Yearly Archives: 2011

Tagged balls, word sommelier, word tasting notes

effrontery

Posted on March 16, 2011 | 4 comments

So, we have been addressing this question:

Dear word sommelier: If I have a sentence such as “I can’t believe he had the ____ to do it,” do I want gall, nerve, chutzpah, effrontery, balls, or something else?

We have so far tasted the first three; now it is time for effrontery. This is the longest of the list above (and in fact one is hard put to find a longer synonym; audacity and impertinence are other four-syllable words in the same set, but other rough synonyms include such as insolence, impudence, and cheek). It pushes forward in its heavy, soft petticoats, ff, and it has the force of a formal, uncommon, polysyllabic word, that forbidding soft stiffness, perhaps, of the schoolmistress or mother superior chastising one for effrontery (or mayhap it’s the sound of the impudent hussy as she goes about whatever it is for which she is chastisable).

And it’s very up-front: the front pushes forward, and, yes, it’s the same front as our word front – well, more accurately, it comes from the same source: Latin frons, meaning “forehead”. It has an overriding echo of affront – in fact, it’s misspelled as affrontery about one time in ten (if a Google poll is to be believed). But affront comes from ad frontem, “to the forehead” or “to the face”, referring to a slap, where as in effrontery in place of the ad is an ex, “from” or “out”.

So does effrontery mean “get outta my face”? Well, no; there is an ongoing argument about the exact sense, but it’s either “pushing the forehead forward” or, using the sense frons also has of “ability to blush”, it may be “unblushing”. I am more inclined to the latter, for what that’s worth; Oxford is too, which is worth a fair bit. Anyway, if it’s “unblushing” it’s rather akin to impudent, from Latin for “shameless”; either way, the forehead forward and the face unreddened, one displays a fair amount of cheek.

This word makes me think of the name Ephron, as in Nora and – perhaps especially – her sister Delia, the author of the pleasingly impertinent How to Eat Like a Child. Also Zac Efron. And, for that matter, Jean Effront, a noted enzymologist (8156–1931), born Isaac Effront. All these names (Jewish family names all) trace to a Biblical character, Ephron, who sold the patriarch Abraham a plot of land in which to bury his wife Sarah – a deal pressed with smoothness rather than effrontery.

The question that remains, in regard to the taste of this word, is whether it has any positive tone, as nerve and especially chutzpah do. I would have to say that it does not carry any particular sense of admiration; it may not be as harsh a put-down as gall (which empties a bladder on the person, whereas this one simply defaces), but it lacks a particular element of praise. Indeed, being the most technical-sounding and formal of the lot, it is the most neutrally toned. Inasmuch as one may speak in neutral tones of such a shameless infraction, of course (most likely a social infraction, incidentally).

Tomorrow we go to the wall with balls!

Tagged effrontery, word sommelier, word tasting notes

chutzpah

Posted on March 15, 2011 | 4 comments

The question of the week:

Dear word sommelier: If I have a sentence such as “I can’t believe he had the ____ to do it,” do I want gall, nerve, chutzpah, effrontery, balls, or something else?

We’re onto chutzpah today, and this word is something special. For starts, it’s special because it’s Yiddish. And that means two things right off the bat: a, you don’t say it like a chutney disaster – the first sound is /h/ or a stronger fricative, like the end of loch, and it rhymes with foot spa (and indeed with chutzpah there’s always something afoot); b, it carries with it very overt tones of Ashkenazi Jewish culture. Those tones are very deep and complex and are received differently by different people, and you need to be aware that how you intend it may be different from how it is received, not only due to the listener’s attitudes but also due to who you are and who your listener is. That’s not to say this is a word to be avoided; in most contexts it will communicate very effectively. But when you use it, you are making a cultural reference.

Yiddish is a Germanic language, but it has a lot of vocabulary items from Hebrew, and this is one. It comes from Hebrew khuspa, a negatively toned word for “insolence, audacity, impudence”. Chutzpah (anglicized a bit from Yiddish khutspe), however, is at least partly positively toned – even if you’re using it to refer to someone whose character you would not advise anyone to emulate, it still carries a grudging admiration, perhaps even a sort of amazement at the audacious effrontery and, probably, shrewdness. Chutzpah has more guts than nerve does, even more than balls does. And neither nerve nor balls conveys the kind of intelligence that chutzpah conveys.

The best definition of something like chutzpah is an example, and the best example I’ve seen is Leo Rosten’s, from The Joys of Yiddish: “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.” No wonder some dictionary definitions include words like “unbelievable gall” – it’s the “unbelievable” that really comes in. More than any of the other choices, this one says “Did he really just do that?!” – and it says it with that kind of laugh that one makes almost involuntarily.

Chutzpah can have more of a business tone to it, too, as well as a natural suitability to the air of a courtroom – famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz titled his 1991 book of essays Chutzpah. Contrast that with some of the other options, such as gall and effrontery, which lean more to the social sphere.

And chutzpah has a bit of electricity in it – that zap in the middle, with the z and the look and sound of tz /ts/. And after the zap… ah. The whole thing sounds a bit like a firework, in fact.

Chutzpah is often defined as “effrontery”. But would you rather use effrontery here? We’ll taste that one next.

Tagged chutzpa, chutzpah, word sommelier, word tasting notes

nerve

Posted on March 14, 2011 | 4 comments

Here’s the question:

Dear word sommelier: If I have a sentence such as “I can’t believe he had the ____ to do it,” do I want gall, nerve, chutzpah, effrontery, balls, or something else?

We’ve already tasted gall. Now let’s try nerve.

Nerve has opposing aspects to it. On the one hand, you have the nerve that it takes a lot of – if you have the nerve to do something, it means that you have actually mustered the nerve to do it, an amount of nerve most people wouldn’t have. Even if, as is often the case, it’s a complaint – The nerve of that guy! Where did he get the nerve to do that? – there is at the very least a sense of strength of will, and perhaps even a grudging admiration: “I could never have the nerve to do that!” And if there are two opposing parties each trying to stare the other down, it can come to a war of nerves.

But on the other hand, you have nervous; if you have an attack of nerves, that means (paradoxically!) that you lack the nerve to do something. The same vibration (you can hear it in the /v/, even) that can give verve to nerve can also be the vibration of shivering with anxiety.

And of course there’s also the nerves that someone gets on. If someone has a lot of nerve, it can really get on your nerves, that’s for sure. (The /r/ nucleus in this word, with its straining growl, can be a very good vehicle for expressing this.) And in fact they may do something that touches a nerve – perhaps even touches a raw nerve.

Ah, nerves are electric. There is always some energy, always some vibration, but it can be positive or negative, bold or timorous, admirable or annoying. And all of those flavours are present whenever you use this word, though of course a particular sense will be more forward.

This multiplicity of sense comes in even in the sentence in question. If you say I can’t believe he had the nerve to do it, you could be admiring his courage, or you could be speaking resentfully of his impudence. The intonation will give the clue as much as anything. Is it “Wow, that took a lot of nerve!” or is it “The nerve of that guy!”?

Nerve, by the way, as you might suspect from the form of it and from its related form nervous, comes from Latin: nervus, “sinew, tendon, nerve, penis, etc.” (isn’t that quite a set of things!). The Latin has a cognate in Greek: νεῦρον neuron, meaning (in Greek) the same things as nervus. But while nerve, borrowed into English well before Shakespeare, has become a very common and often figurative word in English, neuron, which was borrowed in just over a century ago, is still rather technical and literal. You couldn’t say I can’t believe he had the neuron to do it, and if you say I can’t believe he had the neurons to do it people will probably assume you thought he was stupid.

Now, speaking of a term that expresses admiration, grudging or even ungrudging, we will look next at chutzpah.

Tagged nerve, word sommelier, word tasting notes

gall

Posted on March 13, 2011 | 4 comments

Dear word sommelier: If I have a sentence such as “I can’t believe he had the ____ to do it,” do I want gall, nerve, chutzpah, effrontery, balls, or something else?

Ah, now here’s a choice that really brings in the nuances that word tasters learn to discern. We will choose on the basis of the subtle tones a word gets from the various contexts of its usage – words are, after all, known by the company they keep – as well as by other words they have sound echoes of and by other senses of the word. So let’s taste these five words, one at a time, to see which one might fit your need.

First of all, if you feel like using the word unimitigated before the word, then your word is gall. Those two often travel together. But what we need to remember is that the use of gall to mean “impudence” is relatively recent – it showed up in the late 1800s – and particularly American.

Gall, you see, is what the gall bladder squeezes out: bile. And bile is a bitter thing. For most of the history of this old Anglo-Saxon word, figurative references were exclusively to that bitterness. We still use it for that reference, but mainly in the present participle of the verb form: galling. Something that’s galling leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. (Are gall stones galling? Usually one wouldn’t say so – unless, say, you had them when your dissolute uncle who ought to have every disease under the sun is as healthy as a horse, while you’ve been drinking wheatgrass every day for two years. So we can see that galling has the bitterness of envy.)

The bitterness (especially the spiteful or envious bitterness!) of galling is going to flavour the noun gall we’re looking at. If person A has the gall to do thing X, there’s more than a hint that thing X will be galling to some person(s) B (and perhaps C, D…). Person A might do X in spite of B, and B might be spiteful as a result.

One may also think that a thing one has the gall to do is a thing that will make someone else say, “Gaahhhhh!” But the stronger echo, I feel, is from all, with its expansive sweep – gall is likely to carry a tone of greater-than-expected magnitude, even completeness, and in particular an entirely undeserved and impertinent arrogation of that completeness. There’s also the effect of appalling. And probably of balls, too. (Not of small, however!)

Gall has the straightforwardness of being a single syllable, but it is very sustainable. Not only that, the /l/ here is that notably English allophone, where the tongue is raised at the back and the tip just manages to reach up to touch the alveolar ridge; the body of the tongue is thus in a straining U-type curve. And there’s a slight hint of choking in the constriction produced at the back of the tongue.

But, as mentioned, gall often travels with unmitigated. After all, sometimes a single syllable feels insufficient – it needs a nice polysyllabic wind-up to give it more punch.

One thing is certain: there is no great sense of admiration in gall. A recent New York Times editorial that displays it in full asperity (and uses galling too) is “.24 Karat Gall.”

Next up: nerve.

Tagged gall, word sommelier, word tasting notes

wh-

Posted on March 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

I was watching World Cup downhill skiing from Kvitfjell, Norway, today, and I thought, “Huh, Kvitfjell. That must mean ‘white mountain’.”

Which, of course, it did. Now, it’s not that I speak Norwegian, but I do know that fjell means “mountain” (cognate with the English noun fell, now uncommon) and I had good reason to expect that kvit was “white”.

You see, although “white” in modern German is weiss, just as “what” is wass and “which” is welcher (or welche or welches), and in Dutch the three are wit, wat, and welk, meaning that in both languages it’s just w now (pronounced /v/ or, in Dutch, something close to it), I knew that in Icelandic, the three are hvítur, hvað, and hver, with the hv pronounced [kv] or [kf]. And I see, looking it up, that “white” is hvid in Danish and hvit in standard Norwegian (yes, the kvit spelling is a different dialect), though the h seems most likely to go unpronounced.

We should also notice that in many of our modern English wh words, there are Latin equivalents in qu: quid means “what” and quis means “which”, for instance. (Latin for “white” comes from a different root.) This is most notably so with question words (note that question also starts with qu), which we refer to as wh words in English (and in fact linguists will often call the set the “wh- words” even in other languages, though I’d rather think “qu- words” would have a more widespread verity).

This is because they all come from the same Proto-Indo-European roots, which had a /kw/ onset – that oral gesture that may be like sucking or like kissing, but either way involves both front and back of the mouth, with a sort of tension between the lips pushing outward and the tongue sticking at the back. As the various Indo-European languages developed, the /kw/ was preserved in some, and in others became /sw/ (as in Sanskrit svetah “white”, Old Church Slavonic svetu “light”, and Lithuanian sviesti “shine”), or reduced to /k/ (as in various words for “who”: Sanskrit ka, Lithuenian ka, Irish cé) or even changed to /p/ or /pw/ (Greek poteros and Welsh pwy for “who”), or – as in Germanic languages – altered to /hw/ and in some cases ultimately reduced to /w/. (And in some Scots English dialects, under the influence of Gaelic phonotactics, the /hw/ has sometimes moved to /f/, as in fit “what” – the voicelessness and labial location are preserved, but the rest is changed.)

This leaves us with two questions particularly relevant to English. First, are white and what and which now /w/ onset words, at least in some versions of English? Second, why do we write them with wh when obviously we say either /w/ or /hw/ but never /wh/?

To look at the first question first: here in Canada, as in much of the United States, you will normally hear them with just /w/. But the odds are pretty good that there’s still a citation form (as linguists call them) with a /hw/. Get someone to say “I saw a wight which saw a white witch” and then have someone ask them to repeat it more clearly, and you have a good chance of hearing the /hw/ on the wh words. For that matter, there are times (say, when addressing an impatient woman briefly) when one might say Which? very clearly so as not to be thought to be saying Witch! And some people will find they are more likely to say /hw/ in some contexts – for instance, Rosemary Tanner (who suggested this exploration) finds that white gets the voiceless onset when referring to snow and freshly washed laundry. At the same time, of course, we have lots of fun with the usual homophony, for instance with Which witch is which? So there’s no question of our not being aware that we usually say it just /w/!

There is, by the way, some question of whether it’s really accurate to say it’s /hw/. Say /h/, as in the start of how. Now say /w/ as in win. Now tack the one onto the other: h-win. Does that seem quite like what you say when you say when? Or maybe a bit too separated? Dollars to doughnuts your lips are already rounded when you start the /h/ sound, in fact. So really it’s a voiceless /w/ (the IPA symbol is /ʍ/, an upside-down w), and it might get some voicing at the end.

But it undoubtedly came from a /hw/, which came from a /kw/. And in fact in Old English it was written hw. So hwat happened? Well, it changed during the Middle English period. Somewhere in the 1200s scribes started using wh, possibly under the influence of some Norman French spellings of some words (that’s how we got our sh and ch spellings for what had up to then been written sc and c). We’re not actually altogether sure why the change was made, in fact.

But it didn’t happen all at once; it was dragged out, and uneven. In fact, the list of different spellings of white in the OED is rather long, starting with the old hwit and moving to such as wit and wyt (yes, at one time we left off the h in spelling) as well as to whit and whyte and so on but also to an assortment of others, such as qwyte, quhyt, and qwyght.

The same pattern holds true for our various wh question words, of course. The interesting case is who, wherein the /w/ has been altogether dropped; it started out as hwa in Old English, but once the sound had moved to be /hwu/, the more natural progression was to /hu/, assimilating the two rounded sounds and keeping the voiceless opener for an onset. Interestingly, this also happened to the Old English hwo, which became hu… and then, in Modern English, how. How do you like that? And who would have thought it, eh? What do you know…

liqueur

Posted on March 11, 2011 | 1 comment

Oh, dear. Am I in my cups again? Only if you’re talking about the u and u. You may drink liquor alone, with only one cup u, but liqueur is clearly meant for a more social – or romantic – occasion. You can see the smiling person e carrying the little glasses to the table. Perhaps it’s like some Bailey’s commercial: should the gentleman spill some on you, he may have to liqueur dress… or liqueur arm… or liqueur, ah, lips perhaps… Mmmm… there ain’t no cure for love, but there is liqueur for love! (In fact, Marie Brizard makes one called Parfait Amour. It is, so I read, made on a curaçao base. So at least there is a curaçao for love.)

Ah, liqueur, enchanteresse, verse l’ivresse et l’oubli dans mon coeur!* Oh, that’s actually not a love song, it’s from the opera Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas. (You can watch Simon Keenlyside sing it if you want.) But Hamlet’s not drinking liqueur. Actually, he’s drinking wine. Liqueur in French is now used to mean pretty much just what it means in English, but it was formerly used more broadly. After all, it’s the French cognate of the English word liquor.

The root is Latin liquor, which means just “liquid” (and liquor is still used in that sense in some domain-specific applications in English, notably in some food processes). We got licur before 1300 from French, and respelled it later to match the Latin, but then we borrowed (and subsequently repronounced) the modern French form again in the 1700s for those special sweet concoctions which are typically brand-specific and sui generis. We may have “dessert wines,” but we have liqueurs rather than “dessert liquors.”

I do believe, when I first saw this word in my childhood, I thought it was another spelling of liquor – or, with that characteristic logic of English speakers, that perhaps it was the correct spelling, since it looked weirder and less logical. But I came to understand that it had a special pronunciation, and that meant there was something special and classy about what it referred to. And I had the clear sense it was a word my mother was more likely to say than my father was.

I taste a certain fondness in liqueur, and perhaps a feeling that its object should be consumed (not simply drunk) in quiet, civilized occasions with some velvet somewhere in sight. It’s not just liquor, which is said like licker and rhymes with quicker; this one has this cute turn of the vowel in the middle, like the sound of the liquid in a glass as you ting it against another, perhaps. (Of course one may say it the French way, or closer to it; I just happen to have learned it with the “le cure” pronunciation, and that’s what I’m still used to hearing.) It seems to make a U-turn in your mouth as you say it – well, what really happens is that your tongue laps forward and retreats like a wave, while your lips round, making a gesture like a faint, longing, incomplete air kiss, awaiting the enchanter or enchantress, or the perfect love.

*Oh, liquor, enchantress, pour drunkenness and forgetfulness in my heart.

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged liqueur, word tasting notes

privacist

Posted on March 9, 2011 | 1 comment

There are those among us for whom there is no such thing as bad publicity, for whom the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, who would view any lapse from the public oculus as an unbearable privation. There are those among us who would at least like to have to put up with the burden of fame for a while (and who wouldn’t mind the chance to prove that being rich wouldn’t spoil them, but that’s another matter). And then there are those who would really rather not be so well known, thank you.

This latter type we may also bifurcate as the former: one the one hand those who have never been well known and who do not wish to become well known; on the other those who have been famous (and perhaps still are) and who want to be alone, or anyway could do with a bit less attention.

Into this last camp, it seems, falls – at least to a modest degree – Ken Jennings, who won at Jeopardy! 74 times. In his really quite entertaining question-and-answer session on reddit, he says, “I don’t want to be famous. I keep getting asked who my publicist is. Why would I have a publicist?!? I’m just a guy on a game show. I got mine. I need a privacist.”

Not that Jennings scorns what his fame brings altogether, of course; he has a book and his fame helps him sell it (though he rates someone else’s book on the topic more highly – he really is refreshingly frank). But I’m here to taste words, not to taste the sweet bitterness of fame (well, OK, I wouldn’t mind that, either, but a Campari and soda will hold me for the moment), and the word du jour is, of course, privacist.

As Wilson Fowlie, who drew my attention to Jennings’s reddit session, put it, quoting me, “Regarding the subject of ‘He used it, you understood it, it’s a word’…” So, yes, privacist is in fact a word. No, you won’t find it in a dictionary, yet. And Jennings may or may not have heard it before he used it. But he’s not the first to use it. It’s a natural enough coinage for the purpose.

Until recently, it didn’t really seem needful to have someone (theoretical or actual) who could help ensure privacy. Publicity, yes, sure, and still today those are needed, but privacy was something one could usually lapse into with no more than a little bit of effort unless one were enormously famous. But now the digital revolution and social media have made our personal information very widely and easily available indeed. Not so long ago, the idea of seeing an apparently public ad, from some company you’re not on close terms with (or any terms at all), that was tailored to you personally might have seemed unsettlingly creepy. Actually, it may still seem unsettlingly creepy, but now it’s not an idea, it’s something that peeks up at you from your web browser all the time. And occasionally calls you on the phone.

And of course some of those who gather your information may want not to sell to you but to pretend to be you. Impersonation is not exactly new, but it has now evolved into a category of crime called identity theft. Privacy is getting to look rather appealing. And so there are privacists. They do exist already. Their role, mind you, is more the protection of personal information than helping people evade unwanted fame, though I’d imagine you could find someone to help with that too.

But, now, why privacist? Is it morphologically well formed? And for that matter, why is it privacy but publicity? Why not privacity or publicy?

To answer the last question first, the roots are not analogous: private is from the Latin past participle privatus, nominalized to privatia, of which the modern analogue is privacy, while public is from the Latin adjective publicus and the ity suffix is from the Latin suffix (i)tas which replaced the us ending. This also leads us to the answer to the question of whether privacist is morphologically well formed: no. Privatist would be the morphologically “proper” formation.

So we should use privatist then, right? No, actually. There’s nothing wrong with neologizing by blending; we do it all the time. If we can have, for instance, chocoholic from chocolate and alcoholic, we can have privacist from private and publicist. Besides, privatist sounds too much like privatest. And, it might be added, those wanting the services of a privacist want not to be private but to have privacy (there is a difference), so it makes sense to form it with the c of privacy.

Anyway, what else could we call them, given that privatist could be mistaken? Privateer is already taken. And in fact it is often from privateers and other profiteers with their omnipresent ears that those who want privacists want privacy. They do not want to be deprived of all the furniture of modern life, but they want someone to assist them in controlling their info outflow. At the very least, they don’t want to give it away. Let the privateers pay a private eye to pry, if it’s worth it to them.

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged privacist, word tasting notes

turpitude

Posted on March 8, 2011 | 1 comment

Well, perhaps the sheen is coming off Charlie. He’s been dumped, Warner Brothers citing a clause that lets them off the hook if he commits “a felony offense involving moral turpitude.”

Ah, turpitude. This is not some mere dotting of the tease and crossing of the eyes (that would be Ben Turpin-tude); this is a high-toned vituperation, one that fairly spits from its three voiceless stops (though, from the charming side, it does sound like a tapdance at the Cotton Club). Turpitude is at the other end of the scale from a friend of mine who, when chastising herself for some oversight, says “Toopid, toopid, toopid!” (onset cluster reduction being an easy index of intellectual insufficiency). But turpitude is not per se undue stupidity, nor is it a sort of torpor. It is a rupture with prudity and piety, an impertinent attitude that may lead to pruritus and penitentiaries. It is a sort of moral turpentine, stripping the thin coating of respectability to show the true colours beneath.

Oh, yes, moral. You almost always see moral before turpitude, even though it’s quite redundant; turpitude comes from Latin turpis, “base” (as in “low”), and if baseness is not a moral character (or lack thereof), what is? Indeed, one may say those of base character, those who lie, are of the character of lye, a base, and are abased by the corrosion as they try to whitewash their dirty deeds. But that leaves us nowhere with turpentine, which is not acid or base, though it is corrosive, as of course (and of coarseness) is turpitude.

One may also, mind you, say that turpitude is wickedness (another moral judgment), and that will put us in mind of other things that are wicked, such as lamp oil and candles – oh, and to wax poetic, the great quatrain of that wonderful wanton poet of turpitude, Edna St. Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light.

Well, one doesn’t always want to make light of turpitude, even if it may involve a spectacular flame-out (and even if turpentine is flammable – oh, by the way, turpentine is not actually related to turpitude; it comes from terebinth, the Greek name for the kind of tree whose sap was originally distilled to make it). No, we must remember that it tends to take the sheen off things – and, if rests on your skin, you may experience excoriation.

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged turpitude, word tasting notes

rocococity

Posted on March 8, 2011 | 1 comment

Imagine a cacophony of curves and curls, a kind of rocaille quincaillerie a-go-go, not so much baroque as going for broke… a rather cuckoo occurrence. Imagine a whole city, squirrelly with coquilles and asymmetrical curves, like a pile of wood shavings from a carpenter’s plane growing quickly into vines… look, and oh, see, oh, see, oh, see… an atrocity? Rocococity!

Ah, the ferocity of rocococity. For some people, “oc oc oc” might be the sound of gagging at the sight, but for others the curls (ocococ) will spur excited curiosity. Oh, the rococo – a late development of the baroque, just as rococo may also be playfully built on baroque and rocaille (shellwork, grotto-esque and perhaps grotesque) and coquille (a scallop shell) and no doubt something fun or diminutive about the repetition. The doubled /k/ gives a nice kick, with a wind-up from the /r/ and a slide into home with city.

Originally the term rococo was used dismissively to say the style was old-fashioned, but over time what was old can become, if not new, then at least charming again. There are rococo rooms in palaces, and even entire rococo churches, but your best bet is to look in the theme rooms in museums – try the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston or the Victoria and Albert in London, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I think the Louvre has some too, though one might after all randomly bump into rocococity out and about in Paris.

If rococo rooms may daze your eyes, though, surely rocococity will too. How many c’s and o’s are there? Three of each, but it’s ro-co-co-city really. And though rococo puts the stress in the middle on the second syllable, rocococity puts the stress on the middle in the third syllable, to echo ferocity, precocity, and so on. This may be the only symmetrical thing about rococo and rocococity! The baroque was tidy and mannered, the rococo rather less so… it’s what happens to a decorative art when the gardener goes on vacation and doesn’t come back.

But of course rocococity can spread beyond the decorative arts. It infected painting. But more than that: the property of rocococity may be attributed to things not artificially contrived at all, just curly and wanton and asymmetrical: “electromagnetism behaves in essentially the same simple way on all scales, varying only in its general strength, whereas gravity becomes increasingly rococo as you zoom into microscopic scales – signaling that the theory eventually gives way to a deeper one such as string theory or loop quantum gravity. But ‘eventually’ is so far off that physicists can usually neglect the rocococity.” Gravity? And microscopic rocococity? Yes, indeed, and we are reminded of the infectiousness of rocococity: “The rocococity of gravity should infect the other forces.” And who said that? George Musser, in Scientific American (Forces to Reckon with: Does Gravity Muck Up Electromagnetism?).

So here we may have thought of rocococity as some mere frivolity, and we have failed to consider the gravity of the situation! But is it string theory or loop quantum gravity? Well, what do you see in rocococity… strings or loops?

Thanks to Stan Backs for mentioning rocococity and the Scientific American article.