Monthly Archives: May 2024

fulminant, fulminate, fulgent, fulgurant

Posted on May 27, 2024 | 4 comments

It was working fine – fulgently, even. And then, suddenly, after the update, it was not. It was case of fulminant software dysfunction. At random times, it would suddenly slow down dramatically and use up so much memory my laptop’s fan was threatening a tornado. A program I would normally keep a half dozen files open in, and not need to restart for weeks at a time, I suddenly, tout à coup, needed to restart three times a day. Nor were the bits of advice online especially illuminating – no, I’m not going to simply rip out the entire software suite and reinstall, thereby losing all my settings, and [stricken from the text] you for suggesting it.

Needless to say, I was fuming. In fact, I was fulminating. I expounded effusive verbal effluvium, of the fulsomely vulgar kind. I don’t expect software to be inevitably fulgent, let alone fulgurant, but I do want it to be configured meaningfully. And if it’s not being useful, well, I will be Zeusful: hurling verbal lightning bolts at it.

I don’t know just how enlightening that all is, but in the end, it’s the lightning. You see, Latin for ‘lightning’ is fulmen, which is formed from fulgeo ‘I flash, I glare, I am lightning’. And from fulmen and fulgeo we get fulgent ‘shining like lightning’, fulgurant ‘dazzling like lightning’, fulminant ‘appearing abruptly and striking destructively like lightning’ (most commonly used in medical contexts), and fulminate ‘make a verbal attack; hurl verbal lightning bolts; espouse the striking of lightning on the subject’ – fulminate first appeared in English in the 1400s in legal and ecclesiastic contexts, referring to denunciations, formal censures, and similar blasts from on high, but now it’s extended to any kind of verbal inflammation.

These four words are similar and yet not the same – they cover a range of aspects of lightning, positive (the emission of photons and their illuminating effects) and negative (the electrical charge and its destructive power). The point, if you figure it out, is to have the full meaning with all its implications: a shock to the system may be enlightening, but not all abrupt enlightenment is jovial in nature. Yes, Jove – Jupiter – Zeus – is the god of sparkling jollity, but he is also the god who hurls thunderbolts, and they can land in different ways, including the abrupt arrival of a curse, as in misfortune, or the abrupt emission of curses, as in imprecations.

And it can come in multiple scales and modes: macro or micro, hard or soft, deed or word. Now I can hardly wait for the next electric download of an update to restore my software to fulgent functionality.

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morbido

Posted on May 21, 2024 | 1 comment

I don’t often do tastings on non-English words, but this Italian word has always had an interestingly contrasty flavour for me, particularly because I come to it as an English speaker.

I should say, first, that the stress in this word is on the first syllable: “mor-bido.” So you really get that “more” sound. But in the context I usually hear it in, it’s not the mournful “mor” of a mortuary; in fact, it’s rather moreish. You see, I hear it mainly in cooking videos.

No, let me explain. I like to watch cooking videos in Italian. This is because (a) I like Italian food and (b) I like practicing my Italian comprehension. And this is specifically not because the videos are of cooking, uh, morbid things. I mean, yes, there are often dead animals in them (or anyway pieces thereof), but the morbidity and mortality are absolutely not the focus. So why am I hearing morbido? Because it means ‘soft’.

That’s right, it’s what we call a “false friend” – a word that resembles one English word but means a different one. A common example is French travailler, which resembles ‘travel’ but means ‘work’. Often people call these “false cognates,” but beware: not all false friends are false cognates. A false cognate is where two words appear to have the same etymological origin but don’t. A classic example is that cognate is a false cognate with cognitive – the two don’t come from the same root; cognate is from co ‘together’ and gnatus ‘born’ (from a root we also see as gen– as in generation and genital), while cognitive comes from co plus gnitivus, which is derived from gnosco ‘I know’. On the other hand, travel and travailler are not false cognates; they really do have the same origin, but they went in different directions: the Latin etymon was a word for a kind of torture, and the English used it as a word for voyaging while the French used it as a word for work. (Make what cultural inferences you will about that. Anyway, English also borrowed it separately as travail.)

OK, so is morbido a false cognate with morbid? No, it is not. Both words come from Latin morbidus, ‘sickly, diseased’ (which in turn comes from morbus, ‘disease’, which draws on the same mor- root as mortality). In English (and in several other languages), it kept that sense or at least stayed in the same sphere; we now commonly use morbid to refer to a focus on decay, disease, and especially death, but the medical term morbidity refers specifically to occurrences of illness, not of death – the collocation morbidity and mortality refers to bad things that happen in the course of medical treatment, both sickness (morbidity) and death (mortality). Whereas an Italian chef uses morbido to refer to good things – specifically soft ones – that come up in the course of cooking.

So… does that mean that Italians have, or anyway had, a negative attitude towards soft food? As though perhaps it is only for the invalid and valetudinarian? No, it seems not; rather, it was that disease and decay are associated with weakness and lack of strength and firmness, and so it came to mean that, and then it lost its negative tone and took on a positive one to mean ‘soft’, ‘docile’, ‘smooth’, ‘not rigid’. As the website Una parola al giorno puts it, “È uno degli esempi più splendidi di parola che si sia emancipata totalmente dalla sua origine scura e spiacevole, diventando una luce sensoriale potente, gradevole e gradita” (It’s one of the most splendid examples of a word being totally emancipated from its dark and unpleasant origin, becoming a powerful, pleasant, and welcome light to the senses).

It is not, after all, that morbido is used only for soft food; a pillow may also be so (“un cuscino morbido” is not only for your death bed), and, as Garzanti tells us, many other things may be called morbido (or, for feminine nouns, morbida): hair, fabric, skin, wine (smooth and well balanced), paintings (harmonious and delicate), personal character (tolerant, agreeable, sequacious even)… 

All of which inevitably seems a bit odd to my ear, and I can’t get around it. I’m simply too habituated to my English associations. The result is a dissonance that may not be morbid but is not morbido either. Meanwhile, to the person who grew up speaking Italian, the English use of morbid may also seem odd, perhaps feeling that when we talk of “morbid humour” and “morbid TV shows” and so on we have an eye on the cushions in the coffin and the softness of decay. On the other hand, they can associate it with the word morboso, which does mean ‘morbid’ or ‘sick’.

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droves

Posted on May 14, 2024 | Leave a comment

Every afternoon, on both sides of the building I live in, the driving force is cars, droves of them, like cattle crowding into chutes. Out my bedroom window, to the south, I see cars crawling on the expressway; on the north side, at street level, the street – which is meant to have one lane of traffic each way – often has three unofficial lanes jammed up one way and no room for human or beast or automobile in the other direction, just droves and droves striving in intense slowness to make it ultimately onto the equally torpid elevated highway. (Meanwhile, parallel to the expressway, trains carry commuters – each train carries up to 5,000 people, which is as many as you’ll see in the 4,000 cars that at any moment of rush hour occupy two lanes for the full 18 kilometres of the Gardiner expressway – and the trains are moving briskly… but I digress.)

Why do we speak of droves, anyway? Droves almost seem like groves, but mobile: large groups of like beings motivated en masse – leaving in droves, coming in droves, sometimes fleeing in droves or turning away in droves or arriving in droves. Often it’s fans, or voters, or customers, or tourists. People who exhibit group behaviour.

It doesn’t have to be people, though. Poets usually use droves about non-human things, and sometimes modified with an adjective: “the fireflies will rise in lucent droves” (Dave Lucas), “droves of shadows at night move ghost-like through the dying river” (Sheryl Luna), “the forces your covetous presence prevents slowly crawled out in fibrous droves” (Jennifer Moxley), “They blossom, thick and fast, in droves” (Conor O’Callaghan), “Winged droves at evening wheeling!” (Ian Dall). But whatever is in the droves, it’s always the behaviour of a swarm or a herd.

Which is as it ever was, and if they move as though impelled, so much the truer to origins. For the first things to go in droves were cattle: a cattle drive drives a cattle drove. Yes, drove is formed from the same root as drive; in Old English the noun took the same form as the past tense – drāf – and both forms followed the same phonological trail under the whip of time to become drove. Only now, as the noun, you seldom talk of a drove, especially if you’re not talking of cattle or sheep; the multiplicity is an essential quality, and so why imagine just one drove being driven if you can imagine several, perhaps coming from different angles?

Which is like downtown Toronto traffic every weekday afternoon. Every street from whatever angle leading onto the Gardiner is backed up. In the morning, it’s the other direction, of course. Either way, droves and droves of drivers. Does it seem unkind to liken them to kine? Fair enough, they’re not cattle; cattle in a drove are hoofing it and actually moving, and may well make it to dinner first too…

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Pronunciation tip: My IKEA kitchen

Posted on May 12, 2024 | Leave a comment

This is the pronunciation tip I’ve been wanting to do for most of a year. As soon as we decided to get IKEA to redo our kitchen, I knew I wanted to do it. Of course I couldn’t do it until the kitchen was done. The kitchen was done a couple of months ago… but I need the opportunity to record and edit the video, and also, I needed to find out how actually to say the things. Which takes more time than with most languages.

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bizarre

Posted on May 7, 2024 | Leave a comment

Napoleon’s in the back, sweet Eugenie’s in the front
Sweating on the beach in the hot, hot sun
Suddenly Napoleon goes and splashes in the water
Folks all look around and say, “Do you think I oughter?”
Eddy calls up Oxford, says “Come for your appointment,
Meet me on the beach, you better bring the ointment”
How bizarre

How bizarre, how bizarre

Soldiers study in casinos, they’re bathing in the salt
Villa Belza’s run down but it’s nobody’s fault
Virgin’s on the rock, Basquing in the sun
Sharks in the museum but the seals have the fun
When The Sun Also Rises it shines upon the turf
But the director’s friend comes and shows us how to surf
This may seem incoherent, shading into weird
Want to know the sense? Hey, grow a beard
How bizarre

How bizarre, how bizarre

If you were listening to popular music in the mid-’90s – or, apparently, more recently in some circles – you will know instantly what song that’s riffing on: “How Bizarre” by the New Zealand group OMC. And if you know that song, you know it lacks the coherent lucidity of, say, “Down Under” by Men at Work. But you can make sense of the lyrics above… if you know about Biarritz.

Biarritz? Is that a bizarre place? Not exactly. It’s a seaside resort in France, in the Basque region near the Spanish border. But it has enough quirky things that a person can fill out some odd lyrics: 

  • After the French revolution, sea bathing went from a thing one didn’t do to a thing that fashionable people did do, and Napoleon himself did it at Biarritz.
  • Empress Eugènie, the wife of Napoleon’s nephew Napoleon III, built a palace in Biarritz that is now a hotel.
  • Biarritz was also a popular spot with British royalty, and Edward VII caused a minor stir when he had the Earl of Oxford (H.H. Asquith) come to Biarritz to receive his royal appointment as prime minister.
  • There are casinos in Biarritz, though they were converted for a time after World War II to an American G.I. University.
  • There were salt baths – in water ten times as salty as the ocean – though they’ve been closed for 70 years now.
  • Among the sights in Biarritz are a statue of the Virgin Mary on a rock reachable by a bridge; the Villa Belza, a neo-medieval villa built in the 1890s that for a time was in bad condition but is now spruced up into apartments; and the Museum of the Sea, which has aquariums with sharks and seals.
  • When Peter Viertel was in town to direct the movie of The Sun Also Rises, a friend of his came from California and introduced surfing to Europe, and Biarritz is now a major surfing destination.
  • And the name Biarritz is originally from Basque – as is the word bizar, which means ‘beard’ and is not related to Biarritz (similarity notwithstanding) but likely is the origin of the word bizarre.

That took a long time to get not very far, didn’t it. And ended up raising even more questions. Well, at least one question: How do you get from ‘beard’ to ‘weird’?

It’s not that beardos were weirdos. The sense seems to have taken a quirkier route. The Basque word bizar appears to have been the origin of Spanish bizarro, which means ‘handsome, gallant, brave, noble’ (like Zorro, perhaps?). And somehow it came from that into French bizarre, which means pretty much the same as English bizarre – English got the word from French, so at least that’s no surprise. 

Now, the French word may actually have gotten bizarre from the Italian bizzarro, which means now means ‘quirky, weird’ but previously meant ‘quarrelsome’. There are duelling ideas of where bizzarro came from, but the suggestion that it came from Spanish and that ‘gallant, brave’ slid over into ‘quarrelsome’ is at least plausible. And ‘quarrelsome’ can plausibly become ‘incongruous, quirky, nonsensical’, so at the very least we have a possible trail. For that matter, ‘gallant, brave’ can also slide over to ‘extravagant’ or – as brave is sometimes used euphemistically to mean now – ‘extremely inadvisable’. (The alternative suggestion, that the French saw bearded Spanish soldiers and thought they were weird, and used a Basque word for ‘beard’ to mean ‘weird’, is frankly rather bizarre as far as I’m concerned.)

However it got to be what it is, bizarre now is a word for something that is pointedly incongruous. I like the distinction Littré gives between bizarre, fantasque, and extravagant: “S’écarter du goût ordinaire par une singularité non convenable, c’est être bizarre ; s’en écarter par une fantaisie qui tout à coup change d’idée, c’est être fantasque ; s’en écarter d’une manière contraire au bon sens, c’est être extravagant” (To depart from ordinary taste by an inappropriate peculiarity is to be bizarre; to depart by a fantasy that suddenly changes one’s mind is to be fanciful; to depart in a manner contrary to good sense is to be extravagant). So, for instance, if bathing in the sea was simply not considered rational behaviour, doing so might be bizarre. Not that anyone would use that word to describe the emperor.

Merriam-Webster gives a similar kind of distinction between fantastic, bizarre, and grotesque, noting that bizarre “applies to the sensationally strange and implies violence of contrast or incongruity of combination” – which could describe soldiers taking classes in a casino, but somehow that’s not quite it. No dictionary I’ve looked at points out that z is a letter that is often used in English to give a sense of the strange or exotic – as it’s uncommon in the language and features largely in imported and confected words – but the word bizarre is at the very least no less exceptional for having it. (It wouldn’t have that effect in French, where z is somewhat more common.)

But how about that song, now? OMC – short for Ōtara Millionaires Club – were from Ōtara, a low-income suburb of Auckland, New Zealand, not a seaside resort for the upper classes in the south of France, so their song is anyway not Biarritz. And their singer, Pauly Fuemana, wasn’t Basque (he was Niuean and Māori) and didn’t have a beard, but it would have been more bizarre if he was and did, all things considered. But how bizarre is the song? Is it bizarre enough, or is it bizarrely not bizarre (like Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” is ironically full of things that aren’t ironic)? After all, there’s an important distinction to make between bizarre and simply incoherent. Or is the sense of bizarre just getting gradually bleached from time in the hot, hot sun? Well, here, you decide.

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