Monthly Archives: August 2014

infenestration

Posted on August 11, 2014 | 5 comments

Do this: click “play” on the first video below and then click to skip the ad, and then immediately click “play” on the second video below, so they play at the same time. Watch the second one while the first one provides a backing soundtrack.*

Infestation may be a problem with insects, but with birds, infenestration can be a bigger problem. Especially if the bird or the window – or both – aren’t as resilient as in that video. One time when I was a little kid, we heard a smash and went and looked, and a bird had flown into the high window in our entryway. Neither survived.

Oh, is infenestration not a familiar word? I’m not surprised. Don’t bother looking for it in a dictionary; you won’t find it. But it’s a perfectly reasonable confection of parts. Defenstration means throwing something or someone out of a window: de ‘out’ plus fenestr ‘window’ (root) plus ation. Replace the out with an in and you get infenestration. Logical? I think so, and so does Ken Broadhurst, who – independently – used the same reasoning to arrive at the same word with the same meaning: see ckenb.blogspot.ca/2014/05/infenestration.html:

We have the term “defenestration” meaning to throw someone or something out a window. It’s related to the French word for window, which is fenêtre. We don’t have the word *infenestration* as far as I know. If we did, it would mean to collide with a window. People do it, and birds evidently do it a lot.

Infenestration is an infernal frustration, whether you’re a bird or a homeowner. It’s also a problem for people who have sliding glass doors, especially clean ones. A co-worker told me of a friend who broke her nose rushing inside – or rather, attempting to rush inside through a closed glass door. We have a big glass door on a boardroom where I work, and there have been collisions but no fractures. There’s also one in my apartment, at the entrance to the “solarium” (guest room/spare room/etc.), which is a great place for a sleepy person not to see the glass.

What is a defense against infenestration? In my apartment, there’s a tripod in front of the fixed section of the door, and a sticky note at eye level on the sliding section. Public buildings put dots on glass that people might walk into and paper silhouettes of birds of prey on windows that birds might fly into. Or they put nothing, of course. Dead birds are a common enough sight on the sidewalks of downtown Toronto. The offices leave their lights on at night and the birds try to fly in. They usually don’t get to go back and do it again.

*Intense thanks to Iva Cheung for this.

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superior

Posted on August 10, 2014 | 3 comments

From an 1827 edition of Paradise Lost. You can tell it’s especially fancy because it has the u. And the comma tells you to expect more – you can always expect more from a superior person.

Superior is Latin for ‘higher’. In English, it is a word for a boss or a bossy person, someone who is noteworthy or a footnote, someone or something that is the greatest, or the highest, or just all wet: upper crust or uppity and crusty, super or spurious. Unlike its antonym inferior, superior can refer to reality or pretension; like inferior, it can refer to physical position or more abstract qualities.

A truly superior person or thing has greater qualities: finer, rarer, nobler, more intelligent, more attractive. A person with a superior attitude simply pretends to such, and is in fact inferior and infuriating. A person may also be a superior: a boss, someone superordinate in the command chain. A supervisor, a manager. Paradoxically, a person may have superior qualities for an inferior position – be very good at doing the work – but inferior qualities as a superior – not good at managing those who do the work. Their superiority peters out, as per the Peter Principle. But we naturally hope that our superiors are persons of superior personal qualities. And sometimes they are.

Superior is the name of a lake, the largest of the great lakes, the farthest north, and the highest in elevation. It has fewer people living on its shores than the others do, however; superior position in this case, as in many, results in less accessibility. It is rough-edged, cold, and deep, qualities that sometimes also come with being a superior person. And it is all wet, just like people who have superior attitudes.

Superior is also a typographic term. It is or isn’t (depending on whom you ask) a synonym for superscript. Even for those who maintain a distinction between the two terms, the difference is small: they use superior to refer specifically to superscripted minuscule letters in abbreviations, such as the th in 9^th and the re in French D^re. So footnote numbers and symbols may or may not be superior. But those people who insist that it is incorrect to refer to them as superior certainly are superior – I leave it to you to decide whether by that I mean having superior knowledge or just a supercilious attitude.

Superior is also an astronomical term. A superior planet is a planet that is farther from the sun than the Earth is. Why? Is it that they are more rarefied, or have greater affinity to the empyrean? No, silly, it’s because they’re further up. Up and down really mean ‘away from the direction of gravitation’ and ‘towards the direction of gravitation’. In the solar system, the centre of gravity is the sun. We may think the sun is above us because we’re thinking in Earth-centric terms, but in solar system terms it is below us: it’s the big heavy.

Which is rather funny. If you wish to be superior, it helps to be lighter – and indeed I more greatly esteem people whose levity exceeds their gravity. But in the business world, the person at the top is the big heavy around whom all others revolve, and you don’t want to be seen as a lightweight. But to become a superior, you have to climb your way to the top, and that takes effort, which proves that you’re moving away from gravity.

And towards heaven, perhaps – if you are the mother superior or father superior of a convent or monastery, for instance. Except that the sun is in heaven, and the sun is really below us in the bigger picture. But other parts of the heavens are farther away from the sun, but include suns of their own, many of them much heavier than our sun. Every star up there is a sun, the absolute down in its own system. Meanwhile, the superior planets are towards the darkness, but in our usual thinking light is superior to darkness. And superior letters are light subordinates to the letter or numeral they are attached to: they report to it and it is in that sense superior to them.

The more you look at superior, the murkier and less pure the subject seems to become. The letters and the concepts dance around. It leaves a sour-ripe taste. Does it rise up or get mixed up? Prior use leads only to greater confusion.

Finally we must realize that it is all relative, and the way to superior intelligence is to keep everything in perspective – and to maintain a sense of levity.

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Keuka

Posted on August 9, 2014 | Leave a comment

Keuka Lake from Bully Hill

As I mentioned in my tasting of traminette, I spent some time last weekend tasting wines along Keuka Lake. Keuka Lake is one of New York’s Finger Lakes; it’s on the west side of the bunch, and it has a distinctive feature: it’s forked. In fact, it looks not so much like a finger as like your thumb and forefinger and a continuation of their joining down to the wrist. Actually, it looks more like a forked branch you’d use to roast hot dogs or marshmallows. Or, you know, like a lake with a fork in it halfway up.

Keuka would seem a distinctive name, with its two k’s and its echoes of cucumber and cue card and eureka, but I imagine many people get confused between Keuka Lake and the lake two to the east, Cayuga Lake. It’s not that they look similar – Cayuga is longer, not forked, and has much gentler slopes on its sides – but the names sound nearly identical. If you say them slowly, it’s “key you ka” versus “cay you ga,” but who says place names carefully more than a couple of times? In the more relaxed pronunciation, the only real difference is the /k/ versus /g/ in the middle. Coincidence? Not altogether.

It’s not that the two words are really the same name. But they are related. Keuka comes from a word meaning ‘canoe landing’ and Cayuga comes from a word meaning ‘canoe carrying place (trimmed of a final syllable). Canoe see the common element? Of course, in both cases, the names aren’t accurate; they’re really names for shoreline places – the lakes themselves are more canoe rowing places.

Or, today, boat sailing places. Or looking at the pretty water from the shore places. Or, for a lot of people, wine tasting nearby places.

Which is where Keuka comes in for me. A trip down Keuka Lake for me is a trip down memory lane. I went on my first wine tasting trip there about a quarter of a century ago with my cousin Sharon, a wine aficionado (and somewhat older than me). That’s also when and where I first tasted icewine (at Hunt Country, which still makes an excellent icewine, full of brown sugar flavours). I don’t drink too much icewine – just too sweet for me after the first sniff and sip – but I love wine touring. That first experience made Keuka a bit of a eureka for me: it opened up whole new vistas.

Vistas are another reason this isn’t my first return to Keuka. Other Finger Lakes have wineries too – even more of them, in fact – but none are as pretty as Keuka. None have as European a feel. The hillsides sloping into Keuka Lake are dramatic. And there is a high bluff over the fork. With houses on it that look like a stiff rain might just wash them down into the drink.

Ah, never mind the houses, and never mind the canoes, either. I will prefer the drink. The wineries have not improved as rapidly as the ones in the Niagara region of Ontario, but they are catching up now. And I have some more catching up with them to do… next time through.

View from Heron Hill.

traminette

Posted on August 7, 2014 | 1 comment

I was off on a little wine-tasting excursion over the weekend. We went to Keuka Lake, one of New York State’s Finger Lakes. Wine has been made in that area for about a century, but it’s been only a half century since Dr. Konstantin Frank introduced vinifera grapes to the area – the kind of grapes usually used in the non-benighted world to make wine. The grapes that had been used in New York before – and are still used for some products – tend to produce what Tony Aspler has called “block and tackle wines”: one drink and you can walk a block and tackle anyone.

The climate in New York can be hard on some varieties of grapes, so the winemakers are always looking to improve their stock with something that tastes good and is also sufficiently hardy. Enter traminette, a pleasant little white wine grape that is now being used by a number of the wineries in the area. It is a hybrid created in about 1965 at the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign by Herb Barrett. It would be fun if Barrett had been trying to create a kind of urban champagne, but actually he just want to make a nice table grape that had some of the taste of Gewürztraminer. He made it by crossing Gewürztraminer with the hybrid Joannes Seyve 23.416 (does that look like a scriptural reference?). He sent some of it to the experimental grape breeding program at Cornell University, which is at the south end of Cayuga Lake, which is another one of the Finger Lakes. It has spread from there because it survives and it tastes good.

What does it taste like? Well, I’m not here to give you wine tasting notes. You would do better to go see for yourself. I will tell you that it’s reminiscent of Gewürztraminer but toned down, with some flavours that might remind you of pinot blanc or vidal or just maybe Riesling. Or, if you aren’t a wine geek: it’s a nice, moderately fruity white wine, not buttery and not too tart or crazy, but just a little quirky.

What I am here to give you is word tasting notes. Come on, now: we have the word right in front of us. Let’s taste it together. Say it slowly: /træ mi nɛt/. It starts crisp on the tip of the tongue /t/, with a little rolling release into the liquid /r/; the vowel can be realized a bit harder as /æ/ or a bit milder as /a/. The lips come together softly /m/ as though considering a taste. Then another vowel, which can be high and sweet /i/ or more restrained /ɪ/ or rather subdued, almost dull /ə/. The tongue tip presses in again softly and quickly /n/ to start the ending, which is strong and clear, medium-bright and dry /ɛ/ with a fast, crisp final stop /t/.

The word can’t avoid seeming feminine; it has that ette ending. But such a range of flavours swirl around: a mechanical conveyance tram, with a rough hint of tramp and a suggestion of jam; a tighter, tidier trim; perhaps a girl’s name, Tammy; a net effect that could be an ensnaring mesh or a tennis game. It may bring to mind a stern and hectoring martinet, or a dangling, dancing marionette, and perhaps something to marinate in the interim. Look at its shape on the page and you may get a glimpse of a mitten to make it handle the cold better, perhaps a bit of mint (absent from the wine’s flavour), a questionable marine influence, possibly inert, and a backwards look at the commercial mart. But you will certainly see how balanced it is, with the i in the middle and humps and crosses on either side – to the left one cross and two humps, to the right one hump and two crosses. It even looks vaguely reminiscent of rows of grape vines in an orchard.

Will all this affect how the wine tastes to you? I don’t know. It would be a fun experiment to have a number of wine aficionados taste a new hybrid and tell some of them it had one name – say, merlina – and some another – say, xenoraz – and see if their tasting notes seem to be influenced by the name.

But whether or not it would, it’s best to be conscious of all aspects of what you’re tasting. When you taste the wine, taste the word too.

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