Monthly Archives: March 2014

enfeoff

Posted on March 17, 2014 | 7 comments

“For my knightly service, what will you offer me?”

“Hmm. Some hasenpfeffer?”

“Eff off! That’s not enuf!”

“No fee.”

“No fee? Ff… Get stuffed.”

“I’ll enfeoff you.”

“You’ll what? Eff you too!”

“No, enfeoff.” (He writes it down.)

“Enf— that’s a rather naff word.”

“Look, I grant you the fee off some turf. I don’t pay, you just collect from the tenants. You get your own little fiefdom.”

“Mm… OK, but don’t make me spell it.”

Really, this word – its spelling is as much of a relic as the practice it names. It looks like some stuff written by Jules Feiffer set to music by Jacques Offenbach. In fact, it has just the right letters for its sound – if you take away two of them, and leave enfef. But that wouldn’t be much fun.

It’s not that we need the word that much anymore, not literally anyway. We don’t have a feudal system, so there aren’t any fiefdoms to grant knights (and others) for their service. Meaning there is no enfeoffment. No one gets enfeoffed anymore. But it’s so ornamental. Or ornery. Fluffy, anyway.

The en is actually the same en as in endow, enslave, entitle, et cetera. The fun part is the feoff. It’s actually the same as fief – which in turn comes (by way of French) from Latin feudum, which also gives us feudal; fief also comes into English as fee, which referred first of all to a heritable estate held on condition of homage and service, i.e., a fiefdom, and subsequently came to be a word for the money paid from it.

And how did fief come to be feoff? The word was taken into English in the Middle English period, when some Old English spellings – such as eo for what became our “short e” sound – were still around for influence. And the ff just falls in line with the grand old English tradition of luxuriating in double final letters.

Look, we got this word free and clear. No pledge of service required, nor any ownership persisting with its source. We can do as we wish with its spelling. It’s not like we use it every day. So there. Eff off.

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ides

Posted on March 15, 2014 | 1 comment

Originally published on BoldFace, the blog of the Toronto branch of the Editors’ Association of Canada.

Beware the ides of March!

Beware the ides of every other month, too. And the nones. And the calends. Actually, beware Roman calendars pretty much altogether. But beware the ides of March especially.

We generally think of ides as being a March thing, since Julius Caesar was stabbed on that day. But every month in the Roman calendar was marked by three days: calends, nones, ides. All the other days were counted in relation to them. But how they were counted serves as a reminder that things we take for granted as plain and obvious are actually not inevitable and have been done differently in other places and times.

The Roman calendar was originally a lunar calendar. A month started with the new moon. That was the calends (Latin kalendae), which appears to trace back to calare (“proclaim”). About a week later would be the half moon. That became the nones (Latin nonae), so called because it was the ninth day before the ides—which is to say, it was eight days before the ides. (Confused? We’ll get to that.) The third day of note was the full moon, which was the ides (Latin idus, from some Etruscan word). And then…apparently nothing of note between full and new moon.

The calendar came to be standardized and no longer attached to lunar cycles. In the eighth century BC the calendar of Romulus featured ten months of alternating lengths, 30 and 31 days: Martius (31), Aprilis (30), Maius (31), Iunius (30), Quintilis (31), Sextilis (30), September (30), October (31), November (30), December (30). Does that not add up? Well, the rest of the days of the year between December and Martius were just there, not part of any month. Kind of toss-away. Which is how we feel about them even still.

A few decades later Ianuarius (29 days) and Februarius (28) were added. Months with 30 days were trimmed back to 29. The whole year was 355 days long, so every now and then a whole extra month would be stuffed into the end of February (of all the times to have an extra month!). It took quite a long time for the exactly right number of days in a year to be sorted out. More than two millennia, actually.

With the fixing of the months, the specific positions of the nones and ides were set according to the length of the month. The ides fell on the thirteenth day of months with 29 days and the fifteenth day of months with 31 days. The calends was of course the first day of the month. The nones was the fifth or seventh day of the month, because it was nine days before the ides, counting the ides as the first day.

And, of course, counting backwards. Because that’s what they did. The day before the ides, nones, or calends was the pridie of that day—so March fourteenth was the pridie of the ides of March. And the day before that was the third day before the ides. The day before that was the fourth day before the ides. And so on. Everything was in countdown.

Which means that the entire second half of a month, after the ides, was numbered in reference to the calends of the next month. The day after the ides of March is the seventeenth day before the calends of April. That’s what it was called. They didn’t number forwards. There was no Martius twenty-fourth; it was the ninth day before the calends of Aprilis. But still part of the month of Martius. You may be beginning to think the dates were called ides, nones, and calends because people would say “Any idea where we are on the calendar?” “None.”

But hey, if you think that seems like something from Harry Potter, don’t forget that when they added an adjustment month of 22 days, they stuffed it in after the twenty-fourth day of February. Not the twenty-eighth. The twenty-fourth.

But if we just want to wave our hands and say, “Well, those Romans were crazy,” ask yourself this: would it seem crazy to start the new year right in the middle of a month? So that, say, the first 24 days of March were in one year and the last week was in the next? Because guess who did that.

Not the Romans. Nope.

We did.

OK, by “we” I mean western Europe, notably including England and its dominions — such as Canada. Of course, Canada wasn’t a country then and wouldn’t be for another 115 years.

That’s right, England marked the new year on March 25 until 1752 (meaning 1751 was a short year—but so was 1752: they cut out 11 days in September because of the necessary adjustment in the switch from Julian to Gregorian calendar…that’s a whole other article again!). Other countries switched over to January 1 sooner—Scotland in 1600, most of western Europe at various times in the 1500s. To be fair, the new year had in previous times been on January 1; it was switched to March 25 in the middle ages. Why March 25? It’s the feast of the Annunciation: the day marking Mary’s being told by the angel that she was pregnant with Jesus. Somehow that led to the conception that it would be a good day to start a new year…

So the ides (the fifteenth day) of March of 1599, when Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar, would have been almost a year later than the twenty-fifth day of March of 1599…and would on the same day have been the ides of March of 1600 just across the border in Scotland. Beware—or be where—indeed!

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xoloitzcuintli

Posted on March 13, 2014 | 1 comment

Now, there’s a word to make your hair stand on end. If you have any.

Look at it – its hair is already standing on end – those i i i and l t t l. Plus the two staring eyes o o, and the cup being flipped over u n. Oh, and then there’s the x and z, which are always rakish. An x at the beginning of a word is a frank dare to the Anglophone reader. But so is a tzc cluster. Even though it starts with xo, this is not a word you want to kiss and cuddle. Frankly, it looks like a nasty mess, and may seem vaguely vulgar.

So, um, how do you say it? Words that start with an x usually have a front vowel like e, i, or y after it. And they’re usually from Greek. This is not a Greek-looking word. No, in fact, it has some characteristics that point to another place: the tl, the use of c and z and x… and that daunting length, 14 letters. Could it be from the place that gave us axolotl and quetzalcoatl and Chicxulub? Why, yes. Those are all features of Spanish transliteration of indigenous Mexican words. And this word is Nahuatl (Aztec): Xolotl was the Aztec god of lightning and death, and itzcuintli means ‘dog’.

So we know the x is a “sh” sound, and we know that originally the tl represented the same voiceless lateral affricate we see in other languages in words such as Lhasa, but is in English said like any other “tl” – with a syllable boundary in the middle. Let me untangle it further for you: It’s five syllables, “show-low-eats-quint-lee.” (You can also say the beginning as “zo” rather than “sho,” but that’s an English-style spelling pronunciation.)

See it? Xoloitzcuintli. Also spelled xoloitzcuintle.

Also spelled Mexican hairless dog.

Yeah, that’s what this is. A big hairy name for a little hairless dog. (You can also call it just xolo to save some seconds because, you know, yolo.) If you have one of these guarding your house, you might as well just let the name do the guarding while the pooch shivers under your duvet.

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What’s “mor”?

Posted on March 12, 2014 | 3 comments

My latest article for TheWeek.com ventures into phonaesthetics – specifically, why some of the most evil names in fiction have a little something “mor” in them:

Why is the ‘mor’ in ‘Voldemort’ so evil-sounding?

Voldemort, Mordor, Moriarty — exploring literature’s most sinister syllable

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victual

Posted on March 11, 2014 | 6 comments

OK, this is one that makes my vittles a little tender. I mean makes my victuals a lictual tender. I mean…

Here’s the thing. This is one of those words that many people know by sound and sight but have not put sound and sight together. It’s sort of like knowing someone by name (from the web, perhaps) and knowing someone by face (circle of friends, or they work in a store you go to, or…), but not realizing the two are the same person. Until you accidentally find out, and it’s usually embarrassing.

You may well display ignorance by saying this word as it’s spelled. But on the other hand, not too many people would belictual you for spelling this word as it’s said: vittle (or vittles, since it’s nearly always plural). Grammar grumblers are of course more brictual than the average person, but even they seldom spewed much spictual onto the brand name Tender Vittles (off the market in 2007 anyway – it was kind of like skictuals for kictuies). And why would you spell a cat food victuals when so many people think the word is vittle and when victual looks a bit too much like victim (and convict and evict, and actually a bit like ritual too)? Tell the truth: doesn’t it seem just a little precious to spell it victual while saying it “vittle”?

But then, why would you spell this word victual? Or why would you pronounce victual like “vittle”? Ah, food for thought (as opposed to food for the belly, which is what victuals are). Let’s take an intellettle look at the attle fattle historical details.

The original late Latin word was victualia, from victus ‘food’. That got whictualed down in pronunciation and spelling to Old French victaille and vitaille. English borrowed that, at first keeping the spelling and then modifying it variously (by the way, vital is from a different Latin root). But in the 1500s and 1600s there came to be quite the fad for changing spelling to reflect the glorious Latin origins of words: faucon became falcon because of falx; ile became isle because of insula; peple became people because of populus; and vitaile (among other spellings, all said as we say it now) became victual because of victualia.

So… what happened, in short, is that the word aged as words do, and then it got a face-lift, so to speak, to restore it to something like its older form. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the big reasons English spelling doesn’t match English pronunciation: those meddling jerks a half millennium ago who thought that spelling should display etymology rather than matching pronunciation. And that is what gets my goat – and tenderizes my victuals too.

Thanks to Hal Davis for prompting me to do this one.

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varmint

Posted on March 10, 2014 | 6 comments

We all know what a varmint is, thanks to Yosemite Sam (and others). It’s an annoying animal (or person), the fauna equivalent of a weed. It’s something (or someone) who takes your nice, tidy set-up, your lovely garden or lawn or your livestock, and makes a mess of it. Before you had a good environment; now you have a nasty varmint. The last four letters notwithstanding, a varmint leaves nothing in mint condition, be it farm or be it garment.

If you want to arm yourself against varmints, you get yourself a varmint rifle. That’s an actual class of gun, an informal but well-maintained designation for small-caliber guns and high-powered air guns designed for varmint hunting. Because after you’ve gone into the environment and rearranged it and tidied it up to suit your needs, ploughed it and fenced it and taken what you need to feed yourself, it’s mighty annoying to have some critter come along and rearrange things to suit itself so it can take what it needs to feed itself. So coyotes, gophers, weasels, foxes, porcupines, jackrabbits, what have you, are the targets when you go varmint hunting.

Where do these things come from, anyway? They’re already there, of course; they just become varmints through our conflicts with them. But that’s just nature being the way it is. Nothing stays tidy because too many critters are involved.

And where does this word come from? It’s a variant of vermin, as you may have guessed. It’s most strongly associated with the southern side of the United States, but it is attested first in England, and as far back as the 1500s. How did vermin become varmint? I’m tempted to say it’s the same way creature became critter, and to some extent it is so: just as critter is formed by the vowels becoming “short” rather than “long” as in creature, varmint also has a vowel alternation. But the one in varmint is a regular and expectable realization of Middle English short e: we see it in parson (a different realization of person) and Clark (same origin as clerk), and a few pronunciations such as “darby” for Derby.

And how about that t at the end? Well, it just showed up. It’s intrusive. Invasive. Excrescent is the technical word. It’s another thing that pops up here and there in English – against used to be agains, and many people say sense as “sents,” for instance.

So we had this nice, tidy word vermin, taken from Latin (originally vermis ‘worm’). And then language and people happened to it. Now vermin is the more mannered word. If you want to sound rough-and-ready, like you’re packing a varmint rifle (maybe loaded with those exploding bullets sold under the brand Varmint Grenades), you say varmint. Anyway, vermin is a city word for city animals: mice, rats, insects of various kinds. A varmint can be a larger kind of thing, just as the first vowel in varmint is wider and the word is longer – and the countryside is more open.

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silence

Posted on March 8, 2014 | 12 comments

Hello, darkness, my old friend.

Silence is darkness, darkness of the ears. But there is no absolute silence. When I stood in an anechoic chamber, all ambient noise sucked out as by a sponge, the roar of blood filled my ears: always there, never noticed before. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, space is silent, as a vaccum is, but what you hear is the breathing of the astronaut. Silence is irrelevant if there are no ears to hear. If there are ears, there is blood and breath.

Silence is John Cage’s 4´33˝. For four minutes and thirty-three seconds the piano does not play. During that time there is silence. Silence of the piano. But the audience breathes, shifts, rustles; the air conditioning hums; cars pass on the street outside. You hear it. It is what you hear, what you had ignored before. The daily blood and breath in the ears of the concert goer. The chaotic music of the everything.

Silence is silence of something. Of the piano. Of the lambs. Of Jesus before Pilate. Of a freeway with no cars on it. Of that car alarm. Of a person spoken to. Of a signal: in a state of signal silence the sound heard is static. What are you listening for? Or what are you hoping to hear no more? Silence is when sound could be there but is not. Silence may be sweet, or solemn, or sullen. Silence speaks.

Silence that is sought is a silo, an asylum. Silence unsought is an exile. Silence in a Quaker meeting is the space for the spirit to speak. Silence in a war zone is calm, but may be followed by the storm. Silence in a city after an ice storm or earthquake is baleful. Welcome, soothing silence caresses the skin like silk. Isolating, stony silence is silex: flint. Desired silence in soulful solitude is selenic: look at the moon, so high and cool, simply there, emitting no sound, serene and reliable. Silence when you want to hear – hear someone, something – is also selenic, but it is the anoxia of sitting solemnly on the silicon of Mare Serenitatis on the moon’s surface, a quarter of a million miles from all that you know and love and wish you were warmed by.

Silence is a sigh, an island of sound between two hisses of white noise. It is a lovely, whispering, liquid word, instilling, insulating, licensing the eyes and cleansing the ears. It is also the lick and hiss of a snake, insolently inserting its venom. Silence is the sound of a razor’s edge, cleaning the stubble of noise from the face of your surroundings. Silence is the sound of a razor’s edge, slicing open the wrist or the neck and letting the blood fed by communion with others spill softly onto the floor.

Sound is what you seek to hear, and sound is what invades your ears. Sound comes before and after a moment of silence, and runs through it too, from the unsilent things. Sound breaks through, sound specifies, sound structures. Silence sits but sound walks, sound runs. Sound is the black marks on the white of the paper, but the white communicates too. Sound is disturbance, stirring. Sound is activity.

The rest is silence.

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shelfie

Posted on March 6, 2014 | 5 comments

Today has been World Book Day. I became aware of this fact when Catherine Hanley, @CathHanley, tweeted a picture of her bookshelves with the caption “I need more walls #WorldBookDay #shelfie”.

Yes, shelfie. It’s a thing. The etymology is obvious: a pun on selfie with shelf. Selfie was the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013. They note that it was coined in 2002 – before then you didn’t even have the technical means to take a picture of yourself with your phone and post it online or email it – but it really took off in 2013, increasing in frequency of usage by some 17,000%. It’s not new for people to have some fascination with their personal appearance, or to seek approval of the same from others. It’s just become a lot easier and more instant – and more socially accepted.

But book lovers know that while your face may or may not be an open book, if you really want to know about a person, open their books. I know when I visit people I often have a look at their bookshelves to get a better sense of the fuller breadth and depth of their personality: what they like or have liked, what has fascinated them, what they have formally and informally pursued… Looking at a person’s bookshelf is like pouring some of the person into a glass, swirling it and sniffing it, swirling and sniffing again. The many hints and layered complexities of their personality flow around and peel back and flutter past, like a shower of flower petals or leaves through your senses. Not a full taste, not an ordered taste, but such an introduction, so much to see, so many little doors to open.

So when, more than a decade ago, I first made myself a personal website, for my “About James Harbeck” page I didn’t blather on about my personal traits and hopes and dreams and accomplishments, I simply answered at length the question, “What’s on your bookshelf?” (I’ve updated it since, as I keep adding more books.) Because your bookshelf is the book of your self.

Unless you don’t have one, of course. Books are heavy and a pain to move and they take up space. Some people prefer to borrow from the library. Some use e-readers and load them up with more books than I could fit if I filled my whole apartment with them. It’s not that there’s necessarily less to such people. It’s just that there’s less to look at when you visit them, fewer clues to the parts of them you may not get to know very soon otherwise.

I would have a hard time living in a place without full bookshelves, even though I spend more time on a computer, and what reading I do do is as often magazines as books. A library is my comfortable place. It’s not a cocoon or a shell; it’s worlds upon worlds. It’s flesh transformed: shelf. There is no substitute for the feel and smell of paper. Books you have read are trophies of sorts – but animal heads mounted on walls can’t talk to you or lead you on another chase if you want. My shelves are full of dreams waiting to be dreamed again.

So for people like me there is the shelfie. It’s a nice thing. It’s more shelf-centred than self-centred. You see not only the person’s choice of reading (the titles may not be legible at the resolution of a cell phone camera) but their choice of decor and their sense of organization. It’s a little glimpse into their sanctum sanctorum.

So, yes, since you’ve been waiting for it, here’s my shelfie.

jh_shelfie

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transom

Posted on March 5, 2014 | 4 comments

You may find this hard to believe, but when I was young I wanted to be a freelance writer.

I had a copy of the Writer’s Market put out annually by Writer’s Digest – well, OK, my dad had a copy and I used it. There were many magazines that said “No unsolicited manuscripts,” which of course meant there was no way for me to break into them, because they weren’t soliciting manuscripts from me. But then there were the rest, the ones that would take articles or short stories sent over the transom, as it were.

This was before email, so I would send my one good copy with a SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) to ransom it back. I always hoped my work would make some entrance, perhaps put them in a trance of delight or something, but the truth is that, like nearly everything that comes in over the transom, it tended to get deep-sixed. It seems that going over the transom is no smart way to go about it, generally.

You are familiar with the phrase over the transom, yes? Think of a publisher’s office as having a door with an openable window above the top of it – typically one where the bottom swings in or out. This window is a transom window or transom for short, though transom is first of all the word for the top cross-beam of the door frame – the difference between a transom and a lintel, if you want to maintain one, is that a lintel bears weight such as masonry above it, while a transom has a window or similar above it.

The etymology of transom is disputed, because it has gaps – it was a workman’s term, and workmen often mutate things to suit their tastes while leaving no written record. It comes to us from either Latin transtrum (meaning about the same thing) or Old French traversin ‘crosspiece’ (by way of traversayn and transyn).

The sense of ‘crossbeam’ has also led to transom naming a part of a ship. In that context, the crossbeam is at the back end of a ship. When you look at the back end of a ship, you will generally notice a flat end where the curve of the hull is truncated. This is what is called the transom of a ship now.

So picture, if you will, my adolescence’s deathless (because lifeless) prose going over the transom. Not onto the tiled office floor, but into the deep blue, pages fluttering down one after the other…

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churrus

Posted on March 5, 2014 | 2 comments

Words can be so intoxicating. Sometimes I’ll have spent the evening inhaling them and it will just make me want to wander through the dictionary looking for some sapid lexeme to snack on. Oh, look, here’s one: churrus. What could that be?

It sure has a stirring chirp like chirr or churr, but also a clear flavour of churro (and mmm, crisp at the start and then chewier). It’s entirely on the tip of the tongue, except for the vowels of course. It sits near churtle and chuserel (the latter being a word for ‘a debauched fellow’ from the 1700s and 1800s, the etymology of which, Oxford helpfully tells us, is “Apparently an error of some kind”). It has that nice symmetry of urru in the middle, and an almost incoherent urr at the heart of such a mixed-up word. (Really, in spite of being so tidy, it does seem a bit of a hash, n’est-ce pas?) Oh, and cirrus. Yes, it has that wispy little cloud somewhere above it.

So, hey, yeah, what does it mean, by the way? Oh, I see it comes from Hindi charas (wow, that has a different feel, doesn’t it, with the one r and the two a’s, so open and hot), and is also spelled churus (by which gurus? hee hee). So there. Oh, um, the meaning? Yeah. Oh, here’s a great quote, from After Some Tomorrow by Reynolds in 1967, thanks Oxford: “While under the effect of…charas fudge, did you ever experience one of your prophetic…enlightenments?” So it comes in fudge and, uh,

Oh, here: it’s the resin of the hemp plant. Gum, resin, whatever, coming from the flowers, seeds, whatever. Well, that’s enlightening.

Oh. Oh, I know what that is! Hashish! Yeah, it’s hash. Handmade hash. In India they smoke it in a pipe called a chillum. Nice. Now we’re smokin’. And chillin’.

Did someone say something about churros?

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