Yearly Archives: 2011

ill-starred disaster

Posted on October 4, 2011 | 2 comments

Dear word sommelier: I just read the phrase “an ill-starred disaster.” That’s redundant, isn’t it?

Ah, this is a question not simply of linguistics and etymology but, as it happens, of one’s metaphysics and world-view as well.

As you evidently know, but others may not, disaster comes from dis “bad, ill, adverse” plus aster, from Latin astrum, from Greek ἄστρον astron, “star”; a disaster was originally not any old bad accident but specifically one attributed to a bad aspect of a star (although one could contend that pretty much any major mischance was, in the Europe of centuries past, typically attributed to a bad celestial influence; in case you’ve forgotten the extent to which the stars were thought to have a role in everything – not without input from human action, to be sure – go back and look at Shakespeare and his contemporaries, or perhaps read E.M.W. Tillyard’s excellent small book The Elizabethan World Picture; similar views were common throughout the continent). If you look in the OED’s entry on disaster, it suggests that you compare English ill-starred.

So, in origin, a disaster was by definition ill-starred, and vice-versa. But, now, tell me, is that how you use these terms and hear them today?

I could ask first whether you consider all disasters to be due to the operations of the stars. You very likely will say no, since you probably don’t hold so tightly to astrology and you must be honest and admit that disaster is today used to mean “calamity, catastrophe, cluster-f***, etc.” and not specifically “unfortunate occurrence due to adverse celestial effect”. Words often drift from their original meaning, as I mentioned yesterday in rile (see the comments too).

More loosely, since ill-starred could be said to be an allusive way of saying ill-fated, do you consider disasters all to be the operation of fate or acts of God? If you do, there may be a job waiting for you in the claims department of an insurance company. But you likely believe in human error as a cause of many a disaster, and in definable if unpredictable forces – plate tectonics, for instance – as the cause of many others. Given that, specification of a disaster as “ill-starred” would set it apart from disasters that had causes other than ineffable fate.

And you likewise may hold that things may be ill-starred without being disasters per se – for instance, Romeo and Juliet, being star-crossed lovers, were ill-starred, but not everyone would classify adolescent love suicides in the category “disasters” (“bad things”, yes, but disaster, travelling often nowadays with natural, tends to be thought of as involving mass destruction of real estate – or else a really bad outcome for a social event).

However, if you don’t believe in the existence of anything that anyone could in any way call “fate”, then is there still a distinction to be made? If you use ill-starred to mean “a thing that shouldn’t have happened but did”, which is pretty much the meaning available for those who hold no truck with fate or celestial influence, then isn’t a disaster automatically something you’d call ill-starred, like calling water wet?

One could make that argument, but one would risk overlooking all the other effects of lexical entries besides those of paraphrasable definitions. For instance, one might say that a disaster is automatically upsetting, and that dammit expresses being upset, and that therefore “This is a disaster, dammit” should be edited down to “This is a disaster.” Yet can you honestly say that there is no difference in what is expressed about the speaker’s attitude between one and the other?

In truth, even for those who don’t believe in fate or astrology, ill-starred brings an image of either a certain inevitability or a particular conjunction of adverse forces. It also, of course, has the flavour of ill, which can seem a bit green at the gills and which, along with being popular in youthful use lately (ever since the Beastie Boys, really), has rhymes with chill, kill, spill, etc., and a certain similarity to eww. And there is the flavour of star, which has an éclat, a flash and bang, or at least a little twinkle. Don’t miss those double letters in the spelling, either, sort of like the motion lines of a cartoon object entering a collision.

Disaster, for its part, has its own flavour, and although it has similarities with ill-starred (the s t r hint at the fact that aster and star are cognate way back), its sound has more in common with catastrophe (even though that’s not a cognate word). You also get a feel of blast, cast, disturb, and perhaps zaps – less likely sister and Zoroaster, which have resemblances in form but not in sense.

And don’t forget the different effect the length and rhythm of the phrase will have. “This is a disaster” is a simple declaration; “This is an ill-starred disaster” is much more epic and solemn, not only because it’s longer (and more rhythmic) but because it’s more literary-seeming. It says as much about the speaker as about what’s being spoken about. After all, how often do you even hear ill-starred these days? Surely you wouldn’t want to delete it when you actually do see it, would you? That would almost seem to be tempting fate…

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rile

Posted on October 3, 2011 | 4 comments

It’s quite something how some people get riled up about language. (Some people? I’ll bet most people have some usage or other they hate.) An interesting point of general consistency is that these hate-ins usually lack a defensible basis. (See “When an ‘error’ isn’t” for a rundown of some popular bugbears that aren’t the bogeymen they’re made out to be.)

The basis they often do draw on is amusingly opposite to a common trend in some other areas of human behaviour, where change is seen as good: people want to have the latest clothes, the latest electronics, et cetera. Stirring the waters is desirable. And indeed there are fads in language, too, and people may be mocked for using out-of-fashion words. But when it comes to hobby horses, it’s typically a conservative impulse that motivates it – albeit often a misguided one that actually muddies the waters rather than clarifying them. A person learns about some “original” form and decidnes that anyone who uses some changed version is an annoying cockroach and that the usage is a linguistic weed, a dandelion on the lawn of the language, and must be eradicated.

Of course, when talking of language, “original” is nearly always nonsense talk, since there is almost always a form prior to the one cited, and a form prior to that, and it’s turtles all the way down. And, for that matter, change is central to the nature of language. A language that has stopped changing is dead. But typically those calling on some “purer” form are off on some important fact anyway. I am reminded of a fellow student at the University of Calgary (back in about 1986) who “informed” me that Calgary wasn’t really a city because it didn’t have a cathedral. This was based on the idea that in medieval times a city was a city because it had a cathedral. But that was not the first or last definition of a city, and anyway Calgary does – and did – have a cathedral.

But if I seem to have produced a bit of a troubled or turbid tasting here, let me pour some oil on the waters to address what one may see as a mixed-up lie about the word rile. I will quote from the alphaDictionary “What’s the Good Word?” email I got today:

First, let me get this off my chest: “Nothing roils me more than hearing someone pronounce roil [rail] or seeing it spelled rile.” Now, here is a quaint Southernism I just concocted to remind us of the original meaning of today’s verb: “Don’t roil the water where you may have to drink.” It also serves to demonstrate that not all Southerners misspell this verb rile.

It is true that rile is most likely a variant form of roil, which means “make turbid, stir up”, with reference to water. However, it is not some odd American regional aberration, though it has been thought by some to be such, due to a greater use in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation of it is from a 1724 translation of a classical Greek text, published in London; the next is from an 1815 list of Essex dialect words in a magazine. (Note that the OED’s first citation of roil for the sense “make angry” – which is of course what rile means, as I think we all know – is from 1742, and the second from 1818.) So these words first split a quarter of a millennium ago, and rile is quite well established now; indeed, it is much more common than roil (either sense of roil), even in Britain.

“But it came from a mispronunciation!” some may object. “It’s like saying ‘bile’ for boil!” First of all, it is more accurate to say that it came from a dialectal pronunciation, and was respelled, as many words have been over time. But even if it had come from a mispronunciation, so what? It’s established now. It’s far from being the only common word used today that has its present form due to an error or aberration of some kind back in history, and people don’t get riled up about most of them. So never mind whose fault it may be – oh, sorry, should that be faut? tsk – it is as it is now. If we accept a complete reanalysis such as cockroach (from Spanish cucaracha) or dandelion (from French dent de lion), or if we have no problem with cleaving to the cloven pair daft and daffy, or or or (I could spend a lot of time adducing examples), we can certainly accept such a well-established word as rile.

And it does such a nice job, really. It tends to go with some fairly folksy phrases – get all riled up, for instance – but I have seen it in perfectly mainstream contexts. It has that cranked-up /r/ start (I’m put in mind of the sound some people make when imitating someone who’s ranting: “Rarrarrarrarrar”), followed by the biting-down diphthong /aI/, which is part of a rime that rhymes with I’ll, as in “Arrrr, I’ll smite the next person who says ‘rile’ instead of ‘roil’!”

So, yes, rile is a good word – quite a good one, I think. And it’s a nice reminder that, really, we English speakers are living the life of Riley when it comes to our luxuriously replete wordstock and freewheeling usage patterns. Some people may dislike such richness and comfort, but really, I’ll take it.

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dabchick

Posted on October 2, 2011 | 3 comments

How would you like to take a quick dip with a dabchick? Does that sound a little agreeable, or is it even in the least grievous? Would you have a bird, would it be a baptism of fire (“Stop, liquid, stop!”), or would you just duck out altogether?

Well, you would think a dabchick would be a dab hand at quick dips. After all, the dab here refers to dipping – or diving – quickly. Yes, it’s related to our verb dab, as well as to dip and deep. But when I’m talking about a dab chick, I’m not talking about a girl, let alone some dapper boychick; in fact, this chick is not even a truncated chicken (though chick is always a truncated chicken). Rather, it’s a little grebe.

OK, now, we’ve moved from a two-syllable word with a certain charm – the light and lively connotations of dab (not just dab hand but all those dabs of colour) and its cheerful bookends d and b, plus the slick check-and-click of chick to sharpen the sound after the voiced stops – to a one-syllable word that might not seem so agreeable. The various gr words it brings to mind are not invariably pretty: grab, grub, grip, grim, greed; green can be OK, and greet is meet, but their final consonants differ from /b/ in two features (place and manner), not just one, so they’re a little farther to swim.

But do you know what a grebe is? It’s a swimming bird, rather like a duck (but the dabchick has a pointed bill and a “powder puff” posterior). There are various kinds of grebes, all the way from the least grebe (120 grams, 23.5 centimetres) to the great grebe (1.7 kg and 71 cm – good grief). The dabchick is a kind of grebe also known as the little grebe, a name which has its own pretty patterns (the various parallel lines in little with liquid-stop-liquid, and then the repeated e’s of grebe with stop-liquid-stop).

Dabchicks aren’t much for running; their legs are too far back. But they, along with a few other small grebes (including the least grebe), are such sudden dippers that they make up the genus Tachybaptus. That’s from the Greek for “quick diver” – yes, that’s the same root you see in baptism, but this bird is no holy diver; its sudden ducks would make for a tacky baptism indeed, what with a fish in the mouth on resurfacing.

This is not to say that these wee birds say fishy things. If the little grebe has been a little piggy in its eating, or even if it hasn’t, it will be heard to say “wee-wee-wee” all the way home (or to another dabchick’s home; it’s a mating call). Which reminds me that there’s another bird called a dabchick, the New Zealand dabchick, a.k.a. the weweia.

Oh, and Dabchick happens to be a nickname for residents of Aldbourne, Wiltshire, England. There are various stories to account for this. But as I am only dabbling lightly in this tangent, I will leave it to you to check them out for yourself. Or perhaps one of the readers of Sesquiotica will add a comment with context – they may not all be dabchicks, but they are dab hands and quick dippers into the lexis.

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Charlevoix

Posted on October 1, 2011 | 3 comments

My wife and I took a few days off this week and had a small vacation in Charlevoix, a region of Quebec I had heard of at various times but knew not all that much about. Various people had told us it was nice (or better than nice), and it was supposed to be a place rich in good scenery and good food. And my wife had long been charmed by the images of the Fairmont Manoir Richelieu. So a conjunction of available vacation days, a seat sale on Porter Airlines (free wine with breakfast? but of course), and a good rate at Le Manoir Richelieu made for a midweek excursion.

We tasted some lovely food, oh yes we did (my eyes still pop when I recall the duck breast on maple sabayon at Les 3 Canards), and saw some beautiful scenery and drove some roads with up to 20% gradients, and now I’m back to taste the word Charlevoix with you.

Of course, forever henceforth for me, Charlevoix will have a strong flavour of maple-covered hills and maple-soaked food and outstanding cheese (many great cheeses are made in France, but the best I’ve ever had have been from Quebec, and Charlevoix is a key cheese-making region) and fresh air and on and on. You can be sure I will come back to Charlevoix! But before I went there, the word had a few other resonances for me.

First of them was of Charlebois, as in Robert Charlebois, a French-Canadian singer popular in the ’60s and ’70s, known for a very large, curly head of hair and for songs such as “Je reviendrai à Montréal” (“I will come back to Montreal,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZAaEZAzGf0). As it happens, he was also once a part-owner of Unibroue, that remarkable Quebec beer maker. (Most things in Quebec come back to food and drink eventually, and usually fairly quickly. It’s wonderful.)

But also, Charlevoix had the simple resonances of Charles (which Charles? or Charlemagne?), char (“chariot”, or, slangily, “car”, such as the rental one we drove up and down and over and around), and voix (“voice”, also sounding like voie “way, lane”, such as those on which we drove with said car, and of course like the start of voilà, which is from vois “see [second person singular imperative]” and là “there/here”). The soft fricative and liquids of the Charle seemed to speak with the voice given them by the voix; the /v/ gives the word a vibration, a verve, a joie de vivre. And the angularity of the v and x catches the eyes. And what does the voice have? Perhaps choix, “choice” (taking which from Charlevoix you are left with arlev, an anagram of velar; by choice or not, the word Charlevoix has no velar consonants – though in French it has a uvular liquid r).

It does seem classic French in form, taken to the ninth degree with the ix end (which may manifest a bit of Gaul as well). And noble? Why, yes, as it happens: it’s a family name from French lesser nobility. Its most famous holder was Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, a French Jesuit priest for whom is named everything named Charlevoix (including the town in Michigan, which is pronounced with a final “oy” – oy!).

What did Charlevoix do for such honour? Well, you see, his was an important early voice in Canadian history – of the sort of voice you see: a book. He travelled to many places (including Japan) and wrote about his travels; of his considerable time and travels in what is now Eastern Canada (and some of the US) he wrote Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France, avec le Journal historique d’un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l’Amérique septentrionale (History and general description of New France, with the historical journal of a voyage made by the order of the king in North America), published in 1722.

Did Charlevoix visit what is now Charlevoix? Well, he certainly had to go by it – it’s on the way up the St. Lawrence. In 1608, Jacques Cartier had tried to anchor at the river close to where the Manoir Richelieu now is, but he found it unsuitable for anchorage – and then the tide went out and his ships were grounded. So he called it Malle Baye, “bad bay”, which became in modern French La Malbaie, the name of the town right there. But I should say that for a long time it was called Murray Bay, after the English general who succeeded Wolfe (who won at the Plains of Abraham but was also killed there).

It happens that Murray Bay came to be a popular vacation spot starting in the 1760s; indeed, some call it Canada’s first tourist resort. In the 1800s and early-to-mid-1900s many Americans came to visit it. The present Manoir Richelieu was built in 1929. And it remains a cardinal point in the area.

But have you heard of it? And have you been there? I would encourage everyone to visit un lieu si riche et chaleureux (a place so rich and warm)… except that it was rather nice without crowds. Tell you what, you go in the summer. Then we can go and see the autumn colours (and sometimes snow on red leaves) without people in the way.

(If you want to see more of Charlevoix and Quebec City, see my photos on Flickr.)

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school

Posted on September 26, 2011 | 3 comments

The time is come around again: shoals of students appear in the hallowed, formerly hollow hallways of schools across the country. The youngest are wide-eyed oo; older ones stay cool as they scan their schedules. Some submit meekly, and some dive in enthusiastically, while others resist in ways passive or active. They are socialized in ways society finds expectable and acceptable, and may seek out opportunities for going against the grain. But for all it is an important part of their formation through information: they learn things that may not be self-evident, some of which may even be capriciously arbitrary, but they also learn to use their brains.

One of the things they learn is, of course, to spell – English spelling being so capricious as to be mocked in the reference to the elementary school trivium as the “three r’s” (reading, riting, and rithmetic). They may have heard this word school, but they couldn’t possibly predict its spelling from its pronunciation. In fact, they will certainly learn that sch as a rule is pronounced the same as sh, leading to mispronunciation of bruschetta and variant pronunciations of schism and schedule (thoroughly capricious words, neither of which having any actually good historical reason for having an h).

But they will learn that this word is pronounced /skul/; on the other hand, they are unlikely to learn that it comes from Greek σχολή scholé, and thence Latin schola, and has cognates in pretty much all Western European languages, most of which spell it without the h – as English also did until around 500 years ago, when the h was added back in, presumably because that’s how it is in Latin (idealized at the time and often since as the model language) and Dutch (native tongue of many of the early typesetters of English).

School is one of the earliest words kids will learn, so it will affect their perception of some other words, and it will have countless social accretions and collocations. Many of those will involve songs – old standards such as “School days, school days, good old golden rule days” or the one we sang on the bus home from the last day of school, “No more school, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks,” etc., or any of quite a lot of popular songs (songs by Supertramp and the Moody Blues spring to mind immediately for me; I wonder what today’s students associate musically with school).

There are also a few words that school may or may not make you think of but that might make you think of school: cool, skull (actually remarkably different for how similar it is), spool, stool, and snool (verb, “submit meekly” or “cause to submit meekly”; noun, “one who submits meekly”).

There are many words that show up commonly with school: before it, elementary, high, public, private, etc.; Sunday, business, medical, etc.; after it, year, bus, uniform, etc.; and of course verbs such as go to, finish, skip, and prepositions such as after, at, and in. The verbs and prepositions demonstrate a particular grammatical fact about school that native speakers have no trouble with but adult learners of English often find confusing: it can be a countable (at a school) or a mass object (at school). Sort of like fish.

Ah, yes, fish. As in a school of. Why are fish in schools? Lexical splitting and merging. On the one side we have this word descended from Greek and Latin and referring to a place of education; on the other side, and taking the form school just a couple of hundred years ago, we have a Germanic word with the same meaning and origin as shoal – school and shoal split apart at about the same time as school regained its h. That’s shoal as in “large group of marine life”; shoal as in “shallow area in the water” is of different origin, cognate with shallow. English words split and merge about as readily as high school romantic pairings.

Oh, yes. What do you remember from school, really? How much of the experience of the lessons? And how much of the social experience? We have school reunions to meet up with friends and to relive our fun times, not to review notes from our classes. But is not school work? It involves it, of a sort, but we ought to remember that school originally – and still, for some people in some places – is something one does instead of work. (In our society, grad school is certainly known as such.) You take your leisure time to learn something new and interesting – just as you are doing this very moment. After all, as you probably did not learn in school, Greek σχολή originally meant “leisure”.

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nerd, geek

Posted on September 26, 2011 | 8 comments

Dear word sommelier: When should I call someone a nerd, and when should I call someone a geek?

I ought to be a reasonable authority on this, since I’ve been something of a nerd and a geek for pretty much my whole life, although in recent years I’ve become socially adept enough, and learned to dress myself well enough, that my status has occasionally seemed questionable. But my wife still calls me a “sexy geek” and many of my readers call me a “word nerd,” so I guess I still meet the criteria.

But what are those criteria? They’ve shifted during the course of my life. When I was in high school in the early ’80s, geek was really a rather insulting term – I tended to think of some skinny person who couldn’t dress himself properly and had no social skills, or at least no non-repugnant ones.

I do think the phonaesthetics of the word, including the articulatory gesture it involves (mouth spread wide as though you’re trying to swallow something unpleasant and slimy, and the tongue’s double-touch at the back of the mouth reinforces that), had some influence on my sense of it. It was also commonly bruited about that the term originally referred to someone who bit the heads off live chickens. (The correct term for that is actually Alice Cooper Ozzy Osbourne. Oh, sorry, that was a bat.) In fact, geek was used as a name for sideshow freaks of various sorts, especially those who ate nasty things; its origins seem to be a Low German word for “fool”, via Scots English. Somehow it came to be transferred to what Brits call swots and anoraks. But with the rise of computers as a major social tool and necessity, those kids you used to insult have turned out to be very valuable: the ones who are immoderately interested and expert in things that most people find flummoxing and perhaps a bit distasteful. It’s sort of revenge of the geeks.

Wait! The movie is Revenge of the Nerds! So why is it that we tend to use geek more than nerd for these kinds of people now? When I was in school, nerd was what you called the smart kids who weren’t smooth socially but were well-intentioned and knew all sorts of stuff that everyone else would never know. Nerds dressed for function, not looks – pocket protectors, tape on the glasses – and were fascinated with things that made other people’s eyes glaze over. And you know what? I still think of nerds that way. Nor am I the only one. I think of the YouTube videos by NurdRage (yes, a different spelling), in which various chemical and other physical stunts are shown – cool lab stuff. Cool, that is, if you like to see, for instance, how you can make flowers glow in the dark, or use a chemical reaction to cause gallium to beat like a (small and fast) heart.

Nerd is a 20th-century term, possibly coming from nert, a slangy variant on nut. It’s a softer word, with a nasal sound characteristic of many a nerd’s speech; it stays near the tip of the tongue but uses that syllabic /r/ for its peak, which may seem intense or ineffectual. It seems suitable for something ineffectual and without sharp edges. A possible prime vector for the word is Dr. Seuss’s book If I Ran the Zoo, in which a nerd is a kind of exotic critter. Which, come to think of it, nerds still are, sorta. (Nerds are also a kind of candy: tangy, crunchy sugar nubs sold under the Willy Wonka brand. Could you imagine a candy called Geeks? Me neither.)

Why, then, has geek taken over? It seems that nerd has retained the sense of “an intellectually inclined person without social skills” and geek has kept the sense of “someone who has an abnormal amount of knowledge and interest in a certain topic” – as tvtropes.org points out, “There can be such a thing as a Fashion Geek, someone who knows a lot about fashion and is pretty obsessed with it. A Fashion Nerd, in contrast, would be completely unaware that stripes and plaids are unmix-y, and wouldn’t care, even if you told them why the two don’t mix.”

I would add that, while sexy nerd remains something of an oxymoron, the collocation sexy geek is reasonably current – Wired magazine has even had a “Sexiest Geek” contest, and you can see a buxom devochka discourse on geek and call herself a sexy geek at www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9jlefnXKyQ. As she points out, intelligence has become very popular, and that has caused geek’s stock to rise somewhat.

But I find that the distinction is not altogether clear cut. In some cases the sound matters – for instance, where word geek might seem natural, rhyme helps word nerd to prevail. Often, though, personal proclivity comes into it. Of course, not everyone cares that much; if you have strong opinions on the difference very much, then, as the great nerd (or is it geek) comic strip xkcd diagrams, you are a nerd, a geek, or both: xkcd.com/747/.

But speaking of Venn diagrams (since you’re a geek, a nerd, or both, you know that intersecting-circle diagrams are Venn diagrams), there is one currently making the rounds that purports to set the matter straight on the difference between not just nerd and geek but also dork and dweeb: www.buzzfeed.com/scott/nerd-venn-diagram. It’s not bad, but I don’t find that everyone sees it exactly that way. I polled editors and people on Twitter and got a mixture of responses, among which were the following distinctions:

– nerds are less intelligent than geeks
– nerds are much bigger losers
– on Big Bang Theory (wondering how long it would take for me to mention it?), Leonard is a geek but not a nerd, while Sheldon is both
– nerds are antisocial, while geeks are just not socially focused
– nerds have no friends, while geeks have people seeking their advice
– nerds use pocket protectors; geeks don’t
– geeks are cool
– nerds swim against the pop culture grain; geeks are more tech-focused
– nerd = geek squared
– a geek has a useful skill

I just asked my wife if I was a geek; she said “Of course.” I asked her if I was a nerd. She demurred. I asked what the difference was. She had to think. “Well… they’re both genius… geek seems to be more… suave?”

So, in the current linguistic climate – though this may well change – although the terms have a certain amount of overlap, and although you have to allow for factors such as rhyme, generally geek is applied more broadly and with a certain amount of approbation, rather like wonk, while nerd has a greater connotation of social ineptitude or some kind of cluelessness. Among the crowd watching planes take off and land, a geek would be more like an aviation photographer, a nerd more like a planespotter. Trainspotters and other anoraks are no longer geeks; they’re not cool enough. Oh, but what about gongoozlers? A class of their own, I think.

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sinecure

Posted on September 25, 2011 | 1 comment

What is more important to you: a job that is secure, or a job where you feel sincere? Do you want to increase your experience and efforts, or just your bank account? Would a position with no work and good pay be the cynosure that drew you forward, or a curse, a sin, worthy of censure?

Back when the Church was the great pan-European power, it could be very desirable to have a position as a priest in some parish; depending on the location, you might get a quite healthy income from it. Not everyone who got these positions – called benefices, because you benefited from them in money – was highly qualified, to be sure; one particularly poor example was the source of the word mumpsimus. But sometimes one could have a benefice without having to perform any priestly duties, such as, you know, helping the ailing soul. Such a do-nothing position with an income was called sine cura, “without cure”, not because there ain’t no cure for laziness but because it was not a position that involved cure of souls – i.e., priestly duties. Sine cura became our English word sinecure, which is normally pronounced as three syllables (only the last e is “silent”), but the i can be pronounced “short” or “long” (“sin” or “sign”).

The church’s dominating role has been taken over by commerce now. Everything must be justified in terms of profit. Never mind a nice ecclesiastical position; one would rather have a nice job in some Bay Street tower. Even better is to be a board member, and get a handsome income without having to show up and deal with the actual work day in and day out, just attend meetings as necessary, or perhaps not even that much. You’re basically on cruise. (Better still, of course, is to take the money you have and invest it and let other people do the work while you reap great profits. But that’s not considered a job – lately it seems to be considered more worthy than working, given that shareholders get more consideration than employees much of the time.)

So jobs still exist that people call sinecures – political patronage positions, nepotism installments, rubber-stamp board memberships, and so on. The question is, what does and doesn’t qualify? The term includes more than just jobs with no work at all; a job with light work might also be called a sinecure. But how light is light? I find, for instance, this in a book excerpt: “Dodd wanted a sinecure, a job that was not too demanding yet that would provide stature and a living wage and, most important, leave him plenty of time to write.” And in a comment on a New York Times article there is this: “The good teachers, who believe that teaching jobs in New York are not a sinecure for the bottom third of the graduating classes of the public colleges, will back her.”

I think it rather odd that one could ever consider teaching a sinecure (especially in New York)! If you held a teaching position but never had to prepare a lesson or stand in front of the class and talk, that might be a sinecure. But to actually do the job, even in an indifferent fashion? Yet here’s another comment from another article: “Administrators view teaching as a sinecure without intrinsic value.”

We seem to have a certain drift happening here. Sinecure is now becoming a word for any job that might indeed seem to others a sin, and to the holder a cure for having to put in an honest day’s efforts: a nice, sure, easy job with a good paycheque. You may not be flatlining in the position, but you are holding a steady sine wave, just the normal ups and downs, not unlike the n and u in this word.

Should the meaning broaden that way? If you don’t want it to, then use it in the narrower way and don’t use it in the broader way, and define it overtly as you want it. It may or may not have effect.

I will say this, though: at least no one can describe writing word tasting notes as a sinecure, involving as it does real work (if only an hour a day on average) and no pay at all. (One silly person wrote a comment complaining that I was probably supported by his tax dollars. Um. No. But I guess there ain’t no cure for cranks and trolls…)

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crisp

Posted on September 22, 2011 | 5 comments

The Henry V concert was over, and I met up with Montgomery Starling-Byrd on the sidewalk outside Roy Thomson Hall.

“How was it?” I said.

“Crisp,” he said.

“As in Crispin or Crispinian?” These two were the martyred twin brothers honoured on St. Crispin’s Day, October 25, which is when Henry V won the battle of Agincourt. You may be interested to know that the brothers lived in Soissons, France, less than 300 km away from Agincourt (take the highway A26), but 1130 years before the battle.

“Yes,” he said. “Aside from the martyrdom bit.”

“No martyrdom for Crispus today,” I said. “I’m not wearing a tux.” I’ll explain that one: Crispin and Crispinian are derived from Latin crispus, which means “curly”; Crispus Attucks, a man of half-African and half-Wampanoag ancestry, is generally thought of as the first person killed in the American Revolution, at the Boston Massacre. And, yes, I was wearing white tie and tails, not black tie and tuxedo.

“Indeed, proper tails are a constant.” I suspect he was making a joke on Emperor Constantine I, who had a son named Crispus. Whom he had killed.

“Just as well,” I said, “my tux is going to hell in a handbasket.” That was a pun on Helena, the mother of Constantine, and also on Helena Bonham-Carter, cousin of Crispin Bonham-Carter, who is also an actor.

“Well, let us turn back to the future for a moment,” Montgomery said. I was surprised that he had seen Back to the Future, which starred Crispin Glover as McFly. “I ought to have gone once more into the breach in the concert hall; my intermission libations are catching up on me. Is there a pay toilet around here?”

“No pay toilets in Toronto,” I said. “We prefer to hold our manhoods cheap – or free, actually.” This was a reference to a line in King Henry’s speech before the battle. “We could go across King Street to Quotes – I’ll have a pint, and you’ll have a –”

“Yes,” Montgomery said, cutting me off, “that sounds good. A snack perhaps. All I’ve had is a packet of crisps. I wonder whether they have crêpes.” Yes, crêpe is cognate with crisp too. We started walking.

“More likely just French fries,” I said. “Calamari and Guinness are what I usually get. They might have curly fries, though.”

“Indeed, the original crisps,” Montgomery said. What he meant, of course, was that, as I’ve mentioned, crisp comes from Latin crispus – yes, “curly” – and came to mean “rippled, wrinkled” in the 1300s and “brittle” only in the 1500s. Lexicographers are unsure how it came to have the “brittle” meaning but speculate that the sound of the word had some influence. “But of course,” Montgomery added, “French fries are really chips, looking like wood chips. Whereas you colonials use chips to refer to crisps.”

“I do admit,” I said, “potato chips sound more like crisps. You can hear it when you eat them: ‘crisp, crisp, crisp.'” We walked on for a few seconds, pondering onomatopoeia. “So,” I said, returning to the original topic, “Crisp – I mean, Christopher Plummer was suitably plummy for you?”

“He has a voice one can curl up with,” Montgomery said. “And the orchestra and the two choirs could make one’s hair curl. And it was all, as I said, crisp and clear.”

“Marvellous,” I said. “I’m looking forward to doing it again on Saturday. But now,” I said, veering to the steps down to Quotes, “let it be in our flowing cups freshly rememb’red.”

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This statement is false

Posted on September 22, 2011 | 6 comments

Last weekend my brother and I were discussing the statement “This statement is false.” Today a colleague mentioned a similar statement, “The following statement is true. The previous statement is false.” Another colleague likened this kind of pure self-contradiction to the Cretan paradox, also known as the Epimenidean paradox: the statement “All Cretans are liars” said by a Cretan, which would seem to be a false if it’s true and true if it’s false.

But the difference between the Cretan paradox and pure self-contradiction is that the Cretan paradox has a real-world referent. It makes a statement about something external to the assertion. Pure self-contradiction has no real-world referent. It makes an assertion about nothing other than itself and thus has no truth value ascertainable.

As it happens, the source of the Cretan paradox is something Epimenides wrote in support of the immortality of Zeus:

They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one
The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!
But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,
For in thee we live and move and have our being.

Epimenides was himself a Cretan. Thus we know through simple pragmatics that he must have been excluding himself without saying so. To treat it as a paradox is to be disingenuous. It’s fun sport, but in the end it just shows one of the things you can’t do in logical reasoning.

Statements such as the Cretan paradox are an illusion caused by conflation of one level of analysis with a higher level of analysis: an evaluation of the members of a set cannot itself be a member of the set evaluated; evaluation is a comparison of something against one or more criteria from an external perspective – what is being analysed is subsumed within its perspective. Once we acknowledge that the statement “All Cretans are liars” cannot be part of the set of statements evaluated (making it thus a simple problem in pragmatics rather than a trick of logic), we identify an unstated assumption that makes it function, without which we get a sort of Escher staircase illusion, something that can’t exist in the real world.

But with mutually evaluative statements such as the pure self-contradictions, each must be on an evaluative level above the other – each must subsume the other within its perspective. And at the same time each has no further reference; it has no claim to truth or falsehood as the set of all other statements by Cretans does (and as that set’s members individually do).

Analyzing an utterance or set of utterances is like weighing an object. In order to weigh an object, you have to lift it (or anyway support it) and you have to be resting on something that is not part of what you are weighing. In the Cretan paradox, we see that the statement that pretends to be part of the set of Cretan statements is actually weighing them and so cannot be part of them; it is evaluating them against their real-world references – that’s what it’s resting on. In the mutual contradiction case we’re looking at, each is weighing the other, and neither rests on anything else, because neither is being evaluated against anything external to itself. It’s like two dudes trying to lift each other simultaneously. In empty space.

Meaning in human communication, ultimately, is not a question first of all of logic; it is a question first of all of pragmatics. All communication is behaviour; when you utter something, you are doing something with the aim of producing a certain effect. The person hearing you will be conjecturing what effect you are trying to produce and responding accordingly. Logic helps serve this function, but pragmatics is the true basis. And the pragmatic value of things such as paradoxes is sport – mental play, fun. And a demonstration of the invalidity of certain kinds of reasoning.

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Caerphilly

Posted on September 21, 2011 | 6 comments

Montgomery Starling-Byrd, international president of the Order of Logogustation, happened to be passing through town and was pleased to have the chance to catch the Toronto Symphony Orchestra perform, among other things, William Walton’s Henry V featuring Christopher Plummer, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, and the Toronto Children’s Chorus. Today was the day before the first performance, and he was at Domus Logogustationis for conviviality with local word tasters. We had laid on some cheese and crackers and wine and so forth.

“I’ll have to be off to the dress rehearsal soon,” I said to Montgomery and to Maury, looking at my watch.

“Oh, yes,” said Montgomery, “you sing with the choir. Well, sing carefully.”

Elisa Lively was passing by. “You’re singing in something?”

“Walton’s Henry the Fifth,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “can I see the score?”

“English two, French zero,” Maury said. I reached down to my bag, pulled out my copy of the score, and handed it to her.

She flipped through it. “There’s quite a lot of tacet here.”

“Orchestra and narrator,” I said.

She kept flipping. “Oh, the Agincourt carol, nice.” Flip, flip. At the last page, she read a line at the bottom and remarked, “The layout was done in Caerphilly.” She pronounced the place name “care-filly.”

“Say that carefully,” Montgomery said. “The stress is on the second syllable.”

“Ker-filly,” she said.

“Now, when I hear that,” Maury said, “I think of cheese.”

“I’m certain the performance will not be cheesy,” Montgomery said.

“Because of Philly cream cheese?” Elisa asked.

“No,” Maury said, “Caerphilly is a kind of hard, crumbly white cheese. Named after the town it was first made in.”

“And the town’s name,” Montgomery said, “means ‘Ffili’s fort’.”

“Where is that, anyway?” Elisa asked.

“It’s a suburb of Cardiff,” Montgomery said, “down in south Wales. It is known for Caerphilly Castle, an excellent, almost archetypal example of the medieval castle. Thirteenth century, built for military purposes.” (The interested reader can see good pictures and description at www.castlewales.com/caerphil.html.)

“I daresay the English would have had a harder time attacking that than they did attacking Harfleur,” I remarked, referring to the first battle in Shakespeare’s Henry V, on which Walton’s piece is based. “They’d look at it and go once more into their breeches.”

Montgomery raised one eyebrow slightly at my off-colour pun on a Shakespearean quote. Then he said, “They would certainly have to do it carefully. But in fact, although it was built by English to intimidate the Welsh – at which it succeeded – the English did attack it too. Well, one set of English did it against another: the castle’s last real battle was when Queen Isabella besieged it in the early 1300s as an attack on her husband, Edward the Second, and his favourite, Hugh le Despenser.”

“It would have been either ironic or fitting,” Maury said, “for Henry to attack it, for though he was an English king, he was, as he declares in Shakespeare’s play, a Welshman.”

“Well,” I said, looking at my watch again, “today is St. Crispin‘s Day.” (That’s the day of the battle of Agincourt.)

“Tomorrow, rather,” Montgomery said.

“October 25, in reality,” Maury said.

“Well, today is ‘have some crispies day,'” Elisa said, and handed Montgomery a crispy cracker with a large dollop of cream cheese on it. “Be careful – that’s Philly.”

“You seem to have it in ample quantities,” Montgomery said.

“Oh, yes,” Elisa said. “We have a huge dispenser.” She snort-guffawed at her pun.

I made a small salute as I sidled towards the door. “Hold down the fort,” I said.

“And hold up the forte,” Montgomery said. “I’ll see you on the morrow.” And with that I left.

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