Monthly Archives: December 2013

nocturne

Posted on December 17, 2013 | 2 comments

Listen to the music of the night.

No, I’m not talking about some phantom. I’m not even talking about “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues. I mean a nocturne. A quiet, moody composition, often for solo piano, evocative of the night: a solo instrument like a single light, a sound perhaps reminiscent of the arpeggiated strumming of a guitar, perhaps the call of a nightbird floating on top of it. “A expressive melody in the right hand is accompanied in the left by broken chords,” says Michael Kennedy in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music.

Broken chords. The cords are broken, the bonds, the harmony. This can be a hard word, nocturne, giving you a knock and a turn; such things happen nocturnally… JK Rowling knows it, for she named the street of the darker arts Knockturn Alley. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow knows. And night is all shadow.

No, not all. Night is a beautiful time for photography: lamps are lit, and the light is clear, directional, moody, angular; I’ve taken many pictures I like at that time, such as this one and this one. Night is a beautiful time for painting, too: James McNeill Whistler painted several works he called nocturnes depicting nighttime scenes with a fantastic half-seen moodiness; see Night in Black and Gold, The falling Rocket. Night is when light is not taken for granted.

So night is not just the school of hard knocks. It is also the school of soft nox – Latin for ‘night’, related via Proto-Indo-European to the word night, and root of nocturnus, source of French nocturne. It is not all white satin, but sometimes we want the night of the soul, because night is a time for mystery and love and focus and quiet. Sometimes we want to savour the complex and half-known emotions, when we cannot not yearn and doubt; we want to taste the times when there is no turn or no return, when bonds are weak or broken and nothing can be taken for granted, when we do not know if we will ever again find the welcoming threshold, the times when the only answer is music and art. Music like one of Chopin’s nocturnes – this one, maybe: Nocturne no. 20 in C minor, performed by Valentina Lisitsa.

Can you hold a candle to a beautiful nocturne? You can hold a candle because of one: You are walking through the dark, holding a dim candle, the doubtful music playing in the distance, lightly trilling on your heartstrings, and you don’t know where you are going. You continue unsteadily forward, one hand barely able to see the other, a step, a step, a step, and before you, now, you see a door, framed with a soft glow. And so you knock, turn the handle…

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Wah-wah in podcast

Posted on December 16, 2013 | 1 comment

The Week has a section of podcasts – audio versions of some of its articles. We’ve made one of my most recent article, on wah-wah pedals and acoustic phonetics. Now you can hear me narrating it and listen to the examples mentioned all in one easy six-and-a-half-minute shot. It’s at theweek.com/article/index/254186/the-science-of-making-a-guitar-sound-like-a-human-voice or soundcloud.com/theweek/the-science-of-making-a-guitar.

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ornery

Posted on December 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

There’s plenty about Christmas to make people crusty. Of course, there are many people who don’t cotton to the religious side of it at all, and that’s one thing. But for those who do – and even for many of those who don’t – the whole rush and crush and commercial spectacle of it, really a reheated Saturnalia frozen dinner with an overspiced commercial junk sauce poured all over it, can be vexing. And we all know how we, as humans, can be so easily vexed. People are prone to wishing death over ambiguities of grammar that have no effect on comprehension. So of course the biggest holiday madness of the year is going to be prime provocation for making the ordinary person quite ornery. But then there’s the music.

Yes, OK, not everyone likes “Christmas music,” that’s true. There’s no music so wonderful that someone won’t dislike it. With Christmas music, there is indeed an awful lot of dreck and schmaltz (two Yiddish words, by the way, so I guess that’s irony). But there’s also a lot of really nice music that was written for Christmas or is at least mainly sung at Christmas. We really have to distinguish between disliking “Christmas music” and disliking all Christmas music.

One of my favourite tunes that are heard mainly at Christmas is “I Wonder as I Wander.” If you’re not familiar with it – or even if you are – have a listen to this duet do a sweet and not overdone version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQWqkOi175k. I rather think anyone who dislikes that song must be more than a little peevish.

The song, as you will learn in greater depth if you watch this little video, was “collected” by John Jacob Niles in July, 1933; he got it, or anyway some of it, from the daughter of a revivalist preacher in Murphy, North Carolina. The preacher and his family were about to be run out of town for being a public nuisance – camping in the town square, hanging their wash on the Confederate monument, generally being common and low-grade and disagreeable – but they needed money to buy the gas to get out, and the daugher, Annie Morgan, managed to get a couple of dollars off of Niles by singing him bits of this song that had been written who knows when by who knows who. Niles took what he heard and tidied it up and wrote some more.

Anyway, if you’re getting impatient to find out what on earth all this has to do with ornery, well, if you actually listened to the song – I sure hope you did, and if you didn’t, I think you should know I can see how many times people click on each link in my blog articles, so you’re not getting away with it – you will have noticed this line:

For poor ornery people like you and like I

Now, some people in their transcriptions of the lyrics have put that as o’n’ry or similar forms, the idea being that it’s just some poor-folks version of ordinary. But the thing is, although that’s where ornery comes from – an ordinary so ordinary that it’s lost some of its teeth and just sort of rolls through the mouth without a stop – that’s not the current meaning, and wasn’t by the the mid-1800s. It’s possible that the original author of the song may have just meant ‘ordinary’, but more likely he or she didn’t. No, the sense is – and already commonly was by the time the song was written – not just ‘common’ but ‘unpleasant’ and ‘mean’ and ‘willful’ and ‘cantankerous’ and ‘contrary’ and ‘disputatious’.

It’s a good word for that sort of thing. The orn may not sound pointed but it has echos of horns, and the word as a whole seems made to be growled in a curmudgeonly way by someone played by, say, Jerry Orbach. It curls around in the mouth like the spheres of an orrery (the motions of the celestial orbs reduced to a mechanism cranked like clockwork in a little space), groaning in mournful irony. The retroflex /r/ sound is often associated with the very common, from rural folk to pirates; posh people are thought of as dropping it.

This mulishness of ornery gives the song part of its force. It’s one thing to say that someone like Jesus came to die for ordinary people; it’s another to say plainly that he came to die for basic a-holes and rotten jerks. Those cretins who drive so rudely you hope they wrap themselves around a tree sometime. The people who can’t manage to be nice even for a couple of seconds in a shopping mall. Their screaming children, too. The public nuisances.

Also people who grumble about Christmas and Christmas music. People like you and like I. And, by the way, people who get exercised about turns of grammar such as “people like you and like I.” Ornery all. It’s very ordinary to be ornery.

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guillemet, guillemot

Posted on December 12, 2013 | 2 comments

When you read the sea of black on white that is a text, it is as diverse and full of different life forms as the sea itself. It boils with the fantastic fish of words, all their different shapes, and the plankton and krill of periods and commas, and the catching bird claws of apostrophes and quotation marks, and on and on. But just as different seas have different kinds of life, so different languages have different forms of life in their textual waters. Some languages – French in particular – have birds that dive into their waters and swim after the fish: « these ». You see the wings angle as they push through and catch the text they enclose. They are all cupidity, hunger, desire in the head.

Desire in the head? How about a helmet of desire? There’s a name for that: will plus helm becomes Wilhelm or William or Guillaume or or or. And Guillaume has its diminutives and derivatives, two of which being Guillemet and Guillemot.

A French printer of the 1500s, Guillaume Le Bé (“Billy the B” in English, I suppose), invented handy little marks for enclosing quotations, and so those marks, « », came to be named for him, guillemets. The name might have you thinking of gulls, but these marks are not like any gull I’ve met; they are smaller, and black. They are like black birds that dive into the water and chase fish for their dinner. Black (sometimes black-and-white) birds that are called guillemots, not because they have helmets of desire (though they desire fish and chase them with their heads that sometimes look helmeted), but simply because they are named after the French name Guillemot, about which see above. They might look like gills for your bons mots, but they aren’t to help the words breathe; they’re to devour them in the open air.

But, oh, a note of warning. Guillemet is still entirely a French word, occasionally lent to English, and we say it like the French – the English approximation is “gee a meh” (with a g as in guy). Guillemot, on the other hand, has been comfortably in English for centuries, quite long enough to gain a spelling pronunciation: “gill a mot.” It has that French look but sounds more comfortable with the dipping claws “ and ”.

Meanwhile, the real textual guillemots, the guillemets, continue their dives into the chill waters of the text, never coming out empty-mouthed. « Bon appétit ».

Thanks to John Eerkes-Medrano for inspiring this note.

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cakehole, piehole

Posted on December 12, 2013 | 1 comment

“Shut your piehole.”

“Shut your cakehole.”

OK, which is ruder?

Obviously, both are rude. Even “shut your bouche” would be rude, though also confused. But there’s something particulary nasty about piehole and cakehole. If we see them in a context other than shut your, it’s likely to involve a word such as cram or stuff: “He gobbled down as much as he could cram into his cakehole.” “He stuffed it quickly into his piehole.” Want further evidence that these are low, rude words? Compare this: “The queen took the most delicate forkful of camembert soufflé and placed it delicately in her cakehole.” Did you laugh? Proof: the contrast is absurd.

It’s fairly plain to see that hole is a rude word when applied to a mouth. A hole, after all, is a simple, round, inarticulate thing; other holes we have on the body are the earholes and the nostrils (which have a non-hole name) and one other hole, an especially vulgar one. The resonance is clear. Hole is, after all, a plain old Anglo-Saxon word, of the stock that for a few hundred years was associated with the ruder folk while the court preferred French and the scholars used Latin.

So is cake. It has cognates throughout Western European languages, especially Germanic and Balto-Slavic ones. Of course, cake is delicious – everyone loves cake, and some people gobble it greedily, cramming it in their cakeholes. But cake is also a verb that is not always pleasant. What sort of thing gets caked on? Exactly.

Pie, on the other hand, while having been in English since medieval times (think of Simon the pie man, from the nursery rhyme), is not an Anglo-Saxon word in origin. In fact, it appears to come from Latin originally, by way of a bird. A bird? Not four-and-twenty blackbirds, no; a bird that is famous for collecting all sorts of odd things: the magpie, formerly called just the pie, from Latin pica by way of some later Romance languages. It seems that a pie was conceived of as a sort of omnium gatherum dish (mincemeat comes to mind).

Pie has long been a popular dessert, of course, and in many ways a demotic one: there’s the old story of a royal visiting a small town in western Canada and being told, after the main course, “Keep your fork, Duke, there’s pie.” Not “Keep your fork, Duke, there’s cake,” though that would give a more consistent sound. No, cake is a more elevated thing: remember, Marie Antoinette was supposed to have said, in an oblivious insult, that peasants without bread could eat cake (actually brioche in the original). (This line had earlier been attributed to others, and most likely no one ever said it as such.) “Let them eat cake”? How rude. But “Let them eat pie”? Mmm, delicious. It’s true that royals have eaten lamprey pie (and many other kinds), but the associations are established: cake is a loftier dessert, but the word also has more unpleasant overtones, which lend further to cakehole. (There is also possible effect from K-hole, a bad trip caused by a particular party drug colloquially referred to as special K, but that’s in more limited circulation.) Cake is also a harder word, with those /k/ and /k/ stops kicking at front and back. Pie starts with a pop and then fades out.

In any event, cakehole is somewhat older – it dates from at least the early 1900s, while piehole only starts showing up in the 1960s and then more in the 1980s and on – and cakehole is by a long measure the more used of the two. I would say it’s also the ruder. If you disagree, just cram something in your piehole and shut your cakehole.

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What puts the “wah” in the wah-wah?

Posted on December 10, 2013 | 1 comment

My latest article for TheWeek.com is really an introduction to acoustic phonetics. But it’s catchier to approach it from the Jimi Hendrix angle…

The science of making a guitar sound like a human voice

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xing

Posted on December 9, 2013 | 4 comments

Every so often I will see a sign on a street, PEDESTRIAN XING or STOP PEDESTRIAN XING. To me, these seem like names of communist plays from China: the first one about a man who walks everywhere talking about the virtues of the collective, and the second one where he goes renegade and must be stopped. Of course this only makes sense if you know that xing is not only a Chinese word but also a Chinese surname.

OK, no, actually, it’s several Chinese (specifically Mandarin) words, including a surname. Actually, in total, including all four tones, there are 75 characters that can be said as xing (the x is pronounced like something between “s” and “sh,” so the sound of this word is like that of a sword being unsheathed). Many of them are uncommon and used only in combinations. But you’ll really like what the most common of them is: 行, pronounced with rising tone: xíng. It means ‘walk, go, move, OK’ – the ‘OK’ being in the same vein as French ça va, ‘it goes’. A pedestrian, in Chinese, is xíngrén; since rén means ‘person’ or ‘man’, xíngrén 行人 is translatable as ‘walkman’ (and doesn’t 行人 somehow look like someone walking past a crossing guard or gate?).

But even if the pedestrian is named Xíng – since the Chinese for ‘be named’ is xìng 姓, we would say xíngrén xìng Xíng – it doesn’t quite mean it’s like calling him Walker, because the Xíng that’s a name is a different character, 邢.

Also among the different words in different tones that are xing are ones for ‘prosper’, ‘star’, ‘shape’, ‘punishment’, ‘pleasure’, ‘awaken’, ‘luck’, and ‘nature’, and a wide variety of derived senses that come from the combination of one of those with one or more other characters (for instance, xīngqī 星期 ‘week’ uses the ‘star’ one). Hardly pedestrian in its variety, I’d say!

But you won’t connect to any of that if you’re unfamiliar with Chinese – indeed, you won’t even think of it as being said like “shing” unless you know some other language that uses x for a “sh” sound, such as Portuguese, which gives us such words as Xingu, the name of a river in Brazil (probably not so named from someone saying “River, I am crossing you!”).

No, if you’re an Anglophone, you’ll probably go with the usual sound we make when we see x at the beginning of a word: “z.” So xing would be pronounced “zing.” And PEDESTRIAN XING could be a place where you zing pedestrians. Or something else – Mercedes Durham, @drswissmiss, Tweeted, “as a child I thought xing was the word for where animals crossed road (pronounced ‘zing’).”

Or it could be pronounced “exing,” as in “exing something out” – also spelled x-ing. Because, really, x is first of all an X; it’s crossed lines, but when we talk of a cross it’s usually more like a plus sign, +. But PEDESTRIAN +ING? No, that would be confusing, wouldn’t it. On the other hand, xing looks like it could be read “multiplying” – and that would be a whole other thing.

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sylphlike

Posted on December 8, 2013 | 1 comment

In my note on svelte, I used the word sylphlike (ahh) and said “I have to catch my breath after the frisson that runs down me saying that word.” As you can see, this is persistently true.

What is it about this word that gives me such a flash of soft delight, so unselfconscious? No doubt it has something to do with that softest of fricatives /f/ between the two liquids /l/ and /l/, like the sensation of sliding between two silk sheets. In fact, watch how you say the /lfl/: your tongue most likely stays touching its tip behind your teeth while your voice cuts out and your lower lip makes that delicate, hesitant but wanting gesture against your upper teeth as I described in svelte. The net effect is like a hand touch being surreptitiously maintained while lips brush your cheek accidentally on purpose. And at the beginning of the word is a whisper, and at the end the /k/ makes the tongue kiss the palate at the back, near the neck.

I think, too, that this word has a strong taste of snowflake, which is the most sylphlike form of water. There is also the airiness of soufflé. And that’s appropriate, because a sylph is, originally, an air spirit, a light sprite, the waif fashion models of the spirit world.

You may reasonably think that a sylph is a figure from Greek mythology, source of naiads and dryads and fauns, language that has given us so many ph and y words. And indeed sylph (and from it sylphlike (ahhh)) may owe something to Greek. But the word itself, like the thing it names, is a creation of Paracelsus, a 16th-century German physician and alchemist and generally interesting person (do look him up, won’t you). He described them as invisible elemental beings of the air, and the word appears to have come from a blend of Latin sylva ‘wood’ and Greek nymph (I am just going to assume you know the word nymph).

The modern application of sylph to a light, lean, svelte, slender, graceful girl no doubt owes something to the airiness and to the nymphiness. It is worth noting that Paracelsus’s sylphs had no soul, which adds further to the air the word has of waify fashion models.

But even if sylph has too extreme a sense for many a person, sylphlike (oh) may be applied with less self-flattery or self-flagellation, a word for a person who is not quite so airy-fairy or soulless but still occupies the ethereal realm of your mind and eyes, and a word that dives into the soft heather but does not stay there; it flies out again, a brush with a fleeting touch and withdrawal, a flicker, a flirt, a soulful afflatus. A word that is made to be whispered softly and closely into the ear. A word that looks as though its hair is standing on end – and that makes my hair stand on end. But in the best way possible.

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frugvolous

Posted on December 7, 2013 | 2 comments

My wife is a generally frugal person, but she does like to blow the occasional wad on something frivolous. I wouldn’t say she’s penny-wise and pound-foolish – she’s generally pound-wise too – but she has her breakout moments from fiscal restraint. We were talking about it today, and I confected a word for it. Fruval? Frigolous? No, let’s blend just a little bit more. Frugvolous.

And of course you have to know the two words blenderized into this one or you won’t know how to pronounce it. After all, the frug is obviously a closed syllable, so we don’t normally do the “long” sound – indeed, we usually do a whole other sound altogether, the sound in drug. But English is a language with a rather frugal set of letters (not much more than half as many as we have sounds that they represent) but a frivolous way of using them to represent sounds. So this frug is the same sound as in frugal – and in the dance called the frug, which is frugal in the footwork and frivolous in the arm movements.

Where do the two bits of this word come from? From Latin, both of them. The frugal part is from frugalis, ultimately from frux, ‘profit, utility, fruit’ (yes, fruit and fructose come from it too). And frux is properly pronounced to rhyme with cooks. The frivolous part is from frivolus ‘silly, empty, trifling, brittle’, ultimately from friare ‘break, rub away, crumble’. So somehow frugvolous derives from crumbly fruit.

I guess you could also spell this word frugvalous – why don’t I let the readers (and any future users) vote on that in action. But I wonder which of the two would tempt more to mispronunciation: i.e., to putting the stress on the second syllable instead of the first.

No surprise that anyone would do that, though. The two consonants /gv/ back to back make it harder for the second syllable to be entirely reduced and unstressed. We don’t normally pattern sounds that way. But there’s no specific rule that forces stress to be on one syllable and not another in English; we have general patterns, but so many exceptions, largely thanks to having stolen so many words from various other languages.

I guess we could look for a single word that would express the alternation of frugal and frivolous. But that word would not, in form, actually be constructed from an alternation of frugal and frivolous. Why not be frugal with the available word forms and frivolous in how we combine them?

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svelte

Posted on December 4, 2013 | 2 comments

Oh, to be svelte. To be as light as felt, a suave fellow or a lass as light as a velleity, not swelling like Elvis but sweltering hot: no thicker than the drop of sweat that falls down your brow at the sight or the plucked eyebrows of a stylish lady. And stylish, yes, svelte always seems stylish, fitted, bespoke tailored.

For this is a word thick with connotation. Look on Visual Thesaurus: svelte connects to three nodes, one of which branches to slight, slim, slender, another to lithe, lissome, lissom, supple, sylphlike (I have to catch my breath after the frisson that runs down me saying that word), lithesome, and again slender, and the third to polished, refined, and urbane. The svelte person may be lean but is not meagre; this is a person of substance as Cognac is a beverage of substance. To be svelte is to have the air of an eau-de-vie of humanity: a special one plucked out from among the many. I was in my youth slender by nature but could barely manage svelte at even the best of times.

Obviously the word seems to privilege leanness, although I would not say it necessarily implies that a person who is not lean cannot be attractive or of substance – there are other words for them; this just isn’t a word for those with much more than a whippet’s physique.

Look at the word: you can read into its forms the traits of its object if you wish, the lithe s, the plunging v-neck on the evening gown or the lapels of a tuxedo, the svelte tall man l and his svelte consort t, and the eyes e e that watch them pass. Say it: your lips barely move but your lower lip just lightly brushes against your teeth, making the small gesture that might pass over the soft, light lips of a lean beauty as she thinks carefully whether she can keep herself from kissing this dashing fellow, or over the fellow’s lips as he, too, uncertainly prepares for possible osculation with this sylphlike (ahhh) lass.

You can also guess that the word may have roots in Italian and French. The silent e ending that doesn’t make the previous vowel “long” is a sign of French, but the sv onset is not – much more likely Italian, since the word doesn’t overall look Sanskrit or Swedish. And in fact English got this word unchanged from French, which modified it from Italian svelto, past participle of svellere ‘pull out’, originating with Latin ex ‘out’ plus vellere ‘pull, pluck’.

There aren’t too many other words that have made it into English with sv at the start; the OED lists 12, of which half are proper nouns, and four are from Sanskrit, four Scandinavian, only one Italian. The fictitious character Svengali is one of the remainder: the mesmeric impresario of the chanteuse Trilby. The least svelte term of the bunch is the linguistic term svarabhakti, which is borrowed from Sanskrit. It names the insertion of an excrescent vowel sound into a word, as when one says “fillum” for film – or “sa-velt” for svelte: an unfashionable thickness.

Thanks to Hal Davis for suggesting today’s word.

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