Monthly Archives: April 2012

peristalsis

Posted on April 15, 2012 | 3 comments

I’ve just finished reading John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, an exceedingly well written and entertaining book. Towards the end is this wonderful passage:

The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of an individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual. And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by ogreish professional hostesses. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product.

Zzzzzinggg! Man, what a scalpel-sharp tongue that Steinbeck had! On reading that, of course, I immediately thought, “I haven’t done a word tasting note on peristalsis yet.”

I imagine there is an off chance you may not know what peristalsis is. Well, you know how worms move, right? They move by peristalsis: a smooth-muscle flow of contraction and expansion (from Greek, περι peri “around” plus στάλσις stalsis “contraction, constriction” – which in turn is derived from στέλλειν stellein, verb, “set, place”). But Steinbeck did not have worms in mind, and neither do most people when speaking of peristalsis. Indeed, one does not want to have worms in the place one normally encounters peristalsis.

And where would that be? Follow your gut. Food passes through your innards from mouth to stomach through intestines to back door propelled by peristalsis. It happens automatically and regularly, and thus is not, to Steinbeck’s mind, spontaneous – although, given that it occurs without conscious impetus, it does meet a definition of spontaneous. And as to the interest factor… well, some people do study the stuff. It’s a necessary thing.

I don’t want to put you off your bedtime snack, breakfast, or whatever you’re eating as you read this, though. I think we can taste the word without thinking about all that shi… stuff, I mean. For one thing: does the movement of the mouth in saying peristalsis have any similarity to that of actual peristalsis? The closest movement of the mouth I can think of to peristalsis would be the swallowing you do while drinking a glass of something. This word has little of that – just a small reverse wave at /rɪst/; aside from that, it pops off the lips to start and then stays mainly on the tongue tip after. You may think of the s and the s and the s as having some resemblance to the contractions, but aside from that the shape of this word is a little too prickly, to my eyes, to cue the sense.

But, ah, what to make of this word? You take it into your mouth and mind and swirl it around and chew it up and pass it into your system. Perhaps it gets rearranged in the initial mastication: plaster sisi, ’tis ripe lass, sassier plait, rises at lips, sir sips late, is as tripes, retails piss, spirit seals, triples as is; perhaps the sounds are picked apart, “Paris tall sis, sis tips all air, pall stair sis…”; perhaps the associations and echoes are turned one way and another. As a reader, you digest. And you gain mental nutrition from the words. It’s an interesting process. In the end what comes out is not waste but something more like a fertilized plant.

I imagine Steinbeck’s mind worked in a similar way. Words and images and concepts and relations and sounds were taken in at one point, and mixed and matched and turned this way and that, and they passed through the unconscious processes that propel them through the brain with some things taken and some things given, and at the end the product is quite interesting.

Still, I think I see Steinbeck’s point. I would not want to be at one of those peristaltic parties.

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ignotum

Posted on April 14, 2012 | 1 comment

There’s a poem I wrote several years ago that I never published anywhere, don’t know why. It would probably be best suited for a kids’ book, or at least a book for kids who don’t mind a couple of bits of Latin tossed in (in other words, just the best kind of kid). It’s not serious poetry, but I’m fond of it. Here it is:

Absent
by James Harbeck

This is a picture of something I lost.
I bought it somewhere; forget what it cost.
I’m pretty sure that it didn’t get tossed.

I took this picture the following day
just to recall that this thing got away.
It’s not for art; it has nothing to say.

There on the table you’ll see there’s a space
where it would be if it sat in its place.
I’m holding that spot for it now, just in case.

Have a good look so you’ll identify it
if, on some mission, you happen to spy it –
just bring it back here and end my disquiet.

You see, it’s the absence ’twixt table and air –
just look at the picture; there’s no need to stare,
you can see at a glance: it’s the thing that’s not there.

So bring me my thing and I’ll toss out this photo
the moment I have it concrete and in toto,
as large as the life and no longer ignoto.

Until then, I’m keeping this space in its spot.
But if it comes never, it won’t get forgot—
I still have my snap of the there that it’s not.

Now, what’s the unknown word in there? Ignoto. (You’ve probably seen in toto before.) Indeed, you won’t find it in a dictionary. Certainly not in an English dictionary. It’s unlikely you’ll find ignoto in a Latin dictionary, either.

So I just made it up? No… I knew the word ignotum, Latin for “unknown” (neuter; masculine is ignotus, feminine ignota). A dictionary will give you the nominative form. But the dative/ablative form is ignoto. Meaning (according to context) “by, from, or to the unknown”. So there. Now you know.

But this word ignotum, now. I like it. It’s a good word. As I sit here writing this, I’m listening to Magnum Ignotum, composed by Giya Kancheli and performed by members of the Koninklijk Filharmonik Orkest van Vlaanderen. It’s a delicate and dark piece, full of the great unknown. Which is what magnum ignotum means: “great unknown” (I admit it does look like it means “large bottle of wine without a label”).

The taste of ignotum? I’m tempted to say “I don’t know,” but actually I do. It has a strong taste of ignorant and other ignore words, naturally; they’re related. It may also remind you of ignoble, though I would not say that the unknown is per se ignoble, though the anagram gum on it rather is. And it has airs of ingot and I got ’em, both of which convey senses of gaining value – does the unknown add value? Often it does. Omne ignotum pro magnifico, as the saying goes: “everything unknown is taken as great” – the unknown tends to be exaggerated in value or importance.

At the heart of this word is that /gn/, the tongue stopping at the back and releasing with a nasal at the front; it makes me think of having a cold. But it made the ancient Greeks and Romans think of knowing: the gno root shows up in a variety of words relating to knowledge.

I don’t suppose we really need this word as an addition to English; we have a word already, unknown, which happens to be cognate – the un like the in that became i in ignotum, the know coming from the same Indo-European source as gno. But it fills a nice little spot, an obscure word for the obscure, even an unknown word for the unknown. Why not? If you look up ignotum you’ll likely first find the potted phrase ignotum per ignotius, “the unknown by the more unknown”, referring to an explanation that is more obscure than what it is explaining. Mounting confusion – sure to put some gum on it. How ignoble. But sometimes fun.

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An invitation

Posted on April 13, 2012 | 3 comments

I will be on vacation for two weeks in the middle of May. Rather than just stop the word tasting notes then, I’d like to invite other word tasters – you all – to fill the slots. If you’d like to write a word tasting note, of whatever word you choose, in your own style, do so, and send it to me at seamus@harbeck.ca (with a suitably perspicuous subject line so I don’t mistake it for spam, of which I get a lot) by the beginning of May. I’ll schedule them all for posting and sending while I’m away.

Things to think about when tasting words:

  • What does it look like on the page?
  • How does it feel in your mouth? Where does your tongue move?
  • How does it sound? What is the feel of the individual sounds and what is the rhythm of the word?
  • What does it sound like? What other words does it have resonances of?
  • What words does it go with? What words is it often seen with?
  • What contexts is it used in? What tone does it have – casual, formal technical?
  • What quotations is it found in?
  • Where does it come from? How did it come to be as it is? What other words are related?
  • Oh, yes: and what does it mean? What interesting things about its object catch your attention and come to mind when you think about it?

And of course have fun. Play around with it as you wish. Do your own thing.

I look forward to your submissions!

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tarsier

Posted on April 12, 2012 | 1 comment

Imagine you are one of those rarities, one who tarries when the air is starriest, who leaps at dinner when the night’s dark is tarriest: to see in such Tartarean tenebrity would require a stare of the most wide-lidded kind… lids round as riatas, nearly diametric irises, and eyeballs the size of… well, your brain.

Enter the tarsier: a cute animal with acute night vision, thanks to eyeballs the size of its brain – yes, literally. It is a small, furry thing, terribly cute (though I’m sure Bucky, the cat in the comic strip Get Fuzzy, would find few things tastier than a tarsier); it has wiiiiiiiiiide eyes and looooooooong fingers, and very long feet. Relative to its body size, that is: their head and body are 4 to 6 inches long together, while their feet are about twice that, and the same for their ratlike tails. Tarsiers are probably the smallest primates in the world.

Primates? Yes, that’s right. The same gang as includes monkeys, apes, and the Archbishop of Canterbury (there’s an Anglican pun in there). But tarsiers are outliers, and perhaps tardier than most in evolving, though clearly they have evolved some features that suit their lifestyle. They’re night owls, so to speak – but not partiers; they’re terribly introverted, and if you come face to teeny, cute, little face with one it will probably stare in that freaked-out-on-acid way at you and keep eating – see one doing exactly that at www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuH48JW8XrU.

And, uh… what is that it’s eating? Oh, just a cricket. Quite a handful, isn’t it?

A cricket? Ewww!

Yup. These little buggers love those little bugs. Just bite through ’em like a candy bar. In fact, tarsiers are the only primates known to be purely carnivorous. They don’t eat vegetables at all. Banana schmanana, gimme a cricket. They also eat other insects, and also birds, snakes, lizards, and bats – though I’m sure they need to be careful that their eyes aren’t bigger than their stomachs. So to speak. They catch their food by jumping at it – they might bag a bird while leaping from tree to tree.

Do they begin to seem a titch less cute, perhaps a bit creepier, like Gollum, maybe? Well, they’re still furry little things with big eyes, and no matter how adorable any creature is, nature is red in tooth and claw. If you want harmless, go grow a pet carrot. Which, by the way, will be safe from any tarsiers in your neighbourhood. Which is only a concern if you live in the Philippines, Borneo, or thereabouts.

And about this name, now. Tarsier. Its pronunciation doesn’t have that much in common with that of Taser or brasier; rather, it’s just like “tar seer.” And whence comes this word? Its anagrammatical potential is mere good luck; it comes to us thanks to Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, an 18th-century French naturalist who was really the progenitor of the study of evolution, though he did not take it as far as Darwin (he considered but rejected the idea of humans and apes having a common origin, for instance). Needing a name for this little critter he had encountered (and not thinking to ask what it might be called in, say, Malay), he focused on a salient part of its anatomy.

That’s right, its very long feet. The tarsus, after all, is that part of your foot between heel and toe (I will resist a pun on the sole of tarsus and the road to Damascus, as I’m sure many people would miss it, and others might be a-Pauled). The word comes from Greek ταρσός tarsos, which names exactly that same part of the foot.

Tarsos also means the rim of the eyelid. Hmm, would you look at that – it’s as though it was made for this creature, or vice versa.

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rebus

Posted on April 11, 2012 | 3 comments

R U 4 or ugNst cute-C text trix? Do they seem NOv8ive or SN9 and LlitR8?

Well, they may be cloying in their way, and occasionally strained. But even allowing that a rebus abuser bruises or rubs the wrong way, it is both inevitable and useful – and, at least for some, fun – that any language should have words that sound like other words or combinations of other words.

Rebus refers to more than just using letters and numbers to stand in for similar-sounding syllables, of course, though it does indeed include the F U N E M N X with which my father used to torture breakfast waitresses. (“F U N E M N X? Have you any ham and eggs?”) A rebus can, and typically does, include pictures of things that sound like the words or syllables in question: a picture of an eye for I, a picture of a bee for be, perhaps a picture of a female sheep for you, and so one. It sometimes also uses pictures of the actual things in question – a house for house, for instance.

I’m sure you encountered rebuses as a kid. They’re games that can help children learn language while putting the fun in phonetics. But rebuses have also had adult uses. They sometimes show up in heraldry and as a means of signature in artworks and architectural ornament: Lyhart might be a deer (hart) lying, Bolton an arrow (bolt) through a barrel (tun), and so forth.

They’re also important, at root, in why you’re even able to read this. Our alphabetic system of writing purports to represent individual sounds purely in the abstract, of course (though English’s system is erratic and capricious, and people often spell words according to how similar-seeming words are spelled – hence you see people writing kneck instead of neck because, after all, knee has a k). But that system evolved from a system (Egyptian hieroglyphics) wherein, first, certain things were represented by pictures of them, and then other things were for convenience represented by the symbols for things that sounded like them. And then the pictorial representations became more gradually abstracted, and were ultimately whittled down to representing single phonemes… at least ostensibly.

Not that the final whittling down is inevitable. Consider a language wherein certain things were represented by pictures of them (or of some pertinent aspect), and then other things came to be represented by combinations of pictures put together: one for something similar or identical in sound, and another for something similar in meaning. Sort of like putting an eye next to a person for “I” or a picture of a tank next to a picture of a smile for “thank”. And then perhaps over time the pictures would become more and more abstracted for ease of writing, to the point where sometimes the origin is not evident at all, but they still operate by a symbol-per-word (or -per-syllable) rule.

Which is a bit of a simplified description of how many Chinese characters came to being. Complex Chinese characters are typically formed on a sort of explained-rebus principle: one part for the sound, one for the sense. I have to tell you, it adds a layer of complexity to the learning of Chinese. But one thing it’s not is childish! The hieroglyphic and ideographic uses of the rebus principle do not hover between Jebus and Uncle Remus, as some of the more juvenile uses seem to. Indeed, these uses rebut that: the sounds of language are not mere rabbitting by rubes but rather reusable bits of verbal rebar, and not in the least rebarbative.

Oh, and should it be rebi? Is using rebuses the sign of an ignoramus? Certainly not. Rebus is not from a Latin masculine nominative singular, an -us that can become an -i; like omnibus, it is from a dative/ablative plural. (Ignoramus, meanwhile, comes from a conjugated verb.) When it is used as a nominative in English, it has been taken out of its native element and preserved in amber, as it were, and you have no choice but to use English inflections on it.

And why do we have this ablative Latin here? The standard explanation is that it is from the phrase non verbis sed rebus, “not by words but by things” – rebus is Latin for “by things”. Other related possibilities exist, but it is pretty certain that rebus, though we know it only by way of French, comes from Latin “by things”, re-bused to us; we get it on the rebound, as it were. In truth, though, it is not the things but just the pictures of the things that are used – we don’t need to go buy things to go “by things” or have picturesque language.

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autodidacticism

Posted on April 10, 2012 | 5 comments

I think autodidacticism may be headed for a little vogue. Not what it refers to, self-teaching; I think that that’s probably fairly steady in popularity – there are always people who like self-teaching and self-directed learning. But the amount of attention and endorsement it gets varies from time to time. And I think use of the word autodidacticism might be on the upswing.

This has in part to do with the victory of Bubba Watson at the Masters. The latest wearer of the green jacket is a man who has never taken a golf lesson in his life. He’s a “natural”; he just wanted to do it when he was a kid, and his dad told him to go out and do it. So he tried a lot of things and he worked out a style that works really well for him. He never watches videos of himself, has never deconstructed his swing, none of that. And we’re talking about a sport where many pros spend hours and hours on every little bit of their technique.

But I think that’s just one more crack in the dam. I’ve been seeing a few things here and there about people who teach themselves, and the benefits of self-directed learning, and how education and coaching can spend a lot of time ruining a natural technique and telling people what they can’t do. There are things like the TED talk by Ken Robinson on how schools kill creativity. And there’s the latest fad for hyperpolyglots, for instance – few people who know more than a half-dozen languages have taken formal courses in all of them.

I don’t know that I can lay claim to such accomplishment, but I do have at least a workable knowledge of a half dozen languages and an introductory acquaintance with easily a dozen more, and I’ve only ever taken formal courses in French, Italian, and Mandarin (and English, of course). The rest is from books and music and movies, just as much of the squillion odd other things in my brain are. Yes, I’m an encyclopedia reader, and always have been.

So that means I’m on the side of those who hold that all true learning is self-teaching, and that formal education kills creativity, right? Well, not so fast. I think that any truly thirsty mind will always be seeking more information wherever it can get it. But I also think that if you’re the person who’s deciding what you’ll learn about a subject, you’re being taught by someone who knows no more about the subject than you do – and why would you do that? Things that seem unimportant to the underinformed may turn out to be crucial. Better to have someone who knows what really needs to be known giving some direction.

And anyway, you can always ignore them. Don’t give me that crap about how having to focus on what your professor wants kills your creativity. What, you’re not smart enough to be able to keep your own counsel while at the same time telling someone else what they want to hear? I remember once hearing Germaine Greer saying that in her family they had held that straight A’s were a sign of a dull mind. What horseshit. Anyone who’s smart enough can easily get straight A’s if they want and still follow their own interests whatever they may be.

Ken Robinson seems to make some good points in his TED talk about how kids have the creativity trained out of them, given that the open-mindedness of small children is markedly greater than that of their adolescent or adult counterparts. But is it really fair to blame education for that? Developmental linguists will tell you that infants below a certain age can distinguish a variety of speech sounds that are not distinguished in their parents’ language, but as they get older and closer to speaking they start to perceive as the same sound pairs of sounds that their parents treat as the same sound (aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops in English, for instance). That’s way before any formal education. In order to have usable knowledge, you have to be able to draw lines and group things and ignore irrelevant things.

And, honestly, people in general are pretty eager to unlearn as much as to learn: to discover rules and restrictions. People wanting to learn about English usage tend to prefer to be told clear, hard, and fast rules (even if they’re BS) rather than mushy principles that require application of judgement. As people grow, they want to organize their world around them to make sense of things, and that involves deciding what can’t be what. Don’t blame education for that. In fact, education can help us discover exceptions to our what-can’t-be-what ideas. Linguists have far more open and flexible minds about language than most people who have never formally studied language, for instance.

Look, when I was in junior high school gym, and we were doing a gymnastics show, I wanted to be a gymnastic clown. The gym teacher told me that that actually took more, not less, training and expertise. Otherwise you just make a mess, look stupid, and hurt yourself. And he was right. As the Tao Te Ching says, if you try to cut wood like a master carpenter, you just hurt yourself. When I wanted to learn to cook, my mother insisted I use cookbooks, not just “figure things out,” and she was right. I learned a whole lot a whole lot faster, and I wasn’t a crappy cook like the one named Autodidax in Asterix and the Laurel Wreath. Now I mostly invent recipes, but that’s because I learned from other people’s experience and insights. And I still use recipes from time to time for new ideas and advice. Education helps you not have to reinvent the wheel.

And those languages I learned from books? I didn’t learn them by reading the dictionary, and I didn’t learn them by starting with novels or newspapers. I started with books with titles like Teach Yourself Irish. Very disingenuous titles, those: the books are organized into well-planned sequential lessons by their authors. They should really be called Let Us Teach You Irish with This Book.

So that means I’m against autodidacticism? That I think it like autoeroticism? Heh heh. Not so fast. Obviously everyone who goes past high school makes decisions about what courses they will take where; everyone who has a thirsty brain decides what knowledge they want to drink in. When you read an encyclopedia, the information you get has been selected and presented for you by the authors, but you did decide to read that and not something else. There is always an element of individual decision. Learning is necessarily a cooperative thing, and it always takes place at the initiative of the individual. Try to teach someone who doesn’t want to learn and see how it goes.

And most people who have thirsty brains pursue at least some of their learning outside of structured education. And some of the things you learn you do learn by trial and error, by experience, not by anyone else’s initiative. So autodidacticism has its place: what you learned was not automatic; you always did act. No brain is an island, but no brain is a passive receptacle either.

And how about the word autodidacticism? Ah, yes. This is a word tasting! And this is a lovely long word – an excellent word. Fifteen letters, fourteen phonemes (or is it fifteen?). Doublets and triplets like musical counterpoint: autodidacticism – one each of u o s m, two of a a t t d d c c, three of i i i. And the phonemes – well, which ones they are will depend on your dialect and your idiolect. That will affect how crisp and how curvy the word is, too. Is that first /t/ really crisp and voiceless, or more like another [d] (really a flap, which is another sound)? Is that first i reduced or said with full value? The one thing you can be surest of is that it sounds rather dactylographic – the patter of my fingers on the keyboard as I type this is not so unlike the patter of my tongue as I say the word.

The morphemes should be fairly decomposable: auto + didact + ic + ism. It’s all from Greek by way of Latin. You should know auto – it refers to self, Greek combining form αὐτο. The didact comes from διδακτός “taught”. The ic is from a Greek adjectiving suffix, and the ism from a Greek nominalizing suffix. So even if it all seems Greek to you, once you learn what that Greek is, it’s comprehensible.

Oh, and how many syllables does this word have? No, go ahead, count them.

Then ask some of your friends to count them. See if you all get the same answer.

What you’ll probably be taught is that it has six. But if your dialect is like mine, you really say it with seven, or at least six and a half. The culprit is the ism. “That has to be one syllable,” some will say, “because it has only one vowel.” As though the number of written “vowel” letters ever corresponded all that closely with the number of vowels actually said. Many people insert a reduced vowel between the /z/ and the /m/; the Oxford English Dictionary shows it as optional and perhaps only partially there.

Say it a few times and decide for yourself. Then listen to other people and decide how they say it. Do not ask yourself which is right and which is wrong; the OED lists no fewer than nine different pronunciations, each of which with the optional vowel indicated, meaning that there are eighteen or (if you allow fractional syllables) even twenty-seven different versions available just in the OED. But remember that a dictionary is like a field guide more than it is like legislation. Keep your own counsel.

The important thing, whether you’re learning from a teacher or a book or experience, is to pay attention and ask questions. An incurious or sloppy mind will produce similarly crappy results no matter where, and an engaged and probing mind will produce similarly good results whether in the classroom or self-teaching.

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frug

Posted on April 9, 2012 | 7 comments

This is a short and odd-looking word. Why odd-looking? Only because unfamiliar. After all, there are many words in English that closely resemble it in form or sound: frog, frig, frag, drug, shrug, fridge, fog, fug, rug, frock, frugal, fruit, and of course that champagne I hope someday to drink in quantity, Krug.

When you look at this word, your natural expectation is almost certainly that it rhymes with drug. Actually, it doesn’t; it sounds like the first syllable of frugal, which puts it in that rather tidy little set of English words that are spelled exactly the same as in their IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) rendering. Is frugal where it comes from? Maybe – or maybe it’s a modified form of frig, or perhaps it comes from the family name Frug. Or some combination of multiple factors. The usual etymological sources ain’t givin’ me no lovin’ on this one.

So what is a frug? Is it a fugly rug? Nope, nor any other item of fugxury. It is a style of dance. I first saw the word frug in a comic book I was reading in the 1970s; it referred to a dance style, but I got no idea from the reference what dance style it might have been. It sort of seemed like the sort of thing shaggy space monsters might do. It went together with other popular dances of the era, such as (to quote “Revolution 9” by The Beatles) “the Watusi… the twist…” It was only very recently that I finally looked it up. And thought, “Oh, that.”

I’m sure you’ve seen it if you’ve ever watched any movies or TV shows from the ’60s wherein girls in mini-skirts dance. In fact, the odds are not so bad you’ve actually done it sometime.

The first thing to know about the frug is that, as dance steps go, it doesn’t have any. Steps, that is. Your feet stay bolted to the spot, at least in the original version. It’s your hips that move, side to side. Those and your hands, which can do swimming-type movements such as the crawl, the backstroke, and the dog paddle. Seeing teeny-boppers do these is classical and endearing and emblematic. Seeing middle-aged dudes in supposedly funny TV ads do it is enough to motivate me to leave the room.

Here, here are some instructions from the time on how to do it: www.sixtiescity.com/Culture/dance.shtm#frug (on the left side of the page, the newspaper clipping).

But I think it would serve you well to see some examples of it in action. Here’s a nice version from the 1972 Bollywood movie Yaar Mera: www.youtube.com/watch?v=paH6QDIHZsM. And then there’s the bit from Sweet Charity – the “Rich Man’s Frug” sequence, “The Aloof,” choreographed by Bob Fosse: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZnFQvlb2OA.

So now you know. And next time you’re in a dance bar, you can walk up to someone attractive and say, “You wanna frug?” But I take no responsibility for the results.

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salitter

Posted on April 9, 2012 | 3 comments

There is much about this word that I don’t need to say, for it has already been said. This in spite of the fact that you’re not going to find it in your dictionary.

My attention was directed to this word by Jim Taylor, who saw it discussed in “Cormac McCarthy’s 17th Century Vocabulary” on Galleycat. It in turn directs the reader to Barry Weber’s post on it on his blog The First Morning. And Weber’s post is a lovely, lyrical thing that covers it wonderfully. So you should certainly read it. But no one has ever said that if one person has tasted a wine, no else need do so; the same goes for words. So I will ramify it in my own way.

Weber found the word in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road:

The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? … The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind.

McCarthy does not say where he got salitter or what it means. The context does not go far enough, really, in clarifying it. Is this some bit of precious pretentiousness by a writer just showing off that he knows something you don’t? Where on earth did he get this word, anyway?

He got it from Jakob Böhme, as it turns out. Böhme was a religious thinker of the 1500s and 1600s. He had some ideas that were rather uncommon for his time. Actually, some of them would earn him a lot of abuse from several quarters even today. I’m not going to try to give you a full run-down of his thought. You’re on the web; look him up if you want.

But this term salitter, well, what did he mean by it when he used it, this word that slides and taps on the tip of your tongue? It has tastes of salt and glitter and litter and perhaps slit and sally; it seems to patter on the tongue perhaps as rain on a roof or sun sparkling on littoral waves. It makes me think of sale, French for “dirty”, and iter, Latin for “road”. It’s something that dries up from the earth, though – perhaps petrichor?

Oh, but McCarthy’s book is post-apocalyptic. What he’s saying, as it turns out, is that even the essence of life, the divine essence, the divine spark, is drying up, decamping, absquatulating, sublimating to the sublime. Salitter is that: the divine essence that is found in all things. To quote “Jacob Boehme’s Divine Substance Salitter: its Nature, Origin, and Relationship to Seventeenth Century Scientific Theories,” by Lawrence M. Principe and Andrew Weeks (The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Mar., 1989)):

For Boehme, the Salitter designated the embodiment of the total force of the divinity, the compendium of all forces operating in nature and in the human psyche. The substance Salitter is a matrix of forces that are identified with sensible ‘qualities’. The latter interact by means of fundamental oppositions and affinities. Accordingly, the spirit forces operating within Salitter are discernible in many objects of speculation: in the deity, in sensory experience, in vegetable growth, and in the objects of geology, astronomy, and meteorology. Salitter animates the supersensible and the sensible; it is the common denominator of what is conscious and alive and of what appears inanimate and inert. Salitter is the embodiment of a world conceived in organic terms.

OK, very good. Now you have a word for that something. It may not sound like the word you thought it should be (were you expecting something more like om?). But where did Böhme get it, anyway?

Böhme was interested in alchemy, and in alchemy certain earthly substances gave their names to divine principles that are the basic ingredients of all things: Mercury, Sulphur, Salt. To these Böhme added one more, a version of the word we now know in English as saltpetre.

Saltpetre! This is something that I, as a youth, heard was put in some men’s foods to assault their peters and make them peter out (so they would keep their peters in). Cause of impotence! But in fact there is no real support for this young boy’s tale. Rather, saltpetre – potassium nitrate is the chemical name for it – is useful for a number of things, and two in particular: fertilizing things (it is a key ingredient in many fertilizers) and blowing things up (it is a key ingredient in gunpowder). Yes, that’s why fertilizer can be used to make bombs. A third thing saltpetre can do is preserve food – it used to be commonly used in corned beef (giving it its pink colour), but now sodium nitrate is more commonly used.

But think of it! Saltpetre can accelerate entropy rapidly, and it can also accelerate the opposite of entropy – organic growth. It can even delay entropy in food preservation. No wonder Böhme found it such a good basis for his universal divine principle. It is a kind of Shiva, a principle of change both good and bad. The earthly salitter, saltpetre, is but an “earthly, stinking,” dark, limited analogue of the pure, clear divine salitter. Here we see as through a glass, darkly. And yet this “here” is animated by the divine principle, aglitter with an immanent alterity.

Funny. Saltpetre comes from Latin sal petrae, “rock salt” or “salt of rock”, with the petrae coming from the Greek for “rock” (whence we get the name Peter too). I am put in mind of the Roman practice of salting the earth in places they wished to destroy, so crops would not grow there. But I am also put in mind of Jesus telling his disciples they were the salt of the earth. Such duality seems so suitable… And if duality disappears from the earth, what is left but undifferentiated unity? And how can there be change then – growth and destruction, the two sides of everything interesting?

Does this make salitter seem fickle, hypocritical, treacherous? Is the tt a double-cross? Do not be so passive about it. Look to yourself: it must be within you too. Sometimes it just takes a bit of prodding, a drop of salitter from outside to awaken your own creative and discovering spark. Here is a word: look it up if you want. Today that drop of salitter is salitter. McCarthy dropped it in his book, and it was picked up by one blog, then another website, then sent to me by email, and now I am bringing it to you. Just a grain, a seed… a seed that grows and propagates and ramifies.

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thermos

Posted on April 7, 2012 | 2 comments

We all know what a thermos is. It’s one of those things our mothers make us carry to school if we pack our own lunches – not to smother us but just to make sure we’re taken care of (her most precious child should not drink tepid milk or some other such thing). They’re like a thermal sweater for your beverage.

But if they’re the classic glass-lined kind, they’re a little fragile. I remember a few instances in elementary and junior high when my lunch box fell open and my thermos fell out – and the glass lining inside broke (possibly leading to sermons from my mother). That sure sucked.

Well, yeah. Vaccums suck. That’s what a thermos uses: a vacuum. Because you know what the best thermal insulator is? Nothing.

You need enough nothing to do the job, naturally. If you have no nothing between one surface and another, they can pass on their molecular vibrations to each other, and the heat normalizes. You need a space between them with nothing in it – no molecules. A vacuum. Then there’s nothing to communicate the vibrations. So heat doesn’t pass through.

Sound doesn’t, either – in space, no one can hear you scream (I’m sure we all know that the laser and other space sounds from most sci-fi movies are pure BS; the one movie I can think of that is true to the science is 2001: A Space Odyssey). Come to think of it, it would be nice if my downstairs neighbours were to surround their living (partying) space with a layer of vacuum – turn their apartment into a thermos. Their noise level kind of sucks.

You may be thinking, “Why isn’t he capitalizing thermos? It’s a brand name.” Well, yes, there is a Thermos brand, and they are the ones who applied the name thermos to vacuum bottles. Their website proclaims that they are the “Genuine Thermos Brand.” But the word thermos has passed into common usage for vacuum bottles. It is no longer protected as a trademark in Canada and the US (I’m less sure about Britain). Need further proof? The word thermos is in the Scrabble dictionary. You know that proper nouns are not allowed in Scrabble! (Which is why Zen is unplayable – it’s the name of a sect of Buddhism. Don’t get me started on all the places that one is used senselessly.)

Doesn’t it suck that Thermos don’t get the trademark protection on their brand name? Heck, even Aspirin is still protected in Canada (not in the US). This is why Caterpillar and Zamboni are so particular about how their brand names are used – they really don’t want what happened to thermos to happen to them. But there are a couple of things you should know about thermos that might affect how you feel about the matter.

First, and this might not surprise you, thermos is a word taken whole-cloth from Greek. The word θερμός thermos is Greek for “hot” (or “warm”). (Yes, thermoses can also keep things cold. In fact, as you will see shortly, that’s what they were invented for. All they do is greatly reduce the rate at which what they contain normalizes its temperature to the ambient temperature – they are not perfect because the inside of the vacuum bottle has to be attached to the outside and has to have an opening that can be unsealed to allow the contents ingress and egress.)

Sure, Caterpillar is a normal word and Zamboni a pre-existing family name. The trademarked use applies only to the product in question. But there’s more to know about thermos.

One thing to know is that another name for a thermos is a Dewar flask. Now, doesn’t that sound like a container of Scotch? But it’s not named after Dewar’s Scotch. It’s named after Sir James Dewar, the inventor of the vacuum bottle. He invented it because he was studying the optical properties of cooled liquids, and it made the liquids much easier to study for longer periods of time.

Dewar was one of the greats of 19th– and 20th-century English chemistry. He also co-invented cordite. He did much important work on the liquefaction of gases, including oxygen and hydrogen, but (due at least in part to a shortage of helium – the same thing that, decades later, led to the explosion of the Hindenburg, which had been forced to use hydrogen because the US wouldn’t sell helium to Nazi Germany) he was pipped at the post for the first to liquefy helium – and the guy who beat him, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, later won the Nobel, a prize Dewar was nominated for several times but never won. Sucks, eh?

Dewar had the idea for the vacuum flask in 1892, and put it into use successfully. But he did not patent it. A German firm saw the commercial value in it, patented it in 1904, and gave it the name Thermos in 1907. Dewar sued for a share of the profits – but lost because he hadn’t patented it. Now, that sucks.

It’s also why you needn’t feel too bad about using thermos as a common noun. Sure, Thermos (the company) made the invention commercially available, leading to energy savings world-wide in keeping beverages hot and cold and reducing substantially the amount of tepid beverage consumed. But come on. Hardly right sporting, is it, to take someone else’s invention and patent it just because you can and then not give them a share of the proceeds. If they were to leave their invention in their unlocked garage, you would be arrested if you took it, even if you did something good with it.

Now, thermos is a nice name for it, that’s true. The therm is so soft and warm; it has good associations from other therm words, and it has that nice, light, cool dental fricative, a warm /m/ at the end, and in between a steady liquid, the syllabic /r/. And thermos is one easy word that has no other meanings.

But if you want to scotch that use, you can call it a Dewar flask. I’m not sure they’d let you take that to school, though.

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ascapartic

Posted on April 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

Today’s word tasting note was written as a guest post for Logophilius.

David Foster Wallace has confected a nearly infinite jest on readers with his brobdingnagian book Infinite Jest and the gargantuan vocabulary he uses therein. Consider this passage – describing types I recognize from life:

this was the kind of hideously attractive girl you just knew in advance did not associate with normal collegiate human males, and clearly attended B.U.-Athletic social functions only out of a sort of bland scientific interest while she waited for the cleft-chinned ascapartic male-model-looking wildly-successful-in-business adult male she doubtless was involved with to telephone her from the back seat of his green stretch Infiniti.

Ah, that turn of phrase, with its occasional saffron thread of novel lexis as elusive as it is allusive. Ascapartic? Where’s that from (WTF)? It has stimulated assorted online discussions entomologically entumoured and tumescent with ex tempore etymology. One almost comes to wonder whether the spectacular specimen’s car is a classiomatic.

It has a nice taste, to be sure: crisp, perhaps refreshing; after a tongue-tip hiss, the stops, voiceless all, crack from the back to the lips to the tip to the back, with merely the little thrill of a liquid trill to add further to the vowels. As a written form, it is long but short: ten letters, but the heights only tapped by ti. The rest are mostly the curly little trolls, a s c and so on.

So what could this alpha male be? A scrappy Spartacus? An ASCAP artist escaped from the Arctic? Could you with a speculum or scope discern a cleft scapula counterpoised to his spectacular pectorals? In a scrap with a cop in a copse, could he expectorate pixelations to scupper a cepstrum? I don’t expect an ex post facto exculpation of David Foster Wallace, but I will speculate that that prick could have expostulated an explication of his lexicocerebral copulation.

Well, maybe an illumination of the allusion will elucidate. Ascapartic is an adjective formed from Ascapart, also spelled Ascupart, the name a figure from English legend who was defeated by Bevis of Hampton.

Oh, well. That explains everything… if you had only happened to ask a part of the question. OK, I don’t know about you, but until I looked this up I had never heard of Bevis of Hampton. I was tempted to wonder whether he hung out with Butthead of Doubletree. But nope, he’s a figure from medieval legend, and Ascapart was a giant, a Paul-Bunyan-scale sort who used a club made from a whole tree. He swung it at Bevis; it got stuck in the mud; Bevis, rather than killing Ascapart, made him his squire.

And now Ascapart is become a squire word – an adjective, a verbal servant. He has been lanced in Wallace’s infinite joust. I feel sure that you, too, will soon use this word. So what if we have other allusive words for great magnitude – brobdingnagian and gargantuan, for instance. Who doesn’t love a nice shiny new toy?

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