Monthly Archives: May 2013

psoas

Posted on May 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

Does this word look like it wants to be in some other order? Or perhaps as though it’s shorter than it should be – maybe cut down from psoriasis?

Well, if you spend a lot of time sitting at a desk, your psoas might be out of order – by being shorter than it should be.

It? Yes, psoas is singular. It’s sort of like biceps, but also in a way opposite. Biceps is a singular word that looks like a plural and is often taken for one. Psoas is a singular word that was originally a plural word but got taken for a singular. It comes from Greek, psoa, which had an accusative plural of psoas and a nominative plural of psoai. So now the plural of psoas my be rendered as psoai, even though psoas was originally as plural as psoai: it’s getting pulled sideways instead of up or down. But since it passed through Latin on its way to English, you can also see psoae.

Naturally, we pronounce it without the p – so it sounds like “so us.” Or you could say it like “so ass,” I suppose. Try not to say “so as.”

But what is the psoas? It’s the thing my wife was stretching this morning when she put one foot in a skate and held it over her head, pulling it up from the back (not the side) – while standing on the other foot, of course. It’s also the thing that’s probably at the root of some back problems I’m having, even though it’s not in the back.

It’s a muscle that attaches to your spine and the top of your femur, coming around the front way. It’s much involved when you walk or run: you contract and release it with every one of your steps (pasos in Spanish, just incidentally). (Learn more about it and how to stretch it at stronglifts.com and runnersworld.com.) You stretch it when you twist, and since there are two of it, you can – if you want – see them represented with the s and s in this word.

And if you’re sitting too much of the time, it can get shortened and start making trouble for your back. Since it opposes the gluteus maximus, it can ultimately lead to overstrain on that part of your body (not to mention the back compression it can cause, which can make further trouble). Thus any pronunciation that sounds like “sore ass” is not so far off the mark. Ah, the heartbreak of sore asses, thanks to an overshort psoas.

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by

Posted on May 15, 2013 | Leave a comment

A word such as by is really too basic and multifarious to do a tasting of the usual sort on it. Instead, I present a poem – another from Songs of Love and Grammar.

Joined by fate by April

Last fall I was hit by a stop sign
by a truck that failed to stop;
the driver was caught by a red light
and sent off to jail by a cop.
I was taken away by an ambulance
and laid by a nurse in a bed
in a hospital built by a river
and by morning was back from the dead.
I was kept in a room by the river
by the nurse to heal and stay.
I was seen by my bed by the window
by the nurse twice every day.
I was healed by the power of beauty:
I was struck by the nurse’s face
and blown away by her lovely lips
by the time I left that place.
The nurse was known by April
by friends and by people about
and, by George, she was called by the next month
by me to ask her out.
By April she had been courted
by me for half a year
and by then it was time for a ring
to be given by me to my dear.
We were wed by a tree by a lake
by a hill by the moon by a priest
and the joining by God was feted
by the stars by our friends by a feast.
Now I’m joined in my life by April
and by fate we will never be parted,
and my wall is bedecked by the stop sign
by which this all was started.
By the wall a cradle’s been placed,
and by April all will know why:
by and large, my April’s grown pregnant,
and we’ll have a child by and by.

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Clichés and picturesque language

Posted on May 13, 2013 | Leave a comment

Originally published in The Spanner, issue 0008.

At first glance, English may seem to be going through a paradigm shift, with a  dizzying array of ways to put lipstick on the pig. This naturally provokes some push-back, even withering criticism, as we struggle to wrap our heads around it. But the upshot remains to be seen. Should we just run with it? Or should we step up to the plate and think outside the box? If you talk about the elephant in the room, will that mean you’re not a team player? Will you get thrown under a bus? And, on the other hand, at the end of the day, are we even truly at a crossroads?

More to the point, did that paragraph provoke you to hyperemesis?

We Anglophones have an apparently inexhaustible facility for creating clichés. A sharp turn of phrase or a particularly engaging image sparks interest and spreads like wildfire, and soon enough it’s tired and stale. This is not a new thing. Some hackneyed clichés of yesteryear have become so cemented that we continue to use them even though we no longer quite remember the literal reference. The result is sometimes what are called eggcorns: misconstrual of idiomatic words or phrases into things that make more sense to the modern eye and ear. This is how just deserts becomes just desserts, tide me over becomes tie me over, strait-laced and strait and narrow get straightened, sleight of hand gets slighted… Forget about trying to nip these in the bud in the nick of time; many of them are as old as the hills. You may look for the silver lining and try to make lemonade, but…

What? Oh, fine, I’ll stop. What I’ve really been doing is illustrating a central point of all of these: they’re all picturesque. They all involve metaphors. But in many cases the imagery is etiolated. The words are still there, and we could play with the images if we want, but for general use they are like posters or pin-ups that have been on the wall too long and are now faded to pale shades of cyan.

But that is how language works. Most language you use is made of metaphors and images that have lost their vividness and, in many cases, are no longer recognizable as imagery at all. Let us look at some “plain” words that could replace the clichés. Going through a paradigm shift – well, we could say changing, but that comes (much changed!) from a Latin word for bartering and exchanging, and may deriver further from an older word for bending or turning back. We could replace push-back with rejection, but reject is from Latin for “throw back.” If we prefer to understand rather than wrap our heads around, it ought not to take us too long to see the under and stand in understand. And if we go with comprehend? There’s the Latin again, meaning “grasp, seize” (remember that anything that can grab things is prehensile, from the same root). If you prefer betray to throw under a bus, you may want to know that the tray in betray conceals a Latin origin in trans plus dare, meaning “hand over.” And so it goes. Look back over this paragraph and try to find one verb I have used that isn’t a figurative use of a word with a physical reference: work, make, look, go… even prefer comes from Latin for “put in front, carry forward.”

In this way (as in a few others) English is like Chinese. I’m not talking about the Chinese use of imagery and metaphor, which is considerable; I mean the written form, the Chinese characters. People who aren’t familiar with Chinese characters may think of them as pictograms, resembling closely what they refer to. People who try to learn Chinese find very quickly that the characters generally give the reader nothing obvious to grab onto. This is because the characters are like our words and phrases that have had the imagery worn off them.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Look at the character for “look”: 看. Does that look like looking? How about after I tell you that it’s made of two parts, and the 手 was originally a hand (see the fingers? it has changed somewhat) and the 目 was originally an eye (it rotated 90˚ a long time ago; make the outside box curved and see the inside lines as making the edges of the iris)?

Now look at the character for “good”: 好. How does that look good, or like anything good? Well, the 女 part is the character for “woman,” and originally looked like a line drawing of a standing woman with her hands held in front of her. The 子 part is the character for “child,” and if you curve the top part and bend the crossbar down, you might begin to see an infant in swaddling clothes. It seems that, to the scribes who determined this character, the epitome of goodness was a mother and child.

Such is the way it goes, too, with our picturesque language. Time and tide, change and overuse, leave the imagery behind. But if you know how to look, it’s still good – and not altogether lacking in character.

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delice

Posted on May 12, 2013 | 3 comments

My dinner this evening was a delice.

What?

Oh, come on. Something that’s capricious is a caprice. The cause of anything malicious is malice. So my dinner was a delice. It…

How do I pronounce it? OK, OK, caprice and malice don’t rhyme. Which does delice go with? I’m going with the rhyme with caprice. Really, otherwise it sounds too much like jealous. Which you would be, by the way, if you knew how good my supper was. It was at this place called…

Yes, true, it could rhyme with vice, since vice is what – originally – is vicious. But I’m still going with the French-style pronunciation. After all, if you’re in Montreal, which is where I am today, you –

In Lachine. I was in Lachine for dinner, and then a dance performance. That counts. It’s now officially part of Montreal. But OK, yeah, it didn’t use to be, and it’s a ways out of the centre. Anyway, the restaurant is called Shangrila, and it serves Nepali, Indian, and Italian food.

No, I’m not making that up! Look it up for yourself. It’s an unprepossessing place, but I enjoyed the heck out of my dinner, which was “chatpate au poulet” (that’s how it was spelled on the menu) and two bottles of Cheetah beer. What’s with the suspicion here?

Mm-hmm, yes, I suppose we could say delicion instead of delice, given that suspicious has suspicion. But we could also say deliciosity. Which, however, is hardly shorter than deliciousness, which is not quite the same as delice, because something can be a delice but not really a deliciousness.

Why? Because I’m not making this up. Look, there really is an English word delice. It’s just not used anymore. Don’t ask me why. They still use the word delice in French.

Well, that’s where English got it from, of course. As I was about to say before. French made delice from Latin delicium, and English just plain old took it. The first meaning was ‘delight, pleasure, joy, enjoyment’, according to the OED. After that came the countable: a thing that causes the sensation of delice. But both senses are out of use now. I don’t know why.

I’ll tell you this: anyone who has what I had for dinner tonight ought surely to be motivated to bring delice back. Deliciousness just takes too long to say when you’re busy eating.

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to wit

Posted on May 10, 2013 | 5 comments

The owl of word country is a wise bird. It speaks of the two most important things: knowledge and love. I came to it to know.

“To wit?” it asked.

“To wit,” I confirmed. This is how it speaks: using the old verb wit rather than the one more common now, know. To wit – that means ‘to know’ or, more loosely, ‘just so you know’.

“To who?” it asked.

“To you, of course,” I said.

“To it,” it said. Meaning go to it: ask the question.

“I want to know of love,” I said.

“To woo,” it said.

“Yes. Is that all there is?”

“To it?”

“Yes. What is the best way to make my love known?”

“To who?” it asked.

“To the object of my affection,” I said. “There must be a best way to make my desires known.”

“To wit: to woo,” it said. I suppose a more Latinate bird might have said “videlicet” rather than “to wit,” but this is an Anglo-Saxon owl.

“But I lack the nerve,” I said.

“Twit,” it said. Abusive creature, this bird.

“You’re telling me that having nerve is its own justification?”

“True,” it said. Or at least I think that’s what it said.

“But do you think she’ll care even one whit what I think?”

“Two whits,” it said. Great. Not sure how to take that. Two very small bits. Not a lot, God wot. (Oh, hey: God wot – there’s another form of the verb wit.)

“Well, OK, but surely she might turn her affections to someone else.”

“To who?” This owl doesn’t really go for formal inflections, I notice. Never to whom.

“You know, you’re right,” I said. “Who else indeed. A-wooing I will go.”

“Do it,” it said.

“Thanks. Thanks for the encouragement.”

“To-whoo,” it said. I think it was just being owlish. As if to confirm that, it added, “Tu-whit, tu-whoo.”

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gastropub

Posted on May 9, 2013 | 1 comment

Maury and I decided, for the latest in our occasional beer-and-beer-and-food-and-beer sprees, to try the Cobra and Mongoose. Which is a gastropub.

Which of course came up as we were sitting there, surveying our menus, with our pints of local 8.7% microbrews served in improbable Mason jars.

“This is a gastropub,” Maury said, arching one eyebrow as he scanned the food list.

“Not a word I much like,” I said. I looked up and surveyed the surroundings, a pastiche of British Raj and modern Hounslow references somehow reminiscent of the dining room decor of the Pale Man from El laberinto del fauno (misnamed in English as Pan’s Labyrinth).

“Don’t like the air of gastrointestinal, gastroenteritis, gastroileostomy, and so on and so on?”

“And gas,” I said. “It doesn’t help that gastronomy, the source of the gastro, has the stress on the second syllable whereas gastropub has it on the first like all those words having to do with medical things and conditions.”

“You just can’t quite stomach it,” Maury said. Gastro comes from Greek γαστήρ gastér ‘stomach’.

“And it somehow makes the pub, which by itself is fine, sound like burbles from the belly, or a brief eructation or burst of flatulence,” I said.

“I assume you don’t mind that it’s macaronic,” Maury said. By this he meant that it mixes roots from different languages – in this case the pub is short for public house, and public comes from Latin publicus by way of French.

“I do not,” I said, eyes fixed on my menu, “but I’m not sure whether I mind that it’s macaroni.”

“Macaroni?” Maury arched an eyebrow. “I see burgers.”

We exchanged menus. They had separate menus for starch and meat and had given us one of each. Cute. The third menu, lying on the table, proved to be not wine but vegetables. We left it untouched. The beer list was scrawled in chalk on the wall, with daily specials written in dry-erase marker in stall number 3 of the washroom.

“Everyone is doing burgers,” I said, looking at the meat menu. “Oh, look, they also have steak and kidney pie and bangers and mash and all that sort of thing. What’s the deal with the gastro? This is all pub.”

“Fine restaurants are now taking those items onto their menus,” Maury said. “So they are gastro. And apparently it has come full circle now. I think I’ll have the pancakes.”

“What’s special about them?”

“They don’t say. Except that there’s an asterisk. Oh. With foie gras. Hm. I’ll try it.”

“Oh, look,” I said, “Bavarian sausage. Apparently a Gasthaus thing. Which is what a gastropub might have been if they had taken less of gastronomy and the other end of public house.”

A heavy-lidded waiter who evidently went to Medusa’s hairdresser arrived to take our order on his iPhone. Maury went with the pancakes. I went with the sausage with a side of chicken-fried fat. By the time we had taken the foam off our third pints, our gastro had arrived.

“Curry,” Maury said. I looked at his pancakes. They looked normal and plain. “I believe the griddle is seasoned with it,” he explained.

“I remember a restaurant near where I used to work that served curry-flavoured pancakes. Not intentionally.” I started into my sausage. “Currywurst,” I said. Indeed, there was a dusting of curry powder all over the top of the sauce.

“I thought they said Bavarian,” Maury said.

“Currywurst is a Berlin thing, yes, isn’t it,” I said. “They’re all over the map.”

We mounted a proper assault on our food with the aid of pints number four. I further polished off 75% of the jar of Major Grey chutney that they had deposited on the table. By the end of the meal my gastrointestinals were burbling.

“Who do we have to thank for this trend?” I said at last.

“It started in Britain in the early ’90s,” Maury said. “A pub in the London area that decided to start serving acceptable food.”

“And still keep that popular pub atmosphere,” I said.

“Pub,” Maury said. I almost said “What?” but I realized that he was dealing with a gastro issue when he added “Pubbbbbrrrrr.”

“Oh dear,” I said. “How do your guts feel?”

“Like a cobra and a mongoose getting to know each other,” Maury said. Then he raised an eyebrow, raised his index finger, stood up, and sprinted to the W.C.

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Repainting birds

Posted on May 8, 2013 | Leave a comment

There’s been a discussing among some of my fellow editors in recent days about a word – the word complicitly – seen in a document. Should it be changed? But why? Well, it’s not in the dictionary. (“Which dictionary?” is of course another question.) But it fits in the sentence and there’s no problem understanding it. But it’s not in the dictionary! Maybe we should rewrite the sentence to be safe. Etc.

The is the point where I sigh, roll my eyes, and tell a little story.

A guy painting pictures and feeding the birds in a park sees a bird land near him and come up for some food. He doesn’t normally see birds that look like this one. He looks in his field guide to birds and it’s not in there. There’s one that looks like it but has yellow streaks on its wings. So he paints yellow streaks on the bird’s wings before feeding it. Of course, now the bird is going to have some social and aerodynamic problems, but at least it’s a real bird now.

I trust you see what I’m getting at.

Dictionaries are like field guides. They’re not legislation. They tell you what you can see in the wild, but they’re not always exhaustive, and they lag behind reality. We’re editing. We do what we do to enable and enhance communicative effectiveness. We’re not repainting birds.

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infra dig

Posted on May 8, 2013 | 2 comments

This little epithet is a favourite of mine. It has such mixed overtones, and its actual use embodies those contrasts: a slangy, casual clipping of a formal term, used by the confident, vaguely slumming elite to refer to something that is as beneath them as the term sounds like it is.

Let’s start with the echoes. Infra probably makes you think of infra-red (actually properly spelled infrared as one word, but for years in my youth I thought that this rhymed with impaired and did not connect it with the light of longer wavelength than red). Dig is what you do to go further into the ground, but it can also be what you do to something that’s groovy. I think infra dig sounds like the name of some late-’60s psychedelic music group, pumping out singles you can frug to.

But what it actually is is a clipping of infra dignitatem, Latin, ‘below dignity’. It belongs to that set of loose Latin usages characteristic of the rich educated set – the sort of toffee-nosed idle rich nobility who bounded around in the Edwardian era wearing whites during the day and always dressing for dinner. People of untold riches and status who always managed to have nicknames such as Binky and Chirps. Imagine P.G. Wodehouse. Or, better, think of any of several movies or series featuring Maggie Smith. You can just hear it: “Oh, but don’t you think that’s rather infra dig, dear?” You wouldn’t want to do something that would dig below you – which is to say undermine you – would you?

This is a term, then, that really speaks mainly of its user. The person speaking it is presenting himself or herself as familiar with Latin to the point of casualness, and not really pedantic about it – a person to whom things come easily, a person who is used to trailing off intonations in a croaky drawl, a person who is not accustomed to questioning his or her superiority. Perhaps these days toffs don’t use it so much; I don’t know. But at least some members of the intellectual elite do: the well-educated, erudite, learnèd and not ashamed to let it be known.

So of course I use this term. I may not be idle rich, but you will seldom find a person more secure in his self-location in the intellectual empyrean. What do I use it in reference to? Rhyming dictionaries, mainly. And anagram finders. To my mind, such things are as utterly infra dig as training wheels on a bicycle. Never mind the old toff idea that associating with the “lower classes” is infra dig. I don’t care about proving I’m rich or high-class – indeed, scorning people on the basis of income is quite beneath me (and not just because I’m not rich). But I simply don’t want to act like someone who, you know, needs help with words. You dig?

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English isn’t the only language with messed-up spelling

Posted on May 6, 2013 | Leave a comment

Today: my latest article for TheWeek.com, on other languages with weird spelling, and how they get that way.

English spelling is terrible. Other languages are worse.

Many languages use an alphabet borrowed from a different language. It’s like building a dining room set using an IKEA kit for a dresser.

One little correction, a typo I spotted too late: in the Irish Gaelic, shuiamhneas should be shuaimhneas. Of course.

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coolth

Posted on May 4, 2013 | 11 comments

He switched on the air, and a pleasing coolth pervaded the room.

What?

I can write that he switched on the heat and a pleasing warmth pervaded the room, right?

So what’s wrong with coolth? Why would we treat it as uncouth?

Don’t bother saying it’s a non-word made up on analogy with warmth. They both come from the same formation, the one that also gave us truth from true, depth from deep, strength from strong (with a vowel alteration), length from long (ditto), sloth from slow, and a few others. And coolth has been in the language since the 1500s at least. It just happens that it has fallen out of favour in recent times and is now used mainly for humour or cuteness. You can still find it in the dictionary.

What are the alternatives? There is coolness. That, like coolth, adds a suffix. It looks perhaps more normal to us now; new words are still being made with ness. But it’s a longer word, and it lacks the minty fresh final sound of coolth. And would we brook warmness? Our alternative is just cool: “In the cool of the evening,” for instance. That uses an adjective as a substantive – in other words, it’s a conversion of an adjective to a noun. We do it with cold: “Come in from the cold.” But we don’t usually do it with warm or hot: “In the warm of the room”? “I have come to appreciate her hot” (rather than hotness)?

And what would the harm be of keeping forms parallel, and having a distinct and concise and soft cold word for the condition of being cool? Why must it now be just a funny form, a word-that-doesn’t-exist-but-should? I really can’t tell you why it has fallen out of fashion and become uncool.

But what we certainly see is that English does not hew much to logic and elegance and all that. No, it goes by what is cool and couth, what we are habituated to and what we have learned. Here is a rule; here are exceptions. Here is a word you see all the time; here is a word you would expect to see quite often but it just doesn’t show up. You infer that the words that should be there but aren’t are somehow, for some reason, uncool. Lacking in coolth, and therefore received without warmth – except the warmth of mirth. Words that match patterns but aren’t used are taken as signs of poor language understanding (we learn early that small children and illiterates use words like goed). And so, though they are cut from the same cloth, they are considered uncouth.

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