Monthly Archives: July 2023

brave

Posted on July 31, 2023 | Leave a comment

What’s the line between brave and reckless? Between brave and foolhardy? Between brave and foolish? Between brave and careless? Between brave and depraved? At what point does a sincere “Bravo!” slope into a sarcastic “Bravo”? When does amazed “Wow!” slide over to scornful “Wow”? How many shades are there of “You have got to be kidding me” – and how many of them are one or another kind of “brave”? How do we distinguish between raw courage and mere brouhaha?

Of course the lines will be drawn differently by different people. Some people admire sports such as wingsuit flying and BASE jumping, and take the inevitable “in memoriam” rolls at the ends of videos of such sports as evidence of sheer valor; others find them to be the most senseless thrill seeking, and take the “in memoriam” rolls as proof. Some admire those who summit Everest, or K2, or Kangchenjunga, or Denali; others have little or nothing good to say about them. 

And some admire such feats but deny that they are brave, because they involve risk only for personal adventure and reward, and not for the sake of others. Bravery, in such a view, is heroism – and by “hero” meaning not someone who has endured hardship when they had no other real choice, but someone who could have had continued to live an easy and acceptable life but chose to face strain or danger for the sake of another (or others).

But then what of someone whose bravery involves hurting or killing others? Often acts of bravery are done by soldiers at war. Most people would agree that killing people who are shooting at you, especially if you’re doing it to help protect other soldiers on your side (or civilians), qualifies as brave; many people would also extend it to killing soldiers who are not at the moment shooting at you or others but would if given the chance, such as a tank or machine gun nest; many would also accept an attack on enemies by sneaking into their camp and killing them while they ate or even slept; but of those who found such acts brave, how many of them would see them as brave if done by someone they see as an enemy? Does the evaluation of individual bravery vary according to whether the army they’re a member of is defender or invader? If invader, does the motivation for the invasion matter? Or is all “bravery” that involves acts of war depraved? How about on the more individual level – if I say that I should “turn the other cheek” if attacked, does that also mean that I shouldn’t leap to the defense of others but rather tell them to turn the other cheek? 

These are endlessly fraught questions; there are no simple and absolute and undebatable answers, and the trend of thought has evolved over the centuries – when a word refers to something we value, its values will shift as our values do. But such is this word brave. It’s a word for someone who has drawn a line in a place we wouldn’t all draw it, and it’s a word for which we can’t all agree where to draw the line. So if it’s not clear or universally agreed what bravery is and where bravery comes from, should it be surprising that it’s not clear or universally agreed where the word brave comes from?

The immediate source is no problem: English got brave from French brave. And the evidence is straightforward that French got brave from Italian bravo – perhaps via Spanish bravo. As Littré points out, if the word were an older one that came into French directly from Latin, the typical development of form would have made it brou (haha, but the word does not exist). But then where does Italian bravo come from? 

Normally it would be easy: bravus. But such a word is unattested in Latin; we suppose it must have existed in Vulgar Latin, but Classical Latin doesn’t have it. It could have come from Proto-Germanic *hrawaz, ‘raw’, but there’s not much to support that origin. It might have come from a Gaulish word *bragos, which relates to boasting and showing off, but there’s not enough evidence to support a link there either. It might have come from Latin bravium, ‘prize, reward’, from Greek βραβεῖον (brabeîon), but there’s no evidence of development of the sense from one to another, and the phonological development is unlikely too (the stress in the Latin is on the i, for one thing).

So the most likely thing is that it comes from a fusion of the Latin words pravus and barbarus. You probably recognize barbarus; it’s the source of barbarian and barbaric and comes from Greek βάρβαρος ‘foreign’, which was made from an imitation of how foreign languages sounded to the Greeks: “bar-bar-bar,” like if in English we called people from other countries “blahblahs” or “yukkayukkas.” As to pravus, it meant ‘crooked, perverse, wicked, bad’ – and it’s the root of depraved (the de- does not signify negation – how wicked!).

So somehow ‘wicked’ and ‘barbaric’ got together and made a word that passed through ‘bold’ and into ‘valorous, heroic’ (and, as Wiktionary points out, in British English euphemistically to ‘foolish, unwise’) – and, in French, also ‘honest’ or ‘well dressed’ (a sense whilom seen in English), and in Italian (and also betimes in English) to ‘good, nice, clever, skilled’… and in modern Italian it no longer means ‘valiant’. O brave new word, that has such senses in it!

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dastard

Posted on July 26, 2023 | 1 comment

He was no standard bastard; he was a dastard. In a world where some go per ardua ad astra, he had neither ardua nor astra. His skullduggery was of the skulking and drugging kind, and though he thought himself a wizard, he was merely a coward, a laggard, an ill-starred sluggard. 

We will give him, at least, that he was no braggard – that would have meant owning up to his dastardly deeds, and he was too cowardly for that. He could only stab you in the back when his own back was turned – as though the b of bastard were facing away, d – and whether the ill deed was done or not, he could say no more than “drats.”

You may, perhaps, not have met the word dastard as such before. I think you’ll know the word dastardly, though it’s a bit antiquated now – it has the air of mustachioed villains and other pusillanimous vipers of the melodrama era. But just as cowardly is like a coward, dastardly is like a dastard; we have had dastardly since the mid-1500s and dastard since the mid-1400s. And while the -ard is on the model of coward, bastard, and wizard, all from French, dastard is like laggard, sluggard, and drunkard in having a Germanic root taking on the suffix to mean ‘one who does this dirty deed like a dirty bird’ (note, by the way, that words ending with ard that make it rhyme with “hard” or “bard” rather than “word” or “bird,” especially if they have any stress at all on the syllable, have nothing to do with all of this – so no diehard, no discard, et cetera).

And what is the Germanic root in this case? We’re not entirely sure, but evidence suggests that dast is from dased, which is none other than an old form of dazed, and meant ‘dull, inert, stupefied’. So originally a dastard was someone who shrunk from any deed of valor through the most elementary pusillanimity. In fact, it first referred to someone who was simply a dullard, and then over time it added the sense of villainy, of crimes not just of omission but of commission… but only in the most cowardly way. A snake. Or, perhaps, a poisonous turtle.

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forepast

Posted on July 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

This forepast evening, as rain was not forecast, we determined to take a boat to the island with a submarine for repast. But just past four, when I had bought the sandwich, the sky became overcast and the clouds started to pour fast, forestopping our plans. What to do? It was too late to make pasta for supper. Fortunately, within a half hour the downpour had passed over and we met our prefixed plan – we were on the ferry and cast off superfast, and no sooner had we reached the beach than the submarine was within us. And so the forecast was forepast and the repast was forepast, and all was fair sport.

You probably don’t use the word forepast – frankly, I don’t know who does – but it’s in the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, both of them having it as an alternative spelling of forepassed, and neither of them calls it obsolete (though Wiktionary does). But it’s only current, it seems, as an adjective; you can’t use it adverbially (“what I had done forepast”) – not anymore, anyway – and there’s no established use of it as a noun at all: you can’t, alas, speak of “the forepast.”

Which, I suppose, is to be expected; we already have the past, and what need is an extra syllable before it? What, the past before the past? But forepast doesn’t mean that; it just means ‘that has passed before’ – a synonym is bygone, and while we can “let bygones be bygones,” we can’t “let gones be gones,” whereas we can “let the past be the past” and so have no need for the aforementioned fore. And, for that matter, Oxford says that forepast is now used “only of time”; you can speak of forepast days and forepast hours and the forepast evening. 

But you know what? Who even knows that? This word has been with us since the 1500s, if not longer, and it’s in Shakespeare and Spenser, but, though its sense and construction are perspicuous, good luck finding current uses of it except in books quoting or emulating works from a forepast time. So you might as well take it as a lexical snack – use it as no more than hors d’œuvres, and not for repast per se, and you can plate it as you will. Or, you know, eat it off paper wrapping on the beach.

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litany

Posted on July 20, 2023 | 8 comments

“We’ll have to start burning words,” she said, and cold steam curled up from her mouth as she spoke. She hugged her knees to her chest as she sat in front of the dark fireplace, where a pot of ice hung above a forlorn grate. Her hair blazed red but gave no heat.

He nodded sadly and turned to look up at the walls. The room was a moonlit panopticon of bookshelves, a circle of walls insulated by thousands of volumes, a vertical city of language, millions of lexemes waiting only for their chance to breathe life in a reader’s mind. So much potential, so much cold potential, but here were two still-warm bodies that soon would be cold and still if they could have no heat and drink no water. And then whose eyes and minds would give life to the words anyway?

He turned his onyx eyes back to her. “I have never lit any on fire. Which words must die, that the rest might yet live?”

She unfolded, stood, walked to a wall, brushed her fingertips along the spines huddled there. Pulled one volume out. “The ones that are already dead.” 

She turned and held the sacrificial victim solemnly before her: a dictionary of obsolete words. His mouth opened, but the small sound that came out fell as snow to the floor.

“They have had their life,” she said. “They’re gone. This is Lenin’s tomb, relics of the saints, a display of zombies. No one will use these words in earnest again. Let them rest in peace.” She walked over the fireplace, sat down, and laid the book down in front of her, spatchcocked on its spine. She gripped the back flyleaf in her hand, pulled it and peeled it away from the binding, creased it and set it in the grate.

He watched as she peeled the next page, creased it, and laid it in the grate. “They have never had a funeral,” he said. “They have never had a memorial.” She peeled another, creased it, laid it in the grate. He reached forward and picked it up and read from it. “Yekth. Yarringle. Yark.” He turned to her. “Let us sing a litany.”

She raised a thin red eyebrow. “A litany of sorrows, a litany of complaints?”

“A litany of saints. A long responsive prayer, an entreaty. A litany on fire. That these words may one last time illuminate us.”

“That they may keep us warm,” she said. “Give us the breath of life. Melt the ice and sustain us.”

“Let us remember what they meant to someone at some time.” He looked over his shoulder at the thousands of books full of frozen meaning, silent in the late night moonlight that leaked down through the cupola clerestory to land on his page. He turned to the fireplace again, cleared his throat, raised his head, and sang in the tones of the Great Litany: “May all the words lost to the worlds… light and enliven us.” He looked at the page. “Yark, that meant to prepare…”

She joined in: “…light and enliven us.”

“Yarringle, a yard-winder…”

 “…light and enliven us.” She peeled another page and laid it creased in the grate.

“Yekth, that was itchiness…” he sang.

“…light and enliven us.” She peeled another page. 

He laid the page he had been holding into the grate and, as she peeled one more page, took it from her and looked. “Wyndre, that meant to embellish…”

“…light and enliven us.” Another page.

“Winx, to bray like an ass…”

“…light and enliven us.” Another page.

“Vectigal, taxation…”

“…light and enliven us.” One more page. Two.

“Umthink, to ponder…”

“…light and enliven us,” she sang, but he had paused. He glanced back for a moment, as if the word might be in one of those volumes, hearing its end announced. Who would know what it meant? But she kept peeling, a page, a page, a page, each one slowly and solemnly but without stop. The paper was thick and would burn well, and there were many pages still to go. Soon there would be enough to start.

He turned back and took another page and looked at it and chanted: “Stelligerate, that was exalted to the heavens…”

“…light and enliven us.”

“Sprunt, that meant short and hard to bend…”

“Unlike that definition,” she offered, but he was singing “…light and enliven us.” He looked at her, and for a moment his eyes sucked in light, but then he smiled and chuckled once. “A last breath for it,” he said.

Another page. “Shindle, that meant to scratch…”

“…light and enliven us.”

Another. He looked over it for a moment. “Scrute, that was scrutinize…”

“…light and enliven us.”

The pages kept coming, and it was a decent size of pile now. She handed him another page and put her hand into her pocket and pulled out a box of matches. She took one out and scratched it against the emery on the side and it awoke into flame. “Scratch,” she said. “What was that word?”

He shook his head sadly. Too late. She touched the match to light the papers and they quickly came to life.

By the light of the growing fire he looked at the next page that she peeled. He gasped a little and darted his glance once more over his shoulder. Then he steamed a short breath of resignation and sang. “Philobiblist, that meant bibliophile…”

“…light and enliven us,” they sang together. He placed the page with its obsolete word for book-lover in the flames. The fire burned a short time, and then she peeled a few more pages. He took one. He read it, and his eyes lost focus and he gazed at the fire through it.

She took the page from him; he surrendered it lightly. She saw what he had seen, and she cleared her throat and sang: “Owsell, meaning unknown, origin unknown…”

“…light and enliven us,” he joined in with her. She fed the page into the fire. Oh well.

They warmed themselves for a few minutes, and he lifted the pot from its hook. A bit of the ice was melted. He offered it to her, she drank a little, then he drank a little and put it back. She peeled out a few more pages and looked at one. “Lutarious, living in mud,” she sang.

“…light and enliven us.” To the fire.

A pause, a page, a page. “Labant, that meant sliding…”

“…light and enliven us.”

A page, a page. “Kneck, the twisting of a running rope…”

“…light and enliven us.”

A page. “Kenodoxy, the study of vainglory…”

“…light and enliven us.” She placed the page in the fire; the oxygen combusted the oxy and, as they watched, the last letters to go into ashes were no.

The next: “Javel, that meant vagabond,” she sang, and “light and enliven us” they intoned together.

And so it went, by page, by quire, as the cold night drew on: 

“Gowl, weep with anger… light and enliven us.”

“Gorm, a gormless fool… light and enliven us.”

“Genge, that meant valid… light and enliven us.”

“Furchure, where the legs fork… light and enliven us.” 

“Fulculency, dreggy refuse… light and enliven us.”

“Fletiferous, causing weeping…” 

As he sang “light and enliven us” she looked at the glowing ashes of thousands of lost words, lost to all time, no one ever to utter or think them again, and she laid the page to add to the pyre and wept for a moment. He took the pot and served her water, and some for himself.

At the next time of peeling, she handed the page to him. He looked at it, and looked up at the clerestory, where the pre-dawn glow was starting to grow, and sang, “Fenester, that meant window…”

“…light and enliven us.” The word joined the flames, burnt down to nest, flew away.

There was not so much left now, of the book or of the night, and the ice was mostly water. But they kept on.

“Ewage, a waterway toll… light and enliven us.”

“Eslargish, extend the range or scope… light and enliven us.”

“Empyre, that meant worsen… light and enliven us.” The page ignited; the pyre became smoke and the em fluttered up in the flame.

“Catamidiate, put to open shame and punishment… light and enliven us.”

“Brattice, ventilation partition in a mineshaft… light and enliven us.”

Pages, pages, pages. At last they were almost through. She peeled one and handed it to him, and peeled the last few and fed them in, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, she lifted the book’s cover and set it at the side of the fire, so it might burn at its own rate without smothering it all.

He looked at the page he held, and as the first rays of the sunrise began to bless the cupola dome, he handed it to her with his thumb at one word. She read it, and then, in a quiet voice, intoned the last of their litany:

“Apricity, warmth of the sun in wintertime…”

“…light and enliven us,” he joined in.

She started to reach the page into the fire, but then she stopped. And then she drew it back, and folded it neatly, and folded it again, and one more time, and put it in her pocket, next to the matchbox.

The last black flakes of pages of lost words glowed in the grate with the little worms of fire, and the faint remaining heat rose to meet the resurgent apricity.

———

All of these words are ones I’ve written about here over the years, and yes, they’re all at least supposedly obsolete:

yark

yarringle

yekth

wyndre

winx

vectigal

umthink

stelligerate

sprunt

shindle

scrute

philobiblist

owsell

lutarious

labant

kneck

kenodoxy

javel

gowl

gorm

genge

furchure

fulculency

fletiferous

fenester

ewage

eslargish

empyre

catamidiate

brattice

apricity

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flit

Posted on July 17, 2023 | 5 comments

What flits?

Does a hippo flit?

Does a cow flit? Could a calf? 

How about a ship? Perhaps a little light boat? If it floats, can it flit? Flying fish flit, don’t they?

Our feathered friends, fleet of flight, flap their wings and flit. A hummingbird flits. A sparrow flutters and flits. A crow could flit, perhaps. But a raptor? Can a hawk, a goshawk, an osprey, an eagle flit?

Is there a filter for flitting? What is and isn’t fitting? If you can shoo it, can it flit? Can a cat flit? A rat?

Insects flit, sometimes. Bees may flit. Do butterflies flit, or are they too floppy and chaotic? Ticks never flit, but do mosquitos?

Can your fingers flit? Do they flit when you fillet a fish, or chiffonade a leaf of fresh basil? Do they flit over the keyboard when you type? Have your fingers flitted when they felt felt or fluffed a throw pillow?

Do your eyes flit? Does your glance? Your attention? Your little liquid flicking tongue, licking lips or enunciating lexical items?

The issue is this: formerly, many things flitted. And we flitted things, too. You could flit your boxes, your books, your friends, your cattle; it was nothing more than the act of moving from one place to another. And, intransitively, to make any shift was to flit: you could flit from where you sit, or flit to another home, another job, another life. To flee was to flit.

The trick is that flit is not like, say, flap or flip or flick; it didn’t come about from simple imitative sound symbolism. It traces back through Old Germanic roots and on to Proto-Indo-European and is related to fleet and float and flood and flow and even flutter, not to mention so many words in so many other languages. 

We do, it is true, see a certain similarity of sense in so many of the fl- words, and it’s unsurprising: once enough words with a certain sound gain a sense association, it’s more likely to be inferred with further words. And with flit, the quick sharp sound similar to flip and flick has also likely guided the narrowing of its usage. 

So where, four centuries ago, you could flit your cattle from one farm or field to another, now flitting is just for light, fleet things. A blue whale will never flit anymore, nor will a cruise ship or even, probably, a tour bus. But a motorcycle? Perhaps. A camera drone? Certainly. A clownfish? Why not. Any social butterfly or flibbertigibbet? You bet. You can flit through life, flit through time. But does time flit? Does life? How about the meanings of words?

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voluptuate

Posted on July 13, 2023 | 3 comments

Draw a hot bath and add lavender suds. Chill a bottle of Taittinger. Bake an angel food cake, compile a trifle, create an Eton mess. Arrange hydrangeas. Set out the cushion you bought in Vienna, and the other that’s large and shaped like a book. Make a playlist of Ravel and Vaughan Williams, or of John Williams, or of Lana Del Rey, or of Beyoncé. Prepare a Sazerac. Perhaps – perhaps – put out a bowl of sweet, meaty sauerkraut, if that pleases, or a bassinet of crawdads, or a little watermelon gazpacho. Create pleasures. Make luxurious. Voluptuate.

Or sink into the hot bath with lavender suds, and drink a glass or two or three of Taittinger. Eat the angel food cake, eat and mess with the trifle, trifle with the Eton mess. Admire the hydrangeas and inhale their aroma. Lean against the cushions. Let the music play. Knock back the Sazerac and reach for another. Relish the sauerkraut, peel through the crawdads, slurp the gazpacho. Take pleasure. Luxuriate. Voluptuate.

It’s a good word, voluptuate, and it means both ways: make voluptuous, or enjoy voluptuously.

But wait. Voluptuous? In the world of today, that’s mainly a word for a buxom, curvaceous woman. But that is so limited and limiting. Voluptuous means ‘luxurious, sensuous, indulgent, hedonistic, delicious’; from that it includes ‘replete with gorgeousness’. We also have the word voluptuary, which means a sybarite, one who has given over to sensuous pleasures. All of these words come from Latin voluptas ‘pleasure’, which in turn comes from volup (earlier volupte) ‘with pleasure, pleasurably’, which traces to Proto-Indo-European *welh₁-, ‘choose, want’, a word that also has among its progeny well, will, voluntarily, and many more in various languages.

Well. Do you as you will, and do it voluntarily, and enjoy it voluptuously. And, in turn, set the scene: voluptuate so that others may voluptuate. 

Each of us has different tastes, of course. Many treats of the senses are best kept to moderation, lest we end up with headaches, shakes, and assorted scleroses. But there are some that can be enjoyed endlessly. Music, for one. And words for another. For those of us who savour words volubly erupting on our tongues and in our minds, language is an endless smorgasbord of verses and conversation without the vitiation of vice. And so here on Sesquiotica I voluptuate that you may voluptuate, and perhaps even vice versa.

Aina voluptuating in sauerkraut

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subfusc

Posted on July 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

The secret treat of the long days of summer is the ending descent into the subfusc dusk. There are few things more quietly delighting than the quiet de-lighting.

Ironically, it does not stand on ceremony. I say “ironically” because subfusc has a certain ceremonious undertone; at Oxford, it is a word for the prescribed style of clothing with a formal tone: dark, not utterly dark but dark enough, colourless, desaturated – dark suit, black shoes, white shirt. It’s an in-group understanding of ‘dark’ – the casual formality of formal casualness. Something that stops just short of going the whole distance, smart but not so smart that it’s not smart.

Which, really, is this word: subfusc. How dare it end with a c like that. It ought to be either subfusk or subfuscous. But there you have it: it won’t go all in one way or the other. There is fusk, yes, and fuscous, and indeed there is even subfuscous (that long form, for the same sort who would say “champagne” rather than “champers”). But none of those are sufficiently brisk.

What is all this, anyway? Fusk and fuscous come from Latin fuscus, which means ‘dark’. It traces back through the dim mists of time to Proto-Indo-European *dʰewh₂-, which is also the progenitor of English dusk. English fusk means ‘dark brown’ or ‘dusky’; fuscous means about the same. You understand that sub- means ‘under’, but what stands under ‘dark’? Is it more dark or less dark? 

The answer, originally, is less: subfuscus is ‘moderately dark’. Except… in Latin, they would have assimilated the prefix; the more proper form is suffuscus. That b is a bit too bright. The assimilation suffuses it (suffuse is not related to suffuscus, but it will suffice).

So. Subfusc. A grey study. More soft than funk. A good word for nearly the entirety of the photographic œuvre of Josef Sudek. Of course I won’t include any of his photos here; copyright is a real thing. But perhaps a few of my own will suit – a window onto the warm embrace of the post-dusk subfusc.

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impromptu

Posted on July 6, 2023 | Leave a comment

I was listening to the radio the other day and I heard the host of a classical music program (during the program, not in a promo) say, unprompted, “imprompti” as a plural for impromptu.

What! Imprompti? Pre-empting the familiar impromptus? I promptly looked it up to make sure I was not mistaken. But I was not: the English plural is impromptus. Some sources say we got it via French, wherein the plural is impromptus. But impromptu ultimately comes from Latin, where it is in promptu (Latin did not implement the /n/-to-/m/ place assimilation before /p/ in this instance, interestingly; it was left to French and English to do that). And the plural of Latin in promptu is…

Well, before I tell you, I need to give you a bit of background and context. Otherwise it won’t make enough sense. Let’s start, briefly, with that in. Often when we see in- or im- as a prefix in words from Latin, it’s a negator: immovable, indecent. Other times it’s an intensifier: invaluable. Sometimes it’s an intensifier later mistaken as a negator: inflammable, infamous. But sometimes it just means ‘in’, as in the same kind of thing as English in. Like in insert. And that’s what it is here – impromptu does not mean ‘not promptu’, nor does it mean ‘very promptu’; it means ‘in promptus’ (we will get to the question of promptus becoming promptu shortly). And what is promptus?

You might recognize prompt there, and you’ll be right if you do. Promptus is the source of that. As a noun, promptus means ‘readiness’ or ‘an exposing to view’; the noun is formed from the past participle of promo – which, amusingly, is not related to English promotion. No, this is pro ‘for, forward’ plus emo ‘I buy, I take’ (and no relation to emotion – sorry!). You may know the Latin phrase caveat emptor, ‘buyer beware’; that emptor is from the same root. And the past participle of emo is emptus, as in pre-empt (but not empty, which is a Germanic word).

So pro plus emo makes promo ‘I bring forth’, which formed promptus ‘brought forth’, which makes the noun promptus ‘readiness’ or ‘exposing to view’. So the plural of promptus is prompti, right? Ha ha, no. Latin is less simple than we might want; if given the chance to learn all the Latin word forms, we might want to decline, but they already have declined, and this is a fourth declension noun, which forms its forms differently. Let me add the scholarly macrons to mark length (not written in Latin of the time but useful to us today to distinguish vowel length): singular prōmptus in the nominative becomes plural prōmptūs, and in the accusative it’s singular prōmptum and plural prōmptūs. But, as noted, it’s in promptu and not in promptus. That’s because in in this case governs the ablative case (ablative comes from Latin for ‘taking away’, probably because many people wish it would be taken away). And singular in prōmptū pluralizes to in prōmptibus.

But that really doesn’t matter, because when we’re talking about several instances of improvisations (an impromptu is an improvisation, as you know) we’re not talking about being in several instances of readiness or exposing to view. No, it’s another case – like omnibus, rebus, ignoramus, and vade mecum – of a word being made into an English noun that might seem like it’s a direct borrowing of a Latin noun but is in fact grammatically different in the original source. So the plural of impromptu is impromptus, and there’s no alternative. 

But because we have long learned that simple regular English plurals are to be dispreferred whenever possible, and especially that Latin words absolutely must be pluralized in an ostentatiously Latin way, darlings, lest we sound like utter ignorami… well, some of us are sometimes prone to produce spurious Latin-style plurals impromptu.

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knoll

Posted on July 3, 2023 | 6 comments

Some things have clear definitions, or at least seem to. Linguists will point out that you can come up with a definition of chair that will match most but not all chairs and will exclude most but not all things that aren’t chairs, for instance, but you can’t come up with a definition that covers all chairs and no other things, partly because there will always be some edge cases that people will disagree about (you may find some such in art galleries), and partly because chairness is a matter of common functional knowledge rather than strict definition. And yet there is rarely any confusion about whether something is a chair. Most people would agree that chair is much less vague than, say, cup, let alone art. 

Contrast this with knoll.

Now, you know what a knoll is, right? You’ve heard the term. You likely have this general image in your mind: a kind of rounded little hill, or something of that order – more than a mound, but much less than a mountain. You might in particular know the phrase grassy knoll. You might (probably not, but you could) even know that knoll comes from an old Germanic root that also descended to words in other languages for ‘lump’, ‘ball’, or ‘turnip’. So, though a knoll can’t roll, it’s rounded. But how big is it? And how big isn’t it? I was driving with my dad recently in the Okanagan region and he pointed at a long, rounded, grassy, lightly treed prominence in the middle of the valley and said, “Would you call that a knoll?” And I wasn’t sure whether or not I would.

Now, if we had been oceanographers, the question could have been resolved by checking some measurements, because in oceanography knoll means ‘rounded fully underwater hill with a prominence of less than 1000 metres’. They’ve set an in-group definition, as one does in the sciences. It’s the same kind of taxonomic imposition as one encounters when someone tells you that a strawberry is not a berry but a banana is: that’s true when you’re speaking in botanical terms, but it’s different from the common-knowledge usages that communicate to ordinary people in ordinary contexts. So the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, does not at all meet the oceanographic definition of knoll, and yet.

And yet it also might not meet every ordinary speaker’s definition of a knoll either. It’s not pointy-topped, true, but it’s also barely prominent at all in its surroundings. It’s several times the height of a person, but less than the height of any of the trees on it. If you were to ask a person “Would you call that a knoll?” they wouldn’t necessarily say so. But it’s the term that Albert Merriman Smith used when describing the location in connection with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and so it stuck. So we have an established and accepted precedent for calling a low rounded earth form with a prominence of less than ten metres a knoll, for what that’s worth. (Most people who have heard of the grassy knoll probably don’t have a clear picture in their minds of what it looks like. It’s smaller than I expected, I’ll tell you that.)

OK, so what’s the upper size limit of a knoll? How are we even supposed to know? Some people do seem to use the term loosely. In a recent Robb Report article quoted by Merriam-Webster, we see “Built over 25 years ago, the 50,000-square-foot domed dwelling is perched atop a 2,400-foot-high knoll, offering up 60 miles of sprawling coastal vistas.” I think that’s rather high for a knoll, and I have to wonder whether the author is the same kind of thesaurus-scraper who would say “we munched oatmeal” or “Chumbawamba crooned ‘Tubthumping.’” But it does convey the idea that the hill in question is rounded (at least I hope it is).

To help establish an upper limit for knollness, I’ve looked up a few things that have Knoll in their names. As you might expect, they’re more prominent than many knolls you might think of (because why would we have articles about insignificant knolls?). There’s Long Knoll (not to be confused with the former prime minister of Cambodia, Lon Nol), which is in Wiltshire, England, and has a prominence – in the topographic sense – of 171 metres. There’s Brent Knoll (which is probably also the name of one or more persons), in Somerset, England, a significant local land feature near the Bristol Channel with a prominence of 137 metres. There is The Knoll, on Ross Island, Antarctica, which rises 370 metres above the sea. There’s Cave Knoll, in Utah, which is more hard and lumpy looking and with pointy bits on top but has a prominence of just 95 metres. There’s Grindslow Knoll, in Derbyshire, which actually stands (or sits) a few hundred metres above its surrounds but has a high col connection to a neighbouring peak that makes its topographic prominence a mere 15 metres. And then there’s Bluff Knoll, in Western Australia. 

I think Bluff Knoll tests the limits of common knoll-edge. Or perhaps it’s just bluffing. It’s the highest peak in its range, has a prominence of 650 metres, and has cliff edges on one side of its summit – a questionable kind of knoll-edge, to my mind. Granted, much of its overall form is rolling and even grassy, but come on. I’ve seen smaller things called “mountains.” I feel that Governor James Stirling, who named it Bluff Knoll (and after whom the range it’s in has been named), was rather pushing it. It might be better to call it what it has been called for much longer by the people who were there long before Sterling showed up: Pualaar Miial, which means ‘great many-faced hill’. Which, incidentally, seems inconsistent with what I would think of as a knoll.

But then what do I knoll? I wasn’t even sure about that long hill in the Okanagan. Knowing what I knoll now, I would call it one. Or I might just call it a hill, albeit a little one. Anyway, “mountain” would be right out.

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