Monthly Archives: January 2012

hiccough

Posted on January 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

“In answer to this, all that Gussie could produce was a sort of strangled hiccough.”

It was in that passage from Right Ho, Jeeves, or perhaps another like it from the works of Wodehouse, that I first saw hiccough. “Hm,” I thought (or something like it), “hiccough must be like a hiccup, I guess, but mixed with a cough.” Easy enough to imagine a hiccup simultaneous with a cough, perhaps a one-off thing rather than the insistent annoyance that is a bout of hiccups. The word brought to my mind – still brings to my mind – my brother, as an adolescent, laughing so hard he would hiccup and burp at the same time while still laughing.

Ah, but no, that actually doesn’t have a word of its own (unless we wish to try to divert this one to it). What hiccough is, more than anything else, is evidence of the real nature of the progress of English orthography over history: not so much a smooth evolution as a case of historical hiccups. Or should I write hiccoughs.

It started neatly enough: there was this human physical phenomenon in which the diaphragm twitches, causing a sharp intake of breath that causes the glottis to abruptly stop the airflow; in short, the body produces a marked ingressive glottal stop, almost a glottal pulmonary implosive. Then, typically, it does it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And aaaarrrrrgggghhhhh.

So anyway, this irritating thing produces a sound. Want to name it? Imitate the sound. For the most part, Western European languages don’t have a glottal stop as a separate phoneme, and certainly not a strong enough one to do the job here – uh-uh – so a /k/ will do, and /h/ for the sharp intake before it. Dutch has hik, as does Danish; Swedish has hicka; Breton has hok; French has hoquet and Latin has hoquetus; and English had, first, hicket and hickock (with various spellings, including hitchcock) and shortly thereafter hiccup, which from the 16th to 19th centuries showed a variety of alternative spellings: hicke up, hikup, hickop, hickhop, hecup, hiccop, hickup, hick-up…

And somewhere in the 1600s, someone apparently got the idea that this word had come in part from cough. This was a time when words were being respelled by some people on the basis of their origins (real or false), which is how we got such weird messes as debt, people, and island (see “What’s up with English spelling”). Sometimes the pronunciation changed, as with falcon (formerly faucon). But in the case of hiccough, the spelling was simply changed to reflect what was mistakenly thought to be its origin, but the pronunciation was kept the same.

Yough. That’s right. I’m not making this ough. As though ough didn’t have enough different ways to be said, now the cough really runneth over. (If I had a buck for every different pronunciation of ough, the things I could have bought with the dough by the time I was through – um, well, a coughle of coughees, I mean a couple of coffees, anyway. Fancy ones.)

But, really, this word is a sort of ugly poughy, I mean puppy, isn’t it? The hiccough spelling, I mean. Hiccup has a certain cleanness to it, with that prim and proud p and the two gleaming hooks of the cc; even better, hic is Latin for “here”, so it can seem to say “here’s the cup” – i.e., the cup of water you will need to drink slowly while holding your breath in order to get rid of the hiccups. And of course the up brings to mind some words that go with up in reference to eructations and diaphragmatic spasms.

Well, true, cough also brings to mind diaphragmatic spasms. But not when pronounced like cup! And while the various subgroups of letters are not so odd when seen in sensible contexts – hickory, piccolo, accoutrement – hiccough is a bit less expected, most especially because, if you’re like me, your mind rebels against the very idea of pronouncing that gh as [p]. Noghe! Won’t do! Imghossible!

At the same time, though, it’s like a particularly ugly article of furniture that just happens to have been a famous forgery of four centuries past and is now in an antique shop with a breathtaking price tag on it. It puts me in mind of a vase I saw in the Victoria and Albert Museum that caused me to break out in laughter: it was strangely gaudy and ornate, and among other things had a honeycomb neck with bees crawling on it and a base that was three cat feet that looked as though they had been cut off Heathcliff of cartoon fame.

But it’s in the V&A, so it must be worth something! And hiccough is seen in assorted British texts – well, it’s their language, so they must know it, right? (actually, it’s our language too; in fact, their standard version is in many ways farther from the origins than the colonial versions are) – and, most importantly, it has a weird and unexpected spelling. So it must be the better, more formal way to spell it! That’s what people assume, generally: more silent letters and other orthographical perversities equals higher class.

But if you are tempted to jump on that wagon, do bear in mind the admonition of the Oxford English Dictionary: “Hiccough was a later spelling, apparently under the erroneous impression that the second syllable was cough, which has not affected the received pronunciation, and ought to be abandoned as a mere error.” In the end, though, it is ough to you…

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town

Posted on January 10, 2012 | 2 comments

Aina and I live downtown in Toronto (something of a change from my cowtown hometown of youth), and most weekends we stay in town, maybe go out on the town (I’m not really a man-about-town, but sometimes it’s nice to just go to town), maybe stay in (on Sunday evenings it’s Downton Abbey, which many people call Downtown Abbey). But sometimes we get out of town to visit family who live in some other town – a medium-small town on the shore of Georgian Bay, or a suburb of a border town that’s really just across the river from town but is much more like country, or a village near a small city in southwestern New York. This past weekend we visited the latter two, and we had occasion to discuss the word town.

The word town has an official meaning in New York, as in most American states, that may seem a bit odd to those not used to it. I don’t mean the Manhattan-originated distinction of downtown versus uptown, which arose because Manhattan rises towards the north (when you’re far uptown, it’s all pretty elevated, with steep escarpments down to the river). No, it’s this: just as the state is divided into counties, each county is divided into towns (in some other places these sorts of subdivisions are called townships, but New York is not in that boat). The only part of a county that is not a town is any part that is a city. Within the towns are incorporated settlements called villages and hamlets, as well as unincorporated settlements.

For instance, Chautauqua County (the westernmost county of New York State) is divided into 27 towns plus two cities – Dunkirk and Jamestown. (Yes, that’s right, Jamestown is a city, and is not a town or part of a town.) The city of Dunkirk is surrounded by, but not part of, the town of Dunkirk. Dunkirk is often referred to in the term Dunkirk-Fredonia, because it has a twin city, Fredonia, except that Fredonia is about half as big and has the status of a village; it’s in the town of Pomfret. Dunkirk is an industrial town of sorts; Fredonia has a campus of the State University of New York, so it has a little bit of a town-and-gown divide.

My grandmother used to live in Fredonia, but now she’s in a different town, Gerry (pronounced “garry”). She lives in a little town, more of a village or a hamlet, also called Gerry, but though it has a name, it’s not incorporated, so while we might think of this little town as a village or a hamlet, it’s just part of a town. (Every town in Chautauqua – and throughout the state – has quite a few of these little named places. Some are closer to ghost towns now, though they may have been boom towns in their heyday.) But it’s a quick trip from there into town – that is, into Jamestown, which of course is not a town or a part of a town, but is the local business and market town, and it has plenty of nice townsfolk, though it’s not too uptown – very towny for the most part.

So what she’s living in is probably too small to be thought of as a town, except it’s in a town, but that’s a different sense of town. And for me, the whole thing is just plain odd, because growing up I learned that a town was something bigger than a village but smaller than a city, while town (no article) was what you called your largest local settlement, and if you’re in a city you refer to it as town in a variety of phrases. As it happens, this is generally true in common usage, even in the US, so they have the added complexity in most states of the official town along with the colloquial uses of town.

Town really is one of English’s elementary, or should I say elemental, words. Just as chemical elements can combine to make a variety of different things with different characteristics – for instance, a reactive metal (sodium) and a poison gas (chlorine) combine to make an essential dietary component (salt), and different combinations of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms can make molecules that you can drink, that you can fuel your car with, that you can scrape your car windows with, that you can clean your car windows with, and quite a lot of other variations, gas, solid, and liquid, safe and dangerous – elementary words likewise mix to have different meanings in different contexts.

I’ve put a number of those in action already in this note. There are also the compounds, such as townhouse (which means one thing in New York City and something a bit different in Western Canada – but always a narrow multistorey residence), hometown, Chinatown, and all those city and town names ending in town or ton – but make sure you get your town and ton straight, or a country manor could become a business district.

And where does town come from? It’s an old Germanic word, showing up in Old English as tuun, which meant “walled settlement” or “enclosed place”, but the original root referred to a wall or hedge – it came by transference to refer to what was enclosed by the wall or hedge. (Imagine a hedgehog being a townhog!)

And how does it taste to us now? It has all the resonances of its many collocations and compound uses, of course; as a word to say, it is quick and stays on tongue tip with the consonants (crisp start, warmer finish), while the vowel closes to rounded and raises the tongue in the back. For some reason, for me, town has a sort of windy or dusty feel to it, perhaps due to the aspirated /t/ and the rounded vowel. And the letters? You can see own but you can’t hear it; you can also anagram to wont (habit) and nowt (nothing). You may even see a hidden two lurking, and a little hint of twin… but I’m not used to hearing talk of twin towns, just twin cities.

But on the other hand, no one talks of city and country; it’s town and country, and a nice pair they make. After all, a country has parts that are country and parts that are town or city. There is much land in the land, though not all of it is landscape. Oh, yes – land, like town, comes from Germanic roots via Old English, while city and country come from Latin via French. There’s so much flavour and fun available with these words… you can really go to town with them.

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Presenting the future

Posted on January 9, 2012 | 3 comments

In an article in Slate that makes rather much of a little interesting observation in television news topic introduction syntax, Michael Kinsley tosses in this remark: “Long part of vernacular English: referring to the future as the present.”

I think it’s fair to guess that Michael Kinsley has never actually studied the topic, nor really spent all that much time thinking about it. The truth is that English, not just vernacular but all sorts, use present-tense inflectional forms to refer to pretty much everything that’s not the past – even our “future tense” (which we use only sometimes) is really a present auxiliary plus an infinitive. (I discuss this in a bit more depth in “How to explain grammar.”)

But that doesn’t mean we’re referring to the future as the present any more than saying “two fish” refers to the plural as a singular. It just means we have a semantic distinction that is not matched by a strict formal distinction. As with many things, we use our linguistic bits more loosely – English is a real ductape and WD-40 kind of language. Look, Chinese doesn’t have tense inflections at all, but that doesn’t mean that Chinese speakers are talking about everything as though it’s happening right now. Context!

Here’s a little poem, from my forthcoming Songs of Love and Grammar, illustrating our common use of present-tense forms to talk about the future and about timeless and durable states.

Christmas present

Now, Christmas has twelve days, of which the first one is tomorrow,
and I’m giving to my true love all that I can beg or borrow.
She knows that I’m a poet, so I’m giving her my words;
I know that she’s allergic, so I’m giving her no birds –
no swans, nor geese, nor turtledoves, nor even partridge one;
I know she’s introverted – lords and ladies are no fun.
Loud noises give her headaches. Drummers? Pipers? Please, not now!
And I’ll give her maids a-milking when she wants to have a cow.
But every year I give her something more than just a rhyme,
and I hope that she says yes to what I’m giving her this time:
on Christmas she is getting all the joy that I can bring,
for tomorrow I am giving her not five, but one gold ring.
She knows I don’t have money, but she knows she has my love;
with her I know I’m gifted by an angel from above.
So tomorrow I am proving what tonight I’m here to tell:
there’s nothing like the present to begin the future well.

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ballade

Posted on January 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

Well, we know what a ballad is. Don’t we? Um, it’s a long song or poem that tells a story. We know of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde, perhaps. And then there’s “The Ballad of East and West” by Rudyard Kipling. And we may know “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” a song by the Beatles. Oh, and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Which is actually a movie. Starring Will Ferrell.

They don’t have a whole lot in common, but they’re all stories. And they’re long. They’re not all good, but they’re not all bad. You sit down and listen to them. You may hear them quite a few times and get to know them back to front, maybe (or maybe not), and then notice that ballad looks the same in the mirror. But would you dance to them?

Well, that’s what ballad comes from: a root referring to dancing. When you go to a fancy ball, that’s the same root in ball. When some Spanish singer sings ¡Baila! it’s from the same root. And when you read a ballade, of course…

So, wait, what’s the difference between a ballad and a ballade? Is it like the difference between an old town and an olde towne? Mmm, no. The e isn’t just there to be fancy; the word came to us from French, so it’s organic. Ballad and ballade were originally two spellings of the same word, but this is another case where English has kept a divergent form to indicate a divergent referent. The words are sort of like the two brothers in that ’80s TV show Simon and Simon: one is freewheeling, the other tidy. Ballad just wants to go out there and tell its story. Ballade fell in with a set who like bondage and discipline – I mean bondage to a specific form and discipline in adhering to it, of course.

Does that sound a little medieval? Bang on! The ballade is one of the fixed verse forms that arose in France during the medieval period. The form got tidied up, whipped into shape, locked up in rules. A ballade is longer than many fixed forms, but not as long as many a ballad today. It features four stanzas with the same line at the end of each stanza; three are eight verses long, and the fourth is a four-verse envoi, originally typically dedicated to a prince. You may think of the envoi as like the e on the end of ballade, a finishing flourish. Thematically, you may expect some reflection in a ballade, some looking forward and then looking back, and finding parallels in the middle – b ll d. But really, the prescription is the form; the contents are up to the poet.

The rhyme scheme is punishing: ababbcbC ababbcbC ababbcbC bcbC, where C is the refrain. Just as the word ballade stays on your lips and on the tip of your tongue, you will need a lot of rhymes – especially for the b rhyme – on your lips, and not just on the tip of your tongue. It’s the sort of thing a show-off – for instance Cyrano de Bergerac – might create ex tempore.

There are many good ballades out there, and seeking them out is left as an exercise to the reader; you may find some by Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and G.K. Chesterton, among many others. I present here, as something of an example, one of my own, from my set of poems “Forms on the Beach” – fiction, I assure you, and not really the sort of thing the medieval Frenchmen had in mind, but properly reflective, with a little fancy at the end.

Barbecue ballade

Hey, Johnny, grab the keg! The food is here
and Dylan and the girls have got a spot.
We hefted up the metal ball of beer
and ran with it, plus all the Coke we’d bought.
And I met Dylan’s girlfriend, who was hot,
all blonde and soft, with arm fuzz like a peach.
She grilled some wieners and some fish we’d caught
and laid them on the table on the beach.

We drank a lot, and, man, we had no fear.
We broke out some tequila we had brought.
We played Coke baseball, drank from a brassiere.
I used D’s girlfriend’s shorts to do a shot.
She said, I’ll show you something I was taught
but then you gotta promise to me to teach
somebody else. We tried it twice, then smoked some pot
and laid down on the table on the beach.

The night crawled slowly in. The sky was clear.
We sobered up, though we had drunk a lot.
Two girls and I walked out along the pier
and Angela said, Johnny, you know what?
The lake’s reflecting things that I forgot.
Diane leaned over, said, Hey, can you reach
my shorts? I said, No, lovely, I cannot.
You laid them on the table on the beach.

And later on, two of us sat and thought
in cooler air of what had come to each
and took the best of all the things we’d got
and laid them on the table on the beach.

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triolet

Posted on January 7, 2012 | 8 comments

A few years ago I decided to try a little form poetry – poetry following rigid rhyming and metrical schemes. I wrote a fair few but published nearly none of it, but it was a worthwhile exercise, and I still like some of the ones I wrote. Form poetry is regaining some popularity now, no doubt at least in part because one can get a bad taste in the mouth from the abundance of truly trite free verse circulating (schlocky wall plaques lately don’t rhyme).

The triolet is a little jewel among forms. It is not as lapidary as a haiku or a tanka, true, but those forms were invented for a language with very different structure and prosody. Like many tight poetic forms, it repeats some lines. But since it’s only eight lines long, and it repeats one line twice and another thrice, that’s a pretty high proportion of repetition. The trick is to try not to make it trite: vary the sense of the repeated lines so that while the words are the same, you get a new angle each time. This classic one illustrates (though it’s freer with the punctuation than the strictest version would allow):

Birds at Winter (by Thomas Hardy)

Around the house the flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone
From holly and cotoneaster
Around the house. The flakes fly! – faster
Shutting indoors the crumb-outcaster
We used to see upon the lawn
Around the house. The Flakes fly faster
And all the berries now are gone!

You can see the rhyme scheme: ABaAabAB, where the capitals mean the verse is identical rather than just rhyming.

A word like triolet is a nice word for this form, and not just because it describes it – it’s French for “little trio”, and you see that it’s built around three iterations of the first line. It has a taste of the little thrill a well-done poem of this type can give. At the same time, it has two pronunciations, one French-style (“tree o lay”) – more sublime, to English ears – and one English-style (“try a let”) – more earthy, basic, or ridiculous. So, too, the poem may use its repetition for some deeper insight, or for a joke. Or even both: something earthy that seems light but also gives an insight into the working of the human mind in even the basest circumstance.

The pair of repeated verses play into this dichotomy, though we see that one wins in the count; and as we look at the word, we see the t and t bookending it and the l in the middle, the tallest of a triumvirate. The resonances match the dichotomy: the tree echo gives us the branches of the poem, efflorescing and further ramifying; the olé resonance has a small taste of bravado, or is it an au lait with its milky coffee flavour? On the other side, try a let makes it sound like an attempt to score in a game, though the rhyme with violet still brings flowers; and we cannot escape the anagram of loiter and near-anagram of toilet, which take it out of the gardens and into the bus station, or onto a sidewalk with flowers growing through the cracked concrete, or to some other heavily used public place.

Such as the beach. I wrote a set of poetry, “Forms on the Beach,” presenting vignettes of various people on the beach in different strict poetic forms, ranging from wistful to sporty to peevish; I will present at least one more from it in a coming word tasting note. The triolet is this:

Toilet triolet

Ya gotta go, ya gotta go.
I’m gettin’ desperate for a sign –
like “men” or “salle de bain,” y’know.
Ya gotta go, ya gotta go!
I’m outta beer ’n’ outta dough,
’n’ all my chick can do is whine.
Ya gotta go, ya gotta go…
I’m gettin’ desperate for a sign.

I note, incidentally, that there was a Russian-French author named Elsa Triolet (she was born Ella Kagan and married a fellow named André Triolet; she subsequently divorced him and later married the author Louis Aragon). Among the works she wrote was an epistolary novel called Luna Park, which catches my attention because there are several other things by the name, including a Pet Shop Boys song. Triolet, by the way, can also (though rarely) refer to a triplet in music. But “Luna Park” by the Pet Shop Boys is in four-time.

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aleatory

Posted on January 6, 2012 | 8 comments

This evening I saw a lovely new film from Quebec called Monsieur Lazhar. It was in French with English subtitles, and I always enjoy comparing the dialogue with its translation – there are a great many things that can’t be translated as easily as people think they can (you can lose subtleties with subtitles). It’s not simply that it’s not exactly word-for-word, or that there are little inflectional things that exist in one language that don’t in another; entire ways of approaching subjects exist in one language that don’t readily exist in another. Even where both are capable of expressing pretty much the same thing, for a given language a given way of putting something may be more or lesson common, more or less formal, may have different connotations…

Obviously, if you use something like machine translation, you’re taking your chances (and Google Chinglish for some hilarious examples), but even the best translation by the best translator can be a chancy thing. You just have to roll the dice. As is said in Italian, Traduttore, traditore – literally “translator, traitor,” more anglice “A translator is a traitor,” or, as some people put it (those who think they are supposed to explicate when translating), “To translate is to betray” (really, I’ve seen that, and even still such a cack-handed handling of it leaves me downcast).

An example that particularly caught my attention in Monsieur Lazhar was when one character was explaining to another what shuffle meant (as in iPod Shuffle). What was especially interesting to me was that it almost seemed smoother in the English subtitle than in the French: where the English had random, the original French was de façon aléatoire. Which looks as though it would translate better into English as in an aleatory manner.

Except that aleatory is a low-frequency word in English. Meaning your odds of hearing it are somewhat lower, and so it’s worth more. We get our highfalutin vocabulary from Latin and Greek, often by way of French, but French gets its words from Latin by simple evolution – they’re as basic to it as Anglo-Saxon words are to English. And, while a passage of English may be direct and functional or ornate and luxurious or technical, like a meal in a fast-food restaurant or in an expensive dining room or on a space station, a passage of French of whatever level has an element of deliberate pleasure, be it like baguette and Brie on stone steps or like the the most elaborate assemblage à la Carême. They love the longer prepositional phrases just as they love the myriad silent letters. (Of course, it seems doubly exquisite when it is foreign.)

English does, as always, have a panoply of lexemes to suit the context. Random is popular among youth and has overtones of randy, dumb, and a sort of sense of wandering; stochastic is from Greek and is very percussive and technical, seeming almost as though the randomness were produced by some air-driven punch-press machine. But aleatory…

It’s as formal as stochastic, of course, but it carries with it a greater sense of a losing proposition (I’m talking about in English; matters are different in French). This comes from its reference to dice (I won’t presume it has any influence from the echo of alas). All of you who have ever loved Asterix know the phrase Alea jacta est, something the Romans in those comics like to say every so often; it’s what Julius Caesar said when he had crossed the Rubicon: “The die is cast.” The Rubicon was the line in the sand, as it were; actually, it was a river. Crossing it was a declaration of war.

War is always a gamble; you are always dicing with destiny. Romans liked to gamble with dice, too, their soldiers in particular being known for it. But does fortune favour the bold? You may think so, and then meet it in some dark alley and wake up chained in a laboratory… O Furtuna, velut luna, statu variabilis! (Do sit down and read a translation of the opening “O Fortuna” chorus of the Carmina Burana. Better yet, read three and compare them: here’s one; here’s another; and here’s another.)

Fortune is often seen as being a woman – by men, anyway. And what would this woman’s name be? I think Aleatory would be a good one; it sounds like a mix of Allie and Tori. It flows off the tongue, liquids rippling on either side of the /t/, hidden in the silken folds: a stiletto (but do I mean high heel or dagger?). And aleatory has a lovely set of vowels, but look: where are u and i? We own no piece of it.

The Gauls of Asterix knew the ups and downs of fortune well enough, as they had lost an epic battle at Alesia, which, come to think of it, sounds like a woman’s name too – and a bit like aleatory. And yet Caesar, who vanquished Vercingetorix at Alesia, was himself no so long afterwards brutally assassinated.

Randomizers on computers, such as on an iPod Shuffle, are not truly random; they simply use an algorithm of sufficient complexity that it is beyond your power and mine to predict the results. But, then, the same is true of a roll of the dice. If we knew exactly the force and direction of the throw, the spin imparted by the friction in the hand, the resistance of the table, the air currents, and so on, we would be able to predict the result exactly every time. But we lack the capacity to do so. We cannot deduce; we can only say “Aleatory, dear Watson.”

The plot of Monsieur Lazhar is driven by two precipitating events, sudden downstrokes, baleful occurrences that defy the characters to find meaning in them. And such events will always have different meanings for different people; we may be not truly able to make sense of them at all, but able only to translate them into something we can parse, if clumsily. They seem in some ways almost random.

But no, not random; it’s not like the output of a simple mixing-up algorithm where the various outputs are roughly equally fortuitous. They are catastrophes – catastrophe is from Greek for “downstroke” – and they have been cast like dice: snake eyes or boxcars. Abruptly, you must pay, and there is no appeal. The only point you can see is the stiletto in the satin folds. You do not know the telos, but you have found the end.

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carapacity

Posted on January 4, 2012 | 1 comment

I’m going to be a bit capricious today: my word is not to be found in a dictionary. But I’m not the first to use it. Indeed, a very likeable poem is to be found on the web titled “Carapacity,” and I think it expresses the ethos of this word quite well – see it at bluemoonhuntress.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/callous/. The word itself is crisp and flavourful, with its full set of voiceless stops caroming the tongue across the mouth, added to by the quick liquid of the /r/ and the passing hiss of the fricative /s/, and it presents several overtones – which will caper about on my page shortly.

This word is not derived from car capacity, nor is it a merger of capacity and rapacity. But cars of whatever capacity do have a notable carapacity – and a certain rapacity. I have seen many a car rape a city, while subway cars are crammed to capacity and certain politicians thicken their hides and hide thickly. Thicken their hides? Indeed, they have not mere hides but carapaces – the exoskeletons of turtles, lobsters, crabs, and so on. The word comes to us from French, which took it from Spanish carapacho “upper shell of a tortoise”; it may or may not be ultimately related to Latin capa “cape”.

So. We know what rapacity is: the condition of being rapacious, which is to say, greedy, predatory, devouring, like a raptor or a rapist. Raptors are often admired – a basketball team has been named after them (actually after velociraptors, which are dinosaurs; raptors are birds, for example falcons, eagles, goshawks, kestrels), and so has a movie star (Noomi Rapace, who with her husband took the name from the French for “raptor”). Rapists, not so much. Some say greed is good; others, not so much.

Capacity, on the other hand, is seldom seen badly. Physical capacity is almost always a big boon; the more the merrier. It’s one of those things, like having long fingers, that have almost no downsides. Too much stomach capacity may result in overeating, but it’s better than too little. Mental capacity – which adds perspective to increase perspicacity – has no downside at all that I can think of; perhaps I lack the capacity to conceive of it. No one wants overload, of passengers or of information; overmax your lines and you may blow a capacitor and be incapacitated.

By analogy, then, with the other bearers of acity – of which in total there may be, if not a city full, then at least a capacity crowd (there are nearly 100 in Oxford, from audacity to voracity) – carapacity is the condition of having a carapace, or the extent to which one has one. Is it admirable or detestable? I think it’s a matter of context and perspective. It can be good to be thick-skinned as long as one is tender-hearted, though impervious obduracy is seldom a virtue and can often produce craptacular results.

For me, I would rather soften my shell a bit and relax with a carboy of ripasso (not that I advocate crapulousness) and a plate of carpaccio.

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place, plaice

Posted on January 3, 2012 | 2 comments

The Order of Logogustation’s Christmas feast was taking place. We had scheduled it this year on the tenth day of Christmas (January 3), at the usual place: the Rather Good Hall of Domus Logogustationis. This year, as a plus, we had planned for the playings of Placido, a fellow whom Maury introduced as his second cousin once removed. Placido is a minstrel, and he came equipped with pibgorn, shawm, and theorbo, but commenced the evening with juggling all over the place, followed by storytelling from place to place.

Storytelling has its place, to be sure, but it seemed a bit out of place when we wished to be passing pleasantries and plotting plans and, of course, tasting words. As dinner – a poached flatfish, not flounder but plaice – was being placed before us, we became somewhat plaintive; I pulled Maury aside and asked him to plead for some pleasant pluckings or pipings. He sidled over to Placido.

“Placido, old pal,” Maury said, “it would be a plus if you could play us a piece.”

“A piece? A piece for a piece,” said Placido. “If you place a piece of plaice at my place, I’ll play you a piece.”

“Plaice at your place?”

Placido pointed to the fish. “I sing for my supper. Place a piece of plaice on my plate at my place, if you please.”

“That seems a bit out of place.”

“You’re out of plaice? You seem to have a plethora.”

“No,” said Maury, “it’s just that there’s a time and place for everything.”

“Yes, and it’s now time for my plaice.”

“Your place is playing for our pleasure.”

Placido looked over his shoulder at the place he had placed his instruments. “Sounds fishy to me. I think you’re codding me. And I wouldn’t want a cod piece.”

“Neither cod nor plaice. We’re paying; play, please.”

Placido spied Maury’s plate, freshly placed, and slipped over and planted himself in Maury’s chair. “I shall displace you.”

“You shall displease me. You should know your place.”

Placido, implacable, pointed at the fish. “This is my plaice, and I know it. What are you going to do, replace me?”

But Placido had not observed who he had planted himself next to: Marilyn Frack. With a creak of her black leather pantsuit, she leaned over and placed her hand on the plush pleats of Placido’s jaunty jacket. “Is that pleather?”

Placido turned his head to her. “Pleather? Please!”

She stroked it some more. “It just seems too… plush… for leather.”

Her other half, Edgar Frick, chimed in from beyond her: “Indeed, it seems plain it’s some kind of plant matter. Or plastic.”

“People!” Placido said. “I may not be a plutocrat, but I can… Please!” He pulled away as Marilyn planted her lips on the sleeve and proceeded to bite it.

Marilyn looked back up at Edgar and shook her head. “Doesn’t taste plausibly like leather.”

Placido stood up. “In the first place, I paid good money for this…”

Maury took the chance to sit in his place. “And we’re paying good money for you. For which you get neither pride of place nor a prime piece of plaice. You just get to play us pieces. Please. After which you can eat fish in the kitchen.” He leaned closer to Placido and said in a dangerous purr, “You’re once removed already. Shall we make it twice?”

Edgar, drily eyeing his wine glass, said, “Must we implore you?”

Marilyn reached over and plopped her palm on Placido’s posterior. “Or should we explore you?”

Placido pulled back so rapidly he almost ran in place. “Your pleasure is – um, my command is – ah, I was just playing around. I’ll play some now!” And he picked up his pibgorn and – as we ate our plaice and had a pleasant chat about place and plaice both likely being related to flat through Greek πλατύς platus (“broad”) – played a merry hornpipe on the far side of the place: pretty, but perhaps a little flat.

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toque/tuque

Posted on January 2, 2012 | 4 comments

’s gettin’ cold out, eh. And you know what that means. Put on your toque.

Well, you know what that means if you’re Canadian. Of course, even if you’re Canadian, you may spell it tuque. Or you may not. Doesn’t matter. When I was a little kid I thought it was spelled twok, because, you know, two plus k. (I never sorted out what a threek might be, but of course you eat with a fourk.) It’s not as though it’s spelled phonetically anyway. It’s a short word, cold and hard as ice, and easy to say without opening your mouth too wide (handy when it’s –30˚C), but it has that fancy French que at the end. Which is because, like many of the best things in Canadian culture (poutine leaps to mind immediately, and maple syrup too), we get it from Quebec.

Dictionaries can be surprisingly thick-headed on this word. Some only allow the tuque spelling for what I’m talking about, even though I’m more used to toque (your results may vary). The definitions can be really a bit behind: the OED gives us “A knitted stocking-cap tapered and closed at both ends, one end being tucked into the other to form the cap; formerly the characteristic winter head-dress of the Canadian ‘habitant’; now chiefly worn as part of a toboggan or snow-shoe club costume.” I bet a lot of Canadians wouldn’t immediately recognize their habitual cold-weather headwear from that. On the other end of the scale, Dictionary.com says simply “a heavy stocking cap worn in Canada.” The Collins English Dictionary gives the version I like the best: “a close-fitting knitted hat often with a tassel or pompom.” Yep, that’s about it.

Outside of Canada, you will occasionally see the word toque to refer to other kinds of headwear (the tuque spelling is Canadian and specific to our national headgear). Depending on where you see it, it may be naming a small, close hat worn by women, or it may be referring to one of those tall white chef hats that look like stylized overgrown popovers. But for some reason, even though you may see what Canadians would call toques on the heads of people in the US and England, they don’t call them toques. They’ll call them caps or hats. (But, then, these are people who don’t know that gravy goes with fries.)

Now, yes, technically, a toque falls into the broad category of hats. But if I were wearing a toque and someone said, “I like your hat,” I’d wonder at first what they were talking about. I’m not wearing a hat right now… Oh, this! My toque, you mean, yes? A hat is a thing you place on top of your head; it typically is vulnerable to being blown off; it usually has a brim; in general, it holds its shape. A toque is a stretchy thing that fits over your head and keeps it warm and stays on. And it has the same kind of logo-bearing potential as T-shirts and baseball caps. Look, a hat is dressy, generally. A toque is absolutely not. It goes with skis, show shovels, parkas, and Tim Hortons.

Another thing: all those other toques are pronounced like “toke”. The word is cognate with Italian tocca (a kind of cap) and Spanish toca (a woman’s head-dressing or coif). But in Canada, the pronunciation shifted, and so did the spelling – partially: lots of us still write it toque and may even find tuque odd-looking. But don’t pronounce it “toke” no matter how we spell it. We’ll probably think you’re talking about smoking marijuana, or we won’t be sure what you mean. And then, when we realize you mean /tu:k/, not /to:k/, we’ll probably laugh. And think, “Well, these Americans can’t tell ‘ow’ from ‘oo’, so whaddya expect? Don’t mention poutine; they’ll think we’re talking about the Russian head honcho, and they won’t understand the concept of fries with gravy and cheese curds anyway. Weirdos.”

But who knows. Tim Hortons is expanding into the US. Many of the funniest people in the US are Canadians, and some of the most popular singers too (seriously, they can keep Celine and Justin, OK?). We might yet manage to civilize them.

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maya

Posted on January 2, 2012 | 2 comments

Happy new year!

Why does the new year start on January 1? Why have a new year at all? Well, why not? It seems reasonable enough to measure time on the basis of revolutions of the planet (days) and periods of its orbit around the sun (years), and periods of orbit of its satellite (months). But of course we don’t always get it exactly correct (months!), and the decision where to draw the line is somewhat arbitrary. We say days begin at midnight (not exactly the nadir, necessarily, but approximated to the time zone, and perhaps adjusted by an hour), but they could begin (as they do for some) at sunset, or (as seems intuitive to many poets and singers, including the Moody Blues) at dawn. And the year, well, pick a time! Winter solstice? Summer solstice? One of the equinoxes? How about, um, ten days after one of the solstices?

That’s fine; it’s arbitrary, something we’ve settled on, just as we’ve settled on the word year to refer to the period it demarcates. As long as we understand that these things are arbitrary designations, cultural creations agreed on collectively, and not some natural law like, say, gravity, we’re fine. Our problems begin when we reify the distinctions we make, when we take the convenient illusion as reality. Jim Taylor (jimt@quixotic.ca) talked about this in his most recent “Sharp Edges” e-newsletter:

New Year’s Day reminds us that we humans tend to fixate on our creations rather than on natural phenomena. We set up systems – such as a calendar that fixes New Year’s Day on January 1 or any other date – and then treat them as immutable.

For example, David Suzuki speaks about living on a finite planet. There is only so much land, only so much water, only so many molecules of oxygen. Human effort and technology cannot increase those quantities.

But his detractors say, “What about the economy? David, you’ve got to face reality!”

The economy, retorts Suzuki, is not reality. It is an imaginary construct, an idea, a concept. We invented it; we can change it. But, like our calendars, the system takes precedence in our thinking over the reality that all life on this planet depends on a yellowish ball 93 million miles away. Everything else is secondary.

Going back to the calendar, we know we count by tens as a cultural standard, though other cultures have counted by twelves and twenties, and sixteen is a more important number for computers. But imagine if someone from a culture that counted in twelves and that started counting in the year 284 (for whatever reason – the ascension of Diocletian or the birth of Emperor Huai of Jin or who knows what, or maybe they miscounted) told you that this is the year 1728, which is the cube of 12, and so the world would end this year. Ha – seriously? That’s kind of like thinking the world would end in the year 1000, base 10.

Which, of course, many people did think at the time. And many thought it might end in 2000, too. And furious arguments erupted over whether it would be 2000 or 2001 (see “When does the new decade begin?” for a taste). Arrant silliness, of course. I mean, it’s nice to make special celebrations for arbitrary time points, such as anniversaries that are multiples of 25, or birthdays with ages ending in 0. Conventions can be quite fun. But they’re conventions. The mistake of believing our illusions – of thinking that our arbitrary divisions are real (and all divisions are in fact arbitrary; even what you think is your body is really changing all the time – a physicist can tell you you’re a very complex wave function – and the division between body and not-body can only be upheld if you don’t look too close) – has a nice name that we get from Sanskrit: maya, which in roots means basically “not that”. It’s a nice word for it: bounces from the lips and rebounds elastically from the body of the tongue. You could say it in endless cycles: “mayamayamayamayamaya…”

But isn’t that a charming coincidence? You know, of course, what I’ve been circling: the weird fantasy that some people have that because the Mayan long calendar starts a new cycle this year (on December 21), the world will end, or at least we will have a new Chicxulub. Somehow the Maya are thought to have known things we don’t. I recall happening into a Q&A session with the publisher of a local weekly newspaper a few years ago; she averred that something big was going to happen in 2012, because they Maya, “who were a very technologically advanced civilization,” had their calendar set to roll over then. I wonder if she thinks her car will explode when the odometer reaches 100,000 km… after all, the people who made it are way more technologically advanced than the Maya ever were, and the Maya no more said (or say; they still exist as a people) that the world will end then than the manufacturer of your car says it will blow up at 100,000 km (though maintenance every so many kilometres is advised). I also wonder if, in her advocacy of listening to their superior wisdom, she advocated returning to their cosmology and their incessant warfare and regular practice of human sacrifice.

But, ah, there it is: the foreign is an excellent target for projection. We have values we want to integrate into ourselves, but we must see them in others and bring them in that way; it’s what Jung called the transcendent function. I published a paper on this a while ago: “The Transcendent Function of Interculturalism” – you can read it at harbeck.ca/James/JH_trans.pdf. We have this idea of division, of incompleteness of the self, and in order to complete ourselves with what we already have, we have to say someone else has it. A prophet is without honour in his or her own country.

It’s just a handy coincidence, of course, that Maya of Central America and maya of Sanskrit sound and are spelled the same. It’s also coincidence that it sounds rather like Mandarin mei you (sounds like English mayo), which means “doesn’t have” or “have not” or “isn’t there” or “doesn’t exist” (literally “not have”). Another coincidence is the female personal name Maya, as in Maya Rudolph, Maya Deren, and Maya Angelou; in Angelou’s case, it’s a nickname taken from her baby brother calling her “maya sista,” but other Mayas generally get the name from the Roman and Greek goddess Maia, one of the Pleiades, the mother of Hermes.

Hermes? I don’t mean those very expensive fashion accessories (there’s a case of arbitrariness and agreed-on illusion: you know that the price and perceived value of such luxury goods has very little connection with their cost of production). I mean the god with winged feet, the one who communicates between the gods and humans (between you and the big Other, which may turn out to be not separate from you) and who is also associated with obscure mysteries and secret knowledge and so on. In some ways, then, a god of illusory divisions. It’s perfect that illusion (maya, Maia) should name the mother of illusory divisions.

But it’s also perfect that maya should name the mother of enlightenment. Indeed, the mother of the Buddha – of Siddhartha Gautama, the original enlightened one – was (we are told) named Maya, and that is the same maya that means “illusion”. Illusion may be a movement away from truth, but while that may lead to further movement away from it, it can also lead to returning to it to see it with fresh eyes: as T.S. Eliot wrote in “Four Quartets,”

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Yes, and returning is the motion of the Tao, too. And of the years. Meet the new year: same as the old year, but also completely different. Make of it what you will.

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