Yearly Archives: 2013

fogy, fogey

Posted on August 12, 2013 | 2 comments

You get to an age where your eyes, your hair, your memory, are all foggy, and you feel like a fat guy sitting chewing a stogie trying to figure out what you’re forgetting while you grumble about all the guff you have to put up with and how everything was so much better for a guy like you back when things were the way they were…

An old foggy grump. An old fogrum. Fogrum? That’s an old word that’s not used anymore, but seems to be a variant on fogey, or vice versa.

Fogey? Fogy? Ah, which is it, now? Old fogeys or old fogies? Why do they have to make these things so complicated? And why isn’t the g pronounced like “j” since there’s a front vowel after it?

Oh, those were the days. The 1700s, when this word seems to have shown up. The days when not everyone was literate. When things weren’t always spelled the same way all the time. When people said what they said and when they wrote it down they tried to find a way to write it down that seemed sensible enough. Not like these people nowadays who spell words so wrong because they don’t know how to spell them so they just go with how they sound. What?

So anyways, how would you write /fo gi/? With that “hard g” before the “ee” sound? As foguey? Come on, that’s so French. Might as well write faux guy. As foghi? Aside from being Italian, who would get that right? No, in English you could go with fogy or fogey or fogie. As it happens, the first two are used, and the third one isn’t. But it used to be. And in Scots English, there’s foggie. Which might be the origin of the word. But not as in misty; as in a now disused sense meaning ‘fat’.

But the original Scots sense was (per the OED) ‘an invalid or garrison soldier’, and the word fogrum – meaning the same as our common current sense of an old outmoded person – appears to at least slightly pre-date the current sense of fog(e)y. So hmm. But where, exactly, does fogrum (also spelled fogram) come from? No one seems to know. Maybe one old guy did and he forgot.

And, oh, which spelling is better, with or without the e? Well, as Jim Taylor, who suggested this word, found out, Google gives you twice as many hits for fogy… but if you look at the image searches associated with the two spellings, fogey gets you pictures of grumpy old guys, while fogy gets you pictures of foggy landscapes.

As Jim says, “Go figure.”

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penthouse

Posted on August 11, 2013 | Leave a comment

Travelling through Toronto today, I saw a large advertisement for 2-storey penthouses in a new building soon to be built. I’ve just had a look at their advertising brochure online. The places are indeed at the top of a building, and undeniably swish with large terraces and high ceilings and so forth. Mind you, three of the five for sale are less than 750 square feet (not counting the terraces), and the other two are in the 1300 and 1400 square foot range. And I’m sure they’re all listing in the seven figures…

The marketing material is all about life at the top and upward mobility. Cute puns, of course, but they sure do play into the image: a penthouse is the diadem at the top of a high building (like the top of the h in the word penthouse), the special space above the rest with luxurious appointments, the quarters to which urban dwellers aspire. A penthouse is a place where you can luxuriate in all you’ve spent, a place where a playboy (hmm, penthouse, playboy) can satisfy his pent-up desires to get into the penties (or whatever) of top models, perhaps on pretext of painting them or photographing them with his Pentax.

It is, in short, the exact opposite of, say, a little sloped-roof shed annex onto the side of a house. The penthouse is no shabby appendix! It is the apex!

This would, of course, be the point where I tell you that penthouse comes originally (by way of Norman French appentice) from Latin appendix, brought into English as pentice and ultimately reanalyzed as penthouse, the pent part being thought of as the (now uncommon) word for a sloped roof. And that it originally referred to a little sloped-roof annex to a building: a shed, a porch, an outhouse.

So how did it get to the top of a building? In the late 1800s, the janitor or caretaker of a sizeable building might have a residence built for him on the roof of the building. So it was an addition to the building, just on the top rather than on the side. From that it came to refer to a residence on the top level of a building. And of course it happens that those residences are normally the most expensive and desirable, thanks to elevators (otherwise the added flights of stairs to walk up and down would make them a bit less appealing). So there we go.

Actually, we don’t go there in my building. Sensibly, the 33-storey building I live in has the exercise room, jacuzzi, and party rooms on the top floor. And the apartments on the 32^nd floor have to put up with noise from above! So the best suites are really two floors below the top… and you really can’t call those penthouses, whether or not they have playboys in them.

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bollard

Posted on August 11, 2013 | 3 comments

This evening, my wife and I took the ferry over to Toronto Island and went to a beach near Hanlon’s Point, after which walked over to the Ward’s Island end by way of the boardwalk. We saw a whole lot of bollards.

What’s a bollard? You may not guess correctly from the above sentence. Where would we have seen them? Not on the beach, for one thing. They’re not birds or body parts. We saw them in two places, actually: the ferry docks and the ends of the boardwalk.

A bollard, you see, is a short post. At the ferry docks, they’re the short things that the ropes from the boats are slung onto and tied around. At the ends of the boardwalk, they’re the waist-high posts spaced close enough together to keep the four-person cycles and other largeish vehicles off. (Some of those big cycles got on from a side entrance anyway.) The traffic posts are named after the nautical posts, which in turn are probably named after a bole, which is a tree trunk. Bollards are also called posts, but that’s kinda boring and unspecial, isn’t it?

After all, post doesn’t have two big posts sticking right up in the middle of it (plus another at each end) like you see in bollard. It also doesn’t have that ring of boulevard and bully and blowhard and a few other similar words, plus bothered. And it doesn’t have that ard ending that has a slight smack of French. Post is a shorter and punchier word, but bollard still has an explosive /b/ to start with. And it has two syllables, and it’s a less common word. So of course it must be the better word, right?

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propaganda

Posted on August 7, 2013 | 2 comments

Propaganda is not a popular thing now. Oh, it’s common enough, but no one wants the information they propagate to be called propaganda. Propaganda is lies! Disinformation! A salmagundi of improper reasoning and puffery propped up like a Potemkin village for the impressionable to gander at!

And we tend to associate it with totalitarian regimes – communist propaganda is a common collocation. I don’t doubt that many people think of it as really a concept that came about in the 20^th century. I suspect some people even think it’s a Russian word. (I have no evidence that anyone thinks it’s the national airline of Uganda, but I suppose by just mentioning that idea I’ve planted it like a seed in fertile minds.)

None of this is altogether true, and some of it is altogether false.

The first English use of propaganda came through an office of the Vatican. The foreign mission office of the Roman Catholic Church was known, from its founding in 1622 until 1967, as the Congregation of the Propaganda, or just the Propaganda for short. (No, they didn’t change the name because someone saw the pagan in the middle.) Now, why would they admit that what they were doing was propaganda? Because it wasn’t until a couple of centuries later that the word even began to have negative overtones. Check your Latin knowledge: a memorandum is something that is to be remembered, a referendum something to be referred; agenda are things to do; QED stands for quod est demonstrandum, ‘which is the thing to be demonstrated’; the famous phrase delenda est Carthago (and variations thereon) means ‘Carthage is to be destroyed’. So propaganda is what? …Things to be propagated.

And what is the origin of propagate, by the way? It’s pro ‘forward, outward’ plus the stem of pangere ‘fix, fasten, plant’; it means ‘reproduce plants, animals, etc.’ Plant seeds, or impregnate, or or or. Be fruitful and multiply. Not just disseminate, which means ‘spread seed’, but actually make sure the seed takes root.

The sense of ‘spreading information to promote a particular cause or point of view’ comes from the early 1800s. Now, the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, and we know that communist movements considered propaganda important. That’s one reason the word has such a negative tone now. But they just wanted to spread the word of their ideas, just like Ayn Rand thereafter did with her completely opposite ones in her books. And Marx’s manifesto may have come out in 1848, but communism wasn’t invented by it; the Oxford English Dictionary has this 1842 quote from the Communist Chronicle & Communitarian Apostle: “The propaganda fund shall be devoted to the propagation of the doctrines of communism.”

But the word was already in common use as such by then; propaganda war and propaganda warfare have OED citations from 1838 and 1840. And Thomas Carlyle used it in 1822 – italicized as a Latin borrowing, however. The word was used in positive and negative senses into the 20^th century, though it gained a negative tone sooner in the US than in Europe, likely because of stronger anti-communist attitudes there.

It’s a fun word to use, with its 4/4 rhythm, opening with a double pop and then the softer bounce off the back and tip of the tongue. I like the look, too: the prop is straight descenders and open circles; the aganda switches from o’s to a’s and it first curves the descender and then turns it upside down to be an ascender. Such a transformation! And so misleading, because the morphological – and true syllabic – break is before the second p, but phonologically we think of it as breaking after the p, which makes the o “short” and makes us think of it as a mixture of prop and something like agenda. Sometimes no one needs to try to mislead us; often enough, our habits of thought and action conduce quite naturally to planting a seed that propagates itself.

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fatberg

Posted on August 6, 2013 | 3 comments

If you thought sharknado was horrifying, wait until you see fatberg.

Seriously, are you eating right now? Because don’t even keep going here until you’ve digested and your stomach is settled and, in fact, basically empty again. If you’re about to eat, choose one or the other – read this or eat – but assume that the two are incompatible.

I think you can sort out the basic morphology of this word. It’s a portmanteau word, a blend of fat and iceberg. That makes it a new formation from well-aged Germanic parts. The berg part – borrowed in from Dutch, probably, but cognate with English barrow – means ‘mountain’, but because we see it in iceberg we think of it as more like ‘enormous floating white mass’. So obviously a fatberg is an enormous mass of white fat. Floating, though? Where?

Sewers.

Eeewwwwwww.

Actually not so much floating as clinging to the sides, generally. It’s very much like those illustrations of plaque in your arteries in cases of coronary artery disease – the arteries get blocked, which can cause a heart attack. Except here the arteries are sewers. And when they get blocked, well… Do I need to tell you? No? Ah, good.

So why is there all this fat down in the sewers? Because people put it down the drain and it congeals. Don’t pretend you’ve never done this. If you cook, you pretty surely have – perhaps when cleaning the fat off a pan after frying some burgers. But what makes it congeal really badly is wet wipes: those towel-like things that don’t quickly disintegrate like toilet paper does. Fat gloms onto them and they come together to make big masses that float and adhere and block pipes. Masses that can take days to clear.

How big do these fatbergs become?

Well, now, this is what makes fatberg the word of the day for today. It’s in the news: there’s one in the London sewer that’s 15 tonnes (16.5 tons for you people who still think in pounds).

Eeeuuuorrrgghhhh.

Oh, but you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. There’s a video with the story. Actually, there are multiple stories on it – this really is as big as sharknado, but it’s real, and it’s soooooo much more disgusting. Here’s the AP story, as seen in Canada’s National Post: “How a monster ‘fatberg’ clogged a London sewer — ‘We’ve never seen a single lump of lard this big’.” And here’s an up-close-and-personal in New Statesman: “I’ve Seen Fatbergs You People Wouldn’t Believe.” And one more little slap for you because you know you’re part of the problem, from The Week: “Why no city is safe from the fatberg.”

Had enough? Well, how do you like the word? Is it yummy? The fat part is actually a fairly crisp word for what it denotes – I find it has more of the hiss and splat of hot fat in a pan. It also reminds me of Chow Yun-Fat and various other Cantonese names (plus the New Year greeting often rendered as “gong hee fat choy”). It’s a fairly lean word, but it’s so primary we generally don’t stop to think of that.

The berg is a fatter-seeming bit though only slightly longer; its stops are voiced and it has that liquid in the middle (actually for most North Americans it’s a sustained [ɹ] with no vowel; for many or most other Anglophones it’s a sustained vowel with no actual [r] or [ɹ]).

The seven letters of the two bits congealed together have three ascenders and one descender; the word moves from soft to crisp to, frankly, a bit blobby. Sort of like the course of that fat you heated in your frying pan and then dumped down the drain. Next time you’ll pour it into an empty milk carton and put it in the garbage, right? Oh, and don’t use wet wipes. Thanks.

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patio

Posted on August 5, 2013 | Leave a comment

This is a nice warm-weather word. Where I live, summer is patio season – meaning that the local bars put out boulevard seating (or backyard seating, or rooftop seating) and people eat and drink outside because it’s warm enough to do that for up to a third of the year, and boy does everyone look forward to it. And of course people who have houses with patios may like to sit out on them too (though some people have decks rather than patios, and some just have lawns, and then there are those of us who live in apartments).

Canadians who were around in 1986 will surely think of Kim Mitchell’s hit song “Patio Lanterns.” Common collocations for patio include back patio, patio furniture, patio door, outdoor patio (which I think is rather redundant, no?), patio table, brick patio, concrete patio, and that general ilk of descriptive phrase from catalogue, narrative, and real estate. It’s a well-ensconced word, though it’s been in the language for less than a century.

It’s also a very good word for illustrating some important factors in the relation of spelling to pronunciation in English. I think it’s safe to say that the ratio of words with atio pronounced with a “sh” rather than a “t” is quite high. Especially if you bring in all the words that end in ation. Well, all except cation.

Here’s how it is: ratio and some other words ending in atio and all those words with the suffix ation come from Latin but have been in the language a long time (or at least the ation suffix has), so they’ve had lots of time to be subjected to nativizing phonological processes – in this case, palatalization and frication of the stop. They’re fully assimilated into the language. We have a few words from Latin such as consolatio (a consolatory piece of writing) and occupatio (a rhetorical tactic wherein one pretends not to mention something but in fact focuses on it – also known as preterition, with the usual pronunciation of ition) that are rarely used and can still be said as quoted from Latin (more or less); they’re not assimilated. And we have cation, which is a kind of ion (a positively charged one, as opposed to a negative anion), so we keep the full value of ion and treat the cat as a prefix (from Greek kata, as it happens; nothing to do with felines, though, as my high school chemistry teacher Mr. Stutz said, “cats have pos”).

And then there’s patio. It’s a Spanish word for a kind of courtyard. It was borrowed into English in the early 20^th century – you can see it in a story by P.G. Wodehouse in 1931. A patio for Anglophones is sometimes concrete, sometimes brick, sometimes asphalt, but always paved, and adjoining the house or building on the exterior. (Except for with restaurants and bars, for which a patio is generally any outdoor seating, including on the rooftop. There are plenty of rooftop patios in Toronto. And that usage is not just local patois.) The Spanish pronunciation has been kept, because it’s a new borrowing and we most often keep the pronunciation fairly close to the source in our more recent borrowings.

Fairly close. Generally as close as a patio is to a house. The Spanish pronunciation won’t have any aspiration on the voiceless stops: no puff of air on the /p/ or /t/. And the a is said as [a] in Spanish. In standard British English, the stops are crisp (though unavoidably aspirated – that’s so standard in English most speakers don’t even know they’re doing it) and the vowel is still [a]. (Of course some dialects would turn the /t/ into a glottal stop.) But in North American English, that a moves forward to [æ], and the t is reduced to a tap, [ɾ], which is not aspirated or devoiced and so sounds more like a [d] (it’s not a [d], but the phoneme /d/ in the same place would be said the same way, [ɾ]). In order to get the same pronunciation in standard British English, you would have to write the word as pario, because [ɾ] for that dialect is an allophone of /r/. So the pronunciation is not entirely concrete; standard phonological processes and common phonotactics have paved the way for this word being an outlying annex in our spelling and pronunciation, and yet fully assimilated to the common property of English.

Oh, yes, common property. That may be where the word originally comes from. The Spanish word patio traces back through Catalan or Occitan to a word for common grazing pasture or uncultivated land; the Latin origin is either pactum ‘agreement’ or patere ‘lie open’. But scholars can’t entirely agree on which it is, so we’ll have to let that question lie open. And repair to the patio for refreshments.

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usurp

Posted on August 4, 2013 | Leave a comment

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Barack Obama said, “there’s not an action that I take that you don’t have some folks in Congress who say that I’m usurping my authority. Some of those folks think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency.”

So tell me, r u surp-rised to see usurp used in that way? “Usurp my authority” – as opposed to usurping someone else’s authority, or simply usurping authority? It sounds slightly odd to at least some people, perhaps even spurious. What does usurp refer to? Taking something that you are not entitled to – typically a place, a power, an ownership, or some similar position of right or prerogative – usually by depriving the entitled person of it. Most often a usurper is someone who deposes a rightful ruler.

So some fellows in congress feel that Obama is claiming authority that he is not entitled to. But who is rightly entitled to it? If it’s congress, many people would say that he’s usurping congress’s authority, not his own.

Funny, though. If a guy is driving a car and someone else thinks it’s stolen, can he say “That guy thinks I stole my car”? Or does he need to say “That guy thinks I stole my car from someone else”? The argument structure may be the same – or may not, depending on your personal experience and use of the word. But many people would expect that a posessive in a case such as this expresses the original or proper owner unless there is further assignment of that role. So… when the posessive is expressing the new possessor, not the original, is it usurping its role, or the original’s role, or, um, what?

Do be careful, whatever you determine, not to use up this word as you slurp it in your mouth over and over. It’s already worn down some. It comes, you see, from a Latin word usurpare which is formed from usus ‘use’ and a crunched version of rapere ‘seize’ (whence raptor, rapid, and some similar words). So ‘seize the use of something’. As perhaps some other word usurped the e and the s when usus and rapere met. And if one pursues the usurper, one should be careful lest he or she usurp the e and s again and leave one mixed up.

Thanks to Barb Adamski for suggesting usurp and directing me to the Obama quote.

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supercilious

Posted on August 1, 2013 | 2 comments

A friend recommended I look at the Brooks Brothers site for some style ideas. But ignore the models. They’re kinda…

Well, as I observed when I looked, they’re standard glamour catalogue models trying to look high-class or intellectual and they just come off supercilious.

And then I said, “Supercilious. Must use that for my blog.”

It is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser, isn’t it? A word for people who look at things with the arch eyebrows and droopy eyelids of cool superiority, dryly commenting with minimal enthusiasm: “Super. Delicious.” They may want to seem super serious, though if they don’t pull it off they can look a little silly. But they’re always annoying. They may think themselves supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, but everybody else sees them as something quite atrocious.

I think supercilious is a good word for it. Five syllables in a two-plus-three rhythm: already demanding and overfull of itself just for that. Three hisses, one at each end and one in the middle; between all that, a pop on the lips and a licking liquid. Aside from the /p/ and the the back vowel /u/, it’s all on or near the tip of the tongue – rather superficial. Ah, superficial: a word that likely echoes an effect on the sense of supercilious. And then, to add to the effete sound of the enunciation, there is an echo of the weak-brained from superstitious. And a little bit of the sound of shilly-shallying.

Actually, look at the sounds of the words that Visual Thesaurus gives as synonyms: sneering, snide, sniffy, swaggering, imperious, prideful, overbearing, lordly, haughty, disdainful. Count all the s’s and l’s in there… Could be coincidence, of course. But doesn’t that parselmouth sound seem appropriate for these Slytherins in the school of life?

So… not so super, per se. More a piece of parsley (French persil) on the plate of society, but not as good for you. We know that super is from Latin for ‘above’… but what about cilious? Is it a kind of wispy cloud? Nope, that’s cirrus. Think back to your biology classes. What are those little eyebrow-like hairs on paramecia? Not Scylla as in and Charybdis, though the supercilious may seem as inviting an option as those creatures. And not Cecilia, who may be supercilious. No, just cilia. From Latin for ‘eyelashes’. But actually the Latin word cilium originally meant ‘eyelid’ – it’s related to celare ‘cover, conceal’ (and the ceal in conceal is from celare).

Sooo… Latin supercilium means what? Yes, ‘eyebrow’. As in the raised eyebrow of haughtiness. So there: it has been revealed. But you had that all figured out already, didn’t you.

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skink

Posted on July 31, 2013 | Leave a comment

This must be the present tense of something smelly, right? You know, skink, skank, skunk – just like stink, stank, stunk? Funny, when you have sink, sank, sunk, you’re in fluid, probably water, nothing necessarily fetid. But add that voiceless stop and the smell kicks in. (Less so with p: spink, spank, spunk? More punkish. And then there’s the musty recollection of Leon Spinks, for those who remember that he beat Muhammad Ali in 1978.)

Except that unlike skunks (and, imputedly, skanks), skinks aren’t notably malodorous. You might do better to kick off the second k and see the skin. What skin? A squamous one, no fur in sight. A skink is not like skunk or mink; it is a kind of lizard. Actually about 1200 kinds of lizards, if by kind you mean ‘species’. They vary quite a bit in size, appearance, the length (and even presence) of legs (usually short, though), and a host of other details, including how they give birth to their young (live? with eggs?).

But skink is such a nice and ready formation of sounds and letters, it’s not so surprising that there are several kinds of skink the word, too. The lizard gets its name via Latin scincus from Greek skigkos σκίγκος (note that gk is pronounced in Greek as we would pronounce nk – the actual sound is [ŋk], so we have the same manner of articulation in a different place, and the Greeks have the same place of articulation with a different manner). But there’s nothing keeping such a word from showing up in a Germanic origin too.

Such as a word for the shank (and indeed cognate with shank). It has come to refer to a kind of soup. And then there is another skink cognate with Middle Dutch schenk ‘cup-bearer’ and schenken ‘bear a cup; serve alcoholic beverage’. In fact, it’s two skinks: one a verb meaning ‘pour or serve alcholic beverage’, the other a noun referring to not the server but the beverage itself – often a weak, poor, or, um, thin kind. (There used to be a skink that referred to the server, but it’s obsolete.)

So much meaning, and in a word that isn’t really seen that often in common usage. Just like the lizard: variety, but short legs.

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