Yearly Archives: 2013

Capital Letters: WHY? And how?

Posted on November 23, 2013 | Leave a comment

My latest article for TheWeek.com is on capital letters, one of the great plagues of the average Anglophone. When do you and don’t you use them? And WHY DO WE EVEN HAVE THEM? These Questions Will Be Answered… in

Capital letters: FTW or WTF?

 

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squinch, sanpaku

Posted on November 21, 2013 | 1 comment

A while ago a friend let me in on a secret of looking good in photos: raise your lower eyelids. Don’t squint, not exactly; just tighten the eyes, especially from the bottom. It oozes confidence and looks maybe a little mischievous. Which, of course, is attractive.

Just today I saw an article on Gizmodo (with a video embedded) giving a word to this: squinch.

OK, yeah, like squint and pinch together, with tastes of squeeze and some other squ words (squirt, maybe squat, squelch) with their pucker and pressure release, and of crunch (and scrunch) and cinch and maybe even munch to add nch effect: the tongue tip presses close and then has just a little release at the end. A double dose of compressive effect. It seems like a reasonable confection to denote something that’s not full-on squinting but is a pinching with the same part of the face that does the squinting.

But it’s not a new word.

Nope, it’s been around since the mid-1800s. I do wonder whether every use of it between now and then was aware of previous uses; it does seem like the sort of word that could be made up again and again on the basis of the same phonaesthemes (those starts and finishes I just mentioned in the previous paragraph, not actual morphemes but bits that have connotations because of their sound and what other words they may make you think of). But anyway, the dictionary definition of it is more on the line of ‘screw up or distort the face’ – or of ‘crouch down or otherwise compress onself to take up less space’. So what we have here is a new variation of the meaning: ‘lightly squint the eyes, especially with the lower lids’.

A new, useful sense. We needed a word; this word presented itself. We have become aware of the value of looking not wide-eyed afraid in photos, and certainly not ill-starred sanpaku; we know that we look better if we have the eyes a little tighter. (Also bring the jaw forward a bit and perhaps leave the lips slightly open. The whole effect is almost predatory, and people like that.) So it’s nice to have a word for it. “OK, great, that’s great, but maybe can you squinch a little? Can you squinch for me a little, darling? Great, that’s fabulous, great.”

Did I say sanpaku back there? Oh, yes, that. Sanpaku is when you have eyes that show the white between the pupil and the lower lid. It doesn’t necessarily look fearful, but it can look tired or debauched or… well, perhaps even ill-fated. That’s the line George Ohsawa pressed in his book You Are All Sanpaku: showing those lower whites indicates a grave state of physical and spiritual imbalance, and may conduce to not just ill health but disaster. (Ohsawa’s solution to this was a macrobiotic diet.) To be fair, he didn’t originate this general idea; it’s from Chinese medicine – and Japanese too; after all, the word is Japanese: san ‘three’ plus haku ‘white’ (because the eye is three-quarters white) comes together to make sanpaku. (The same would be sanbai in Mandarin – which sounds almost like “stand by…”)

If the word sounds familiar to you from some bit of music, I suspect it’s from the 1983 new wave song “San Paku” by the Canadian group Darkroom. It shows up in a couple of other songs, but I doubt they’d stick. It has a good sound for a song like Darkroom’s: the almost electronic first two [æ] vowels (the first with a nasal on it) between the hiss and the two crisp stops, and then that final hollow [u]. It is in some ways a very opposite word to squinch. And actually, although squinching eyes are clearly more attractive than sanpaku eyes (and go better with new wave music), I’d have to say the word sanpaku seems way cooler and more attractive (and new wave) to me.

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sanctimonious

Posted on November 21, 2013 | 3 comments

You can see the sanct in this, as in sanctuary and sanctify and so on, the etymon of saint. And in the noun sanctimony you can see more clearly the Latin-derived abstract noun ending mony, as in matrimony, alimony, parsimony, testimony, and so on. And of course there’s the adjectival ous. So this word would, by its origin, seem to mean ‘holy’, ‘saintly’, that sort of thing.

Which, originally, it did. But it came soon enough to shift in sense, from religion to religiosity, from holiness to hypocrisy. Now we see that the sancti is only for the money; this is the trade of the Tartuffe, the devourer of widows’ houses, perhaps the poseurs who sank Timon with IOU’s (a Shakespearean reference there). The po-faced people with hands folded, eyebrows arched, eyes cast heavenward, who are mainly concerned with making you feel inferior. And, by extension, the concerned ones. Those who pretend not, perhaps, to piety, but anyway to purity or caring, but really seem only to care about taking others down a notch. It’s a common character type in novels and movies.

Fortunately, the type is rarely encountered in so pure a form in our normal lives. Sanctimonious is for the most part not what someone is as a person, but just something someone is being at a given time. And few indeed are those among us who haven’t been at least a bit sanctimonious on occasion, condescending, acting holier-than-thou, if not for the money than to score some other kind of point. Of course, some people are more practiced at it than others.

It’s a nice word, sanctimonious, a word long enough that it can really express the exasperation one feels when one applies the label. Every one of its five syllables has its little jab. Sanc is no thanks but rather the sound of a sunk ship; ti is, unstressed, a homophone of to, making it like thanks to but not – rather more like sank to as in new lows; the mo is a moo with a condeming moue of o, asking not for mo’ but for no more; nious is not nice but rather a sound like knee us, as in in the groin, which is what those sanctimonious people are doing with their pretentious piety. Oh, no, we’re not good enough, we don’t understand, we’re just rambunctious unholy thoughtless guttersnipes.

Isn’t it nice that there are sanctimonious people, so we have someone to look down on for looking down on us?

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lamprey

Posted on November 19, 2013 | 2 comments

Think of what this word could be a name for. If we keep bells in a belfry, could not the lamp part of a lighthouse be a lamprey? Or perhaps it could be a smaller lit tabernacle whereat one may pray before the rays of a lambent flame… The tongue licks so softly at the start of saying it, and in the middle the lips make a little kiss (try it; it’s hard not do it – the lips meet for the [mp] and then have to round forward for the [ɹ]). So sweet, whether you say the final vowel as [i] (the dictionary’s official way) or [eɪ] (a spelling pronunciation).

But the actual thing it names… the actual creature named by this word… is the stuff of nightmares. Oh, sure, it’s basically an eel, a kind of sucker-fish, yeah, like a large marine leech. Sure. Have you seen a picture of this thing?

I’m not going to include a picture here, for one thing because I don’t have the rights to one and for another because I don’t want to ambush people with something like that. Never mind that it’s ugly, ugly, ugly (tubular, mottled, and scaleless). Its mouth is a ring with rows of teeth. It’s like a small version of the sandworms from Dune or the mouth of the sarlacc from Return of the Jedi. Or, more sensibly, they’re probably inspired by it. If your nerves are strong, Google it. Honestly, it’s a kind of Freudian nightmare, a phallus with a vagina dentata at the end. Gurkh.

It’s also a plague in the Great Lakes. Sea lampreys are native to the Atlantic coast but have invaded inland waters, and they can deplete native fish stocks quite rapidly. These things are basically aquatic vampires: they latch onto fish and suck the blood out of them. It is a fitting coincidence that Dracula was based on Vlad the Impaler, and lamprey anagrams to ympaler – so close. But of course they don’t impale. They puncture and suck.

Enough of that. How did this nasty sea vampire come to have such a pleasant name? It traces back through Old French to medieval Latin lampreda, which appears to have been a mutation of the synonymous lampetra, from lambere ‘lick’ and petra ‘stone’ – because they attached themselves to rocks. It happens that this is also the source of limpet. It’s not a hundred percent sure that it’s the true source for this word, though.

So what do you do with lampreys? In the Great Lakes, they’ve reduced them by 90% (the state regulating successful entrepreneurs out of business! Lampreys just happen to have a good business model! It’s shameful to interfere with the wisdom of the free market! err…). I’m not sure what the preferred method of catching and killing them is, but I do know what is a popular thing to do with them once they’re dead: eat them.

Yep. Especially in England (perhaps more in the past than now), lamprey pie is quite a thing. (Also in Game of Thrones.) A big one was served at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and another at her golden jubilee. King Henry I was said to have died of eating a surfeit of lampreys. They have, apparently, a deliciously meaty flavour. I suppose a diet of blood will do that. Mmm, sea vampire pie. Well, I’d try it. After all, it has such a lovely name…

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taikonaut

Posted on November 18, 2013 | Leave a comment

A taikonaut, we are told, is a Chinese astronaut.

Do you know what we call a Chinese baker? A baker. Do you know what we call a Chinese pilot? A pilot. Do you know what we call a Chinese physicist? A physicist. Do you know why? Because we’re speaking English. Of course if we were speaking Chinese we could call them mianbao shifu, linggangyuan, and wulixuejia.

And if we were speaking Chinese, we would call an astronaut yuhangyuan or hangtianyuan or, if we were from Taiwan or Hong Kong, perhaps taikongren.

So where the heck is this taikonaut from?

Well, in taikongren, ren means ‘person’ and taikong means ‘outer space’, from tai ‘greatest, farthest’ and kong ‘empty space’. Take taikong and add the Greek naut ‘sailor’ suffix by analogy with astronaut and cosmonaut, dropping the ng for ease of pronunciation and to make the ending onaut like the others, and you get taikonaut. The Xinhua News Agency has, since China started sending astronauts up, used this modified term (not invented by them but seen on the web variously since at least the late ’90s).

So why wouldn’t they use astronaut?

Well, why wouldn’t they use cosmonaut, for that matter?

You know the difference between an astronaut and a cosmonaut, right? One is American (or at least is with the American space program) and the other is Russian (or at least is with the Russian space program). Both words come from Greek roots – ‘star sailor’ and ‘universe sailor’ respectively; astronaut is the older of the two, around since at least the 1930s. But the Russians were the first to send a person actually into space, and a space program is a big thing to have – only the greatest world powers have them, and the space race was a big big thing – so they went with their own branding, космонавт kosmonavt, anglicized as cosmonaut.

So a pattern was established. Each different space program has to have its own naut! Otherwise you’re sending out your product, your pride, with someone else’s branding! Your marketing would be all for naught! Better for it to be for naut.

Or not?

Frankly, I can’t make myself not see it as silly. But, yes, there are historical political reasons for the difference in word choice. Obviously we make an exception to the usual “call someone what you call them regardless of where they’re from” rule here, a rule usually infringed only by job roles that are culture-specific (e.g., chai wallah for a tea delivery person in India). And the naut suffix has become a handy identifier. If some other country develops its own space program, their astronauts will get their own naut word too, I guess. India’s astronauts, for instance, will apparently (as per the Indian Space Research Organization) be called vyomanauts, from a Sanskrit root for ‘space’ plus the naut (although the echo of vomit presents an uncomfortable overtone).

So the Chinese march to the beat of their own drum. Cue pun on taiko drummers. Oh, wait, taiko drummers are Japanese. Well, if we want to go with Mandarin, taiko really sounds like tai ‘too much’ and kou ‘mouth’ to me. Or, on the brighter side, it could make me think of Tycho as in Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer of the 16th century (they’re all astronomers no matter where they’re from) who made some good steps forward in understanding the planets and their motions (and their non-fixity), steps towards having a space program in the first place.

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kabocha

Posted on November 17, 2013 | 1 comment

I had this for supper tonight. To be precise, I had a soup made of kabocha and turkey stock with curry seasoning. As it bubbled on the stove like saffron-coloured magma, it almost made sounds like “kabocha.” But really, I think “kabocha” sounds something like one of these hitting the ground after being dropped from a high window. The word puts me in mind of the favourite book of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes: Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie. No doubt that’s a reason I thought for a long time that this big squash was called kablocha with an l.

Oh, yes, that’s what a kabocha is: a big squash. In the Latin, it’s a Curcubita maxima. Don’t confuse it with kombucha, which is a kind of fermented tea the health benefits of which are controversial. A kabocha is a big, rustic-looking green or orange winter squash with grainy, sweet orange flesh. It looks a bit like a small pumpkin as conceived by a late-20th-century ceramic artist.

I like the squash well enough, but I like its name much more. Yes, because of the percussive, even explosive sound of it – a kaboom from the bouche, kicking from the back, bursting from the lips, echoing off the tongue tip. But not just that. Its origin is quite the treat.

The immediate origin of kabocha is – did you guess it? – Japanese. You probably don’t think of great big gourds as something Japanese. And fair enough: this squash isn’t from there originally; it was brought in by Portuguese merchants. It’s used quite a bit in Japanese cooking now, though. But the Japanese name comes from the Portuguese name for it.

The Portuguese name is Cambodia abóbora. The Portuguese sailors called it that because they got it from Cambodia. The Japanese adapted that to their phonotactics. So your kabocha is Cambodia just as your cashmere is Kashmir and your cravat is Croat.

But where did Cambodia come from? You may know that in Khmer (the language of the land) the name of the country is Kampuchea. But its name was originally Sanskrit, Kambuja (possibly named after a purported founding king, but it’s not certain). And so my use of curry in the soup gains a little extra justification.

But wait, there’s more. This squash is not the only thing named (mutatedly) after Cambodia. There’s also the gamboge tree and its resin, a resin used to produce a yellow dye – which is used to colour the robes of Theravada Buddhist monks, which are about the same hue as the soup I had for supper tonight.

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snarf

Posted on November 16, 2013 | 1 comment

This really seems to be a word that changes with the generations. Its superficial resemblance to scarf and arf and Nerf doesn’t really play in all that much (well, depending on the scarf you have in mind); the sn onset gives a general sense of having to the do with the nose, which may or may not be relevant, depending on the sense you go with. The sound of sniff has had some effect at times.

Among the set of people I generally hang with, snarf usually means “have liquid that you are drinking come out your nose because you suddenly laugh.” As in “I just about snarfed my beer when I saw that clip of the mayor on the Daily Show.”

However, that is not the definition you will find in Merriam-Webster or The American Heritage Dictionary; it is not one of the several definitions you will find in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is one of the definitions you will find on Urban Dictionary (this one with 781 up votes and 514 down votes). But back to that in a moment.

The normal dictionary definition is ‘eat quickly, voraciously, greedily’ – as in, for instance, “I was a little peckish. I snarfed down a whole box of marshmallow cookies.” And indeed this also gets used. As does another definition you will see in the OED (and, in other wording, on Urban Dictionary, with 392 up votes and 353 down votes – all of these are on Urban Dictionary), “To grab or snatch, esp. without permission; to take or use greedily or rapidly.” As in, “Hey, who snarfed all my cookies?” or “I saw that plate of cookies there, and though I knew it wasn’t for me, I couldn’t help snarfing it down in 20 seconds flat.” Both of these are mid-20th-century definitions, as far as the citations show (this word seems to have appeared in the late 1950s to early 1960s, if we go by the citations). So it has meanings rather like snaffle and the rapid-eating sense of scarf, which is also related to the rapid-eating sense of scoff.

But then there’s the meaning I encountered in my youth when reading Kurt Vonnegut (yes, I was one of those kids who read Vonnegut in high school; I’m sure that tells you a fair bit right there). Vonnegut, in an interview originally published in The Paris Review, recalled his time in high school working on the school newspaper:

…one time, while I was writing, I happened to sniff my armpits absentmindedly. Several people saw me do it, and thought it was funny—and ever after that I was given the name “Snarf.” In the annual for my graduating class, the class of 1940, I’m listed as “Kurt Snarfield Vonnegut, Jr.” Technically, I wasn’t really a snarf. A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls’ bicycle saddles.

So the sniffing of armpits lent itself readily enough to this word, which was at the time entirely in the unregulated domain of teenage slang. But there was, at least in Vonnegut’s mind, from having been told by someone, an official definition: “a person who [goes] around sniffing girls’ bicycle saddles.”

And yes, that definition, too, is in Urban Dictionary. Or, to be precise, the definition there is “a person who gets off smelling bicycle seats.” It has 70 up votes and 61 down votes.

Notice, by the way, that Vonnegut graduated nearly 20 years before the first citation in the OED, and yet the word was current slang among his set then. The printed evidence does take time to catch up. Especially with teenagers.

And it seems reasonable enough to think that this word originated with teenagers. They like coming up with new words to solidify their sense of being part of an in-group, and they also have a liking for terms that name some particular thing (real or imagined) they find amusing but unnamed.

So, naturally, they are heavy readers of and contributors to Urban Dictionary. You will often find references that make sense only to a barely pubescent set, and usually some made-up definition that just seems like a fun thing but that has never actually been used in real life. And the votes up and down have as much to do with what’s cool or funny as with what’s accurate.

So we see that the first and third definitions (of 7) on Urban Dictionary for snarf relate to a character of that name on the TV show ThunderCats. These definitions have between them more up votes and a better up-to-down ratio than any other definition. And stuffed in with definition 1 is an unrelated second definition as an adjective meaning “sexy and/or stylish.” Odds of seeing or hearing that in real life: not high unless you hang with just the right set of pimply-faced dweebs. And perhaps not even then.

But among adults who have had time to calm down with and about this word? Just the food-related senses, it seems. The dictionaries speculate that snarf is related to scarf (as in ‘eat quickly’), which comes from scoff (same sense), which comes from or is related to scaff (same sense), which comes from Mars for all anyone knows. But clearly the word had to have emerged from somewhere into the adolescent world of the 1930s, to land on Kurt Vonnegut, and the sense it had at the time was not the sense it has now. There may have been some change between now and then due to sound similarities; the normal course of semantic shift can lead from fetishism to famishment to farcical snafu.

And we should remember that Vonnegut, having been an adolescent at the time, would not necessarily be the most reliable informant for standard usages of the then and there… Read his definition of twerp, immediately following the one for snarf in the same article, and judge for yourself. But maybe snarf down your food and bev first, lest you snarf while reading it.

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huh

Posted on November 13, 2013 | Leave a comment

I like the look of this word, that’s for sure: could be shrugging shoulders, perhaps with an upturned hand in the middle; could be two upside-down cups and one rightside-up, perhaps awaiting a fill or perhaps revealing that the little ball is not where you thought it was and five dollars please, want to try again?

I like the sound, too. It’s about the only word in English that you can really say actually ends in [h] – at least some of the time. It comes in on a breath, pops out that shortest and most neutral of vowels, and then drops off to breath again. It makes me think of “O Superman” by Laurie Anderson, a song full of unanswered questions, misty cultural references, and non sequiturs – and huh (o, do watch it on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VIqA3i2zQw).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word huh is “A natural utterance, expressing some suppressed feeling. Also as an expression of interrogation.”

Huh? A natural utterance? What’s that?

Well, according to Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira, and Nick Enfield, huh is a sort of universal word.

That doesn’t mean it’s the exact same in every language. Indeed, the vowels vary over a sort of fan between the mid central [ə], the mid front [e], and the low central [a], and may be nasalized and/or move into a diphthong that ends high front (as in “hi”); there may or may not be an opening consonant, though it’s [h] or a glottal stop if there is one. Read more at “Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word?”

It also doesn’t mean it’s innate. Babies don’t make the sound, as Dingemanse, Torreira, and Enfield point out. It’s learned. You need it once you have speech that you may not hear or understand clearly. It’s part of what linguists call a repair strategy: there has been a disruption in the flow of communication due to someone speaking unclearly or saying something difficult to process, and so it quickly requests a reiteration or clarification. And it seems that it’s similar between languages because of convergent evolution: it just happens to be the best kind of sound for that purpose.

Huh. Whaddya know. Mind you, DT&E don’t talk about that other function of huh in English, or whether it is paralleled in other languages: that bit that the OED calls “expressing some suppressed feeling.” Typically it expresses the act of assimilation of unexpected information – an expression of wonder or a shrug or shake of the head. A quick repair of a rip in reality. An equivalent (at least in the English I know on a daily basis) is “Hm!” – which is more convenient if your lips happen to be closed.

That non-questioning (or perhaps rhetorically questioning) huh is actually the one I use more. If I haven’t heard something clearly, I will more likely – as my wife will attest – say “What?” Which is the other common repair strategy. But somehow we still have huh. Huh, it must be useful. Uh-huh.

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Bang! “Ow!”

Posted on November 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

My latest article for TheWeek.com is about the way different languages codify the sound of, say, knocking your shin against a piece of furniture… and your response to it. From language to language, it’s similar in some ways, but different in others:

Why pain is expressed differently in different languages

 

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tolerance

Posted on November 10, 2013 | 13 comments

I don’t like tolerance.

I don’t mean I don’t like the word tolerance. The word is a nice snack-cookie of a word: the wafer crunch of the [t], the nice liquids in the middle, the marshmallow [n] and a final chocolatey coating [s]. It’s a nice word to say. You can feel good saying it. And that’s part of the problem.

Tolerance is an intrinsically opprobrious thing.

Consider four levels of response to another person’s presence: welcome, acceptance, tolerance, and rejection.

Welcome is greeting with open arms, a ready smile, a hug or warm handshake. It may even be going out and eagerly pulling the person in.

Acceptance is not necessarily as enthusiastic, but it’s at least a polite, easy handshake.

Tolerance is a little sigh and a roll of the eyes as you sit down. A resigned look. Tolerance is rejection that allows the rejecter to pretend to himself or herself that he or she is being a nice person. It’s not the acid-splash of overt rejection. It’s a steady little drip, drip, drip of acid on you as you sit at the table. If you don’t get the hint – and if the tolerance never improves at least to acceptance – you can sometimes end up more damaged than if you had just been openly rejected to begin with.

As you might guess, I have strong feelings about this because it’s personal for me. I might seem to have a pretty good social life, and that’s because I do… now. But for my childhood, adolescence, and younger adulthood, I was generally tolerated, often rejected, seldom welcomed.

Oh, it’s not because I was a member of some visible minority, or had some perceptible disability, or anything like that. It was just because I was a weird kid who told strange, incomprehensible jokes, could be kind of condescending, and didn’t know how to shut up. I know I wasn’t blameless in the matter. But let me explain.

I’m not an extravert. Some people think I am, but it’s just because I like attention. That’s not the same thing. I’m very comfortable in front of an audience of whatever size (as long as I’m prepared). But put me into the middle of a large social gathering and I’m wallpaper. On the other hand, if I can find some person or small set of people I know, I will happily chat with them. Maybe even too happily. Because I’m not such a hard-core introvert that I draw all my strength from within. I need social contact; I just have an upper limit. I value my friends and my social contacts very highly.

It’s that need for social contact that was really a root of my problems. I grew up out in the country. My social contact was mostly limited to school time, and that’s not really the same. So when I was in any sort of real social context with peers, it was like an intoxicant for me. I was very enthusiastic about it. Too enthusiastic. This manifested in an excessive talkativeness and boisterousness. On top of my basic weirdness.

So every time I came to a new social circle, at first I would usually be welcomed. Which made me very happy. Which made me very expressive. So my full weirdness came out, the incomprehensible jokes and the excessive talkativity and so on. And soon enough I had become the weird kid. The dork. I moved from being welcomed to being tolerated and avoided. I had blown it again. This happened over and over again. Of course, that hurt, so I developed the aforementioned condescension (even arrogance) as self-protection. But that didn’t make me any less needy. Just even less acceptable. And it was a vicious circle. The rejection and tolerance made me desperate, which led me to do things that made it worse.

I think of one time when I went to a party with my brother. They were his friends, but I was invited along. I had a lot of fun; I was intoxicated by the social welcome. They had some dry ice keeping beverages cool, and I discovered that inhaling the fog from it produced a pleasurable hypoxemic giddiness which induced in me gales of laughter and a frank garrulousness, especially since I was enjoying being at a party so much.

Some weeks later, my brother was heading out to some unspecified thing, and no one would tell me what, which obviously annoyed me. Finally one of my parents told me that he was going to a party with the same friends and I wasn’t invited. And they didn’t want to hurt my feelings, so they had been trying not to tell me.

Well, of course, I understood why I wasn’t invited, and I said so. I didn’t hold it against the hosts. I knew it was my own fault. I had blown it again. For the umpteenth time, and not the last time either. I didn’t blame the hosts. I just felt awful because I had blown it again, as I always did. But I also knew I would rather not be there than be tolerated, be the inappropriate person that no one wants around but no one will tell directly.

Which is what I was most of the time anyway. It took me a long time to be able to contain myself enough in social situations that I could manage, at least some of the time, not to be just tolerated. I still blow it sometimes, and I can never manage to notice it when I’m doing it.

So I thank all the people who had the nerve to tell me what I was doing that I shouldn’t be doing, because that’s the first step to welcome: it lets me know what I need to change, even if I don’t seem able to change it quickly. I may be smart, but that doesn’t mean I can figure out absolutely everything on my own.

I don’t thank those who tolerated me. I’m sure they thought they were being nice. Mainly they were letting themselves off the hook while being scarcely less cruel. Yes, everyone has their problems. I can’t expect them all to put out extra energy for someone who doesn’t know how to be a normal person. I don’t think they’re especially bad people for being tolerant. But I don’t thank them for it.

And this helps explain why I can seem cold or aloof at times. I don’t want to be where I’m not welcome. If I’m in a social gathering, I don’t want to horn in on a conversation and simply be a tolerated presence. I’d rather not be there at all. I wait to be invited to join people. If I’m not asked, I don’t invite myself unless I’m sure I’d be welcome. Because when I was younger, if I hadn’t been invited to join a group of people but I asked to and was allowed to, I would typically at best be tolerated. The tag-along nuisance. And I knew it, every acid drip drip drip of it. But I still wanted that contact.

Now I have friends and real social contact. I have a lovely, sweet wife, so I really never feel lonely, though of course I still need friends too. I’m better adjusted… somewhat. And so now I would rather be alone than be tolerated. There are few things that make me feel more awful than knowing, or even just suspecting, that people would rather I not be there.

Not so long ago, it was common for people to plead for tolerance: religious tolerance, tolerance of alternative lifestyles, et cetera. I really came to dislike that. It meant that you were still viewing the group as inferior and treating them with disdain, but you were doing it at closer range. Oh, you… people… sigh, eye roll… yes, OK, fine, you can sit there if you must… Now we talk of acceptance. I think we should talk about welcoming. And if we find we can’t welcome some particular group, we should have an honest discussion about why. Tolerance avoids that honest discussion.

The Latin source of tolerance and tolerate is tolerare, verb, ‘endure, bear, suffer’. The first use of tolerance in English referred to enduring pain or hardship. It hasn’t really moved very far from that. In forestry, it means the ability of a tree to exist in shade rather than sunlight. In biology, it means the ability to survive and thrive when you have a parasite or other infection. In medicine, it means being able to take increasing doses of something without responding. In mechanics, it means the amount of deviation you can get away with from the exactly desired dimensions – just how much not-quite-right can be endured. And socially, it means enduring someone (or some set of people) who is… well, not quite right. A shadow on the occasion. A bit too much, but you can ignore them. A parasite. Or who at least seems so to you.

So no, I don’t like tolerance.

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