Author Archives: sesquiotic

livery

Posted on August 16, 2010 | Leave a comment

There’s a knock on your door. You open it, and there’s a man in uniform holding a package. It’s some high-end steaks you ordered from Japan. You see behind him there’s a horse.

“You came on a horse?” you ask.

“Yes, it’s all part of our delivery,” he says. “But the stable is nearby,” he adds, leaning a bit closer and glancing over his shoulder, as if letting you in on a secret. “Actually we drive the packages to it in a truck.”

You nod knowingly. “A plain white truck, eh?”

“No,” he says with a teeny smirk. “Kinda silvery, in fact. Actually it has our logo on it.”

“D’you drive the truck?”

“No,” he says. “In fact I don’t even drive. I get to the stable by cab.”

“And where does the truck pick up the steaks?”

“At the airport, of course. They’re flown here, air freight.”

“Huh,” you say, taking out your wallet. “Well, what do I owe you for all of that conveyance?”

“Oh, no,” he says, “it’s free delivery.”

So you take the steaks. You thaw one out and grill it. It’s well marbled, but it tastes kinda… livery.

Well, that can’t be a surprise. After all, there was livery all the way along its delivery – found with everything that had a stake in delivering your steaks. The delivery man was wearing livery; the horse was kept in a livery stable; the truck was in livery; the man took a livery cab to work; and the freight airplane, too, was most surely in livery. Verily, there’s no mix-up here!

But, now, how is this word livery delivered to us? Well, originally from Latin liberare “liberate, set free”; that developed into a French verb livrer meaning “hand over” (so, yes, deliver is cognate); what was handed over in this case was provisions – food and clothes to servants, and food to horses. This became our English noun livery. The clothing given to servants ultimately narrowed the sense of livery to “uniform” – which has since broadened to refer to insignia on vehicles: trucks, airplanes, cabs. Meanwhile, a stable that gives food for horses is still a livery stable. And actually since cabs were first drawn by horses, the term livery cab traces back to that livery. Now, of course, the only livery you’ll find with cabs is the insignia, not the nag.

For quite some time I wondered whether this word – which I saw on occasion but generally didn’t hear – was to be pronounced with a “long i” in the first syllable, i.e., a diphthong as in lie. After all, livery can look quite lively, no? And horses are alive. And why would we want a word for regalia to sound like spots seen on old hands? But “short i” it is, rhyming with slivery; if you say livery livery livery et cetera, it can come to sound like relive relive relive after a couple of repetitions.

Is livery flavourful? Well, it gives you the liquid lick of the /l/ and purr of the /r/ along with the lip-biting buzz of the /v/. Its shape starts high and ends low; perhaps the v in the middle is a feed trough or a formal collar. It’s not necessarily a pretty word, but it gets the job done, so I have no beef with it.

Thanks to David Moody for suggesting livery.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

hick

Posted on August 16, 2010 | Leave a comment

Quick – picture a hick. What’s he look like? Chawin’ on a hickory stick, swiggin’ a jug of moonshine (hic!), somewhere out in the boondocks? Or maybe just another country hayseed, watchin’ cows or gawkin’ at city slickers?

At any rate, it’s probably a he – how likely are you to picture a hick chick? But they must have ’em, to make more hicks, right? Well, now, but tell me, what’s your hick’s name? Is it Jebus, or Billy-Ray, or Cooter? No, I’ll tell you what it must be on his birth certificate: Richard.

Well, if he’s the archetypal hick, anyway, it must be. You see, that’s where hick comes from: an old nickname for Richard – matching similar others, such as Hob for Robert and Hodge for Roger. Taken aback by the phonological transformations? Well, we have Dick for Richard, Harry for Henry, Ted for Edward, and Jack for John, so what’s the big surprise? True, this H set of nicknames has dropped out of use in more recent times, but it was common enough (if perhaps somewhat country-ish) in the 16th century, when its general application to country-types seems to have first come about.

This is certainly not the only name to have come to refer to a type. Those who live in and around Durham in England are called Geordies, for instance, from a nickname for George. Irishmen are sometimes called Paddies (but, unlike Geordie, this is rather rude). Cops in some US cities have in the past been called Shamuses due to how many Irishmen there were in the police force. And on and on. Interestingly, although hick really isn’t used as a personal name anymore or for any other competing designation, many people still find country hick worth saying (or writing).

But still, why hick and not, say, hob? Aside from hob having another use (plus the competing taste of hobknob) and hodge being a family name, I’m sure it doesn’t hurt the effect that hick has a short, rough sound, rhyming with stick (and sick and thick) and has that rough, almost inchoate breathing at the start. It also has some vaguer echoes of a more vulgar word. And if you think about terms that have been used to refer to an unsophisticated rural or smalltown location, there are indeed some that make use of such a vulgar term, and also of course some that use hick – such as hick town (the most common collocation of hick). (Interestingly, the use of hick as an adjective seems to be less than 100 years old.)

It is true, mind you, that Hicks is a family name. And so we have at least two towns named Hicksville, which cannot help but be a bit unflattering, I suppose. At least for the three-thousand-some residents of the one in Ohio, which is a 40-minute, 30-mile drive from the nearest city of any note, Fort Wayne, Indiana. You will see, however, that they have a website; you be the judge of whether it helps or hurts the impression: www.hicksvilleusa.com. The residents of the other one may be less concerned about that image, located as they are in the middle of the suburban mega-sprawl of Long Island, about a 45-minute trip on the commuter train from Penn Station – that’s 30 miles, theoretically a 40-minute drive but closer to an hour and a half in heavy traffic.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

moulder

Posted on August 13, 2010 | 2 comments

Do you know the song “John Brown’s Body”? Well, you know the tune, for sure, because Julia Ward Howe wrote some “good words for that stirring tune”: The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Anyway, the older words in the first verse, the John Brown words, go something like this:

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
His soul’s marching on!

Now, of course, if he had been cremated, he’d be smoldering instead, but either way, ashes to ashes and dust to dust return: we’re made of earth and we return to earth.

Which is actually what mouldering is all about. When this fine (or coarse) clay mould of ours is broken, it will decay – and perhaps there will be mould, but with modern practices, probably not – and it will return to soil, which is to mould.

But didn’t I just say there would be no mould? No, no mould, but there will be mould. Ah, you see, not just bodies but words, too, can over time wear down and become indistinguishable. The mould that means that gross stuff that grows on food in your fridge comes from a verb moulen, which is unrelated to the mould that refers to something used to form things – a hollow shape, a model – which is from modulum (so, yes, it’s related to model), and both are unrelated to the original word mould, which refers to loose earth or soil. But almost no one uses mould in the “dirt” sense now, while the two words that merged with it – very likely under its influence – are quite common. Well, never mind, it all comes together in the end.

And moulder with its er suffix is a frequentative verb like flicker and shudder. It means indeed “decay to dust” or “become dirt” or similar, as it is based on that original mould (the one that now seems broken, but not the kind of mould one speaks of breaking). Its sense has broadened a bit, but it has also been influenced by that new mould that has grown on it, so now we think of not just any old decay but that dank, mildewy kind of rotting.

Doesn’t the very word moulder seem kind of moist and dank, or at least like dark, soft soil? With that soft /m/ and the dark and deep /o/ pulling back into the /l/ – that “dark” /l/ that comes after vowels in English, with the back of the tongue raised. And then, after touching on the /d/, it decays with a slow syllabic /r/. It has a more solid role than mud, and while the m is no louder the move to /o/ can make it longer, as though ruled by om: meditate on these things, find the ur-model of the world. (Perhaps mould is to our world as ylem is to the universe.)

Ah, not such cheery thoughts – dark and deep, but not necessarily lovely. But I have promises to keep, and words to write before I sleep. And whether or not I moulder, I’m older – as are we all.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

ylem

Posted on August 12, 2010 | 3 comments

You know how sometimes when you’re looking at some website there will be an ad showing a female face with four eyes and two mouths and asking you to click to say how many eyes she has? It’s really hard to look at that face, isn’t it – because our minds are made to process faces with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. That’s why we see faces in things that don’t have them.

Well, we may not be biologically programmed to expect certain letters in certain places in words, but we still get used to the way things are in our language, and when an anglophone looks at a word like ylem, the mind may go into the same kind of tizzy as those four-eyed faces cause. Wrong order! Is that supposed to be mely? Or emly? Or what, now?

The proof that this is not inborn is that it was once quite common in English to have words that started with y plus a consonant. The Oxford English Dictionary, not one to remove a word simply because it’s 600 years out of usage, has a decent little list of them. It happens that it was a standard prefix for the past tense: ylent was the word that is now lent (past tense of lend), for instance, and fans of medieval music may know the song Adam lay ybounden (ybounden means bound).

So, in the past, that y signified the past. That rather takes us to the beginning of things, no? Well, no, not for this word, anyway. This word is even older than that old. It comes from classical Greek originally, which was around two millennia before Middle English. The Greek hylé, υλη, originally “wood”, was used by Aristotle to refer to the primordial matter of the universe. And from him came a much more modern English usage: circa 1400, writers also used it to refer to the primordial matter of the universe, the uncreated chaos.

And then, in the middle of the 20th century, some physicists, thinking about what stuff was really made up of before there was stuff – what was in the great cosmic vat of Play-Doh, or rather the tight little ball that blew up into everything there is, me, you, Mahattan, and the Pleiades included – decided they needed a word for it. And what better word to use than the one that the medieval thinkers had already used?

Well, I’ll tell you what better word: the same word, but renewed by a shift in form. In written Greek, that h was actually just a diacritic – the word was ylé, υλη – and later, in Latin, if you took the accusative form, it was hylem. So a bit of historical acceleration gave us ylem. Sort of like the accelerated history in the opening credits of the sitcom Big Bang Theory.

And everything that’s old is new again, but changed in a way that produces a sort of cognitive dissonance. I mean, how do you even say it? (Like “ee lem”.) And does it seem sort of like mêlée? (Well it may – the beginning of things was a bit wild.) Well, one thing is sure: what should be last is seen in the first place, and from that initial constriction the tongue touches for a moment and then opens for another before closing again. Its y beginning also makes it seem strange, maybe even eerie, but also a throwback to a much older time. And so we have the word for the dust that to dust returns, as it is bound, and then expands again to make everything, from Adam on. And maybe next time around four eyes will be normal (he says, adjusting his glasses).

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

ponder

Posted on August 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

In Byron’s Manfred, Nemesis speaks of spending his time

Goading the wise to madness; from the dull
Shaping out oracles to rule the world
Afresh, for they were waxing out of date,
And mortals dared to ponder for themselves,
To weigh kings in the balance, and to speak
Of freedom, the forbidden fruit.

Ah, they pondered – that most human of acts, free thought, the fire of Prometheus: the ability to reflect, to weigh matters and hold them in the balance, pound for pound, ounce for ounce. It’s like gazing in a pond, asking questions – and knowing your reflection will be the responder.

One may certain ponder light matters, but most typically the object of pondering will be ponderous. Not that ponderous means “fit for pondering”; it means “weighty” – it has the same source as pound, as does ponder: the Latin pond root referring to weight, whence pondo “by weight” and ponderare “weigh, appraise”, also related to pendere “hang” (as in suspend judgement). (Our word pond “small lake” actually comes from another word pound: the one in dog pound, from the same Germanic root relating to containment that gives us impound.)

So you ponder a question or a meaning or mysteries – your thoughts wander as you think upon durable matters. You take a proposition p, try it different ways: with bits removed o or n, turned around d, reduced and negated e, stripped down further r… roped in, you long to find an open road; perhaps you stretch out proned, pour a Pernod and watch as melting ice clouds its lucid clarity with a turbid whiteness. You want to get the matter right; you do not want to chicken out, or to lay an egg…

Speaking of which, pondre is French for “lay” (as in an egg). That’s not the source of our word ponder, however, which in French is pondérer. Mais lorsqu’on répond, il faut pondérer et ne pas pondre!

Thanks to Alison Kooistra for suggesting ponder and mentioning pondre.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

abeyance

Posted on August 9, 2010 | 1 comment

It’s a bad day: you’ve got an eye on a buy (perhaps a nice cane) on ebay, but you want to double-check to make sure that you don’t pay more than you would, say, at the Bay. But time’s slipping away – your internet connection won’t obey, the other bidders are like baying hounds, the auction is like a B-52 about to open the bomb bay… and there’s no way to keep it in abeyance. You feel like you’re ready for the sick bay (or an ambulance!).

Well, at the end of the day, perhaps it wasn’t meant to bey. I mean be. But some of the bay/bey similarities above were meant to be – that is to say, they’re cognate (they have a common origin). And I won’t keep an explanation in abeyance any longer.

Abeyance, which is normally preceded by in (or sometimes into) and typically is seen in held in abeyance or, sometimes, put in abeyance or similar other phrases, originated with an image of an open mouth of expectation – it could be a chick awaiting a worm, or perhaps someone cut off in mid-sentence by a “Hang on for a moment – gotta get this call” (or a “Talk to the hand”): Old French abeance “gape, aspire after” came from a plus late Latin badare “open the mouth wide, gape”.

And that gaping mouth also shows up in bay meaning “an opening in the wall”, whence we get bomb bay (but not Bombay) and sick bay – but apparently not the bay in Hudson’s Bay (whence the Bay) and ebay (originally named after San Francisco Bay), which comes from late Latin baia (though badare may have had an influence). It also seems to be a source of keep at bay or hold at bay, but that has also been influenced by bay as in what hounds do, which is from Old French abai “barking”. The other thing hounds will do if trained – obey – comes from Latin ob “towards” and audire “hear”.

The word abeyance actually looks like, say, an ebay username that might be used by a guy named Abe Yancey (actually, the rare synonym abeyancy would suit even better). The act of saying it may be seen just vaguely to illustrate it in the way the glide in the middle (in the International Phonetic Alphabet, [j], which here is written y) holds the vowel in suspension for a moment, keeping the tip of the tongue from reaching the alveolar ridge (in fact, it makes a sort of triphthong, a three-part vowel, that is often heard in southern US pronunciations of words such as bad and mad). French speakers may also note a resemblance in sound to abeille, “bee”, which is one thing you may want to keep in abeyance for as long as possible.

Oh, and your ebay cane? Well, abeyance is a word you may want to keep in stock, but you can’t always keep stock in abeyance. If the auction gets away from you, I know a guy named Llano who can set you up with a nice cane…

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

phthisis

Posted on August 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

Perhaps antique medical terminology entices you. An image of surgeons wearing ties is appealing; you see them gathered around a patient, whose lungs are laboured (his breath sounds like “ph, th, ph, th”). It’s some infection. The gentleman in charge lifts his stethoscope from the chest and pronounces, “This is not staph; this is phthisis.”

But how does he pronounce it? Is this a word like exophthalmic, where the lower lip and the tip of the tongue exchange fricatives against the teeth? That’s one option, yes. But although it’s no great problem to make that sound (stick a little hair on the tip of your tongue and see how many times you make it until the hair is gone), it’s not part of the normal phonotactics of English. So some drop the /f/. Some go further, making the onset a simple /t/. Oh, but what a crisp, delicate touch that is, a tip-of-the-tongue stop, so far removed from the fricatives – and making four letters represent a single short sound.

The back half of the word is agreed on, at least. The remaining two consonants are also voiceless fricatives: it’s pronounced like Isis, the name of the goddess, or like “Aye, sis.” So no matter how you do it, there is ample hissing – or wheezing – for your consumption.

And, indeed, consumption is another word that used to be used to describe the same thing that phthisis was most often used to describe: what now we call tuberculosis. But it has been used to describe other wasting diseases, particularly of the lungs, as it has been ever since it was a Greek word. (One thing’s for sure: if you have phthisis, you’re not just up shit creek, you’re on shit ship.)

There is one kind of phthisis that is not of the lungs, however, and it may be a bit ironic, given the superficial kinship of form between this word and exophthalmic: ophthalmologists may speak of phthisis bulbi (not related to Taras Bulba), which is an atrophy of the eye, involving shrinkage of the eyeball.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

exophthalmic

Posted on August 8, 2010 | 1 comment

Now, there’s an eye-popping word. Seriously, what are the odds your eyes even know what to do with the phth – other than bug out at the sight of them? The first three letters even look like the sequence your eye goes through when seeing a cluster like this: e squint, x close tightly for a moment to readjust, o open wide! The forest of ascenders makes it hard to see the trees – and, for that matter, it’s not the most natural thing to type, either.

In fact, in the most common word using this root – Greek οφθαλμος, ophthalmos, “eye” – people tend to reduce it in the thinking and saying, away from the watermelon-seed-spitting double fricative followed by tongue-tip liquid and towards a pair of stops with much less sliding: ophthalmologist is often thought to be optomologist (and why not? their partners in trade are optometrists and opticians).

But today’s word is not common enough to get that sort of shop wear. Like ophthalmoscope, it has retained its fricatives. It’s a special word, kept in a velvet-lined drawer with assorted other curious instruments, some gleaming, some tarnished, to be brought out when one fancies just the right amount of erudition or scientific bent – words such as etiolated. Now, one may have few chances in real life to use it, but if one is writing fiction, one may of course create a character to whom to apply it.

Indeed, as Margaret Gibbs has informed me, in every one of P.D. James’s novels there is a character with eyes described as exophthalmic – and another character described as etiolated. (“You find yourself waiting for those characters so you can get them out of the way and start following the plot instead,” Margaret says.)

Now, you may have sorted out that ex means “out” and ophthalmic relates to the eyes. Does that mean that exophthalmic means “having lost an eye or eyes”? No – rather, that the eyes look as though they are straining to leave the head. That is, they are protruding. The condition, called exophthalmus, exophthalmos, exophthalmy, or exophthalmia (talk about four eyes!), is often called bug eyes or pop eyes. Not something you see all that much in real life, but it does seem appropriate to mystery novels, no?

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

Counterfactual or not?

Posted on August 6, 2010 | 3 comments

A colleague was wondering about a sentence similar to the following (I’ve changed it slightly because it’s from something she’s working on):

If we treat dogs and cats equally, we might expect them to turn out to be friendlier than they would if we treat them differently.

She feels like the second treat should be treated but she’s not sure why.

Here’s why – or why not, depending. Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in editing, language and linguistics

Tagged , , ,

minion

Posted on August 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

The archvillain looks archly and villainously over his dominion, his assembled army like so many huddled masses, here and there a spear or torch or tall head jutting above the rest. It is an ominous, inimitable, inimical sight, layers and layers of them like some enormous human onion, murmuring, rumouring… the sight and the sound alike say it: minion minion minion. Many minions. (But is any one his favourite?) The archvillain’s patience is at a minimum; with some animus, he declares “I’m in no…”

But wait. These minions are kind of cute. That one there especially. Is that reasonable? Decent? Sensible? We know what minions are; how could one be some kind of mini son, perhaps even un peu charmant?

Well, in fact, although we see the plural of this word more often than the singular nowadays, and typically relating to some evil figure, be it the devil (or, occasionally, Bill Gates) or some lesser dark power, originally a minion was a favourite hanger-on of some powerful person (king, prince, what have you). Fitting enough if he got his fill of the filet, for this word comes from the French mignon – “dainty, charming, cute, etc.” It seems to have come to the “sidekick” sense by way of a term for a lover. (It is not related to minyan, the quorum of ten males required for Orthodox Jewish worship.)

But over time it came to refer to anonymous replaceable henchmen, the sort to which the boss may simply say “Do, minion” to exercise his dominion, the sort that are mown down innumerably in movies. No doubt the negative sense came in pretty much from the beginning, though: resentment and insinuation come with the turf – as in Marlowe’s Edward II (1593): “The king is love-sick for his minion.” The insecure sneers of a more benighted time. How easy it was for it to become a simple typecast.

There is another type of minion I’d like to cast eyes on, though: a typeface made by Adobe. It’s an elegant, economical serif face with some modern touches. It’s among my favourites; I’ve used it in laying out magazines. And I am not at all alone in my liking for it: when you settle down to feast your eyes on the great dominion of the planet with a copy of National Geographic, the stories you read are all set in Minion.

Thanks to Rosemary Tanner for suggesting minion after watching Despicable Me.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,