17 | September | 2013

Daily Archives: September 17, 2013

parbuckle

Posted on September 17, 2013 | 4 comments

Does this word have just a faintly familiar ring to it somehow? If so, it’s not likely that you were watching Fatty Arbuckle as a parochial swashbuckler parboiling a carbuncle (or a barnacle). You probably heard or read it in a story about the salvage of the Costa Concordia. It’s what they’re calling the technique by which the ship was rolled rightside-up.

Well, it does have a sound suitable for nautical use, anyway. There’s that “arr” near the start, and the “buckle” right after it, and all those echoes I already used above. But it’s not actually originally a nautical term. After all, it’s not all that often that you need to roll a capsized ship back upright by pulling it with ropes.

And actually, what they’re doing to the Costa Concordia isn’t really quite the same as the original use of parbuckle. You see, they have the cables attached to the nearer side and are pulling directly on it. A parbuckle in the original sense would involve running the cables under the ship and then pulling them across the top.

Need a clearer image of what a parbuckle is? (Yes, it’s a noun first, and the verb was derived from that.) If you have shoji blinds on your windows, parbuckle is a good way to describe the way the ropes pull them up. If you don’t, well, do this: Get your significant other to lie on the middle of the bed. Flip up one side of the bedspread and lay it over him or her. Then go around to the other side and pull on that top edge so that your increasingly unimpressed s.o. rolls towards you and off the bed, thump.

The basic definition is thus that a parbuckle is a means of moving objects (usually lifting them up an inclined plane) by using a sling-type arrangement, usually of ropes or cables, so that the object is playing the part of the movable pulley. It also means that for every two metres you pull, the object moves one metre (thus you need only half the power that simpy lifting or pulling it would take). So it’s a way of moving heavy barrels up a slope, for instance.

The looser definition, used with the Concordia, is to roll a ship upright by pulling on the side (and making sure it rolls rather than just sliding). Well, it’s a fun word to say and at the same time sounds kinda technical – it’s not a word most people have heard before – so why not. And we know that newscasters just love, love, love to introduce an item with “It’s called ____.” In this case, “It’s called parbuckling.” And then you wait with bated breath to find out if parbuckling is more like twerking, more like tweeting, more like huffing, more like abseiling, or… more like pulling.

Where do we get this word? It’s not entirely clear. What we know is that it showed up in English in the 1600s as parbuncle, and a century or so later started being used as parbuckle because, well, belts and buckles and so on. It just sounded righter. Where did it come to English from? Maybe a Scandinavian word with bits referring to a pair of loops, but no one has seen an actual instance of such a word.

But what the heck. It’s a fun word. Enjoy it. You probably won’t get that many chances to use it. Polish it and stick it in your silverword drawer to bring out about as often as the runcible spoons.

4 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged parbuckle, word tasting notes

stracciatella

Posted on September 17, 2013 | 1 comment

Ah, you can see this is a nice, lovely, long Italian word. Look at those two c’s (with an i after, at that), and those parallel l’s, sort of like skis to go with the boots of the c’s. It has three a’s dispersed in it, one of which at the end. It looks extra yummy because it ends like Nutella – and, you know, those c’s kinda look like hazelnut shells too, when you think of it. Hmm, it does have a sort of shellish brittleness. Ah, what could this be?

Well, it’s an Italian word borrowed unaltered into English, so the odds are excellent that it’s to do with either music or food. You could certainly sing it – hold that double l extra long, stretch it out. But you can taste it so deliciously on your tongue, too: the opening /stra/ with the /r/ properly trilled, the long affricate – in Italian you say it like not “stra-cha” but “strat-cha” – and then to the tap and luscious lick, and all on the tip of the tongue. It’s not such a stretch, to tell the truth, to see it as a word for some kind of food.

But what food? Not pasta; that’s usually pluralized: tagliatelle, not tagliatella. Hmm. Maybe a kind of gelato (or ice cream)? Or perhaps a type of soup? Maybe an extract of some sort?

Yes. Yes. And, in one way of seeing it, yes.

Stracciatella is a kind of gelato yes. It’s vanilla with little shavings of chocolate in it. Like chocolate chip, but less chunky.

Stracciatella is also a kind of soup. It’s an Italian egg drop soup. The eggs are beaten with cheese and seasonings and then dropped into the soup and whisked in, so they float around in little shreds.

Always make sure you’re clear which one you’re ordering, but there will probably be few cases of possible confusion.

Here’s a tip about Italian words: if you see a stra at the beginning, it probably comes from Latin extra. So is this gelato or soup extra something? Hmm, well, not exactly; in this case the extra is extracted out of context – from extractare, which is ex plus tractare. That word – meaning ‘pull out’ – is the root, of course, of English extract, but also of Italian stracciare, ‘tear up, rip up, shred’. (Incidentally, neither shred nor stretch is etymologically related to this word.) And stracciare is the source of stracciatella, which names a soup with shreds of egg in it or a gelato with shreds of chocolate.