Monthly Archives: January 2025

squab

Posted on January 28, 2025 | 1 comment

“So I was out with my squad,” Arlene told me and Jess as we sat in a new hip coffee joint called The Exquisite Exequies, “and we went to this fancy restaurant, and somehow we ended up having squab.”

Jess raised her eyebrows. “That’s unexpected.”

“Yeah,” Arlene said. She paused to sip her coffee and peer up at the oversized stuffed Harlequin. “I thought that was something you did to decks.”

“Swab?” I said.

“Yeah, I guess I kind of swapped words there. Anyway, that’s not what we thought we were getting. It was dim and the menu was in a kind of squiggle, so we had to squint. And then when it arrived there was a little squabble. See, I thought it said squid.”

“Wouldn’t it have said ‘calamari,’ then?” Jess said. “They don’t usually like using the plain English word.”

“So why do they use the plain English word for squab, then?” Arlene said. “What would that be in Italian anyway?”

I was already on it; I had my phone out. “…Piccioncino, apparently.”

“That’s kinda cute,” Arlene said. “It sounds like a sausage. Or a Starbucks drink. (Oops.)” She glanced around to make sure no one had heard her say “Starbucks.”

Jess also had her phone out. “Wait, Google Translate says ‘piccioncino’ means ‘lovebird’.”

“What?” Arlene said. “I ate a lovebird? Oh, that’s sad.” Jess raised an eyebrow at her. “I mean, a literal lovebird bird,” Arlene clarified, “not, you know… figuratively.” She turned a pink that was probably similar to the colour of her squab – they’re usually served fairly rare. Also fairly rarely.

“Squab is not a lovebird,” I said. “‘Piccioncino’ literally means ‘little pigeon’, so that’s why it gave me that. The French word for squab is ‘pigeonneau’, which also means ‘little pigeon’.”

“But it’s not literally a little pigeon,” Arlene said.

Jess started nodding sadly. I added a sad nod.

“One-month-old pigeon,” I said. “Grown to adult size but not yet flying.”

“Oh no,” said Arlene, looking a bit squicked. “That’s even worse.”

“They’re farm-raised, not wild caught, if that matters to you,” I said. “You’re not getting a bird from the parking lot that’s been dining on trash. Pigeons have been raised for food for all of recorded history.”

“I mean, it wasn’t bad…” Arlene said. “Maybe a bit small.”

“Yeah, I think bigger birds just give better return on investment,” I said. “Chicken, turkey, goose.”

“All of which,” Jess said, “are also insults. Unlike ‘squab.’ Oh, and ‘duck.’”

“What?” Arlene ducked slightly and looked up and around. The various plasticine fairies suspended from the ceiling remained immobile. “Oh, ha ha. …So they call it ‘squab’ because ‘pigeon’ would bother people?”

“It doesn’t seem to bother the French or Italians,” Jess pointed out.

“Yeah, but on the other hand,” I said, “they also call other kinds of meat after the animal: ‘bœuf, porc.’ We don’t say we eat pig or cow.”

“Or squid,” Arlene said.

“We do eat duck and chicken, though,” Jess said.

“I think part of it in this case,” I said, “is that a squab is not a fully adult pigeon. It’s grown to adult size, but it’s still young and fat and hasn’t gotten tough from flying. The word ‘squab’ was first used for any kind of fat young bird, and then it generally got narrowed to mean a pigeon. The word has also been used to refer to cushions –” I glanced at the overstuffed superannuated pink bolsters on the sofa I was occupying – “and people who… resemble a cushion.”

“How rude,” Arlene said.

“That’s true. I don’t think it’s used like that anymore.”

“Well, it does sound… pudgy.”

“So, mister phonaesthetic?” Jess said. “Is that where it comes from? Sound symbolism?”

“We don’t really know,” I said. “It kind of showed up in the 1600s. It may be related to a Swedish dialect word that refers to fat or flab. There’s an old ideophone ‘squab’ or ‘squob’ that imitates the sound of something landing with a heavy fall or squash.”

“So it could be,” Jess said, “that it just fell squob into the language.” She picked up a small decorative beanbag and dropped it on the coffee table for effect.

“Or burst into it like a squib,” I said.

“A damp squib,” Arlene offered.

“Moist,” Jess said. I winced. “Speaking of which,” Jess added, “how was the squab?”

“It was… good,” Arlene said. “Kinda fatty. So even though it wasn’t big, it was filling.”

“Made a square meal?” I said.

“More like round,” Arlene said. “But I didn’t even entirely finish mine.”

“Wasn’t it expensive?” Jess said.

“Yeah… I kinda squandered it, I guess.”

“Did it come with a vegetable?” I said.

“Oh!” Arlene said. “Yeah, it was –”

Jess interrupted her. “Let me guess –”

And, nodding in unison, they said, “Squash.”

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ostrich

Posted on January 24, 2025 | 3 comments

You may recall, from the learning revealed at the end of my last word tasting note, that, at least once in the 1580s, abstruse was used for ostrich (“many Abstruses in the Plaines,” the Oxford English Dictionary quotes). You may have noted then that I didn’t remark on how that could have happened. Was it through some arcane process? Or perhaps an ill-consumed cocktail of absinthe and Chartreuse? (Definitely not that; neither liquor existed in 1580.)

In truth, it’s fairly straightforward, which is a blessing in bird names. Some birds, yes, are named clearly enough – after the sound they make (chickadee), what they eat (flycatcher), where they are wrongly presumed to be from (turkey – which in French is dinde, from d’Inde, ‘of India’, and in other languages is named after Guinea, Peru, and even the city of Calicut), and sometimes what they look like. Others should be named one of those ways. The Canada goose, for instance, is sometimes affectionately called the cobra chicken by Canadians, for reasons that are obvious if you’ve ever surprised one on a footpath.

In the case of the abstruse naming of the ostrich, the quotation is from an English translation of a book about the “discovery and conquest” of Peru (by a bunch of turkeys, so to speak). Here is the full line as given by the OED: “In certaine places of Chili, were many Abstruses in the Plaines.” The author is, in fact, not even talking about real ostriches; the birds he saw were rheas. But the original author was writing in Spanish, and the Spanish word for ostrich is avestruz.

Yes. If you know that v and b are phonologically interchangeable in Spanish, you can see that avestruz is within a pinfeather of abstruse. That’s rather straightforward, isn’t it?

So then we need only wonder where this word avestruz comes from. We will note right away that it seems related to the French word for the same bird, autruche. And we will further note that autruche is within a pinfeather of Autriche, which is the French name for Austria. Could it be that this African bird was, like the turkey, named after a country it had nothing to do with?

Nope. Pure coincidence. Sorry. Autruche and avestruz both come by meandering pathways from Latin avis struthio – where avis means ‘bird’ and struthio means ‘ostrich’. Struth! I don’t know why they needed to respecify “bird,” but there you have it. (As to English ostrich, by the way, it is from the same root, but by way of Old French.)

OK, so where does struthio come from? It’s a Latinization of Greek στρουθίων strouthíōn. Which also means ‘ostrich’, but it’s a shortened form of the full name: στρουθοκάμηλος strouthokámēlos. I mean, I can see why they’d shorten it a bit, can’t you? It’s rather long-necked as it is.

Speaking of which: στρουθοκάμηλος is a compound. It’s made from στρουθός strouthós, ‘sparrow’ and‎ κάμηλος kámēlos, ‘camel’. Why is it called that? For the same reason we call a Canada goose a cobra chicken. Camels have long necks, you see. And I guess somehow the sparrow was the particular bird that came to mind. I can’t say I see why. But maybe it was sarcasm. Or imprecision about scale. Or maybe it’s that it’s not a camel sparrow, it’s a sparrow camel: camel with sparrow mods, rather than the converse.

So. The ostrich was once called the abstruse for what turns out to be simultaneously the most and least recondite reason imaginable. Is that a stretch? Well, don’t say I never stuck my neck out for you.

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abstruse, recondite

Posted on January 22, 2025 | 5 comments

I learned something not too many people know last night.

My wife and I went just a short block up the street at the end of which we live, to the theatre, to a splendid production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee, put on by Canadian Stage, directed by Brendan Healy, and starring Martha Burns, Paul Gross, Hailey Gillis, and – as a late replacement (due to an unspecified health event) – Rylan Wilkie. We were seated in the front row, which is my favourite place in any live theatre. This play is not about Virginia Woolf; it joins The Iceman Cometh in founding its title on a joke that is at once louche and recherché. It is a classic of the twentieth-century American theatre, and I’m not going to tell you all about the plot, but it takes place between about 2:00 and 6:00 in the morning in a living room in a small New England college town and goes through much liquor, many words, and quite a lot of often (but not always) hilarious cruelty. In my last year of getting my BFA in drama I did a short piece of the play with another student in acting class (the George-and-Martha two-person stretch in the middle of act 2). I recall actually learning something about acting when I did that scene.

When we saw the play last night, I learned something about language.

Specifically the pronunciation of one word.

Allow me to reproduce, first, a snippet of dialogue from act 1, which I have ready to hand not because I have the script of the play (I’m not sure I do; I thought I did but I can’t find it on my shelf) but because it’s the epigraph for Dreyer’s English, by Benjamin Dreyer, of which I do have a copy:

MARTHA. So? He’s a biologist. Good for him. Biology’s even better. It’s less . . . abstruse.

GEORGE. Abstract.

MARTHA. ABSTRUSE! In the sense of recondite. (Sticks her tongue out at GEORGE) Don’t you tell me words.

(WordPress is preventing me from applying proper small caps; please imagine them in place of the full caps you see in the quote above.)

So which word surprised me? You may guess, but allow me to adduce J. Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of 1791, as quoted by the Oxford English Dictionary:

Dr. Johnson, Dr. Ash, Dr. Kenrick, Mr. Nares, Mr. Scott, Mr. Fry, and Entick, accent this word on the second syllable; Mr. Sheridan and Bailey on the last. Notwithstanding these authorities, I am mistaken if the best speakers do not pronounce this word with the accent on the first syllable, and if it is not agreeable to analogy to do so. A few words of three syllables from the Latin, when anglicised, without altering the number of syllables, have the accent on the same syllable as in the Latin, as Opponent, Deponent, &c.; but the general inclination of our language is to place the accent on the first syllable, as in Manducate, Indagate, &c.

I have always been in the camp of Drs. Johnson, Ash, and Kenrick, and Messrs. Nares, Scott, Fry, and Entick, saying “re-con-dite,” and until I heard Martha Burns pronounce the word live on stage, I had not realized that stressing the first syllable – like “reckon-dite” – was even an option. But as it turns out, Mr. Walker’s taste has prevailed: it’s the first listed option in Merriam-Webster as well as in Oxford.

Well, what. I may have an enormous vocabulary (in fact, I do; it’s been demonstrated on tests as well as through normal people not understanding words I tell them from time to time), but I acquired many of these words through reading, as one does. And recondite is a word that surely describes itself: ‘little-known, little-understood, abstruse’.

Recondite in the sense of abstruse? Sure: the words can serve to define each other. The OED defines abstruse as “difficult to understand; obscure, recondite” and recondite as (among other things) “little known or understood; abstruse, obscure; profound.” It seems apposite, doesn’t it? The arcade of the arcane, a circuit of many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, looking up things from one foxed and vermiculated volume to another and so, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to the first.

What is the substrate of abstruse? Its source is Latin abstrusus, past tense of abstrudere ‘conceal, hide, thrust away’ from ab- ‘away’ and trudere ‘thrust’. If you are thumbing the ancient pages of secret knowledge and someone comes around the corner, you may thrust the volume deep into the nearest shelf. Or, if you are an ordinary person who dwells in the plain and has no taste for twenty-dollar words, you may just thrust it all away from you like a surprise ortolan canapé.

And how may we recognize or reconnoitre recondite? It comes from Latin reconditus, from re- ‘back’ plus condere, from con- ‘with, together’ and dare ‘put’, which, all put back together, means ‘hidden, concealed, put away’. The parts are all well known and well used, but the recipe is singular; it’s like the difference between C2H50H and CH30H – just a tweak of proportions changes ethanol, fuel of many a play, to methanol (imagine a recipe for cake such that if you halved the number of eggs it could make you blind).

But enough biology. (By the way, what, in the quote from the play, is biology better than? Math, as it happens. But the two can work together: with C2H50H, the effect of biology is to make you number.) For whatever reason (its faint hint of Chartreuse? the strangling strength of str?), abstruse seems to be the more common word. The OED declares that abstruse occurs about once every two million words in modern written English, whereas recondite occurs about once every three million words, making it indeed a bit more recondite. But recondite has a faintly more highbrow air to recommend inditing it, at least to me. 

Either word, mind you, is suited best for a person with their head buried in a stack of books like the legendary ostrich with its head in the earth. Which is apposite when you learn – as I did, late last evening – that, at least once in the 1580s, abstruse was used for ostrich (“many Abstruses in the Plaines,” the OED quotes). Such are the things you can learn if, when faced with recondite knowledge, you do what the plain-dwelling abstruses ought: look up.

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quisling

Posted on January 19, 2025 | Leave a comment

I imagine you’re familiar with quisling. It’s a pretty well-known word. The broadest definition is ‘traitor’, but more particularly it’s ‘citizen who collaborates with an occupying force’ – and more particularly still ‘citizen who serves as a political puppet of an invading country’.

It’s a word with a certain something: echoes of queasy and gosling and underling and questionable and quiz and maybe even weaseling… all those quirky q words plus the slick clinging sling, said “zling.” And it’s an eponym: Vidkun Quisling was the puppet head of government for Norway when the Nazis were in control of the country. One may well wonder: given how phonaesthetically apt quisling seems for a traitorweasel, to what extent was Vidkun Quisling’s name his destiny?

The full story of Quisling’s life and poor choices and their consequences is widely available, but I’ll give a quick run-down here. Vidkun Quisling was born in 1887 in southern Norway. He was an academically gifted student who found his way into the diplomatic corps. In 1929 he settled back in Norway and became active in national politics, moving gradually towards fascism and publishing openly racist views. By 1932 he was head of a new political party, Nasjonal Samling (National Unity), with support from many in the Oslo upper classes. However, although he thought that Norwegians were the most racially superior people in the world, Norwegians didn’t, overall, return the esteem; his party underperformed badly in elections. 

But when Hitler came to power, Quisling saw him as a hero and model and offered assistance in his goals. And, in early April 1940, when Norway found itself unable to remain neutral in World War II, Vidkun Quisling was ready to head up a German-backed government, and he attempted a coup in aid of that. However, Hitler wanted more legitimacy; he asked King Haakon of Norway to appoint Quisling prime minister. Haakon said no way, no one wants that guy. Hitler said OK, appoint someone else then. And Quisling was out… for the moment. 

But the king really didn’t want German domination, so Hitler suspended the monarchy and appointed a German governor-general to run the country. And at length, through political manoeuvring and general sucking up to Hitler, by the end of 1940 Quisling made his way into the halls of power with his Nasjonal Samling, which was then declared the only party allowed. And by 1942 he was, with German backing, “minister president.”

Quisling’s views were very much in line with Hitler’s – including virulent antisemitism – except that he saw Norwegians, not Germans, as the ultimate master race, and he wanted full independence for Norway… with him in command, of course. An obstacle to this was that he was, by this time, ferociously unpopular among Norwegians, and all his power came from German backing. Hitler could see quite well that if he cut the strings, Quisling would fall as quickly and completely as any puppet.

And, indeed, as soon as Germany surrendered in early May 1945, Quisling’s government fell and he was arrested. Long story short: in October 1945 he was executed by a firing squad in Oslo.

So yeah. A guy who, unable to achieve all his goals domestically, decided to take the opportunity of an invading power to gain his ends – but of course, since the invaders had the real power, he was always just being used for their ends. He betrayed his country to try to build his vision of his country; he helped an invading power to build his own stature. And the result? Well, he did become famous…

In fact, he was internationally famous even before he actually became head of the puppet government. As soon as he attempted the pro-German coup in April 1940, his renown was established: The Times published an editorial under the headline “Quislings everywhere” which said, among other things, “To writers, the word ‘Quisling’ is a gift from the gods. If they had been ordered to invent a new word for traitor… they could hardly have hit upon a more brilliant combination of letters. Aurally it contrives to suggest something at once slippery and tortuous.” The word caught on quickly; by June 1941, Churchill was using it in speeches, such as in one to Allied delegates: “A vile race of Quislings—to use a new word which will carry the scorn of mankind down the centuries—is hired to fawn upon the conqueror, to collaborate in his designs and to enforce his rule upon their fellow countrymen while groveling low themselves.”

It really is a wormy and weak kind of word in its way. Which, by the way, doesn’t match the visual presence of Vidkun Quisling: he was reasonably tall, reasonably well built, reasonably good looking. But what does that matter, eh? When you’re a treacherous weasel? And when you have that slippery Q right there?

Which, by the way, is not a typical Norwegian letter at all. Norwegian has never had a need for qu; it’s always been just fine with kv. This advocate of the superiority of Norwegianness who surrendered the real power to a foreign invader had a name that also drew on esteem for a foreign invader: Latin. (English has likewise acquired some q spellings through such esteem; for instance, Old English cwen is now queen.) 

You see, one of Quisling’s ancestors was from Kvislemark, a village in Denmark. (The village name appears to come from Old Norse kvísl ‘branch, fork’ and mǫrk ‘borderland, woodland’ – forking around the border?) The ancestor in question, on moving up to Norway, decided to make a Latinate derivative, Quislinus, which he then shortened to Quislin. And that, over time, re-Scandinavianized its ending to Quisling. If his ancestor had simply kept Kvislemark – and perhaps stayed in Denmark – do you think the name would have become a byword for betrayal of one’s homeland? It seems as though by chasing esteem by borrowing on a foreign power, he ended up with exactly the wrong kind of renown. 

So Vidkun Quisling’s name was, in a way, his destiny. Oh, and what about his first name? Vidkun is no foreign invader: it’s a purely Norse name, sometimes spelled Vidkunn (double n). It comes from Old Norse víðr ‘widely’ +‎ kunnr ‘known’ – in other words, ‘famous’.

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fly-blown, full-blown

Posted on January 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

Metaphorical turns of phrase can, with time, become tired, dusty, decaying… it gets to be like flogging a dead horse. But what you’re seeing is just the surface; appearances can deceive. Sometimes, with a bit of historical decortication, what may seem a fly-blown idiom can reveal a full-blown case of mistaken identity.

Have you ever paused to consider fly-blown, by the way? We know it means ‘sordid, squalid, rotten’. I had always thought of it as an image of some creature or thing lying out in the elements and beset by insects: a horse corpse, perhaps, with the high prairie wind desiccating it and flies blowing around it. 

Well, it’s sort of like that, but sort of not. I’ll tell you now that it’s more disgusting.

In fact, don’t look at the Wiktionary definition page for flyblow if you don’t like being ambushed by a picture of something that may for an instant seem innocuous but, on description, is likely to creep into your dreams. Oh, did you notice I said for flyblow and not for flyblown or fly-blown? Here’s why: fly-blown (with or without the hyphen) means ‘contaminated with flyblows’. That’s right. It doesn’t mean it has flies blowing around it. So what’s a flyblow?

You don’t have to read on if you don’t want.

A flyblow (or fly-blow) is, to use the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, “The egg deposited by a fly in the flesh of an animal, or the maggot proceeding therefrom.” The Wiktionary page kindly illustrates with a photo of a flyblown human shoulder.

Look, I warned you.

So this is the fly we expect – the insect (which, by the way, is etymologically identical with fly the verb, as in what flies do when they’re not eating, mating, or laying eggs). But it’s a different blow?

Ha, no. It’s the same blow as in the wind. Somehow the blow that is the noun form of the verb blow, as in what wind does, has come also (since the 1600s at least) to have the meaning (per the OED) “The oviposition of flesh-flies or other insects.” The OED quotes from a 1611 translation of the Iliad: “I much fear lest with the blows of flies His brass-inflicted wounds are fil’d.”

It may seem sensible to expect that the eggs are called fly-blows because they come from the blowfly. In fact, it’s the reverse: blowflies are so called by reference to fly-blows – they’re the insects that show up and blow their blows into the carrion. The first known use of blowfly is from more than a century after the first known use of fly-blow. It seems, rather, that the eggs are called blows because the fly seems to blow them into the carrion – or anyway that the maggots that hatch from them a few hours later can be found deep enough to seem blown in.

So fly-blown is not a mistaken identity but rather something that appears to be a mistaken identity. Not full-blown at all. But on the other hand, full-blown…

Well, you tell me what image full-blown gives you. I don’t mean what it usually applies to – a disease, for instance – but where the metaphor seems to come from. Do you picture sails on a ship, with the wind full in them? Such sails can indeed be called full-blown. However, that’s not where our conventional use of full-blown comes from.

Here’s a 1578 quote from the playwright John Lyly, courtesy of the OED: “A Rose is sweeter in the budde then full blowne.” Here’s an 1878 one from Robert Browning: “Flower that’s full-blown tempts the butterfly.” These flowers are not blowing in the wind. They are in full bloom.

And this blow comes from the same root as bloom – and as the modern German word for the verb ‘bloom’: blühen. It’s not related to the other blow (as in the wind), but they’ve been blown together by coincidence, and then by the attraction of resemblance, at least since Middle English.

Any flower can be “full-blown,” too; it doesn’t have to be a rose or other pretty and sweet-smelling one. The lily Helicodiceros muscivorus can be full-blown, and while it’s as pretty to look at as many a lily, its common name will tell you why you won’t be getting it at your florist: it’s the dead horse arum lily. This lily produces an aroma that (I hope) you don’t want in your house, but it’s very attractive to certain kinds of flies.

I think you can see where this is going; no need to flog a dead horse. Yes, a Helicodiceros muscivorus, when full-blown, can be fly-blown. (Oh, and if you know Latin, you may be smiling at muscivorus: it means ‘fly-eating’. But the lily doesn’t actually eat the flies; it only traps them inside overnight so they can fulfill their pollination mission. Then they are free to blow away on the wind once again.)

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Pronunciation tip: 64 French expressions

Posted on January 12, 2025 | 1 comment

A little bit of French has long been a sign of culture in English (never mind how much of our vocabulary comes from French). We like to drop in the occasional cultured phrase… and many of us aim to be particular about the pronunciation… including some people who don’t really know the original French pronunciation. I have pronunciation tips for 64 French terms that get tossed around in English, not always accurately. This doesn’t include food-related terms; I’ll do a separate video for those. Today I cover aide-de-camp, au contraire, au naturel, avant-garde, Beaux-Arts, Bell Époque, bête noire, bon voyage, boudoir, bric-à-brac, bricolage, cache, cachet, carte blanche, cause célèbre, chaise longue, cherchez la femme, clique, concierge, couloir, coup d’état, coup de grâce, crèche, cul-de-sac, de rigueur, déjà vu, eau de toilette, en pointe, en route, esprit de corps, fait accompli, femme fatale, fin de siècle, fleur-de-lis, haute couture, idée fixe, je ne sais quoi, joie de vivre, laissez-faire, lèse majesté, lingerie, ménage à trois, naïveté, noblesse oblige, nom de plume, nouveau riche, œuvre, oh là là, papier-mâché, pas de deux, petite bourgeoisie, pied-à-terre, prêt-à-porter, prix fixe, quelle horreur, raison d’être, roman à clef, roué, sacrebleu, sang-froid, savoir-faire, tête-à-tête, trompe-l’œil, and vis-à-vis.

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mend, mendacious, mendacity, mendicant

Posted on January 9, 2025 | Leave a comment

You have a hole in your soul, a hole in the sole of your sock, or a rend in your heart, and how do you mend it? How can comfort be yours on this cold mountain? Do you say “Mend? I can’t without your help” and become a mendicant – do you go begging, alms for what ails you, yearning for yarn or a salve for your salvation? Or do you say audaciously “Mend this little thing? I can even mend a city!” and choose mendacity – do you satisfy it with comforting myths, happy little lies, or perhaps the belief that tearing another person’s soul or sole or breaking their heart will heal yours? Or do you just fix a previous “fix”?

There are many ways to repair faults. Some say that the best way to mend is to add more – this suits with socks, but darn it, there’s always that tough patch. Others say that taking away is better: removing the fault you feel or the fault you inflict. At root, you may need to know how it all started.

And in the case of today’s words, it started with Latin menda ‘fault, defect’. That headed in three different directions. 

It added the suffix -icus ‘pertaining to’ to give mendicus, literally ‘having fault’ or ‘faultlike’ but used to mean ‘needy, indigent, beggarly’. That has comes down to us as medicant, a beggar, someone who can’t mend their problem without your contribution.

It added the suffix -ax ‘having the tendency’ to give mendax, literally ‘faulty’ or ‘faultish’ but used to mean ‘unreal, false, deceptive, untruthful’. That has come down to us as mendacious ‘inclined to lying’ and mendacity ‘occasion or condition of lying’, that is, speech that has fault: in place of mending it gives audacity.

It added the prefix e- (trimmed from ex-) to give the verb emendo ‘I correct, I cure, I atone, I chastise, I repair’, which passed through Old French to become the Middle English amenden, which we now know as amend (and, separately, emend was taken directly from the Latin), but amend was trimmed down just a bit more to make mend. At long last the mend- root has been de-faulted – a fix that was accomplished by removal of affixes.

There are other mend words out there, of course. There is Mendocino, a derivative of Mendoza, which is a Spanish name of Basque origin, thought originally to mean ‘cold mountain’. And there is Mendelssohn, from Mendel, from the Yiddish personal name Mendl, a diminutive of man ‘man’ used as a pet form of Menachem, which comes from Hebrew for ‘comfort, console’. Neither is related to our mend – one can’t produce etymological relatives on demand – but both have meandered over time to far from where they started. 

They need no mending; words change naturally. And sometimes the same word takes multiple paths. But if you seek comfort on the cold mountain and need to ease your mind, remember that the most direct route is not mendicancy or mendacity, but simply to mend.

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wake

Posted on January 7, 2025 | Leave a comment

Life is but a dream, and it ends with a wake. You can see it, the ship of dreams passing through the sea of existence, trailing ripples behind it; when the person is gone, they leave – as Arundhati Roy would put it – a person-shaped hole in the universe, but unless we are in a world of ice, the hole becomes waves that spread, expanding like your lips as you say the /w/ in “wake”; the passing of the person makes ripples that are wider and fainter until, through recirculation, they are at last subsumed into the general Brownian motion of all things… just like the vivid dreams that evanesce from your mind when you wake: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”—

One wakes, and one has one wake, but there are two wakes. One wake is a verb that is a convergence of two similar ancient verbs having to do with coming out of slumber and being aware; it has also begotten a noun that refers to staying up rather than sleeping, in particular the night before – or, in some cultures, after – a person’s interment or cremation, when the family and friends swim in the last ripples of the person’s existence, reflecting on the fading dream of life rather than, this night, dreaming the fading reflections of life. (I remember going to many of these in my childhood, in small houses heated by old iron stoves, with many small cups of strong tea, and a man named Lazarus leading the hymns.) The other wake is a noun that has to do with the movement of water, related also to an Old Norse word for a hole in the ice: a displacement, but never permanent. A wake may even be the chaotic currents in the air left by a butterfly that will later wonder if it is a man that dreamed it was a butterfly or a butterfly that is dreaming it’s a man. Which side of the wave is awake?

Wake is a word of disruption, of awareness, of a turning of a switch, a change of the narrative, like the ablaut from awake to awoken. You wake to cold, hard reality, to facts, to the existence of other humans, people you cannot and should not ignore or treat as dream phantasms. You are, probably, still in the warm, soft comfort of your bed when you wake, but that will change. You will arise, leaving a you-shaped hole in the sheets, an impression that might stay as it is or might be tidied up, but the thing that leaves no impression at all on the physical is the dream, the entire oneiric world, its faint wake now rippling away in your mind.

And we all must wake, again and again. And we all must wake others. And we all must leave wakes, in the water and for other people. We cannot dream our way through life, even if life will end with a wake. The waves that ripple above our heads are motions of the surface that we, too, must ultimately pierce – or, as T.S. Eliot elegizes in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

We leave a wake or we leave, awake. But we are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. And at the end of the day, we submerge and turn to the fin again, like James Joyce beginning Finnegans Wake, a long the “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back…”

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betweennesses

Posted on January 2, 2025 | Leave a comment

We are in a time of betweennesses. As the year turns and many things in the world are in transition, we are in a condition between the dark and the daylight, between a rock and a hard place, between the devil and the deep blue sea, between you and me and the wallpaper. The old year now away is fled, the new year now is enterèd. Shortly we will be at Twelfth-Night, when traditionally for a liminal evening the social order was revocably overturned, a kind of Las Vegas of the ecclesiastical season. Shortly after that, this time around, political changes will occur that, history has indicated, will not be so readily revocable. 

But for the past fortnight, more or (likely) less, we have been on holiday, we have been in YOLO-days, we have been pivoting at the sun’s minimum (or maximum, if you are in the antipodes), we have been on a break from our usual rules of consumption. We are seeing double – and not just because of the doubles we may have been drinking.

And so there are the betweennesses: two e’s for taking time to ease ourselves, two n’s for the two ends of the years, two s’s for… hmm, what? In the southern hemisphere, for spring and summer, but up north it’s winter and fall, and winter to fall is WTF – the same as the first three weekdays of 2025. Let’s say the s’s are for stop and start – how is that? So-so? Let’s assess.

It is, truly, a time of be-twin-ness: two alike and yet different, a year and another year, good twin and evil twin, and never the twin shall meet except at the passing shadow of midnight.

“Never the twain shall meet,” you insist? Yes, well, twain and twin are, in origin, the same word, as is the tween in between, and they have the same root as two too. The be- is not an imperative (“be tween!”) but just an old form of by; between meant – and means – ‘by two’, as in by one on the one side and by the other on the other. And -ness is an old suffix that has always served to make a noun of quality, and -es is just the plural for the extra s (excess? ha, success).

But betweennesses makes a fine lengthy word that can be divided so many ways: a bet to start (the odds are always betweennesses); a twee that is a little too cute; een, which is an odd kind of even or, if hallowed, evening; the nnesses, which is Guinnesses after the first good quaff; the nesses, which is one less than onenesses; ness, the name of a loch in the Great Glen, the deep valley that cuts aslant the Scottish Highlands, the meeting point of two tectonic plates, a place with its fault (a strike-slip fault) but not without its creature comforts; esses, which self-describes with ease; sses, which is what’s left if you assess asses and they lose their head.

But what goes around comes around, not just years but decades and centuries, even though the turning happens almost imperceptibly, like the smallest sound. A century ago this year, T.S. Eliot wrote “The Hollow Men,” a poem about betweennesses, and this is how it all comes around in the end:

Between the idea 
And the reality 
Between the motion 
And the act 
Falls the Shadow

            For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception 
And the creation
Between the emotion 
And the response 
Falls the Shadow

            Life is very long

Between the desire 
And the spasm 
Between the potency 
And the existence 
Between the essence 
And the descent 
Falls the Shadow

            For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is 
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
Not with a bang but a whimper.

But in every instant a world ends and another is born. We know only the world that has passed and can act only towards the world that is yet to come, so our lives are an infinite series of betweennesses. So happy new world, and again, and again.

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