Monthly Archives: July 2025

Pronunciation tip: French cuisine

Posted on July 27, 2025 | Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I’ve done a pronunciation tip video, and it’s mainly been because I wanted to do this one but I was hoping to do some kind of stunt for it such as making coq au vin. Well, I made coq au vin less than a month ago, and I was too busy cooking to make a video. So never mind. Here, for those who want to know the French pronunciations, is how you say 65 food-related terms from French that show up in English: aigre-doux, aïoli, à la carte, à la minute, à l’orange, amuse-bouche, apéritif, au jus, baguette, bain-marie, béarnaise, béchamel, beurre manié, beurre noisette, bon appétit, bouillabaisse, bouillon, bouquet garni, brioche, brunoise, chiffonade, confit, coq au vin, cordon bleu, coulis, court bouillon, crème brûlée, crêpe, croissant, croustade, demi-glace, digestif, en croûte, entrecôte, fleur de sel, foie gras, fricassée, hors d’œuvre, julienne, lyonnaise, macaron, macédoine, Madeleine, mélange, mesclun, mirepoix, mise en place, moules marinières, pain d’épices, pain perdu, papillote, pâte à choux, pâtisserie, piperade, ratatouille, rouille, roux, salade niçoise, sauce bordelaise, sole meunière, soupe du jour, tournedos Rossini, velouté, vichyssoise, and vol-au-vent.

caboose

Posted on July 22, 2025 | 2 comments

When you were a kid, did you always wave at a caboose when you saw one?

There are four possible answers:

Of course!
That was before my time.
What’s a caboose?
Whaaaaaaaaaaaat? That would get me slapped!

Well, there is a fifth possible answer – “No” – but I think the only people who would say that would be ancient mariners. You see, though it’s now often used to mean, um, “booty,” caboose has gone on a long and interesting trip, starting in the same place you might find booty but perhaps on a higher deck. I mean that it started out as food storage, whereas now it’s, um… Let me put this another way: it was a place where you could really get cooking, whereas now it…

OK, let me be plain. A caboose, in the oldest sense we know of, was a shack built on a ship’s deck to house the stove and/or to store the food. It was used when there wasn’t a proper galley. The word is descended from Middle Dutch kombuys via French cambuse (and we’re not really sure where kombuys comes from; the etymons have the look of meaning ‘something-house’ but I’m not sure what the something would be. Also, although Portuguese comboio ‘train’ has a certain resemblance, it’s unrelated – though it is related to convoy). Other descendants of these words (e.g., modern Dutch kombuis, Swedish kabyss, Italian cambusa) still generally name a food storage place or a cookhouse. But in English, in particular in Canada and the US, the word got on a different train.

It’s not that other countries don’t have trains, of course. But in North America, the long freight trains that covered long distances needed a crew car at the back, partly so someone could hop off and reset a switch once the train had passed over it, partly to give a place to look over the train and make sure that everything was OK with it (no load shifting, no damage, no fires, no detachment), partly to give a place to do paperwork and to sleep and cook, and they decided to call the car – which was originally just a cabin on a flatbed – a caboose, after the shipboard thing it first resembled. (It’s not that nowhere else in the world had similar cars; they just didn’t look quite the same, and they weren’t called cabooses.)

Cabooses are cute, especially the ones with the little cupola on top. The cupola is there so a crew member can look over the train; some cabooses instead had bay windows on the sides, and some had both. But there’s something very Richard Scarry about a little head poking up in a little cab on the top of a little red car at the end of a train. If you’re a kid and you see one, of course you wave! And maybe the train whistles back at you (probably not, though; you’re at the end away from the whistle).

Nowadays, though, you should neither wave nor whistle, for the only caboose you are likely to see on the average day is the rear end not of a train but of a person. The transference of sense is obvious – from back end to back end – and the word has a certain fun sound to it, complete with boo like in booty. But the train that got it there has moved on now. Train cabeese (sorry, cabooses) were legally required up to the 1980s, but improvements in train technology – which included not only cameras and sensors but also suitable room for crew quarters up in the engine – obviated them, and the train companies’ fiscal desires led to crew reductions, and so cabooses were written out of the law. And that made an end of them. So to speak.

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plankton

Posted on July 13, 2025 | Leave a comment

Imagine you’re a right whale. Left to your own devices, you wander around the oceans, filter-feeding and taking it as it comes. No planked salmon for you, just plankton: copepods, krill, pteropods… the true drifters of the ocean, riding the current from past to future until they are baled by your baleen: a live-and-let-die diet. They’re not chewy; they’re so small, they’re indistinguishable from foam (and not the kind that’s gotten tired on Michelin menus – just the sea foam you see foam on the sea). You could have ten million in a dessertspoon of saltwater. In one baleen-filtered rightfully right full right whale mouth you could have as many microscopic life forms as there are whales and humans hosted by our whole planet, all brought together by circumstance, not a phalanx but just a huddled mass.

You could also have that as a human, if you were to drink seawater. But don’t. It will make you sick. Among the plankton are not just vanishingly small shrimp-looking and flea-looking and jelly-looking things but also mightily many bacteria and viruses, not to mention far too much salt for a human gut. Plankton is, after all, a whole class of thing: any kind of small living thing that drifts in the ocean, ranging from the micrometre scale to the centimetre scale – even a jelly or squid relative that is carried willy-nilly by currents counts as a plankter. It only matters that it not motivate volitionally in counteraction to currents.

The definition of plankton – and indeed the word itself (and the individual plankter) – was created in 1887 by the German marine biologist Victor Hensen. Plankton is, tout court, organisms that drift; the word is from Ancient Greek πλαγκτός (transliteration plagtós but phonologically plaŋktós), which means ‘drifter’ or ‘wandering’, from πλάζω (plázō) ‘I wander’.

Wander? Hmm, I wonder. There is another Greek word for ‘wander’: πλανάω (planáō), and it seems as though it could and should be related to πλάζω but it’s not clear how – the phonological transformation required is troublesome. Perhaps the two simply drifted together. It’s a big enough planet…

…and, by the way, planet comes from πλανάω because the planets (Mars, Venus, etc.) were seen by early astronomers to wander in the sky. Of course now we know that our own island home is also a planet like those others, and also that they are not wandering aimlessly; they are carried by the currents of gravity, swirling in the eternal gradual gravitational whirlpool of a star. Physics! We are all plankton, from the galactic to the Planck length.

What is the Planck length? It’s a short walk; before you know it you’re in the foam. Planck distances are the smallest conceivable distances in space and time; the Planck length is so small a hundred quintillion fit in a proton, and even the smallest bit of plankton is a whole universe, relatively. To quote David Mermin, “spacetime becomes a foam at the Planck scale.” It’s the great class equalizer, invented by Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck – or, as he called himself from childhood on, Max Planck. (Why Planck? It seems that – to abridge a prolix peroration – his ancestors lived near a bridge, i.e., a plank across a stream. And plank, as it happens, traces back through the seven seas of European languages to Greek φάλαγξ, phalanx, which names a wooden board, or a mass of infantry arrayed for battle, or one bone of a finger.)

Well. That’s all a whale of a tale, isn’t it? But it’s not just a tale of a whale. In this ever-changing world in which we’re living, we all intake our share of plankton. After all, it’s not just adrift in saltwater; a dessertspoon of tapwater will likely have some too, as everything carries myriads of myriads of microscopic beasties, just drifting. The air does, too: aeroplankton includes viruses, bacteria, fungi, and even pollen and similar plant propagations. And of course aerosols; if you sit in a space with other people, they will exhale not just aeroplankton but microscopic water drops with various entities in them, and you will inhale some in turn (unless you’re wearing a well-fitted N95, and even then a few may pass through). They drift into you as you drift on this planet, whether wandering in the woods or tapping into the daily phalanx of the digital sea. Such is the foam of time and space, the walk we are planked on.

lizardry

Posted on July 4, 2025 | 1 comment

Let us say, just to taste the air, that you want a word for the state, quality, or practice of being a lizard. Lizardlikeness? Hmm, no, not like. Lizardsomeness? Well, er, OK, but that’s just to do with the essence, you know, the state of being, rather than, say, the actual practice and so forth. We need a word that covers eating dragonflies, shedding skin, staring into space, occupying prominent appointments in certain political administrations, that manner of thing.

Say… there’s an inspiration. What would be the equivalent for, say, coward? Or, on the other hand, wizard? Well, there’s cowardice, and cowardliness, and, on the other hand, wizardry. Is there wizardice or wizardliness or cowardry? And, to get to the point, is there lizardice, or lizardliness, or lizardry?

There is, in fact, wizardliness, though not, it seems, wizardice (except perhaps in some role-playing game). And there is cowardry. And, to get to the point, there is lizardly and, by extension, lizardliness; there is no lizardice (except in some social media handles and brand names, I guess), although I rather like that; and yes, Iva, there is lizardry, and I must say, I fancy it.

The truth is that -ry nouns have a broad appeal, and a broad range too. Wiktionary lists 308 of them. And among those, there are 12 that have -ardry. The rest are bastardry, blackguardry, drunkardry, dullardry, haphazardry (I like that), hazardry (gambling, apparently), Lollardry, niggardry (note that this refers to miserliness and is not related to a racial epithet that it somewhat resembles, but I’m inclined to avoid it anyway), and stewardry.

I should say that neither Merriam-Webster nor Oxford has lizardry. But Wiktionary does, and it has citations to support it – the first being from 1940, from Esmé Wingfield-Stratford’s Crusade for Civilization: “just as we can imagine that when Tyrannosaurus met Brontosaurus, no consideration of common lizardry prevented them from tearing each other to pieces.” (For those who wonder about the likelihood of this Jurassic picture: Mr. Wingedlizard-Stratocaster was not, I find, a paleontologist.)

Wiktionary’s definition of lizardry is “The state or quality of being a lizard.” But I can’t help but wonder whether there could be also some lizardmongery possible – you know, lizard husbandry: not wedding lizards but wielding them, or anyway enchanting or otherwise impelling them. Or would that technically be suborning lizardry? I mean, if you can suborn perjury and suborn bribery, you can suborn lizardry, right?

Which is not the same as saying you should, mind. If we’re talking figuratively, about being lizardly as a human, it may not be something we want to foster. As long as the lizards are merely lounging, we have little to fret about, but if they are being skinky right from the gecko, they will need strict monitoring, no heel dragon, lest you have a reptile dysfunction.

On the other hand, if we’re talking about literal lizardry, well, that’s lovely; suborn to your heart’s content – perhaps you can be the Dame aux Chameleons.