“By applying a low-pass lifter to the cepstrum in Figure 2 to extract the low quefrency components below the first rahmonic peak, the slowly varying curve (in red, upper graph) results.”

I read that to my wife and her eyes turned into a pair of shirred eggs. She was, for a time, speechless – a condition that, incidentally, the process described in the quotation would have been helpless in the face of.

Make no mistake: what Al Oppenheim and Ron Schafer are describing in their article (From frequency to quefrency: a history of the cepstrum, Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE (September 2004), 21 (5), 95–106) is freakin’ hard for most people to wrap their minds around. But while it might seem as dry as dust to you, that passage actually evinces a fundamental fact of true nerds: a sense of humour and playfulness.

There are four words in there that you need to look at: lifter, cepstrum, quefrency, and rahmonic. They are terms that apply to this specific mathematical process. The process itself is a little quirky, and applies to things that themselves require a bit of explanation to have real meaning – a bit more than I have space for here. But here’s a very short run-down – if your eyes start to glaze, skip to the paragraph that starts “So anyways.”

Sounds such as human speech are actually very complex, made up of a lot of different harmonic resonances on top of a basic sound frequency. It’s these resonances that allow people to discern the difference between different speech sounds: the position of your tongue in your mouth (among other things) changes the shape of resonating chambers and makes certain bunches of harmonics, called formants, stronger – you might say the formants are the informants of what speech sound you’re hearing.

When linguists – acoustic phoneticians in particular – and engineers and physicists analyze sound waves, they use a wonderful mathematical function called a Fourier transform to identify the different resonance frequencies in the sound waves, what is called the spectrum, a perfectly appropriate term since the spectrum of light is also the different frequencies. (Think about if someone were tapping 9 beats a second and someone else 12 beats a second and someone else 36 beats a second. If you graphed the sound waves, you would have something looking like :,..;..,:.,.:,..;..,:.,.:,.. and on and on. A Fourier transform would just show a graph plotting frequencies with one mark at 9 per second, one at 12 per second, and one at 36 per second.)

Well, if you treat the Fourier transform graph as though it were a graph of sound waves and perform a Fourier transform on it (it’s just slightly twickier than that, but that’s the general concept), you are performing a curious but useful inversion. You can identify how close together the harmonics are, and how close together the formants are; it tells you how frequent the strong frequencies are on the graph, so to speak. Believe me when I say this is useful, and not just in speech analysis: it makes cleaning up the sound on old recordings a lot easier, for instance – you can filter out unwanted resonances from the original sound-capture device.

So anyways, when you do this process, you get something that looks like a spectrum but is really a spectrum looked at the other way around, and you get what looks like frequency but is really frequency looked at the other way, and harmonics that aren’t actually harmonics, and you can apply filtering processes on the data that aren’t filters like the normal data filters are. You’re treating frequency as though it were time and time as though it were frequency.

So what do you do? You come up with new words for what you’re talking about. And if you’re a nerd, you may take this opportunity to be a little playful. (Businessmen would use wanton sesquipedalianisms and initialisms to try to sound impressive. Nerds don’t feel a need to try to sound impressive because they actually know what they’re talking about.)

That playfulness actually tells us some interesting things about language, too: not the way we perceive sounds (which is what the data that all this analyzes help us to understand), but the way we think of and group sounds and how we perceive the structure of words. You see, the guys who came up with this – Bogert, Healy, and Tukey, three engineers back in the early 1960s – wanted to signify the inversion by inverting the words. But you will notice they only inverted parts of the words, in order to maintain comprehension I suppose – in the process producing pseudomorphemes (I’ll explain, hold on) – and they did it in some particular ways:

spectrum –> cepstrum
frequency –> quefrency
filter –> lifter
harmonic –> rahmonic

In all of the words, they only inverted the first part of the word, thereby treating the front end of the word as the significant part and the remainder as a sort of tail (a common enough things for people to do – go to SoHo and ask JLo), and also treating them as separate bits of the word, like tweet plus ed in tweeted – meaning-bearing building-blocks called morphemes. Except that trum, ency, ter, and monic actually are not morphemes; they have no meanings of their own – they’re just phonological divisions.

And the way they inverted the first half is notable: in three of the four, they just reversed the letters in the first syllable, which in all cases also reversed the sounds (you should know from this that the original pronunciation of cepstrum is with a /k/ at the start). It was always the syllable, not any other division: not rtcepsum or nomrahic, which would be morphologically appropriate but phonologically and orthographically problematic. As usual, the sound patterns of the words guide how they’re treated – when you turn it around, it’s the sound you’re turning around (this is standard in most playful things we do with words, and it’s how we treat helicopter as heli plus copter rather than the original helico plus pter, and why we say a whole nother thing, and also why people asked to say my backwards will probably say “I’m” – reversing the phonemes – rather than like “yam” – reversing the actual sounds).

In the other word, that wasn’t possible – /rf/ and /wk/ aren’t acceptable syllable onsets. So the syllable onsets, /fr/ and /kw/, were simply swapped to make quefrency. The vowel sounds were not swapped: it’s just not comfortable in English to say /’kwε frin si/. But when you look at that word on paper, do you want to pronounce it with a “long e” on the first syllable? To me, thanks to other words starting with que, it looks first like the que is said like the one in question, making both vowels /ε/ and conforming the word to expected sound patterns rather than to the original sounds.

But at least quefrency looks like a swapping-up of frequency. When I first saw cepstrum, I didn’t see spectrum in it at all (obviously I wasn’t swirling and sniffing it at that point). It looked more like it was just some other Latin word I hadn’t seen, joining the long list of neuter nouns like rostrum and plectrum. And rahmonic, aside from making me think of Rahm Emanuel (and maybe rah-rah-rah), had a taste of rampike and mnemonic but took a moment to show its harmonic resonance. (Lifter happens to be an English word in its own right, and thereby carries unbidden resonances. Ironically.)

However, the resemblance of cepstrum to spectrum is not lost on those who are expecting to see spectrum. And the hazards of such wordplay showed up in an early publication by Oppenheim and Schafer on the topic – and make for a cautionary tale for editors and authors alike. I’ll quote directly from the same article I started with:

throughout the various stages of proofreading of this book, we constantly had to maintain vigilance to be certain that this “strange” term cepstrum wasn’t inadvertently “corrected” to what seemed to be more appropriate. . . . We breathed a sigh of relief when the last page proofs were returned to the publisher. When the first printing of the book appeared, it was clear that a particularly diligent proofreader at the publisher had caught the “error” at the last instant and cepstrum had been reversed to spectrum throughout.

Well, not entirely reversed – but run through a transformation aimed at making the strange look normal again. Ah, but too late – and sometimes you want to see things strangely.

Thanks to Colleen Kavanagh (@CanuckWordNerd) for drawing my attention to this whole sandbox of words.

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zein

Posted on August 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

Have you seen this word before? You might think you’d remember if you had, but I think you more likely haven’t. Yet it’s a short word (unlike, say, zeaxanthin), and at the same time eye-catching, thanks to the z at the front – and it’s very angular indeed if you write it in all caps: ZEIN. If the EI were, as they almost appear to be, a single character looking like an 8 from an LED readout, ZEIN would read the same vertically when rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise.

Ah, the plasticity of the written word. It’s a nifty little thing, too, this word, and the odds are very high that you’ve actually encountered what it names. And yet the odds are also quite good you won’t even get the pronunciation right at first try.

Also, was kann es sein? Well, if you think it’s pronounced like German, try again. It’s two syllables: like “zee in” – as an American might say, “There’s a zee in this word.” But what else is in it? Hmm. There’s a bit of maize in it… you know, zea maize, a.k.a. Zea mays, a.k.a. corn? More exactly, zein is in maize. It is to corn what gluten is to wheat.

Well, whoop-de-doo. Isn’t that amaizeing. Actually, though, it’s more interesting than you might think, because it is a very useful protein. Pure zein is (to quote Wikipedia, which is borrowing from who knows what) “clear, odorless, tasteless, hard, water-insoluble, and edible.” That gives it quite a lot of uses in a variety of areas of manufacturing. All those bio-plastic cups, for instance. But also coatings on pills, candies, paper cups, bottle caps, buttons, fabrics, and more. You’ve almost certainly handled it, and you’ve almost certainly swallowed it, too (in the many corn products out there, of course, but also on candies and pills, where it may be referred to as “confectioner’s glaze” or “vegetable protein”).

And yet zein remains an exotic, little-known word. Well, unless you’re a reader of AK Comics, an Egyptian-based superhero comic, in which Zein is the name of a superhero philosophy professor who is the last of the ancient line of pharaohs. Wot, they named him after corn protein? Naw, not really, though zein is something of a superhero shape-changer product. Zein just happens also to be an Arabic name (pronounced differently). The corn protein, for its part, gets its name from Latin zea (from Greek ζειά zeia), meaning “spelt” (the grain) originally but more recently applied to corn (i.e., maize), and the same derivative suffix in that’s in protein and a variety of other biochemical names.

And so we have maize, originally from Taino (a New World language), and zein, originally from Greek, and they both utilize e, i, and z. Man! Whaddya think of that! Such plasticity written language has… These bits that get used all over. It’s a maize zein!

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ajar

Posted on August 14, 2011 | 3 comments

You know this one, for sure: “When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar!”

OK, try this one: “When is ajar not ajar? When it’s not a door!”

Perhaps that requires some explanation, lest I leave you with mouths agape. I was playing poker with some friends last night – real ones, not fictional characters – and one of them, Michelle, observed that you can only use ajar on a door, not anything else. Alex, who seldom misses a turn to burnish his cynical and gruff image, in response produced the sentence “Your mouth is ajar.”

And indeed one may on rare occasion see references to mouth(s) ajar – also window(s) ajar. It’s worth noting that mouths ajar would not be the same as mouths agape, as ajar means “slightly open”.

But what, anyway, has a door’s partial openness to do with jars? Were doors once held open with – or for – mason jars (from Arabic jarrah, earthen vessel)? Indeed not, nor has it anything to do with the door having been jarred, i.e., bumped (a word that comes from onomatopoeia for a harsh sound – physical jarring is actually derivative from sonic jarring), though for a time many people thought so. Rather, this jar comes originally from the Germanic word char.

But that’s not the char that has to do with burning, nor the one that has to do with tea, though both involve chores that a charwoman might do. This char, you see, is related to chore – it’s the char in charwoman, and it referred originally to a turn or a returning; the surviving sense is of an occasional turn of work – a little chore. So a door is ajar because doors swing open and return, and one that is not completely returned is still on the turn: a (a variant of on) jar.

This is a word that requires no more effort than closing a door that’s been left ajar (so close it already!). The act of saying ajar, one might say, leaves the mouth ajar – opened but not returned to shut – and the tongue, too: it touches at the tip on the j and then hangs near the palate but not touching it with the retroflex /r/.

It’s a nice, tidy, even pretty little word – the j in the middle is a little unusual, especially in a word so short; it adds a stylish little swing below and dot above, so much nicer than achar, I’d say. It’s raja backwards, and it makes me think of the Steely Dan album Aja, which has (among others) the song “Peg”: “Peg,” Donald Fagen sings, “it will come back to you.” I guess that peg is what the door closes against. The door swings open, and then shut – every time it goes one way, it will go back, Jack, and do it again (OK, that’s a different song). But of course you can always leave it partially open and let the charwoman close it.

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reticent, reluctant

Posted on August 13, 2011 | 4 comments

Dear word sommelier: When should I use reticent and when reluctant?

I’m a little, um, hesitant to wade into one like this, because this gets to be one of those pedantics-versus-the-universe points. Not that there’s a whole lot of debate over reluctant, mind you – though there is a little specification of sense that some may stipulate. But reticent is one of those words that some people will use as a net to catch you with if you so much as offer a penny for their thoughts – or even if you don’t.

There is, of course, a difference in the feel of the words that will always have some effect, whether you’re a semantic stickler or not. They are similar-looking words, re____nt; one has tice where the other has lucta, both with a t and a c, so the difference in look is mainly i and e versus lu and a. The feel of the sound is more different. The rhythm, for starts, is a dactyl in reticent and an amphibrach in reluctant; ironically, the vowel in re is (or may be) “long” in the word where it’s unstressed but not in the word where it’s stressed. More to the heart of the matter, reticent stays on the tip of the tongue, a little more tentative and delicate with the /tɪs/; in reluctant the mouth is locked up with a clucking coarticulation after the lick: /lʌkt/.

There’s also the relative frequency of the words. Reticent is a much less commonly used word than reluctant. That makes it a pricier word – used when people want to sound more erudite, impressive, what have you. It’s also a newer word by a couple of centuries; it first showed up in the early 1800s, while reluctant has been around since the early 1600s.

Both come from Latin, naturally: the re at the beginning is the same, meaning “back” or similar things, and the [a/e]nt is a present participle ending. The root difference is in the occupant of the space for re____nt. In reluctant, it’s luctari, “fight”. Originally, to be reluctant was to actively resist something; there’s a verb, reluct, which doesn’t get used now, at least in part because now we view reluctance as more of a passive resistance or even simple hesitation. It might be as little as not truly believing you’ve lucked into something – for instance, if you’re reluctant to believe that the person calling telling you you’ve won a cruise vacation is on the up and up. I’d like to think the effect of the tongue backing away in the luc adds to that sense, but of course I have no data for that.

In reticent, on the other hand, the root is tacere “be silent” (compare French Tais-toi! “Shut up!”/”Be quiet!”). The original use, and the one still preferred by those who make it their business to prefer such things, is closer to “taciturn” than to “hesitant” or “resistant”: it means “disinclined to express personal thoughts and feelings; the opposite of loquacious”. It stands alone: “Herb was reticent.” (That’s a quote from MAD magazine. Yes it is.) But you may often see reticent used to mean, well, “reluctant” – the same sense of “reluctant” as we use today, often taking an infinitive complement: “The State registrar was just as reticent to give us information.”

That last quote, by the way, comes from 1875. This usage, which undeniably uses it to mean what there’s already another word to mean, but with the added air of elevation, erudition, or plain misplaced prissiness, has been around much too long and is much too well established to eradicate. That doesn’t mean you have to use it, of course; you’re perfectly within your rights to reserve reticent for what you wish pedants would be. But if you are not reluctant to use it as a shiny substitute for “reluctant”, just be aware that there may be a semantic retiarius ready to cast a net of condemnation without so much as one red cent in payment for their liberally expressed conservatism.

Thanks to Stan Backs for suggesting reticent. A retiarius, by the way, is a gladiator who uses a net.

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phocomele

Posted on August 11, 2011 | 5 comments

I recently read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, a sci-fi novel written in 1968 and set in 2010. In his version of the – well, of last year, from my perspective – the world has about 9 billion people (enough for all to stand on Zanzibar if everyone had a space one foot by two feet – not something that happens in the novel; just a bit of trivia that is the only mention of Zanzibar in the book). This overpopulation is resulting in severe overcrowding, such that every so often a person will simply snap and run amok, slaughtering those around. (Given our experience of a world fast closing on 7 billion, Brunner seems to have overestimated the demographic pressures and their effects.)

Anyway, a result of this overcrowding is that much of the world, and especially the developed world, has taken on strict eugenic legislation. People must be tested for genetic defects they might pass on, and if they have a gene for anything such as hemophilia or colour-blindness – let alone worse – they are not allowed to have children. Along with this prevailing ethos is a shift in the terms of abuse – bleeder is among the most common, replacing bastard and similar – and an overall focus on a melange of possible genetic defects. Among these is phocomelia; Brunner’s book is the first place I am aware of having heard of this condition by this name.

Brunner never explains what phocomelia is, but he tosses it in – and the noun for a person afflicted with it, phocomele, which he spells phocomel, and the adjective phocomelic – here and there to exemplify some particularly dreadful congenital condition. Now, I read novels on the subway and bus, well away from a dictionary (I do not have an iPhone), and once I get where I’m going there are other things on my mind and I tend to forget to look up any word I don’t know (a phenomenon I encounter once in a while). So it was only just now that I looked it up and found out what it meant.

I have to admit that phocomele was not morphologically transparent to me – I am not actually fluent in Classical Greek, and this word’s parts are not so often used in English word formation. I knew it was from Greek, due to the ph spelling. It did seem odd: like a respelling of focus or focal, though I was sure it wasn’t. It’s reminiscent of Phocis, a place name mentioned in The Libation Bearers, a drama by Aeschylus that I performed in once. It’s also reminiscent of Jacmel, a town in Haiti that my mother once lived in long ago. The word seems an awkward joining of two parts that aren’t quite meant to join together: a hard, cold, round phoco and warmer, more voiced, more front, nasal-and-liquid mele.

By the context, I made the assumption that it must be a mental disability. After all, in the real 2010, when people focus on congenital disabilities and talk about one as though being particularly unfortunate, there’s a fairly strong chance in our culture it’s in some way cognitive. But in 1968, there was a different kind of congenital disorder that was still much on everyone’s minds. You may recognize the word thalidomide: a drug for morning sickness that came out in the early 1960s. It was found to have an association with phocomelia.

Phocomele comes, as it turns out, from ϕώκη phoké “seal” (compare French phoque) and μέλος melos “limb”. It refers to a condition where the long bones of one or more limbs are shortened or nonexistent, so the hands and/or feet are joined closely to the trunk of the body. I have been aware of the existence of this condition since I was a child, but I do not recall ever having seen this name for it. People affected with it were and are (in my experience) called thalidomide babies. Frankly, phocomele seems a rather unkind word, not just for meaning “seal limb” but for equating the person with the condition. In Brunner’s dystopia, the person is inseparable from the disorder; it has a deterministic effect on them. Today we lean towards seeing such things as incidental to the person: something that has happened to them, rather than something they are.

Brunner’s book is not without hope, but it has a strongly bitter tinge. He gets some things close to right, and other things rather less so. His faith in science is hardly untarnished. But given that he was writing in the era that had just been reminded of the dark side of scientific advancements, is it any wonder? What we have learned better between then and now is, perhaps, that while humanity and its sciences can be very destructive, there is also corresponding growth in enlightenment and redemption.

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ambsace

Posted on August 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

This word makes me think of three others: Alsace, Ames, and Ambrose.

It also makes me think of embrace and ambulance and a few others, it’s true. But I’d really like to roll the dice on those three proper nouns.

I should say, first of all, that this word comes from French ambes as, from Latin ambas as, meaning “both ones” or “both aces”. In English, the more common term for this is snake eyes. It’s referring to dice, you see: those two separate dots that stare at you like a colon or a snake’s eyes, expecting what is to follow – your loss. In Texas Hold ‘Em, two aces is good – pocket aces are usually good for a pre-flop all-in. But in craps, two ones is doubleplusungood. So ambsace can, aside from “snake eyes”, mean “bad luck”. It can also mean “the smallest amount”, no more than a jot or a tittle – you may have heard “within an ace of” something; in craps terms, that’s “within ambsace”.

I should also say that this word has two pronunciations. You likely read it as “ams ace”, which is one possible; the other is “ames ace” (i.e., “aims ace”). This is why it reminds me of both Ames and Ambrose.

First to Alsace, though: that region that has historically been bounced back and forth between France and Germany like a tennis ball. And yet, for all that, it is not just politically important, it also produces much of France’s beer and some mighty fine Rieslings and Gewürztraminers. Nuts to the bad-luck rolls of history: the glass is neither half-full nor half-empty – when it’s empty, refill it and have another!

Now, Ames: that’s the name of a town in Iowa, but it’s named after a U.S. Congressman, Oakes Ames. Why name a town after him? For the same reason they named a monument in Wyoming after him: he was perhaps the single biggest factor in getting the Union Pacific portion of the transcontinental railroad in the U.S. built. Lincoln asked him to take charge of it, and he did: he awarded a bunch of contracts to firms his family owned, and then he sold shares in them at discount prices to other congressmen, and they voted for legislation that allowed it to go ahead. And it got built. And a monument was erected to him in 1882 at the highest point of the railroad: a stone pyramid, not really a monolith but nonetheless an ace for Ames.

But his dodgy dealings in the sale of shares led to his censure and expulsion from congress, and he died soon after. And in the decades after 1882, the railroad realigned, stranding the monument and killing the nearby town of Sherman. Ames’s ace became ambsace.

As to Ambrose, I mean specifically Ambrose Bierce, that crusty American writer best known for The Cynic’s Word Book, republished under the better-known title The Devil’s Dictionary. It is a satirical, cynical work, with tart little definitions such as “Selfish, adj., Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others” and “Loquacity, n., A disorder which renders the sufferer unable to curb his tongue when you wish to talk.” For “Railroad” he offered this definition: “The chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off.”

Not all of Bierce’s definitions were pithy; I would like to quote at length his definition of “Lexicographer”:

A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered “as one having authority,” whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as “obsolete” or “obsolescent” and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor – whereby the process of improverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that “it isn’t in the dictionary” – although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation – sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion – the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create.

In other words, old words crap out, while new ones are told “No dice.” But good descriptive lexicographers are not so cruel; it is, rather, certain users of their field guides who load the dice.

As to Ambrose Bierce: at the age of 71, he  departed for Mexico and simply vanished, his ultimate end unknown. His words survive, of course, every titillating jot of them.

Thanks to Elaine Phillips for suggesting ambsace.

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awesome, fantastic

Posted on August 10, 2011 | 3 comments

Dear word sommelier: I’m at a friend’s place, and he’s made bobotie, and it’s really good. Should I say “This bobotie is awesome” or “This bobotie is fantastic”?

First of all, we must acknowledge that there is a certain set of people who will insist – quite vehemently – that neither is acceptable: that awesome can only mean “inspiring awe” and fantastic can only mean “characteristic of, or produced by, fantasy”. People of this set actually do have dictionaries, but if they look in them, they arrogate to themselves the right to declare the ones they disagree with (all of them, ultimately) wrong: only the “original” meaning of a word is correct, and by “original” they mean “etymological, as they understand it”. (In truth, awesome first meant “full of awe”, and only in the next century “inspiring awe”; the original term for that was awful, a word that picklepusses frequently use unreservedly in its much more modern meaning of “nasty”.)

But such people are among the most arrant fools in all of creation, and ought not to be heeded any more than one would heed an unknown petulant two-year-old’s admonitions. So let us proceed with reality. Reality does include the meanings mentioned above, to be sure, but it is not restricted to them.

The question you ask may reflect a shift in usage, though I’m not sure of it as yet. My friend Michelle remarked to me today that she had the sense that fantastic was overtaking awesome as a general adjective of enthusiastic approbation. This is quite difficult to assess objectively, as simple searches don’t sort semantically. In overall usage, fantastic has always been more common than awesome, but awesome is actually a newer word and has certainly increased in usage, reaching a soft peak around 1980 and holding fairly well since, if Google Ngrams are to be believed (and they do have their limitations!). A Google search for each does pick up twice as many hits for awesome, but wordcount.org places fantastic much farther up in the British National Corpus.

Awesome is the more bivalent of the words. It retains a more specific sense, and one may use it as such. When someone sings the hymn “How Great Thou Art” and pronounces “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,” there’s no risk of its being taken to be like saying “when I in totally wicked wonder” or “when I in way bitchen wonder” or something like that. But within the context of colloquial usage, it has a very clear air of youthful informality. It became so common and bleached in its peak (from which it has not subsided too much) that I used to think of this version of it as ossum, a sort of verbal marsupial hanging by its tail in the midst of the sentence. Which awesome is wanted can readily be specified by surrounding words and their tone: which would you take truly awesome to mean (I would take it to mean “awe-inspiring”)? How about totally awesome (“really good” for me)?

While awesome has had this bleached usage only since the late-mid 20th century, however, fantastic has been in similar broad service since at least the 1930s – which is still recent, given its existence as a word since the 1400s. But any use of it to mean anything other than “really good” now is very likely to have an air of quaintness. In the more cultured spheres, wherein dwell such people as know Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, the sense of phantasm and fantasy is likely more present, and that large set of people who have see the musical The Fantasticks will have that charming tale (and its memorable tunes) imprinted in their minds, but hoi polloi will more likely think of a brand of spray-on cleaning solutions, Fantastik. (Observe the effects of the k with or without c, too, though.)

For either of the words, of course, usage on TV and in movies will have a strong effect, and we may assume those were prime vectors of the ascendancy of awesome for approbation. Fantastic likewise gets used by some notable personalities, and I can recall an ad from a few years ago for a lottery that paid $1000 a week for life in which  the protagonist exclaimed “Faaaaantastic!” on receiving each cheque.

And that takes us to the heart of the matter. The bleached sense of these words is fundamentally phatic, and relies strongly on expressive potential. Awesome allows the gaping “aw” to lead in, embodying an expression of awe, surprise, amazement, et cetera. It then closes off neatly with an unstressed second syllable. It works much better, rhythmically, with totally than fantastic does (try both and see what I mean). It’s a big, smooth, solid stroke.

Fantastic, on the other hand, has three syllables, the stressed one of which is the second – but the first may be stretched out and emphasized as well. Due to its rhythm, it is conducive to tmesis: you can slip in an expletive intensifier, as in fan-freaking-tastic, which is not done in a word such as awesome. So it is more flexible and extensible. Its sound is less full of round-mouthed amazement and more full of wide-mouthed joy, pride, or enthusiasm. It has voiceless stops and another fricative, giving it the éclat of fireworks.

Moreover, because fantastic is widely established as a simple term of strong approbation, it doesn’t carry with itself the air of “valley girl” or similar teen in-group-ness (of course it was an “in” term back in the ’30s, but that’s too far back to have influence now), and so there is less likely a sort of winkingness to its usage, at least currently.

In your case, given the rhythm of bobotie and of the sentence as a whole, I would incline towards fantastic. It also more likely carries a tone that is more ingenuous and sincere and less self-observing. It may seem a stronger term of approbation, mind you, and the shape of the mouth in awesome may seem more suited to a comestible, so you do have to go with your own immediate sense of the occasion. The truth of it is that usage in such matters is an art, not a science, and one may defensibly use either, for different taste sensations.

You will also, by the way, want to consider what term, if any, you will use for the blatjang that (I presume) has been served with the bobotie.

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ark

Posted on August 9, 2011 | 1 comment

Ark shows up in a lot of places. Most of the time it’s a reference to Noah’s ark, that very large wooden box (that’s really what it was – an epic parallelepiped) that, the Bible tells us, held eight people, seven pairs of each species of clean animal, one pair of each species of unclean animal, and seven (individuals, not pairs) of each kind of bird. It was like an enormous treasure chest preserving the future of dry-land life, bobbing on the waves like a message in a bottle: each entity a word, or, really, many many words. It puts me in mind of the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, which is preserving the vegetal biodiversity of the planet (especially its food crops) – see the article in the July 2011 National Geographic.

Ark often appears in science fiction, as the idea of an interstellar ship carrying the few survivors of a planet through the dark oceanic void of space is an appealing one and can present quite a few possibilities. (Not all such tales use ark; I’m put in mind of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and of the ill-fated TV series Starlost.) There is typically the idea of a ship or an analogue of one, perserving all life. But, really, it’s not a ship that one navigates from one place to another – it simply floats like a message in a bottle, or rather a treasure chest floating on the water with the hope for the future inside it.

Did you know that the little vessel of bulrushes in which the infant Moses was placed so that he could float down the stream and be discovered by the Pharaoh’s daughter was also an ark? Not all translations of the Bible use the term, but that is the time-honoured term, and is a reasonable translation of the Hebrew teiva (compare tebhath Noah, “Noah’s ark”). That little vessel, most likely made of papyrus reeds, carried the hope of Israel – and of all its words; the words were later themselves written on papyrus, but the man traditionally given as the origin of the first books of the Bible was Moses, who was carried to safety in a boat of papyrus.

But an ark is not a boat, not really. No, it is a box. A treasure chest or any other kind of chest. Noah’s ark was an exceptionally large one; the ark of bulrushes was smaller, but not really closed like a usual box. But the sea vessel image is so pervasive that when I first heard of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark (shortly before it was released in theatres), I assumed it had to do with Noah’s ark.

It didn’t, of course; it had to do with that third ark, the Ark of the Covenant: the holiest vessel in the Biblical Hebrew religion. It contained the tablets on which God inscribed the commandments – the words that they took as their guide. Of course, they didn’t open it and look in all the time; it was far too holy for that. They knew the words; the box preserved the originary text, but while it held the cold stone the words were alive outside it, and even after it disappeared they survived. (In the here and now, there are many people who have things to say about the value of those words and their effect, but I am not here to enter into that debate; I’m tasting the word ark, and this is an important influence on it.)

I would be remiss if I did not mention also the sense of promise and covenant following on these three arks. You may remember what sign God gave to Noah as a promise not to flood the planet again: a rainbow, a great arc in the sky (arc-en-ciel in French, in fact). Moses, of course, brought promise and the covenant with God in the form of the commandments, and it is those commandments that were in the Ark of the Covenant. So an ark holds treasure, holds words, brings promise, brings covenant.

That’s quite a bit for such a small, plain word, isn’t it? Ark comes to us from Latin arca, “box” – nothing more arcane than that. Our English ark is a short, sturdy word, almost a fragment; it shows up in so many other words (and its sound in even more). It’s quite popular in its role as abbreviation for Arkansas. You may remark on the marks you read on the page, or hark to the words you hear spoken. It is not a seed of these words, or a root, but it is carried in them and keeps them afloat. I will not even begin a list of words with the letters or sound in them; that’s an exercise you can occupy yourself with in your spare time.

But I will mention the photo with which I illustrate this note. This ARK is obviously scratched with many more words, the etchings (in Italian, “etchings” is graffiti) of the masses passing by. In fact, this ARK was hidden behind a metal sign for some time, and was revealed by the sign’s removal. To see it (I believe it is still there), you must travel through the dark void in a box, in this case a metal box, not made of rushes but used during rush hour; it holds words in many languages, some printed or etched but many more spoken and heard by the mingled masses of humanity carried safely to their futures in it. The box itself embodies something of a covenant with nature: if you’re in it with the others of humanity, sharing their words, you are not alone in a metal box by yourself, clogging up the streets and polluting the air.

Of course the box is a subway car. The sign is on a subway platform. In full, it reads QUEEN’S PARK. But at the end is a word, and the word is ark.

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flaxseed, linseed

Posted on August 7, 2011 | 5 comments

You’re probably familiar with Claude Débussy’s Prélude “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” If you’re not, or even if you are, I invite you to listen to a harp transcription of it played by a young woman with flaxen hair: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v_ys5Fgqiw

Now, that harpist is named Alexandra King, but I rather like to fancy that the name of the girl with the flaxen hair is Lindsay. I’m sure it’s not – that’s hardly a French name – but it does have a certain paronomastic appeal.

I’ll explain. In English, we call the plant with the blue flowers that produces the blonde fibres flax, and its useful seeds are often called flaxseeds (you can find them in certain hot cereals – Sunny Boy and Red River come to mind – and in some multi-grain bread, among other places). But the French have a quite different name for it, as you see in the French title of Débussy’s piece: “La fille aux cheveux de lin.” Yes, lin, which we do see in some English words: linen is one, and linseed is another. Indeed: linseed, which produces that oil that is used in so many places for so many things, is the same as flaxseed.

So lin makes me think of linseed, which makes me think of Lindsay. Now, Lindsay is not related to linseed at all; it’s actually a Scottish family name (a clan which I apparently have some connection to somewhere way back there), but in fact it’s not originally Scottish; it comes from Sir Walter de Lindesay, a retainer of King David I of Scotland (1084–1153), and he brought the name from Lincolnshire – Lindsay comes from words meaning “Lincoln’s wetland.” No relation indeed – you don’t even grow flax in wetland.

But look at the difference – taste the difference, even. Flax flashes and flaps; it is dry as flint, and it rustles like clean sheets in the breeze (which linen does not). It appears to come from old Indo-European roots meaning “plait”, though some suggest the real root relates to “flay”. It is perhaps ironic that flaxseed, with its printing-press sound, and its sword-crossing x and tall grassy f, sounds somewhat like flaccid.

Linseed, by comparison, is lighter, more liquid (better suited to oil than to crunching?), perhaps even more refined-seeming. It is the more classical word; it traces to Latin linum, meaning “flax”. Flaxseed and flaxen make me think of a country girl with flying whitish hair who delights in leaping fences; linen makes me think of domestic niceties, and the sound (not the oily taste) of linseed makes me think of a genteel lass, one who sits in parlors and plays piano. Or harp – except that, of course, Alexandra is rather more like flaxseed, isn’t it? Compared to the more feathered f of flax, the l of lin is lean and lithe: just a line (oh, yes, line is directly related to lin and linen – thanks to the threads, strings, and ropes one may make from flax). The n is legs held in parallel where the x is legs crossed. And so on – of course one may discern what one desires to see to match the sense.

But remember that the sense is in fact the same, really. The words are used in different contexts, but the plant is the same. Remember too, though, that the girl’s hair looks like the fibres, not the seeds. It may be, too, that her eyes are as blue as the flowers of flax, but we don’t know. We don’t know her name, either. But we do know that she has cherry-red lips, and that she has been sitting on the flowering alfalfa (not the linoleum), singing since the fresh morning.

We know this because Débussy’s piece is based on the poem “La fille aux cheveux de lin” by Leconte de Lisle:

Sur la luzerne en fleur assise,
Qui chante dès le frais matin ?
C’est la fille aux cheveux de lin,
La belle aux lèvres de cerise.

L’amour, au clair soleil d’été,
Avec l’alouette a chanté.

Ta bouche a des couleurs divines,
Ma chère, et tente le baiser !
Sur l’herbe en fleur veux-tu causer,
Fille aux cils longs, aux boucles fines ?

L’amour, au clair soleil d’été,
Avec l’alouette a chanté.

Ne dis pas non, fille cruelle !
Ne dis pas oui ! J’entendrai mieux
Le long regard de tes grands yeux
Et ta lèvre rose, ô ma belle !

L’amour, au clair soleil d’été,
Avec l’alouette a chanté.

Adieu les daims, adieu les lièvres
Et les rouges perdrix ! Je veux
Baiser le lin de tes cheveux,
Presser la pourpre de tes lèvres !

L’amour, au clair soleil d’été,
Avec l’alouette a chanté.

I hope you will not think me lax for not providing a translation here and now. In order to do the poem real justice (rather than simply translating it word for word, which rather betrays the overall poesy) I would need more time than I can spare this evening. I suggest that you instead watch the video of Alexandra King’s rendition again, and reflect on whether you find her more to suit flaxen hair or cheveux de lin.

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