Monthly Archives: March 2012

changeroom

Posted on March 6, 2012 | 3 comments

Tense, tired, and cold, I sought escape to someplace exotic, warm, and relaxing. I replaced my world of concrete and dust and ice and dry wind with a realm of warmth and wet air, redolent of lemongrass and myriad mysterious fragrances, a place where my tension could be wrung out of me and dripped off me. Bowls of fruit lay open for the taking; cups of citrus water refreshed; nearby, a table could be had and served with coconut soups and red and green curries. I had ventured somewhere – where? Chiang Mai? Yangon (erstwhile Rangoon)? Angkor? Was the moist air the onset of a monsoon? Quietly, wafting over the air, I could hear singing, or was it the chants of meditation?

My portal, my access point to this world of wet warmth and relaxation, bore a sign: Changeroom. Ah! Another long, complex word with a mixture of foreign flavours. Changeroom meant “welcome”. Changeroom meant “come in”. Changeroom meant “leave behind your daily burdens”. Changeroom meant “take on new light, soft vestments”. This was a liminal place, a border, a Narnian wardrobe. Everything became something different, underwent a sea-change into something rich and strange.

Even the word itself. Ten letters, but of those, two different sets of two each stand for a single sound, while two other letters stand for altered sounds, and one stands for no sound at all but merely works a small magic on another letter. The word has two parts: the first is affricate-to-affricate with a nasal in between, all on the tip of the tongue; the second pulls the tongue back and at the same time rounds the lips, and a liquid moves through a vowel tunnel to a nasal. The first part comes from warm southern climates, the second from cold northern ones, but the first word is crisper and more biting, the second warmer and softer. The word is rich and strange and mixed, a magic trick, a linguistic shapeshifter. How you see it depends on… how you see it.

These simple letters could stand for singing – Mandarin chang ger – or meditation, the long tone of om, but instead they present a space for transformation: change, from French, ultimately from Latin cambire “change”, and room, an old and widespread Germanic root referring to space and interior places. An interior of transformation: here is where you go within, lock away your quotidian raiments, and come forth clad in soft white. The silence will change you just as the silent e signals a change in the way you say the a.

Yes, I spent another evening at the spa, steaming, soaking, swimming, and getting a massage. I left my keys and cards and money and phone and clothing in my wardrobe locker in the changeroom, put on a bathrobe, and my world was become a softer, quieter place for three hours.

But of course all my stuff was waiting for me when I was done. As was the bill. Ah, spa, and your magic gate changeroom, I will return. I would go back there tomorrow but for the work that I have taken on… On the other hand, that work pays for me to go in the first place.

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mulligatawny

Posted on March 5, 2012 | 5 comments

Imagine being a young Canadian and first seeing this word on a soup can. What crosses your mind? Probably first of all “That’s a long word” and, immediately, “What the heck is that?” Could it be some weird ingredient like gumbo, or weirder, like mongoose or alligator or tadpole? Or some creature from Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo? A check of the ingredients reveals nothing as exceptional as the name: just some meat, some vegetables, some spices, stuff like that.

So it must be some kind of eponym, perhaps? (I’m sure every Canadian youth knows the word eponym. If by every you mean “no”.) It does look like a Scottish or Irish name. Maybe this soup is what they serve at St. Andrew’s in the clubhouse to anyone dressed in tawny clothes who has taken a mulligan. Or is it a magic word uttered by the witches in Macbeth – something on the line of alakazam but with the duller, rounder sound reminiscent of the rumbling in a sheep’s gut, or in yours after an excess of haggis? Maybe it’s a place, like the Mull o’ Kintyre. It kind of has the sound of some burbling bog, actually.

But if you’re mulling a getaway to the home of mulligatawny, cold muddy bogs are not on your itinerary. Rather, take your tiger repellant. This word is another hangover of the British Empire. Tony Aspler, the noted wine critic, once wrote about how England has “phantom Raj syndrome” – they no longer run India, but they still eat curry by the bucket (or the takeout container). This soup is a product of the British domination of India; it’s a contact food – it came to being due to the contact between the British and the Indians. It is indigenous to India in the same way as a child born in India of an Indian parent and a British parent is. It’s a gastronomic creolization (but not what in gastronomy is called a creole), like South Africa’s bobotie.

The British, you see, particularly the officers and various other moneyed sorts, expected a soup course at their meals. Indians did not do soup courses. In fact, Indian food is normally served all at once, not in courses, and the soups they had – or the closest thing they had to soups – were really sauces to pour over rice or plain curries. So something was come up with. More than one something, really, but in Madras (now on maps as Chennai) this soup – or its progenitor – was come up with, and it spread as readily as that other great Raj invention, the gin and tonic (a palatable way of taking your quinine).

The something up with which they came has a lot of variations, it should be said. It usually has meat, and a yellowish colour, and a curryish flavour; there are normally onions in there somewhere. Expect a mixture of ingredients as heterogeneous as the mixture of letters in mulligatawny: humps, cups, lines, curves, rings, crosses and angles, and a dot. The mulligatawny I have in my fridge right now – I made it on the weekend and we will continue to consume it for a couple more days – contains chicken breast, chicken stock, onions, garlic, carrots, potatoes, red lentils, an apple, a chili pepper, an assortment of spices, and coconut milk. It’s yummy. But you could buy a can of soup labelled Mulligatawny and encounter something as different from mine as Richard Mulligan is from Tawny Kitaen.

Still, it will have at least a little pepper of some sort in it, one hopes, if only for the rectification of names. Etymology is no guide to current meaning, but your enjoyment of the soup and its name may still be seasoned a bit more by the knowledge that it comes from Tamil milagu tanni, “pepper water”. The word, like the food, has been adapted; it remains fairly close to the original, but it has been given a sort of bluff British officer’s walrus moustache and a touch of the throat-clearing “harrumph.” In fact, it’s an excellent word for evoking a moneyed British accent. Try it aloud and see for yourself. Then have a bowl of the stuff.

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bannock

Posted on March 4, 2012 | 4 comments

I was over at the house of my friends Beth and Keith for a party last night, and at one juncture Keith brought out, fresh from the oven, a nice round hot bannock: a griddle-baked soda bread made with, in this case, oats and flour. It was duly served onto the table next to all the other snack-type items (including a quartet of cheeses that served further to prove that Quebec makes the best cheese in the world), and maple syrup was set out for dipping it in. A small crowd of small children materialized instantly around it, but I did manage to get a piece.

It reminded me of my childhood, sort of. Bannock was a staple when and where I grew up. Not that I relished it as these children did. But I still ate it, a fair amount of it.

Why did I not relish it? And where did I grow up? Regular readers may recall that I have on occasion adverted to my formation in southern Alberta. From that you may speculate that my exposure to bannock was due to the strong Scottish influence thereabouts. This is actually only indirectly true. And in fact I had no idea that bannock was originally Scottish. I assumed it was Indian. As in Canadian First Nations. Specifically Nakoda, also known as Stoney, a branch of the Sioux ethnic group.

My parents worked on the Stoney reserve at Morley, west of Calgary. My younger years were spent in the surrounds of the reserve, and many of the things I went to with my parents were functions on the reserve: tent meetings and house meetings (evangelical gatherings with preaching and prayers and hymns accompanied by electric guitar, bass, and drum – and maybe accordion – late into the evening) and pow-wows (gatherings for competitive and community dancing in ornate costumes to the beat of a central group of drummers and singers) and, on certain holidays, feasts.

At any one of these gatherings, after and before endless rounds of handshaking and greetings of “Âba wathtech” and so on, and washed down with enough strong black tea to float the British navy, and – at feasts – nestled next to turkey and good canned cranberry sauce (I love canned cranberry sauce, especially when it’s still in its cylindrical shape from the can), there would always be squares of bannock. Which in this case was a fairly plain wheat-based soda bread baked in pans, and if ever in my life I had it at any temperature other than room temperature I do not recall it.

Nor would there have been maple syrup for dipping it in. Maples don’t grow in Alberta, and maple syrup is even more expensive there than it is in Ontario. We put Roger’s Golden Syrup (lightly flavoured corn syrup) on our pancakes and corn bread, but not on bannock.

The Stoneys and other First Nations people across much of Canada apparently picked up the concept, recipe, and name of bannock from fur traders. The fur traders brought it from Scotland. The word bannock may come from Old English bannuc and/or may be related to Scots Gaelic bannach, which in turn was probably borrowed from Latin panicium, from panis “bread”.

In other words, like the food, this word also follows a trail of borrowings. Just as the bread is economical and easy to make, the word is not difficult – it would never cause a speaker any panic, in spite of the rhyme – and transfers easily from place to place. You can take it to the bank, as it were. It touches all three main points of articulation in the mouth – lips, tongue-tip, velum – and brings a voiced stop, a nasal, and a voiceless stop. And, true to English form, it uses seven letters to spell five phonemes. It occurs to me that the shape of the word could be seen as a bit like a pan of bannock, with the risers of the b and k the sides and the letters in between the bready contents (have an n, won’t you?).

So was the bannock my equivalent of Proust’s madeleine? Did it bring childhood memories flooding forth unbidden? Well, not the taste of it; as I say, it was somewhat different from the kind I grew up with. But that word bannock, well, now, it took me back to Alberta’s dusty foothills, to a community hall in the Bow Valley full of people mostly talking a language I didn’t understand, who called me by the name Ûpabi Daguscan, “Son of Rock” (to my ears it was “pobby dowscun”) and all commented to me in English on how big I was getting, and to tea and tea and tea and bannock and bannock and bannock.

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ulu

Posted on March 4, 2012 | 1 comment

This word looks architectural, doesn’t it? Or, in a way, like an epergne. Or a post with a basin on either side. Or something, anyway, with a central stem and two cups on the side. But when you say it, the lips don’t show symmetry at all; they show a simple steady rounding all the way through, and the tongue, in its hiding place behind, manifests the symmetry: the tip starting behind the teeth, then flipping up to touch the palate, then dropping back, sort of like the motion with which you remove the skin from, say, a chicken breast or a dead seal.

Not that this word seems symmetrical to everyone. We in English tend to think of the spelling first, and if we have some linguistic knowledge or understanding, we may think in terms of phonemes or phonetics. But what if you think first in terms of syllables? Then you have two: [u] and [lu]. So if you spell this word with a syllabic orthography, you have two characters, one of which may be, say, a triangle pointing to the right, and the other of which may be, let us say, a fish hook lying on its side with the bottom of the hook to the right and the top of the stem to the left. Letter forms are, after all, arbitrary, as transparent as they may seem to the native speaker.

In either case, mind you, I would be able to point at a semicircle in a letter form and say, “Look! A resemblance!” Pure coincidence, but there it is. And what does a semicircle have to do with this word? Well, it’s like this. I have a pizza knife that has a semicircular blade and, attached to it at the diameter, a straight wooden handle. I tend to think of it as an ulu. This is not quite accurate, but there is a resemblance. And ulus are something I saw in pictures and/or videos in school long before I ever saw a pizza knife.

Why would I see ulus, or have seen them? Because I live in Canada and we are taught about the Inuit. For non-Canadians, the Inuit are the people formerly called Eskimos – calling them Eskimos is like calling the Deutsch Germans, or the Saami Laplanders, or calling Magyarország Hungary, or Zhongguo China: it’s using someone else’s term. Obviously we do that a lot, but it happens that we are increasingly tending towards calling people what they call themselves, and that is the case now in Canada with the Inuit.

Which reminds me: one Inu, two or more Inuit; one ulu, two or more uluit. I have been calling them ulus, going by English morphology, but since we now like to keep plural morphology on loan words where we can, we might as well call an ulu and another ulu together uluit.

So, oh, yes, what is it? A knife with a curved blade (now steel, formerly slate) and a handle made of wood, bone, or whatnot. The handle is, like with my pizza cutter, parallel with the tangent of the peak of the blade, but it is attached at one or two points, rather than at full width, as with mine. The curve of the blade is like the curve in your tongue, downward between tip and tail, when you say [ulu] (which does give a new meaning to “cutting remarks”). The ulu is used among the Inuit by women (at least traditionally) for skinning, cutting food, and trimming blocks of snow and ice for igloos (I won’t say igluit, though I could).

And what does the word taste like? I get halo and hula (as in hoop) and lulu and similar curved things, plus uhuru, the widely borrowed Swahili word for “freedom”. And perhaps yoohoo!

Oh, and the interior jungle portion of Malaysia. Which, as the OED tells me, has a word: ulu. We can assume that it’s not what the Inuit have in mind.

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epergne

Posted on March 2, 2012 | 2 comments

This word seems almost pregnant with possibility – especially, at least to my eyes, the possibility of food. Perhaps because it’s a French term, and in particular one that you don’t see every day, the assumption tends to the gastronomic. Of course, it could be some other stereotypically French thing – like an épée, say, or some diplomatic manoeuvre – but when I think of the land of Époisses and Bourgogne, my thoughts turn to cuisine.

I suppose this word isn’t obviously French to everyone. After all, epigone comes originally from Greek (via French, true), and we have a few cases of gn words from Greek as well (gnosis, for instance) – and Gnaeus was a Roman personal name (look as it might like the growling gruntings of Gnasher, the nasty little dog in the British strip called Dennis the Menace – no connection to Hank Ketcham’s American one of the same name). And in that light, the gn can look a bit gnarly. But if we can say lasagna and cologne, I think we can manage epergne.

Um, so how do we say it, by the way? Take it as a given that it’s not “ee-prrg-nee”; some will say it in the Anglicized way, sort of like “ippern”, and others will do the English rendition of the French pronunciation, like “eh pair’n”. If you know how to speak French, you know how it would be said in French; if not, never mind, just grab a cream puff and you won’t have to speak.

Cream puff? For what it’s worth, that’s what the three e’s in this remind me of. Of course, they could be serving bowls attached to a centrepiece or something like that. Serving bowls attached to a centrepiece? Who would have something like that? How about the sort of person who would have an epergne?

Yes, indeed. An epergne is a centrepiece, typically made of metal or sometimes glass or both, that has a larger central bowl with a number of smaller bowls (shallow or deep according to the design of the specific item) in orbit around it. The best way to get an idea of the thing is to look at lots of pictures of examples. For those of you who like to read classic fiction, you may recall it in a memorable scene in Great Expectations:

An epergne or centrepiece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.

I also like this charming snip from Our Mutual Friend, also by Dickens:

‘Here you have as much of me in my ugliness as if I were only lead; but I am so many ounces of precious metal worth so much an ounce;—wouldn’t you like to melt me down?’ A corpulent straddling epergne, blotched all over as if it had broken out in an eruption rather than been ornamented, delivered this address from an unsightly silver platform in the centre of the table.

Indeed, in general, epergnes seem to be associated with wealth and its display – hoi polloi may have lazy Susans, but voici une Susanne paresseuse. This is possibly a great irony, as, inasmuch as anyone has any idea what the etymology of the word is, it seems to come from épargne. Which is French for “saving”.

Oh, but above all, remember this: in French, it’s not even called an epergne (or épergne). It’s called a surtout.

Thanks to Carolyn Bishop for suggesting epergne.

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quirt

Posted on March 1, 2012 | 1 comment

“It’s such a cute little word!” Elisa Lively chirped, looking at the piece of paper Ross Ewage had just handed her.

I raised an eyebrow. Cute is not exactly Ross’s usual métier. Elisa held up the slip. “Quirt.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “quite.”

“No,” Elisa said, “quirt! Not quite quite! It’s such a quick little chirp, like a small bird. Like… quirk. Or quart. Or maybe even quiet.”

“Don’t forget squirt,” Ross said.

“You know,” Elisa said, rotating the slip of paper, “I’d never really thought before of how qu rotates to nb.”

“Note that well,” I said.

“Of course, the rest of the word isn’t much to look at rotated,” she said. “But that q… What does it make me think of, shape-wise?”

“A little whip?” Ross offered. “Straight handle, the whip curled up, awaiting use…”

Elisa snorted. “A little squirt of whipped cream, maybe. Oh, this is such a cute, charming little word. Does it have anything to do with quarto?”

“Latin for fourth? Yes, by way of Spanish, it seems. Cuarto, which is the source for cuarta, which slipped into English and became quirt.”

“Noun or verb?” Elisa was champing at the bit.

“Noun, and a verb derived from it,” Ross said. “Here, let me read you some sentences using it cited in the OED.” He pulled another piece of paper from his pocket. “Here’s C. Winterfield in The American Review: ‘“Davis can tell,” said some one, in a loud voice. “Yes, he knows all about it,” said Fitz—“lets quirt him until he tells.”’ Here’s one from Hopalong Cassidy: ‘He says you did—an’ somebody quirted him.’”

“It sounds like tickling!” Elisa said.

“Here’s from Where the Wagon Led by R.D. Symons: ‘So I quirted that pony a couple of times.’”

Elisa pulled a little quizzical smile. “Really?”

“Teddy Roosevelt in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: ‘A first-class rider will sit throughout it all…quirting his horse all the time.’”

“Ooohh…” Elisa said. “For some reason that sounds kinda sick.”

“Here’s one with the noun, from The Look of the Old West by William Foster-Harris: ‘The cowboy’s quirt was ordinarily about 2 or 3 feet long, of plaited leather, though sometimes of stitched buckskin or woven horsehair.’” Ross smirked slightly.

“Oh, now, I really am all at sea,” Elisa said, beginning to look marginally queasy.

“If you were at sea,” Ross said, “you might be less likely to see a quirt or to be quirted with it. Depending on the kind of ship, I suppose.”

Elisa held the slip of paper in front of her gingerly now, as though ants might start crawling out of it. “I’m not going to like it, am I?”

Ross shrugged. “It’s a braided whip with a short handle. It seems to be named after the length of its handle, since a cuarta was a unit of measurement.”

Elisa looked sad. “It’s such a cute, quaint word… Oh dear.”

“Sometimes a cute thing can really smart,” Ross said, and took the piece of paper from her, ready to spring it on another victim.

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