Yearly Archives: 2011

Spuzzum

Posted on November 27, 2011 | 8 comments

My friend Antonia Morton drew this one to my attention recently. It’s the name of a town I’ve passed through – it’s on the way to Vancouver if you drive there on the Trans-Canada Highway from points east, which I have done, though not recently; it’s about 50 km north of the town of Hope, which allows the joke that it’s “beyond Hope.”

Spuzzum is a very small town. It was never big; it used to have a sign on the highway that read on both sides, “You are now leaving Spuzzum.” It had a gas station and general store until the building burned down in the 1990s. The population is in the double digits, and is heading towards the single digits.

And there’s that name. Spuzzum. It seems made for mocking. My first tastes of it match Antonia’s: “All the associations I have are dirty-minded or otherwise disreputable: spasm, sputum, jism, sperm, scuzzy, bosom, buzzard, spud…” Indeed, the salient parts all have some associations that give it an off flavour. The opening /sp/ often shows up in words to do with messy liquids, such as spit, spurt, splatter; of course it shows up in many other words with other tones, too, but the associations are steered in the dodgy direction because that’s the overlapping area of the sets of associations of its parts. The um is a Latin neuter ending, used on many innocuous and frankly boring things, but also on words for various things (medical or otherwise) indelicate to discuss over tea, as well as commercial creations such as Stickum. And it has the dull echo of dumb and ummm. And in the middle, between the u’s, is that double z with its buzzy sound. Oh, it could have the verve of jazz or the effervescence of fizz, but in the context it more likely brings to mind buzz, muzzle, guzzle, buzzard… Also, as it happens, the insertion of zz into various words as a fad in gangsta rap argot and related speech styles (e.g., guzzun for gun). Indeed, this word may, to the person seeing it afresh, have the appearance of a chimera made of bits of the uglier animals.

But Arlene Prunkl, who lives much nearer to Spuzzum than Antonia does, says, “It’s funny how, if you hear a name or a word like that all your life, you don’t notice how odd it is.” Indeed. And the word comes from somewhere other than bits of odd English words; it comes, it is thought, from Salish spozem “little flat”, because it’s a little flat area, I s’poze.

And everywhere is somewhere, and everwhere people live has meaning for those people. Many important places in my life are such towns, places that seem like odd little hiccups in the landscape but that have whole lives’ histories in them, places that were the centre of some people’s universes, places that have memories. I am put in mind of the Beatles: “There are places I remember all my life, though some have changed: some forever, not for better; some have gone, and some remain…” My great-grandparents lived in a small, small town called West Clarksville, and good luck finding it (there is no nearby Clarksville or East Clarksville), but their house held many memories for four generations, some of whom are now buried just across the road. I spent much of my childhood in and around a town called Exshaw. It’s not much to look at, but you only have one early childhood, and mine was spent there, picking crocuses and chasing dragonflies and hiking up to look at the “ice castles” formed by a leaky pipe that came down from the dam above town. There are quite a few people who love the place dearly even now. And back before I was a kid, it used to be a resort town…

So did Spuzzum. It used to be a place to stop through or even to go to. It was there when the Canadian Pacific Railroad was being built. It was there in the 1940s for the Japanese Canadians who had been interned and were released but still couldn’t settle within 100 miles of the coast. I enjoin you to read more about it at Michael Kluckner’s site for his book of watercolours, Vanishing B.C.: www.michaelkluckner.com/bciw6spuzzumhouse.html and www.michaelkluckner.com/bciw6spuzzum.html, complete with memories shared in correspondence from people with Kluckner. You will become fond of it, I think.

The more you know about the thing a word names, the more it tends to take over the taste of the word. The initial phonaesthetics never vanish, but there is so much greater richness of flavour that you discover something to love in even the most awkward word. They are like George Eliot, the English novelist, real name Mary Anne Evans, about whom Henry James once wrote, “She is magnificently ugly – deliciously hideous. She has a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth, full of uneven teeth, and a chin and jaw-bone qui n’en finissent pas. . . . Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you as I ended, in falling in love with her.”

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hurt

Posted on November 25, 2011 | 4 comments

This is one of the basic words of English, a word so common that it has a great depth of flavour from all its uses and associations, and the flavours that stand out will be particular to each individual at each time.

For me right now, what comes to mind first is Johnny Cash’s moving rendition of the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt” – listen to it and watch the video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=l95D7leeU3w. Words often bring songs to mind for me; another that comes to mind is “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. (now there’s also an “Everybody Hurts” by Avril Lavigne for some reason). It also makes me think of two actors: John Hurt, who is very good at looking hurt, and William Hurt, who is a bit too smoothly good looking to quite match his last name. It reminds me, too, of my time working in a bookstore, when we had a big bin of Penguin “hurts”: books that had been damaged a bit and so were marked down. And you can follow hurt down the path of poetry, down the path of country music, down the path of childhood bruises or of adult betrayals. Oh, the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to…

Hurt comes in many places, in many forms, in many magnitudes. And hurt has the classic versatility of short old English words. It can be a noun, either countable (So many hurts I have felt) or mass object (I’ll open up a can of hurt on you); it can be an adjective (You look hurt at the price we charge for these hurt books); it can be a verb, either present and future (“I’ll hurt you if you hurt me”; “Love hurts” – see Nazareth or Joan Jett) or past (“I hurt you you ’cause you hurt me” – The Pretenders). The noun and the verb have been in English since the 1200s, the adjective since the 1400s – but the past tense used to be hurted, as in “he never hurted any” (as you can hear in “Geordie,” a truly lovely song sung by Joan Baez), now reduced, probably thanks to haplology.

Is the word suited in form to its meaning? It’s hard to tell – it’s one of those words that set the tone. It starts with an exhalation, a sigh but not a soft sigh, more like the sharper exhalation of pain or impatience. In the writing this is followed by a cup u perhaps of sorrows, but in pronunciation the cup is taken away and only the liquid remains: a syllabic liquid /r/ and no vowel at all. And then it knocks smartly at the end with /t/, like the crack of a whip.

What other words is it like? Hunt, heart, curt, hurl, hurtle… Oh, yes, hurtle is derived from hurt. Hurt first meant “knock, strike, dash”, and the iterative ending le gave it a sense related to collision. What other word could be used? A related one is smart, as in “cause pain” (that smarts) or “feel pain” (I’m still smarting). It relates specifically to a sharp pain, and it is from that sharpness that the adjectival sense eventually slid all the way to “intelligent”. It’s cognate with German Schmerz, which seems like a good word for hurt. But smarting is not the same as hurting; smarting is a sharp pain but one you will get over, while hurting is a deeper, more sorrowful pain, one you are less likely even to want to acknowledge openly. But it’s the kind of pain you write songs about.

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haplology

Posted on November 25, 2011 | 6 comments

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere (An Appreciation of English: A language in motion), language changes, constantly, and there are two main reasons people change language (deliberately or accidentally): to make their lives easier, and to make themselves feel better. In-group inventions, which give a sense of superiority and belonging, are a good example of the latter group, and include slang and technical jargon. The various reductions and weatherings that speech undergoes make up an important part of the former, and among these is haplology.

Haplology is a sort of reduction – syncopation, in fact – that might be made by some hapless guy provoking “LOL,” or it might be done deliberately with no apology. It’s simply removing one of two sequential identical or similar sounds or syllables. For instance, if haplology were to become haplogy, it would have been subject to haplology.

It can happen because you lose track – in a word such as unununium, for instance (and, by the way, if you were to lose track the other way and make ununununium or haplolology, that would be dittology, as would dittotology). It can happen because it’s a real nuisance to say – in a word such as peroration or library (especially in British pronunciation), the sequential /r/s are extra exercise for the tongue, like a couple of sit-ups, so they do tend to smear into one /r/. Or it can just happen because to heck with it. Who needs morphophonology when you can have morphonology? You probably can’t be bothered with both /b/s in probably most of the time. (Dropping both of them down to “prolly” is not only haplology but also deletion.)

On the other hand, you’re less likely to do it with a word such as titivate or mimetic or gigabyte; you can skip over bits in the mushy middle of a word, especially when they’re unaccented, but up front the salience adds distinctiveness.

We know that there are many languages where reduplication is actually an important morphological feature; Hawai‘ian gives us mu‘umu‘u and humuhumunukunukuapua‘a, among others, for instance, and you would not expect them to trim those down, because that would change the meaning. But many people think haplology is also infra dig for the language of Englaland, a sign of a simpleton.

No, Englaland was not a dittograph (reduplication in writing or typing); it’s what the name of the place was at first (or Anglaland, Englalond, or a few other versions). Say it a few times and it should be clear why it easily folded into England. It stands as a bit of a counterbalance to those who would maintain some sort of idololatry of the original. Oh, sorry – although idololatry would be true to the Greek and subsequent Latin source, it’s always been idolatry in English.

But it’s true it’s simple. That’s the point: simplify. The haplo is from Greek ἁπλοῦς haplous “single, simple”. The term was actually coined in the late 1800s by the American philologist (not philogist) Maurice Bloomfield. It doesn’t get used a lot, but we sure do what it names a fair amount. With the double lick of /l/ it’s like a la-la lark or glossolalia, and if it makes you happy make no apology.

Thanks to Lynne Melcombe and her blog post The Happy Haplologist? for bringing this word to my attention.

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administrivia

Posted on November 23, 2011 | 3 comments

Write this word out longhand. Bit of a nuisance, isn’t it? (Especially if, like me, you make your n’s and m’s generally with points rather than bumps, so they look like sets of i’s without dots.) Along with all those up-and-down letters, you have to cross the t and dot all four of the i’s – make sure every jot and tittle (iota and titulus) is as it must be. If you do this a lot, you’re probably a four-i’s too. And the word starts at the beginning – a – and the consonants go, with one exception, in alphabetical order, but at the end you’re back at a where you started! What’s more, just as its referent keeps you on your toes and fingertips, this word stays at the tip of your tongue or slips forward to your lips.

Alas, administrivia! Surely there must be some third way, between utter chaos and this amazing round of endless paperwork designed to satisfy government or ISO standards. It can be a frustrating struggle – and so often things that should be separate end up being joined on, like the s on adminis ganging up with the tr on trivia for strength to strike and strangle you with constraints. And many strive to find a way to somehow get the paperwork to go away or go more easily, but there’s bad luck awaiting – administrivia’s half-dozen syllables bring 13 letters, and many more forms and emails than that. Your many ministrations must make use of all the grammar, rhetoric, and logic you can muster. Not to mention time and patience.

Administrivia is made, obviously, from administration and trivia, and the sense of the blend is pretty apparent. But just as you accept the various formalities of administration without necessarily knowing where they all came from, you can accept and use this word (as with pretty much any other word) without knowing where its bits came from. But isn’t etymology trivial anyway? Well, not in the mathematical sense – you can’t simply deduce the source of a word from present information – but it may make use of grammar and logic, and perhaps even rhetoric.

I’ll explain. The seven liberal arts, as defined in the Middle Ages, comprised four higher arts – the quadrivium (four ways), arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music – and three lower arts – the trivium (three ways), grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Things less exalted and more commonplace came to be called trivial, and the sense shifted to the insignificant and insubstantial thereafter. The word trivia is actually a modern addition to English – about a century ago – as a plural of trivium to refer to those inconsequential little things, the knick-knacks of the mind.

And the staples of administration. Which comes from ad “to” and ministrare “serve, provide, manage, control”. It is, or is supposed to be, what government ministers (a term not in use in the US) do. But the British TV series Yes, Minister reminds us that ministers, like many others, often leave the administrivia to their assistants.

Thanks to Jim Taylor for suggesting today’s word.

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sauromorph

Posted on November 22, 2011 | 1 comment

Out the window of my office I can see a building being torn down. The building is one of those modernist cubes, not high modernism but just the sort of unimaginative vernacular that was being built in the new suburbs of Toronto 40 or 50 years ago, a style made possible by reinforced concrete and the new approach to construction it allowed: an elevator core, and pillars regularly spaced holding up the floors. Such a concrete innovation has allowed us to reach from the fundament towards the firmament. But the buildings we built to soar morph into carbuncular bunkers, clichés, no longer art but just commodity, and their contents degrade. They are weighed in the balance and found wanting. And so, while from my apartment I watch as new buildings reach up to claim my view, from my office I watch as a once-new building is removed and the view past it opens up… until another is built in its place.

First the contents of the building were ripped out and dumped out the windows and sorted and trucked away. Then the facings were taken off. The top two levels were jackhammered away and pushed over the edge by little bobcats that scooted around. And now the little busy creatures have left and there is a triad of big creatures: three pieces of heavy equipment with long hydraulic arms. One has a bucket for lifting and scooping and dumping. One has a claw with a saw, to cut and to grasp. And one can reach up eight storeys and saw and push. The big one cuts away the floors between the pillars. Then, when a column of pillars is cut to a peninsula, the small one comes with its claw and cuts a bit and pulls and it all comes crashing down in a cloud of whitish-grey dust. Then there is cleanup – the little one and the scooper push things and drop things and take them away. The three of them resemble nothing so much as dinosaurs.

Surely you’ve seen Fantasia, yes? With its sequence set to Stravinsky’s great ground-breaking modern masterpiece The Rite of Spring, the dinosaurs reaching their long necks and plucking from the high trees, strings of vegetation hanging from their mouths. These colossal beasts devouring the building next door look just the same, with the same graceful movements of the long necks, nudging, pulling, and the long strings of vegetation are rebar – iron reinforcing bars from the concrete. Our modern mechanical dinosaurs are devouring our modernist past. Am I anthropomorphizing them? Of course not – that would be seeing them as human. I am theriomorphizing them, zoomorphizing them, seeing them as animals; more to the point, I am sauromorphizing them, seeing them as lizards, big lizards, dinosaurs. They are sauromorphs: σαῦρος sauros, “lizard”, and μορϕή morphé, “form”, from Ancient Greek. They are old things made from new parts, as sauromorph is a new word made from old parts.

Everything changes, of course, and sorrow morphs to joy. The view I am gaining from the disappearance of this building is of a Superstore across Eglinton Avenue. When I first started working at Don Mills and Eglinton, where that store is was an empty lot, a great open bit of the wild, fenced off, with high grass and flowers and a million insects, and a circular driveway – there had been a building there before. And even now there is a strip between the Superstore and Eglinton that has grass and trees. It used to have a path that was crumbled pavement, but now that’s been bulldozed, and likely the rest of this piece of nature will have its turn to be turned over and built on. So this building goes away, and I see nature, and the building where nature was where a building was before, and the nature won’t last either. The world is a sophomore, wise and foolish, forever partly formed. It all cycles through: “The eternal process: creation – maturation – destruction.” Creation dances with destruction, from the smallest meson to the whole multiverse, and nature is red in tooth and claw.

Red. That was the name of the play I saw this evening, a play by John Logan about the modern painter Mark Rothko, portrayed captivatingly by Jim Mezon in Canadian Stage’s production. It is the great abstract expressionist in the late peak of his career, when the new wave of pop artists – Stella, Lichtenstein, Warhol – were up and coming, just as the abstract expressionists had in their own time dismantled what was before. “The child must banish the father,” Logan’s Rothko says. “Respect him, but kill him.” Rothko even refers to himself – perhaps ironically – as a dinosaur, sucking up oxygen that the new furry little mammals want. “The eternal process: creation – maturation – destruction.” He has no respect for, does not want his paintings to become, overmantels: “those paintings destined to become commodities” – to be hung over the mantels in the homes of the rich. He talks of Rembrandt’s Feast of Belshazzar and quotes the writing on the wall: “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin: you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

But everything is ultimately wanting, and the days of everything are numbered. We destroy the dinosaurs, and then we create new dinosaurs to destroy what we have built. From the amorphous we add r selves and make the sauromorph. We dream, and we shift shapes – Morpheus the shapeshifter was Ovid’s god of dreams in his Metamorphoses. We are perhaps Tolkien’s Sauron, creating a ring that will itself come full circle, ruling, finding, binding, and then being melted again in the primal heat of magma from the mantle. We are Sauron-Morpheus, we and our sauromorphs. The rite of spring is a rite of the fall… and rising again. And the background to it all… can you hear? I put on The Rite of Spring when I started writing this. And now I hear the last song of the dinosaurs. Which is?

The CD has finished. Logan’s Rothko says it: “Silence is so accurate.”

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aloof

Posted on November 21, 2011 | 1 comment

Do you prefer to be on the floor, where the action is, or to play your fiddle on the roof, aloft, hoping not to fall with an “oof”? Do you like to swim in the flood, or, fearing being scrubbed as by a loofah and looking the fool, would you rather simply look on, aloof, and risk being seen as a loafer? What if someone offers to grease your palm – can you be enticed?

It is interesting how we conceptualize action and involvement: as something we enter into; the default state is distance, inaction. We remain aloof, or we stay aloof. And as opposed to the heat of battle, to be aloof is to be cool or cold. But we do not usually sit aloof; we normally stand aloof. I bet that the very phrase gives you an image of a person standing back, arms crossed, looking askance. Alert, to be sure – be alert, the world needs more lerts – but aloof. Does the world need more loofs? And by being a loof, do you manage to stay back and keep from being the fool?

Now, tell me: is going against the wind being aloof? In the song “Against the Wind,” by Bob Seger, you have a picture of someone constantly struggling against the current of the times, breaking rules, always moving fast. Not aloof. And yet to be aloof is to be upwind of something, even to move upwind of it. I don’t just mean figuratively – certainly upwind makes more sense than downwind as far as involvement goes – but literally: that’s where the term comes from.

And not standing upwind. Floating upwind. We may be inclined to visualize being aloof as standing aloft, high and dry, but aloof first meant “upwind” nautically. Turn aloof meant head into the wind. (Can you now hear the sails flapping as you tack across the wind, gradually making your way into it, “loof aloof aloof”?) And one reason to do so would be to steer clear of some downwind point – a shore or ship that you wish not to encounter. You don’t let the wind blow you into it; you resist the natural trend and remain aloof. You’re not loafing, but you are remaining circumspect. You don’t want things to get out of hand.

Speaking of hand, loof is a word meaning “palm of the hand”, as in creesh your loof, “grease your palm” (“give you money or flattery”). It may be related to luff, originally a type of rudder, then a ship’s weathervane; from the weathervane we get keep your luff “stay close to the wind” and spring your luff “turn into the wind”, and a luff “close to the wind” (i.e., with the bow pointed more towards the wind).

So, while we now think of someone aloof as perhaps standing apart in a drawing room, or otherwise keeping a distance, at least emotionally – wanting perhaps to be in the loop informationally, but not to be in the pool with the sharks – and so might see the position as more akin to the view from an airplane, originally it was a view from a ship. Just one that prefers to pass in the night. But either way, you can see the binoculars in aloof, that oo with the hands holding it on the side loof, offering a view from a distance. (Or is it a snorkel mask?) And the word doesn’t quite say “Halloo”; it has the cool /u/, made for shouting over a distance, but then finishes with the soft /f/, like quiet static on the radio or the sound of a wave breaking on a distant shore. And walking on that shore, feet in the soft sand as the waves lap, “loof aloof aloof,” is someone thinking, “I wonder who’s in that boat?”

Thanks to Rosemary Tanner for suggesting aloof.

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qvevri

Posted on November 20, 2011 | 2 comments

I was at the Food & Wine Show yesterday. It’s quite the thing – more samples than you could ever get through (or afford; you have to buy tickets and they tend to run from a dollar to four dollars for lower-end stuff, and up to 18 dollars for the top end), and actually more crowds than you could easily get through either. It’s been a couple of years since last I went, and I had nearly forgotten a striking feature of the people in attendance: a very high percentage of young women wearing plunging necklines. In V-neck veritas!

But I digress. The Food & Wine Show always has a few feature countries, and this year one of them was Georgia. That’s the country in the Caucasus (known to itself as Sakartvelo), not the state in the US. Now, Georgia has been on my mind for some time, and a bit moreso recently. A decade ago I sang with a choir called Darbazi that did music from Georgia – they have an old and glorious polyphonic tradition; it’s older than the European polyphonic tradition. And it just happens that Georgia also has a very old winemaking tradition – by some accounts, Georgians were the first to stomp grapes.

Which has something to do with why Tony Aspler, whose website I edit, recently made a trip to Georgia (see “Munching through Georgia“). So that brought Georgian wine back to mind. And naturally I tried a couple of samples. And I had a query for the first person I got a sample from: “Are these made in qvevris?”

“In qvevris?” you may be thinking. “Is that some pretentious Latin term, spelled even more pretentiously with the old angular u’s – the shape now taken over by v?” Most proofreaders would probably query qvevri immediately. It is indeed a jarring word. And even once you know it’s a real term, you’ll be wondering what language it’s from. Some Scandinavian one, with that qv (think of Husqvarna chainsaws, for instance)? But, no, you can guess easily enough in this context: it’s Georgian.

And I should say that a syllable beginning with a stop and a fricative is child’s play for Georgian. This is the country that gives us rkatsiteli grapes. It’s the country that has Tbilisi as its capital city. In Darbazi, along with the church polyphony, we used to sing a charming pop song about Tbilisi, the refrain of which was as follows:

Tbiliso, mzis da vardebis mkhareo,
Ushenod sitsotskhlets ar minda.
Sad aris skhvagan akhali Varazi?
Sad aris ch’agara Mtatsminda?

Oh, yeah, see that ch’? Georgian has ejectives, too. This is a language in which a charming lullaby has words in it like vktbe. That would not help most Anglophone kids get to sleep.

But I digress again. A qvevri is a large clay amphora that is buried in the ground – only the top of it is accessible. The crushed grapes go into it; wine comes out of it. Qvevris are used for both fermentation and storage, and they maintain a constant temperature by being buried. They can hold up to 8000 litres – and, coincidentally, the oldest qvevri so far found dates from 8000 years ago. I told you the Georgians had wine and song first!

The third member of the collocation with wine and song – women – can of course be assumed to have been present in all cultures from the beginning, even if qvevri does feature those V-necks… but only in the Roman alphabet; in the Georgian alphabet, the letter for /v/ looks like a 3. Perhaps (probably not, but perhaps) this is why in Georgia the people you’re most likely to see with the wines include spokespersons for the Holy Trinity, i.e., priests (and not female ones). The only jugs they are displaying are those for pouring wine.

How does qvevri wine taste? I’d recommend you try it and see. In my limited experience, Georgian wines are pretty full-bodied, suitable for accompanying rich foods and choral music that includes stacked fifths. But never mind fifths – there’s a whole lot more wine for the drinking than that. If you’re interested in learning all sorts of things about qvevris, I can point you to Tony Aspler’s notes from the International Qvevri Wine Symposium.

As to how qvevri the word tastes, well, it involves the back of the tongue, the lips, the tip of the tongue; it’s not really hard to say at all. It has overtones of beverage and every. Its appearance may bring to mind a quirky verve; in total, it seems geared to revive. As may a good glass of saperavi or rkatsiteli. It has been pointed out that nothing important happens in Georgia without wine and song. To that, I say – as Georgians do when toasting – Gaumarjos!

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straphanger

Posted on November 17, 2011 | 3 comments

The first time I saw this word might have been on a bus or subway train, if only because that’s where I do most of my reading, usually seated but sometimes standing, gripping a bar with the other hand or just riding like a surfer. Or I might have seen in back before I was regularly commuting, perhaps in my youth. I don’t rightly recall. But I do recall wondering how it was pronounced. “Straffanjer”? “Stra-fanger”? I wasn’t entirely sure what it signified, either. Something to do with commuting. But it looked like a family name – like Taittinger (another pronunciation problem, since it’s a brand of champagne), Basinger, Nuthanger (a farm in Watership Down), Behringer, Levenger… Names that might make you think of products and people with a certain classic something, or if not classic then at least quaint.

The first time I saw it wasn’t in this quote from Punch, but it was a similar context, and you can see where I would have been a little uncertain: “I am a Straphanger. I am one of a million swaying souls who travel underground to the vast city.” And one of the reasons I would have been uncertain is that on buses, subways, et cetera, one simply never hangs onto straps anymore. Metal bars, certainly. Swing-down metal handholds, yes, on some kinds of subway cars. Swinging metal things attached by metal coils, sometimes. But straps? How very, very last-century. As in a whole century ago, even.

Do I go too far back? Are you having trouble picturing the masses cramming into subways on their way to work in 1911? That was, after all, a time when horses were still common on the streets. Yes, well, true, as you can see, for instance, in a video of San Francisco in 1905 and 1906. But look at the cable-cars: quite full of people, sitting and standing, and the standing ones had to hang onto something. But some commuters were already riding subways; by 1911 London had had underground railways for nearly half a century and New York had had them for seven years – see the maps from those times: London 1908 and New York 1906. The quote from Punch above? It dates from 1905. Great public transportation networks were essential to the growth of these cities into the modern metropolises they are. And they are still essential to their functioning. A city without sufficient public transportation infrastructure is like a city without sufficient water infrastructure; designing for cars, cars, and cars only is like designing for people to drill their own wells and put in their own septic tanks.

Not that straphangers – or strap-hangers, as the word is often written – are (or were) only on subways. One may be standing on a bus or streetcar (or cable-car). Of course, it’s always better to be sitting if one can; hanging one’s parts from a strap (and risking a fall on the prat) may conduce to more anger… who likes being sardined? It gets to be quite a circus, and it’s easily to become a bit stroppy. But it’s also better to be travelling smoothly and efficiently, and to be able to read while doing so, than to be caged in a two-ton metal box by oneself, barely moving and forced to grip a wheel and fix one’s eyes on the sea of metal boxes between one and one’s destination. With the amount of money we squander on such extravagances, we can certainly afford to spend more on public transport, so that such cramped standing may generally be obviated – and the roads will be clearer too.

But I digress. I shouldn’t get stroppy and harangue you. This word, in spite of the standing and swaying and crowding it bespeaks, is a classic, a word that has an air of old leather – gripped by many hands, perhaps. You can see the h sticking up like an arm to grip. The word’s parts hang together, if awkwardly, like two people forced to stand closer together than social convention would normally suggest, but at least they are both time-honoured English words that have always meant about what they mean now, though strap is a variant form of strop, which we now use to refer to that thing with which one sharpens razors – or, rather, we don’t, because no one sharpens razors anymore, not any more than one hangs from leather straps except in circus acts. The reference is already of a bygone time, like talking of dialling on one’s cell phone. Which, by the way, it’s legal for straphangers to do, unlike for drivers.

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two-peat

Posted on November 16, 2011 | 14 comments

Today was an interesting day, sesquiotically, for a couple of reasons. For one, I went to see Umberto Eco in conversation with Michael Enright at the Metro Reference Library. Eco didn’t look as he usually does (quite something how my various longstanding idols manage to have changed their appearances when I actually get to see them): he had only a moustache, not the beard that gives him such an air in his photos. But he was still Umberto Eco, and witty. When Enright asked why he had such a fascination with stupidity, he replied, “With normal intelligence, you have two plus two equals four. That’s it, finished. Stupidity is infinite!”

Eco, author of The Open Work (Opera Aperta), certainly doesn’t think that literary texts are quite 2+2=4; there is a good deal of room for the reader’s participation. But not an infinite amount! He declared that he could not be held accountable for the perversity of readers if they, for instance, wanted to take his latest book, The Prague Cemetery, as an incitement to anti-Semitism simply because it follows – in a very unflattering light – an anti-Semite. In my turn at the question mike, I asked him about his view on whether there was a definable line one could draw between acceptable and unacceptable perversity of the reader. He didn’t give a nuanced answer – given the context and that he was not speaking Italian, this is understandable – but he was certainly of the position that some things are insupportable by the text: “There is participation and then there is stupidity.”

Now, language is all participation. Linguistics does what it can to be scientific, but language is a very involved group creation that is never entirely fixed – it keeps changing, and even at any one time a word or expression can have so many different nuances of sense. One needs only to look at the very common “production errors” people make to get a sense of how speaking can be like a game show where you have to take live fish from a bucket and stuff them into labelled slots on a moving wall against the clock. But there are cases where the existing structures and lexicon, communally created though they may be, just don’t support a usage.

This is loosely related to the second reason today was an interesting day, sesquiotically. It has to do not with a disastrous syntactic excursion but rather with a lexical innovation. Certainly many people get worked up quite readily at some lexical innovations or perceived innovations; generally I will strive to be the moderate voice and take a descriptive approach in these matters. But sometimes I do find myselve stopping, stepping back, and gaping momentarily.

Imagine, for instance, that you had a word for X, and you needed a word for X+1, so you modified the word for X to suit. Well and good. But how about if you now decided that you needed a word for (X+1)–1? Would it make sense just to use the word for X? You would think so. But it seems that, just as for some people 2+2–2≠2, for some people (X+1)–1 calls for something other than X.

So anyway, here’s the second reason, a headline from a story on page E1 of the November 16 Toronto Star: “A two-peat for literary star Patrick de Witt”.

I can’t lay the creation of two-peat at the feet of the entertainment columnist or other headline writer for the Star. It’s been around for a bit. UrbanDictionary.com has an entry for it from 2009: “To repeat for the second time in a row; usually used in sports.”

A triad of things here. First, winning the Governor General’s Award is literature, not sports, and various people will feel variously about the application of a sporting approach to literary reporting. Second, it may seem ironic that an article on literature would use two-peat rather than repeat or another well-accepted usage. Third, isn’t repeating for the second time in a row a three-peat?

Three-peat is, of course, the X+1 here. In sports, where there is an obsession with dynasties and winning and losing streaks and so on, winning something significant three times in a row merits a good word. If the second championship for a team was a repeat, well, the third is a three-peat. Sure, why the heck not. The word has been around for about a quarter of a century already. And four-peat is a natural extension too, not quite as cute because four doesn’t rhyme with re as three does, but still.

So anyway, you win. Then you repeat. Then, the second repetition, you have a three-peat. But a two-peat? Who would take a two-peat to be the same as a three-peat? Not the Toronto Star; the GG Award is de Witt’s second big win this season. And, really, a two-peat must be one less than a three-peat, no? Like an echo: you shout, it repeats. That’s two. Eccolà.

But then, what the heck would a one-peat be?

I’ll tell you what it would be: a sarcastic term referring to an unfulfilled ambition to repeat. That’s what I see in the few uses of it I’ve found on the web. Could it be used without sarcasm? Um. Heh. Is 2+2–2 equal to 2 or not? See Eco above.

Nor do I have a great taste for two-peat. It has its potential, to be sure, as a derisive indicator of an incomplete three-peat, and as a Shakespearean pun: “Two-peat or not two-peat?” But otherwise, really, for peat’s sake. I mean Pete’s. I beg you. I petition you. I petition you twice (bis repetita placent) – I make a two-petition. Would that be a two-peat?

Hm. Maybe I should just follow Google’s lead on this. Search two-peat and you get sports, but search one-peat and you get Scotch. The nice peaty kind. Of which I have a few bottles around. If I can’t scotch two-peat, I can still have two peaty Scotches.

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plouk

Posted on November 16, 2011 | 3 comments

This is a little carbuncle of a word, isn’t it? Quite the thing to spot on a page. It seems to be made of bits of other short words mashed together – you almost feel as though you recognize it, but nope, you don’t even quite have a sense of what word it might be supposed to be. Pluck? Plonk? Some pieces of plural, pluperfect, lout, look, polka, um…

To add the the muddle, but also to clarify the pronunciation (maybe), it’s also spelled plook and pluke. The latter form may be rather unpleasing to look at, due to its strong resemblance to a word for something distasteful. The former almost seems silly – you get that oo as in loony, kook, spook – but really, if you dropped the p, it would end up with a rather ordinary look. But it nonetheless rhymes with kook. Except that some people (the OED tells me) say it like pluck.

You’re unlikely to encounter this word, anyway, outside of the occasional Scottish usage, though it was formerly more widespread in English. But what is a plouk? Is it something that makes a dripping noise – “plouk, plouk, plouk”? Nope. Is it something to do with plies or plaid or pleurisy or pleather or plurals? Not per se. Does the sound make you think of a single spot, such as you might jab your finger into? You’re closer now. And does it make you think of plug? The words may be cognate.

But a plouk is not a plug. It’s a spot, alright, but the result of something being plugged – a pore. Let me quote from a modern Scottish novelist, Irvine Welsh, in his best-known work, Trainspotting (that’s a signal that those averse to disgusting things or Scots dialect should just stop reading now): “Billy, ma contempt for you jist grew over the years. It displaced the fear, jist sortay squeezed it oot, like pus fae a pluke.”

Mm-hmm. It’s a zit. Especially a bright red one. A scarlet pimple. A carbuncle. Compared by authors (in the OED’s quotes) to ripe tomatoes and currant berries. If you were to colour in the o in the middle of plouk with red, you’d produce something like the effect. That might add to the overtones of polka, but I don’t know that you’d want to poke a dot like this one. Or pluck it. You may be waiting for that o on your forehead to become a u or that p on your cheek to become a k, and then back to the smooth l, but think of the future effects, and remember from your school blackboards that PLO means “please leave on”… u know?

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