Yearly Archives: 2011

avarice, greed, cupidity

Posted on July 21, 2011 | 7 comments

Dear word sommelier: I’m unsure whether what I want to describe is best called avarice, greed, or cupidity. Which should I use for what where and when?

Oh, heck, why have just one if you can have all three?

If you’re wondering about the semantic difference between the three, you’re not the only one. This question was discussed today on the Editors’ Association of Canada email list, and there were differing opinions about whether one or another was more or less money-specific. And while a dictionary might tell you some little difference like that – or actually more likely won’t be so obliging – what really matters is how the people who actually read or hear it, who are unlikely to be running every word through a dictionary, will perceive it. And we know that there are different views on that. In other words, never mind the label or the guidebook, let’s taste it and talk about food matching.

Words, after all, are known by the company they keep. And they also gain flavour by other words and sound patterns that they bring to mind. So let’s swirl and sniff and sip and spit (or swallow) each one of these.

Greed is now the most common of the three by a fair measure, though if Google ngrams are to be believed it was not always thus (remember, though, that the Google ngrams search books, not popular usage in general). Its popularity gives it a certain commonness but also gives it more accretions. There are the pop culture references – “Greed is good,” as Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko said in Wall Street, and Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged also glorified greed; meanwhile, Han Solo blasted a slimeball named Greedo in a cantina on Tattooine – and it tends to show up with words such as corporate, human, personal, pure, sheer, and simple.

It has a taste of green, as in envy, and creed, as in a fixed statement of belief. And it has that growling, gripping /gr/ onset. Generally it is the most purely negatively toned of the three, Gekko and Rand notwithstanding. Interestingly, while greed tends to focus on financial and material acquisition, greedy, its related adjective, can also be used comfortably to refer to such things as eating. Just by the way, greed actually comes from greedy, not the other way around; greedy is itself a derivative form of a Germanic root for “hunger” or “greed”, however.

Avarice is less popular than it used to be – the word, I mean, not the thing, which is quite durable. It is found in more elevated texts – it is more erudite in tone, and seems a more expensive word. It’s like greed as practiced by “the right sort” of people – greed with a bowtie. It’s also one of the seven deadly sins. It comes from Latin avaritia, from avarus “greedy”, and it’s been used in English at least since Chaucer.

The feel of it may vary a bit from person to person – it makes me think of avaler, French for “swallow”; also avalanche, avenue, rara avis, avid, average, maybe aviatrix, and perhaps advice… Its adjective, avaricious, on the other hand, carries an air of vicious. Avarice seems comparatively open and airy in sound; certainly the mouth is much more open than for greed.

Cupidity, in the here and now, is one of those words that people probably feel a little twinge of pride in knowing, because it’s sufficiently uncommon. It’s a bit like avarice with a PhD. It keeps pricier company – words such as pudor and rapacity may be seen in the same sentence. Or maybe I’m only thinking of education because someone pointed out to me once, as we were walking by it, the cupid that is on top of the spire of The Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, and I said it was a monument to cupidity (Harvard’s endowment is $26 billion. Yes, $26 billion). And, yes, that chubby little cherub shares a root with this word: Latin cupidus, “eagerly desirous”. It’s a little newer to our tongue, having arrived in the 1500s.

The taste of cupidity is conditioned by various odd echoes: stupidity, cube, cubic zirconium, cubit… It is a word with a cup that runneth over (and still wants to be refilled). And it may well have a tinge of sexual desire, not just from Cupid but from concupiscence (which might be practiced in combination with a cupidous concubine). But it is the crispest of the three words, chunky, blocky, or at least tapping; its four syllables have four stops, each with a vowel, while avarice has three syllables with fricatives and a liquid (and vowels before consonants), and greed has two stops, a liquid, and only one vowel.

So which to use? Consider the rhythm and the sounds of the sentence around; consider also the tone – how lofty or plain? How harsh or mitigated?

But certainly keep all three in your bank to use. Look, you can never have too many words at your disposal. And spending them is actually your best investment.

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groundhog

Posted on July 18, 2011 | 4 comments

Maury and I and Maury’s friend Gwen (Jennifer) were besporting ourselves at the pool at Maury’s uncle Red’s country place. More specifically, Gwen was swimming laps (in spite of being two martinis to the better), I was swimming a bit and standing a bit, and Maury was sitting in a deck chair, fully clad, on his third martini.

“You should come in!” Gwen shouted at Maury. “It’s fun! Exercise does a body good!”

“I am of the conviction,” Maury said, “that one’s heart has only so many beats in a lifetime. Raising one’s heart rate therefore shorten’s one’s life.”

“I think I’ve pointed out the error in that reasoning before,” I said. “For instance, because I exercise, my resting heart rate is about 20 beats per minute slower than it used to be when I didn’t exercise. While I’m exercising, it averages about 80 beats per minute faster than my resting heart rate used to be, or 100 beats faster than my resting rate. But I only exercise six hours a week. So one twenty-eighth of my time is spent exercising each week. That means my average heart rate is… let’s see, a difference of 100 averaged out over 28, just about three and a half… my average heart rate is about sixteen and a half beats per minute slower than it would be if I didn’t exercise. Sixteen and a half times how many minutes are there in a lifetime?”

“Alright, I get the point,” Maury said. “I nonetheless find this option more refreshing. And I’m less likely to drown.”

“Except your sorrows.”

“May they be few.”

Just then, Maury’s uncle Red strode out. “Lady and gentlemen, I would like to point out that the sky is darkening and there will soon be lightning.”

I pulled myself up out of the pool. Gwen protested: “But that’s why I’m in the pool! I’m lightening myself up!” Funny how the skinny ones always complain about their weight.

“You could end up blackened,” Red said, “like catfish. C’mon in, food’s a-fixing.”

We retreated obligingly. I headed to my room to change. As I opened the door I heard a sudden scuffling noise, and I noticed the corner of the carpet turned up. But a first scan of the room showed no animate forms.

Hm.

I knelt down and looked lower. I found what I sought beneath the bedside table: a critter that looked like a gopher, but click-dragged to rather larger size. A groundhog. It was cowering and looking at me nervously.

I shouted into the hall. “Red! There’s a groundhog in my room!”

Red came around the corner. “Oh fer… gracious mercy… He was in here yesterday. It’s like Groundhog Day.” Maury and Gwen appeared behind him.

“Well, we aren’t all that far from Wiarton,” I observed.

Gwen peeked down. “And he does look a bit like Bill Murray. I wonder what he’s after in here.”

“Some marmot-lade, perhaps?” Maury said. (Groundhogs are a kind of marmot.)

“Maybe it’s looking for some wood to chuck,” I said. (Woodchuck is another name for a groundhog.)

“Well,” Red said, “he can chuck all the wood that a woodchuck chucks… outside. And hog the ground there too. Hand me that broom. And open that door.” He gestured to the door to the outside that my room – actually a converted covered porch – featured. I went over and opened it. Maury handed Red the broom, and then grabbed a golf putter that was leaning against the wall.

Red looked at Maury. “What are you doing with that? We’re trying to chase the poor thing out, not beat it to putty. I have all the ground hog I need in the kitchen. Oh, no vegans here, right? Because I’m making something I saw on Epic Meal Time.”

“I’m just trying to help encourage it to go to ground,” Maury said.

“Well, let’s line up and make a path to the door for it. Coooome on, little guy… get the hell outa here.” A little encouragement and some sweeping under the bed eventually resulted in our little friend making a break for it through the open door, which we swiftly closed.

“I wonder where it will go,” Gwen said.

“Oh, it has plenty of room out there,” Red said. “This used to be a farm. I’ve sold off most of the turf, but I still hogged enough of the ground for myself. Just as long as it stays away from my car.”

“Have you seen Red’s car?” Maury said. “It’s in the barn. It’s a brilliant red Barchetta.”

“Bugatti,” Red corrected him. “It’s a real rush to drive.”

“You don’t need to worry about him stealing your car,” Gwen said. “He’s not Mr. Toad.”

I, meanwhile, was standing there sounding out the various names of the beastie. “Grrroundhoooggg… round and rumbling… Wood! chuck! short and sharp… Marrrmota monax… murmuring up to a crack, like lightning in reverse…”

The heavens obliged at that moment with a crack of a lightning bolt not so far away and the following rolling rumble.

“Poor thing,” Gwen said, looking out towards the groundhog’s path of retreat. “What if the lightning zaps him?”

“It’s OK,” Maury said. “He’s a natural ground.”

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Jennifer, juniper

Posted on July 17, 2011 | 1 comment

Maury’s uncle Red has a country place, and Maury wangled an invitation for a set of his friends to come up and spend the weekend. He intimated to me that he was bringing a new interest named Jennifer.

It was rather hot out when I arrived, so I quickly dropped my bags and changed into swim gear. I passed through the kitchen to grab a bevvy, but Maury said that he had some he was just fixing up that he would bring out shortly. So I made a beeline to the pool.

I was just setting down my towel when a fetching lady emerged through some ornamental heather near the pool’s edge. “Hello,” I said. “I’m James.”

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Gwen. In fact, I’m gwen into the pool.”

I paused. “Oh, you must be Maury’s friend. I thought your name was Jennifer. …Oh, wait.”

“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “Gwen as in short for Jennifer.”

“Because Jennifer is really a Cornish version of the name Guinevere,” I said. “Yes, I’ve seen Shaw’s Doctor’s Dilemma.”

“Yup,” she said. She quoted from the play: “‘My name is Jennifer.’ ‘A strange name.’ ‘Not in Cornwall. I am Cornish. It’s only what you call Guinevere.’ Well, thanks in part to Shaw, it’s not so strange anymore. Jennifer is now about as plane as Jane, so I went with the English version and then shortened it to Welsh roots.” This was true: Guienevere is from Welsh gwen “white, fair, blessed, holy” and hwyfar “smooth, soft”.

“You could have gone with Gaynor,” I said. Gaynor is a variant of Guinevere.

“Ew. Didn’t want to. ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor would be playing through my life. Anyway, it’s getting common in England, and over here sounds a bit too much like Gaylord.”

At this juncture Maury arrived with a pitcher of martinis and some glasses. “Ah,” said Gwen, “you’ve brought my namesake.”

“Juniper and Jennifer aren’t really related,” Maury said.

“Oh, jenever know,” Gwen said, playing on Dutch for “gin”. “Yes, yes, I know it’s from Latin.”

“And from juniper,” I volunteered, “come genever and genièvre and ultimately gin.”

“Maury mentioned that,” Gwen said. “But I do like the similarity of sounds. Jennifer and juniper differ only in one vowel and one consonant, and those consonants are closely related.”

“For all that,” I said, “Jennifer has a bit more of a rustle as of heather, and juniper has a little more of a nip to it.”

“Meanwhile, Guinevere starts with a g and all those variants on juniper begin with the letter g,” Gwen said. “But Maury, dahling, can you give me mine with a twist? Since I’m by the pool.”

Maury obliged and handed Gwen a decent-sized martini with a twist of lemon peel. She held it up in toast: “Gin gin!” Then she downed the whole glass and danced a quick little twist. But her foot caught on my towel and she spun into the pool with a bit of a flip and a bit more of a splash.

“Well,” Maury observed as she resurfaced spluttering, “that was a double Gaynor.”

“She did say she was Gwen in,” I remarked.

“Ha,” said she. “I will survive.” She held up the martini glass that she was somehow still holding. “Arrr. Pirate Jenny wants a refill.”

I looked at Maury as if to say, “You’ve found a winner.” He just lifted an eyebrow and the jug and refilled her glass.

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bung

Posted on July 14, 2011 | 3 comments

Lynne Murphy, @lynneguist, separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/, mentioned today on Twitter a word that I (like her) have come to see as particularly British in flavour: bung.

It’s not that I encountered it first in a British context; actually, I knew it first as the name of the alcoholic court jester in The Wizard of Id, the cartoon strip by Brant Parker and Johnny Hart (see johnhartstudios.com/wizardofid/characters/index.php?page=bung). It was some time after that that I learned that it was another word for a cork.

But cork is a tight, stopped-up-sounding word, starting and ending with /k/. It’s what you stick in a bottle – you can hear the sound as you push it back into a bottle that (like you) is half drunk (“cork, cork, cork”), or later as you pull it back out (“corrrrk”). Bung is resonant. It’s something you would stick in a barrel, whacking it in with a rubber mallet so the entire vessel makes a “bung!” sound.

Not that that’s where cork comes from, nor – in the case of the stopper – bung. That kind of bung seems to be related to Middle Dutch bonge, meaning the same thing, which may have come ultimately from Latin puncta “hole” (though there are some holes in the etymological trail too). There is also a sense of bung as “dead” (or “bankrupt”) that comes from an Australian Aboriginal language. But some uses of bung do seem to originate in sound symbolism – specifically the senses meaning “throw violently, put forcibly” and “right in the middle of things” – and it’s quite reasonable, I’d say, to think that there is real influence of the sound on all senses (certainly in English usage), just as the “stopper” sense surely has some effect on the non-stopper uses.

At any rate, in Britain the word gets around; they will often say (as Lynne Murphy points out) “My nose is all bunged up” rather than “My nose is all stuffed up,” and they may say, as the Macmillan Dictionary says, “Bung the ball to me, Jack” or “Bring me another beer and just bung it on the bill” – in those senses it’s not merely a real or metaphorical projectile motion that is signified, but specifically a fairly careless one (as may go with the bluntness and dullness of sound of the word – not as focal as bang, let alone bing, nor even as bright as bong). They also use it to refer to bribery and other under-the-table financial payments, as for example secret financial incentives to facilitate a deal in British football  (thanks to Lynne for the examples as well).

One may imagine that if you throw a cork (metaphorically) into the middle of a shady transaction in a small house, thereby stopping the action and basically killing it, you could say that you bung a bung bung into the middle of a bung in a bungalow, bunging it up so it’s bung. But that sounds like a bungled jungle of bungs…

I do hope that Lynne Murphy does not find this effort merely echoic of hers. But I thought it a good way to direct you all to her blog and Twitter feed, which are worthy of notice. And it’s a good excuse to move farther afield than just my usual Torontonian perspective.

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under the sea

Posted on July 13, 2011 | 1 comment

Dear Word Sommelier: I was just watching The Little Mermaid and I was struck by the song “Under the Sea.” The sea is the water, right? All the creatures are in the water; only the sea bed is under it. So shouldn’t it be “in the sea”? Or is this one of those idiomatic things? If I wanted to write about the beauty of sea life, should I write about the colours in the sea or the colours under the sea?

Oh, prepositions are bedeviling. Which preposition goes with what is one of the least predictable things about any language. But I’m not going to wave this off with “It’s idiomatic” (which might be read as “It’s idiotic, Ma”). In this case you have two usable options, depending on your choice of schema for the sea: as container or voluminous body, or as surface with or without depth: without, like a boardwalk (“under the boardwalk, down by the sea”), or with, like a blanket of snow.

Under the sea uses the “surface” schema; it means below the surface of the sea, and – giving the sense that it’s a surface with depth – usually towards the bottom; the fact that it’s actually in the seawater doesn’t change the “under” relationship to the surface and to all the water on top of whatever is under the sea. Jules Verne’s book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is something that often hovers in the mind when one speaks of being under the sea, as does the Beatles’ “I’d like to be under the sea, in an octopus’s garden in the shade.” Another phrase that makes use of the same schema is beneath the sea – or, perhaps more commonly, as in “Octopus’s Garden,” beneath the waves (do remember that waves are more than just a pure surface phenomenon in reality). We must remember, too, the very common word and image underwater (and its counterpart underground).

In the sea, on the other hand, uses the “container” or “voluminous body” schema (that’s two different schemata, not two names for the same one). It presents an image of being in the water, surrounded by it or as part of it or using it as a medium. It can even involve being partly out of the sea (e.g., swimming, which you do not do “on the sea”).

There’s also the question of vantage point. If you’re looking at the colours in the sea, you’re most likely looking at them from outside, perhaps on a boat looking down into it. To see all the colours under the sea, you’d more likely have an undersea perspective yourself – if not in a submarine or scuba diving, then at least snorkeling or in a glass-bottom boat. Also, colours in the sea could imply or at least include the colours of the water itself, which colours under the sea would less likely do – though it might imply the colour of the light coming down through the water.

There’s also the phonaesthetic angle, which is a little fuzzier: under has that depth of sound, that hollow central vowel with the resonant nasal-stop /nd/ and the echo syllabic /r/, just like thunder (and also, of course, blunder, chunder, plunder, and wonder). Anyone who has had their head under water and heard hard things bonking together in the water (even if it’s just your shampoo bottle falling into the tub) will have some sense of that hollow sound. In, on the other hand, has a high front vowel into a simple nasal. It’s short, direct, less resonant, less capable of evocativeness. One might say it’s a jackknife dive to under’s cannonball, but it’s not really amenable to even that much flourish.

In a song like “Under the Sea,” of course, the rhythm is an important part of it. But for other uses, you may also want to consider the sound and the rhythm along with the image. Oh, and less-common usages tend to have a certain dearness compared to more-common ones… and under the sea is and (indications are) has always been somewhat less common than in the sea.

Just as a parting shot, ask yourself whether you would use under the ocean. I suspect most people would find it less idiomatic. Sea, an English word as long as there has been an English, has more native idioms and a greater literary accretion. Ocean is a loan from Greek (via Latin and French, arriving in English in the 13th century) and, like many such, is a little more technical and precise, and a little less flexible.

Thanks to Gael Spivak and several other editorial colleagues for input and inspiration.

Questions for the word sommelier are always welcome!

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baksheesh

Posted on July 12, 2011 | 3 comments

You may most likely hear this word in some expression of exasperation: “The whole economy there is lubricated by baksheesh! Everywhere you go around there, to get anything done, you have to slip them a buck behind the back! Sheesh! You’d think baksheesh was the sound of the printing press producing all those extra banknotes!”

Well, yes, there are some places where it’s a good tip to know that one is expected to give a good tip, as it were. But remember that, just as tip is not actually an acronym for “to improve performance” (no, it’s not; it’s not an acronym at all), baksheesh doesn’t come with performance guarantees, either… aside from a reasonable guarantee of lack of obstruction. You could think of it as the sound of a latch clicking (bak) and a sliding door opening (sheesh).

But it can also be a payment of alms – in India and Pakistan, the beggars cry “Baksheesh, baba!” – and a thanks or a veneration, for giving the opportunity to gain merit by giving alms or for the simple act of performing one’s little job (as a waiter, doorman, parking attendant, or what have you). It can be outright bribery of an official, too, of course, but it can also be subtler – a donation to a police charity, earning a bumper sticker that might make the boys in blue more favourably disposed, for instance. Generally it’s money, but I suppose other things given could count (perhaps baklava or hashish?).

Just as the act has various forms and valences, so too the word has a few different forms. The pronunciation is always the same – with that mechanical clack and slide like a machine that requires lubrication – but it has been spelled in English as baksheesh, bakhshish, bakshish, bakshis, buckshish, backsheesh (a spelling I saw just today in the cartoon Alex, www.alexcartoon.com/cartoons/5749_12072011.gif), and even (a couple of centuries ago) buxees. And the word has other spellings in other languages – bakchich, Backschisch, and spellings in the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets. It doesn’t mean quite the same thing everywhere, either: in Balkan languages, it generally just means “tip” the same way we mean “tip” in Canada, and in Greek it can mean simply “gift”.

“Gift” is probably the best word for it anyway. Not just because you really can’t expect much in return (as opposed to the rather negative things you may expect in its absence in some contexts), but because it comes from Persian for “gift, present”, from a verb meaning “give”.

Just incidentally, there’s a Punjabi name Bakshi that comes from the Persian for “paymaster”. But that’s not the source of the family name of famed animation director Ralph Bakshi; his is a Krymchak (Turkic Crimean) Jewish name derived from the Turkish word for “garden”. Well, every garden needs a little seed money to keep it animated, too… but to be of the Bakshis or even just Bakshi-ish has nonetheless nothing to do with baksheesh.

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viraginity

Posted on July 12, 2011 | 1 comment

This is, of course, what Kate loses at the end of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.

No, no, no, look again! There is that a in there! You see that it makes the heart of the word like an incomplete raging. And in the pronunciation it not only adds an unstressed vowel (compared with virginity) but changes the quality of the first vowel, so that it is no longer a syllabic /r/ (or something near) but becomes an actual /I/ as in spirit.

Spirit, of course, is something Kate has in abundance in that play. She may be a virgin, but she is not blushing or modest. Virgin comes from Latin virgo, probably related to virga “branch”, but Kate’s not a tender shoot – nope, she’s a real switch, a stick to whip with. But take a little piece of wood and dip it in the right solution and you will get a match, which can really ignite something – and Kate meets her match, and the sparks do indeed fly.

Kate, you see, is a virago quite surely – virago meaning a bold woman: in its approbative sense, a warrior woman, but in its negative sense a termagant, a shrew. A woman who does not behave as was thought womanly at the time the word came about (and, honestly, ideas about what is appropriately feminine behaviour do persist today). And a word for the quality of being a virago – a rare word, to be sure, but it’s in Oxford – is viraginity. It’s a nice enough word in itself; the a adds balance, putting the g in the middle, and the v pairs with the y to counterpoise the verticals in the middle. And the whole thing stays at the tip of your tongue – while virago bounces to the back and so on down.

But whence virago? Has it to do with vinegar? No. With rage, with vigour? No. And don’t even ask about that popular drug that many men like to use (why would I want to snag on spam filters?). Nor is it the name of a Shakespearean character. It comes, in fact, from vir, “man”; it means a woman who is manlike. It was also used in early English translations of the Bible for the name Adam gave Eve: “And Adam seide… This schal be clepid virago, for she is takun of man.” No branch here; we’re talking about a rib.

Well, fair enough: Petruchio takes quite a bit of ribbing – and beating – from Kate in the course of the play. But the two are really just two sides of a coin, made for each other… she may seem to surrender, but watch if he does not come under her thumb in the long run. Does she really lose her viraginity, or does she put it in trust in order to gain interest – and leverage?

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tosh

Posted on July 10, 2011 | 3 comments

A colleague who is not a native English speaker was looking at Doris & Bertie’s “Does your writing pass the ‘mum’ test?” The poster and the “mum” (mother) in question are both British, it would appear, and one comment on a bit of consulting-biz buzzword babble was “all sounds like tosh.” My colleague was wondering what tosh meant, as to her (perhaps by no coincidence an erstwhile dreadlock wearer, though of Polish extraction) it was just the name of a reggae musician.

Well, indeed, to me, tosh also immediately calls to mind the noted reggae man and Rastafarian Peter Tosh (born Winston Hubert McIntosh). But I am aware at the same time that it refers to trash, bosh, rubbish, piffle, stuff and nonsense… basically some bit of dish-dosh that someone pulled out of their tush.

It’s such a nice, hand-flipping word – it seems like just the sort of thing some toff might say when having a bit of a tiff and wishing to brush it all off and dash back to his quaff (perhaps a Pimm’s): “What a load of tosh.” The milieu: likely early 20th century, the costume perhaps tennis whites or dinner tails, the author Wodehouse or Waugh or someone like that. Or even, perhaps, you will picture hearing it from a 1940s middle-class housewife in her row house in Wandsworth or Wapping…

Well, the 1920s through the 1940s in Britain were this word’s heyday. So now when you use it you can call on not only the attitude and the sound it presents but also on the taste of that milieu. The word in this sense first showed up in the 1890s, though, and there were other words also tosh that showed up earlier in the 1800s: “bath or footpan”, 1880s, and “valuable items (especially made of copper) retrieved from drains and sewers”, 1850s; there’s also an 18th- and 19th-century Scottish adjective tosh meaning “neat, tidy” or “agreeable, comfortable” (not necessarily plush or cushy, let alone posh, but at least with a nice touch of titivation).

The relation of these words to one another (if any or much of any) is not clear, nor is the origin of our trashy tosh. It may have some influence from bosh, a Turkish word with much the same meaning brought into English in the earlier 1800s. But of course bosh bursts with a blunt /b/, whereas tosh spits crisply off the tip of the tongue with /t/. Both are like a water balloon bursting, but the former more through overfilling and the latter through dashing on your door. And tosh also brings to mind tush, by which I mean here not the short form of tuches but the impatient interjection, rhyming with hush, that means “oh, rubbish” or “what a load of tosh”. This tush, around since the 1400s, may have influenced tosh, but we don’t know for sure.

At any rate, tosh is a nice, concise word with which to brush off prolix poppycock – the kind of twaddle turned out by those who believe that if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, you should baffle them with… well, tosh.

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grawlix

Posted on July 7, 2011 | 4 comments

You know those symbols cartoonists use for swearwords – the squiggly lines, the punctuation marks, the stars and skulls and mushroom clouds and so on? Perhaps the sort of thing Hagar the Horrible would emit if he found crawlies in his gravlax? Or what Sarge growls at Beetle for being lax? Have you ever thought, “There has to be a name for these things”?

Well, Mort Walker did. And, not being aware of one per se, he made up one.

Well, OK, he made up several, according to type, along with names for various other marks one sees in cartoons (surrounding a character’s head to denote surprise or anxiety, for instance). The words were, by all evidences, made up off the top of his head because he liked the sound of them: blurgits, briffits, jarns, quimps, nittles… They didn’t fall instantly into the dustbin of history; their creator was, after all, Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, and he published a book (The Lexicon of Comicana) detailing them. But the one that has really caught on is the one that, starting as a word for an incoherent squiggle, has come to refer to all kinds of marks indicating profanity: grawlix, plural grawlixes.

It does seem like an apposite word, doesn’t it? It has such suitable flavours: the gripping, growling /gr/ onset, and the overtones of growl, craw, curl, raw, rail, licks, garlic, warlocks, prolix, and scrawl, among others, plus the suitable shapes: the crossing-out of x, the open jaw or curling intestine of g (depending on how it’s written), the w that may be like an accordion from Hell or just may be two more x’s waiting to be formed, the l like a line of surprise on a cartoon character’s head, the i like an inverted exclamation mark.

Some people have imagined that words in general at first came about through just this kind of creation: give it a name because it sounds right. But, while we obviously have various words that have been created that way, we have to stop and ask, “What makes it sound right?”

In the case of a word such as this one, there is very likely influence of other known words and sound patterns in English, plus attitudes towards such things as the letter x. But you can’t have any of that until you have a well-established language and culture. If you’re a proto-human looking for a word to name something that doesn’t have a word, what do you do? Make a word on the basis of other words you already have for resemblant things? What if you have none such? Make a word on the basis of sound resemblances (onomatopoeia)? What it it’s a big rock? Make it on the basis of sensed appropriateness for size and similar qualities (based on experience of high sounds going with smaller size, etc.)? Go with something that you somehow remember from your own formative experiences? Was there really any first person who just made up language, or did it just slowly grow over generations from something not quite language to something fully language?

Well, probably that last one, but, really, we have no #@%& idea. All we know is we’re here, now, and we have the linguistic and cultural accretions to produce and appreciate a word like grawlix.

Thanks to Adrienne Montgomerie for mentioning this word on Twitter today.

Follow me on Twitter if you want (or don’t if you don’t): @sesquiotic.

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bobcat

Posted on July 7, 2011 | 2 comments

I’ve been enjoying watching a couple of bobcats lately. No, not via webcam, and I’m not watching old Hinterland Who’s Who episodes. I’m watching them out my window. They’re gradually ripping apart the building next door to my office, floor by floor.

Right, I mean the small front-end loader machines, popular on farms, construction sites, and so on. (Obviously I should have written Bobcat loaders, but that would have given away the game.) The building next door is – was – an office building, and the bobcats are lifted onto the floors by crane and used for knocking out walls and fixtures and dumping them out what used to be the window. I must admit, though, it’s a pleasing picture to imagine a couple of feisty felines doing the damage.

On the other hand, it would also be quite amusing to picture twin versions of Bobcat Goldthwait doing it. He might just run around screaming at things and they would crumble. (See his role in Police Academy for the reference.) Of course, in the world of real physics, he’d probably do pretty much bupkes.

The word bobcat is rather likeable. It has that one-two punch of a two-syllable two-morpheme compound, as though it’s a more specific, more emphasized version of cat. (Vulgarities sometimes gain a similar impact from the addition of horse, bull, goat, or such like before the focal four-letter word.) It has a nice balance, too, with the twin voiced stops bouncing off the lips first, and then two voiceless stops bringing in the tongue tail and tip. The vowels also balance, back vowel with front consonant and then front vowel with the farther-back consonants. And it’s sort of pretty, too – I do fancy the two b’s to be like the tufted ears of a bobcat, and the t perhaps to be a bit like the short tail.

And it’s that short tail that gives the cat its name – the bob is the same as in “a pageboy bob” for a short haircut for women, or bobtail as in “bet my money on the bobtail nag” and “bells on bobtail ring, making spirits bright” for a horse with a docked tail. It may be from a Gaelic root. This bob doesn’t have any known etymological connection with the name Robert, though Robert is the real first first name of Bobcat Goldthwait.

Whether the animal as a whole is short is a matter of perspective. It’s the smallest of the lynx family, and so much smaller than most wild cats, but it’s still around three feet long (66–104 cm, according to animals.nationalgeographic.com) and up to 30 pounds (14 kg). You might think it a pretty kitty, but if you want cat scratch marks, it will surely deliver if it has to.

The odds of your getting so close – or even seeing one out your window – are not so high, though. They avoid people and are most active in the hours around dawn and dusk. And the odds of seeing two of them working together are even worse; they’re solitary animals. But, on the other hand, you might live closer to one than you think: they’re found throughout quite a large part of North America, and there are lots of them out there – probably more than a million.

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