Monthly Archives: January 2014

brink

Posted on January 6, 2014 | 1 comment

Imagine the most remarkable display of brinkmanship you could bring to a rink. Let’s say the rink is a frozen infinity pool, the waterfall edge the very brink of a cliff. Place a golden bracelet or ring there, on the brink – a real piece of bling you’d need to bring in a Brink’s truck, one that would break the bank or bring you to the brink of bankruptcy – and have a race to skate over, snatch it, and skate back. The starting bell rings, and they’re off. Look at that one, a real Hans Brinker, silver blades and all! (Actually, good steel does better, but, then, fiddles made of gold sound bad too and yet people want them.) The bling is teetering on the brink, and the others are making straight for it. But our Brinker skates around in a big S, swings in along the brink and, in the blink of an eye, picks it up with his pinkie! Will he slip over the brink? More to the point, will all the other skaters diving for him push him over the brink? No! He executes a beautiful Axel, sails over them as they go over the brink, and lands with a ringing silver “plink!”

Back from the brink of disaster! Brinkmanship indeed. No, wait – look at the big S right down the middle: that’s brinksmanship!

Brink is one of those good old resonant Germanic words (so many echoes of other words, and such a suggestive sound too) that these days are used more figuratively than literally. Things are on the brink, maybe teetering on the brink, or are brought back from the brink – of what? War, extinction, bankruptcy, disaster, death, collapse. All precipitous things, just like the cliff that a literal brink is the top edge of… in English, anyway.

It is interesting to see how brink has developed in different Germanic languages. In Danish, brink is a precipice; in Swedish, the descent of a hill; in German, a green hill; in Dutch, a hillside or the edge of a grassland – or the village green itself: that is where the family name Brink comes from. I suppose the ancestors of Perry Brink, founder of The Brink’s Company, may have been protectors of the village green; his company protects a different kind of green.

And brinkmanship – also seen as brinksmanship? It’s a creation of the Cold War, coined in 1958 by either John Foster Dulles (secretary of state) or Adlai Stevenson in reference to Dulles’s diplomatic approach of pushing opponents to the brink of nuclear war. Nowadays it is used more generally to refer to an approach that plays very close to the edge, just betting that the other guy will be the first to blink.

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balaclava, cardigan, raglan

Posted on January 5, 2014 | 7 comments

It’s cold outside. Storms are in the offing; power is on and off. Charge your flashights and pull out your warm clothes: your balaclava, your cardigan with the raglan sleeves… Go out to do war against the incessant snow and ice. It’s a fool’s errand in the guise of heroism: you know you will be defeated, you are surrounded on all sides, the snow will fall, the road will be covered again, but go you must. Yours not to make reply, yours not to reason why, yours just to do and… well, try.

Yes, a Canadian winter has that much in common with the Charge of the Light Brigade.

How much? Not just the glorified misguided heroic futility (though at least your version of heroism doesn’t involve killing people – somehow in civilian life they’ll put you in jail for that but in war they’ll give you a medal), not just charging the light, but wearing the balaclava, the cardigan, the raglan sleeves: all named because of that one battle on October 25, 1864, during the Crimean War.

What, after all, was the battle on that day named? Not the Charge of the Light Brigade; that suicide mission of cavalry with swords against entrenched guns, of olden chivalry against newer technology, done in error due to simple linguistic ambiguity, was just one part of it. It was the Battle of Balaclava. It was named after the town near Sevastopol where it happened; the name is thought to come from words meaning ‘catch fish’.

And who was the commander of the British forces? Field Marshal FitzRoy James Henry Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan. He was 66 at the time and had lost an arm in the Battle of Waterloo.

And who was the leader of the Charge of the Light Brigade, that charge made famous by a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (giving us lines such as “Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die”)? James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, just turned 57.

These are not coincidences. All three items of clothing – balaclavas (also called Balaclava helmet or Balaclava cap), raglan sleeves, and cardigans – got their names because of that battle and that famous charge. The battle was lost by the British, as was the famous charge, but it was such a glorified example of heroism (mocked decades later by G.B. Shaw in his play Arms and the Man) that the place and those two key leaders came to give their names to emblematic items of clothing: the woollen head coverings worn by the soldiers (the weather was not warm), the style of sleeve preferred by the one-armed field marshal (with one piece of fabric right up to the collar, rather than with a seam at the shoulder), and the buttoned sweater worn by the cavalry commander.

The words don’t all have the same flavour, to be sure. Balaclava is the most exotic-sounding to Anglophone ears, and makes me think of balance, and claviers, and baklava, which I would much rather be inside eating than shovelling snow or killing people. Raglan has a clear echo of rag and Raggedy Ann but also, for me, of the song “My Lagan Love.” Cardigan makes me think of a Scotsman (since it’s a Scottish name, like Costigan and others similar) sending the same card again. All of them have at least one liquid (/l/ or /r/) and one velar stop (/k/ or /g/); only one has a vowel letter other than a, and two end in an.

And they have come to have different usages, frequencies of usage, and associations in modern times. The cardigan is by far the most spoken of, and is an item of apparel thought of as comfortable, domestic, bookish, not military or heroic. Raglan sleeves are, well, a style of sleeve, and the person most likely even to talk about a style of sleeve is probably your mother or someone you equally associate with domesticity.

But as to the balaclava, I will quote from the Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place Names: “The town has given its name to the balaclava, a knitted woollen covering for the head and neck worn by the British against the cold and much favoured by modern criminals.” Ah, yes. This, at least, is keeping the crime in Crimea.

Now put yours on and go out into the valley of snow, with your shovel or your six-horsepower snow blower. Things could be worse. In fact, they probably will be soon.

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hootenanny

Posted on January 2, 2014 | 2 comments

“I love folk music,” Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary, “but the name ‘Hootenanny’ rather repels me.”

Oh dear. All the hoot ’n’ holler got her goat? No need to be so owlish about it…

Not that this term for the folk music equivalent of a jazz jam session has any direct reference to owl hoots or nanny goats. It showed up in the 1920s as a word for a thingumajig, a doodad, a whatsis. But by the 1940s it had been picked up by folk musicians – well, it just sounds like a folkie thing, dunnit? I half expect there to be a folk group called the Hootin’ Annies. Oh, wait, there is. Five women who play bluegrass. Um, also there seem to be several other small-time groups going by that name. Of course.

Folk music likes to go for the earthy. It has different streams, but one thing that they mostly have in common is that they eschew the sophisticated and elegant feel. It’s folk, after all, not ladies and gentlemen. So I’m not surprised that they would be attracted by the sound of hoot with its dull round high back [u] sound, which generally carries an unrefined air – large, dull, and so on – and also by the maximally contrasting but also somehow less-refined-sounding nasal [æ̃], the usual sound used to imitate bagpipes. And it gives the speaker the chance to use a country-sounding syllabic [ʔn̩], like the end of hootin’. Simply not somethin’ yer fancy sorts a people would be caught sayin’.

At the same time, the word has rhythm to it. In fact, it neatly matches the rhythm pattern of a standard 4/4 bar of music. And it has a certain visual patterning: the paired oo in the first part, the paired nn in the second part, the h of the beginning rotated and bent to the y of the end, a t and an e in the middle hinge. So, Lady Bird notwithstanding, it has just the sort of appeal one wants… precisely because it’s an ungainly, even repellent word. It’s honest. Or it sounds like it is, and if you can fake honest, well, you’re set.

And, like a lot of folk music, it comes from who knows where. Yes, it was first a word for ‘thingamabob’ or ‘doohickey’, but who made it up, when, where, why, how? No one knows. It was penned by that great folk author, Anonymous – or confected on the spot by a bunch of people, like any good hootenanny.

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ghost

Posted on January 2, 2014 | 2 comments

Watch a video of me reading this ghost story, if you would like, or read it below. Or read along with me.

This word has a ghost in it, a little guest in the host: a letter h, symbol of a soft breath, here seen but not heard – like many a spectre.

In Old English, this word was gást, with no h. By the 1400s, it had changed to gost or goost. But it was not until William Caxton brought over the printing press from the continent that the h appeared: Caxton had spent much time in Bruges, and when he printed this word he added an h to match the h he knew in the Flemish gheest.

If Caxton had taken a freshly printed sheet, the ink still wet, and folded it, the ink would have produced another ghost: a light mirror image of the printed matter. This is one of many similar things called ghosts, such as phantom images on televisions and on radars. Things seen but not signifying the same thing.

But what, in origin, is a ghost? Let us return to that letter h. It stands for a breath. And breath has been equated with the spirit, the soul, in many cultures, languages, and times. The word for that part of us that is immortal was, in Old English, gást – not that your soul is a guest in your body, but it is the ghost that you give up when you die; it ascends to join the Holy Ghost and the heavenly host.

Over the centuries, we have come to prefer the Latin-derived spirit for that, and have reserved ghost for a spectral being – especially the echo of a person who has died. A haunted house may have a ghost that repeats the same action over and over again, something emblematic for that person, perhaps something fraught with emotion. It can be an ordinary action of an ordinary person, but to see something so eerie, so eldritch, as a bodiless spectre – a ghost without the machine – will leave us frightened.

But how are these ghosts wandering around if their spirits are supposed to be in Heaven or Hell? This is why I said echo. It has been suggested – I seem to recall by Kurt Vonnegut, but I have only the suggestion of a memory of where he suggested it – that ghosts are not actual beings but simply echo images. Something passed through and left ripples, and the ghost is the ripples. See it come… watch it go… st.

I wonder, too, whether the ripples may be not from what the supposed person saw or felt, but what we have seen and felt, perhaps what we remember or imagine of the person. A ghost could be of a living thing. I think of Laurie Anderson’s “Gravity’s Angel”: “Well, we were just laying there. And this ghost of your other lover walked in. And stood there. Made of thin air. Full of desire.”

There are many places I pass by where I can almost see, feel, or taste what happened there. Something that involved me. An argument. An accident seen or averted. A kiss. A casual touch or glance, full of intention. An understanding reached. I can stand in these places and look where I looked and almost see what I saw, almost feel what I felt. The person or people involved may be living or dead, near or far, but there is a ghost there, just for me. Made of thin air. Full of desire. Or dread. My desire or dread.

And ghosts can be things that should have happened. Or things that I think happened but did not. Things that I just wanted to have happened. For any person, their home town is a ghost town, a town not empty but full of the empties of pasts consumed and possibilities not realized.

And sometimes our ghosts create a reality. A thing that does not belong but sits there silently before our eyes because we think it should be there. Not a whole and not a hole, holy or unholy, not a sign but… a sigh, unrealized. The h in ghost.

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