My latest article for The Week answers the question, “Why do we have nope and yup… and yep and yeah and nah and yea and nay?” Or, as their title puts it,
I must say I like to have the odd duck. It can be quite nice. Uncommonly among birds, it can even be cooked rare.
I also like to be the odd duck. And to know the odd duck. An unusual person. A rara avis: a rare bird. Not necessarily sui generis – one of a kind – but infrequently seen. A paragon, not an epigone; perhaps also a paradox, an enigma. An enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in bacon and glazed with an orange brandy sauce, and not overdone. Raring to go.
You can cook duck breast rare because ducks are tougher birds (have you ever tried to joint one?), less susceptible to infection; the meat is also better suited to it at least in part because it is better suited to flying. It can make it up to where the air is rarefied, and perhaps by consequence it can manage to be served rare. Indeed, if it is not rare I would rather say it is not well done. As it were.
Rare duck breast is not rare because it is hard to find but rather because it is like a soft-cooked egg. From Old English hrere, probably originally having a ‘shaken, agitated’ sense, we got a word rear that retained its old-style pronunciation, as bear has. It referred to the condition of a slightly undercooked egg. The sense transferred to meat by the 1700s, by which time it had been respelled rare.
A similar change took place later in the US (from the same people who gave us varmint from vermin and grits from groats): the verb rear, as in go up on the hind legs, became rare and is usually seen in raring, especially raring to go. To me it gives an image of a dragster peeling out from the start, the nose lifting up a little, because of the sound of it: “Rare. Rare! Rare rare rare rare rare!” This works better in North America, of course; the British pronunciation, as given by Oxford, is /rɛː/, which has lower air pressure.
But our rare for ‘uncommon’ is our rare for ‘sparse’. Rare soil is soil loosely packed; rare earths are minerals and elements that are sparsely distributed through the soil (specifically they are the lanthanide series of elements). Neither rare soil nor rare earth elements are actually all that uncommon; they are just not highly concentrated. Rare air is not uncommon, either; there’s quite a lot of it surrounding the whole planet – you just have to get up to a loftier level, high peaks and flight paths.
These rares come from the original Latin sense of rara (also rarus and rarum and so on depending on inflection): ‘loose, spaced, porous, sparse, few and far between, uncommon’… It all goes together. But with room between.
So, too, do my friends the rarae aves, the rare birds and odd ducks. They can be found in the loftier levels, sometimes up in the clouds and wanting in concentration, perhaps prone to ducking out of crowded occasions, but – like rare earth magnets – capable of exerting a powerful attraction, one that pulls over a long distance. They will not get or give a lot of rah-rah-rah, but they are always worth the effort to have for dinner – or drinks, or smart conversation, that rare art.
The first time I recall hearing this word was in a recording of an Irishman (middle east coast, I think) that I was listening to for accent acquisition purposes. He talked about dulse, which the fisherman liked to eat because “it gave them a good thirst for their porter.”
What I recall most particularly about his pronunciation was the intrusive schwa. Irish accents, due to a feature of Irish phonotactics, militate against adjacency of /l/ and any of several other consonants. You will hear “fillum” for film, for instance. And so dulse in that accent sounds like Dulles, as in John Foster, as in the Saarinen-designed international airport near Washington DC.
But there’s a good reason for that: the word it comes from in Old Irish is duilesc (in Scots Gaelic, duileasg). There’s an actual e written there. In the English transcription, it was dropped – because they’ll say it anyway. (The e on the end is likely there to keep the s as /s/ and not /z/.) All the non-Irish Anglos, however, seeing the spelling, make it rhyme with pulse and Hulce (as in Tom, the actor). Which actually results in a different sound for the phoneme /l/: back of the tongue higher, tip tense and touching less (if at all). Readier to swallow.
What is dulse? A vegetable, but not a pulse. It’s a kind of seaweed, and yes, it does give you a good thirst for porter or whatever else may be to hand that is wet and copious and dulls the desire. I will say it’s not the dullest thing I’ve ever tasted, nor is it dolce. A bit more like salty licorice painted onto a dishwashing glove. Not the sort of delicacy one fights duels over. In fact, it’s not really a delicacy at all – it’s available in quantity, cheap, and is not actually disgusting.
The phonetically inclined may notice that dulse in the Irish pronunciation, /dʌləs/, is very nearly a rearrangement (anaphone?) of /sæləd/. (A closer anaphone of salad would be dull-ass.) Well enough: you could make a salad of dulse. Mind you, you would probably find yourself wishing you had just eaten it by hand out of a bag. It’s not the sort of seaweed you get on your sushi (which, it occurs to me, I ate at Dulles when we were waiting for our flight home). It’s about as thick as the schwa between /l/ and /s/ in that Irish pronunciation. I mean, it wouldn’t be a dull-ass salad. But it schwa could be intrusive. Better to keep one hand free for your porter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Up to today, this word would call forth four things for me:
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.
Joss Stone, British singer, female.
Joss Whedon, American director, screenwriter, and actor, male.
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.
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.
Sesquiotica 