Yearly Archives: 2011

oxalate

Posted on July 5, 2011 | 2 comments

To my taste, this word seems to oscillate. It opens with hug and kiss, or open and shut, or light and dark – ox – and then flutters with ala… but that may be just the beginning of a late addition…

It comes from Latin oxalis “sorrel” (from Greek ὀξύς oxus “sour”, which is also found in oxygen). Sorrel is a plant with pretty (often white) flowers. Wood sorrel has been eaten and used for medicines for millennia (though you may not ever have had any as such). Oxalate makes me think of Ocala (apparently meaning “big hammock”), the name of a city in Florida, and of Oglala (meaning “scatter their own”), a branch of the Sioux, and of Oksana, as in Oksana Baiul, Olympic and world figure skating champion from the 1990s.

But it especially makes me think of Oxala (pronounced, and sometimes spelled, Oshala), an alternate name of the Yoruba/Candomblé deity Obatala. Oxala is the deity said to have created human bodies, the deity of clarity and clarification, of purity and whiteness – all white, always white, everything associated with Oxala is white. And the view given by Oxala of the world is all blacks and whites, lights and darks – no grey.

But this is not to say that Oxala is all “goodness” all the time, in spite of having qualities parallelling Jesus (such as a resurrection story). The Yoruba deities have their own individual characters; Oxala had a falling out with his brother at one point, and at another he got drunk on palm wine and made some mistakes in his acts of creation.

One of those mistakes may or may not be oxalate. It is present in your body, but mostly from the food you eat – quite a lot of foods have it, including black pepper, dark chocolate, and black tea (and many things that are not especially black or white; I’m not sure whether it’s in Oxo bouillon or oxtail soup, but probably).

Or, rather, they have oxalic acid, C2O4H2. In your body, it loses its hydrogens and becomes an ion (oxalate) that combines quite readily with various minerals. And some of those combinations are not light but heavy; they do not stay dissolved – they have a falling out. After all, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.

This precipitate may simply pass out of the body with the rest of the waste. Then again, it may not. Calcium oxalate is a primary component of kidney stones. Thus the question of whether oxalate is a bad thing.

But perhaps it oscillates. It has its good. It has proven useful in some drug formulations involving metals. Oxalic acid is also quite useful for cleaning surfaces, purifying them and giving them a shine – and for bleaching.

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vice

Posted on July 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

A few of us were at Domus Logogustationis, malingering after the annual general meeting. Edgar Frick held high the remains of a bottle of quite passable Chianti and gestured towards Maury. “Let’s drink a toast to our new vice president!”

Glasses were empty all around. I thrust mine forth; Maury edged his ahead of mine; Marilyn Frack, already tipsy, leaned forward precariously with hers, nearly spilling out of her chair and perhaps her leather blouse.

“I’m the president of vice,” declared Edgar, “so I make the call and decide in favour of Maury.” He filled Maury’s glass with the last of the bottle. “Oh! Well, there’s another one here.” He reached down and produced a new bottle. “Different producer, but…” He started looking around for something.

“Fungi vice,” I said. (That’s “fun-jye vie-see.” It refers to a suitable equivalent substitute.)

“Never mind the fungi,” said Maury, “this is the vice I see, and it is a nice vice.”

“It’s an apposite one, too,” I said, “given that vice as in ‘clamp’ comes from Latin vitis, referring here to a screw but actually meaning a grape vine – since their vines grew in spirals.”

“That’s suitable,” purred Marilyn, “since drinking can lead to screwing, and vice-a versa.”

Edgar looked up. “That’s vice-versa, my delicious, not visa-versa.”

“I know that! And you know I know that. I was just making a pun. Since I am not averse to a vice.”

“Well, speaking of screws, have you got one, comma, cork?”

“Oh, give me that bottle,” said Marilyn. “I have a way of extracting the cork without one.”

“Perhaps not here, darling…”

“No, not that!” Marilyn giggled. “I just need a shoe…”

“There’s another bottle over there,” Maury said, pointing offstage right, “with a screwcap. I wouldn’t want to damage the immovables.” (He knew what Marilyn was about to do: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAx2TXt1v_I. Don’t worry, it’s not naughty.)

Edgar trotted off after the other bottle. Marilyn contemplated the unopened one she held. “Well, of all the vices to be in the grip of, this is one of the better ones… Say, isn’t that the origin of our use of vice for something like this? It puts the screws to you?”

“In fact not,” Maury said. “It’s a different Latin root: vitium, ‘fault, defect’. So that rather vitiates that link, appealing as it may be.”

“Well, how vicious,” Marilyn said, pouting slightly.

“And then,” I said, “rather not fungi vice, there’s the third vice, as in president, versa, and fungi. It’s from vicis, ‘place, stead, turn’.”

“Turn!” Marilyn said. “You see, we’re back to spinning around… or is that the room…”

“Perhaps too many vice verses have given you vertigo,” Maury said.

“Those are all from the same root,” I pointed out: “versa, verse, vertigo, all from vertere, verb, ‘turn’.”

Marilyn began to sing, a rare thing for her. “Turn, turn, turn… You spin me right round, baby, right round…” She looked around. “I want either Edgar or a shoe. Or a screw. Comma, cork.”

Edgar obligingly reappeared. “Put a cork in it, darling.”

“Screw off,” Marilyn said.

Edgar obliged: with the customary cracking sound, he broke the seal on the screwcap and unscrewed it. “Veni, vidi, vici… vice!”

I thrust my glass forth again. “And now, please…” I sang out a line from Verdi’s “Anvil chorus” from Il Trovatore: “Versami un tratto!” (“Pour me a drink!”)

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marmoreal

Posted on July 2, 2011 | 1 comment

Is it mere rumour that our murmured memories seem more real when immured in the armor of a marmoreal memorial? Are words engraved on a stone, or forms resembled in marble, the Ozymandian azimuth of immortality, or are they just marmalade or Marmite on the toast of eternity?

And do big questions call for big words? Or for hard words? Marmoreal is a fairly large word, but a soft one, two lip-pillows of nasals and three smooth liquids, like the water of the stream of time that wears down even the rocks. A smaller and harder word that means the same (when an adjective) is marble. It has a nasal and two liquids, but you can hear the stop of the /b/ in between the liquids, and it converts them from the murmur of winds and waters to the rumble of boulders and smaller rocks as they tumble from crumbling temples.

How do we come to have these two words? We can blame the French. The original Latin word for “marble” is marmor, from Greek μάρμαρος marmaros. Our word marmoreal is formed directly from the Latin, as we often do it. But marmor became marbre in French, the nasal gaining audibility by hardening to a stop, and in English we made our lives a bit easier again by holding down the tongue tip to an /l/ to stop the rolling /r/.

So we have a word reminiscent of Montreal, which in English has a stop in the middle but in French is much like most of marmoreal. And Mount Royal, with its monuments and its cemeteries and oratory with all their marble, the timeless handcrafts that aim to frame humanity in eternity… is not more eternal than any remote mountain range with its arboreal roamers and its marmots ambling.

Our efforts last, but they did not come first and they will not stay last. Even our immortal words are changed – by nature, because we are part of nature. And so are the stones we move around to mark our moments. We may take it for granite, but even our marmoreal monuments are not more real than memories, for it is only memory that gives them meaning.

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tragic, tragedy

Posted on July 1, 2011 | 1 comment

I have a challenge for you: listen to your local TV news and see if you can get through it once – even just once – without hearing tragic, tragedy, or both.

I just heard it again myself: “It appears to have been a tragic accident.” If you know how newsreaders say these things, when I tell you it was a concluding statement you probably have the intonation contour in your head already: roughly A AD D D DC [pause] A CC BAA (“it aPPEARS TO HAVE BEEn [pause] a tragic accident”).

What is tragic? What is tragedy? Well, the words have a certain feel that’s worth a look. They have the paired tongue-tip affricates of, for instance, judge, but with that rolling-in /r/ you get in /gr/ and /kr/ words such as great, grief, crap, Christ, grip, and gross. It has a bit of a different feel with the /t/ or /d/ (which become like “j” and “ch” before the /r/) – think of the feel of traffic tragedy on the train tracks – perhaps lacking the sense of base or depth you get from the back of the tongue, but there’s that straining-forward constriction: say tragedy emphatically and see how your lips thrust forward like an African mask. So the word has a good feel and shape for the effect.

But is the effect appropriate? Are these words well used? Ah, there’s something of a debate about that. This is where the newer usage of these words really gets some people’s goats. James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus weighed in on it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

—Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

—Repeat, said Lynch.

Stephen repeated the definitions slowly.

—A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions.

More often the dissent is on the basis of the Aristotelian idea, in which a hero capable of great acts falls to disaster (catastrophe) in a sudden reversal (peripeteia) through a flaw of character (hamartia), an overreaching (hubris). The audience (and perhaps one or more characters) experiences emotional cleansing (catharsis) through this.

But Aristotle’s idea was just Aristotle’s analysis. He didn’t write any plays himself – he described them a century after the heyday of Athenian drama – and the plays of the classical Greek theatre did not universally follow the pattern he described.

So what was a tragedy, originally? A goat song, it seems, if the usual etymology of  τράγος tragos “goat” and ᾠδή oidé “song” is to be believed. But no one’s entirely sure exactly how that came to be the name of the serious drama of Greece. Perhaps it was related to the satyr play that originally formed the fourth piece after a trilogy of serious works.

What we do know is that Greek tragedies involved a small number of actors and a fair-sized all-singing, all-dancing chorus; that they focused on mythical subjects; that the actors wore masks; that the writing was poetic; and that they didn’t always end, um, tragically. Sometimes the ending was happy. Even when it was sad, the hero didn’t necessarily die – Oedipus, for instance, just blinded himself and went into exile.

Obviously the sense of the word has shifted somewhat in non-theatrical usage. In the world of the people who write and read the news you get, a tragedy is not something that happens over a period of time with a playing out of any sort of plot at all. It is not schematized with duration. If someone on TV or in the paper says that, for instance, some ongoing bit of mismanagement is a tragedy, you know you’re listening to commentary. When it’s news qua news, a tragedy is “an instance of a bad (usually deadly) thing happening”.

If, say, a good kid makes a number of stupid mistakes and has a terrible accident in which at least one person dies (whether or not it’s the kid who made the mistakes), it is the accident itself that is referred to as the tragedy. To refer to the whole story as a tragedy would be evaluative in a way that is reserved for commentary.

And it’s all in little hits. The news is full of not three-act or even one-act plays but rather something that is to a drama what a shooter is to a glass of wine, or what a one-bite snack is to a restaurant meal. Tragedy has lost its masks, its chorus, its traffic of the stage; there is no peripeteia, no hamartia, no hubris. Just the anti-orgasm of fatal catastrophe.

And tragic? Ah, tragic, now, that’s even better. It’s like unfortunately. It doesn’t add any more information about what happened. Rather, it adds information about the attitude and character of the person speaking it – the person wants you to know that they know that it is a bad thing, and they want you to feel that it is a bad thing too.

To say of an incident in which someone at a party in a park died “It appears to have been an accident” might seem somehow to dismiss or diminish it. There are accidents all the time, after all. No, no, this is not some simple traffic accident. We must make it clear we are at not ff but full-on g. In order to show that you appreciate how bad it was, and to give that emotional clench that newscasters tend to love, it is necessary to state the obvious just so that no one thinks “Isn’t it obvious to you?” – and so the viewers can feel the punch a little more.

And what’s the effect of that punch, by the way? The viewers probably don’t know or have any connection to the person. Consider: If a friend of yours dies and another friend tells you about it, do they say “It appears to have been a tragic accident”? Likely not. You’d think “Do you think I don’t know it was bad? Do you think I don’t know you know?” Among friends it would be just “It appears to have been an accident” – or “They think it was an accident.” No, the tragic is part of the aesthetic experience of the news.

Yes, indeedy. You may or may not hold to the theory of catharsis, or to the theory of rasadhvani, or to any other particular theory of aesthetic perception, but we know that our response to fiction – movies – has a metacognitive value. We are getting experience, in a way, because we are receiving stimuli highly resemblant to real-life stimuli, and so we have similar reactions. But the lack of immediate consequences for us allows us to experience these things in an at least slightly different way. We can swirl them in the glass, sniff them, roll them on the tongue.

And that’s what much of the news is for most viewers and readers. It has no direct effect on us. It may have happened in reality, but we are not experiencing actual consequences from a stranger’s death or house fire or whatnot, or from some star’s divorce. I know, no one is an island when all is said and Donne, but unless the “tragedy” involves something we have a direct connection to, it’s more like entertainment. We see it, we are shocked, we can process the shock aesthetically; we feel bad, and we feel good about ourselves for feeling bad.

And so you know, when you hear tragic – when you are listening to the goat-song bleatings of some drudge who has dredged up a bleeder to lead with – that you are being invited not just to know, not just to experience, but to know the knowing and experience the experiencing. To feel the terror and the pity, and come away ennobled in your humanity. And all in one act.

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maneater

Posted on July 1, 2011 | 3 comments

This word always makes me think of Mini-Wheats.

You see, when the 1982 Hall & Oates song “Maneater” was being played on the radio all the time, Mini-Wheats were what I mainly ate for breakfast, and many was the bite I made into a Mini-Wheat while “Watch out, boy, she’ll chew you up” glided by in the background.

But, then, that song makes me think of another, more recent (2006) song by the same title, by Nelly Furtado. When I first heard it, I thought, “What the heck! Who goes and makes a whole different song by the same name as an existing one?” But actually she’s hardly the first to do such a thing.

Well, it’s not as though the maneater is going to eat Nelly Furtado, whatever her transgressions, after all. In both songs, the maneater is a “she” going after guys – and, hey, as everyone knows, even in tiger country women may walk fearlessly. Tigers are maneaters!

And indeed the next thing I think of is tigers. Especially paintings from India involving tigers stalking people, some of which I recall seeing in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which I used to haunt when I lived there. And then I think of sharks. Which means Watson and the Shark, by John Singleton Copley, in the same museum. Which means that now, from the taste of Mini-Wheats, I have moved on to the smell of the MFA: that musty tang of ancient oil paint and biodegrading tapestry mingled with overtones of museum café (all museum cafés smell the same, it seems). I used to go there as much to smell the smell and swim through the art as actually to stop and stare.

Following that, I might wander off into musing on man-eating, often applied to tigers, sharks, et cetera, and thence to the side-show attraction I once passed (which frankly labelled itself “a complete rip-off”) that trumpeted SIX FOOT TALL MAN EATING CHICKEN. Yeah, yeah, watch the hyphen or the absence thereof. That phrase described me eating supper this past Tuesday, and I bet that’s about what people who went in got to see too.

But, on the other hand, I might start musing on the shape of this word. I wouldn’t dwell too long on the available split ma neater; I might think about a manatee (marine but not prone to eating humanity), or I might even consider the partial resemblance in spelling to cotoneaster, a kind of shrubbery. Which would make me wander off into “Bring me a shrubbery” and then from the same movie (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) the lethal rabbit…

I probably wouldn’t muse too much on the etymology of man and eater because they’re hardly at all changed over the centuries in form or sense. Once I got onto the sound of the word, I would think of the double-stress construction, which makes the man last about as long as the eater. It works well musically in the phrase “She’s a maneater.” Which is found in both the songs mentioned above.

Ah, the things that may consume the mind when it is set to wandering. And of course each person’s experience and flavours will vary, partly because experience and influences are personal, and partly because there’s no accounting for taste.

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fugxury

Posted on June 30, 2011 | 12 comments

My friend Trish was telling me this evening about a particular well-known rich person’s house a friend had seen. It was loaded with all sorts of expensive stuff that was there simply because it was expensive, and the result was stylistically incoherent, rather vulgar in fact. Trish pulled out the perfect word to describe it, a word her husband, Jaba Adams, had confected: fugxury.

We actually had to discuss how it’s best spelled. But the word itself is so very well suited, because it is an ostentatious mishmash. It’s a blend of fugly and luxury, and fugly is in turn a blend of ugly and a vulgar intensifier you have probably already guessed (if you didn’t know the word fugly before). It couldn’t be fuxury because it would lose the g cluing to ugly (and many people say the x in luxury voiceless); it couldn’t be fuggury because that would lose the “zh” /ʒ/ sound that off-glides from the x.

So what we have is, on the one end, a pricey Latin-derived word, luxury, from luxus “abundance, sumptuousness”, and on the other hand two Germanic-derived words (neither of which originates from an acronym, by the way), both having meant more or less what they now mean for quite some time; ugly comes ultimately from Old Norse for “dreadful, fearsome”. Thus a blunt coupling forces its way indecently onto a pretty, glittery word, with a result of two oversized cups u and u, an uncomfortable pairing in the middle gx – sort of like being forced to kiss that terribly unappealing person you just happen to be squeezing past as you notice there’s mistletoe overhead – and the whole form proceeding from high to low, from the expensive Art Nouveau standing light f to the crotch on the oversized smutty painting y.

And so the decor is shrouded in a kind of frowsy fug that does injury to the eyes. Its very vulgarity bespeaks an excessively high money-to-taste ratio. You can imagine the faux-Roman architecture, the leather couches with massive space-age-looking home stereo system, a warehouse of assorted high-priced kitsch, mirrors and little lights on everything… The look, like the word, is the perfect match for a sweatxedo.

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anoplothere

Posted on June 29, 2011 | 2 comments

You raise this word to your eyes, scan it once. At any distance it has a certain length and density, lightened slightly by the openness of the two o’s. But at the first real glance, words leap out at you and you can’t stop them: a no plot here. Look again and the here becomes there, but then what is the rest – is there a partial nope, or an interrupted plosive plo, or an anonymous that is mostly anonymous? Are the ruins of Constantinople interrupted by something other?

Swirl it and more dances before your eyes. Did you glimpse hoplite? But not quite… You get dancing images of hope, loop, pretonal, pelt, replant, pleat, plate, eater, troop, panther…

Oh, but that’s all neither here nor there. This is something other, something rich and strange. Put it on your tongue: “a naw pla theer”, with the “th” voiceless as in theriomorphic and threnody. It has quite a three-step stumble from stress to end, doesn’t it? The /pl/ is like your foot flicking downward as you step too far forward on a stair, that dental fricative /θ/ requires you to thrust your tongue forward right after pulling it back for that reduced central vowel, and then the tense “long” /i/ pitches forward, a bit too much for an unstressed final. But it’s all so soft, almost whispery, with the /l/ partially voiceless after that /p/, and of course the /θ/; at the same time, it has that run of liquid in the /l/ and /r/. It has a plethora of pleasures for the tongue and the ear; as it slips and threads and rustles whsipering, it’s like a Gauguin tiger stalking through the night foliage.

But though it burn bright, this is no tiger, nor even a panther. It lacks the teeth to be any more than a plant eater. I don’t mean the word – the teeth are in that – but the creature it names. Yes, an anoplothere was a quadruped – was not is, as it lived during the Eocene and Oligocene. It was a pachydermatous ungulate of no exceptional size. And, more to the point, it didn’t have claws, horns, or fangs. Thus, from Greek ἀν an “without” plus ὅπλον hoplon “weapon” (whence hoplite) plus θηρίον therion “beast” we get this collapsed concatenation, chewed together like so many leaves: “the weaponless animal”. It’s often referred to by the Latinate version of its name, anoplotherium.

But though we may conclude from its extinction that it had no hope later, it thrived for a time. One need not be red in tooth and claw to poll heather in one’s home plot. It tasted of the richness of its world, the delights of the eyes and tongue, just as we (also sans claws, horns, fangs) may do – though with our words we can also pin down things not only before but even after they have escaped.

Some anoplotheres subsided into gypsum and their bones were found in 1804 – one of the earliest fossil mammals discovered. And yet this beastie is still little known. Oh, but it and its word are among those rare delights one discovers covered in a light layer of dust, well worth the taste. (Read more at “The Camel that Walked on Two Legs.”) We need no plot here, no gravestone, no epitaph, nor even a threnody; in the end is the word.

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geezer

Posted on June 27, 2011 | 1 comment

Rob Tilley mentioned this word this evening. My first reaction was, “Geezer Butler!” Naturally, Rob and our friend Franklin knew who that was.

What? He’s the bassist and main lyricist for Black Sabbath, of course. You didn’t know that?

Oh, get over it. The band named themselves after a Boris Karloff movie. Geezer Butler may have written a lot of dark lyrics, but the guy’s a vegan and a pacifist and doesn’t even use vulgar language.

You find that strange? Maybe that’s why he’s called Geezer. It’s not because he’s 61 years old (62 in July), anyway – he’s been called Geezer since he was young, and 61 isn’t all that old anymore. No, in some British dialects geezer can mean “strange guy” of whatever age or even just a somewhat derisive term for whatever male. So the ee may be not heavy-lidded eyes but merely shifty ones, and the z could be not just the one in wheezer and the euphemistic zoomer (meaning a baby boomer old enough to be looking for a word that pretends they’re youthful) but the one in zany and bizarre. After all, eccentricity and pertinacity may seem the province of the superannuated (males in particular), but they are in fact more widely distributed.

You may have encountered the broader use of geezer in the writing of this or that British novelist – Graham Greene, for instance, or P.G. Wodehouse, who in Right Ho, Jeeves has Bertie Wooster say to a woman, “You are a silly young geezer. And, what’s more, you know it.” In 1965, a writer in the New Statesman used this utterly British sentence: “I have my hands full with his china who is a big geezer of about 14 stone.” (China is Cockney slang, from china plate, rhymes with – and thus means – mate, as in “friend”; British measure weight in stone, with one stone being 14 pounds.)

Geezer comes from guiser, you see. As in mummer. Someone who dresses up in a mask and goes around from house to house looking for drinks. The word traces back through guise to French and Italian and from there back to a Germanic route, a bit of a strange reverse masquerade itself. But that, anyway, is why the g is /g/ as in guy, rather than the first syllable being like geez, also spelled jeez, as it would appear.

And to add to the mummery and flummery is a word for a flume of furious fluid, geyser, which also comes from a (different) Germanic root (related to gush) by way of the Icelandic toponym Geysir. You and I know that it’s pronounced like “guiser”, i.e., “guy zer”, but there are British people who may be heard saying it like “geezer”.

Well, anyway, those Brits are a bunch of odd geezers. Or, on the other hand, maybe we North Americans are, for using the word geezer only to refer to a decrepit buzzard of a senex, prone to cantankerous caning. Geez – I don’t know.

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nudibranch

Posted on June 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

If you branch off the main trail to the beach, you will find a set of secret stairs going down… and then, if you peek carefully between the branches, you may be able to see something rather, uh, natural. But do be careful that you don’t get slugged for peeking.

Well, it’s not as though you’ll get slugged in the eye for what you see. It’s really more that you’ll eye a sea slug. Hate to disappoint, but that’s what a nudibranch is (though not all sea slugs are nudibranchs).

Yes, those little slimy things might (in some cases) look like something that would make a prude blush, but more likely they’ll just give the squeamish the willies. And by “willies” I mean fantods. Their name, on the other hand, is reasonably eye-catching. It’s long, it has that dib cluster in the middle with its symmetry and its resemblance to a variety of different things, and it appears to be made of parts (nudie branch) that would suggest, well, a euphemism for something that sea slug could also be a euphemism for, perhaps.

And indeed the nudi is the same as in nude or nudie – it’s from Latin nudus “naked”. But the branch is not the same as in English branch. It’s not related – our word branch comes from Latin branca “animal’s paw”, whereas this branch is from Latin branchia “gills”. Not only that, the ch here is pronounced /k/, meaning – what a visual prank – that this word rhymes with bank.

You won’t necessarily find a nudibranch in a bank, though, not even a sandbank – more likely a tidal pool or anywhere in the intertidal zone (the part of the ocean’s edge that is sometimes submerged and sometimes not). And of course in a National Geographic article on the intertidal zone, such as the one in the June 2011 issue.

You will see, too, when you peek (try www.sergeyphoto.com/underwater/nudibranchs.html and ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/06/nudibranchs/doubilet-photography for some good galleries), that these sea slugs are not actually all slimy and disgusting. Some of them are quite pretty. They’re all hermaphroditic, too (who peeked!) and come in sizes from less than an inch to two feet long.

Yes… a two-foot-long sea slug. That’s rather longer than the word nudibranch, which barely even qualifies as sesquipedalian. And, like the word, they can have a look that is simultaneously familiar and exotic – and a bit deceptive and possibly even blush-inducing.

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anarchist

Posted on June 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

When you see this word, what image comes to mind? A bearded bomb-thrower from the early 20th century? A political assassin? A punk rocker? A teen spraying a big red A in a circle? A “protester” wearing a bandanna mask smashing shop windows and torching police cars?

These seem to be the general images associated with anarchist. Certainly anarchy tends to be used as equivalent to chaos or the sort of wanton violence that characterizes a failed state. The anarchist is viewed as a sort of antichrist.

I’m sure, in fact, that the taste of antichrist in anarchist has had an effect on the word’s reception. It wasn’t lost on the punk group the Sex Pistols, whose hit song “Anarchy in the U.K.” opens with the following lyrics:

I am an antichrist
I am an anarchist
Don’t know what I want
But I know how to get it
I wanna destroy passerby
‘Cause I wanna be anarchy

It has the extra charming touch of pronouncing anarchist to rhyme with antichrist. (It’s linguistic anarchy, I tell ya!)

Anarchist has a well-established history of negative, deprecatory tone in common usage, so much so that when I stop to think what word it is, reeking of chaos and dripping with acid, that this word makes me think of, I realize that it’s actually anarchist itself that I’m thinking of.

Its first usage in English was in application to those who wanted to overthrow the King, in the 17th century. (Such a difference in tone from such a small change in form between monarchist and anarchist!) My first encounter with the word was actually in a Tintin book (King Ottokar’s Sceptre) in which Tintin shouts warnings of a plot to a king but is dragged away and not heard, and the king’s aide describes him as an anarchist. I wasn’t sure exactly what an anarchist was, but I knew it was someone who wanted to act against kings and government.

Which is pretty much accurate. An anarchist is someone who is opposed to top-down government of whatever sort. It comes from Greek ἀν an “without” and ἀρχή arkhé “sovereignty”. The basic attitude often manifests as the sort of puerile anti-authority rebellion that leads clove-cigarette-smoking undergraduates to decorate their notebooks (and campus walls) with A’s in circles. But there’s much more to it – and other – than that.

Anarchists, you see, have had a variety of leanings and philosophies and even gone under a variety of names. After all, if you are against having a state with a ruling apparatus, how do you propose that people make things work? Many anarchists have believed in collectivism – leaderless communism, as it were. Anarchism (particularly anarcho-syndicalism) was a driving force in the origins of the labour union movement. Another name for one set of people who believe in doing without sovereignty or top-down government and prefer reliance on the individual is libertarians – which has a more positive tone, but libertarianism is, among other things, anarchist.

Much group organizing and massed protest and disruption was done by people who called themselves anarchists a century ago. But now the people who call themselves anarchists are often mild-mannered graduate-student types. They see humans as born free but everywhere in chains, and believe that we should build communities without hierarchical or bureaucratic structures. They have, in short, a stronger belief in the possible goodness of human nature than most of us do, because such communities require a level of cooperation and civic thought that clearly is not universally manifest in the world we live in now.

It is ironic that anarchists, who are likely to see official celebrations of massive spectacles such as team sports as a narcotic for the masses, are being blamed for hockey riots in Vancouver. I’m not saying that there were no punks who call themselves anarchists involved in those riots (there certainly were some in the G20 riots in Toronto, but anyone who smashes shop windows and loots is engaging in exactly the sort of behaviour that vitiates the collectivism or at least mutual respect that functioning anarchy would rely on), but the evidence is that in general most of the damage was done by youthful addicts of consumer goods who were bombed on cheap beer. Meanwhile, at home, reading their books, were self-identified anarchists such as you may encounter in this article: www.vancouversun.com/technology/blame+anarchists+professor+says/4998569/story.html.

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