Monthly Archives: March 2015

gorm

Posted on March 12, 2015 | 2 comments

I really wanted to start with this nice reel (Irish dance tune) I remembered. I thought it would be easy to find a version of it on YouTube. But no, it’s not. And the thing is, I have the music for it, and I have a tin whistle (several of them, even), but I’m not sure how well I’d play it with minimal practice, and I am sure that if I were to try recording it now at half past 11 I would be counselled very quickly on the risks of disturbing the crusty neighbour lady. So. I’m a bit out of feck. Here instead is a link to the sheet music and a playable MIDI file: abcnotation.com/tunePage?a=www.oldmusicproject.com/AA2ABC/1201-1800/Abc-1301-1400/1399-PrettyBlueSeagull/0000. The MIDI file is about as soulless as you can get but it will do, I suppose, for those who can’t quite picture the tune from the notes. Just try to imagine it done with a proper fiddle or whistle and, you know, some sense of merriment.

Oh, why am I linking to this reel called “The Pretty Blue Seagull”? Erm. Couldn’t even find something with the proper Irish Gaelic title. Really I’m just a bit of a schlimazel here. The Irish for that is “An feilionn deas gorm” (which I feel compelled to say is pronounced something like “a fail yin jass gorum”).

So yes. Gorm. This is our word of the day. I’m out looking for gorm and coming across gormless, gorm maith agat. (Sorry, in Irish that sounds in casual speech just like go raibh maith agat, “gurramahagut,” which means ‘thank you’. More literally gorm maith agat would mean ‘you have good blue’ or ‘good blue to you’ or, exactly, ‘good blue at you’.)

Well, this is my day to be lacking in good judgment or perhaps good sense. Which is what gormless means. I remember playing a gormless Yorkshire lad (and his identical triplet brothers) in the play One for the Pot some 25 years ago in Edmonton: my first experience of the word. This gorm of which one is -less is apparently from the obsolete word gome, which means (per Oxford) “heed, attention, notice, care.” It comes form an Old Norse root.

So it would be good, then, to want some gorm, right? To be – what is it? Gormy? Gormful? Gormed? As @ivacheung declared today, “I’ve always wanted to be well gormed.” I mean, that doesn’t sound quite as appealing as well formed or well groomed or… well, gorm sits towards the back of the mouth until it closes with that soft ending on the lips, and so it lacks a certain brightness. It’s glum, gloomy, maybe a bit gory. Like a name for some gormless character in a Terry Pratchett book (RIP). Someone who does bugger-all because he can’t do bugger-all.

If the contronymic character of that last sentence pleases you, you’re sure to like what Iva subsequently found in Oxford: there is a noun gorm, but it means “an undiscerning person, a fool.” In other words, someone who is gormless is a gorm.

Um.

What gormless twit came up with that.

Well, I did just go on about how gorm seemed like a name for someone lacking in feck. I guess I wasn’t the only one who noticed. The word gormless was around nearly two centuries before this gorm showed up, but it was inevitable, I suppose. Suitable sound combination is noticed standing around near sense… is pressed into use with sense. It’s like some gormless security guard being pressganged into helping the bank robbers. Of course you know he’ll be kicked to the curb in the end… Sitting there feeling blue…

(That was the bit where I circle back to the beginning, because gorm is Irish for ‘blue’. Not sure if I was obvious enough about that. Well, I guess by explaining it now I’ve kind of killed it. Never mind. Valar morgormless: All men must feck off. Um, was that too obscure too? It was a reference to a phrase from Game of Thrones and to feckless as similar to gormless and… ah, bollocks, never mind. I think I’m experiencing, as @rgodfrey put it, the perfect gorm.)

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jill

Posted on March 10, 2015 | 5 comments

The sea is as still as gel in a Petri dish. A small boat moves idly along, mills about, sending smooth, even ripples in the glassy surface: |||| . It is on a booze cruise, perhaps, hopping from half-pint in one port to half-pint in another, or perhaps it can’t even be bothered to do as much as that. It’s just some lad and lass on it, and one of them cleans a fish and both have a glass of white wine to sharpen the appetite. And still the little swells follow, breaking up a bit from |||| into jill.

Jill? Without a capital j: jill. A verb for a boat moving idly about. It may come from the verb gill, pronounced the same, which in its time referred to doing a pub-crawl with just a small drink at each, or perhaps to having a little bit of white wine before dinner – so Oxford tells me. That comes from the liquid measure gill (same pronunciation again) equalling a quarter pint (thus a half cup, which is four ounces, eight tablespoons, or two dozen teaspoons).

But then there is another verb jill, a variant of gill meaning ‘clean a fish’. And of course there is the noun jill meaning ‘girlfriend’ or ‘sweetheart’, taken from the name Jill, as in Jack and Jill. There are other more recent uses (noun and verb) of Jill too, as female parallels to uses of Jack; some of them are about as impolite as their Jack counterparts.

The name Jill is usually short for Gillian (or the same with a J) or – dictionary.com tells me – Juliana. But just by itself, in its ripple shape on the page and its jarred liquid sound in the mouth, it stands apart a bit. And it has some associations for me, of course, as it likely does for most people. It’s a name just common enough that a person may know one or two Jills, just enough to give a clear character. The first Jill I knew, as a pre-teen, was a girl a bit older than me, daughter of some family friends; she had blonde hair and seemed a paragon of sensible prettiness. The second Jill I knew, in high school, was also, come to think of it, a blonde paragon of sensible prettiness. There was a third I knew, briefly, in university, a tall ash blonde from England, elegant, sensible, pretty. You see a pattern. (I haven’t met any new Jills lately, though.)

What has this to do with moving idly about, drinking in half-cups, and gutting fish? Hmm… Jill-squat, probably, other than coincidence. But can’t you picture some lucky Jack spending a pleasant afternoon with a sensible pretty blonde jill (named Jill or not) lolling in a boat jilling about on a jelly sea? It almost makes me jillous.

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Proof that English spelling is an evil trap

Posted on March 9, 2015 | 7 comments

My latest article for The Week looks at 10 words that are further evidence of the malicious character of English spelling. They look like they should be easy to pronounce, and many of us pronounce them as they look… but they’re really supposed to be pronounced quite differently:

10 words we’ve forgotten how to pronounce

 

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Melanchthon

Posted on March 7, 2015 | 1 comment

Aina and I and two of my friends went skiing today. As my friend Trish drove us up through Dufferin County towards Collingwood, we passed through Melanchthon Township, home of not very many people but a decent number of wind turbines. Trish wondered out loud where the name came from.

I knew off the top of my head that Philipp Melanchthon was one of the protestant reformers, working closely with Martin Luther in Germany in the 1500s. I said that the name looked Greek – it looked like it should be Greek for ‘black earth’, from the melan ‘black’ and chthon ‘earth’ roots – but Philipp Melanchthon was German, so it had to be a coincidence. But then I said, Why don’t I look it up on the web? I pulled out my iPhone and checked.

The first thing I found out was that he wasn’t born Melanchthon. He was Philipp Schwartzerdt. OK, so he changed his name… but why? And (clickbait here) what I read next made me say (rather loudly) “Of course!” and start laughing.

How’s your German?

Schwarz is standard High German for ‘black’. Erde is standard High German for ‘earth’. Melanchthon’s family name, Schwartzerdt, was (in another dialect) ‘black earth’. He just changed it to the Greek: Μελάγχθων.*

OK, but why? Well, at school he studied Latin and Greek. Renaissance humanism – and admiration of the classics – was ascendant at the time. And his great-uncle, an influential figure in the set, suggested he change his name to the classical Greek version, as was a common practice among humanists at the time. Philipp was an eager and impressionable boy barely over 10 years of age. The Greeks were such a model to be enthused about and followed. Another language, another time, another place, an enlightenment, a bright harbinger of reason!

This, mind you, was the same Philipp who grew up to fight against the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, its foreign language and borrowed ideas, its fanciful and expedient adoptions, its irrational digressions from the plain, clear, and simple. The same man who had discarded his plain and comprehensible German name for a borrowed Greek one, an idealization from another time and place, and informed his mind with their opinions too.

Inconsistent? Perhaps not. The Greek ideas planted their seeds in the fertile black earth of Melanchthon’s mind and the grain that grew forth was one advocating rationality and a rigorous logical inspection of premises and entailments. As well, in both cases, Melanchthon was dissatisfied with what he saw around him. The German name was as base and debased for him as the common ideas of indulgences and the cult of the saints and various other appurtenances of the Church. He fought this melancholy miasma and ran in the marathon of reformation. He wanted to undo the dammed-up theology and draw power from the wind of the Spirit.

In spite of all that, his name is seldom remembered, whereas Luther’s is all over the place.

Well. Luther is an easier name to remember. It does have an overtone of Lucifer, true, but then Melanchthon has an overtone of Moloch. And of course it is melancholy and chthonic, and has that nchth cluster that is sure to put off many a reader. Not that Schwartzerdt would have been a whole lot more appealing.

Meanwhile, in Melanchthon Township, the rich dark earth does not protest when it is ploughed and seeded. It knows neither Greek nor Latin nor German, nor English, but only the recurring phrases of the seasons. And we drive through without stopping, paying mere passing attention to the signs.

*The sharp-eyed among you will notice that where he has nch the Greek has γχ. This is because in Greek you represent the [ŋ] sound before velars with γ, which is normally transliterated as g – but not in this case. When the root is not before a velar the [n] is written with the usual Greek letter for n, ν.

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Swearing around the world

Posted on March 6, 2015 | 10 comments

About a month ago, I got an email out of the blue from an editor at BBC Culture asking me if I was interested in doing an article for them on why different languages focus on different things in their swearwords (or whatever you want to call them). Of course I was interested. The article went live today. If you don’t like reading crude language, taboo language, coarse language, vulgarities, etc., don’t read this article. But if you’re curious about why people shout different things when upset…

Mind your language! Swearing around the world

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ickle

Posted on March 5, 2015 | 1 comment

This word seems to connote a little drip.

You may not know it if you’re from North America and haven’t read the right things. It may appear just to be the common part of fickle, mickle, pickle, prickle, sickle, stickle, tickle, and trickle (and, in sound, of nickel too), words that really don’t have a whole lot in common aside from sounding a bit like a small flow of water. It might seem a bit icky, too. But there are two things that ickle means in Britain.

Those of us who have read the Harry Potter books may recall Harry’s nemeses taunting him with “ickle Harry.” What does that mean? It’s actually just British baby-talk for little – it intentionally talks down by imitating child speech; it implies “you little drip.” It often shows up somewhere near bicky, which is baby-talk for biscuit (which, in Britain, means what we North Americans call cookie).

How do you get ickle from little? In North America, where we say the latter more like “liddle,” you don’t. But if you retain the manner (stop) more than the place (tip of the tongue), and turn the /t/ into a glottal stop, and – as one does – make that late /l/ into something halfway to a [w], the [k] is a reasonable outcome. And dropping the initial [l] is just baby talk. It wasn’t made up by JK Rowling, anyway. It shows up in Charles Dickens, EM Forster, George Orwell… It’s classic. If you’re British.

But there’s another word ickle too. Many people in England don’t use it either, but if you find someone who does, they’re probably from Yorkshire or parts near it. I hadn’t been aware of this word until I saw it mentioned in “The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape.” But it will be plain once I tell you what it means: ‘icicle’.

Does icicle seem like a good word for the thing it names, by the way? I’ve always thought so, but ice and icicle are words I learned at such a young age that they shaped my idea of what they named. The /k/ in icicle and ickle is hard like ice, yes; how about the syllabic /l/? Does it perhaps have a sense of the drips that trickle to the tip and make the icicle grow?

Do you wonder where the word came from?

It seems plain enough at first glance: ickle must be a clipped form of icicle, yes? But then where does icicle come from, anyway? It must be ice plus… what?

Plus ickle.

Ickle comes from an old Germanic word relating to pieces of ice. It mostly referred to these aqueous stalactites, but its cognate in Icelandic is jökull. Does that look vaguely familiar? You may remember Eyjafjallajökull; if you’ve learned anything much about Icelandic geography, you may know that the frozen centre of the country is a huge glacier, Vatnajökull. As it happens, jökull is the Icelandic word for ‘glacier’. (IPA geeks: it’s said [jœːkʏtl̥]. The rest of you: never mind.) So one way or another, ickle is a piece of ice, but in Iceland it’s rather bigger.

Well, like glaciers, icicles do grow under the right conditions – but glaciers are added to by snow on top, while icicles add a drip at a time, rolling down from the top to the bottom. A bit more, a bit more… sort of like how ickle became icicle. I guess the plain ickle (which, in Old English, was gicel, said like “yickel”) was just too, uh, ickle for them. So, for clarity, they added the ice part.

Hmm. One more drip and they would have had a means of conveyance.

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piteraq

Posted on March 5, 2015 | 1 comment

One of the reasons I love National Geographic is the new words each issue brings. Look at this one! I particularly like how the p and q are facing off across a jumble of other letters. A jumble? Look closely and you’ll see that pitera anagrams to pirate. It’s like a pirate and another pirate attacking each other in a melee, each trying to win the letters.

And what is that q doing at the end? I bet National Geographic has a much-higher-than-average rate of words with q not followed by u thanks to transliterations of languages such as Mandarin, Arabic, Inuktitut… and its use in the spelling of Albanian, among others. But which language is this word from?

This word is from the article “End of the Earth,” by Murray Fredericks, who went to Greenland (also known as Kalaallit Nunaat) and photographed the scenery on the ice cap. You can see some of the photos online in “What Does Nothing Look Like?” The views are transfixing, infinite, white on white (not green – that name was just marketing by Erik the Red). But in all these pictures, you can’t see one of the most powerful things he encountered.

Piteraq.

In Tunumiisut, the Inuit language of the east coast of Greenland, this means ‘attacker’.

It is an apt name.

Is it a polar bear? No. You can take pictures of those. This is something that besets you – besets whole towns, even – for a day or longer. You have no choice but to hide from it and hope it does not tear your protection away from you. It can cause massive damage. The only blessing is that you can see the sign of its approach hours in advance. In the snow, rising up in the distance.

But you can’t see a piteraq.

And it’s pretty hard to see much when a piteraq is attacking.

Because the snow is flying.

But who has seen the wind?

Yes. A piteraq is a wind. It’s a katabatic wind: a cold wind formed on high that comes sweeping down, aided by gravity. It can move at over 200 km/h. Here’s a nice rundown of the facts of piteraqs from the blog Ultima Thule.

And here’s a video of someone up on the ice cap experiencing one. Now imagine that sweeping down a fjord into a town.

Since Tunumiisut is an Inuit language, we know that the q stands for a voiceless uvular stop. Imagine you’re trying to get rid of a popcorn hull stuck at the very back of your mouth and you should get the tongue position about right for this sound.

So when you say piteraq, it bounces back in your mouth like a tent being blown through town by a piteraq: first off the lips, then off the tip of the tongue, fluttering for a moment more there (snagged on something?), and then accelerating to knock off the back and – it’s gone. Nothing left to be seen.

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What do we do when a language is dying?

Posted on March 2, 2015 | 4 comments

The Pitkern language is dying. It’s dying because it has a small number of speakers and it’s not the language of opportunity for the youngest generations, who are moving away to Australia and New Zealand. Even the Pitkern-language version of Wikipedia has been proposed for closure – twice. What can we do? What should we do? Is saving endangered languages like saving endangered species? Are there reasons to let a language die? I look at all this in my latest article for The Week… and when it comes to Pitkern, there’s an additional twist. Read it now:

Why do we fight so hard to preserve endangered languages?

 

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butternut

Posted on March 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

Where I come from, butternut is the name of a squash. If you say the word, you mean the squash. The squash, of course, is neither butter nor nut, and does not taste specifically buttery or nutty; neither does it look like any nut you’re likely to see, nor like any butter you’d want to eat.

But, as it happens, it goes very nicely with butter and with nuts. Melt the one and sprinkle the other, or use both in a soup with the squash. Or whatever. Butternut squash is one of the most agreeable squashes, as far as I’m concerned; complaisant in the cooking, the flesh a rich orange hue on the eyes, the texture neither grainy nor too stringy, and the taste soft and sweet and round. It’s not dissimilar in these respects to pumpkin, but it’s smaller, it’s easier to handle, and it has a much higher ratio of flesh to entrails. And it has perhaps the most appetizing name of all the winter squashes.

Seriously. Butter? Nut? Compare with kabocha, acorn, spaghetti (I mean, yes, spaghetti is nice, but come on, butter and nuts are really nice), Hubbard, delicata, buttercup – well, that’s not bad, but I think nut beats a flower – or pumpkin. The only negative to the name is its resemblance to better not, and even that is a plus for those of us who like plays on words: “Should I pass on the squash ravioli?” “You’d butter nut.”

Where does it get its name from? Is it somehow an exocentric compound, a bahuvrihi? No; it seems to take its name directly from the nut called the butternut. The butternut is an oily walnut, hence the name (honestly, I think macadamia nuts are butterier, but I guess they didn’t have those around in the 1700s when the walnut got the name). I don’t know that those who gave the squash that name in the 1940s thought it tasted like it; actually it tastes closer to roasted chestnut. More likely they used the name because of the colour. Butternuts were used sometimes to home-dye fabric, thus giving the cloth and a colour the name, and some of that fabric was used for some Confederate soldiers’ uniforms, which is why Confederate soldiers were sometimes called butternuts (whether there was also any intended impugning of their manhood I’m sure I don’t know). Not seen any of them lately? Well, butternut cloth is about the colour of the skin of a butternut squash: a light grey-yellow-tan kind of colour.

Of course, you can use butternuts with butternut squash if you have some and you want to. Walnuts can sometimes make my mouth sore, so I lean more towards pecans (though if it comes to nut butters, I prefer almond butter – to me, peanut butter seems a bumptious second to the almond kind, though the almond kind is runnier and has to be stirred). Here’s a recipe I made this weekend (as I tweeted it) for what I have decided to call butternut bacon soup, although there are no actual butternuts in it (if you make it, you can use them in place of the pecans and I’m sure it will be splendid). Actually, I didn’t use butter, either, but you certainly could.

  1. Quarter and slice an onion and fry it in red palm oil. Add a minced clove of garlic. Toss in a bit of maple syrup so it will caramelize.
  2. Halve two butternut squashes and scoop out the entrails. Put them face down on a baking sheet in a 400˚F oven.
  3. Once the onion is caramelized, add a litre of chicken stock.
  4. Once the squash is soft (the baking sheet will be all wet with squash sweat), take it out and let it cool face up.
  5. Clean the baking sheet off because you’re going to use it again right now, unless you’re just made of baking sheets.
  6. You didn’t turn the oven off, did you? It needs to be on still, at 400˚F.
    What? Well, turn it on again then.
  7. Get out your kitchen scissors and snip up about 3/4 of a pound of bacon onto the baking sheet. I like the Danish style but whatever.
  8. Add a bag of pecan pieces. Um, I guess 100 grams or so. As much as you easily hold in your hand in a bag. As many as you want, OK?
  9. Add them to the baking sheet, I mean. With the bacon. Which you cut into strips about 1 cm wide, right? Mix them together and spread out.
  10. Well, so read all the instructions before starting. Or do you want me just to do this for you?
    Stick the baking sheet in the oven.
  11. Cut the squash off the skin. Or the skin off the squash. Anyway, you want the squash into cubes that you can smush. Toss the skin.
  12. By the time you’ve done that, it’s probably about time to pull the bacon and nuts out and stir them up and smooth them out. Do that.
  13. Sprinkle some curry powder over the bacon and nuts. Stick them all back in the oven.
    I use Sharwood’s.
    Some! Like, to taste!
  14. Grab the squash by handfuls and smush it up and drop it into the stock. Stir it. Add a can of coconut milk and a couple ounces of sherry
  15. Once the bacon and nuts are all roasted – the bacon is looking towards crispy – I don’t know, ten minutes? Shit, I just look…
  16. Anyway, take it out and add it to the soup. Stir it all. Give it 10 or 15 minutes to simmer.
  17. Purée? You wanted it to be that smooth? Well, you could have done that before adding the bacon and nuts if you wanted. Too late now.
  18. I think the texture is nice, OK? I like it like this.
  19. If you happen to have some candied cashews lying around the house (like, in a bag, not on the floor), you can sprinkle them on each bowl
  20. Oh, I know what I was forgetting! Sprinkle some brown sugar on the bacon and nuts if you want before putting them in the oven.
  21. Yeah, it’s a little on the sweet side. Your call. Also you may feel like adding more salt. Or not.
  22. Anyway, this makes enough to feed two people several times this week. I hope you have room in the fridge.
  23. Did I mention the sherry?
    Oh good.
    Well, you can drink some, too, you know.

There you go. Butternut squash is winter comfort food. Butternuts are, um, oily nuts. The word butternut is appetizing, probably not really because of its pattering sound like that of pecan pieces being dropped on the floor, I mean on a baking sheet, but just because butter and nut both bring tasty images to mind so quickly. Squash is not a pretty word but just eat it, OK?

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pyroclastic, comminute

Posted on March 1, 2015 | 2 comments

A day is a pyroclastic flow of time, from when you erupt into wakefulness first thing in the morning until you settle at last, still smouldering, into dreams again at the end. Time is continuous like a river or a rock, but as our daily events tumble forward under the gravity of existence and its myriad exigencies, we break it into hours, minutes, seconds, moments of various durations, starts and ends and passages. The crush of the morning and evening commutes, the commingled minutes and minutiae of our jobs and our shopping, the conflicts and comity, calms and enmities, of comrades and committees, the innumerable numismatic munificences and noetic illuminations, all tumbling together, edge to edge, happening to happening. The candle burns down, and as it combusts time busts; we rise bolder in the morning, but the boulder is at last the sand in the hourglass. A turn of a page, a lift of an eyebrow, an utterance, an interaction, a contretemps, all mutually triturated; even the lodestones of our most magnetic ironies are filed away. All is comminuted. Finally the dust settles, and it becomes fixed in memory: another day interpellated in life by the holy rolling stones of broken moments.

I have made allusions here that may not be plain. Let me tell you about a bit of history of which I first read in my childhood. On May 8, 1902, on the island of Martinique in the West Indies, the volcano Mont Pelée erupted. It spewed forth a pyroclastic flow: a nuée ardente, ‘glowing cloud’, a burning mixture of hot gas and stones, tumbling down the mountain at the speed of a jet plane. Pyroclastic is from Greek-derived roots, pyro ‘fire’ and clastic ‘breaking’, because the stones in it are breaking as they burn. The Oxford English Dictionary defines pyroclastic as “Designating, relating to, or consisting of rock fragmented by volcanic action or comminuted in the process of eruption.” Comminuted? It defines comminute as “To reduce (solids) to minute particles; to break, crush, or grind to small fragments or to powder; to pulverize, triturate” – from Latin com ‘together’ and minuere ‘make smaller, lessen’. In as little time as it took you to read those etymologies, the pyroclastic flow burned through the capital of Martinique – the town of St.-Pierre, the “Paris of the West Indies” – annihilating as it comminuted. More than 30,000 people died in a flash. Only one person in town lived, kept safe by thick walls from the burning that flashed through. The thick walls of a windowless prison cell. Auguste Cyparis, the man in the cell, had been locked up the night before after some contretemps in the street – a fight, perhaps? Did he kill someone? Only one person who knew survived, and that was Cyparis himself. Although he did not escape without burns, his crime saved his life; we may say his sentence was commuted by comminution. People who know French will recognize another irony: Saint Pierre means not only ‘Saint Peter’ but ‘holy stone’.

At the ends of our days, we are survivors, too, emerging with permanent marks at least in our memories from the holy heat of the day. But are we Cyparis, who set out to see Paris of the West Indies and ended up séparé, spared, and rescued from his prison four days later? Or are we the mountain, Mont Pelée, with a name so like that of Pele, the Hawai’ian goddess of volcanoes – but actually just meaning ‘bald mountain’? Or are we the pyroclastic flow that peeled forth from it and pulverized as it poured down? Do we disgorge time, do we fragment time, are we burned by time but saved by… by what, exactly? Which thing saved Cyparis?

Perhaps we are all three. We create time, we move with time and break it up, we survive the onslaught of time. And then we go back and do it again.

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