Monthly Archives: September 2013

jot

Posted on September 3, 2013 | 1 comment

What word does jot go with?

There are two most likely answers, and which one you choose will say a little something about your literary disposition.

The older of the two, and the one more restricted to literary and Biblical references now, is tittle. The original vector for it in English is Matthew 5:18 in the King James Bible: “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” These days people will speak of every jot and tittle or not a jot or tittle, but most of them probably don’t know one iota of the literal reference. Which I will get to in a moment.

The newer travelling companion of jot, and since the 1970s the more common one (see this Google ngram), is down. This is not jot the noun now; this is jot the verb. You don’t have to jot things down; you can jot a few notes, for instance. But you almost always do jot things down (or jot down things) – notes, thoughts, things, ideas.

As the Google ngram will show you, jot is well past its heyday as a noun, but is gradually increasing as a verb (after a slight slump between the ’40s and the ’70s). Well, why not? It’s a nice, quick word, something you really could jot down. And there’s such a nice little tight chewiness to the word – it makes me think of chewing a flaxseed between my incisors (something I do with some frequency, as I like multigrain bread for my morning toast). It has nice tastes of jut, jet, jitney, and perhaps jute and jaw. Maybe even chit and chutney.

Are the noun and the verb related, really? After all, the noun means a small thing, while the verb means to write quickly and sketchily. But yes, the verb – which showed up in English two centuries after the noun – is based on the noun, from the idea of making quick small marks. You know, jots and tittles. I suppose they could have said tittle it down instead of jot it down, but that wouldn’t have been as short – though it might have been more titillating.

And whence comes this word in the first place? Really a translation failure. You know how when you get a computer to translate some text, if it doesn’t know a translation for a word it just keeps it as it is? Well, William Tyndale, in making his 1526 translation of the Bible (on which the King James Bible was heavily based), encountered the word iota and, in spite of the fact that he encountered it in the Greek (ἰῶτα) and had every reason to know the word and know what it was intending to convey, decided simply to transliterate it into English as iott (the letter j was not an independent letter yet; it was just an alternate form of i, and represented sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant – just as u and v were two shapes of a similarly bivalent letter).

Perhaps he assumed his readers would also have some knowledge of Greek. How much knowledge? The alphabet would be enough. You see, iota is the name of the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet: ι. In the Latin alphabet it became i; they started to jot a dot atop it just to make it stand out a little more. A little more? A tittle more – a tittle is any teeny little mark such as an accent or dot.

And both jot and tittle are still with us – neither has passed away yet. But now that I’ve jotted down this disquisition, my daily duty is at least fulfilled.

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perihelion

Posted on September 2, 2013 | 1 comment

This word makes me think of Murray Perahia, a well-known concert pianist, but it also makes me think of Trent Reznor and Stig Larsson, as well as sci-fi author Dan Simmons and a British perfume chain.

It makes me think of Reznor and Larsson because one of the pieces on Reznor’s sound track for the movie of Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is called “Perihelion.” It’s a brooding, atmospheric piece, the sort of thing I used to hear on CBC Radio 2’s program Nightline when I was delivering newspapers at 5 am in Edmonton under the aurora borealis. It all fit together very well then. Of course I didn’t hear this piece at the time, as Larsson hadn’t even written the book in 1989. But the style fits. Never mind that I never delivered papers at perihelion – I did it for less than a year and missed the dead of winter.

It makes me think of Dan Simmons because it seems like a name for a book he could have written. But no, that’s Hyperion. But there are books out there called Perihelion, including a book in the Isaac Asimov’s Robot City series (the book is by William F. Wu) and a sci-fi erotica title by Sylvia Walters.

And it makes me think of a British perfume chain because the chain is called Penhaligon’s. Which to my ears has an echo of perihelion.

This word also seems somehow arch to me. The /p/ at the front is pert, perhaps prim but perhaps perky, but a /h/ in the middle of a word always seems to have a current of violence or vehemence or some reptilian, perhaps ophidian, quality, especially when it is so heavily exhaling between two vowels. Could it all be the heavy purr-exhaling of a lion?

It’s Greek, originally, as you may have noted. The peri typically means ‘around, about’; the helion is from the root for ‘sun’. The ancient Greeks didn’t use this word because they had no reason to; there was no conception of bodies orbiting the sun on elliptical paths until rather later, and it didn’t really seem necessary to invent a word just to talk about Daedalus and Icarus. Johannes Kepler invented the word in a Latinized form as perihelium in 1609, and it was soon thereafter modified into a purely Greek form. It’s the opposite of aphelion (which is pronounced as ap plus helion, not a plus phelion). In an elliptical orbit around the sun, the aphelion is when the body (planet, comet, asteroid) is farthest from the sun, and the perihelion is when it is closest.

So how’s your memory of the astronomy you learned in school? When is the earth closest to the sun in its elliptical orbit? Not when it’s summer in the northern hemisphere… Nope, earth’s perihelion is January 3, and its aphelion July 4. I will glide past the fact that the earth is farthest from its source of light on the American national holiday. There are no national holidays on January 3, although I do note that on that day in 1496 Leonardo da Vinci tested a flying machine… without success.

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Coxsackie

Posted on September 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

You may be fortunate enough to go through life without reason to encounter this name, but since I make my living handling information about health, I inevitably met it in the term Coxsackie virus (also sometimes written closed up, as is a standard practice for virus names: Coxsackievirus).

I should first say that, as you have probably guessed, the virus is named after a place. This is common enough for viruses; other places so honoured include Norwalk, Ohio, and Lyme, Connecticut. The place in this case is – can you guess it? Oh, let me give you some clues.

First of all, it’s morphologically opaque; the word appears to be a concatentation of English morphemes that make no sense together, so it’s probably an Anglicization from an indigenous language of a colonized place. The use of c rather than k suggests it was rendered into English somewhat more than a century ago. The use of x is especially telling, particularly in xs: since the x represents a “ks” sound and not something like “sh” from an adapted orthography, there’s a decent chance it’s from a place that had some Dutch influence at one time or another (the Dutch, remember, are the people who gave us names such as Schillebeeckx and Hendrix). Where might that be? Well, think of Tuxedo Park, New York, not too far north of New York City.

Indeed, Coxsackie is not all that much farther up the Hudson River, in New York. Its name comes from ma-kachs-hack-ing (that’s how it’s spelled in Wikipedia, though it’s not an exquisitely phonetic spelling), which was rendered by the Dutch as Koxhackung. The English, when they took over, kept the x but changed the K to a C, as was their wont in the 1700s. And they conformed it to familiar shapes: cox, sack, and the suffix ie.

I think I probably don’t need to point out that, aside from the effect of those bits, the overtones of this word are on the impolite side for most readers. But the sound of it is very crisp and mechanical, like the loading and cocking of a gun or the operation of an old printing press.

Now, then, to the unpleasant bit: Coxsackie virus. The virus was named after an outbreak in the eponymous town. The Coxsackie virus is in the same family as the polio virus, and it has some pretty nasty effects. It is among the leading causes of meningitis, and it can lead to a variety of disabilities. Read a little bit more about the discovery of the virus etc. at virology blog (yes, there is a blog for that, in fact probably more than one; there’s a blog for everything).

One thing that I note about the Coxsackie virus is that belongs to the enterovirus genus Picornaviridae. This seems somehow just a little glancingly suitable, as it has a rather off-colour overtone to go with the blue overtones of Coxsackie. I mean the p and, soon after, orn. You might miss that with all the other overtones, such as pico, corn, and corona, but if you’ve been primed for it, it’s there.

And if you’re wishing you hadn’t gotten started with what Coxsackie sounds like, well, be glad that it’s just the sound of it that’s infecting your brain. If you had caught the actual virus, that would really suck, eh?

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