Author Archives: sesquiotic

firmament

Posted on August 27, 2010 | 4 comments

Plant your feet firmly on the earth. Affirm that you are fixed on the fundament. Reach your arms high, towards the sky. In one direction is the firmament, and in the other?

The earth, of course.

Let’s approach this another way. You know Atlas: he’s that bloke with the globe on his shoulders, right? So what’s he holding up?

The firmament. And where’s he standing?

On the earth. The Atlas mountains, now in Morocco, to be precise. (What would he be standing on if he were holding the earth – a turtle? Which is on another turtle, and so on all the way down?)

Never mind that firmament appears to have two feet firmly planted in it, m and m. It means the heavens. That globe Atlas is holding is the celestial sphere, not our planet, and really, in mythology, he’s holding the sky above the earth. And the sky, wherein the sun, moon, planets, and stars are fixed, is the firmament.

That seems a touch weird, doesn’t it? Although firm is not a hard word (no knocking stops in it), it has that sturdy hum like a diesel engine. And ment makes a noun of something – it pours concrete on a concept. But the heavens are mostly empty space with balls of hot gas spinning about in it. They’re the counterpoise to terra firma. So what silly person decided the heavens were the firmament?

I certainly found it confusing for a long time. When you get a sentence like the first verse of Psalm 19 (KJV), “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork,” you can think firmament means the earth. But when you run up against Hamlet saying “This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours,” well, you’re going to get confused.

You wouldn’t be the first. Evidence suggests that the people who translated the Bible from Hebrew to Greek were also confused. Referring to the vault of the sky, the Hebrew word most likely meant “expanse” or “spread”, but in Syriac the same verb meant “condense” or “make solid” (probably the divergent senses both trace back to a sense meaning “tread” or “beat out metal”), and that led the Greek translators to make it “firm, solid structure” – which went from the Greek to the Latin, where it was rendered firmamentum, from a verb firmare meaning “strengthen”.

So much for a firm basis for interpretation! An error stands on another error standing on another… Turtles all the way down? No, the bottom turtle is standing on air, but no one’s noticed. And now it has the solidity of tradition! Good heavens.

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canola

Posted on August 25, 2010 | 1 comment

In the summer, the Canadian country driver between Kelowna and Kenora or perhaps between Cornwall and Petrolia may happen to pass great fields of little yellow flowers. Beneath each green stem lies a bulb of the Brassica kind, akin to a turnip. But it is the seeds that are the crop. They are not the kinds of seeds one crunches in granola, nor quite like the linseeds that go into linoleum. No, they are a great part of the Canadian identity and the Canadian kitchen, and if (as the turn of phrase goes) you know shit from Shinola, you know they’re canola.

It’s almost an Italian-sounding name, isn’t it, canola? But you’re unlikely to find canola with canoli or canneloni; Italians use cream and butter for fat for the one and might have some olive oil (and more) with the other. Nor is it akin to NOLA, New Orleans, Louisiana, home of many fine foods such as muffuletta sandwiches. Canola is also not like payola but in a can – though the same ola that has a certain phonaesthemic presence in granola, payola, Shinola, and Victrola (and originally pianola) no doubt influenced the formation of this word. So, too, we may expect, did the ola that is truly morphemic in cupola, aureola, and lineola.

That second ola is canola‘s one vague link with Latin. For more Latin we would need to go back to the root – and I don’t mean that bulb of Brassica. The Latin name for this kind of plant (or turnips generally) was more commonly rapum, from which we get the rape that is in rapeseed – an entirely different rape from the one signifying sexual assault. But how could anyone see the one word and not think of the other? No wonder, when Keith Downey and Baldur R. Stefansson bred a variety of rape in the 1970s that was low in undesirable erucic acid, they took their description Canadian oil, low acid and made an acronym of it – the first half a syllable acronym (as in SoHo and SoWeTo), the second half an initial acronym (as in NASA, RADAR, and TASER): Canola (because CanOLA is tacky and canola oil is slippery).

Yes, the can in canola is short for Canadian, like so many cans in our can-do country. And its popular oil is emblematically Canadian, even though canola is now grown in other countries too. If, as Pierre Berton once said, a Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe, then surely a Canadian is also someone who knows how to make food with canola. (Not that it’s difficult, unlike that canoe thing.)

Thanks to “Upstater” for asking about canola and rape via a comment on triticale.

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bookkeeper

Posted on August 24, 2010 | 2 comments

I remember a little story in some book of mental exercises about a bookkeeper who happened to be entering an item about a purchase of balloons (probably 1100 of them) and noticed that there were two double letters in sequence, lloo. He got to thinking about other words that had the same (I don’t remember their examples, but spittoon and settee would be others), and wondered whether there was any word that had three double letters in a row. After thinking long and hard, he noticed something in his office that gave him the answer. What was it?

Well, the plaque on his desk, or the sign on his door, or his business card, whatever – as long as it said bookkeeper. An extra interesting detail about this word, however, is one that might in fact ironically have kept the reader from noticing the sequential double letters: the double k is across a morpheme boundary (since this is a compound word, made of three morphemes – book + [keep + er]), and – unlike most double letters in English – it actually represents a double sound, or anyway a long one (since the /k/ isn’t released twice but is held for double length).

We rarely do double sounds in English. We used to; vowel length once really was vowel length. Now it’s more a function of a change in quality. And we don’t say a long /l/ in balloon (as a speaker of, for instance, Italian might) – it’s not /bal lun/ but /bə lun/.

There are a few other words in English (I don’t have numbers on how many) that have long consonants, and generally they are due to morpheme boundaries. There are at least three that even may be said with long consonants but written with a single letter: thirteen, fourteen, and eighteen, which can (but don’t always) have a held /t/, partly to distinguish them from thirty, forty, and eighty.

But it would be sloppy to say bookkeeper with just a single short /k/. That would make it sound like bookie per, say. And while a bookie may be a bookkeeper of sorts, a bookkeeper is not necessarily a bookie per se.

But this word – and especially its related verb bookkeep – suits bookkeeping well enough. It’s all double-entry ookkee, with the positives b on one side balanced out by the negatives p on the other. (You could also view the kk as the ledger columns, the boo as a positive with trailing zeroes, and the ee as cancelled amounts before the negative p.) Certainly you want to double-OK everything in the accounts, with no book capers and nothing that leaves you saying “eep!”

Book and keep are both old, time-honoured English words (keep originally meaning something more like “capture”). Bookkeeper has, for its part, been around at least since the 16th century. But it has rarely been used for someone like me, who buys books (especially reference books) and almost never sells them. Rather, the books that are being kept are account books (for instance at toll bridges), and the keeping is like housekeeping – not just retaining but maintaining. Why has it always cleaved to that one sense? Oh, there’s no accounting for the vagaries of language… we can just keep the books.

Thanks to my wife, Aina Arro, for prompting me to do bookkeeper.

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triticale

Posted on August 23, 2010 | 2 comments

This is a crisp, hard, almost brittle word at the start, its sound glittering like a cut diamond, gleaming at the end with the /li/. The crosses of the t‘s add to the angularity, and the short high front vowels keep it clipped and quick before it opens wider into two “long” vowels (really diphthongs). For all that, it’s musical, four crisp beats in two trochees (but you may say it in a three-time rhythm), like tapping feet and perhaps a fiddle, say, at a ceili.

And why not a ceili? After all, the grain this word names was first bred in Scotland – and Sweden. Yes, it’s a cereal grain, the mule of the breadbasket: a cross-breed between wheat (genus Triticum) and rye (genus Secale) that is sterile… until treated with colchicine (I wonder if mules would like a chemical that would let them reproduce).

Triticale sounds technical, strong, important, not trite; it’s a plant with a critical trail, the first man-made crop species. And it can grow in places where wheat cannot, and it has a high lysine content, good for feeding people and animals; it’s thought of as a crop of the future, which, given that its name sounds like a planet from Star Trek, seems reasonable enough.

But how can it replace wheat? Wheat is a softer, shorter word, and we easily think of flour with it… How can something called triticale become soft flour? Why, by being triturated, of course, just as is done to wheat for the same purpose. And rye – European bread and Canadian whisky – can triticale supplant it? Well, why should it – augment it, rather. After all, triticale is an augmented-feeling word (long like the name of a Sri Lankan city, perhaps), suitable enough given that triticale grains are somewhat larger than wheat grains, though not quite as large as rye grains.

But at least the linguistic blend is Latinate. Had it been in Gaelic, it might have been something like cruithneachteagal. Of course, in Swedish it could have made veteråg, which sounds earthy – though more like a name for a troll, perhaps, than something scientific. But had it been a simple English concatenation, it may have been wheatrye, which would have been pronounced like “we try”. And of course we try – that’s how we come up with things like triticale.

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carboy, demijohn, delope

Posted on August 23, 2010 | 1 comment

The Words, Wines, and Whatever tasting event was drawing to a close, and Maury’s aunt Susan, eloped from her nursing home, was feeling delightful. “Maury!” she said, throwing her arm around her nephew. “My glass is empty. The bottle is empty. Fetch me a carboy.” She tittered as she titubated.

“Fetch you a car?” Maury said. “Shall I call you a cab?”

“No, you silly thing, call me your aunt. I didn’t say I wanted a car, boy. I’ve had more than enough cars and boys and boys in cars in my life. I said I wanted a carboy.” She giggled again. “A large glass jug.”

Maury sighed. “I feel you need to be contained.”

“I’d take a demijohn. Though a demijohn often leads to a full john.” She smiled happily and, looking around, spotted a still-unopened bottle of champagne by the bookshelf. “Maury, my boy. I want to look something up. Let’s repair to the bookcase.”

“What would you like to look up?”

“A Scotsman’s kilt!” She giggled some more. “I want to explore the origins of carboy and demijohn.”

They made their way to the shelf; Susan positioned herself in such a way that the bottle was not obvious to Maury but was within her reach. She pulled out an etymological dictionary. “Funny two words for glass jugs both sound like names for patrons of prostitutes.” She flipped some pages. “Of course, I’m sure those demi-Johns and car boys like nice jugs.” She found her page: “From Persian qaraba, ‘large flagon’. Ay qaraba! A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou.”

“A flagon,” Maury said. “I think you’re flaggin’.”

She flipped some more pages. “Now… Is demijohn from Persian too? Or Arabic? Oh, I see: cognates in Persian and Arabic seem to have been borrowed from the French, as our word is: from Dame Jeanne, ‘Lady Joan’, because it looks like a fat lady. This word has had a change of sex!”

“Not one, but two, cases of reanalysis,” I said. “Under the influence of alcohol, quite evidently.”

“Speaking of which…” Susan grabbed the champagne bottle and started to undo the foil.

“The evening is concluding,” Maury protested. “You really must return.”

“I eloped at the beginning of the evening,” Susan said, “and once I have dealt with this small matter I will delope.”

“Delope isn’t related to elope, though,” Maury said. “It’s a pistol dueling term; it means ‘fire into the air’.”

“I know,” said Susan. “I’ve read books by Georgette Heyer. One does it when one’s opponent is simply not up to one’s level. And, Maurice, lad, you are not as looped as I. Therefore, I must delope.” Whereupon she popped the champagne cork into the air. It whizzed past Maury’s ear and ricocheted off the ceiling.

Maury took the bottle from her, drank a good draught straight from it, and handed it back. “Time for the genie to go back in the bottle,” he said, and went off to arrange for a taxi.

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for mentioning delope.

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tittup

Posted on August 22, 2010 | 5 comments

I was serving as Virgil to Maury’s aunt Susan as she paid our monthly Words, Wines, and Whatever tasting a visit. It was clear that she was enjoying all three of the titular enticements. “Dear,” she said, taking a refill of her wine, “I have an ounce, next I have two, and then it’s three, and I’m off! I believe that’s what my doctors call titration.”

“I must say your graduated dosing is a good example of titrimetry,” I said.

“To trim a tree?” she echoed. “It’s not Christmas, but we certainly are opening some nice gifts of words here. I find it quite titillating.”

A voice from behind said “Titillating?” Oh dear. It was Ross Ewage. He stepped forward. “Down to the last jot and tittle?”

“Oh, hello,” said Susan, turning.

“Ross, this is Maury’s aunt Susan,” I said. “Susan, this is Ross Ewage.”

“Raw sewage?” Susan said.

“I’m a veritable effluvium,” Ross said. “Don’t worry,” he added, shaking her hand, “hands clean, mouth dirty.” He pulled some small note cards out of his pocket, a word on each. “I overheard you sampling some words on my current theme: titration, titillating… Perhaps you would like to try some more.”

“What’s your theme?” Susan asked.

“I call it ‘Show Me Your –'” He broke off as I suddenly aspirated some wine and started coughing. “You alright?” he said.

“Um, fine,” I croaked, and swallowed some more wine to make the first bunch go down more smoothly.

“The wine is getting to us, I think,” Susan said.

“Soon you’ll be titubating,” Ross said, holding out a card with that word written on it.

“That sounds naughty,” Susan said with a little smirk.

“The implications are staggering,” Ross said. Susan turned over the card and saw that titubate means “stagger, reel, stumble” and comes from Latin.

“Well, I must apologize for my appearance,” Susan said, indicating her nightdress. “I could use a touch of titivation.” (Which means “sprucing up” and is fake Latinate, formed probably on the basis of tidy.)

“Well, no one’s asking you to tittup,” Ross said. Susan raised one eyebrow slightly; Ross handed her another card.

“Three t‘s,” Susan said. “Not a triple x. I trust that tup here doesn’t mean what tup means by itself.” She flipped the card. “‘Prance like a horse’. Onomatopoeic. Oh, and there’s a noun, too. Which can also mean ‘impudent hussy’ or ‘minx’.” She handed Ross his cards back. “How could I possibly have made it to seventy-five without ever being called a tittup? Alas, I guess it’s just not a common word, even if its object is common.” She smiled sweetly. “What other words have you there? Perhaps titmouse?”

“Naturally,” Ross said. “A nice name for a little bird, and a good example of reanalysis, as it has nothing to do with either of its ostensible roots.”

“Oh, yes, I know about birds,” Susan said. “I used to be quite the avid birdwatcher.”

“I like watching birds,” Ross said.

“I bet you do,” Susan said with a little smile. “One I particularly like can’t be found here in North America, though. The Parus major. It can have up to forty different calls and songs. Oh, now, Parus major…” She looked thoughtfully upward. “What do they call those in English?”

“Great tits,” Ross said.

“Why, thank you,” Susan tittered, smoothing her nightdress. She patted Ross on the cheek and teetered off towards the bar.

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Susan

Posted on August 20, 2010 | 5 comments

Maury’s aunt Susan, lately eloped from her nursing home, pulled up a chair in the kitchen of Domus Logogustationis. “I’m pleased to meet you gentlemen,” she said, smiling prettily. “I’m Susan. I can’t remember my current surname at the moment, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s not my first, and it may not be my last.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Daryl and I both said. Maury said nothing, having known her all his forty-two years.

“I thought I’d have a night out from the residence,” she said. Plucking at her nightdress, she added, “I’m more dressed for a night in, but I learned a long time ago that if you look like you’re going to leave, people may try to stop you. Anyway, I heard you taste words here, and that sounded like a kind of diet I could go on. I regret not having one to bring to the table. Certainly my name isn’t much for the palate.”

“Susan?” I said. “Plenty to go on there. Almost too much, in fact.”

“Brown-eyed Susan, black-eyed Susan,” Daryl said. “Both flowers, though ironically Susan – or rather Susanna, which it comes from – means ‘lotus flower’.”

Susan smiled even more and folded her legs up on her chair. “Lotus I can do! I used to be a flower child. A late bloomer, though – I was thirty-three in the summer of sixty-nine. I was like the Suzanne who takes you down to her place near the river… Only, of course, I was Susan.”

“So,” Maury said, “you’d take them down to see what ensues an’ all that.” His vaguely weary, knowing manner telegraphed that Maury had heard many tales of her colourful life.

A thought occurred to Susan. “Wait, doesn’t Susanna mean ‘lily’? Which is twice as ironic!”

“Yes,” said Maury, who it seemed had told her this before, “‘lily’ – or also ‘rose’.”

“Not the rose of Sharon!” Susan giggled.

“The source seems ultimately to be from Egyptian for ‘lotus’, though,” Maury continued, “as Daryl says. But the Hebrew root for Shoshana, which is ‘rose’ or ‘lily’, is also from a verb meaning ‘be joyous’.”

“Well, that suits me!” Susan said. “Oh, Susanna, don’t you cry for me… I’ve come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee. Or anyway from East York with a Band-Aid on my elbow.” She pulled up her sleeve. Nope. She pulled up the other. Nope. “Hmmm… Either that was another time or it’s on another body part…”

Maury leapt in to distract her from the search. “You never went by Sue, though.”

“Nope!” she said, looking up. “I didn’t want to have a name that was a constant reminder of legal action. Not that I’m all that keen on imputations of laziness.”

“Nobody who knows you would ever call you lazy, Susan,” Maury said. He left it unsaid that legal complications might be more common, given her storied adventuresomeness.

“I did try Susie on for size,” she said, “in fifty-six or fifty-seven… Of course I’m not a Susie Q. But ‘Wake Up, Little Susie’ was my theme song… Well, it came second after ‘Sleep with Me, Little Susie,’ which was very popular.” She giggled mischievously; Maury looked a bit uncomfortable.

“Susan is a popular name,” I offered. “Several of my junior high school teachers were named Susan. Well, they were named Mrs. This and Mrs. That, but we found out they had first names, and they always seemed to be Susan.”

Susan raised her hand. “I was a teacher for a time. But I prefer to be thought of as like Susan Sarandon. Or maybe Susan Sontag. Anyway,” she added, stretching and shaking out her long hair, “I always liked the shape of the word, with those two sinuous s’s, even if I never liked the buzzing sound in the middle.”

Daryl and I looked at Maury. “How come she hasn’t been a member of the Order of Logogustation for years?” I asked him.

Maury paused and looked a bit uncomfortable as he tried to find a nice way to put it. Susan just laughed. “I’m not very reliable, and neither is my brain. I have episodes. I forget things. Now, of course, many people my age spend time thinking about the hereafter – they come into a room and say, ‘Now, what was I here after?’ – but while I’ve been a bit of a menace to society since at least nineteen fifty-four, I’ve been a bit much of a menace to myself from time to time since… what year is it now?”

“Two thousand ten,” Maury said.

“Good grief,” Susan said. “I’m seventy-five. Wait – what month is this?”

“August,” Maury said.

“I’ll be seventy-five soon. You must come to my birthday party.”

The word “party” reminded Daryl. “We have a party to set up for.” He turned to Susan. “You will stay?”

“That’s why I’m here! I’m not just sussin’ the place out…” She turned and looked at Maury and the melon that was before him. “I brought a cantaloupe. You can use what’s left of it if you want.” She swatted Maury lightly on the shoulder. “Piggy.” She turned back to me and Daryl. “Now, I think I heard something about wine?”

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elope

Posted on August 19, 2010 | 6 comments

Daryl and I, preparing for the monthly Words, Wines, and Whatever tasting event at Domus Logogustationis, walked into the kitchen, where we happened on Maury, seated at the table, wearing one of his wonted looks of weary beleaguerment. He was eating a melon bitterly.

“Why so low, Joe?” Daryl said.

“My aunt eloped,” Maury said.

“Oh dear,” I said. “Your aunt eloped? To play?”

Maury gave me a look that suggested he was considering uttering some seldom-heard discouraging words.

“Wait,” said Daryl. “Your aunt ran off to get married?”

“Well, yes, she did,” Maury said, “when she was much younger. It was a bit of a family scandal, but only a bit. It saved my grandparents a lot of money, and everyone saw it coming. So when she threw her suitcase out the bedroom window, went downstairs and announced she was going to go buy some milk, her father simply said, ‘Get some flowers while you’re at it,’ and gave her a dollar. My mother said, ‘Good luck,’ and off she went to the waiting car.”

Daryl was momentarily nonplussed. “…And this accounts for your current funk?”

“Well, no,” Maury said. “That was just the first in what has shaped up to be a habit.”

“You can elope more than once?”

“I say,” I said. “I think we must taste elope tonight. You didn’t know that ‘run away to get married’ isn’t the original meaning? That sense has only been around since the nineteenth century.”

“Well, it means ‘run away’, anyway, right?” Daryl said. “The lope is the same one as in lope meaning ‘leap’ and is cognate with German laufen, ‘run’.”

“The oldest sense in English,” Maury said, “was ‘run away from one’s husband with one’s lover’. You can tell that that one comes from the fourteenth century – that was the ideal of romantic love back then: romance didn’t lead to marriage, it led away from it.”

“So your aunt ran away from her husband?” Daryl said.

“More than once,” Maury replied. “As I said, it came to be a habit. And then she’d elope from the lover she’d eloped to. Sometimes she eloped to another lover and sometimes back to her husband. He was a patient man. And not an altogether faithful one.”

“So who’d she elope from this time?”

“The nursing home.”

“You can’t elope from a nursing home!” Daryl exclaimed.

“In fact, she took a cantaloupe when she eloped this time. But, yes, you can elope. It’s the term nursing homes use when one of their inmates goes AWOL.”

I chuckled. “It certainly always gives me an image of seniors running away to get married.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Maury said. “They’ve found her in some interesting places on previous elopements.”

“Well,” said Daryl, “what’s knocked you for a loop this time?”

Maury took a bite of his melon and considered his response.

“Hey,” I said, “where’d you get the cantaloupe, anyway? It’s not on the menu.”

Just then a winsome septuagenarian in a nightdress came out of the pantry. “Lovely place you have here,” she said. “Where do you keep the words?”

“Gentlemen,” Maury said to us, “meet my aunt Susan.”

Thanks to Marie-Lynn Hammond for asking for elope.

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maroon

Posted on August 18, 2010 | 1 comment

This word, I must confess, has a particular inescapable tone for me, given it by Bugs Bunny, who, laughing derisively at one nemesis or another, said “What a maroon!”

Now, we may reasonably conclude that this was a mutation of moron, but for me, a certain shade of mauve has been forever stained with the tarnish of foolishness. As has the fact of being stranded on an island.

To make matters worse, at a more recent point (perhaps a decade and a half ago), reading through a cookbook written by a guy with mob connections who included anecdotes along with his recipes, I found that a favourite expletive among the Italian-American circle of the author was marrone.

So, great. Now not just dumb, but venal, violent, et cetera.

Well you may wonder why I would let such chestnuts flavour a word so strongly. But with this word, one simply can’t escape the flavour of chestnuts. After all, marrone and French marron mean “chestnut,” and it is from them that we get the word for the colour. Yes, yes, I know, chestnuts are a rich brown, not what we would normally call maroon in colour – maroon is, as the OED puts it, more like claret (red Bordeaux), which is to say a deeper, richer red than Burgundy. It can also be brownish-crimson, and that would seem to have been its path from nuts to wine. Meanwhile, through the same connection, it also names a kind of firework that makes a loud bang – because a chestnut tossed on a fire will do the same once it’s heated up enough.

But how does it get from nuts to desert islands? Well, it doesn’t quite. It’s more like being on the island and going nuts. That is to say, the word for the stranded person (which in turn became the verb for stranding) started out as a different word and, through modifications, came to look like the word for the chestnut.

That’s right, no crimson tales of swashbuckling here. Actually, the first maroons were not people left behind or stranded by a storm; rather, they were people who wanted to get away. Slaves. Slaves in the West Indies, specifically. To get away from working on plantations, they escaped to inhospitable regions – not desert islands but rather the mountainous interiors of the islands they were already on (and of Suriname). From this, they got the name cimarróns, from Spanish cima “peak, summit” (compare Spanish cimarra “wild place”). And subsequently, from the idea of isolation and exile, came the verb meaning “leave ashore on a desolate island or coast” (Désolé? Désolé, monsieur, nous allons vous quitter.)

So there you have it. Both sides do have the whiff of gunpowder – the slave rebellions and pirates on one side, and the fireworks on the other side – and the crimson to boot. And actually the influence is mutual: cimarrón may have been clipped to be like marron, but it appears that the island sense was first to move to maroon and the chestnut followed after.

There aren’t too many connections between the sea and trees, certainly; I’m put in mind of Tom Lewis’s song “Marching Inland,” which starts as follows:

Lord Nelson knew the perfect way to cure your “mal-de-mer,”
So if you pay attention, his secret I will share,
To any sea-sick sailor he’d give this advice for free:
“If you’re feeling sea-sick, sit underneath a tree!”

Maroon does have a mer sound at the start, too – as in la marée haute, high tide. And with the nautical connection, how could it escape getting the oon ending? Army and navy, they have their poltroons, dragoons, saloons, typhoons, lagoons… not that oon only shows up in that mileu, of course; it also shows up, for instance, in cartoon. And in cartoons.

Thanks to Elaine Freedman for suggesting maroon.

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cwm

Posted on August 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

Cwm? WTF? Ths wrd hs n vwl! What is it, an initialism for “come with me”?

Well, no, at least not in this case. And it does have a vowel. A double one, in fact: a double u, which is w. Which represents a vowel in Welsh. Remember: a vowel is a sound, not a letter. And when you say this word, /kum/, you undeniably say a vowel. The fact that w does not normally represent a vowel in English is quite immaterial. We stole this word from Welsh fair and square. (Well, OK, we didn’t steal it – Welsh still has it and uses it. We copied it. Without altering it.)

Actually, this word does have an apparent English cognate, coomb (also spelled combe and comb in place names – as in Branscombe, Eastcomb, etc.). I say apparent because while it refers to the same sort of thing as cwm, it has a homonym that is derived from Germanic roots and refers to a cup. And it just happens that what cwm names is rather cuplike.

Well, it can be rather cuplike. In the original sense, it’s a valley; more particularly, it’s a hollow at the head of a valley, shaped like half a cup, dug out by a glacier. We have another word for these in English, a word we stole (copied!) from French: cirque. A coomb, for its part, can be a small cuplike hanging valley, or a deep notch valley, or a valley inlet from the sea, depending on which part of England you’re in.

The word cwm itself has a certain roundness to it in the saying, the tongue making a hollow after touching at the back and the lips closing off the hollow; it’s a bit like how you hold your mouth if you have a hot piece of potato in it. The sense of closedness of the roundness gets an added boost from the spelling. As to the form, we can certainly see a cirque in the c, and perhaps a pair of valleys in the w and a hillside in the m. But, you know, it could just as easily be a lamp with a standing screen and some drapes, or what have you.

This cwm, though it names a glacier-made hollow, nonetheless has an inviting quality. Aside from looking like it says “come with me,” it sounds like a northern English pronunciation of come. But who’s saying “come” to whom? My first reaction is that the addressee is Rhonda. Of “Help Me Rhonda”? Well, yeah, no, I guess not. The person who is doing the guiding and inviting is God, and Cwm Rhondda is the name of a tune to which one of the grand old Protestant hymns is set. The usual text begins “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah.” A more direct translation of the original Welsh would be “Lord, lead me through the wilderness.” The first verse of the Welsh is as follows (just because I love looking at Welsh):

Arglwydd, arwain trwy’r anialwch,
Fi, bererin gwael ei wedd,
Nad oes ynof nerth na bywyd
Fel yn gorwedd yn y bedd:
Hollalluog, Hollalluog,
Ydyw’r Un a’m cwyd i’r lan.
Ydyw’r Un a’m cwyd i’r lan.

Not see cwm rhondda in there? No, there’s no valley of the shadow of Rhonda. Actually Cwm Rhondda is the place the tune is from, the Rhondda valley in Wales. The Rhondda valley, a former coal mining area in south Wales, is actually two valleys (w?), one large and one small, merging at the bottom. Rhondda, for its part, means something on the order of “babbling” as in the sound of a brook – or the Rhondda river. (By the way, the rh stands for a voiceless /r/ and the dd stands for the voiced dental fricative we use at the beginning of the.)

The Rhondda valley has quite an interesting social history, being heavily involved in the changing tides of fortune of industrialization (the coal working men), and passing from a strongly Welsh-speaking area to an English-speaking one just in the past century. Its history is not as short and elegant as cwm, nor as glacial as a cirque. I leave it to the interested to look it up further.

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