It’s New Year’s Eve, and the atmosphere is one of hoopla… depending on what channel you’re tuned to, at least. If you choose to be at a party, there will be hooting and hollering and whooping it up, perhaps some woo girls (the ones who shout “WOO! PARTYYY! WOOOO!”), and maybe even a hula hoop.
OK, perhaps not a hula hoop, but if not, why not? The year is a ring around the sun, after all. The connecting point of the ring – the mouth of the ouroboros, as it were – is generally celebrated with much ado. And if you’re in Singapore, a request for a hula hoop sounds like a request for a hubbub: “Give me the hoop lah.” (And as I write this, it’s already the new year in Singapore.)
Why do we ring in the new year – the end and start of the year’s ring – with such hoopla? Any excuse for a party, and any chance to try to clean the slate, to be sure. But also just to get a leg up on it. To mount the steed of the times, or to jump the threshold, anyway. Because hoopla – influenced though it may have been in English by words such as whoop and hoot – quite possibly comes from French houp-là, which means, more or less, ‘upsadaisy’, as a thing you say to a human or beast. It might have spread into English on the basis of its being a thing you say to accompany or encourage sudden movement, and from that became a word for the sound of excited exclamations – cheering, jeering, or other clamour.
Well, it made the leap, one way or another. And it puts me in mind of a passage from Adolf Hitler – My Part in His Downfall, Spike Milligan’s memoir of soldierdom in World War II, wherein he recalls one Gunner Naze competing in a high-jump competition with little (no) preparation:
Came time for the jump off. An official signalled Naze and asked him if he was competing. Naze nodded. Naze walked twenty yards away, turned, and now saw that the officials had set the bar at five foot. For the first time he looked worried. He walked back a further fifty yards. He started his approach. The stadium fell quiet as the great athlete bounded across the grass. We all felt that something unusual was about to happen. On and on he came, making little clenching gestures with his hands . . . he reached the bar and with a triumphant shout of “Hoi Hup la!” and an almighty effort he hurled himself upwards. The bar broke across his forehead. Cheering broke out from the stands. Gunner Naze kept running, he left the field, he left the stadium, he left athletics.
May you enter the new year – without or without hoopla – with more success. It is a leap year, after all.
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate. I hope you have received a plethora of gifts and consumed a plethora of good food and beverages. Or maybe no, I don’t hope that.
I’ll explain… but first, let’s get something out of the way: the stress goes on the first syllable. It’s pleth-o-ra (actually ple-tho-ra, because the th is the start of the second syllable, but because the e is short, and the th is voiceless, we tend to think of it as pleth-o-ra even as we actually say it ple-tho-ra).
I don’t know about you, but when I first encountered this word, I assumed it was ple-thor-a, and I’m sure many other people have assumed that too. But no dictionary includes that pronunciation. I don’t make the rules. There is not a plethora of ways to say this word, and you don’t want to sound like you’re trying to put on airs and failing.
Oh, another thing: you probably know this, but when it’s used to mean ‘a lot’ (which it nearly always is, but wait for the surprise), as a rule it’s preceded by an article (or other determiner) and followed by of: “a plethora of ways,” “the plethora of options available,” et cetera. You must not say or write “there are plethora gifts under the tree.” You can do that with myriad, but you can’t do it with plethora. I don’t make the rules. There is not a plethora of ways to use this word, and you don’t want to sound like you’re trying to put on airs and failing. You can write, as Alistair MacLean did in Puppet on a Chain, “from this sophisticated plethora extracted a humble but essential screwdriver,” but you probably won’t.
And here’s a third thing: you can use plethora with countables or with mass objects. When I look at the nouns that most often follow a plethora of in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, I see issues, options, studies, possibilities, and problems, but I also see evidence, research, and especially information.
So anyway. In general, a plethora means ‘a lot, and I’m fancy’. Most people who use it seem to use it just because it’s more dressed-up and literary – and perhaps more effusive – than many or much. They may also particularly like the sound, with the pleasure of that opening [pl] (or even [pl̥] with voiceless l due to spread of the aspiration of the p) followed by the soft touch of the [θ]. But – and here’s the problem – they seldom seem to have an eye on just where it might sit on the semantic spectrum from sufficiency to surfeit.
For those who want to know, though, its origins, which it has not altogether left behind, are squarely in the realm of surfeit. You are not (now) wrong if you use it with a positive tone, such as “a plethora of tantalizing dishes,” but you connect more to its history when you use it with a negative tone, not so much in the sense ‘a lot of a bad thing’ (“a plethora of pests”) but rather in the sense of ‘too much of a thing that could otherwise be good’ (“the plethora of festive beverages left me in a parlous state”).
And this is because – surprise! – the original use of plethora in English was to name a medical condition – or, more precisely, a medical sign: a physical manifestation of some particular condition. Plethora, medically, is an excess of a bodily fluid, usually blood (a.k.a. polycythemia). When it involves the face, it gives a puffy, rounded, reddish appearance. It can also involve other parts of the body, such as the heart (pericardial effusion). It is used in this sense in the same way as names of other medical conditions: “the patient has plethora,” or “the patient has a plethora,” or “the patients have plethoras.” No of.
It’s still used in this sense, although not often. It transferred from that to a broader sense – two quotations from the early-mid 1800s given in the Oxford English Dictionary are “full to a plethora with knowledge” and “swollen to plethora with plebeian pride.” But it’s not used that way anymore, it seems. If it’s not medical, it’s a plethora of something. I don’t make the rules.
And where did this word come from? Greek, originally: πληθώρη plēthṓrē, ‘fullness, satiety’. You may notice that Greek has the high tone accent on the second syllable. If we had carried that over to English, the way it looks like it should be said would be the way it is said. But it was borrowed from Greek to English via Latin, and its English pronunciation was affected by Latin patterns – and by scholarly affectations. The people who made the rules on these things knew that if they kept the pronunciation counterintuitive, it was a useful way to put on airs and at the same time to make sure that other people who tried to put on airs would fail.
It’s all a bit much, isn’t it? I hope I haven’t impaired your pleasure in your plethora of festive funstuffs. But I know that once you know things like this about a word, it tends to affect how you think of it. If the word plethora now seems de trop, well, there are plenty of others available.
You’re a highly literate person, ever so widely versed in the ways of the word, so of course you can picture what these quotes from hits in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (with its cited sources) are describing:
a simpering, whimpering child (The Nanny)
that simpering, doe-eyed ex-housewife (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel)
you simpering twit (Batman: The Animated Series)
simpering at me over the meatloaf (Confrontation)
not posing or simpering, but doing something useful (Paradise Found)
am I not simpering hard enough (Miss Sloane)
If you see someone described as “simpering,” you will undoubtedly have a good sense of what the mood and attitude are, and what kind of person and relationship is involved.
But can you define it?
If I asked you to simper, what would you do?
Should I have asked something simpler? It can’t be a very complex act, can it, simpering? But I asked the question “Without looking it up, how do you define or describe simpering?” on a couple of social media platforms and got varied responses:
fake obsequiousness to manipulate
self-pitying, self-serving whining
way over-the-top fanboying
obsequious, performatively unassertive, and gratingly ingratiating
affected sweetness/cutesiness; fake attempt to charm
coy and falsely shy
something like having a silly (embarrassed? self-conscious?) smile
smilingly whimpering
It spreads over a saccharine spectrum from sucking up to smiling fatuously. Quotes from literature give an at least equal range – let me turn again to the Corpus of Contemporary American English for simper:
learning to simper in that charming southern way (The Adventuress Lady)
we also like our heroines to have less simper and more personality (Entertainment Weekly)
and the way they simper like starstruck teenage girls (Fantasy & Science Fiction)
learn to handle things with a resounding bang, not a girlish simper (Atlanta Journal Constitution)
But in some cases, the author seems to have a different sense of the word:
Peter’s expression turned into a mocking simper (Ender in Exile)
his lips curled into a simper (Ploughshares)
a mean little simper accompanied her statement (Hudson Review)
a bored, cruel simper lifts the scar on his lower lip (Harper’s Magazine)
So… what’s going on here? This doesn’t quite seem like simper fidelis.
Let’s have a look at what dictionaries actually give for the meaning of simper.
Merriam-Webster is concise – verb, intransitive: “to smile in a silly, affected, or ingratiating manner”; noun: “a silly, affected, or ingratiating smile.” Smile? No sound or anything like that? Just smile? Not quite; there’s also a transitive form of the verb: “to say with a simper.” Smile plus words.
Wiktionary is also brief – verb: “to smile in a foolish, frivolous, self-conscious, coy, obsequious, or smug manner”; noun: “a foolish, frivolous, self-conscious, or affected smile; a smirk.” OK, but smug is different from the other manners, and a smirk is different from the other kinds of smile. The others are deliberately inferior, status-wise, while smug and smirk are pointedly superior. This needs a bit more thought.
The Oxford English Dictionary is more replete, as is its wont, but in essence it’s in agreement with Merriam-Webster. The intransitive verb is “to smile in a silly, self-conscious, or affectedly coy or bashful manner, or in a way that is expressive of or is intended to convey guileless pleasure, childlike innocence, or the like”; the transitive verb is “to say, utter, or express (something) with a simper, or in a simpering manner”; the noun is “an affectedly coy or bashful smile; a smile expressive of, or intended to convey, guileless pleasure, childlike innocence, or the like; a smirk; an act of simpering.”
That was going well – including the “in a simpering manner” loophole – but there’s that smirk again. So let’s look at the OED’s definition of smirk: “an affected or simpering smile; a silly, conceited, smiling look.”
Hmm… circularity of definition aside, that’s not how I use smirk – how about you? I go more with Wiktionary’s definition: “an uneven, often crooked smile that is insolent, self-satisfied, conceited or scornful” or “a forced or affected smile.” But then Wiktionary gives simper as a synonym of smirk.
I’m sure I’m just missing something here. Facial expressions convey attitudes and negotiate relationships, and perhaps you could tell me how something that conveys “affectedly coy or bashful” can equally convey “insolent or conceited.” The looks might be similar in the broad strokes, but it’s like sugar and salt: you can say they’re both granular and white, but when you put them into use there’s no confusion as to which is which.
But all these writers quoted are such fine writers, really quite respected, and they’re all published and paid and widely read; I guess there’s just something new I’ve learned from them today.
But, then, the other question: Is simpering really a matter of a kind of smile above all? Couldn’t you simper without smiling? Say, by some other gesture, or by words alone? Gosh, I don’t know, I couldn’t possibly say…
Does it matter what it’s a dollop of? Is a dollop of mashed potatoes more than a dollop of whipped cream?
Don’t tell me to look in a dictionary. I’m asking you what you think without looking at the book. Anyway, I have looked in a dictionary. Several, in fact. Here are the definitions of dollop in Merriam-Webster:
chiefly British : an indefinite often large quantity especially of something liquid
a lump or glob of something soft or mushy
an amount given, spooned, or ladled out : portion
a small lump, portion, or amount
something added or served as if in dollops
So. Is it a large amount (1), a small amount (4), or just a portion (3) or glob (2)? An 1819 definition quoted by Oxford says “a dollop is a large quantity of any thing,” but current usage suggests that a dollop doesn’t go as far as it used to.
If you do an image search for dollop on Google, you will mainly find images of a dollop of whipped cream, which is that amount of whipped cream that fits on a piece of pie and rises to a peak. It’s larger than, say, a Hershey’s Kiss, but it’s surely less than the amount of whipped cream I put on a piece of pie when using the canned sort: hold can upside down and dispense for at least three seconds while laughing maniacally.
And yet my Marge-Simpson’s-hair-shaped pile of whipped cream is still less by volume than the amount of mashed potatoes that would be described as a dollop. Why? In part because a serving of mashed potatoes is by habit, custom, and good sense much more than a serving of whipped cream. And also, and relatedly, in part because we use a bigger spoon for the mashed potatoes.
I don’t know about you, but for me, “dollop” expresses the singular gesture of splopping one good serving of some heapable mass off a serving spoon onto a plate or other surface, such that it might plausibly make the sound “dollop.” It doesn’t have to be food – I suppose one could talk of a dollop of oil paint or mortar or wet cement – but it typically is food.
Of course, that’s entirely an impressionistic personal sense; there’s no reason to think that’s where dollop comes from. We don’t know exactly where it does come from – its origins are lost in the mists of time – but, starting in the 1500s, the oldest senses of dollop (often spelled dallop) meant ‘patch, tuft, or clump of grass or weeds’: for instance, “Dallop, rank tufts of growing corn where heaps of manure have lain” (R. Forby, Vocabulary of East Anglia, 1830, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary).
I’m tempted to say that the sense transferred from the vegetation to the manure, but I don’t know that. Indeed, there’s nothing to say with absolute certainty that the modern dollop comes right from that. It could be mere coincidence. By 1830, dollop was already being used to mean ‘large quantity’ or ‘big shapeless lump’. And over the intervening years… well, you know. The sense has become ever more formless and impressionistic. As Lenie (Midge) Johansen’s Dinkum Dictionary puts it, a dollop is a “shapeless and messy lump of food” – and I don’t think that’s an exclusively Australian definition.
But if I’m going to ask you how you use dollop, I should really ask, do you use it? Is it a part of your active vocabulary? You may have an aunt or grandmother who uses the term, but would you say “Give me dollop of mashed potatoes”? Or is it more a word that you just expect to hear or see in certain contexts – such as recipes and food reviews?
Magazines, newspapers, and websites, in that order, are the top three places you’ll see dollop, if the results from the Corpus of Contemporary American English are indicative. It’s not quite a tawny-gourd-ism like pontiff or temblor, but it seems to be used by the kind of people who write things like “munching thick crusty slabs” and other slightly self-conscious feature article stylings.
And what do they say comes in dollops? As I look through some of the results from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, I find that dollops can be of yogurt, ice cream, mascarpone, pesto, mayonnaise, packaged coleslaw (really, People magazine?), cornbread mixture, hot sauce (really really, People magazine? hot sauces are too runny to dollop in my world), and other things that go into recipes (and in Country Living magazine, a dollop of peppermint filling is about 1.5 tablespoons, a dollop of orange cream filling is about 1.5 teaspoons, and a dollop of preserves is about 1 teaspoon), along with hair mousse, shaving cream, shampoo, moisturizing foot cream, and such manners of thing; also, in extended senses, of melting snow, tritium, and land (a small island); but then also, and fairly often, you can have “a dollop of” such abstract things as cuteness, comedy, drama, fun, government intervention, and “old-fashioned sex-and-violence soap opera” (thanks, Newsweek).
So, in other words, a dollop is, generally, a nonspecific quantity that can be added all at once (in one gesture) of something that can be seen as a thick but fluid mass. You can’t have a dollop of steak (oh, I hope not), and you can’t have a dollop of wind (can you?), and not everyone would say you can have a dollop of soup. You can usually fit a dollop into your mouth, but that’s not the defining characteristic. And a dollop is not precisely shaped: it looks about the same from any angle. Which is one more way the word dollop is apposite… rotate the word 180 degrees and it still looks about the same.
Do you have a dim view of gloom, or a gloomy view of dimness? Many people do; the gathering or already gathered dark is not everyone’s favourite. But I like the rise of the gloaming, the crepuscular turning from the sun, and the tenebrous hours that follow; it makes it so much easier to find the sources of light near you, and to delight in contrasts.
Gloom is a useful good old Anglo-Saxon word, descended from the Old English verb glumian ‘be gloomy’ – and yes, glum is related. But where glum is dull and dumpy, gloom looms and booms. It plays well for its sense: it has that gl-phonaestheme associated with visual things (more often gleaming and glittering, though), and it has several rhyme partners – the top three most used can all be found in George Santayana’s “Sonnet XXV”:
As in the midst of battle there is room For thoughts of love, and in foul sin for mirth; As gossips whisper of a trinket’s worth Spied by the death-bed’s flickering candle-gloom; As in the crevices of Caesar’s tomb The sweet herbs flourish on a little earth: So in this great disaster of our birth We can be happy, and forget our doom.
Occasionally a few other rhymes show up:
O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom, Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom? —Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Ave Atque Vale”
At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. —Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush”
Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom, And stamened with keen flamelets that illume The pale high-altar. —Edith Wharton, “Chartres”
You can see how often it is used for contrast, juxtaposed with something bright or pretty. It’s sometimes paired with gleams, as for instance in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “My Lost Youth”:
I remember the gleams and glooms that dart Across the school-boy’s brain
And Algernon Charles Swinburne really goes to town in “Nephelidia”:
Gaunt as the ghastliest of glimpses that gleam through the gloom of the gloaming when ghosts go aghast?
But even without the rhymes, it seems to beg for something far less sombre to contrast with it:
In the gloom of the deepening night take up my heart and play with it as you list. Bind me close to you with nothing. —Rabindranath Tagore, (“Keep me fully glad…”)
Into the gloom of the deep, dark night, With panting breath and a startled scream; Swift as a bird in sudden flight Darts this creature of steel and steam. —Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “The Engine”
The sleek Brazilian jaguar Does not in its arboreal gloom Distil so rank a feline smell As Grishkin in a drawing-room.
Gloom, we see, is not simply an absence of light; it is an invitation of light. You know that the gloom will at some time, in some way, be relieved, be it by candle, or lamp, or lambent moon, or the dawn’s early light. Or by simply making light, as Edna St. Vincent Millay found in “The Penitent,” which (by grace of the sunsetting of copyright) I will present in full:
I had a little Sorrow, Born of a little Sin, I found a room all damp with gloom And shut us all within; And, “Little Sorrow, weep,” said I, “And, Little Sin, pray God to die, And I upon the floor will lie And think how bad I’ve been!”
Alas for pious planning— It mattered not a whit! As far as gloom went in that room, The lamp might have been lit! My Little Sorrow would not weep, My Little Sin would go to sleep— To save my soul I could not keep My graceless mind on it!
So up I got in anger, And took a book I had, And put a ribbon on my hair To please a passing lad. And, “One thing there’s no getting by— I’ve been a wicked girl,” said I; “But if I can’t be sorry, why, I might as well be glad!”
We are in the season of dreary weather now, and shall remain largely in it for some months. There will be breaks of sun, yes, and festive decorations for a time, but by and large it will be dreadfully bleary and drab and uncheery as we drudge, weary, through the grey rain and dull snow, longing even for the quick red break of a brake light.
Dreary is a word that seems well suited to its sense, and it is readily used as a clear brushstroke in poetry. It is a word of winter, often, and of wintry places:
Be left more desolate, more dreary cold Than a forsaken bird’s-nest filled with snow ’Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine— Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know. —William Wordsworth, “Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant”
Let the wind moan through the pine-trees With a dreary, dirge-like whistle, Sweep the dead leaves on its bosom,— Moaning, sobbing through the branches, Where the summer laughed so gayly. —Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Below”
All day the gusty north-wind bore The loosening drift its breath before; Low circling round its southern zone, The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone. No church-bell lent its Christian tone To the savage air, no social smoke Curled over woods of snow-hung oak. A solitude made more intense By dreary-voicëd elements, The shrieking of the mindless wind, The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind, And on the glass the unmeaning beat Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet. —John Greenleaf Whittier, “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl”
Ae dreary, windy, winter night, The stars shot down wi’ sklentin light —Robert Burns, “Address to the Devil”
I’m on my way to Canada, That cold and dreary land; The dire effects of slavery, I can no longer stand. —Joshua McCarter Simpson, “Away to Canada”
But it is perhaps even better known and loved in poetry for rhyming with weary:
He passes the fountain, the blasted pine-tree, The footstep is lagging and weary; Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light, Toward the shade of the forest so dreary. —Ethel Lynn Beers, “The Picket-Guard”
She only said, “My life is dreary, He cometh not,” she said; She said, “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!” —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Mariana”
“Your old earth,” they say, “is very dreary;” “Our young feet,” they say, “are very weak!” Few paces have we taken, yet are weary— Our grave-rest is very far to seek! —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Cry of the Children”
Of the mother I think, by her sick baby’s bed, Away in her cabin as lonesome and dreary, And little and low as the flax-breaker’s shed; Of her patience so sweet, and her silence so weary, With cries of the hungry wolf hid in the prairie. —Alice Cary, “The Window Just Over the Street”
But of thee it shall be said, This dog watched beside a bed Day and night unweary, — Watched within a curtained room, Where no sunbeam brake the gloom Round the sick and dreary. —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “To Flush, My Dog”
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary; Leave the sick hearts that honor could not move, And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, And all the little emptiness of love! —Rupert Brooke, “Peace”
Often footsore, never Yet of the road I weary, Though long and steep and dreary, As it winds on for ever. —Edward Thomas, “Roads”
All the world is sad and dreary Everywhere I roam. O dear ones, how my heart grows weary, Far from the old folks at home. —Stephen Foster, “Old Folks at Home” (revised version)
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”
And sometimes we get both winter and weary:
Crying, my little one, footsore and weary? Fall asleep, pretty one, warm on my shoulder: I must tramp on through the winter night dreary, While the snow falls on me colder and colder. —Christina Rossetti, “Crying, my little one, footsore and weary”
Thick throng the snow-flakes, the evening is dreary, Glad rings the music in yonder gay hall; On her who listens here, friendless and weary, Heavier chill than the winter’s doth fall. —Julia Ward Howe, “Lyrics of the Street”
Dreary is, in fact, seldom rhymed with anything other than weary. Oddly (or not), no one seems to rhyme it with dearie or teary or even bleary, let alone query or cheery. But Longfellow did (a bit dodgily) rhyme it with Miserere:
Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary, When the death-angel touches those swift keys! What loud lament and dismal Miserere Will mingle with their awful symphonies! —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Arsenal at Springfield”
But dreary was not always a word of dullness. Its sense of ‘dull, drab’ came from a sense of ‘doleful, melancholy, sad’, which descended from the Old English dreorig, which meant ‘grievous, horrid, gory, bloody, sad’ – senses that seem still to have been present in the mind of Edmund Spenser in 1590:
So fiersly, when these knights had breathed once, They gan to fight returne, increasing more Their puissant force, and cruell rage attonce. With heaped strokes more hugely then before, That with their drerie wounds and bloudy gore They both deformed, scarsely could be known. —The Faerie-Queene, book 1, xlv
The Proto-Germanic origin of dreorig, *dreuzagaz, meant ‘bloody’, too. But in its other modern Germanic descendants the redness has also receded, perhaps under the cross-influence of *drūsijaną (‘look down, mourn’): Dutch treurig means ‘sad, gloomy’ and German traurig is ‘sad, sorrowful’.
Still, a lingering spatter of bellicose blood may be discerned in a few places:
Many men mauled with bronze lance-heads, Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms: These many crowded about me, With shouting, pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts —Ezra Pound, “Three Cantos”
Is it really there? You can hear it if you put your ear close, as to a seashell. Or perhaps you’re hearing only the roaring of a dull and dreary wind.
Well. Close the door, light the fire, let winter be wearisome beyond the window, and open a book of poetry. Life will never be fully dreary if one can always do verse.
Today’s pronunciation tip comes by request (and actually I’m surprised I haven’t done it already). Many people are aware that the English pronunciation of Vincent van Gogh is quite different from the Dutch original. But how should you say it, then?
Sesquiotica 