Author Archives: sesquiotic

Jeggings

Posted on May 11, 2014 | 1 comment

Taste is individual, and your results may vary, but for whatever reason, I find this word quite disgusting. Not because of what it names – leggings that look like skinny jeans, or pants made of a material that is a sort of stretchy denim so they’re like a cross between jeans and leggings (really not any worse than a sweatxedo and maybe even a bit better). No, there’s just something about how it sounds that makes it seem to me like a name for something really disgusting. You know, like clippings of dead skin from callused heels or similar foot boogers.

I’m sure that smegma has something to do with this. I can’t see how egging would make a difference. Jugs and jiggling would make this word more suitable for Hooters if they had much influence (maybe they do for some people). The medial /g/ as in booger might have some effect on the taste of the word. But I think there is also an effect from the pluralizing s (so there are lots of whatever it is) and the ing (which can mean a small derivative part and/or the product of a process). Think nail clippings and nose pickings and diggings.

Jeggings is a trademarked brand name, so I capitalize it – although it’s already being treated by many as a common noun for the type of thing, like Kleenex. That also means that the people who own the trademark might be ticked off if they find out I think it’s disgusting-sounding. To that I can only say that taste is individual, I’m not their target market anyway (and I’m not sure how many of my readers are either), and they didn’t have to choose a name that sounds kinda nasty to one or more persons. I mean, they could have called them Jeanings. That has the mark of genius and a genie (and the name Jean, which has positive associations for anyone who has ever known and liked a Jean). But perhaps they didn’t like the leanings of that word.

And perhaps the people in their target market just like Jeggings better. I don’t know. There are all sorts of wildly popular things that I have no taste for at all. On the other hand, there are quite a lot of things I like that I can’t really understand why more people don’t like. Phonaesthetics, for instance…

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scut

Posted on May 8, 2014 | Leave a comment

Over supper I was lamenting to Aina how much more bother it is to put together a paper in linguistics than it was when I was a drama grad student. Drama, at the PhD level, is like English or history: you read some books, do some historical research, think some. As a bonus you can even go to see a show or two. Then you write it up. But linguistics! To do a paper in linguistics you also have to go collect a bunch of data from speakers or texts and then code it all, analyze it all, just a whole bunch of tedious segmenting and entering into spreadsheets and calculating and so on. And then you think and write. In short, the real difference is all the time-consuming scut work you have to do.

Scut work. Such a good term. It sounds sort of like a word a camp counsellor would use, or some 20-year-old who’s supervising a bunch of 18-year-olds. Scut work is the sort of stuff you do for pittances when you’re young. Scut work is also the sort of stuff you still probably have to do more of than you expected when you’re older, but the pay is better. And if you’ve climbed up the ladder a little you can foist a lot of it on your juniors.

Scut work is work for scum. It’s the kind of work you cut and scoot – or cuss about if you can’t. You may think your day is empty and you’re Scot-free, but no, there will be sweeping up of assorted remains, scat of customers, flotsam and jetsam of the day’s dreary traffic, tightening of the loose and loosening of the tight, and unclogging of the foul (o most unkindest scut of all). Scut work is the kind of work you can do while listening to the most mind-destroying music you have. In fact, it practically demands it, or you’ll be too skittish.

Scut is like a loose little cut-off bit, perhaps an end of a piece of wood left on the floor in a construction site or theatre shop. Its sound is broken off before it reaches its end: it slides in on /s/ like a broom sweeping, snaps at /k/, gives the shortest, most indistinct vowel possible, and then before you can even get your tongue to touch on the /t/ your glottis stops the sound: enough of this, I’m done. (If you actually fully crisply pronounce the /t/, you are not likely the sort of person who is in any way accustomed to doing scut work – or speaking of it.)

Whence comes this scut word? From the same place scut work comes from: around. Just sort of came up and whatever, can’t ignore it forever. There are actually several scut words. One means ‘short’ or ‘cut off’, like a skirt (or, better, a cutty sark). One refers to a tail that is short and upright, as on a rabbit or deer. Neither of these seems to be related to our work word.

Then there is a Scots word for a scoundrel, a contemptible person – when I look at the OED illustrative quotes, it occurs to me that some current Scots speakers might use a similar-sounding but rather ruder word (if you have seen Trainspotting, think of Begbie’s vocabulary – although Begbie himself is rather a scut). It may be from that scut that we get the scut of scut work. Or it may not be. We’re not entirely sure. Finding out involves a lot of lexical historical dumpster diving, poring over old texts and making notes. Yet another kind of linguistic scut work.

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Żubrówka

Posted on May 7, 2014 | 3 comments

Last night we saw The Grand Budapest Hotel, a rather fanciful and enjoyable movie. Going into it I said to my wife that the only things that I knew about it (aside from the cast list) were that it probably involves a hotel and probably takes place in Budapest. Well, I was half right. Don’t always trust appearances… the hotel is actually on a mountain in a fictitious central European country (somewhat reminiscent of the Czech Republic and Austria) called Zubrowka.

Naturally, today I went and bought a bottle of flavoured vodka.

No, there is no flavoured vodka consumed in the movie (not that I noticed, anyway). The name of the country is the name of a flavoured vodka. Or, rather, is very very like the name of a flavoured vodka. The actual name of the vodka is Żubrówka. That’s a Polish word, and it’s pronounced “zhoo-broof-ka” /ʐu ˈbruf ka/.

Sorry, does that not look like how the word would be pronounced? Don’t always trust appearances. It’s perfectly consistent with Polish orthography. Do they pronounce it the same in the movie? Actually, they don’t pronounce it in the movie; you just learn it in titles setting the scene. And there are no diacritics on the letters in the movie. Funny – they would have made it seem more foreign. But might have made it too exactly like the vodka name. (I don’t know if there was any arrangement between the makers of the movie and the makers of the vodka.)

So what flavour is Żubrówka? Buffalo grass – or should I say bison grass. Every bottle of it has a blade of bison grass in it. It’s called bison grass because European bison like to eat it. The name for Europan bison in Polish is żubr. The rest is derivational affixes making it about the grass rather than the beast. The vodka gets the same name. I’m giving it a capital because, in spite of its having been consumed in Poland for quite a long time, it’s trademarked.

Oh, you don’t know what bison grass tastes like? Well, going by the vodka, it’s pleasant enough, and curiously familiar; it makes me think of vanilla and chamomile and similar anodyne and soporific herbals. Look, just because bison are large brutish horned hairy beasts worth of a Yeats poem, it doesn’t mean they like nasty flavours. Yes, I suppose to naïve ears “zhubroofka” might sound like a threat of violence uttered through clenched teeth on steamy breath in a cold place, but the only cold place involved in this case is my freezer, where I keep my vodka.

And bison may seem the size of trucks, but they’re not inevitably truculent. Usually they’re quite placid. Quite unlikely to drop from a stroke, I’d say. Especially since they’re eating all that bison grass. Aside from having a soft, sweet flavour, it happens to have coumarin in it, you see, which is an anticoagulant. Which is why real Żubrówka has long been unavailable in the US, a fact of which I was unaware because I live in Canada and that’s where I’ve always bought mine.

That’s also where I’ve seen bison, which we usually call buffalo. We have bison in Alberta, where I grew up. I grew up on the Stoney Indian Reserve (my parents worked there; we are not members of the Stoney tribe). They have a buffalo paddock. They also have quite a few other things. Including bison grass. But they don’t call it that. The North American name for it is sweetgrass. And I first tasted and smelled it as a small child, long before I ever heard of Żubrówka. Such a foreign-looking word, and such a homey, curiously familiar thing. Don’t trust appearances…

So I am drinking a toast to a charming movie with a star-studded cast. The cast really is quite admirable. Regrettably, the movie rather fails on the Bechdel test, but its two most notable female characters are played by two redoubtable actresses: Tilda Swinton and Saoirse Ronan. Are you wondering, by the way, how Saoirse is pronounced? Like “seer-sha.” Hey, it’s perfectly consistent with Irish orthography. Don’t always trust appearances… I do wonder, come to think of it, whether that wouldn’t be a good name for a liquor…

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grimalkin

Posted on May 6, 2014 | 1 comment

May a cat look on a king? Perhaps a pussycat can be kin to a prince. Which prince? I’m inclined to think Albert of Monaco would be good… His mother was Grace Kelly, after all. But never mind her feline charms; the man’s a Grimaldi – that’s his dynastic family. So if a cat (especially an old cat (especially an old grey cat (especially an old grey female cat))) is a grimalkin, is that not kin of a Grimaldi?

Alas, no; the word resemblance is mere coincidence. But as we will see, a grimalkin is indeed relative to royalty – of a rather colder place.

I do like the sound and feel of grimalkin. Yes, it sounds like it could be the love child of John Malkovich and Ellen Barkin, but it also sounds like a word best said by Allan Rickman. But really it’s a nice word because it’s a word for a cat. It has that grim beginning, true, but perhaps it’s really just a fading grin as on a Cheshire cat. It has a sound like milk, too. And, honestly, the whole word grimalkin sounds to me more than a little like a cat purring as it licks itself clean – or just maybe like one of those quizzical little chirruping trill meows some cats make when they want you to follow them, probably to the kitchen, where their bowl sits empty, obviously some kind of mistake, why aren’t you filling it already, are you even paying attention? Grrrimmmmallkin?

In fact, it comes from grey plus malkin. No problem with the grey, a grand old word for the colour of my hair, with cognates in various languages. But what is malkin? It looks like a surname. But it’s actually a word used on its own for a scarecrow, a mop, or a girl who resembles one or the other or both. From the girl sense comes the cat sense. But the word itself began with the girl sense – Malkin is a pet form of a girl’s name. The kin is as in babykins, pussykins, et cetera: cognate with German chen as in Gretchen and many others. And the mal? From Maud, the name for which Malkin is a diminutive.

Maud, I should say, is itself a bit of a familiar form. It’s shortened from Matilda, which comes originally from Germanic roots for ‘might in battle’. The stop in the middle was dropped, and the /l/ was reduced as we see in folk and palm and sauce and faucon – sorry, we spell it falcon now in honour of its etymology and have repronounced it to match the spelling.

And where is the royalty? If you go to your wall-sized map of Antarctica that hangs above your bed, you will see an area of it called Queen Maud Land (although if you really have such a map, you surely know of Queen Maud Land already). Why is it called that? The Norwegians of the earlier 20th century named it after their queen. Why was a Norwegian Queen named Maud? Maud of Wales, in fact? Because she was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria – her father was Edward VII. She married a Dane and then they were invited to be the royalty of Norway, which they became in 1906.

So there we have it. No Mediterranean Riviera for this old grey cat, just Norway and Antarctica (and England and Wales). But that may still be enough glamour for this grimalkin.

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anaclastic

Posted on May 5, 2014 | 4 comments

This is a word of desire.

It may seem inelastic, cataclysmic, or simply classic yet plastic; it may crackle too lightly to match the pyroclastic flow of the volcano of desire; it may seem suspended between antic and class. No matter.

This word, this adjective, comes from Greek ἀνα ana ‘back’ and κλᾶν klan ‘break’. Is it that desire can be backbreaking? Salvatore Quasimodo wrote of love as backbreaking work: “Fatica d’amore.” But no, this breaks back in another way. Three other ways.

The first thing analcastic refers to is refraction. When light comes at an oblique angle into water, or any other medium that it travels more slowly through than the air it was in, it changes angle. This is why a stick half in a pond seems to break at the surface, why a body in a bathtub seems flatter than the head that sits above the surface. The waves of light are like a marching troop who go at an angle from hard earth into a body of water: the first ones in, on one side, slow down while the others are still marching at the faster speed; as they all enter, they all slow down, but since the slowing starts at one side and moves across, it changes the overall angle of their progress.

Why is this like desire? Because desire is like water: you swim in it, it embraces you, but it slows you, it slows time, and what seems straight when seen inside it seems crooked when seen from outside. And vice versa. Eyes that look into desire see things at different angles, closer, larger. And if you are moving forward with another person, and one of you enters or exits desire before the other does, the angle will change, it will break.

The next thing anaclastic refers to is a kind of glass. Here, let me quote from the supplement to the 1753 Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, nicely supplied by the OED:

Anaclastic glasses are a low kind of phials with flat bellies, resembling inverted funnels, whose bottoms are very thin..and..a little convex. But upon applying the mouth to the orifice, and gently..sucking out the air, the bottom gives way with a horrible crack, and of convex becomes concave. On the contrary upon.. breathing gently into the orifice, the bottom with no less noise bounds back to its former place.

When desire enters you, it may have been flowing in gradually, but at some point the pressure reaches a break point and you have a realization – the arrow of cupid strikes you – and with a crack, your volume expands, you swell, the pressure is too much. Likewise, if desire flows out gradually, at some point you can no longer hold on and, with a crack, the vacuum is corrected and you are back to normal, but somewhat diminished.

The third thing anaclastic refers to is anaclasis, a little trick in Ionic verse where the long beat at the end of one foot swaps with the short beat at the start of the next, so instead of “da da DAH DAH, da da DAH DAH” you get “da da DAH da DAH da DAH DAH.” How does this have to do with love? Because it is used in “L’amor, dona, ch’io te porto” by Jacopo da Fogliano. Here, listen to it and you will hear the anaclastic metre:

Now, if your Italian is not sufficient to tell you what the singer says, read the serviceable translation posted by Piero Scaruffi at http://scaruffi.tumblr.com/page/19 (third item down). You will see this is a song of lovesickness, of a man who is strongly desirous of a woman but cannot find the words to express it. She draws back and his heart breaks. The song does not say what the lady’s name is. I will say it must be Ana. Ana Clastic. Clearly.

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titbit, tidbit

Posted on May 4, 2014 | 3 comments

I am aware that today’s word – titbit, also spelled tit-bit – may cause my emails of this tasting note to snag in some people’s spam filters. And I suspect that that may have a little something to do with the North American preference for tidbit to titbit. It is not, of course, that the British do not use the word tit for ‘breast’; it’s more that they use it for some other things that North Americans don’t really use it for and so it doesn’t have as naked an association. Also, the British seem to be on average a little less bothered by bare breasts, as witness their presence on page 3 of some tabloid newspapers (in North America, where there are page 3 girls at all, they are never utterly topless).

But it’s not that the word titbit was transformed by nervousness or prudishness into tidbit. Indeed, both forms of the word are time honoured, even though the crisper rhyming version seems to be preferred in Britain as the voice-assimilated version is preferred in North America. Indeed, the ultimate origin of the word could be from one or the other, so we can’t make a flat statement about which comes first. The cleavage between the words traces right back to our earliest attestations.

What we know for certain is that in the 1600s there were both tyd bit and tit-bit, and in both cases it referred to toothsome morsels of food (as OED puts it). We know where the bit part comes from; it was originally something bitten or bitten off – a little mouthful, say. As to the first half, it could come from an Old English word tidre ‘fragile, weak’ or dialectal tid ‘fond, fanciful, playful’ or tyd ‘wanton’. Or it could come from tit. But which tit? There are, it turns out, a fair handful of tits to choose from.

The one that we should grab hold of from our lexical treasure chest in this case refers to a small animal, first of all a small horse but thereafter several kinds of bird, including titmice, titlings, titlarks, tom-tits, coal tits, bearded tits (!) and – I just love this, because I’ve seen it used with straight face in the title of an ornithological paper – great tits, which might seem an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp, given that the point of calling them tits is that they’re small.

And what is the etymology of these small tits? In Canada, we might think right away of Québecois French ’tite, which is short for petite and is pronounced like “tit” (actually a bit like “tsit”). But while this may look good, there is no evident connection; indeed, this word has cognates in the Scandinavian languages, such as dialectal Norwegian titta ‘little girl’ and tita ‘little fish, little kernel, little ball’.

While we’re at this word buffet, though, let us sample some of the other great etymological titbits (gah, my MS Word just autocorrected it to tidbits and I had to go back and fix it) that titbit leads us to: the other kinds of tits out there. Tit can mean (in Scots dialect) a sharp pull or jerk; it can be the first part of tit for tat, which appears to come from tip for tap; it can be a little loose piece of metal in nail-making or drilling; it can be used (or at least was at one time) to call a cat, as in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers: “It must have been the cat, Sarah,’ said the girl… ‘Puss, puss, puss – tit, tit, tit’”; it can be a nincompoop or twit, as in “Shut your festering gob, you tit”; or, of course, it can be a teat: a boob, a knocker, a hooter, a tata, a gazonga, whatever you want to call it.

It’s always fun to come across a word with such a little pearl necklace of different meanings – it’s like a tasting menu of lexical titbits. Or tidbits. But now, which sounds tastier or smaller to you, titbit or tidbit? The first is crisper, but the second has a certain sapidity, a sound like niblet, maybe. Ah well, you don’t really get to choose anyway: the way it is now, you’re pretty much consigned to one or the other by where you’re writing for. And you have to be careful, because if you use the British one in North America you might unleash some unexpected titters.

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unhighlighted

Posted on May 3, 2014 | 1 comment

What a suspension bridge of a word this is. You want to drive right across it without stopping. It’s not the sort of word one highlights. The repetition can almost mess with stereoptics, causing eyes to cross like when looking at repetitive wallpaper. My eyes want to skate over it and then just bounce right on to the next word without dwelling too long.

But that’s not what we’re here for, is it? No, when you have a word with this kind of structure, even if it’s a word that you would not normally focus on, we want to take it apart. And there’s a specific order in which it must be taken apart.

In English we dismantle words from the edges in (we don’t have infixes, although we absofrickinglutely do have the exception of tmesis). But which edge to start with? If we make it unhighlight+ed we have the problem that something that is unhighlighted is not something you have happened to unhighlight; it’s something you have not highlighted. So un+highlighted.

And then of course we take off the ed. But the next question is, why not highlit rather than highlighted? Indeed we do sometimes see highlit. But that’s the result of a reanalysis. You see, the word highlight was first a noun – a compound made of the adjective high and the noun light: those parts of a painting that have high, meaning strong, amounts of light, meaning light-coloured paint. From that we got the verb highlight meaning to apply highlight literally or figuratively. And when we form a verb from a compound based on a noun, we typically treat it as a regular verb, even if the noun has a related verb that is irregular. We can also add ed to nouns to make an adjective relating to application of the object of the noun (“a sports-jacketed, mustachioed professor”), and in that case it’s always straight addition of the suffix. Unhighlighted is probably formed from the verb, but one can make a case for a noun base.

Well, there might as well be something regular about this word. The spelling is not exactly what some would call phonetic. Oh, we know very well that igh is said as /aɪ/, but the point is that we don’t say it like “igh” – whatever we would say that as. High front vowel plus voiced velar fricative? Or plus voiced stop plus the /h/ sound?

The spelling is that way because, of course, the pronunciation was once like that too. The sound was not always as high and light as it is now. The Old English words were heah and leoht. The pronunciation of the eah and eoh would have been like a southern US gentleman saying air and then clearing a little popcorn husk off the back of his palate.

So the sound changed, and the spelling didn’t keep up. And the meaning expanded, too, as new uses required the word; now, along with talking of highlights in paintings, and of a trip to the gallery being a highlight of a visit to another city, we also talk of using a highlighter to highlight passages in a book – and leave the rest unhighlighted.

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doozy

Posted on April 30, 2014 | 4 comments

Oh boy, tonight on Twitter was a doozy.

Does that word, doozy, get used much anymore? Well, if it’s not so familiar, let me start by talking about what went down online. Twitter is where I get my breaking news first. So I was sitting at my computer listening to a Led Zeppelin live concert CD set and trying to do some research for a presentation when I started seeing tweets about Toronto’s dudebro-in-chief, Rob Ford, taking a leave of absence.

Why? He said it was to go to rehab. But as “Dazed and Confused” blazed and buzzed on my speakers I learned that someone had an audio tape of Ford – all drunk and woozy – saying some perfectly awful things this past Monday, including crude racist and sexist comments. Oh, and someone else has a video of him – dazed and dozy – smoking crack (not just a  doobie) in his sister’s basement this past weekend. Then there was Justin Bieber asking him at Muzik where he could get crack. And some other stuff about nose candy at some event. Oh, and there may be a sex tape? Excuse me, I’m feeling queasy.

Oh, and plus also as well in addition too, the Raptors won their playoff series. Many of the usual suspects in Toronto politics were trying to enjoy the game when all this broke (ah, the dues they must pay!). The Raps blew a 20-point lead in the last quarter (there was speculation Rob Ford had put on a Raptors jersey) and won a knuckle-biter in overtime. Utterly dizzying.

So yeah, a doozy. But doozy doesn’t have any direct connection with dazed, dizzy, dozy, woozy, queasy, nose, or dude. It may gain some effect of their sound on the sense, of course, along with the effects of the big hollow [u] vowel, the start that’s like doom, the end that’s like crazy and so many other things, and maybe a bit of the buzz of the [z]. But it doesn’t come from them. Not that we’re entirely sure where it does come from.

What we do know (thanks to Oxford) is that the word first showed up in the early 1900s. And it meant, as it does now, ‘an impressive, remarkable, amazing, or unbelievable thing’. Also, it was used as an adjective first, and showed up as a noun soon after.

Beyond that, there are various ideas. It may have morphed from a sense of daisy meaning ‘first-rate person or thing’. It was very likely affected by the actress Eleonora Duse, who was at the height of her fame at the time the word became popular. But there was also another thing that gave it some drive – and a clear 1920s and ’30s taste.

That something was a car. Not just any car: this car was a doozy. I should say a Duesy. It was the Duesenberg, a high-performance luxury car that gained association with some rather famous owners, including tycoons, actors, and criminals. Its nickname naturally mutually reinforced with the already existing word doozy.

Duesenberg cars are long gone, alas. We have nice cars and all that now, but an era of glamorous style and design is gone, and with it are the tycoons, actors, and criminals of that age. Now we have to make do with a Ford. But that can still produce the occasional doozy.

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Germany, Allemand, Deutschland, Saksa, Tyskland, Niemcy…

Posted on April 29, 2014 | Leave a comment

My latest article for TheWeek.com is about how (and why) some countries have completely different names in different languages:

The Netherlands, Holland, and the Dutch: Why some countries have so many different names

 

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lottery

Posted on April 25, 2014 | 3 comments

I like to play the lottery.

There, I’ve said it. Go ahead and make your snarky comments now. There are a lotta reasons they’re misconceived. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

I like the word lottery too, though that’s not why I play the lottery. I like it a lot, because it’s fluttery and lettery and a little bit buttery, and because it gives us a key to an old and influential concept.

The concept is of choosing a person for some purpose by “random” chance. I put “random” in scare quotes because what we treat as random is really just whatever has causes and mechanisms inaccessible to us and, consequently, outcomes unpredictable to us. When ancient people wrote names on pieces of wood – each one a lot (Old English hlot) – and shook them in a jar and saw which fell out first, the rules of physics governing what fell out first were the same ones that apply everywhere. Today we could in theory with perfect data and a precisely calibrated machine cause a specific lot to fall out as we wish. The same goes for coin tosses, balls from lottery machines, and so on. Even random functions in computers are actually based on identifiable input and processes. It’s just like the ball-in-cup game: if you can pay close enough attention, it’s not random.

But that’s a lot to ask for. Quite literally. Say, wonder how lot came to be used for land, auctions, and indefinite plurals? Originally, your lot was what determined for you what you got when goods or property were assigned; then it spread to the thing you got. Which would be property of some kind. Or a set of property, as in an auction. And from that, a lot of other things. And when you “accept your lot in life,” the lot is not your property, it’s your “random” drawing. (There is no known connection between this lot and the Biblical Lot whose wife was turned to a pillar of salt in a suspiciously Eurydice-like moment.)

More things than just pieces of wood in earthen jars can be used for “random” outcomes now, of course. Coins are very popular for Boolean stochastics. And coins illustrate nicely two fallacies about probability.

The first is well enough known. If a coin has come up heads three times in a row, what are the odds of its coming up heads the fourth time? One in two, of course; a fair coin has an equal chance of coming up either side in any toss with no regard to prior results (provided the tosser is not so adept as to control the outcome).

The second is sometimes overlooked. If a coin has come up heads 15 times in a row, what are the odds of its coming up heads the 16th time? In this case, given that only one time in 32,768 will a fair coin toss come up heads 15 times in a row, we may ask ourselves whether there isn’t a much greater than 1/32,768 chance that the toss is not fair. It seems reasonable, frankly, to imagine that the coin is unevenly weighted or the tosser especially skilled. So I would go with heads again, unless it seemed like that was just what the person flipping the coin was waiting for me to do.

But, now, lottery. People like to joke that the lottery is just a tax on people who are bad at math. As it happens, I’m quite good at math, and I know that the odds of winning the big prize (easily looked up anyway) are vanishingly small (heck, they post them online). So why would I play it?

Simple. In Ontario (where I live), the lottery is run by the government, and the profit from the lottery goes towards arts and hospitals and community projects and similar things, things that really deserve support. So I’m happy to see some money go to them, and it’s a lot cheaper than a charity dinner (if you go to a $200-a-plate charity dinner, not all of that money goes to the charity, after all). And there are prizes other than the big prize. Every so often I will win a free ticket or $5 or $10 or, now and then, $50. Once I won over $100. Do I run a net loss? Of course I do! Really, it wouldn’t make money if people didn’t. But I find it amusing. I get more fun out of a $5 lottery ticket than I would out of a $5 sugary coffee drink. It buys a piece of a fantasy. It’s like probability porn. Do you really think people who look at smut think they have any real chance of getting it on with the men and women they see there? Pfft. Same with lotteries: ticket buyers generally know their chances of winning are inconsiderable. I know that instant millionaire is not likely my lot in life. So what.

There’s one more thing that many people don’t understand about lotteries: what odds are and aren’t relevant. I once looked (for some reason) at one of those little checkout-stand impulse-purchase booklets on things to do to win the lottery (sorry, did you have something in your mouth? take a moment to clean your screen), and it gave advice that showed a basic failure to understand the nature of the thing. It said that you should make sure to distribute your numbers fairly evenly because the odds of them all clustering within, say, the set of numbers that can represent birthdays is on the low side.

Well, yes, that’s true, but it’s irrelevant. You’re not betting on the distribution of the numbers. You’re betting on six or seven specific numbers. Which means that you’re betting on six or seven specific balls in the machine (that’s what they use to draw the numbers). Each of those balls has no idea of what number is on any of the other balls, nor, in fact, even of what number is on it. You may as well be betting on which six random strangers out of a crowd of 49 will scratch their noses first. Or on which 6 specific paint colours out of 49 will be chosen first by a crowd of deranged colour-blind interior decorators. In the world of the balls, 8 is not between 7 and 9; it is just a ball with a two-looped ink shape on it, bouncing around with all those other balls. Unless you realize that, you don’t get what’s going on. 1 2 3 4 5 6 has exactly the same odds of coming up as 1 5 17 24 33 46.

But also, until you realize that those balls are actual physical objects with subtle irregularities, objects that are replaced every so often when they seem to come up too often or not often enough, you also are overlooking potentially relevant information. Just remember that the subtle increase or decrease in the odds may require a lot of play to net you any benefit.

The biggest hazard in games of chance, in fact, is not utter naïveté. It is cockiness. It’s thinking you’re smarter than all those suckers. Once you get cocky, you’re an easier mark. Cockiness results in failure to accurately assess what is and isn’t relevant.

Consider a roulette wheel. It is spun by a croupier, a human who has certain tendencies in when to set the ball rolling and how hard to push the ball and so on. If you think you see a recurring pattern in the numbers, you may be wrong, but then again, you may not. One time I watched a person spinning a cogwheel at the Canadian National Exhibition and realized that the stopping spot tended to be a predictable distance around from where the person pushed it from. I used this to double up my money. And then I moved on. Remember: it’s not really random. But it’s not always completely predictable, because there are too many factors involved.

And one of those factors is humans. Humans can sometimes be moderately predictable – there’s money to be made from that, and more in sales than in gambling – but can also in ways be sufficiently irregular to be as good as random. When so many people can’t manage to construct a five-point bulleted list with syntactic parallelism, you have to reckon that the way they do anything else will also be unreliable. Better to bet on bouncing balls. Although you know you can’t know well enough how they will bounce.

But I know this: When I buy a lottery ticket, part of it goes to something worthwhile. And the rest goes to fantasy. And it’s cheaper than most fantasies and not as brief as many. And that’s saying… well, if not a whole lot, then at least half a lot. It may not be my lot in life to win a lot in the lottery, but so what? It still draws me.

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