Yearly Archives: 2011

chipmunk

Posted on June 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

This is a word from my childhood, in more ways than one.

There is of course that hoary old chestnut about a monastery opening a fish-and-chip shop with a fish friar and a chip monk; I’m sure I first heard that somewhere in elementary school.

But there’s also the actual animal, the chipmunk. I saw them often when we were hiking in the hinterlands (e.g., up to Lake Agnes, above Lake Louise). Cute little things, always darting and chattering and trying to get seeds and nuts (maybe not hoary old chestnuts) with which to stuff their cheeks.

And then there’s this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l5ap0p_3-o – that great old TV vignette series, Hinterland Who’s Who, in this case on the chipmunk. It has that wandering, wondering, almost haunting flute music. A more emblematic piece of Canadiana from the seventies could hardly be imagined. (But Hinterland Who’s Who has not gone away – it’s gone on web: learn more about the chipmunk at www.hww.ca/hww2.asp?id=86.)

And, of course, there’s that Christmas song from Alvin and the Chipmunks, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dnrosVyamY, featuring the step-out solo “Me, I want a hula hoop” (which in my younger years I couldn’t understand at all – “Mi, a waa na ooooo la oooo”?!). I regret to have to inform you that that, too, was more recently brought “up to date” – see www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjz8lG-SsnY , and I’m not surprised if, like me, you hit stop within a half minute.

I mean, seriously, the music is a trite guitar-heavy “rock” arrangement (the polar opposite of the Hinterland Who’s Who theme), and the chipmunks are dressed up like hip-hop homeys or something equally inane. Crap rock with hip-hop getup? Come on – if you want cute rodents with hip-hop, try this Kia ad: www.youtube.com/watch?v=miC1VZ9UVCQ.

And if you want a hip-hop singer named Chipmunk, by the way, there’s a bloke from Tottenham who will fill your bill: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDwI7KQAlD8.

But that of course has nothing to do with my childhood. Other people’s for sure, such as the ones writing the comments on the YouTube video. I might say, though, Chipmunk’s rapid rap has a certain chipmunkiness to it, and is about as immediately comprehensible to me as what I was hearing from those little seed- and scene-stealers in the hinterlands.

The rodent in question is of course not a monk, nor does it eat chips (well, OK, I think it ate some of mine at least once, but usually it goes for seeds and nuts). The present form of its name is almost certainly an English reconstrual of an Algonquian word – the Ojibwa word ajidamoonh “squirrel” (literally “headfirst”, because that’s how it goes down trees) is a very likely cognate.

The word chipmunk also has a quick and chattery feel to it, doesn’t it? It has two quick syllables and darts from one to the other. And hey, do this: say chipmunk chipmunk chipmunk chipmunk chipmunk chipmunk chipmunk chipmunk chipmunk chipmunk chipmunk as fast as you can. Look in the mirror and tell me it doesn’t look like a chipmunk chewing its seeds. Stuff your cheeks with snacks for an even more impressive effect.

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Okanagan

Posted on June 2, 2011 | 5 comments

A few weeks ago I was in the Tasting Tower at Summerhill liquor store in Toronto, an excellent place to give oneself an education in whiskey and wine (and to help pass the time, but don’t cause no accidents – after two samples, it’s “Baby, step back” with a light foot). I was rather amused, and my curiosity was piqued, at the sight of a bottle of Irish whiskey named O’Kanagan.

Oh! Come again? The name on the bottle is in all caps, too (see http://www.vinexx.com/Vinexx/Toorank_Distilleries.html), so the visual connection is immediate for most Canadians (especially western Canadians): Okanagan. As in the Okanagan valley in British Columbia.

Now, Okanagan sounds like “oak a noggin,” and since a noggin is (aside from being one’s head, in a usage parallel to mug for the same) a small cup or a small amount of alcoholic beverage, and since whiskey is often aged in oak (I believe O’Kanagan is, but I’d have to go back and taste it again to say for sure), this may seem appropriate enough. But, on the other hand, make it O’Kanagan and you’re most likely to shift the accent – to make the rhythm like that of “O Canada.”

But, hey, that’s the name, right? There’s an Irish family named O’Kanagan, so…

No, actually, it doesn’t seem there is. O’Kanagan Irish Whiskey is made in Ireland, true, but made for and branded by a Dutch company, Toorank. And it seems to be targeted at the Canadian market. And I can’t find any evidence of any actual Irish family named O’Kanagan.

It would be a funny coincidence if there were, anyway. Okanagan is not an Irish word. It’s from the First Nation (aboriginal, American Indian) people who were there first (and still are there, along with lots of other people by now). There’s some debate over its etymology, but it seems that (like oak a noggin, by coincidence) the source word contains a root meaning “head” – or “top end”. It may be “looking towards the upper end”, “seeing the top”, “transport towards the top end”, or something like that. It could refer to a local mountain, but it could also refer to the point on the Okanagan river, just below Okanagan Falls, that is the farthest up the river that salmon go when spawning.

Anyway, the current word is somewhat altered from the source (and the spelling Okanagan was set to differentiate it from the American place names spelled Okanogan). But its original sense and form are immaterial to most people who go there now. The word is agreeable as it is (OK and then some, a real AAA piece of work), with its opening O! like Oklahoma and the tongue then doing a double back-front touch, and it brings clear images to the minds of those who know it. Going up to the Okanagan is a retreat to a sunny vacationland with beautiful scenery, watersports, and lots of luscious things.

I mean fruits and berries. When I was a kid, it was a place for peaches (there’s even a town called Peachland) and similar succulents. It still is, but, as Wikipedia somewhat bitterly misphrases it, one of the fastest-growing industries in the Okanagan is “the ripping up of orchards and their replacement by wineries and vinyards” (I’m fairly sure that ripping out the orchards is not itself the fast-growing industry). Yes, if you’re having an oaky noggin in the Okanagan, it will most likely be a taste of one of the region’s many wines (not whiskeys), some of which are outstanding and most of which are at least quite good.

Indeed, not only wine production but wine touring as well is a staple of the economy there. And ever since I showed my wife Aina the region a few years ago, she’s been saying, “Oh, can we go again?” But gladly. So we made sure to stop through there on our latest trip west and visit a few more wineries. (See http://www.flickr.com/photos/sesquiotic/sets/72157626748240883/.)

But you do have to be careful – the wine can go right to your head! (And you might knock your noggin.)

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spatchcock

Posted on June 2, 2011 | 4 comments

Comic books have quite the variety of means of communicating violent sounds. They’re always in capitals, of course: WHAAAM, SLISH, THUNK, KHWOORMF, AKA-AKA-AKA… really a nearly endless variety of nonce onomatopoeia. It’s the print equivalent of the Foley artist’s job.

You know what Foley artists are, right? They’re those guys who create the sounds you hear in movies and TV shows when assorted things happen – a door is slammed, a person walks up stairs, someone gets punched, a slasher rips someone open… They accomplish some of this with little doors, pairs of shoes on wooden platforms, pieces of wood and/or leather; they also use more organic matter when it produces the best sound. Like in some horror flick. That disgusting sound made when a person is ripped apart might have come from, say, a chicken (ready for cooking) being roughly handled. Imagine the scene of gross horror that could take its sound from a chicken having its backbone ripped out and then slapped flat on a grill.

And now imagine what sound a comic book might use for that sound. Even a comic about a Foley artist. Or perhaps a comic book about a chef. After all, that is a way of preparing a chicken – ripping (or, well, cutting) the backbone out and laying the chicken flat on its inside for roasting. Do it in violent kung-fu style, and you’ll get quite the sound effect:

SPATCHCOCK.

Which just happens also to be the word for doing that to a chicken. (Butterfly is also used, and what a different word that is!) It’s a kind of preparation method that can produce quick results, since the chicken is flat – you can grill it rather more quickly than you could roast it intact. The whole thing may have a sort of quick-and-messy air to it. Certainly the word does, with the same kind of effect as slapdash or hatchet job. The incoming hiss /s/ has the effect of something speeding towards a surface, and the remaining consonants are all percussive, with a rebounding second syllable, but there’s that affricate right in the middle suggesting a mess…

Small wonder that spatchcock is also used to mean a quick stitch or patch job on something, a slap-together hackle-schmackle – an inappropriate interpolation of material in a text. Slapping it in like slapping a spatchcocked chicken on a grill.

And where do we get this sloppy word? Seems reasonable enough that the cock should refer to a chicken, and, come to think of it, spatch is short for dispatch, isn’t it… Such an easy surmise, so it’s no surprise that it was the commonly given etymology for a long time. But there is no conclusive trail of evidence to prove it. And there’s an older term (at least 200 years older), spitchcock, which is a means of preparing an eel (cutting it into short pieces and dressing it with bread crumbs and herbs). It’s very unlikely that the two words are unrelated, and no one really knows (yet) what the origin of spitchcock was. It’s kind of a mystery – a sort of horror mystery, really. Like from Hitchcock.

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daft & daffy

Posted on May 25, 2011 | 2 comments

Dear word sommelier, if my friend suggests something like, say, matching cabernet sauvignon with canned tuna, do I call him daft or daffy?

You’re so polite. I probably wouldn’t think of either of those words first, but if I had to choose one, it would be daft. To my palate, daft has fewer positive overtones; it bespeaks an insufficient grip on reality, and gives a sort of sense of a draft blowing from one ear to the other. It also has a strong British flavour. North Americans would be more likely to say crazy or insane; crazy has too much of a positive tone, however – no one says a wild and daft guy, for instance – and even insane can have a sort of admiring tone, whereas daft is more likely to be dismissive and, at the very least, not edgy or admirable. (For much more on crazy versus insane, see sesquiotic.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/crazy-insane/.)

Daffy, for its part, is just too, well, silly. Daffy Duck names a cartoon character prone to fits of “woo-woo”; daffy is also the name of a ski jump move (a sort of flying front-and-back split). And it sounds like taffy. You may also get an image of someone cavorting in daffodils. It’s possibly loveable and at the very least deliberately amusing. None of which seems appropriate for cabernet sauvignon with canned tuna. Eiswein with pancakes, perhaps, but there’s a difference between, well, cute and disgusting.

It’s ironic, actually, that daffy is the word with more of a silly flavour. Silly actually has more in common with daft in their histories. Both have undergone considerable pejoration. Silly started off as a word meaning “blessed” (compare German selig) and shifted through “innocent” to “inane”. Daft started off as a word meaning “meek” and “mild” and passed through “innocent” to “irrational” and thence to the present sense. It may have had a nudge from the apparently etymologically unrelated word daff, which means “simpleton” or “fool”. Daff, for its part, took on a lighter tone with the addition of the y suffix to make daffy – in other words, it underwent amelioration, the opposite of the pejoration of daft.

I can’t say with any certainty that the softer sound of daffy helped it to a softer sense, though the y, as I hinted, likely helped in that direction with its diminutive effect. The stop at the end of daft sharpens it a bit, makes it a bit more deft on the tongue, and I suspect that the single f in the spelling gives it less of a sense of a featherweight puff.

Again, though, faced with someone proffering a glass of cabernet sauvignon with canned tuna, I’d probably say something other than “You’re daft” (let alone “You’re daffy”). If I were really trying to be nice, I might say “No tuna for me, thanks,” or, more frankly, “Um. I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” but otherwise I would probably use something rather spicier and more full-bodied. I mean the word, not the wine. (For the wine, I suppose I’d lean towards a chardonnay or a riesling, depending on presentation. Or perhaps a grüner veltliner.)

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subgum

Posted on May 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

You have to figure this is something you stick in your mouth. But what? If you don’t know, there are a few possible guesses.

You’ll most likely proceed first on the basis of sub + gum. Is it something you put under your gums? How would you do that – would it be like that nasty Skoal tobacco that you (or someone you’d rather not stand too close to) stick between cheek and gum, provoking excessive expectoration? Or is it something that simply seems to support your gums? Perhaps something toothsome? Or is it like a gum but less so? Or a substrate for a gum? Or is it a gangster chew (as in submachine gum)?

But, then, what if it’s not sub + gum? Perhaps it’s like gumbo. Or perhaps it’s like sorghum. Maybe it’s a kind of backwards humbug. Where is this word from, anyway? It could be from Latin, if it’s sub + gum, but perhaps it’s from Hindi – it has that sort of sound. Or is it from an African language? The /bg/ could be a coarticulation… This word, so simple-looking, really does seem to have a whole mix of possibles in its soft, quick two-syllable double bump.

The clue that will help solve it for you is that it is typically followed by one of the following pairs of words: chow mein, lo mein, or chop suey.

Yes, if you’ve seen this word, it’s probably been on a Chinese restaurant menu, in particular an Americanized one. It comes from Cantonese sap gam “numerous and varied” or “mixture” – one might say “bits ’n’ bites”, “allsorts”, “this ’n’ that”… The dish it names has a mixture of various vegetables. There’s often also some kind of formerly animate stuff (that’s the word that comes before subgum: chicken subgum, pork subgum, seafood subgum, etc.). And you may expect some noodles if, for instance, it’s chicken subgum chow mein.

But, now, just tell me the truth: doesn’t it seem a bit like it’s somehow substandard or insufficiently something or other? When I see sub somewhere, that’s the default expectation in the absence of some root that makes it something else (substance, submit, submarine, etc.). It’s either that or it’s under something. And the gum gives it that soft feeling. You almost feel like it should be some suspicious glutinous mass. And instead you get crispy mixed vegetables (and nary a slice of gumbo in sight). Ah, dumb-dumb, it’s yum-yum! So num-num!

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manticore

Posted on May 19, 2011 | 1 comment

This word is metal from the rich romantic ore of myth. It names a magical beastie indeed, but not like a unicorn, though the words share a phonological core. No, there are no dreamy books and smeary posters of this critter marketed at the not-quite-post-fluffy-bunny set of girls – though, given the current popularity of vampires, perhaps we should wait for it.

It’s a courtly enough word, after all (even if looking a bit like a British version of a name of a city in India), starting with a mannered pair of nasals, then hardening to a pair of stops, and in all this moving from the front of the mouth to the back; it then finishes with a round vowel and a liquid consonant, and the flourish of an orthographic e. It may not have the plunging neckline of vampire, but it has such a savour to it, of a romantic man, cordial but with a mysterious core.

Well, young girls do swoon over amazingly inappropriate targets betimes, so why not this one? A manticore is a creature that comes to us from Persian legend (as does its name, changed by way of Greek and Latin). It has the body of a lion (or similar animal), the head of a man (but with a mouth with extra rows of sharp teeth), and a barbed tail that can shoot poisonous arrows. Sounds like something from Dungeons and Dragons, really.

Manticore may make you think of mantis, but this beast doesn’t pray, it just preys. It doesn’t eat manicotti, either; rather, it eats any man it’s caught, and it doesn’t waste time with riddles, either – it just kills them (through a-sphynx-iation?) and eats them entirely, leaving no trace. I’m inclined to cue Hall and Oates – “Who-oa, here she comes, she’s a man-eater” – but it seems that (unlike the sphynx) this one is a man to the core. Or anyway it’s male.

Because it ate even the clothes, disappearances of persons were taken as evidence of its existence (making it like a Windigo, for instance). The very absence of evidence is the evidence of presence. Clever beastie, able to swallow not just people but logical reasoning whole (and leave a kind of logical reasoning that is more than a little hard to swallow). Who could ask for more antics!

At least in some ancient accounts, it is thought that the manticore was really a tiger with embellishments in the telling. In the modern world, perhaps by coincidence, the manticora (note the last letter) is a kind of tiger beetle – a big black bug with massive mandibles, known in African legend as an evil doombringer. But Canadians are most likely to see manticore in a more novel form: the second novel in Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy, The Manticore. The book follows a Jungian psychoanalysis wherein elements of the subconscious are manifested in mythical form – the obvious eponymous.

Manticore was also the name of the tiger that attacked Roy of Siegfried and Roy. One must be on one’s guard with real beasties; they can be prone to myth-behaviour.

I will be on vacation for the next two weeks. I will try to write a few word tasting notes, but they will be sporadic.

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rudera

Posted on May 18, 2011 | 4 comments

The wind has blown; the stones lie fallen –
Oh, what rudera, oh, what detritus
Shall in its broken death invite us
And seed our fantasies like pollen?

Though we can read no truth at all in
Ruins, histories excite us:
Oh, what rude era, oh, what detritus
The wind has blown! (The stones lie, fallen.)

But dust in wind will put its call in,
And gasp of death outshout vagitus:
These are the stones of Heraclitus,
Entropy’s rudders, nolens volen’.

The wind has blown the stones. Lie, fallen!
Oh, what air, Rudra! Oh, what detritus.

What, then, is rudera? Well, are rudera, I should say. Ruins. Broken stones, perhaps with vines crawling over them. Rubble. Rudera is the plural of the Latin rudus, meaning “broken stone” or “lump of stone”. The word is probably related to rude, which in origins meant “crude, unwrought, unripe, etc.” long before it meant “socially offensive”.

It’s actually a comparatively fluid word, isn’t it, for something so solid? Well, but are broken stones really so solid? They are evidence of the flow of time – as Heraclitus (of Ephesus, where there are some stirring ruins) said, you can’t step into the same river twice. But, as he also said, the path up and the path down are the same.

What else flows? Wind, of course, as in “Dust in the Wind” (the classic Buddhist-inspired song by Kansas, a band named after a place famous for dust in the wind, but not for rudera, just for a rude era, the dirty thirties). And if you want wind, look to a storm – or to the Vedic (Hindu) god of storms and the forces of nature, Rudra.

Rudera, incidentally, is also the name of a winery in the Stellenbosch region of South Africa, so named for the broken stones in the soil on which their vines grow.

The last line of the third stanza of the rondel is, I admit, cheated; nolens volens is the proper term, meaning “whether willing or not.” I had thought of using tholen, past participle of thole, but decided against it.

Oh, and vagitus means a cry, particularly that of a newborn. Which reminds me that I didn’t fit in a reference to ruach, “breath” and “spirit” – the wind of the body, connectind to the oxygen we need to live but that slowly erodes our cells. We are not made of stone, of course, not exactly: dust, rather. And such stuff as dreams are made on.

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sacroiliitis

Posted on May 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Wow, holy what-is-that! This word looks like it’s slamming on the brakes in order not to hit a wall – or maybe just screaming in pain as it wrenches around a corner. In fact, there are so many vertical lines in the back half of this word, it looks like it’s already slammed up against the wall.

But of course that could also be hair standing on end. Or just an effort to straighten up a bent back – unsuccessful, it seems, as it reverts to s at the end. Whatever it is, it’s not natural to English eyes, because it’s not a natural English combination of i’s. Oh, we have other words with four i’s in sequence, but usually they have consonants between them. Double i’s are the real oddity. Think of English words with other vowels doubled: baa, bee, boo, and, uh, vacuum. But find me one with two i’s in the same syllable!

Well, when you do, it won’t be this one. These i’s may have you crying, but there’s no real love between them, either; between them, they have all three of the common pronunciations of i: [I] as in hit, [i] as in machine, and [aI] as in hi (and then it’s back to [I] again). The act of saying this word is like a funky workout for the tongue, sort of like one of those workout programs you see advertised on American infomercials – the ones that will probably do your joints in.

Joints! This word has two of them in it, holding together three morphemes of two syllables each: sacro, having to do with the sacrum, the bone at the bottom of the spine (and this is from the same Latin root that gives us sacred); ili, having to do with the ilium, the lowest part of the abdomen, and the top bony flanks of the hip; and itis, a Latinate suffix (originally from Greek) that means “swelling”. So you have the ili in the middle like your backbone, and these two wider bits joined to its sides. And when there’s swelling in those joints – the sacroiliac joints (that’s five syllables, by the way, sac-ro-i-li-ac) – it’s sacroiliitis.

Does that sound like a kind of arthritis? Yeah, it’s a symptom of several kinds of arthritic conditions, notably various spondylarthropathies, such as ankylosing spondylitis. It can also be caused by other things, such as a car accident. But I’m kinda wondering if it’s so sore just from carrying all these heavy words around.

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crotchet

Posted on May 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

I think I might have a little note for this one in my quiver.

On the other hand, there are two quavers in this little note – quaver meaning “eighth note” and crotchet meaning “quarter note”. But fancy that, eh? How does a word for such a common snip of music gain such a scratchy, cranky, ratchety, crusty-sounding word?

Well, one might have an image of a crotchety musician, able to play a good hook but hard to work with – perhaps one of those who like to crochet between numbers, then ditch the work in their crotch while making the minimum brief quavering effort with the minims (half notes), semibreves (whole notes), quavers, and crotchets, or perhaps tossing the tune around like a game of lacrosse, but anyway getting through it by hook or by crook.

Well, actually, it’s a hook and a crook that are at the root of all this. Croche, to be specific: an old Northern French word for a hook or a bishop’s crosier (shaped like a shepherd’s crook). Its cognate crosse is the root of lacrosse. Croche itself has forked into a few branches.

There is, first, the one that leads to crotch (yes, yes, always the crotch shots early and often, like a movie). Our English crotch probably borrows as much from crutch as from croche, but one way or the other it appeared meaning a stake or pole with a forked top, used for supporting things. From that it came to refer to the place where a tree or branch divides in two, and from that the analogous location on the human body (so “the crotch of the tree” was not originally an anthropomorphic metaphor – rather the opposite – though of course that’s how it’s read now).

Then there is the diminutive, crochet, a little hook. That should be obvious enough, yes?

But from that came crotchet, which also meant first a small hook or hooked instrument (I’m not inclined to say a crooked instrument, not just because hooked does not mean crooked in the figurative sense, but because Bob Cratchit was as honest as the day is long, and crotchet makes me think of him). From this, it came to have the figurative meaning of a pet conceit, perverse pertinacity, whimsical fancy, or similar insistent digression – typically on a small point – from popular opinion. And it came to refer to a quarter note. Some suggest that the “whimsical conceit” sense had some base in the musical sense; others see in the old shape of a quarter note (more like a lozenge or diamond on a stem rather than the circle or oval you see now) something sufficiently close to a hook (though I do think eighth notes look more hooklike).

It is from the “perverse pertinacity” sense of crotchet, anyway, that we get crotchety. It is not now used to mean “tending to follow flights of fancy” or “waywardly whimsical”; rather, and I’m inclined to think thanks in some measure to the sound of it, we use it to mean “cranky” – the pertinacity is specifically that of negativity, whether the crotchety person be a witch, bitch, curmudgeon, or other frictionable person with an alveopalatal affricate (“ch”, “j”) – the sort of person who makes you say, “Tch!” But it must be duly noted that they won’t give you quarter.

Thanks to Jim Taylor for mentioning this one.

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ogdoad

Posted on May 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

This word strikes me as a bit of an ugly doo-dad, a knot of voiced stops. I’m not a synesthete, but I see a kind of sick yellow colour with it (your results may vary). I get that from a coagulation of different factors: the gd, which always seem to be glued together or tied with gut strings; the two o’s, which can look kooky or pretty or clean and cold but which always stand for back vowels, more often than not rounded, and so have a sort of dullness to them; the oa, which in some cases can be quite lovely but which seem stunted by the d at the end.

Aside from that, the word makes me think first of the name Ogden, which has a few associations for me: an industrial district of Calgary; Ogden Nash, an amusing poet; David Ogden Stiers, who played Charles Emerson Winchester III on M*A*S*H. And it makes me think of dog (and dead dog), dad, good ad, d00d…

Of course, all of that might just make you say, “Huh.” On the other hand, the word ogdoad itself might make you say Huh… and Hauhet, Naunet, Nu, Amaunet, Amun, Kauket, and Kuk: the ogdoad of ancient Egypt. They were male-female pairs (the males had the shorter names) of gods representing the concepts of primordial waters; air or invisibility; darkness; and eternity or infinite space. Of course there were four; that’s the number of completeness, and they were gods of creation. Double that and you get the most excellent number eight (also thought lucky in Chinese, but for paronomastic reasons).

And the Gnostics liked this double quaternity, too, speaking of the four emanations by which creation occurred: masculine abyss and feminine silence, grace, thought; from these, masculine mind and feminine truth; from these, masculine word and feminine life; and from these, masculine man and feminine church.

At any rate, it’s eight. You likely know the root for “eight” as octo. Well, for the ordinal, there was a phonological transformation in Ancient Greek, making those stops voiced, and from that came the word for a set of eight – just as myriad is a set of ten thousand. Interestingly, this is not some recent borrowing into English that really ought to be set in italics or quotes; it’s been around since medieval times – in fact, there’s even a sighting of it in Old English.

The ancient Angles were talking about Gnostics and hieroglyphics? Some were, yes, but others made broader use: “The Ogdoad, they said, was the first Cube, and the onely number evenly even under ten” (T. Stanley, 1660). An ogdoad, after all, can be any eight things, as long as you don’t mind that your readers will likely take it as a reference to the Egyptians or the Gnostics. Or, more likely, they will just say, “Huh?”

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