Monthly Archives: June 2012

dubious

Posted on June 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

One of my colleagues reported having heard, yesterday, a politician introducing her boss (the premier) with the words “and so now it is my dubious honour to present…” – and saying it in such a way as to give the sense that she was not making a joke, but actually seemed to think it was a positive thing to say.

Well! That’s a dubious introduction. Was she smoking something doobie-ous? Of course, she might have grabbed the wrong word en passant. But I suspect she had picked up the phrase at some point without actually knowing the word dubious and had made an incorrect inference about it. Sort of like the veteran I once heard at a school assembly in the 1980s referring to World War II as “four score years ago” – he knew four score but didn’t know it meant eighty, not forty.

I do like the word dubious. It’s one of those words, like nauseous – or doubtful – that can refer to the subject or object: you are dubious about something that is dubious. It doubles up! It goes two ways in the mouth, too: lips forward on the /u/ and back on the /i/, with tongue in counterpoint, and the consonants bounce between tongue-tip and lips. Likewise, the d and b seem like someone looking both ways, either dubious about something or up to something dubious. Perhaps an IOU is involved.

Dubious may put one in mind of a singer with dubious lyrics – doobie-doobie-doo – or perhaps of someone called Dubya. For me, it brings to mind an early encounter with it in – can you guess? – an Asterix comic. There was a Roman (naturally) character named Dubius Status. He was one of two centurions in Asterix the Legionary – the other was Nefarius Purpus. (I mean in the English translation by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, of course.)

Dubious does come from Latin, of course: dubiousus, dubium, dubius, all “doubtful”. (That b in doubt, by the way, was stuffed in by certain Englishmen who found that doute had come from dubitare and so added the b – as they also did in debt – just as a little reminder of the Latin origin.) In modern English, dubious is a word that most often tends to pair up with a short list of common words.

Status isn’t actually high on the list. But dubious most often modifies positive words that it is there to undermine: distinction (first by a long measure in the Corpus of Contemporary American English), honor (or honour outside of the US), value; less frequently, proposition, claims, assumption, reputation, character. And some more past that, in dwindling number.

And there are also some other teams you will see our questionable word du jour in. For instance, if a Wikipedia article contains claims that seem a bit iffy, it may have the admonition “[dubious – discuss]” put on it. Well, that’s lovely: we have just discussed dubious. Does that mean that Wikipedia is now fully reliable?

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quagga

Posted on June 13, 2012 | 3 comments

I am happy to report that this word is not yet another of those execrable nicknames the British press come up with for well-known figures (e.g. Macca for Paul McCartney and Gazza for Paul Gascoigne, a footballer). No, it’s a word you can play in Scrabble. Alas, it’s a word for an animal that doesn’t exist anymore.

A quagga is – was – a sort of zebra, but with stripes only on the front half; the back half was a solid colour (as though in a quagmire?). The shape of the word itself is only vaguely reminiscent of this for me – the vertical lines in the front-end qu followed by the rounder, non-stripey agga. These beasties were common enough in South Africa for eons, but the farmers didn’t like sharing grassland with them, so they were hunted as pests – and also for meat and hides.

But these beasties were thought to be just a slightly different-looking version of the zebra. So no one really thought about their possibly becoming extinct. A law was finally passed banning hunting for them – about three years after the last one died, in a zoo in 1883, and likely more than a decade after the last one was hunted in the wild. Cue Joni Mitchell: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” And the quagga becomes quiet.

The name quagga comes from Khoekhoe – that’s the language, though Khoekhoe does look like it’s related to to quagga, with the paired velars and the unrounding vowels, doesn’t it? The Khoekhoe word was ||koaah, which starts with a velar-coarticulated lateral click – coincidentally the kind of sound many people of European origin use to get a horse to start moving – and, after moving through a diphthong that opens from rounded, ends with a velar or other dorsal fricative. It is apparently imitative of the sound the animal makes. I mean made. It came to be brought into Afrikaans, which added a vowel at the end and converted the opening /||k/ into just a /k/. The letter g – or a double g – in this, as in most, cases in Afrikaans is a voiceless velar fricative, as in ach and loch and so on. In English, we change it further, making the gg just a /g/, as we will. So the click and the fricative are gone, and most of us wouldn’t even have known they were there. The wild bray is become something more like a half-submerged duck’s call.

But the animal named by ||koaah and, originally, quagga wasn’t the quagga in specific; it was the zebra generally. Indeed, the plains zebra, one of several species of zebra in existence, is Equus quagga (boy, do I love the look of that term! such a beautiful pattern on the page!). The quagga is – was – a subspecies, †Equus quagga quagga (oh, please stop, I’m having a word-nerd-gasm – everyone please say “equus quagga quagga” five times, and the world will turn backwards). Notice the obelisk at the beginning of the Latin name, that orthographic tombstone: it says “There ain’t no more.”

But some people beg to differ. Just as there are still Khoekhoe and Afrikaans speakers maintaining the phonological originals of this word, there may be the genes of the quagga roaming around the grasslands of South Africa. Some people think the quagga’s genes – or anyway genes that would express its phenotype – may be available, unexpressed, recessive, in related subspecies of the plains zebra. A selective breeding program is underway to turn back the spin of time and bring back the Equus quagga quagga. See The Quagga Project’s website.

And why? Why bother bringing back what is really just another type of zebra? What’s the business case?

What business case? Why does there need to be a financial justification? Money is a means, not an end; it is just a medium of storage and transfer of value; we use it to get ourselves things that we value. Do you like the incessant, infinite variety of life? Do you delight in seeing a word such as quagga? Why would you not delight in seeing such a beast as a quagga, then? Another, and different, beautiful pattern on the grassland, eking out its hardscrabble existence, more than just a hard Scrabble word.

You know, sometimes we just don’t feel like having yet another too-late-realized loss to sing about.

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corroborate, corroboree

Posted on June 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

I’m sure you know the word corroborate. Generally it’s used for accounts or evidence that strengthen a case. It’s from Latin cor (intensifier) and roborare “strengthen”; you may remember the word roborant, which I tasted about three months ago. So you would expect a corroboree to be someone or something that is corroborated, right?

No. That story is very much uncorroborated. The Latinate morphology may have had some influence on the English form of this word, but the word corroboree is borrowed (with small phonological changes) from an Aborigine word – a word from a group who lived near Port Jackson, NSW, and whose language does not exist anymore.

Or perhaps I should say it doesn’t exist in our here and now. There are other times, other places, other realms, other realities, in which we cannot rule out its existence. We tend to think only in terms of the constitutive framing of our lives: the narratives of our daily lives, the coherent threads we weave out of them. Interrupting these threads are other threads that are in separate frames, separate realities: we dream, and when we wake up we see that that was all in its own separate box. We go to the theatre, and we see a performance that is done by real people in real space, but it is representing an action that we process as part of a separate narrative in a separate reality with separate rules, almost like a waking dream. Even in a religious ceremony, you may in a more or less literal way reenact some happening from the past, from the binding mythos of your credo; its connection and its reality in the moment are matters of doctrinal dispute.

When you have these different stories in their different frames, are they like actors in different inertial frames of reference in relativistic motion, dilated in time and contracted in space but still part of one reality? Do they have traces in our own reality that corroborate them? Or are they more like peeks into other branches of a many-worlds view of reality? And will performing stories corroborate them?

Corroborate, I don’t know. But strengthen them, yes. And what is the occasion of this strengthening by performing? It can be a corroboree.

A corroboree, you see, is (originally) a nighttime gathering among Aborigines for performance – dance, music, costume – of narratives from the Dreamtime. They may be for celebration or similar gathering occasions. They are more than just theatre for entertainment, but they are not exactly religious ritual per se. They are beyond the quotidian – they are extra-daily, to use a performance studies term favoured by, among others, Richard Schechner (I did my dissertation on him) – and the audience for them may be restricted. This restriction can be a question of maintaining not just the frame (the set of rules by which that particular set of narrative threads is interpreted) but also its numinosity, its significance, its perceived power with relation to the constitutive (“real world”) and to group identity and cohesion. By keeping it more of a secret, and thus less corroborable in the sense we would think of, one may strengthen it: stronger because less, not more, widely known – but strongly reinforced in those who know. And these stories relate to things that have left their traces on the physical reality of the here and now. If you know the story, the reality it refers to corroborates it.

The word corroboree has a wider usage now. It can name tourist performances, for instance – cutely packaged representations that have the appearance but not the numinosity or other deep personal and cultural significance for the tourist viewers, who instead project their own fantasies and expectations on it; their search for “authenticity” leads them to something that, by very dint of their being the ones there seeing it, makes it irredeemably inauthentic, the far side of a divide with no ties in between, not two inertial frames of reference but completely different systems. The perceived possibility for corroboration leads to vitiation.

It can also name more general cultural performances where they still do have cultural significance. And it has come to be used more broadly, too, as for instance for a lively party – perhaps a cross between a jamboree and a shivaree (charivari). The sound of the word surely carries some of the rhubarbery of a hurly-burly. But it may be a disservice to its origins to use it so broadly, heedlessly.

And then there is the corroboree frog. You can see one at arkive.org. It gets its name from its striking yellow-and-black striped coloration. As it happens, striking striped body paint is a common feature of the corroboree, and the markings of this frog are reminiscent of that. I won’t say that its markings are quite reminiscent of the look of this word, but there is a certain pattern in the repetitions of letters: corroboree – three r’s, three o’s, two e’s and a c (which is like an e that hasn’t quite closed yet), and the lone b reaching above and giving a solid central support, like a tree with a thick base. The curves of the c, e’s, and o’s give it a repeating cyclic feel.

Repetition strengthens. If the very source of what is being presented is the performance and repetition of it, if that is its interface with our everyday reality, then repetition is its real corroboration, isn’t it? And if it is something we have produced out of our individual and cultural imaginations, then our own minds are not only the corroborators but the corroborees. As it were.

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marquetry, parquetry

Posted on June 11, 2012 | 3 comments

These words put me in mind of a ma-and-pa store, let’s say Ma and Pa Arquette. Both of them work with pieces of wood to make flat designs, but whereas Pa makes geometric designs, usually repeating, and typically (but not exclusively) for flooring, Ma makes intricate pictures with pieces of all shapes and a few other materials too, for box lids, table tops, and many other purposes.

The interesting thing is that although the techniques are very similar, to an extent variations on the same theme, the words for them – parquetry and marquetry – although varying only in one letter (and, phonologically, only in voice and quality of one phoneme, not even in place), are not variations on the same origin.

They do both come from French. Marquetry comes from marqueter “variegate”, from marque “mark”. Parquetry comes from parquet, which in this case meant “collection of blocks forming a floor” but which has had a variety of different senses relating to floors and enclosures, especially in courts and theatres, and which ultimately comes from parc “park”.

So… if you park a tree, do you need a lot? If you mark a tree, is it because you have designs on it? How about your marketing? I imagine most of us are most familiar with parquet, as in parquet flooring, which I have long thought of as Parkay flooring – a sort of oleo, I mean olio, of wood. (If that’s opaque, I’ll explain: Parkay is a brand of margarine; oleo is another word for margarine; olio is a crossword-puzzle-favourite word for a mixture of heterogeneous elements.) Actually, that’s not quite fair; marquetry uses more heterogeneous elements. The parquet floors one sees in apartments of a certain age (especially in Toronto, where there are squillions of them) are made of identical short pieces of identical wood, set down in squares (three, four, or five to a square) of alternating orientation.

The two words trace, as I have already mentioned, the same pattern in the mouth: from the lips, they bounce back (with a retroflex liquid on the way) to the velum, which cracks forward to the tongue tip, which breaks off with another liquid and then it all fades with a high front vowel. This could be seen as a design from one or the other, though not quite par for the course; it could be seen as like one of the little grooves one of my chairs has made in my “hardwood” veneer floor, marring it without easy replacement (as parquet flooring might allow); or it could be seen as a bit of lingual coquetry.

Oh, yes, coquetry. Another quetry word: par, mar, co. Of course it has a different origin again, though again French. That makes a neat trio! Any others? Oh, blast, yes – musquetry. Which is rather antithetic to coquetry. And then there’s raquetry.

But, though there is raquetry, there are only two words that share arquetry (which is an anagram of quartery, which, however, is just quarter with a y or quarterly misspelled), or, for that matter, rquetry. Wooden you know it.

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frenzy, phrensy, frenetic, phrenitic, frantic

Posted on June 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, he occasionally uses the word phrensies.

Well, now, that just seems like a fancy way to spell frenzies, doesn’t it? With that posh classical ph that shows up in scientific terms and assorted BS, not to mention slang here and there. It sort of makes the user look like he’s got a swollen head, so to speak. And the s in place of the z – it makes it look more like pansies or perhaps a bit of palsies, and perhaps phrases and nephritis and…

But it also makes it look like it’s related to the Greek root ϕρεν phren “heart, mind”, from which we get the once-popular phrenology “study of the mind through the shape of the brain and cranium”. Is it? Could our wild, fuzzy, crazy frenzy come somehow from a pretentious-looking Greek root?

Oh yes. It did all start with the Greeks. In the beginning was ϕρενῖτις phrenitis, “delirium”, literally “mind disease” – I’m sure you recognize the itis, which now normally refers to swelling. But we don’t think of a swollen head as being the same as delirium! A swollen brain, on the other hand, may cause delirium… that’s the modern use of phrenitis.

From that, anyway, we get the adjective form phrenitic, which English has had since the 1600s. But we had a cognate term rather sooner – a person afflicted with phrenitis was, in Latin, phreneticus, which passed through French to become, by the 1300s, English frenetic.

You know that word, of course! It may have originally meant “delirious, temporarily mad”, but it came to refer to particularly energetic bursts of madness, mania, wild excitation… and from that it was applied more loosely to over-rapid activity generally: the kind of fever-pitched hectic energetic flurry that leaves you frazzled. It may be an overstatement to match that to a scrambled brain infecter, but exaggeration is the mode of such things.

And if you’re so wild with busy distraction that you don’t even have time for that extra et in frenetic, you go with its sister term, also brought to us by way of French from phreneticus: frantic. That energetic /ε/ opens wider to an almost-wailing /æ/. Frantic sounds more like panting and hand-waving and calamity and can’t handle it. Also more like France, but I’m sure that’s just coincidence…

Phrensy and frenzy, for their part, are from a pseudo-Greek formation in Latin, phrenesis, again by way of French; the original meaning is “delirium; temporary insanity; mental derangement”. The phormer, the phancy spelling, is rarely used now, typically just phor prophetic ecstasy or demonic possession.

All of these words have that opening /fr/ sound that you get in frustration and fright and, on the other hand, frig and frottage. It reminds me of the rocket-taking-off sound that my Mac Mail makes when I send an email, all friction and liquid, fading into the blue, but when you say it your mouth is tight and clutched up: lips biting, tongue curled. A tense sound. And on the other hand they all also have the /n/, that nasal on the tongue-tip, a sound capable of sustained personal intensity.

And they are all, as a group, emblematic of English word formation and derivation. It can drive a person frantic. Not that it’s usually all that frenetic or frenzied – it takes place over time: a delirium, yes, but a tremendous delirium as words are gradually withdrawn from their origins and made – I was going to say our friends, for the frenzy echo, but do friends treat friends as we treat our words? or as our words treat us?

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get

Posted on June 7, 2012 | 8 comments

It was just after Montgomery’s and Elisa’s discussion of get-go and gecko that things almost came to blows.

Not between Elisa and Montgomery, to be sure; rather, the issue was with a prospective member who had joined us at the restaurant, a rather self-important specimen named Will Knott. He caught the end of the discussion on get-go and commented, to no one in particular, “I had thought that this was a society for people who valued the English language and knew how to use it well.”

“It is for people who love the language and wish to handle its words as fine ingredients in excellent dishes,” Montgomery said.

“So how did this one become a member?” he said, jerking his thumb at Elisa. “That’s not very good English. Get-go.” Elisa looked hurt and focused her attention on her wine glass and its emptying and refilling.

“You need to be sensitive to context,” I said, my hair starting to stand up on the back of my neck. “I’m not quite sure you got it. It was a colloquial recounting.”

He waved me off with his hand before I was done speaking and turned to Montgomery. “I suppose everyone enjoys a bit of slumming now and then, but I certainly wouldn’t allow such common – almost vulgar – words in my workplace. I handle important documents.”

Montgomery’s left eyebrow was arching ever so slightly higher and higher. “Vulgar?”

“Get. Got. That’s not good English.”

“Get is not good English?!” I exclaimed, almost disbelieving (I say “almost” because I have once or twice heard of others having the same view).

Will Knott sighed slightly and looked upwards for a moment. Then he continued speaking to Montgomery. “It’s a bit discouraging that you have members who are surprised to hear this.”

“Perhaps,” Montgomery said, “it’s that they wonder at your placing yourself above Shakespeare, Pope, Dickens, Thackeray, Emerson…”

“Shakespeare had terrible grammar,” Will Knott said. “Everyone knows that. Many supposedly great authors were sloppy with their usage.”

“You don’t like ‘Get thee to a nunnery’?”

“He was just trying to fit his meter. He could have said ‘Take thou holy orders’ or ‘Enter the novitiate’ or any of several better options. It doesn’t even make sense as it is. Get means ‘receive’. Receive thee to a nunnery?”

“Get has a rather broader range of use than that,” Montgomery said.

“I’m talking about the proper definition,” Will said.

“I thought you said it wasn’t a proper word,” I said. Will made an eye roll worthy of a fourteen-year-old girl and returned to ignoring me.

“The Germanic root it comes from,” Montgomery said, “is one referring to seizing, taking hold of, grasping, obtaining, and such like. The word get has, of course, been in the English language as long as there has been an English language to be in.”

“A weak defence,” Will said. “There are always better words, just as with many other old Anglo-Saxon words. I hope you grasp my meaning. Not get, grasp.”

“I don’t know that you can always get away with such substitutions,” Montgomery said.

“Would you use that sentence in a government report?” said Will. “It would be better as ‘Such substitutions may not always be allowed.’ Or, to avoid the passive, ‘You may not always succeed in making such substitutions.’”

“They don’t mean the same thing,” I said.

“Could you be quiet?” Will said. “The adults are speaking.”

“Get over yourself,” I said.

He gave me a condescending look over the tops of his glasses. “Be less impressed with yourself.”

“You might want to try to get along with others,” Montgomery said.

“Agree is a better word than get along with,” Will replied.

Elisa broke her silence. “Even I know that those don’t mean the same thing.”

“You do not know all the meanings of the word agree,” Will said.

“You don’t know all the meanings of the word get,” I said. “And you get your back up too readily.”

“I am too readily irritated, you mean,” he said. “However, it seems to me that you are the one with a temper here.”

Montgomery gestured towards me and Elisa. “It is from members such as these that you must get permission to get into the Order of Logogustation.”

“Obtain permission,” Will said. “Obtain is a much better word. And join or enter, not get into.”

“You truly feel that this is the way to get ahead?”

“To advance, I believe you mean?”

Montgomery paused and glanced at his watch. “Well, it’s getting on.”

“The hour is advancing,” Will corrected him.

“Let’s get this over with,” Montgomery said, glancing at me.

“Draw it to a conclusion,” Will said.

“Get up,” Montgomery said.

“Arise,” Will said.

“And get out,” Montgomery said.

“Leave, exit, depart,” Will said.

“I mean you,” Montgomery said. “Do you get it now?”

“Understand it, you mean,” Will said.

“We mean get out,” I said, positioning myself behind him with two of the waiters, whom I had signalled to come over. “You will never get in. You need to get a clue.”

“The door is this way, sir,” said one of the waiters. “Don’t make us exert ourselves.”

Will Knott looked at us distastefully and drew himself up to standing. He looked for moment more and made a bee-line for the door, muttering “Disappointing!” loudly enough for all to hear.

“You ignorant git,” I said after him as he left, exited, departed.

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gecko, get-go

Posted on June 6, 2012 | 5 comments

Montgomery Starling-Byrd was back in town on yet another global word-tasting expedition. A few of us joined him for dinner and drinks. He happened to be seated next to Elisa Lively, and I canted an ear to their conversation. Which did not disappoint.

“Well, we ran into trouble right from the get-go,” Elisa was saying.

“From the gecko?” Montgomery said.

“No, from the dog. It kept taking the food.”

“From the gecko,” Montgomery said, seeking clarification.

“Yes, right from the get-go. It liked lizard food right away.”

“As long as it didn’t like lizard for food.”

“Oh,” Elisa said, “that’s a whole other tale.”

“Another tail from the gecko?”

“No, that came later.”

“Where was the tail from?”

“From the gecko, but later. Not from the get-go.”

“I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread of the tale here,” Montgomery said.

“Well, the gecko’s tail was threatened. Actually the dog pulled on it and wouldn’t let go, and the gecko dropped it.”

“Autotomy,” Montgomery observed (that’s the word for when a lizard drops its tail).

“It wanted its autonomy, yes. So that was the end of the tail.”

“And there was no more.”

“No,” Elisa said, “it grew another one. Geckos do that.”

“Indeed they do. It’s a kind of insurance.”

I just about choked on my wine stifling a giggle at the thought of the Geico gecko and its accent, which is not quite as plummy as Montgomery’s.

“That happened more than once,” Elisa said. “But the worst was the noise.”

“From the gecko?”

“Yes, from the very start. Especially from the dog.”

“Why?”

“It didn’t like the noise the gecko made.”

“Ah, yes: ‘Gecko!’ That’s how they got their name. It’s from Malay.”

“The poet?”

“What?”

“‘I burn the candle at both ends…’ She named the gecko?”

“The… Oh, no, the Malay language. In Malaysia. Not Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

“Oh. Well,” Elisa giggled, “that gecko burned at both ends. It made a noise the dog hated. And so the dog barked like crazy. And the gecko made more noise.”

“A sort of gecko echo.”

“Yeah! And at the other end there was that tale.”

“The end of the tale.”

“Repeatedly.”

“From the gecko.”

“No, not from the get-go.”

“From the dog?” Montgomery furrowed his brow.

“No, from the gecko.”

“Are you insane, or am I?” Montgomery said, staring abruptly into his wine glass.

I intervened. “Montgomery! Do you mean to say you are unfamiliar with the Americanism – and Canadianism – from the get-go?” I pronounced it slowly and clearly.

“From the… get? go?” Montgomery said. “Oh yes, I see. Voice and place assimilation with reduction: the /t/ devoices the /g/ after it, but also moves to the back and simply pre-stops the stop. Well, this is a very hockey-sounding term. Or perhaps NASCAR. So I take it that it comes from get going, which has been shortened and treated as a noun.”

“Truncated and mutated,” I said.

“Like my gecko,” Elisa said.

“I don’t think I would,” Montgomery said. “I would as soon have a grackle.”

“I guess your kind of bird is the starling.” Elisa giggled.

“Rather. I prefer a murmuration to the noise of a gecko.”

“So would Lawrence,” Elisa said.

“Who is Lawrence?”

“My dog.”

“Oh,” Montgomery said. “And what, dare I ask, was the gecko’s name?”

Elisa held her hands wide, palms up, as if to say it was obvious. “Gordon, of course!”

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Ohthere

Posted on June 6, 2012 | Leave a comment

Today, through a passing reference in Melville’s Moby-Dick, I became aware of a Norse explorer from the 9th century AD. This was a chap who had mainly commercial interests – killing whales and walruses – but who decided to go see what he could see.

Not that he sailed around the world or anything. You have to remember the time and its limitations. The boats they had were not large. One normally sailed following a coastline, and anchored (or even camped ashore) at night.

But this chap lived in Hålogaland, pretty far north on the Scandinavian coast – so far north that, as he told King Alfred of England, no one lived any farther north, except for occasional Finns; it was all wasteland. Well, one day he decided to see just how far north the land went. So he sailed up along the coast for six days – in three days he was as far as the whale-hunters went, and in another three the land turned eastward. After that he followed it down again and into the White Sea as far as where Arkhangelsk now is. Then, seeing that there were people there (Sámi, as it happens), he turned around and went back home.

So I wonder if, when he passed the northernmost point, he said, “Oh, there!”

If he had, one is tempted to say he could have named it after himself.

This is not actually true. It is true that we call him Ohthere (not pronounced like “oh, there”; stress is on second syllable, there are three syllables, and the th is voiceless), but he spoke Old Norse, in which the expression would have been different, and in which his name was Ottar (which probably means something along the line of “fearsome”). But it sounds nice, doesn’t it?

You could also come up with some other version of his name. Melville actually calls him Other, in fact. Imagine if he had named the northernmost point after himself, and his wife asked him where he was going, and he said, “Oh, somewhere or Other…”

But that’s just silliness. Still, his name pleaseth. I don’t mean Ottar; that’s like Otto and otter and Ottokar and attar and all that, a little brittle. Better the soft cloth of the Alfredian version – it’s a touch more, oh, therapeutic. But note that in the Old English original text, that th is actually written th – not with the thorn (þ) or eth (ð) used to signify dental fricatives. One may surmise that it was thus actually a stop, perhaps with aspiration after it (and – as the preceding h will tell you – even before it, as is the practice in modern Icelandic with double voiceless stops).

Oh, there we go again. Take it as it comes. And take him as he comes. He came to England at some point; after all, he told King Alfred about his voyage north (his recounting was recounted by another; Ohthere was not the author), and about another one south to the bottom of the Jutland peninsula. Where? The south end of Denmark. Oh, there. Yes, there.

Well, he may not quite have been Franklin, reaching for the Northwest Passage, but on the other hand he came back. The gesture of saying his name reminds me of that – it starts at the back of the mouth, with that back vowel /o/, but the lips rounding, as looking forward; and then the tongue darts forward, touches the tip at the teeth, and then at last pulls back into the middle again. There and back again.

If you would like to read the account of Ohthere’s voyages found (as an addition) in Alfred’s version of Orosius, stop by www.oldenglishaerobics.net/ohthere.html. If you would like to read it in Modern English, I recommend dl1.yukoncollege.yk.ca/agraham/ohthere. It won’t take you long.

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dweeb

Posted on June 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

We were milling around before the official start of the monthly Words, Wines, and Whatever tasting at the Domus Logogustationis, warming up our palates with start-up glasses of wine and some conversation. Arlene was talking about a recent conference she had been to.

“So there was this word challenge thing,” Arlene said, “and one of the challenges was that there are only three words in the English language that start with dw, and all of them are common words.”

I cocked my head slightly and raised an eyebrow. “Three?”

Daryl pulled out his iPad. Arlene darted a hand to block it. “No cheating.”

“There must be more than three,” I said. “Let’s see…”

“No,” Arlene said, “let iPad Boy here see if he can cough them up straight out of his cortex without an index.”

Darryl pulled a little face. “Um. Dwell. Uh, personal names should count – Dwight, Dwayne… Oh, dwindle. And dwarf. Which is actually a noun and a verb, so you can count that twice. We’re already over three that way. And dwelling! The noun means something not exactly the same as the gerund of the verb. I think that’s a pretty comprehensive confutation of the contention.” He smiled.

“Dweeb,” Arlene said.

“I don’t think you’re being fair,” Daryl said. “Geek, sure, nerd, maybe, but I’m not a dweeb.”

“You’re not exhaustive, either,” Arlene said. “You missed dweeb.”

Daryl facepalmed.

Arlene smiled. “I got them all and then I tweeted it.” She took a sip of her wine. “Sweet.”

“No need to gloat,” Daryl said, and turned his attention to his own glass.

“No, this wine is sweet,” Arlene said.

“Kabinett,” I said. “Riesling.” I mused aloud: “Sweet – tweet – dweeb…”

“It doesn’t really have that much in common with the other dw words, does it?” Arlene said. “More with some other words that have that vowel.”

Daryl had his iPad in action now. “First OED cite is 1982. Which sounds rightish to me. …Probaby comes from feeb, for feeble, with that dw added at the beginning. Maybe from dwarf.”

“I bet there are some phonaesthetics at work there,” I said. “We know that those high front vowels tend to be associated with lighter, smaller, less substantial things. Compare dweeb with what it would be if it were, say, dwab.”

“Sounds like twat,” Daryl said. “And a twat is more obnoxious and less ineffectual than a dweeb.”

“I think the rounded glide into it adds contrast,” I added. “Compare deeb. Think about how we talk about a tweet rather than a teet.”

“Will you stop with the female body parts,” Arlene said.

“No, not – oh, never mind,” I said. “Anyway, what other words do we get a taste of in dweeb?”

“Well, twee,” Arlene said. “And wee.”

“And maybe queen and queer,” Daryl said.

“Oui,” I affirmed. “It’s a little farther afield to squeal, but then there are those toys, Weebles. And weenie.”

Arlene wagged her finger: “Body parts!” I rolled my eyes.

“Weed,” Daryl said. “And Guido.”

“Ooh! Guido!” Arlene said. “Is a Guido a dweeb? They’re kind of different, aren’t they?”

“A dweeb is like a nerd or a geek,” Daryl said, “but with excessive self-estimation, combined with a neediness and overearnestness.”

“Overweening,” I said. “Sort of like a twerp. Which is also a very similar word.”

“Ah, yes,” said Arlene. “I’ll have to tell my tweeps.”

“But, by the way,” Daryl said, scrolling on his iPad, “there are some other dw words that aren’t so common: dwale, ‘deadly nightshade’; dwalm, ‘swoon’; dwang, ‘a short piece of reinforcing timber’; dwerg, a pseudo-archaic form of ‘dwarf’; dwile, ‘floor-cloth’; dwine, ‘waste away’; and a bunch of obsolete ones.”

“And dwapp,” Arlene said.

“Dwapp?” said Daryl. “That’s not in the OED.”

“As in Tony Orloongoo and Dwapp, a fake African music duo from a Don Martin comic strip in MAD Magazine?” I said.

“As in dwapp!” Arlene said, backhanding Daryl lightly on the side of the head. She turned to me and backhanded me as well. “Dwapp!”

“I think I shall dwalm,” Daryl said. “And dwine.”

“And whine quite a lot,” Arlene said. Then, with a smirk, she said, “Don’t dwell on it… dweeb.” She tossed back her glass, turned, and went to refill it.

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