Monthly Archives: April 2016

disconnect

Posted on April 30, 2016 | 4 comments

 

Things get taken apart.

People break away. Logic fails. Lines are broken. Needs and desires diverge. Perfectly good things are disarticulated. You expect disco

very but get disco

nnected.

Sometimes you let things slide. Sometimes you can’t, because the slide is no longer there. Sometimes you look across a water gap at a waterslide that is being dismantled, displaced. At some moments life feels like a slide that is falling apart behind you as you slide down it. Or being taken apart.

We can connect disconnect to its history. It traces easily back to Latin. The verb at the heart is nectere, ‘bind, tie, fasten’. It gives us nexus but not (etymologically) necktie. Tie two things together (con) and you get connectere, which (by way of French) gave us the English verb connect by Shakespeare’s time. Add the dis and you have disconnect, according to Oxford first attested in English in 1751 meaning ‘destroy the logical sequence of’ or ‘make disjointed or incoherent’. In 1758 a physical sense is attested. An electrical sense came in 1826; a telephonic sense, in 1877. A personal relationship sense appeared in 1870. A sense of withdrawing from society did not show until 1961. The noun meaning ‘an act of physical disconnection’ shows up by 1905. But the more common current noun sense, ‘discrepancy of understanding, agreement, or communication’, dates only to the early 1980s in the citations. Somehow it took 230 years for the verb to come around in the noun. But that’s not a disconnect. It’s just a slow connection. Like dial-up, not hang-up.

This picture, right here, at the top of this word tasting, which you probably have to scroll back up to to see, is a picture of a disconnect. Not just a disconnection. You can see that the waterslides are being disconnected, of course; the reason they are is a disconnect. Or perhaps more than one.

That’s Ontario Place. An amusement park in central Toronto, on the shore of Lake Ontario, built by the Ontario government, opened in 1971. A great place for urban citizens. Paddle boats, log ride, maze, discotheque, IMAX theatre, concert venue, mini golf, and that waterpark. Summer employer for many a student, including my wife, who was a lifeguard there for several years and, for one summer, a costumed character, which she will readily tell you was “the worst job of my life.” After she and I moved into our place in the heart of Toronto, we would go to the waterpark once or twice each summer to do the waterslides.

It got older and a bit more worn, as things do. Suburban citizens didn’t need to come to it, of course; there are amusements farther out, including a much larger park with many roller coasters and waterslides at the very edge of the urban area, a long trip if you don’t own a car (and not a short one even if you do). Ontario Place remained for those of us who lived in and loved the heart of the city, even though we somehow seemed to be less important to the government. But a renewal project was launched and things were starting to look more spruce. We went and waterslid and looked at the new slide parts and the landscaping being done in preparation for construction.

And then, the next year, 2012, the government decided to close it. They cited some vague budgetary I can’t even tell you what. No communication, no understanding. No waterslides.

The concert venue is still operating, a great place to see acts you liked 30 years ago. The spaces are still there for event rental. The marina is still in business. The rest is empty, echoing silence. They say the whole place is being revitalized. The plans are vague. They do not appear to include a waterpark.

Certainly not this one, anyway.

Since then, Aina and I have been to a couple of waterparks. In Orlando, Florida. Not much harder for us to get to than the one on the north side of the city, and associated with a much better theme park. But that doesn’t let our government off the hook. They’re there; we’re here.

Disconnects. We look at them and we ask why. Why do they have to be? Do they have to be?

Are we, after all, connected? Our minds do not meet, not in this world. We can’t hear or read each other’s thoughts, which is probably a very good thing. Communication is not truly contact; it is an attempt to get solitudes to resonate in harmony. Sometimes they do. Sometimes it seems they do and then we find at some point they do not, perhaps have not. We try to repair, or we fight, or we walk away. We all want different things. Sometimes they are close enough. Sometimes the line is

We all have hangups. If we can let them slide, it may go swimmingly. If we disconnect instead, what will we build next, and how?

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Stoney

Posted on April 26, 2016 | 8 comments

Books you’ve had for a long time may seem like a trip down memory lane. But a book is more than a lane, especially if it carries an important part of your formative years. It’s more of a memory neighbourhood. Smetimes when you visit it you notice that it’s still a living neighbourhood. And sometimes as you step into the houses you find the foundations… of your present life and world. You open the cover, leaf through the pages, and see that it is part of how you learned to see. And what you learned to see.

I have two copies of a very special book. The book was printed in a limited leather-bound edition in 1980. One copy was given to me, signed, in 2003. The other belonged to my grandmother, and so, like my full set of Encyclopedia Britannica, it came into my possession. They are up behind some of my other ways of seeing, new and old. I need to remove a lens to see it more clearly.

Not a metaphorical lens. That Canon 135mm f/2.5 lens. (Ironically, I grew up using my father’s Nikon F2. The Canon equipment, though of similar age, came into my possession in more recent years.)

Do you see them now? Two leather-bound books with ornamental laces? Here, let me take one down and set it on the table.

Stoney Country, 1970–1980.

Is this a rocky land? It is a land near the Rocky Mountains. But though the country may be stony, and often dry and dusty and cast in the colours of cover and table, Stoney is not a description of it, not directly. It is the English name given to that people who live there. They call themselves Nakoda. Where is there? Morley, Alberta, Canada. The Stoney Indian Reservation (that’s still the official designation). If you saw The Revenant, you saw some of it, because much of the movie was shot there.

But I saw even more of it. Because I grew up around there.

I saw this sign every time we drove back home from Calgary on the Trans-Canada Highway.

This is a lovely book, many images, few words. It has sheets of parchment every so often with a few more words. When you open the book, the first photo you see is half-seen through a sheet of parchment, like a palimpsest.

Like a memory that is still there in full vividness when you turn the page.

If your memory seems like parchment, it may be that it is parched and needs water. Or it may be that you just need to turn the leaf.

As I leaf through this book, I see picture after picture of what I remember from my childhood.

Teepee encampments in the summer. Real teepees, not fake ones set up by tourists looking for some “authentic” experience. Ways of living, set up in the summer as a retreat from their houses. Flip aside the flap, stoop down and come in, greet everyone one by one, have a cup of tea, sit and talk.

Or, if you were me, sit and mostly not listen and mostly not understand. We, not being Stoney, spoke English at home, but my parents – especially my father – spoke Stoney and had long conversations. I looked at the fire. I played outside. Sometimes I played with the other kids.

Sometimes we went to the rodeo.

One time I even – in a small paddock by the house of one of our neighbours on the reserve – tried riding a calf. I’m not sure I lasted two seconds before ending in the dirt. At the rodeos I just watched, or didn’t watch, and maybe played or got some food. Tea, bannock. (A culinary ethnologist could be forgiven for thinking at first that the Stoneys were a lost tribe of Scots.)

Then I got older and didn’t join my parents to these things as often. Looking back, it would have made more sense for me to have learned the language. But little kids never really enjoy adult conversations, do they?

But the mountains don’t go away. None of it goes away. I went away, but it didn’t go away from me. Look, here is the mountain we lived at the foot of for five of my most formative adolescent years. Yamnuska.

The book closes with a traditional Stoney benediction. I’ve heard it spoken so many times. I’ve even said it aloud a few times myself. Next to the benediction is a picture of crocuses growing on the shoulder of that same stony Rocky mountain. Crocuses like we used to pick when I was a small child.

It is the country of the Stoneys, so it is Stoney Country. It is also stony country with rocky mountains. And I, having grown up there, am a child of those stones. Having been born there, to parents who had been accepted as part of the community, I was given a name: Îpabi Daguskan (or, as it sounded to my young ears, “Pobby Dowscun”). It means Son of Rock. Or, I guess, Stonechild.

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that I have ended up with two copies of this book. This one is number 743 of 1000, initialled at the time of publication by the person who did much of the work putting it together, who took me to the production shops where I first learned about CMYK offset printing, who photographed so much of it with his Nikon F2.

My dad, of course. (But the snowy photo above was, fittingly, by Tom Snow.)

I haven’t really talked much about this word Stoney, have I? Not directly. But what you see above is some of how it tastes to me.

Oh, and this. The theme music from a multi-media show about the Stoneys my dad did in 1977 (using, among other things, some of the same pictures). It wasn’t written for that, but it was perfect, and the singer – Lobo – let it be used. Let’s play this video of it for the closing titles today, shall we?

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chimera

Posted on April 24, 2016 | 2 comments

Cliff Jardine was pissed off.

Miss Henderson had circled a word in his essay and written, “You don’t know what this means.” But he had looked it up in the thesaurus! It was a synonym of spirit! So how could he be wrong to talk about “finding the right chimera”? Such a nice, shimmering word, too, like a ghost or a ghostly chiffon wrap. “Shimera!”

I’d never seen the word before either. It was high school, and his outrage seemed quite reasonable to me. It was some time before I learned what a chimera actually is, and even longer before I learned that the ch is pronounced “k.”

The joke on Cliff was that he had already found the right chimera. It’s called the English language.

What, historically, is a chimera? First of all, it’s also a chimæra. The æ is the Latin spelling, seen in some English versions though lost in the French chimère that was the immediate source of the English word (some writers changed it back to match its glorious classical origins). The Latin got it in turn from the Greek, χίμαιρα khimaira – note that that χ that I render as kh is before a high front vowel and could be like the ch in German ich, which is as close to “sh” as to “kh,” but phonemically it is nonetheless “kh.” But we in Modern English, having neither sound, just harden it to “k.”

A chimera is a mythical creature. It is made of parts from a lion, a goat, and a serpent, and it breathes fire; in Homer, it was slain by the hero Bellerophon riding on Pegasus. By extension, chimera refers to any creature made of wildly disparate parts, or to any implausible fantasy. Or, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “An unreal creature of the imagination, a mere wild fancy; an unfounded conception.” Like if you had to fight a dungeon monster made of reanimated hash. Or rehashed animals. The chimera has been quite catchy in popular culture too, as Wikipedia gladly manifests. It is like a camera on America, an avatar of the hyperreal. There are also fish of the order Chimaeriformes, most notably Chimaera monstrosa, also called the rabbitfish or ratfish. Chimeras are, as Buck 65 puts it, wicked and weird.

And so is English: a West Germanic language that displaced a Celtic language and was heavily changed under the influence of invading Scandinavians who had settled in France and brought their version of French to England, and other invading Scandinavians who came directly from different parts of Scandinavia, and that has in more recent times augmented its vocabulary heavily with bits from Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Polynesian languages, Algonkian languages, and, frankly, everywhere. And it has things that look like one thing but are another (ch, anyone?) and things that are sometimes there and sometimes not, or sometimes one thing and sometimes another (is the e version more likable, or is the æ version more likeable?). Whatever you think you have, you don’t have, or you have two of. Every allusion is an illusion, every illusion an allusion.

But you don’t need to be Bellerophon: you don’t need to slay the chimera that is English. You just need to find the right spirit.

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euge

Posted on April 22, 2016 | 2 comments

This word may bring to mind a preferred adjective of a paradoxically half-baked yet overdone blowhard. “Yuge! It’s gonna be yuge!” It looks like another way of spelling it, doesn’t it? One that is simultaneously quasi-classical-looking and yet iconic of a revulsion reaction, the cut-eye glance e e with the ug in the middle like a thought balloon.

But this is a word seasoned by time. It manifests another paradox: that truly well done things are rare.

Is this word well done? Would I steak my name on that? Sorry, I mean stake? I could. It is a Greek bearing a gift. It comes from εὖγε euge, the bits being eu ‘well, good’ (as in eulogy, euphoria, euthanasia) and ge ‘done’. It was a cry of approbation in Greek, and was borrowed whole cloth into Latin.

But how was it pronounced? In the original Greek, it would have been two syllables, something like /ɛw gɛ/. The pronunciation of Greek has progressed over the ages so that in modern Greek (where it still exists) it is said /ɛv jɛ/ (i.e., “ev yeh”). But when Latin took it, it gained a syllable: /e u ge/. Shouted (as one may with such praise), it sounds a bit like an old car horn – just a little higher in the front than the classic “ah-oo-gah.”

But, you know, English has developed its own ways of saying words borrowed from Greek and Latin. We know how we say Eugene, which comes from Greek for ‘well bred’ (the gene from the same root as genesis and generation – and gene, for that matter). The correct English pronunciation of euge, when it’s actually said, is /ju d͜ʒi/ (i.e., “you gee” – in other words, Eugene without the /n/). The ferment and curing of the ages can have profound effects, and whether you think they are improvements is a matter of taste.

But it’s not actually said very often. It may be ‘well done’, but it is rare. We have other ways of saying things are well done, of course – for one, we borrow from Italian the expression bravo (which, by the way, modern Greeks do too: another way of saying ‘Well done!’ in Greek now is Μπράβο!, which is just a modern Greek transliteration of Bravo!). Ironically, we have also made bravo a noun (uncommon now, true) meaning ‘daring or reckless villain; hired assassin; desperado’. Somone in the line not so much of “Euge!” as of “Yuge!”

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The quick way to know what that language on the imported cookie package is

Posted on April 20, 2016 | 2 comments

After a bit of a pause while I was busy doing and writing other things, I’ve written another article for The Week. This one is on a shortcut to knowing what language you’re looking at (when it’s written in the Latin alphabet and is a language you’d reasonably likely see on merchandise or in mass media or social networks). The short of it is: It just takes a little character.

How to identify any language at a glance

(My editor wrote the title. Obviously it’s not really any language.)

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vectigal

Posted on April 18, 2016 | Leave a comment

For many people, the vectigal is a galling vector, a vehicle for conveying vexation, oft inveighed against. Oh, it is taxing. But why?

Because it is taxing. Taxation. Tax. Most specifically it is a kind of tax or tribute to the government that was imposed by Rome on its subjects, but it has gained a broader sense than that: dues you pay to the government for the right to use those things the government has paid for. You know, roads, utilities, police forces, that kind of thing. People have no problem with paying private organizations for similar services and privileges, and have no problem with mutual funds and buyers’ clubs and similar joint efforts to save money through oligopsony, but as soon as it’s government getting the money compulsorily (well, you could always renounce your citizenship and move elsewhere, but that seems drastic), many people resent it, even though it pays for things they inevitably benefit from.

But let us evade that discussion and return to the word. Vectigal is a noun, even though it looks like an adjective (there is an obsolete adjectival form, but it’s… obsolete). It comes from Latin, of course, and is unchanged. The plural, in case you want it, is vectigalia. If you expected a Latin source vectigalis, as –alis is often the source of English –al, you may be happy to learn that it exists. It is the genitive of vectigal.

And where does vectigal come from? It’s a derived form of the verb veho, which means ‘I carry, bear, transport, convey’; it is the source of the veh in vehicle, the vey in convey, and even the veigh in inveigh. Its derived and related forms also give us vector, convection, convex, and even veterinarian, among others. It is, in other words, itself a vehicle or vector for many meanings in many forms.

But for all the use and value we get out of all its derivates, almost no one now knows this verb veho – or wants anything to do with vectigal, so isolated as to be nearly vestigial lexically. It is like a little nightingale, singing madrigals in its dark corner but mistaken for a magpie or gull by those with no ear for it, a victim of its choice of tribute.

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cambric, Scarborough

Posted on April 17, 2016 | 3 comments

What fine vestments memory and associations weave and work for us, needing neither needle nor thread to imbricate the pieces that have come from the looms of the fates.

Take cambric, a rich word, cambered with c’s and bricked with m, learnèd as Cambridge and savoury as turmeric. Where have we heard this? Is it a kind of cheese? No, hum and you will know it:

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt,
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
Without no seams nor needlework,
Then she’ll be a true love of mine.

A shirt. But what shirt bears this rubric? One made of fabric from Cambrai (called Kameryk in Flemish, and so the French and Flemish come together in one cloth). It is a fine, dense fabric, of high quality, made originally of linen but now also of cotton.

And who will make this shirt, and who will wear it? For many in modern times, it must be Mrs. Robinson, or perhaps her daughter, Elaine, in The Graduate, scored incessantly with this song, sung by Simon and Garfunkel. I don’t mean the eponymous “Mrs. Robinson,” of course; I mean “Scarborough Fair,” an English folk song of some antiquity, known as an anthem to the impossibility of foregone and bygone attachments, and incidentally as a good recipe for seasoning roast chicken.

Are you going to Scarborough fair,
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme?
Remember me to one who lives there;
She once was a true love of mine.

Where is Scarborough? In my youth I knew only that it was in England, though I can tell you now that it is on the sea coast in North Yorkshire, its castle sitting on bluffs above the salt water and the sea strand. It is those bluffs that led to its name being given to a suburb of Toronto, now thought of by many as the great Siberia of Metro Toronto (they call it Scarberia, in fact). It has an unjust reputation thanks to pockets of rough neighbourhoods, but much of it is leafy green neighbourhoods, rolling parklands and shopping centres, cliff crests and golf courses. It has been around long enough to become a land of memories and futures, adverted to in songs by such as Bruce Cockburn and Rush, the archetype of the Canadian suburb, a forgotten fabric for some but still present and woven seamlessly into the warp and woof of Toronto’s streets. And why Scar? For no other reason than that the original Scarborough was settled a millennium ago by a Viking named Skathi and his clan. We know no more of him and yet he is the mark on this fabric.

And so what colour is our cambric shirt? Is it scarlet? Blue? Or a plain clean white? I think it has been calendered to give it a shine. The remembrances of which it is made are as well seasoned as a fowl. Is it fair? Not all in life is, and scars burrow into our hearts and minds like runs and rough fibres and rend us so that we are left with separate pieces. We may seek sage advice, but what we need most is time. And in time, however we are torn, we do our best to assemble it coherently and leave no scraps on the floor. It may seem impossible, but we do it anyway. We find at long last that we can do no other, and so we make our own cambric shirts.

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skelp, skelt

Posted on April 16, 2016 | 3 comments

Skelp that skelp! Skelp it, I say, and skelt – do not skelt it helter-skelter, or I’ll skelp you!

Uh… help?

If you’re scratching scallops into your scalp over these ones, I can’t blame you. One of these words has not been in use since Chaucer’s time, and the other one is archaic and mainly northern English and Scottish. But they have some promise and value, so I’m blowing the dust off them and setting them here in front of you for your diligent and hasty study.

Do diligent and hasty seem at odds? Haste makes waste, after all; hasty efforts are often scattered to the wind. This is one of the odd and appealing things about skelt. The Oxford English Dictionary gives it two senses: intransitively, it means ‘hasten; be diligent’; transitively it means ‘spread or scatter hurriedly’. There is no known etymology to help sort this all out and tie this all together, and no one seems to have used the word in modern times. But if we think of the intransitive as meaning ‘throw oneself into something’, it makes sense, and the transitive can be in the line of ‘throw from oneself’, which will tie in well enough. It also fits with the sound-symbolic effect of /skɛlt/. Is it related to helter-skelter? Quite possibly.

Skelp also seems to have sound-symbolic or directly imitative origins. It can be a noun or a verb, and as a noun it has another sense as well. The main sense is ‘slap, smack’ – verb or noun – and in most recent use the verb seems to have narrowed to ‘spank’, i.e., it’s specified the location of the slap as the breeches. The other noun sense is (to quote Oxford) “A thin narrow plate or flat strip of iron or steel, which by twisting and welding is converted into the barrel of a gun.” It shows up in the early 1800s and probably comes from the main sense. That is, you skelp the steel (with hammers or whatever) into a skelp.

Slapping steel? Well, pounding it. It’s not the same kind of skill as to sculpt, and you’re not sharpening a scalpel, but it does need to be reasonably precise. Which is perhaps suggested by the /ɛ/ vowel, not quite as high as the /ɪ/ in whip (and slip) but higher and tighter than the /æ/ in slap, to say nothing of the /ɑ/ in slop. We don’t seem to use /ɛ/ as much now for this kind of impact, but clearly in centuries past it had a more direct appeal. (And the “short” vowels haven’t changed since then, whereas the “long” ones have.) Perhaps our sense of this sound has changed scope.

Well, it’s not too late to put it back in use – although it does risk being misheard as scalp. I think skelt has more hope, especially the transitive sense. Maybe if we skelt it here and there it will get picked up.

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fussbudget

Posted on April 12, 2016 | 4 comments

What does a fidgety flibbertigibbet become with age? Not a fuddy-duddy, for sure. Would we have to fudge it a bit to imagine she might be a fussbudget?

Of course you can be a flibbertigibbet at any age, and a fussbudget too. But I think a young fussbudget is more likely than an old flibbertigibbet.

Well, whatever’s your bag. Some people make a fuss about every bug and widget. Not all fretful sorts are full-fledged fussbudgets, of course, and many a chatterbox is blithe and garrulously agreeable, but there are always the Felix Ungers of the world, fluttering fingers, noodging neighbours, futzing with widgets, fussing over dust and fuses, and budgeting down to pencil stubs.

Not that a fussbudget is someone who fusses over budgets. Budget is an old word with more meanings than just ‘a set plan or limit for spending’. It first hit the language as meaning a purse, bag, pouch, or wallet (typically leather), a sense that hasn’t been seen in use in well over a century; it came from French bouge, ‘leather bag’ or ‘wineskin’, from Latin bulga. And yes, bulga is also the source of bulge. To have a bulging wallet is almost cliché; to have a bulging budget may seem an inane extension of an image, but etymologically it’s tautological.

From that purse or bag, anyway, we got the sense of the money in it, and the limitations thereto; we also got a sense of ‘bundle’. It is more likely that last sense that was intended in the first confection of this word, since it only showed up in the earliest 1900s, around the same time as fuss-box and somewhat before fuss-pot, both of which mean the same thing: a person who is a walking cluster-fuss, so to speak. But fussbudget has had the greatest staying power, perhaps because of the echoing vowels and the muttering ending of budget. To my ears it just seems fussier, for whatever reason.

And what is fuss? Whence comes it? Since its first huffing and snuffling onto the scene in English around 1700, it has had the sense it still has. Its source is uncertain. It may be imitative, metaphorically onomatopoeic or anyway somehow phonaesthetic. It may come from Danish fjas ‘foolery, nonsense’. It seems to show up first in Anglo-Irish writers, but it has no clear connection to Irish Gaelic. I note with pleasure that in older texts with the long s (ſ) it would look like fuſs and, when inflected, like fuſſes, fuſſing, and fuſſed.

But no fuſſbudget, alas; the long s was long gone by the time this word appeared. Pity. That teeny difference – just the right side of the crossbar, projecting like a little sliver in your fingerpad – seems ideally suited, the ſort of fine ſilly offſetting detail that only a fuſſbudget or ſimilar ſuch ſelfſtyled miſfit with an infinite budget for fuſſing with ſtuff would inſiſt on perſiſting with. (Although in truth they would not be ſatisfied with ſatiſfied; the sf combination is an exception.)

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veg, veggie, vegan

Posted on April 10, 2016 | 4 comments

Let’s start with a little tone association. What kinds of phrases does each of these words – veg, veggie, vegan – bring to mind? Here are some that come to me.

“Meat an’ two veg.” “I’m just going to veg for a while. I’m bagged.”

“I’ll have the veggie burger.” “So go ahead and have fun livening up your menu with lots of fresh healthy veggies!”

“Don’t you have any vegan options on your menu?” “She’s a vegan, so we have to consider that in the menu planning.”

So. Veg meaning ‘vegetable’ has, in my world, a distinctly British tone, and is especially associated with the phrase meat and two veg. But veg meaning ‘vegetate’, as in ‘relax and do nothing of any importance’, is quite common in Canada and, I suspect, much of the US (I note that the Oxford English Dictionary has a first citation from a Canadian newspaper, and two of the five it cites are Canadian). Sometimes you’ll see it with out (i.e., veg out).

Veggie meaning ‘vegetable’ seems perky. Too perky sometimes. The sort of forced perkiness that you often see in lifestyle writing. It’s a common word, of course; I suspect many people say veggie more often than vegetable.

Did you know that both of these words have, in the past (not so much in the present), also meant ‘vegetarian’?

Veg meaning ‘vegetarian’ showed up first in the 1880s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Veg meaning ‘vegetable’ first showed up even earlier, in the mid-1800s. It’s very difficult to do a proper Google Ngram search to see historical frequency, because veg. is also used as an abbreviation in technical documents, which doesn’t really count. So I don’t know when exactly it became really popular. But meat an’ two veg (in literal reference to a standard menu) shows up in the early decades of the 1900s.

Veggie meaning ‘vegetarian’ (noun) shows up first in the 1950s; meaning ‘vegetarian’ (adjective), which is the same as meaning ‘vegetable’ (attributive noun), shows up first in the 1940s; meaning ‘vegetable’ (noun) shows up first in the early 1900s. But if you do a Google Ngram, you will see that it was used barely at all until the late 1970s, and then it just shoots up. (It’s still running way below vegetable and vegetables, though.) So it’s really a fad term of the last few decades. (Don’t bother checking the post-2000 numbers on the ngram, because a large number of historical books were added and it registers them erroneously as when they were added rather than when they were first published, so the numbers for recent terms slump.)

Both veg and veggie can also be annoying to many people named Reg or Reggie, who may occasionally be called Veg or Veggie, since vegetable also has an unpleasant use referring to someone who is comatose or brain dead, and it seems to bleed over when these words are used on a Reg or Reggie. I suspect it’s more of a nuisance for adolescents than for adults. My brother, Reg, is over 50 now. I should ask him whether he still has a distaste for the words veg and veggie.

How about vegan? Does that seem like an even newer fad? When was the first time you heard of vegans? I heard of them in the 1980s. You know what a vegan is, right? If not, here’s a quote from the person who invented it, in the place where he introduced it:

‘Vegetarian’ and ‘Fruitarian’ are already associated with societies that allow the ‘fruits’ of cows and fowls, therefore… we must make a new and appropriate word… I have used the title ‘The Vegan News’. Should we adopt this, our diet will soon become known as the vegan diet, and we should aspire to the rank of vegans.

This is from the first issue of the The Vegan News, published by Donald Watson in November, 1944, wherein he started a society for people who eat nothing that has come from animals, living or dead.

So yeah. Veganism has been around for 72 years.

And while we associate veg with either working-class vegetables or just classlessly vegetating after work, and veggie with perky colloquial vegetables, many of us associate vegan with dietary difficulty and restriction. After all, it’s just so hard to find food that doesn’t use things made from animals or animal products!

Well, less hard than it used to be. (And most alcoholic beverages just happen to be vegan. So, by happenstance, do many other treats, such as Oreo cookies.) And there are all sorts of other things we could eat but we don’t. Generally in our society we don’t eat cats or dogs or certain parts of cows and pigs, or sheep’s eyeballs or live monkey brains, and we get along fine.

I’m not a vegan, but I do know some vegans. I even work with two of them. While vegan might, for food, seem first of all to many of us to involve restriction, and for some might call to mind militant animal rights activists, all the vegans I can think of whom I personally know are happy, pleasant, good looking, and healthy. (And not averse to a drink or two.)

I wonder if people named Regan are at all bothered by the word vegan. People named Megan ought not to be, since it doesn’t rhyme with their name, anyway. But vegan doesn’t have any connotation of the sort vegetable has. It just has that confusion with Vegan, which means someone or something from Vega.

Vega, aside from being a model of car, is a star. The star is so named because in ancient Egypt the constellation it was part of was called the Vulture, and the Arabic al-nasr al-wāqi ‘the vulture coming down’ was shortened and mutated to Latin Vega.

So, um. That set of people who distinguish themselves by not eating dead animals or anything to do with animals have a name that coincidentally is the same as a name that traces back to a vulture, an eater of dead animals. Well, at least this should help ensure vegans get enough irony.

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