Yearly Archives: 2015

honest

Posted on August 17, 2015 | 1 comment

I was listening to The Burdens of Being Upright by Tracy Bonham this evening, and it reminded me of a review I read of it when it came out back in 1996. The reviewer praised it for its honesty.

But how did the reviewer know?

Honest is a term of high praise for a performer. It basically means “He/she is doing or saying things that I, or most people, would hesitate to do because they would show me, or them, in a bad light or make me, or them, unwontedly vulnerable.”

Here, have a look at an example: “The Ten Most Brutally Honest Songwriters.” These songwriters are disclosing personal details, talking about things one simply doesn’t normally talk about.

Well, heck. One doesn’t normally sing, either.

I don’t doubt that many songwriters who are praised for honesty really are being truthful about details of their lives and feelings. But, in general, how do we know? How do we know that they’re telling the truth and not just making up things for better effect? They’re performers, and the point of performance is not what you feel, it’s what your audience feels.

Which is why the saying goes, “The most important thing is honesty. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” (Actually, there are many different versions of the saying; Quote Investigator has traced its origins back to actors Celeste Holm and Ed Nelson.) If people could always tell when someone was being honest, life would be different. So different.

There are cases where we can evaluate more surely whether they’re honest. I don’t mean instances where a performer is singing “honestly” about something that can be documented not possibly to have happened. I mean the even more nebulous kind of “honesty,” a kind that was very popular 15 years ago and still shows up: the band sound like they’re recording it in a public washroom while their lead singer unloads a vicious case of diarrhea (and is also suffering from a Biblical bout of catarrh). So true! So like real life! So bare and raw and unprocessed! So unlike, say, Madonna, who is clearly heavily produced in a million-dollar studio!

Except that the Folding Bowels Band (or whoever) is also in a million-dollar studio, processed and produced, but pretending not to be. And, incidentally, is it more honest to expect people to pay for a technically highly competent performance or for one that your neighbour’s shaky adolescent squawks out in the shower? I think you’re making a more honest living – delivering expected quality for money paid – in the former case, though I must admit that if people really (for whatever reason) prefer the trans-tracheal evisceration sound, then yes indeedy, it is more honest to give it to them. De gustibus non est disputandum, eh?

But what, exactly, do we even mean by honest, really? A lot of time it’s in the line of “Dude was on. Dude was onner than anyone else. Dude was onnest!” Id est, it’s a plain term of approbation for a virtuous character or performance. We say it to honour someone. And why not? Honour (or, rather, honor, the Latin original without that dishonest pseudo-classical intrusive u that I, as a Canadian, refuse to relinquish) is the etymon; its derivative honestus (which came to us by way of Middle French) means ‘deserving honour; honourable; fine; top rank; doubleplusgood; meritorious of utmost respect’.

It just happens that we esteem highly – and (whether justifiably or not) associate with people of high station – truthfulness: a correspondence between what the person appears to intend and what the person actually turns out to intend. But we used the word honest as a more general approbation for nearly a century (in the 1300s) before starting to use it specifically to mean ‘truthful; not cheating’, and we still use it sometimes in more general sense to mean ‘respectable’ without specifically referring to lack of deceit.

But here is where we run into an issue with using it for performers – actors, singers, painters (a painting is a performance too, though the movement has stopped before you get to see it), so on. We turn to aesthetic performances in order to connect with things that expand our experience without actually involving us in real-world consequences. We want a vicarious experience, a fantasy. Even if it’s not a fantasy for the performers (as in a documentary), it is one for us, our reflexive responses no more imminently significant than the refreshing fear we feel standing on the glass floor in the CN Tower. We may want to have a sense that what we are seeing truly expands our grasp of the world in some way and doesn’t just comfort us – that it’s honest and not escapist – but our experience of it is not more honest, in the sense we think of today, than a roller coaster is an honest experience of a car crash.

We want well-faked honesty. We want not honest but Heston, a great thundering Moses leading us across the gap in a rearing Red Sea between our enslavement in reality and the promised land of truer (but non-damaging) understanding and experience. We want a performance that is honest only in that it delivers to us what we are paying for: a stirring deception.

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craven

Posted on August 13, 2015 | 3 comments

When I was a child, and there were cigarette vending machines in various places, one of the names I saw on them (along with Players and du Maurier) was Craven A. If you were cravin’ a cigarette, you might well buy a pack of those. It seemed to me an odd name for cigarettes, like a name for a bird perhaps (a bird kicking the habit? “Quoth the craven, ‘Nevermore’”) or an large cave (a cavernous one, in fact). The v in the word could make a person think of a V-neck sweater, perhaps with a cravat tucked into it.

When I first saw the word craven as an adjective, it naturally made me think of the cigarettes. I knew that it didn’t refer to them – more to some cringing person craving protection – but once I learned its meaning it did make me wonder why anyone would name cigarettes for cowardice.

It turns out that the cigarettes are named after the Third Earl of Craven. The earl in turn is so named because the surname of the First Earl of Craven was Craven, and that surname comes from a place in West Yorkshire, which seems to have come from a Celtic word meaning ‘garlic’. The cigarettes do not taste of garlic, I assume, but I am sure they leave a more lasting scent in room, on clothes, and in breath.

But while the cigarettes are not afraid of being smoked, craven people are. Smoked, or beaten, or crushed. A craven was originally someone who was defeated, utterly crushed, and who admitted being crushed; it likely comes from an old French word meaning ‘crush’ (compare modern French crevé ‘burst, worn out’; it is only coincidence that it is reminiscent of vaincre ‘defeat, vanquish’). It thence signified a fearful, pusillanimous person, one who cries out and cringes. And so it came to mean a coward, self-confessed or at least known as such. (Coward, by the way, is another English surname that does not mean what it looks like it means; its original bearers were cowherds.)

There will ever be those who shrink from the slightest shadow. There will also be those who are always craving attention but cannot stand scrutiny, who seek glory but seek it behind a cover. We should be wary of such craven images… If once we cave in to them, if we mistake craven voracity for veracity, we must learn to say “Nevermore,” lest we let ourselves in for such horrors as the craven avoid (or Wes Craven creates).

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pre-empt

Posted on August 12, 2015 | 2 comments

“Tonight’s episode has been pre-empted.” Pre-empted! How peremptory! Is it cancelled or just postponed? Wait – pre-emption is postponement? Well, that’s preposterous.

And yet there you have it. We may be tempted to think it unkempt, and perhaps a sign of contempt, for a third party to attempt to exempt itself from the usual rules and schedules. But broadcast schedules, like so many others, tend to follow the golden rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules. If someone has the money or the power, they can bump you or gazump you. They can even buy the spot before you get a chance at it.

Which is what pre-empt means. Its source (via French) is Latin prae ‘before’ and emptio ‘purchase’. Its first sense is ‘purchase a property before it is offered to another party’. Its use in broadcast started from ‘buy a time slot to keep others from using it’ and progressed to ‘cancel a planned broadcast in order to give the time to something else’ (generally something that’s worth more money, or at least will get more interest, which is largely the same thing).

Now it can be used in an even broader sense if you’re careful about it. One could raise a certain topic in conversation to pre-empt discussion of another topic; one could use a certain political manoeuvre to pre-empt a decision or action. But if you’re tempted to pre-empt, do be aware that it may provoke resemptment. I mean resentment. If your pre-emptees have enough gumption, at the resumption of business as usual – or even before it – you may in turn be gazumped or otherwise thumped. So caveat pre-emptor.

 

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Different sounds that we think are the same sound (but others don’t)

Posted on August 11, 2015 | Leave a comment

My latest article for The Week is on sound distinctions that other languages make but we don’t. Some of these are things that even linguistics students don’t notice until they’re pointed out. It includes a video!

The subtle sounds that English speakers have trouble catching

 

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awry

Posted on August 10, 2015 | 4 comments

If even the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft a-gley, you can well imagine how often and how badly the chaotic gallimaufry and salmagundi that is English spelling goes awry. I’m sure you and your coworkers have often been misled onto a pronunciation sideroad. The epitome of this would be some biopic or miniseries where the heroine, on a moped, seeks out the best sundried tomatoes, and finds that infrared light works best (or perhaps her story predates that). What is needed is a kind of orthographic clerestory to let some light in, or a sewer to stitch the spelling together, or at least a blast on a conch so that you would be wary… rather than awry.

Really. Raise your hand if you thought once – perhaps for a long time – that awry was pronounced “aw-ree.” Raise the other hand if, once you realized it’s a plus wry, you thought it was just you making the mistake.

Both hands raised? Congratulations. You have now surrendered to English spelling. Join the club. Words that are often misread because their parts are misconstrued are called, by some people, misles; some years ago, some people on a forum (alt.english.usage) compiled a “misle list.”

Awry is one of the worst of the set for a few reasons: 1) we don’t often form new words with a-, and when we do we typically put a hyphen after the a; 2) aw is a common spelling pair; 3) -ry is a plausible word ending (a search on that word ending in the OED online produces “around 8800 results in 7648 entries”); 4) wry is itself a problematic word, thanks to the silent w (it was not always silent, but it’s been centuries since anyone said the w – don’t be fooled by the fact that your lips round when you say the “r”; they always do that in English with “r”). A medical condition most formally known as torticollis is also called wry neck (because your neck goes awry); “rye neck” hits in Google slightly outnumber “wry neck” hits (though many of them are for a place in New Jersey called Rye Neck).

Wry, anyway, is a very old English word; its earliest form was a verb for moving, going, or turning (it may be related to wriggle), and then for going astray or turning aside. From that it came to be an adjective and adverb meaning ‘twisted, contorted, distorted, deflected, etc.’ Its modern-day use relates mainly to the attitude conveyed by a wry smile, and I must confess I find wry humour exceedingly appealing. But give it the a- that shows up in aright, awrong, ahead, aside, and so on, and you have a similar kind of adjective and adverb.

So it makes sense, historically. But because our pronunciation has changed while our spelling has persisted, it catches the unwary. Aw, such is always the story. English spelling is as it is because people are greedy, lazy snobs. Best to make a wry smile, say “Tha’s a’righ’,” and move on to the next turn.

Thanks to @TheLingSpace for mentioning this word.

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misle

Posted on August 9, 2015 | 11 comments

Oh, yay. It’s election season. Kind of like the run-up to Christmas: too long, too expensive, too noisy, and you probably won’t like what you get on the actual day. But instead of people wanting to nuzzle us standing under mistletoe, we get people wanting to misle us to non-understanding.

Misle? Sure! Check news reports about any ad or debate: “[Candidate X] misled voters with a boutique selection of house-trained factoids…”

What’s that, you say? Misled is just a past tense of mislead? It should be said mis-led? Come, now. Have you never looked at this word and been misled by its appearance, reading it at first as though it rhymed with “wise’ll” or “thistle”? Admit it, it works: we are rained with missiles of measly, even miserly, misinformation – slim bits of truthiness from slimy politicos. If you try to fight through the pettifoggery, the mist’ll clear to a fine drizzle… they’ll be telling you it’s raining, but really they’ll be micturating and hoping you’ll be too befuddled to figure it out.

It happens that there is a verb misle – in fact, there are two different verbs misle. In both cases it’s an archaic alternative spelling for mizzle. The first verb mizzle means ‘drizzle; rain in fine droplets’. The second verb mizzle – apparently unrelated – means (to quote Oxford) “to confuse, muddle, mystify; to intoxicate, befuddle.” And this one has a minor history of relation to mislead, as we see in two quotes that Oxford has given us. Bishop W. Barlow, in 1601, wrote “They were by their owne ignorance mizeled, or by their blind guides miss-led.” And in 1999, an author in The Scotsman wrote “Do not be mizzled, I mean misled, by their propaganda.”

So it’s an agreeable, even plausible, form; it has echoes and overtones of relatable imagery; it has historical associations and attestations. It is, we may say, a truthy word. And, more to the point, it’s perfectly cromulent. We can, by the power vested in us as users of the language, decide it should be a verb, and start to use it as one, and it will be so. It won’t change its past – a word’s history isn’t just whatever you decide it should be, although many people seem to think so – but it will change its present and future.

It’s sort of like an election. But there are differences. If someone misles you – if you are misled by them, I mean – on matters such as balance sheets and scientific fact, voting for them on the basis of their version of the truth will not make that version instantly true. Language can shift according to the decisions of users, because it exists by common agreement in our minds, but the hard cold world of external reality will not smile on those who misle.

Addendum: It turns out that misle is also used as the name for words that are commonly, spontaneously, persistently misread. See Misle list 2002 for a list.

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gasp

Posted on August 6, 2015 | 1 comment

You are sitting alone at home in the late evening, staring at your computer screen, when something sends a sudden chill down your spine. A bit of news you read on the web? Or an unknown visitor dripping cold water on your back?

You’re watching TV, a live leaders’ debate before an election, when someone says something disarmingly frank… or utterly stupid. Maybe “Of course we don’t want a free press.” Or maybe “Don’t worry your pretty little head.”

You dive into a swimming pool. You dive deep. Quite deep. You’re swimming down there, holding your breath, swimming, going upward, swimming, still under the surface, holding your breath, how deep can you be, um, are you actually moving up? Swim, come on, swim up, come on, can’t hold your breath forever, where is that surface where is and your head breaks through to air —

You’ve found a new romantic interest, and you’re in a secluded place… wondering how far it will go… and you find out when your lover touches you just… there…

What, in each of these moments, does your mouth do? What do your lungs do? What sound do you seem to be making?

Is not gasp one of the most perfectly expressive words there are? The tongue unblocks the back, the mouth gapes to let air through, then like a wave it closes again, washing at the tongue tip and stopping at the lips. A round intaking gesture.

But a sudden, grasping one! You may be inhaling deeply, but it’s sure not a yawn. Well, not in English, anyway. In the original Scandinavian source, that’s what it meant, and in modern Scandinavian languages the word it has become still means that – Swedish gäspa, for instance (which is said like “yes, Pa”): yawn.

In English, that yawn has come to a startled awakening and realized its full expressive potential. It has also accumulated expectations, images, and clichés: the crowd gave a collective gasp, an audible gasp; a gasp of surprise, horror, pain, or pleasure was heard – or perhaps it was a strangled or stifled gasp. But more than anything else, it comes down to that echoing last gasp.

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Here’s me saying some words that no one says “correctly”

Posted on August 5, 2015 | Leave a comment

My latest podcast for The Week comes from my article on words we don’t say the “proper” (unexpected) way anymore. In case my pronunciation guides didn’t communicate well, now you can hear me saying them:

5 words we’ve forgotten how to pronounce

 

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Olean

Posted on August 1, 2015 | 4 comments

I’m back for a day in the Southern Tier of Western New York, where my mom grew up. I’ve visited every so often since I was a kid, and more often since I moved to Toronto. It’s lovely lush rolling hilly country with no straight roads, and the Southern Tier Expressway (New York Route 17, now also Interstate 86) snaking through it like a dead anaconda dried into pitted concrete. For me, it is a land of family mythos and childhood memories, of the smells and sights I associated with visits to my grandmother and great-grandparents. And it is a land of towns and counties with names quite unlike any I knew in Alberta.

The Southern Tier is Chautauqua /ʃəˈtɑkwə/ (“sha-tok-wa”), Cattaraugus /ˌkætəˈrɑgəs/ (cat-a-raw-gus”), and Allegany /ˈæləˌgeni/ (“al-a-gay-nee”) counties. Towns that we passed through or heard of on the way to West Clarksville, where my great-grandparents lived and they and my grandmother are now buried, included Houghton /hotən/ [ˈhoʷʔn̩] (that business there with the International Phonetic Alphabet means // is what people think of the sounds as being but [] is how those sounds are realized – Berlitz-style would be “hoe-ton”), where my parents met in College; East Randolph; Salamanca /ˌsæləˈmæŋkə/ (“sal-a-mang-ka”) – stretched like a leisurely salamander next to the expressway in a scenic notch; Cuba (said as you’d expect), which I knew as a town before I’d ever heard of it as a country (and which is a good place for cheese); Bolivar (/ˈbɑləvɚ/, like “Oliver” with a B); Friendship; and the one we’re closest to right now, Olean, another set of newish large stores and oldish houses and no-longer-fresh businesses on the main drag, sitting by the expressway, a lump of human manufacture in this wiggling valley of trees.

Before I give a pronunciation guide, how do you think Olean pronounced?

Does it look sort of like Orleans?

Nope. Think more in the direction of linoleum. And petroleum. And oleander. It’s pronounced /ˈoliæn/, “oh Leanne.” And it has the same ol as in those other three words: related to oil and, originally, olives – oleander is so named because it looks sort of like an olive tree but is not; in fact, it’s poisonous.

Olean’s connection to oleander stops at the name and the basis of the etymology. It connects a bit more to the other two.

Olean is actually near the first place in North American that petroleum was sighted; there was an oil spring a bit east, near Cuba, originally discovered in the 1600s. When Europeans settled in the area in the 1700s, they first called it by a name given by the local Iroquois peoples, Ischua. But that name had multiple spellings and seemed odd to Anglophones, so a major who bought land in the area decided it should be renamed with the Latin-derived invention Olean in honour of the oil spring. That oil spring turned out to be quite a boon for the town. Once oil became a big thing, starting in the mid-1800s, Olean became a local depot and distribution point. Oil was a major part of the local economy until 1954. Between then and now, the city has lost nearly half its population – it’s a bit over 14,000 now.

They don’t make linoleum in Olean; linoleum is a kind of tile originally made with an extract of linseed oil (lin for linseed oleum is the Latin for ‘oil’, related by way of Greek to olive), and the tiles that were made in Olean for a century were ceramic. Have you heard of American Olean? You can still buy it. It’s a very popular widely used brand of ceramic tile. (Speaking of ceramics, 95 miles further east is Corning; you have their casseroles, perhaps – but at least as likely you have their glass on your mobile phone.) The Olean Tile Company was founded in 1913 in Olean. After they were bought by another company, the products became American Olean. They continued to be made in Olean until 2013; now they’re made in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Which just happens to connect to why we’re here. My mom wanted to come to a reunion of descendants of the 154th New York Regiment from the Civil War. They came from around here but fought (along with many others) at Gettysburg, among other places.

Actually, I’ve never been to Gettysburg. I grew up in western Canada, and we learned very little about the American Civil War in school. But I did visit the Southern Tier a few times. And now I’m back here again and learning more about that war at least one of my ancestors fought in… and about these places with names that had been familiar as road signs passed by and as words on my nearer ancestors’ lips.

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brattice

Posted on July 29, 2015 | 3 comments

It’s true that when I was a minor I was often more than a little brattish. However, I did not like when others pointed it out, as my brother often did. Reg, three years my elder, often used his seniority as cause and means to torment me, and the fact that our rooms were divided by the merest of partitions – well, a standard domestic wall made of drywall, but not a very effective sound barrier – meant that a lot of venting went on, especially when he did such things as making a three-minute loop tape of himself whispering loudly “Jamie is a brat, a brat, a brat” and playing it at full volume on the other side of the wall. My dirty dark room became the pit of my despair, and I didn’t dig it.

So when I see the word brattice, it inevitably comes with a bitter taste of youthful torment. It’s no minor thing. However, it is a miner thing. Specifically, a brattice is a partition at the bottom of a mine shaft – most typically made of boards – to keep the outbound and inbound ventilation separate. (Better-made mines have two shafts.) It can also refer to other similar walls of planking. I can’t help having an image of it as some sort of lattice, thanks to the word form, but it’s not. It’s solid enough, although it can be makeshift. Indeed, the first sense of brattice – now obsolete – was a temporary wooden structure added to fortress battlements for use during a siege. Its etymology is convoluted and a bit brutish, or at least brutesche (one ancient spelling), but it comes by way of French and perhaps before that German. Other accepted modern versions of the word are brettis and brattish. Fair enough: a brattish is stiff boards, and I was brattish because I was bored stiff.

In its role as a ventilation partition, a brattice would typically have cool, fresh air on one side and hot, stale air on the other. As I am building a hasty analogy between it and the wall between my bedroom and my brother’s, you can easily guess which side I wish to present as being cool and fresh and which as being assailed by intolerable stale hot air. My brother’s puerile pesterings have poisoned even the word bratwurst for me, though I love a good sausage so much I can ignore the name. But I will tell you this: I may have been the worst brat, but my brother was a wiener.

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