Author Archives: sesquiotic

abracadabra

Posted on October 13, 2010 | 1 comment

The magician has sawn in half the box in which his lovely assistant lies. Now he turns to the top half, from which her head protrudes, looking on expectantly. A lively tune by Steve Miller bounces and zaps in the background. This rabbit-grabber, who goes by the sinister name of El Maestro del Cadáver, raps his wand on the box and commands it in Spanish to open: “¡Abra!” And open it does, to reveal his assistant’s top half clad in nothing but an amulet with a paper scroll inside it. The assistant surveys her bust, folds her arms and, shooting El Maestro a look that could kill, says icily, “A bra, cad, a bra.”

Well, that’s what today’s word makes me think of. But mostly it makes me think of the Steve Miller song – “Abracadabra” (“Abra, abracadabra… I wanna reach out and grab ya”). And, of course, in the world of Harry Potter, the killing curse: Avada Kedavra.

This word is the quintessential magic word – or, anyway, the quintessential magic-trick word, the word you use to go with a little hocus-pocus. It has a bit of the incantatory quality to it in the rhyming, /æbrə/ and /dæbrə/, with an epenthetic syllable /kə/ giving it a feel in the same vein as thingamabob or tickety-boo with a taste of ka-ching, kaboom, and all those other words that cock before firing. The rolling /r/ gives it the necessary flourish for magic. The shape of it looks a bit like a film strip of a fancy trick with cups and balls. Even the fingers, typing it, may seem to be performing a little magic gesture, a dance that loops around and back with a central epicycle under the left hand – how sinister!

You may be interested to know that this word once was used as an actual charm – to be used in an amulet to drive sickness out of the body, written on a piece of paper in a triangle:

A B R A C A D A B R A
A B R A C A D A B R
A B R A C A D A B
A B R A C A D A
A B R A C A D
A B R A C A
A B R A C
A B R A
A B R
A B
A

It was mentioned by a Roman physician in the 4th century AD. But where did he get it from? A congeries of conjectures have been conjured forth. Some think it comes from the beginning of the alphabet, an abecedarian invention. Some think it’s related to Abraxas, a gnostic name for the supreme god. Various ideas have been put forth about origins from Hebrew, Aramaic, or related languages: perhaps from berakah “blessing” and dabar “speak”, perhaps from ab “father”, ben “son”, and ruakh akadoskh “holy spirit”, perhaps from Chaldean abbada ke dabra “perish like the word” or Aramaic avra kehdabra “I will create as I speak” – certainly J.K. Rowling seems to have been aware of one or both of the latter two. We do, however, run up against the absence of abracadabra from Jewish texts before the middle ages, which is a gap of several centuries.

But, really, if you take a set of basic sounds arranged in a reasonably straightforward way, regardless of where you got them from, you are likely to have many coincidences between your constructed word and plausible phrases in several other languages. You can conjure etymologies out of thin air with a wave of your word-wand… all the while leaving the real origin obscured in the mists of time.

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brouhaha

Posted on October 11, 2010 | 4 comments

You know trouble’s a-brewin’ when there’s a murmur, a rhubarb, a hubbub, a brutish babble… it all builds up to a big brouhaha. Oh, brouhaha, a word that in its triplet time and rough, smeary consonants has a bit of the sound of a hundred clog dancers in Doc Martens all stomping a threatening protest pattern.

But that’s because we know it’s another word for “hubbub”, “commotion”, “to-do”, et cetera. Taken in isolation, what words does it sound like? Think of bwa-ha-ha and mmuuu-ha-ha and similar: always the same gesture of the mouth opening in a moue and spreading like a shock wave from an airburst into a big, wide forest-burning face of laughter, and not laughter of joy but laughter of evil. Sort of like how the devil in a play, uncovering himself for the audience, might voice his anticipated triumph.

Which is, in fact, where we get this word. Brouhaha was, as it happens, a stereotypical laugh of the devil in medieval French religious plays. The sense shifted over the centuries, so that by 1890, when it was borrowed into English, it had the mob rumbling sense.

But where did French get it from? Well, in fact, there’s a minor brouhaha over that question. It has been suggested that it is imitative of Hebrew barukh habba, a phrase meaning “blessed be he who comes” or, more loosely, “welcome”, that would have been heard on some public occasions of Jewish observance. The existence of similar borrowings in other languages certainly makes this plausible (and we already know that Jews were often demonized in medieval and Renaissance times), but it is not a concluded fact; there is no concrete trail, just circumstance and resemblance, and there is also evidence of a French brou root relating to taunting. So, until further detail is unearthed, we are left with a big “maybe” – and, in any case, a usable word that has strayed somewhat from its origins… whatever they may ultimately have been. A bit of linguistic hocus-pocus, as it were (hocus-pocus, for its part, may have come from Latin hoc est corpus – from the Catholic mass).

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posse

Posted on October 11, 2010 | 1 comment

The sound of this word makes me think of Yosemite Sam. Can’t you just hear a hoarse voice with a southwestern American accent coughing it out through a bushy moustache? “Get mah hoss! Round up a posse! Someone stole mah hossenfeffa!” (Side note for the millions who have seen the “hossenfeffer” cartoon: it’s a German word spelled Hasenpfeffer and meaning “rabbit pepper”.)

Oh, this word has a mighty western flavour for me. But it also makes me think of the T-shirts I saw for sale in Tijuana when I was there in, um, 1980 (they probably still have them) that read “Tijuana Pussy Posse” – of course they were illustrated with cats. And then there’s the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse, which reminds us that posse is now used commonly in hip hop circles – the posse has taken on a gangsta air, quite contrary to the spontaneous law-enforcement idea of the old west posse. But, then, Jamaican posses are actual criminal gangs, so that takes it even a step further.

No matter how you slice it, posse is a word that has a wild edge. The puff of air in the first syllable also brings a taste of fur and claws with its “paw” sound; the “see” in the second might suggest that you set down your coffee and have a look-see. But, now, we know where a posse comes from – it’s who of the local able-bodied men the sheriff can round up to pursue a miscreant – but do we know where posse comes from?

We could say it comes from England, because that’s where posses first came from (though they’re obsolete in English common law). But the word itself is Latin. And I don’t mean Spanish; I mean Latin. It’s short for posse comitatus, which means “force of the county”. Comitatus, meaning “county” (or “of the county”), comes from a word for “companion” because a count was a companion of the king (and, as it happens, posse comitatus could be said to mean “force of companions”). Posse is translated here as “force” but could also come through as “power” or “ability” or, infinitive, “be able”; it is also related to potent, potency, potential, and so on.

So… posse can be translated as “be able”. One could from that say that someone who is being pursed by a posse has a “can” on his tail… and they aim to have him end up in the can. They’ll do whatever they must to possess him; they’ll even lasso him if necessary.

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glad

Posted on October 10, 2010 | 2 comments

My mother is in town, and we drove up to Collingwood today to spend a day with my wife’s side of the family; I, like a good lad, was the driver. Across the back window was a bunch of glads, their bases wrapped in a plastic bag (not a Glad bag, just a smaller one); in the trunk were two pumpkin pies my mom made last night, each covered with a square of Glad Wrap. Also along in the trunk were some glad rags: my wife’s exceptionally fetching cocktail dress from a recent reunion of professional figure skaters in France, for showing off but not for wearing all day.

The weather was beautiful, for which we were glad; the sun was shining, and the driving was smooth. All the family was happily gathered, which gladdened us even further. It was just an immediate-family do, no cater-cousins to glad-hand over cocktail shrimp. A half dozen children were playing in a toy-strewn lower room, the most noisy toy of which was one that kept playing Christmas songs – a bit out of season; Thanksgiving may have its own glad tidings of great joy, but they aren’t the ones spoken of in the Bible.

In short, it was a glad day (by which I do not mean it was Canada’s first, and North America’s oldest, gay and lesbian bookstore, Glad Day, which is on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto). And the sight of those gladioli had me thinking of Sir Hubert Parry’s coronation anthem, “I was glad,” which I have sung a few times with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. (I might also have thought of “Gladsome Radiance,” the English translation of “Svyetye Tikhiy,” part of Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil.)

Ah, glad. Such a bright word, with its low front /æ/ vowel (the word itself was originally spelled glæd back when we had æ in use for English words and not just Latin loans), and its shiny, smooth /gl/ onset, one of the great English phonaesthemes, as in glimmer, gleam, glamour, glow, et cetera. Indeed, though glad has meant “happy, joyful” for as long as it has been in English, its sense evolved from “bright” and even “smooth”.

Ah, now, what bright, smooth thing might one picture with such a word form as glad? Well, to ancient Romans, it would be a sword. The Latin for “sword” was gladius (not related to English glad). From this we get gladiator and, yes, gladiolus – those pretty flowers have sword-shaped leaves, after all. My, my… glad the impaler? Well, there was a Glad who is said to have ruled Hungary for a time around AD 900. And there was a horse called Glad that was ridden by Norse gods gong to their daily judgements at Yggdrasil. But now one is more likely to think of the shiny white Man from Glad and his plastic bags.

But even if Glad bags are strong, glad has gotten weaker. At the time of the writing of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662, “I was glad” could be used to transate Latin “Lætatus sum”, which we would more likely now render as “I was joyful”. Now glad can be used, certainly, for a strong positive feeling, especially if preceded by really, but think how you feel when you use any of the following most common glad phrases:

glad to see you
glad you did
glad to hear it
glad you came
glad you asked
glad to (finally) meet you
glad I caught you
glad you caught it

It’s seldom insincere, but I’m glad you liked it is not as strong as I rejoice in your liking it. Still, it’s nice to have a word that means about the same as happy but that has a bit more shine, sturdiness, and brevity to it – and rhymes with mad and sad and bad. Aren’t you glad we have it?

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morpheme

Posted on October 8, 2010 | 1 comment

“I celebrate myself;” so says Walt Whitman, beginning Leaves of Grass, “And what I assume you shall assume; / For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.”

Ah, atom to atom: a shape-shifter! A form that can become another form, taking only the barest bits from one to the other. Later in the same, Whitman writes

I am exposed, cut by bitter and angry hail – I lose my breath,
Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death;
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call BEING.

Ah, she’s alright, morphine… but it is only when it lets up, when one sees again not the peace but the piece, the piece in the puzzle, that we can find being: the concrete bits come together and reality takes shape.

So, too, is it with words: they are made of bits, linguistic pieces, shapes that in many cases can only take real form when combined with other forms. What can you say is -ed, or -y, or -s, or -th by itself? And what of bits that change shape all by themselves – anger to angr, long to leng? What shape shall they assume, and what bits belong to what?

Do I blaspheme against the language, the sanctity of our words? Ah, but one who sees a language as being but one way is a veritable Polyphemus: a name that speaks of many words, but designates one who is but half seeing.

The pheme in blaspheme and Polyphemus, you see, is from Greek phemos “speaking”. But the pheme in morpheme is not. It is not a morpheme, not productively or even historically, even though morphemes undeniably have to do with words and speech.

Morpheme, as it happens, is modelled on phoneme. And what is phoneme? An anglicization of phonema, Greek, “sound”; it refers to a sound that is accepted as being an identifiable sound in a given language. Phonemics is the study of the sounds that languages identify as discrete sounds. Phonetics is its counterpart: the study of actual speech sounds, which are rather more in number. For instance, the /n/ in Banff is not exactly the same sound as the /n/ in Toronto, nor is the /l/ in Calgary just the same as the one in Halifax, but we perceive them as the same sound nonetheless, local variation notwithstanding.

This distinction is the emic/etic distinction: the codified (culture-internal) versus the objectively actual. Dizzying? Emetic? It is relevant. For there are morphemics, but no morphetics – words, and parts of words, have only a culturally determined reality, not any objective form at all. A piece from which a word is made up is called a morpheme – morph for shape, and eme as we have just said.

So steeped is the morpheme steep plus the morpheme ed; windpipe is a compound made of two morphemes that make whole words unto themselves. And then there are the morphemes that are not functioning separate bits now but historically were bits that made up the words: throttle is from throat (shifted in shape) plus le (a frequentative suffix), but one may not make a similar word now from chest or tweet or what have you plus le. Oh, and as just seen, a morpheme may shift shape all of its own: anger to angr, historically, for instance, but also lose to los plus ed to t to make lost, and crazy to crazi (note the change in pronunciation! pronunciation is primary!) plus ly to make crazily.

Oh, dizzying it is, but not emetic: intoxicating. One may be entranced, set into a reverie, as by the god of dreams, Morpheus, so called because he could take on the shape of any person (why? because he was none other than they, in the mind of the dreamer). And it is after him that morphine was named: the principal alkaloid of opium. Inhale your words, and dream; but it is only when they take solid form that they arise from their slumber, come together as pieces of a puzzle, and are fit to come forth through the windpipe as words.

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Tag-teaming without coordination

Posted on October 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

I read the following in a New York Times article, “Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery“: “A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem.”

Does that sentence read a bit funny to you? It should. The fact that there are two things acting together does not automatically make them a compound subject – don’t mistake semantics for syntax. The phrase tag-teaming with is not a syntactic equivalent of and. It is not a conjunction; it is a non-finite verb phrase headed by a present participle. It has as a complement a prepositional phrase headed by with, and the complement of that prepositional phrase is the noun phrase a virus:

[_NP A fungus {_VP tag-teaming [_PP with {_NP a virus}]}]

The structure is the same as, for instance, An archbishop speaking to an actress or A dog barking at a car. Everything after the first noun is modifying the first noun, not coordinating with it. (Here’s a big tip: any time you see a preposition before a noun, you know that the noun and preposition modify what’s before them – meaning that they are not the main noun in town!)

Would you write An archbishop speaking to an actress have fallen down the stairs, or A dog barking at a car have run into a hydrant? Nope. So you don’t write A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have interacted. The fact that the fungus and the virus are working together doesn’t change the syntactic structure, which, at its core, is subject fungus and verb has interacted. I’ll say it again: never confuse semantics with syntax.

(And never look to newspapers for grammatical guidance. They make all sorts of silly mistakes. Sometimes it’s because they’re on tight timelines and sometimes it’s because they’re inappropriately applying rules they haven’t thought through well enough.)

thrum

Posted on October 6, 2010 | 1 comment

You have a bundle of multicoloured threads, let’s say, and as you walk down a crowded sidewalk you absent-mindedly pull a few out with your left hand and run your right thumb across them, making a bit of a casual hum in the throng. You look up and see a friend approaching and, in your distraction, you thump your elbow on a post as you pass, snapping a string. You don’t notice until your friend says, “What’s that blue thing on your thumb?” You reply, catching yourself as you look: “It’s a thr— um…”

Thrum, thrum, thrum. You have thrummed on a thrum with your thumb as a thrum thrummed about you, and with a thump you thrummed your thumb; now your thumb makes no thrum but has a thrum. All together now, one, two, three: Um… what?

There are three thrums (a trithrumvirate?), each with a different meaning, each a native English word (i.e., not adopted from another language), each thrum from a different source, and each having both noun and verb form. Ain’t that thrumthing!

The one we all know now is what one does on a guitar or similar instrument: you may thrum it or produce a thrum. This is onomatopoeia, the /r/ giving the rolled sound and the /m/ the sustained hum, with the voiceless fricative to start with simply giving a soft start, softer than in strum. It is also the newest of the three thrums, appearing first in the 1500s. And I should add that in some dialects it also refers to the purring of a cat… Can’t you just hear it?

The other thrum still in some form of use is the one referring to a loose end of thread, a bit too small to be of much use. But not no use at all: one may make a thrum cap or thrum mop. And thrum also gets (or, in the main, got) use in such pairings as thrum beard and thrum-chinned, which give a picture of a sort of scraggly long stubble. As a verb it means “decorate with thrums” (as opposed to “make a thrum”). It comes from an Old German word meaning “end-piece” or “remnant”; trace it back to Indo-European and up into Latin and you will find terminus at the end of your thread.

And then there is the thrum that means “crowd”, “throng”, or “bunch” or, as a verb, “crowd” or “cram”; it has been out of use for half a millennium. I know you’re wondering whether it’s related to throng and its source thring. Well, it doesn’t seem to be; thring comes from a verb focusing on the agitation of a crowd, and had forms þring, þrang, þrong, whereas thrum’s source focused on multitude and magnitude and strength, and got to us by way of þrymm. (That þ letter is thorn, the old way we represented the voiceless “th” sound.)

The sounds of thrum have a sort of soft warmth, and perhaps a bit of heaviness, no? It is in the same general set, aesthetically, and throb and hum but not so much as thrust or thrash or thrill. And in the act of saying it, your tongue strokes back from your teeth across your alveolar ridge, culminating with the lips closing – not altogether unlike the gesture of a hand thrumming just once on a guitar… or perhaps, better, a theorbo.

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting thrum… a year and a half ago. You see, I do get to them all eventually…

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ptosis

Posted on October 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

Ptosis? Ptui! When you spot it, what you want it to do is stop… but no staples or Post-Its will put a stop to ptosis.

Does this word seem perky, with its paired stops, voiceless and voiceless, appropriate for popping or pipping? If one posits such a link, one will be disappointed: it’s quite the opposite. Anyway, the sound of the p has dropped off – the Greeks may have said it (and not just here – another root you’ll know is pter, which drops the /p/ in pterodactyl but keeps it in helicopter), but we get floppy about such things in English.

And its meaning is likewise anything but perky. Greek ptosis meant “falling” or “fall”, from the verb piptein. And what is falling? Perhaps your eyelid – drooping eyelid is blepharoptosis, also called just ptosis. Or perhaps your breasts: breast ptosis is what happens to mammaries as Cooper’s ligaments relax with age (Betty Cooper’s? don’t be so arch). We assume there must be something in the line of butt ptosis as well (perhaps by another name).

It could be worse, though. Another word that comes from the same Greek root is ptomaine, which comes from ptoma, “fallen body” (i.e., “corpse”). And then there’s apoptosis, which is the “falling away” of cells in your body – more to the point, their death. Sounds apocalyptic? It happens all the time: old cells self-destruct to make way for new ones.

But if you have some incidence of ptosis, at least you have a nice, clean-sounding word to dress it up. I think it will be generally agreed that droop sounds rather droopy; so much nicer to have the toasty ptosis, even if the result is the same toast.

bolero

Posted on October 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

Slow, hot, steamy, gradually building in intensity, insistent, turning and turning again, as though flying in circles, until at last it bowls you over, or you are bolted by Cupid’s bow and arrow… Ravel ravels and you are unravelled; it is unrivalled…

Oh, Boléro, the now-archetypal classical music of sex, with its repeating phrases and steady 3/4 rhythm with 16th-note triplets: dum, dadada dum, dadada dum, dum; dum, dadada dum, dadada dadada dadada… On and on and on… (There’s a story that at the premiere, a woman shouted that Ravel was mad, and Ravel, hearing of this, smiled and remarked that she had understood the piece.)

Ravel’s piece is not the only or the original bolero, of course. The dance had been around more than a century before Ravel wrote his version. It came about as a cross between a contradanza and a sevillana (there is a Cuban dance of the same name that has no relation). The origin of the word bolero may have to do with balls (I mean the kind you throw or swing – the word itself seems decorated with them, o e o plus the one on the b), but it’s not certain – nor is it entirely sure how that relates to the short jacket also called bolero. But when you follow the bouncing ball, the rhythm is the same one as Ravel used, those two bars with their eighth-note/triplet-sixteenth rhythms.

It’s a rhythm quite similar to that of a fandango, as it happens. And in fact when Ravel was first writing his piece on commission from the Russian ballerina Ida Rubinstein, he called it Fandango. Well, that might have turned it a whiter shade of pale – or it might have been just fine and dandy. But bolero is a more bullish word, and Spanish speakers may hear echoes of volar “fly” and volver “turn” (the v is said the same as b).

And English speakers may hear echoes of Bo Derek. In fact, anyone who was around in 1979, even if they never saw the movie 10, probably has an image of her cornrow braids, utterly iconic. The movie thrust her to stardom, made a sex anthem of the song… and did quite well for Dudley Moore, too, who, for some reason, is not so often thought of in this context even though it was he who was getting it on to Ravel’s dirty dance. (And who, besides Bo, did he do it with in the movie? Julie Andrews. The hills are alive indeed…)

Five years after 10, the tune’s vigour was still fresh and further freshened by the highest-scoring ice dance routine in Olympic history (6.0s across the board for artistic interpretation), Nottingham’s Torvill and Dean skating an erotic adventure in flowing purple culminating in collapse (if they had skated for the full quarter hour of Ravel’s music, they surely would have collapsed for real!). Needless to say, other skaters have used the music, but there was only one Torvill and Dean Boléro (just as there was only one Katarina Witt Carmen).

Not that everyone is a figure skating fan, of course. But most people who now think of Boléro as the erotic classical piece probably haven’t seen 10, either, and many of them may not have heard of it. (Even fewer will know of the 1984 movie Bo Derek produced and starred in, Bolero, a film that was released unrated because it was too explicit but still won six Golden Raspberry awards.) Boléro = sex is just part of the common currency of culture now… at least for those who don’t find it boring and repetitive (find which boring and repetitive, Boléro or sex? um, either).

ravel

Posted on October 3, 2010 | 3 comments

Imagine a piece of music like a long thread being slowly unwound from an article of knitted clothing – just a little variation, but again the same, around and around, though you may feel a sense of tension building as the clothing disappears before your eyes. Revel in the tension! Why not? Did I not mention someone was wearing it? More and more is revealed, until at last it falls away abruptly…

Ah, yes, Boléro, by Maurice Ravel: in the musical canon unrivalled, like a garment being ravelled…

Wait – do I not mean unravelled? Well, ravelled, unravelled, either may be used. You see, unravel is not the antonym of ravel; actually, knit would be a better choice for that – as Shakespeare knew, and had his Macbeth say: “Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.”

Now, how did these two apparently contradictory forms get tangled so, and the usual sense of opposition get undone? We may find some enlightenment in the origin of the word, which is no less entangled: in fact, early modern Dutch ravelen or rafelen meant “tangle, become confused” and “fray, come undone”.

How could it mean both – how could these senses cleave together rather than cleave apart? Not like the two senses of cleave, which come from two different origins that converged on one form. No, rather, the two meanings come from the tangled mess that threads that come undone or fray tend to end up in. In short, this is a word for the entropy of strings, threads, and fabric.

And why not have a fraying sense with a word that sounds rather like raffle and ruffle and riffle? But why add the un? Well, as an intensifier, perhaps – a redundancy of form seen in unloose, which, redundant though it may be, has been in the language consistently since the 1300s, or the more modern unthaw, first seen only around 1600. Or from the “tangle” sense of ravel gaining un, even as ravel had likewise the “come undone” sense. Either way, unravel has been in English almost as long as ravel has; ravel appeared in the mid-1500s, unravel in the early 1600s.

Anyway, why not have a paradox in a word that anagrams velar but has no velar sounds in it? And why not have a word relating to strings that resembles (it’s not the same; the pronunciations and origins are different) the name of an orchestral composer? True, Boléro wasn’t Ravel’s magnum opus (he once called it “a piece for orchestra without music”), but it may be his best known, and it resembles not only an unravelling but also another form of entropy: swirling around and circling into a centre of gravity (perhaps a black hole) until finally crashing into it. And, to quote athome.harvard.edu/programs/sst/, “strings and black holes have been found to be inextricably intertwined.” (They mean string theory, of course…)

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