Monthly Archives: October 2025

ceilidh

Posted on October 23, 2025 | Leave a comment

I arrived at Domus Logogustationis to find an assortment of women, mostly in their thirties but some younger, arranging chairs on one side of the main room.

Philip McCarr, whose visit from Scotland was the occasion of the evening’s meeting, strode up to me. “Ye’re jus’ in time, lad! Allow me to introduce the ladies I’ve invited.” He indicated them in sequence: “This is Kayley, Caley, Kaly, K. Leigh, Kaley, Cayly, Caolaidhe, Kaylee, Cayleigh, and Keili.” He turned to them: “…Do a have thit right?”

One of the women said, “Almost! I’m Kaly and she’s Cayly. You got the rest, though.”

“Ah, well,” Philip said, “practice makes pairfict.”

“And to what do we owe the pleasure of their company?” I said.

Philip gestured at various instrument cases ranged against the wall. “It isnae hard tae see – they’re here for a ceilidh!”

One of them stepped forward to shake my hand. “We’re the Ceilidh Bunch.” Or maybe she said “the Kayley Bunch” or “the Caolidhe Bunch” – or all three at the same time, or…

“So membership is open only to homophones?” I said.

“More or less.”

“Do you ever have a Kelly, Keely, or Kylie?”

“Occasionally.” She smiled and went back to her work.

“As befits a ceilidh,” Philip said, “they take turns at solos and it’s a casual thing like.”

“Dancing?” I asked.

“It can happen.”

“So I assume,” I said, making my way over to the refreshment table, “that this is a cèilidh and not a céilí” – although they’re pronounced the same, Philip could of course hear the difference because he’s a character in a story written in text – “because you’re a Scotsman, not an Irishman.”

“Bang on,” Philip said, “but, ye ken, all are welcome. The music soonds aboot the same at any rate.”

“It’s rather amusing,” I said, “that it all only works because, by coincidence, it all sounds about the same. Since all the various spellings trace back to Caolaidhe, which means ‘slender’”—

—“Or ‘narrow,’” Philip said. “Although there’s a broad variety in spelling.”

“Yes, and the popularity came under the influence of Kelly and Kylie, which aren’t related. And of course, returning to ‘hard to c’, also of ceilidhe, which—”

Philip finished my sentence as he gestured at the assembled musicians: “—means a gathering, or a visit. Perhaps from the Auld Gaelic word for ‘companion’, céile.” (For those of you reading, it’s pronounced like “cay-lya.”)

“Old Gaelic?” I said. “I thought it was called Old Irish.”

Philip, ever the proud Scot, turned his eyes to the ceiling. “Do be companionable, man.” He turned to the refreshment table and busied himself with whisky and glasses.

I laughed. “Well, I’m glad they chose to come and keep us company.” They were now tuning up their instruments and the music was soon to start.

Philip handed me a wee dram. “Whit’s the chance ye’ll be up there dancing wi’ them, Jimmy lad?”

I eyed my little bit of liquid courage. “Slender,” I said.

beguine

Posted on October 8, 2025 | 2 comments

Look out: That wiley big guy’ll beguile you. He may seem like a colporteur for the jubilee, but begone, you, or you’ll get a bee in your bonnet it for him; it may seem a mere crush, but it won’t be so benign… I’m begging you, don’t put the begonia in your hair in the warm Antillean air, and don’t let them begin the beguine.

Oh, dear, I’ve shaken the tree of longing and lexis, and the words have fallen out like so many needles from a memory evergreen. Let’s see if we can draw the connections.

You know the song “Begin the Beguine,” I trust. It’s by Cole Porter (whose words were full of spirit, but he was no colporteur, i.e., seller of religious publications). It first appeared in his silly regal musical Jubilee. It’s been recorded in ever so many versions; I won’t link one, just search for videos of it and choose your fancy. But do you know what a beguine is?

Let’s make a beginning by saying it’s nothing to do, etymologically, with begin. Or with begging. Or, for that matter, with benign, though you probably weren’t wondering. And not with beguile, either, though the song is about some level of guile – which is to say, wiliness (wile and guile are two versions of the same word, historically). Yes, the song is about longing and memory and what the Brazilians call saudade, but there is a turning, a denial and then surrender, or prelapse and relapse, to say nothing of paralipsis – or a pair of lips. And anyway, its heart is not in Brazil.

In fact, Cole Porter composed the song on an ocean cruise somewhere between Indonesia and Fiji. But that is not where the heart of the beguine lies either; this emotional anthill is Antillean.

The Antilles are a pearl-string of islands, greater and lesser, half-ringing the Caribbean sea. The Greater Antilles include Hispaniola, the west side of which holds Haiti, once the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which in the late 1600s had a governor named Michel Bégon who was also an avid naturalist, and for whom Charles Plumier, a patron of botany, named a plant with pretty red flowers the Begonia.

But, ah, begone, ya! That big isle and its blooming bloke are not whence comes beguine. No, it is something both more and less French than that, something both intrinsic to the Antilles and imported by colonists. If you look up béguine, you will find that it is the feminine form of béguin, which names a kind of semi-monastic layperson living in communities, apparently eponymous from Lambert le Bègue, “Lambert the Stutterer.” But there is no tongue-tying involved here. We should sooner look to the bonnets worn by the women of the order, bonnets that were also called béguines. For some reason, these bonnets became a byword for infatuation – the verb embéguiner (‘wear a bonnet’) means ‘have a crush on someone’. So, you might say, beginning the beguine is initiating the infatuation.

Except no. Well, maybe that too, but this beguine is less mooning and more boogeying: it is a dance, a sort of slow rhumba, from the lands of rhum, specifically the French Lesser Antilles islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. It mixes Latin dance and French ballroom dance, with a hip-roll from the rhumba. It is both local and imported. And in the local creole language, begue means ‘white man’ and its feminine form is beguine.

So there it is. A dance that transports that was transported, a dance that brings to mind infatuation and flowers, in a song by a fabulous wordmonger and musicmaker from Indiana who moved to Paris and later to New York, Cole Porter, who has embiggened this tropical splendor, this music so tender, that puts the ember in remember. The beguine is always already begun, and we are beguiled.

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capade

Posted on October 2, 2025 | Leave a comment

You know what a capade is, right?

You’ve seen capade in various places, I’m sure, often in the plural: horse-capades, lunch-capade, bike-capades, sexcapade, Borscht Capades, mice-capade, and of course Ice Capades. So it’s obviously a word. You hear it, you have the vibes of it, it’s cromulent, like classiomatic.

Only it’s not quite like classiomatic, because it’s not a mondegreen. It’s more like copter or -aholic. But not exactly like those, either, because it does have etymological morphological integrity.

Let me explain that bit. The word (or combining form) copter is shortened from helicopter, taken as being made of heli plus copter, though it’s really from helico (‘spiral’) plus pter (‘wing’). Similarly, the suffix -oholic or -aholic, as in chocoholic or workaholic, is taken from alcoholic, taken as being alco plus oholic or aholic. We know, of course, that alcoholic is from alcohol plus -ic. But alcohol traces back to Arabic al kuhl (‘stibnite powder’). So, like copter, -ohol and -oholic is a rebracketing by reanalysis. We split a word and took something as an independent part that’s not an independent part.

But with capade it’s not a rebracketing. No morpheme was broken to make this word.

Yes, the first use of capade that all these other uses are taking it from is Ice Capades, the famous touring figure skating company that started in 1940, folded in 1991, and was revived briefly by Dorothy Hamill in 1993 and very briefly by Almut Lehmann Peyper in 2000, since when it has been an ex-capade. If you’re over a certain age, you very well may have seen the Ice Capades. I remember seeing them in Calgary starring Karen Magnussen circa 1980. My wife also saw the Ice Capades when she was a kid. And in 1991, she joined the Ice Capades as a cast member (after it folded, she joined Holiday on Ice). It’s tempting to say she ran away and joined the show, but while she did escape from the ordinary life in Toronto to travel the world (not quite a holiday, but an ice time was had), she didn’t actually elope per se. (Nor did she when she married me nearly a decade later.)

OK, so where did the Ice Capades get capade? You probably know the answer, but let’s say for a moment that you don’t, so you look it up. If you look up capade in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find it as an obsolete word (related to cap) from hat-making, referring to what is commonly called a bat, a felted mass of fur or of hair and wool. And I’m sure, what with the many headpieces worn in their glamour numbers, there were such capades involved in the Ice Capades. But no, that’s not it. And so perhaps you go to Wiktionary, where you find that it is, in Galician, the second-person imperative of the verb capar, which means ‘castrate’. In other words, if you say it in Galician, you’re ordering several people to castrate. But no, that is not where Ice Capades got it.

No, of course, Ice Capades is a pun on escapades. You know what an escapade is; Wiktionary defines it as “A daring or adventurous act; an undertaking which goes against convention.” Sort of like going off to spend your twenties travelling the world with an athletic glamorous entertainment troupe. And that does carry with it escape, of course; the word escaped to English from French, where escapade first referred to the act of escaping, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally, and French got it via Spanish escapada, from escapar (‘escape’), ultimately from Vulgar Latin excappare, which etymologically meant ‘get out of a cape or cloak’. (So if a Romulan bird of prey cloaks to escape, that’s paradoxical.) The root in that, cappa, is also the source of cap, the same one that shows up in that obsolete hat word capade. But it is not related to that Galician word. No, it is not.

So anyway, the morpheme division in escapade is es-cap-ade, and so capade is not a rebracketing. And etymologically you could say capade refers to being caped or cloaked, or perhaps otherwise costumed. Which the performers in the Ice Capades were (not very heavily, of course, just enough that you can caper in them). But in the main, a capade is – to get to it at long last – an entertainment extravaganza, or an adventure, or some other thing that guarantees an ice time for all.