Monthly Archives: January 2015

Miss Knirps (a story)

Posted on January 18, 2015 | 3 comments

This is a fiction I wrote several years ago for a book idea that I didn’t finish. I just remembered it. Here, read it.

One of the people who had a profound influence on my early development as a word taster was my grade two teacher, Miss Knirps. It was not quite that she had a word taster’s love for language and for the flavours of words. Oh, she loved certain words and ways of saying things, but she always seemed to approach words as though they were bees, useful for honey but capable of stinging you at any moment.

Miss Knirps of course seemed impossibly old, but I believe she was about 27 at the time. She was prim and pretty in a very tidy way. She was also very concerned with decorum. She wanted, I think, for all the children of the world to spontaneously join in a circle to sing decent songs about pleasant things. She was a naïve romantic at heart, her world view evidently shaped by too many Barbara Cartland novels. But she must have had a darker, funkier side to her, kept very far apart from her classroom life, because the songs she would recite to us, or have us recite, or even sometimes sing, were lively, popular songs from the current hit parade… bowdlerized. Songs from groups like The Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan.

I remember her sitting and reading to us in that exaggerated intonation and sing-songy voice that teachers of small children can have: “Old black water, keep on rolling. Mississippi moon, won’t you keep on shining on me? Keep on shining your light; you’re going to make everything all right. And I don’t have any worries, for I am not in a hurry at all. I would like to hear some happy Dixieland; pretty lady, please take me by the hand.” She looked at us with a very proper smile of the sort intended for those of tiny brain. “And the lady would take him by the hand and say, ‘I shall dance with you, good sir, all day long.’”

Miss Knirps folded the piece of foolscap she had written her lyrics on. One of the girls – Shelly Priest, in whom one could see the spark of a Knirps-in-training – raised her hand and said, “And then what would they do?”

Miss Knirps got a dreamy look in her eye. “They would have to part ways, of course, as the sun came close to the evening. But he would give her his calling card, and he would say –” she produced another sheet of foolscap and unfolded it carefully like a blintz or a diaper – “Missy, don’t lose my name; you don’t want to dance with anyone else. Send it off in a letter to yourself! Missy, don’t lose my name, for it is the one you will own. You will use it when we are together and have a home.” (We didn’t know at the time that Miss Knirps – Melissa Knirps – was called “Missy” by many of her friends.)

Then she taught us that chorus to a rather stiffly simplified version of the music – the refrain from Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” of course. I have to say that, stripped of its louche jazzy tone, that tune is as stiff as an old dry washcloth. But we didn’t know any better. We sang it together.

We sang it a few times through, in fact, so that some of us could actually remember it when we got home. Joey McTavish was singing it around his house when his teenage sister Janis heard him, did a spit take with her Coke, and fell about the place in a paroxysm of laughter for more than ten solid minutes. Then she pulled out Pretzel Logic and played it for Joey.

Joey’s eyes, so I’m told, were the size of dinner plates by the end of the song. Naturally, she played it again, and sang along. And for good measure she played him a the rest of the record too. And when she asked him if Miss Knirps had taught them anything else, Joey’s muddled recollections ultimately allowed her to sort out enough to pull out the Doobie Brothers and play “Black Water.”

When show and tell came the next day, Joey had a look on his face like he had a unicorn with side-mounted machine guns in his bag. When his turn came, he toodled over to the record player, which was already out and in position from some Burl Ives songs Miss Knirps had played for us. As he pulled out his record, Miss Knirps naturally went over to help him.

As she reached for the record, which was not in the album cover, she spotted the label on it and froze for approximately one half second. Then, with her smile held with the firmness of rigor mortis, she took it from him, placed it on the player, and played “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.” Which, in case you don’t know, has no words and is a Duke Ellington tune of the sort children would enjoy and teachers would not object to. Even if it is being played by Steely Dan.

“But that’s not –” Joey started to say.

Miss Knirps pressed one finger on her lips and another, firmly, on his. “Let’s listen.”

The tune done, she handed the record back to Joey and said, “You must thank your sister for lending us her record.” He hadn’t mentioned that it was hers. Apparently this was an easy guess. “But tell her to be careful and make sure it doesn’t get damaged. I think it could get scratched if you keep bringing it here.” And, smiling ever so sweetly, she sent him back to his seat, his face now looking like someone else had just eaten his ice cream. We couldn’t figure out why.

But of course we found out later, after school, and several of us got Janis to play it for us until she heard her mother coming home.

As for Miss Knirps, she switched genres, preferring to base her verse on literature that no one’s teenage sister was likely to be reading. She read us “The Highwayman” largely unaltered, quite a thing to do for grade two kids in 1974. She also read us something that to this day I haven’t traced for certain but strongly suspect was based on Charles Bukowski; I remember her saying “We danced and danced and danced and danced. And danced.” Heh. Danced indeed.

In retrospect, I do believe that Miss Knirps would have been more disturbed to hear us singing the nonstandard negatives (“you don’t wanna call nobody else”; “and I ain’t got no worries”) than to hear us singing about adult romantic entanglements. Such poor language was not for good children! I know for certain that it was those, and not the entanglements – more adumbrated than explicit, and opaque to us at that age anyway – that really blew away Joey. And the rest of us, too. Hearing them in those songs was the linguistic equivalent of seeing Miss Knirps taking a pee.

Here are the songs mentioned:

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epigone

Posted on January 17, 2015 | 3 comments

I do not want to be an epigone.

I do not want to devote my life to explicating someone else’s epic after they’re gone. I do not want to be one of the little piggies trotting along chasing the big one. I do not want simply to imitate some idol. I don’t even understand people who would rather argue about, for instance, exactly what Kant did or didn’t say rather than about the viability of this or that idea Kant might have said – people for whom the world of facts and information is just a world of warring planets, and they have chosen one to be an asteroid of, hoping perhaps for a promotion to minor moon by the end. I simply don’t understand people who just want to devote their lives to the work of some other person. It doesn’t matter even if that other person is really just the hydrant they’re peeing on; while they’re peeing on it, someone’s peeing on them.

To be perfectly honest, even if someone tells me I’m just like this or that other person, or have said or done something that is so [person X], I try to be nice about it but it drives me crazy.

Maybe this is partly because I have a brother who is three years older than me who always preceded me to the next level of schooling. I hit high school wanting to establish myself among new potential friends (after my previous disasters) and I’m instantly “little Harbeck,” judged by what my brother has done and measured against him. I move on to university and I’m “little Harbeck” again, the anticipated duplicate nerd who turns out to be a loudmouth spazz with a temper and a deathly fear of saying actual nice things to people.

I’m sure it’s also partly because I have always had an unassailable belief in my own potential. Does that sound obnoxious? I won’t say it’s not. See above. I’m not so obnoxious now. But I still have an abiding desire to do things that are in some way singularly new.

It’s also because I’m built to follow and handle ideas, not people. I’m still learning about people. The one thing I can say for sure is that the truth value of a universal proposition does not depend on who states it. (The perceived truth value does.)

This all may seem a bit funny if you know that my doctoral thesis focused entirely on the life’s work of one person, Richard Schechner. I have an excuse: my advisor told me that would be the best topic to pursue. I was pragmatic enough to know I should do what would get me the degree efficiently. Plus it came with a five-week sojourn in Princeton. It was really fascinating learning about this guy. But mainly it taught me some things I would need to do and be if I wanted to be someone, not just an epigone of someone.

Well, no one else is doing word tastings. Ha. Speaking of which: epigone.

Nice word, uses all three stop locations in English – lips, tongue back tongue tip – and all three kinds – voiceless, voiced, nasal. I want to pronounce this word “e pig a nee,” /ɛˈpɪgəni/, because it’s evidently Greek and Greek words and names usually get that treatment in English – it would rhyme with Antigone, for instance. But this word is actually said /ˈɛpɪɡoʊn/, stress on the first syllable, the last syllable rhyming with cone. Why? Because it’s not actually a Greek word unchanged.

We got it as the plural epigones from French épigones, from Latin epigoni, from Greek ἐπίγονοι epigonoi, which was the plural of ἐπίγονος epigonos. Which meant ‘born afterward’ (the epi in this case meant ‘after’; in some other instances in English it means ‘around’). There were seven heroes who led the war against Thebes, you see, and their sons were the epigones – the less-distinguished inheritors. Nowadays in English it means, as dictionary.com puts it, “an undistinguished imitator, follower, or successor of an important writer, painter, etc.”

So not only are those scholars who dedicate their careers to some author epigones, and not only are those no-lifer fanboys who spend all their money aping this or that sci-fi show or movie epigones, but so are all the lesser abstract expressionists, all the splash painters after Pollock, all the uninventive atonalists of the later 20th century, all the movie scorers who set Glass-like scales, all the fanfic authors… for that matter, so was I in my late teens, trying to produce something like Finnegans Wake (the results were vomitrocious and soporific). I think one goes through excusable phases of epigonism in one’s youth; ideally, at length one learns to be “inspired by” and “drawing on” rather than slavishly imitating.

Unless one builds one’s entire career on being an epigone of some greater light, of course. Many comfortable, even “distinguished,” careers have been built on such. But do I want my mark in history to come after e.g. or i.e.? Nope.

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stertor, stertorous

Posted on January 14, 2015 | 3 comments

He got on the elevator just before the doors closed, that guy. Him again. An inch or two taller than me and probably 1.4 times my weight. A bit socially odd and hard to read; always seems like something is nettling him a bit.

It’s an elevator ride. Twenty-something floors. Stare at the door, the floor. Sometimes people talk. Fortunately not this time. But as soon as he exited the elevator, five floors before my floor, I pulled out my phone and made a note:

Stertorous

His most salient characteristic, you see, is that his breathing is very audible. Very. With occasional mouth noise, but mostly through the nose.

Usually if I’m in the elevator with someone who makes that kind of noise breathing, that someone is a dog. Probably a little bulldog.

More often when you hear a person breathing stertorously, you’re in their bedroom. Or near them on a bus or airplane. Or in church. Or maybe a meeting at work.

Stertor is loud breathing, one could almost even say stentorian breathing. Constricted breathing. Breathing as of one asleep. In particular, breathing like snoring, although it can be gentle snoring. Stertorous is the adjective. Of course.

The word stertorous does not have a gentle sound to it, does it? It sounds strained, terse, tense, tortured perhaps. There may be a stutter, but a restricted one, ingressive.

Here, do this: whisper “stertorous” as you inhale. Presto, stertor. Even better, move your tongue back a bit in your mouth, as though you’re about to clear your throat, and do the same thing again. Yeah. Like that. That’s some serious stertor. Not so much sonority as snority. Or just snorty.

That works particularly well if you’re a typical North American or someone else who uses the humped-up-tongue /r/. In that case, both syllables of stertor have no real vowels; the peak of each is a syllabic /r/: [stɹ̩ɾɹ̩]. (Doesn’t that transcription look like it could be a visual representation of snoring?)

The word stertor comes straight from Latin, of course. The Latin noun is formed from the verb stertere ‘snore’. That happens to be an anagram of resetter, as in resetting your sleep or your alarm, but I doubt the ancient Romans foresaw that fact. But of course stertorous is an anagram of sot rouster and rests or out and torture SOS and rots so true and to trousers and…

Well, anyway. It may be a sound often associated with sleep or coma on the part of the person (or dog) making it, but for those of us hearing it at close range, it is rarely ours to rest.

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A rant on censorship

Posted on January 14, 2015 | 3 comments

A bit over a year ago I went on a Twitter rant about censorship. Then I made an image of the entire text so I had it in one place and tweeted that. Today Daniel Trujillo asked me about it. I found I hadn’t ever posted it here. So I dug it up. Here it is; you may have to click on the link to see the image. Maybe later I’ll convert it to real text rather than an image.

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Posted in arts, editing

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propaedeutic

Posted on January 14, 2015 | 4 comments

Say you’re writing a text for an introductory course, something just to make sure students are prepared for higher education in the subject. You want to use a diction proper to the level, right? Maybe some eidetic imagery? You wouldn’t want to prop up your vocabulary with opaque sesquipedalian escapees from an encyclopaedia. That’s not the proper way to do it. Might make you look like a professor, but won’t make you look like a pro at preparatory communication.

But every so often you’ll get a text, or at least an opening section, that will declare itself propaedeutic. “This course is propaedeutic for the more advanced study,” perhaps – or, as a noun, as in John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, “We can pass from this simplified propaedeutic to the problems of the real world.” Simplified except for what you call it.

It’s a word for those who consider teaching to be a bit infra dig; they want to be paedagogical. This is a serious course of study you’re embarking on, as witness the lexically luxuriant luminary who will be Virgil to your Dante (and remember, Dante went through Hell first before getting to Heaven). Switch on your academic propeller beanie; this is just the warm-up act.

It’s an impressive and almost balanced-looking word, propaedeutic. The paed could rotate 180 degrees and look much the same – in fact, write it with the digraph, pæd, and it would look the same. You could spin it like a propeller, and in fact “propaedeutic” sounds a bit like an old prop plane starting up. The p at the very start of propaedeutic would do well to be matched with another d at the end to make the whole word spin, but we just get c, which is literally 1 short of d, so we miss the stem – preparation not finished, I guess.

The pro at the start is the pro that means ‘before’, from Greek προ, which also helps us know it’s proper to start this word with “pro” and not “prop.” The paed is the root you see in words relating to children (from paedagogy or pedagogy to rather less pleasant ones); here, it’s part of a word for ‘education’: παιδευτική paideutiké, whence the eutic as well.

Not a great start to an education to start with a word you need an education to know, though, is it?

Well, it could be worse. It could always call itself cataskeuastic.

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joss

Posted on January 13, 2015 | 4 comments

Up to today, this word would call forth four things for me:

  1. Joss Ackland, British actor, male, who’s been in a gazillion things but who I remember best from the 1987 movie White Mischief, a murder mystery based on a true happening among a particularly debauched set of people in colonial Kenya, the true story of which was recounted (among other things) in the fascinating book The Bolter.
  2. Joss Stone, British singer, female.
  3. Joss Whedon, American director, screenwriter, and actor, male.
  4. Joss sticks, a kind of incense.

Joss Ackland and Joss Whedon have in common that they are males, and actors. Joss Ackland and Joss Stone have in common that they are British and their names are both short for Jocelyn, which, like Vivian and Marion, used to be commonly borne by men. (Joss Whedon is Joseph.) They all have their spots in the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) pantheon, whether or not you would call any of them idols.

But then there are those joss sticks. I was never sure why they were called joss sticks. I was never in a position to look it up when the question occurred to me. The word just seems jaunty and maybe a bit exotic, in an Anglicized way. Was joss a word for something mystical? Was it borrowed from something to do with, say, horsemanship, or a sport like jousting or some kind of tossing, or something more functional? Or was it one of the ingredients?

Then, today, I was reading Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills, an early collection of short stories, in an Oxford edition replete with explanatory notes. I read the story titled “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows,” which is about an opium den in Lahore run by a Chinese expatriate. I read this: “In one corner used to stand Fung-Tching’s Joss – almost as ugly as Fung-Tching – and there were always sticks burning under his nose; but you never smelt ’em when the pipes were going thick.”

There was no explanatory note. Apparently Oxford assumed all the readers would know what a joss was. Or else they were just relying on their figuring it out from context – the Joss gets a further passage about it from which it is easy to tell that it is a statue.

A statue of what? A Chinese deity, as it happens.

Joss is a Chinese word? It most certainly is not. I have yet to encounter a dialect of Chinese in which that is a plausible word phonologically; although there are many more dialects than I have met, word-final /s/ is quite out of play in the ones I’ve seen.

No, joss is a word from Chinese Pidgin English, a language used for trade in south China, with simple syntax based on Chinese and with words largely taken from English and other European traders’ languages and modified to fit Chinese phonotactics more or less. The word pidgin, for instance, comes from the word business.

The word joss is, as I mentioned, a word for a Chinese deity (or similar) or statue thereof. You may know that deity comes from the Latin word deus. Also from deus came Portuguese deos (that’s an old form). From Portuguese deos came Javanese dejos, which was used for Chinese religious statues. From dejos came Chinese Pidgin joss. And joss stuck, in English as well.

Joss sticks still. Well, joss sticks still sell, anyway, and burn, more often in home incense holders than in front of statues of deities. Joss isn’t a word you’re likely to see applied directly to a Chinese statue in ordinary usage now. But you do see it on some members of the IMDB pantheon. And now you can take it as emblematic of how some word forms burn down like incense, in sense and in form.

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cellophane

Posted on January 10, 2015 | 2 comments

This was once a word of the future, the bright, clear, future, full of shine, as emblematic for many years as its near-doppelganger cell phone was more recently. It names a smooth, glassy, pliable, diaphanous film made from the same general sort of thing as paper is: cellulose. It’s a smooth, slippery word, not a stop in it, just the /s/ and /f/ voiceless fricatives, the /l/ liquid and /n/ nasal, and three vowels, one or two of which are diphthongs. It’s a word that can bespeak silly fun or a subtle, profane phallocentricity, depending on what – or whom – it’s wrapping.

For me, cellophane will always call forth Plastic. It will call forth lower-case plastic, of course, because we often call it plastic wrap, though there are many kinds of things we’ll call that and cellophane is only one (cling wrap is another – not the same thing). But it will call forth upper-case Plastic too: Plastic Bertrand, the ultimate invented plastic pop idol from Belgium, presented shrink-wrapped for public consumption, complete with his first smash hit, “Ça plane pour moi”:

Plastic Bertrand was an epiphany for me in junior high: pop punk in French. Does he seem plastic? Sure. Cellophane? Well, if you listen to the second verse of the song, you may hear the words poupée de cellophane, which mean ‘cellophane puppet’. The song is not written for coherence, I should say, and multiple interpretations are available. When I listened to it in my adolescence, I thought I heard couper la cellophane, ‘cut(ting) cellophane’. But I didn’t really understand a lot of the rest either. It turns out it’s not really understandable, but anyway I didn’t get the right incoherent words. It was anything but transparent.

Transparency is a hallmark characteristic of cellophane. In fact, it’s in the name: cello from cellulose – the plant product from which it is made – and phane, from the Greek ϕαν root meaning ‘come to light, show’, which we see in words such as diaphanous (the French inventor of cellophane had the French word diaphane ‘transparent’ in mind) and epiphany.

So cellophane, which seems so artificial, is nonetheless made from organic matter (so are oil and gas, mind you: organic matter decayed and changed over millions of years). And the word cellophane, which seemed so modern even in the 1960s and ’70s, came into existence in 1912, with the product it names. Sometimes plastic things seem realer than real. And sometimes something is so transparent you don’t even notice it.

Plastic Bertrand has mounted a bit of a comeback recently. Here’s a video of him singing his top hit a few years ago:

Does he sound like the same guy as in the first recording? I mean, he’s older and all that, of course. But still. Now listen to this 2010 version by a different guy, Lou Deprijck.

Doesn’t that sound a bit more like the original?

Go find every TV performance by the young Plastic Bertrand and you’ll realize quickly they’re all lip-syncs to the studio version. If you happen to have a copy of Plastic Bertrand’s greatest hits album, as my brother did (I was listening to his copy), you may think at some point how it’s odd that his voice in the songs recorded at live concerts is a bit different. Or you may think nothing of it because you know studios do things with voices.

Such as use one person’s voice and another person’s face.

When Plastic Bertrand – real name Roger Allen François Jouret – was hired by a producer to be a start and sing songs the producer had written, the song “Ça plane pour moi” had already been recorded – with the producer and songwriter, one Lou Deprijck, on vocals. In fact, all four of Plastic’s first albums were with Deprijck’s voice. Plastic was a great face and a lively performer. But Deprijck didn’t even want him singing on the albums. He was a cellophane puppet.

This fact came to light quite recently. In fact, Jouret only admitted the truth of it in 2010.

And I read it and I said, “Huh.” And then I said, “Of course.”

Is nothing sacred? Well, maybe not nothing. But sometimes things aren’t just profane. They’re cellophane.

And that’s a wrap.

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octozumba

Posted on January 8, 2015 | 1 comment

This is a word from a childhood song.

Or maybe it’s not.

For one thing, I never knew what it meant. But when you’re young, you hear plenty of words that you don’t know the meanings of and you treat them as lexical units and assume they must mean something.

For another thing, it’s not so much a word as a magical entity that, as you pursue it, breaks into many, flaking off phantoms here and there, and you have to try to follow and find the word at the bottom – the one that, in reality flaked off all those phantoms as it headed towards you, and the word you started with was really one of the phantom endpoints. It is a one that contains a many, and it is one of many that lead to one. And what it leads to is not octozumba. Except in my version.

It’s also associated with a gesture. Or a set of gestures. Or nothing. Depending on who you’re asking. But always, always, always, it is associated with a song. How the song goes varies a little, mind you…

Let’s start where it started for me.

When I was in the early years of primary school, we lived in Exshaw, Alberta, a small town with a large cement plant set at the entrance to the Rockies and not too far west from the Morley Stoney Indian Reserve. My father worked on the reserve while my mother taught – at the time, at Exshaw School, but afterward at the reserve school. In Exshaw, my childhood experiences took place with playmates and friends and classmates and with my brother. My brother, Reggie, unlike me, belonged to Cub Scouts. Where he learned interesting things.

One of the things he learned was a song. Well, he learned more than one, but I’m talking about this one. I also remember a gesture, which actually goes with a different song about junior birdmen: you make goggles by making thumb-and-forefinger rings and then putting them over your eyes with your hands upside-down, palms against forehead. This had nothing to do with octozumba but I always remember it with octozumba. Somehow the gesture seems octozumba-ish, perhaps because ocular.

Octozumba came from a song that I remember quite clearly:

Octozumba zumba zumba, octozumba zumba zay
Octozumba zumba zumba, octozumba zumba zay
Hold ’em down, you mighty warriors,
Hold ’em down, you mighty chiefs
[repeat senselessly]

Clearly this song had something to do with Indians: warriors, chiefs, you know. The music sounded sort of like the music associated with Indians in western movies (you know, with cowboys). What was octozumba? I think I was too young to think “octo = 8,” but I recognized the octo, like in octopus. And zumba was maybe something like Montezuma or something.

Anyway, it had the air of the secret knowledge passed from one young boy to another. Reggie had learned this at Cub Scouts, and it was a new thing I was learning that seemed to have been passed down as special information. It was a thing. It meant a thing. It was a thing you did. Add it to the ever-growing list of Things.

Fast-forward four decades. I’m sitting in Toronto and I wonder whether someone has YouTubed this song or what. I start trying to find it.

To begin with, I find a site with some warm-ups for improv performers. It has the word(s) as ay kazimba. I also find a site with some Girl Scout songs. It has the word as akamazuma, and gives not “mighty warriors” but “Zulu warriors”…!

More digging follows. It’s a Boy Scouts song. It’s an army song. It’s a rugby song. It’s a drinking song. It was used during the Boer war. It supported the Zulus. No, it taunted them. It wasn’t Zulus, it was Swazis. The words are “Hold ’em down,” “Take them down,” “Haul ’em down,” “Get ’em down,” “See him dance,” “Hold him back,” “See him there”… The gestures are a complicated series of touching the leg and/or arm of the persons on either side; no, they’re a dance; no, it’s drinking; no, it’s hauling down your pants; no, it’s… what gestures?

And octozumba? It’s I kama zimba, I zicka zimba, Hi zig a zumba, Izika zumba, A kin a zimba, I kama simba, Ai-zika-zimba, I come a zeema, I giva zumba, I ziga zumba, Ah-chika zumba…

In all this, and especially with the aid of a very replete discussion of it at The Mudcat Café, I come to find that the song is usually called “The Zulu Warrior” and was recorded by The Brothers Four. But not first. It was first recorded in 1946 by a South African named Josef Marais, who made a career collecting and singing folk songs, most of the time with his wife, Miranda. Here, give it a listen; the tune is just as I remember it:

Marais didn’t write it, though; he just wrote it down. It probably does date from the Boer War era, if not earlier. Among the people who fought in the Boer War (and lived in South Africa throughout that period, with contact with the Zulus) was Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts.

I will leave you to consider what the evolution of octozumba – I should say ai kama zimba – demonstrates about the nature and causes of change in languages and culture.

I’m still not sure what ai kama zimba zimba zayo means, though it does seem to mean something. One commenter at The Mudcat Café, Ewan McVicar, says a Swazi prince told him it means “a warrior should be brave.” It happens that kama simba means ‘like a lion’ in Swahili, which is a related language – not that closely related, though. Zulu for ‘lion’ is ibhubesi… not sure about Swazi; I haven’t a Swazi dictionary.

It is late now. I shall have to continue my hunt for the true meaning later… although I already know the meaning of octozumba. It’s all that I’ve just told you.

The nearest synonym is probably classiomatic.

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lambeosaurus

Posted on January 7, 2015 | 3 comments

Let us now amble in the beam of that most lambent of sauri, lambeosaurus: a large lizard, nearly 10 metres from bouche to back end, with a coxcomb’s crest – in fact, a headpiece something like a hatchet, or a cartoonist’s rendition of the hairdo of the later Elvis. It had short forearms, and in consequence may have sometimes crouched forward like a kitten playfully preparing to pounce. A gigantic, squamous, green kitten with a beak and a bony bouffant.

The lambeosaurus seems to provoke ardent loyalty. As has been proclaimed on reddit, “we feel that the Lambeosaurus is clearly the best dinosaur, and that no better dinosaurs have existed or will exist in the future.” With a hollow crest that its sinuses actually ran through and that may have been a sound amplifier too (and perhaps an opener for very large bottles), and with eating practices that would not displease a Buddhist monk, how could it not be?

Witness further this video, “Extinct Dinosaurs: The Lambeosaurus,” with “Smackdown” by Blue Stahli for a soundtrack. What is not to enthuse over? (I must confess I can hardly wait for the series on dinosaurs that are not extinct, as the title implies there must be.)

A lack of embalmed specimens has proven something of a problem in labeling this amiable thunder lizard. Paleontologists, having only the jigsaw puzzles of broken bones to piece specimens together, at first took as different species what are now thought to be just different ages and sexes of the beast. It does have more than one species, but not as many as first believed.

Do you wonder where the name comes from? It is named after Lawrence Lambe, a pioneering paleontologist. As the Wikipedia article tells us (note the thrilling attempts at stylistic variation in the sentences!), “In 1902, he described Canada’s first dinosaur finds, various species of Monoclonius. He described Centrosaurus in 1904. Euoplocephalus was named by him, in 1910. In 1913, he named Styracosaurus. He was responsible for naming Chasmosaurus and Gorgosaurus, in 1914 and Eoceratops in 1915. In 1917, he created the genus Edmontosaurus. In 1919 came Panoplosaurus. He also discovered and named the hadrosaurid Gryposaurus.” This passage is like a paleontological nerdgasm in a house of mirrors.

Did you notice that lambeosaurus is not named above? Lambe did not name a saurus after himself. He did study the materials that were ultimately put together to be called Lambeosaurus lambei, but it was not all assembled before Lambe disassembled in 1919. The beastie was named after him in 1923 by William Parks following its full recreation.

I do not know for sure, but I strongly suspect Lambe was pronounced like lamb. Notwithstanding this, in lambeosaurus the be is pronounced: “lam bee o sor us.” We may hold Lambe blameless in this. He did not finish the assembly. It was only once the parts were put together that this extra syllable came to be.

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thimble

Posted on January 6, 2015 | 4 comments

We all know what a thimble is. It’s a little metal cuplike thing, best known for being little and cuplike. It is most useful as an image for expressing ridiculously small amounts of fluids such as liquor, coffee, and common sense. It’s a Tom Thumb tumbler.

Thimbles are also sometimes collected by people – they have been made in a variety of outrageously cute and decorative forms, some really quite scenic and fine, and consequently quite expensive at auction.

The word thimble is also useful for making puns; in particular, thimble-minded suggests itself readily, though you probably won’t get to use it too often. It also has a taste of nimble (thimble-fingered?) and humble (thimblebrag?) and of course symbol (sex thimble?).

Many people know that thimbles typically have a pitted surface reminiscent of that of golf balls. Most people, if they have seen a thimble in person, happened on it in their mother’s or grandmother’s sewing kit. Or, of course, in their Monopoly game.

But did you know that thimbles are actually used for something?

For many years of my childhood I had exactly no idea what the point of a thimble was. I just knew it was a thing used somehow for sewing, and it was shaped like a cup but you couldn’t set it with the open end up because the other end was curved. Then, one day in my adolescence, I set to sewing some small fix. I found that it really freaking hurt to have to keep pushing the needle through the thick parts of the cloth with my fingertip. The back end of a needle may not be the point, but it’s still pretty acute. And somehow the light just dawned. I knew a thimble could fit over a finger. I suddenly realized why you would want to have a thimble on your finger. Huh.

Look, I learned a lot about cooking from my mother, but I generally had little interest in sewing and never really asked her to show me how, beyond the simplest things. (From my father I learned about photography, in case you’re wondering.)

Sewing was a stereotypically distaff activity for centuries – distaff itself, which means ‘of or relating to women’, is a metonymic use of the name of an implement used in spinning flax into thread – and so the sewing kit and its bits, notably thimbles, could be assumed associated with the lady of the house. A thimble was a small, dainty, ostensibly useful gift. Hence the collectible thing. Even princesses and queens would give and receive them on occasion. Usually ones quite inappropriate for actual use, of course.

And where did we get this word? Old English þymel, from þuma ‘thumb’ plus the suffix el, which we also see in, for instance, handle. A handle is an implement used by and fitted to the hand; a thimble is an implement used by and fitted to the thumb. Or finger, if you prefer. Or, of course, used for its merely thymbolic value.

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