Author Archives: sesquiotic

Eyjafjallajökull

Posted on April 18, 2010 | 5 comments

The sight of Icelandic can scare people sometimes. A word like Eyjafjallajökull might seem like a Viking war scream, something you’d hear coming at you across a wide-open rolling plain with mountains and glaciers behind, a rugged, untamed land – some of the youngest land on the planet (with more being spewed fresh from the mantle on regular intervals), but with an old language, one that has changed little in a millennium. Iceland: a land of incessant striking scenery (“stunning but nondescript,” as my wife put it after several hours – see our travelogue), a harsh land where for centuries people spent many long hours in small cold cabins, an island country where, thanks to a small population and an annual democratic gathering, there is no significant dialectal variation in the language. A land of very few trees, and not big ones either (what do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest? – stand up), where many of the population believe in the existence of huldufólk: hidden folk, for instance trolls, after whom a whole peninsula is named.

How do trolls hide in a place without forests? Iceland is a place where you can see for miles and miles and miles but whatever you’re looking for you probably won’t see until you’re practically on top of it. Its famous waterfalls, for instance – they don’t fall down to you from above you; rather, they fall from a river that has carved into the plain you’re on, down into a gorge even father below. And major sites of interest – historical sites and geological sites – are marked with little signs and small, mostly empty parking lots next to their two-lane roads. You’re just driving along, and suddenly, whoa!

The language likewise is plain and yet spectacular. Names for things are generally straightforward – they translate to things like Smoky Bay (that’s the capital), Island Fjord, North River, Lake Glacier (the biggest glacier in Europe – and the word for “lake” is the same as the word for “water”), and Midge Lake. But Icelandic has retained three letters that English lost long ago (edh, thorn, and ash: ð, þ, æ) and has retained an involved system of inflections too, and it has developed a tendency to devoice things (for instance word-final l and r) and often to pre-aspirate double voiceless stops (not only do you devoice the consonant, you cut the voice off even before you get to the consonant). If you see nn or mm, you’re looking at a voiceless nasal – and with the nn there’s a sort of [t] at the beginning too. These are sounds you really can’t even hear unless you’re at close quarters in a quiet place. And ll? A voiceless lateral affricate – the same as we see rendered with lh for Tibetan names (e.g., Lhasa) and tlh in Klingon. If you say “hotlips” making sure you actually touch the tongue on the t (rather than making a glottal stop of it) you’ll sort of get it. To all this relative exoticism add the tendency to make compounds and you get some striking words.

For instance, take “island”, “mountain”, and “glacier”: ey (said “eh” – y is just like English y), fjall (said “fyatlh” – one syllable, ending with that ll voiceless lateral affricate, not like the end of Seattle, which keeps the voicing), and jökull (the ö is like German ö and the u is similar but a little lower and farther back, like in French coeur). Since Icelandic puts modifying nouns in the genitive case, you add genitive suffixes to the first two nouns. Then you glue all three together, and whoa! Eyjafjallajökull, “ehya-fyatlha–yökuhtlh”! It’s like you’re driving along a wide-open space and suddenly a Viking horde comes at you from a hidden ravine, and they’re all screaming and whispering at you. Or you’re standing on a glacier and suddenly a volcano erupts from under it. The word looks sort of like a fall, a flight, a horde itself, or the onrush of smoke and ash, perhaps. But all those ascenders and dots and descenders are really your hair standing on end at the very sight of it.

And at the very prospect of saying it, if you’re like a lot of people. And, well, there’s the thing: just as out of nowhere there is all this ash filling the air that is keeping people from flying, likewise out of nowhere is this word, the name for the glacier on the mountain and for the volcano under it that’s burping up the ash. The ll sounds begin to sound maybe like burps of steam and pumice, in fact. And good luck finding another European language that can even deal with this word phonologically. Icelandic has retained and added sounds not found in even the other Scandinavian languages. English certainly just has to do its best with what it can. This word can’t become an English word, after all, unless and until it’s adopted English phonotactics. And it remains to be seen how people will agree on pronouncing it, if they in fact ever will.

People are surely wishing for something nice and simple like Krakatoa right about now. Even Popocatépetl is looking good… though it (in the original) ends with exactly the same sound as does Eyjafjallajökull: not with a bang but a crackling hiss.

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

satisficing

Posted on April 15, 2010 | 3 comments

To at least some people’s ears, this word surely does not satisfy. What you see is a common English word (satisfying) with just a slight addition making it a blend with another word (sufficing) – like mocktail (a word that I confess pulls my nose hairs). But this has the added bitterness of business-speak, and of seeming to try to sound clever or superior by dint of a slight modification while not necessarily succeeding, at least in the utterance of its average user.

It’s not that the guy who invented this word was soft-headed. Herbert Simon was one of the leading American social scientists of the 20th century, a Nobel prizewinner, a Turing Award winner, a seminal figure in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and economics (among other fields). He knew how people really do things: markets don’t work with perfectly rational consumers making fully informed decisions, for instance; the cost of getting full information and the effort required to attain perfect results often outweigh the perceptible increase in benefit over a less costly, easier result that is close enough. And choices are often made by groups of individuals with conflicting desires and positions, and simply coming to an agreement is often quite enough, never mind coming to the best possible agreement. So people do what is sufficient to satisfy. Anyone who has worked in the world of business – or, for that matter, just about anyone anywhere who has done anything, really – knows this very well. “That’s good enough – move on,” and the great mantra, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Satisfice.

And no doubt the association of this word with business buzzspeak is a strong factor in its distastefulness to those who dislike it. I think the sound of it is also a problem. To start with, it sounds a bit like a razor doing something I wish it wouldn’t to some usable part of my anatomy. It’s a real hiss festival, and those three i-dots are sort of like one’s hairs standing up at the sound. But beyond that, there’s something satisfying about the word satisfying – that big, wide-open [aI] is like a sigh of satisfaction. But with satisficing, just when you get to that part, there’s an [s], slicing into it. And if you’re Canadian, the vowel sound even changes: the [a] part raises up a bit in the mouth (say eyes; now say ice; repeat) – and the voiceless consonant following it also makes the vowel shorter (a standard effect in most English phonology). So it’s like relaxing in your easy chair and suddenly getting a sliver of ice down your back.

And then there’s the question of redundancy. If we’re talking business, what does satisfy mean, as in “satisfy requirements”? It means “do enough” – not “do everything” but “do enough” (it’s always meant that; it comes from Latin satis “enough” – also the root of satiated – and facere “do”). And suffice means “be enough, be adequate” (from sub “under” – which is often shifted in sense as an affix – and the same facere). It would seem that satisfice is rather more than enough, especially for a word that means, as Oxford puts it, “To decide on and pursue a course of action that will satisfy the minimum requirements necessary to achieve a particular goal.” I guess satisfy, suffice, and various existing phrases had too much latitude for interpretation, and so Herbert Simon came up with this one to stand clearly for just the meaning he wanted. I do feel that he could have come up with a more aesthetically likeable word, but perhaps he didn’t see it as worth the extra effort.

Thanks to Adrienne Montgomerie for wondering aloud about this word on the EAC list.

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

nonce

Posted on April 15, 2010 | 6 comments

As I was on my nightly stroll through the Oxford English Dictionary, I spotted a word that quite fishhooked my eye: hirquitalliency. Needless to say, my hair Van-de-Graaffed. I clicked and looked. It referred to the state, in an infant, of acquiring a strong voice, and was ported over little changed from the Latin for the same, which in turn borrowed it from a Greek word for a male goat. I looked at the citations. How many times had it ever been used, then? Once! Yes, and the OED declares it a nonce-word. Apparently nonce-words used by Sir Thomas Urquhart in or about the year 1600 are worthy of inclusion (with the dagger of obsolescence clearly affixed), even if, in terms of actual usage, they are a non-see.

Of course, one couldn’t include every nonce formation out there. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake would blow the doors off the project from the get-go. But nonce words are perfectly good and useful things, suitable in their various cases for entertainment, display of erudition, filling out a line of verse, and plain old directness. They may be non-correct English, ‘n once is enough, but many things are worth doing for the nonce, and neologizing is among them.

Borrowing, compound, derivative, formation, and phrase also all attach to nonce. But outside of linguistic terms, it is seen almost exclusively in the phrase for the nonce (though I suppose it is nonced in here and there on rare occasion, when speakers don their noncing shoes). You will probably already have guessed that its present form arises from a reanalysis – a transfer of the n from word word to another. This is true. However, if you surmise that it comes from for then once, you are mistaken. The transfer happened in the Early Middle English period, back when we still had somewhat more inflection than we do now. The old form of the word one was ane, and the genitive of it was anes; it could be used adverbially in a prepositional phrase, and the definite article had a different form for the genitive, so the phrase was for than anes (to than anes was also used). As the inflections reduced in use, this established phrase became a whole nother thing: for the nanes. And that came to be for the nonce today, without ever actually involving the word once.

So… shall we nonce? It has a nice, light touch to it, doesn’t it? Like the tip of the finger tapping a moment in time, no more than an ounce of eternity (though, ironically, the tongue taps twice, holding the second time). It’s all small, round letters. They could be logical operators: the n is like the intersection sign, the c is like the subset sign, the e could be the “element of” sign, and the o a Venn diagram with only one circle. A single set, a set of one, arising at the unique intersection of specific circumstances, a subset that is an element of… what? Of all the possibilities of that word. Or perhaps the ce is the eyes of a person running a cups-and-ball game (cup: n; ball: o), one eye winking at you: just this once I’ll let you have it, and he flips the middle cup to show you: non. Like that ball, what is for the nonce has a sort of spatiotemporal ubeity; it is, we may say, ad-hocsome. It is a party of one.

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting nonce.

6 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

bogus

Posted on April 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

This word may have that high-sounding Latin-looking us ending, but you just know that it’s the us that likewise graces (or disgraces) doofus, dorcus, and similar epithets – the extended index finger of its high sound is not apodictic or apotropaic but simply there to poke us, and so this word is less bonus and more onus. It has all the bluntness of the voiced stops, making what could be the end of hocus-pocus into something so much less clever-sounding, and its core is the ominous, odious, or simply moaning long puckering /o/. That bo is bumptious enough, bowling you over from the start, and then along comes its brother, not Luke but gus. Oh, and they’re big, those buggers – ahem, beggars. They come boogeying out of the bog with a bag of bugs and boogers, and, dude, it’s bogus!

Duuuude. Remember Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Of course you do, even if you never saw it. Unless you weren’t around in 1989 to see Keanu Reeves get his big leap into stardom. (Refresh your memory, or find out what I’m talking about – here’s the trailer.) Anyway, bogus was their word for “bad” – a word they liked enough that the sequel to the movie was Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (they go to Hell).

There was also another movie with Bogus in its title: Bogus, 1996, starring Whoopie Goldberg, Haley Joel Osment, and Gerard Depardieu as Bogus (an imaginary French musician). Never heard of it? Apparently it was pretty bogus – Goldberg got a Razzie nomination for it. But it was directed by Norman Jewison!

Bogus isn’t bad news for everyone. If you live near Boise, Idaho, and you ski, Bogus Basin will be your bag. And if you speak Indonesian or Malay, bogus will remind you of bagus, which means “good”. But for most people, bogus means “fake” or “counterfeit” – common words for it to modify include claims, checks (or cheques to non-Americans), cards, charges, argument, documents, bills… It’s pretty much equivalent to spurious, but where spurious spears, bogus bludgeons. Spurious sounds like spearmint, which still has a mint, but bogus is the kind of money that you get from a bogeyman.

Some people think it may have a connection to bogey, too. It’s hard to say for sure, though. The most standard account of its epiphany is in application to a machine for counterfeiting money, in 1827 (it transferred thereafter to coins made by such a machine). It has been suggested that it is a shortening of tantrabogus, an eastern American vernacular term for “any ill-looking object”. This might in turn be related to a Devonshire term for the devil, tantarabobs, which may in turn relate to bogey. But who knows? That could all be bogus.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

mustelid

Posted on April 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

Hoo-wee! What’s that smell? Is that mustard gas? Man, someone musta let one, eh! Or musta left the lid off the composter… Whoever did it shouldn’t weasel out of it. It’s not fair at all; they oughta do the right thing without being badgered. …What?

Actually, that musty, not to say mephitic, miasma is wafting your way courtesy of a mustelid. So what’s a mustelid? Is it a kind of worm or mollusc? Perhaps a plant, like a mustard green? No, it’s closer to a mus musculus, but longer and larger. If your kind of vermin is ermine, or if you like to think of mink, you’re on your way to the source of the stink.

Yes, the mustelids are a family of carnivorous critters (in Latin the Mustelidae) with long bodies, short legs, fur – often quite luxuriant – and musk glands. The must in this word is not related to the musk gland, nor to the word musty; rather, it’s from mustela, Latin for “weasel”. And along with the weasel you have the ferret, the otter, the badger, the ermine, the stoat, the mink, and the wolverine… and, until recently reclassified, the skunk (now reclassified, fittingly, as Mephitidae).

The elid gives the word a fairly good biological – specifically taxonomical – flavour; one thinks quickly of annelids, for instance. But actually the morpheme boundary is at id, and there are plenty more taxonomic words included by that: hominid would be closest to home. The must is as down to earth in taste as the id is scientific; one may think of freshly crushed grapes, or imperatives, or some longer words: you must muster the mastery to remove the mustard from your mustache. In the middle of all this you may also see tel, which may seem delicate or may have the telling air of a report. Looking at the meeting of these two opposite ends with the telling middle, you may call it dualism, but with armed scent glands, I call’t duelism.

Thanks to Elaine Phillips for suggesting mustelid.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

persiflage

Posted on April 11, 2010 | 3 comments

Here’s a word that immediately communicates two things (to those who understand it): the discourse referred to is light, and the person speaking or writing is erudite.

Persiflage refers to the sort of light banter one just breezes through, breezy talk to shoot the breeze, mere raillery: more flapper than sage; more purse than flag; a trifle, a siffle, mere piffle. To speak in this way is to persiflate, and indeed one may just as well purse one’s lips and inflate a balloon (you know how to persiflate, don’t you? you just put your lips and tongue together and blow smoke): it is flattery or flatulence, but no divine afflatus. It is prating parsley on the plate of locution (not so unlike the decorative starlets the Italians call prezzemolina, which means “parsley”). It is designed as prophylaxis against a slip, a gaffe, a slur – although it may mask a jape or a sly undercut.

And the breeze comes etymologically to it: it comes from French, per (from Latin for “through”) plus siffler “whistle” (which traces back to the same Latin root that gives us sibilant, a phonological term that describes sounds such as [s]). Thus, it is a high-toned means of blowing discourse away like dust. “Meretricious persiflage,” wrote D.H. Lawrence in Women in Love. “Infidelity and confections and persiflage,” wrote Walt Whitman in the preface to Leaves of Grass. “Smooth and shallow persiflage,” wrote Charles Kingsley in Hypatia. “This vertiginous persiflage, this gyrostatic amphigouri,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in a New York Times review of the 1920 play Where’s Your Husband? “Is this a time for airy persiflage?” wrote W.S. Gilbert in The Mikado.

Well, and perhaps it is a time for airy persiflage. Does not everyone, once in a while, want to pass the time flapping the gums, one hand waving lightly through the air, the other perhaps sustaining a martini? One may even all the while endeavour to sound frighteningly erudite. “Oh, do come join us for some syllabub, a pousse-café, a canapé, and a peck of persiflage.”

Thanks to Marie-Lynn Hammond for suggesting persiflage (quite some time ago).

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

Each and every

Posted on April 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

A colleague asked about a sentence similar to this one:

The aim is for each waffle and every pancake to taste as though they were made out of dreams.

The colleague at first wanted to change “they were” to “it was” but then had doubts: there’s an and, so it’s a compound subject and therefore plural, right?

Actually, no. Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in editing

Tagged , , , ,

I must disagree with whoever wrote that

Posted on April 11, 2010 | 1 comment

Consider the case of a sentence such as the following:

I must agree with whomever wrote this.

Is that correct?

Nope. Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in editing

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

What’s the referent?

Posted on April 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

A colleague asked about a sentence similar to the following:

Implementing personnel policies is the only real delegation left to make, which requires involvement at all executive levels.

Let us accept, for the sake of argument, that the “which” clause is a nonrestrictive clause – i.e., that the comma belongs there (otherwise, take out the comma, replace which with that, and you have a coherent sentence – but one that implies that there may also be tasks left to undertake that don’t require involvement at all executive levels). The problem, then, is that it’s not clear what the which refers to. Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in editing

Tagged , , , , , , ,

sough

Posted on April 10, 2010 | 9 comments

The first time I recall encountering this word – or, rather, its present participle, soughing – was actually when I was in graduate school. The drama department at Tufts University (that’s where I was) was performing Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, in the translation by Patrick Bowles. (I was playing one of the two blind eunuchs. It was not my moment of greatest glory on the Tufts stage – that was probably when I played Flan in Six Degrees of Separation.) There is a line in it, “Cool wood, and the wind in the boughs, soughing like the sea-surge.”

Which tells you well enough what soughing means, without your having to rough it out or tough it out yourself. What it doesn’t tell you is how you pronounce sough. You may guess, from the assonance evinced by the line as a whole, that it rhymes with bough, and that may be what Bowles had in mind. But Heather, the assistant director (the director was a native of Shanghai and left the English tips to Heather, an American grad student), told the actor to pronounce it like soft minus the t – i.e., soughing was to be “soffing”.

It happens that Heather’s is not one of the two pronunciations given in the OED, the Random House, Merriam-Webster, or the American Heritage Dictionary. All agree that the two possible pronunciations rhyme with how and stuff (or with bough and tough, if you will). The OED allows a third for Scots speakers, [sux] – where [u] is the vowel in loop and [x] is the same voiceless velar fricative you hear in loch (so it’s not a respelling of sucks).

The Scots pronunciation is actually the one least changed over the ages. The source of this word is Old English swogan, but the g is really a yogh and would thus be a velar fricative (though perhaps voiced). But velar fricatives have been lost in most kinds of English for centuries, and they have been replaced by a variety of approximations: [f], [w], [i], [ə], nothing at all. Consider that almost anywhere you see a gh there was originally a velar fricative: cough, rough, laugh; caught, bough, though, through; height, weight… The loss of this phoneme, combined with various caprices of vowel shift, has done much to loosen the connection between English spelling and pronunciation.

This word, for its part, was also in danger of being lost, at least south of Scotland. But it proved useful to the literary muse in the 19th century and so had a bit of a revival, and its persistence in the works of Wordsworth, Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Thoreau, and their ilk has given it a certain lasting presence. It shows up both as verb and as noun: “its branches soughing with the four winds” (Thoreau, The Maine Woods); “That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote” (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre). It can also refer to sighing or even to whining.

You may also see another word sough, unrelated, used to refer to a bog, a swamp, a gutter, a sewer, or a slough. Naturally, since it can refer to a watery slough, it’s pronounced to rhyme with the desquamation slough rather than the watery slough. What did you expect?

But, now, you tell me what sound wind in the boughs and the sea-surge make. Go dig through your 1970s LPs for the Environments series released by (fittingly) Atlantic in the 1970s, and play the first side of the first one, titled The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore (did I say 1970s!), 30 minutes of waves (recorded at Brighton Beach but significantly adjusted on an IBM 360) – or pick up any of the many relaxation CDs more recently made inspired by them (go to a spa and get a massage; odds are you’ll get rubbed to the sound of harp, pipes, or piano with waves in the background – here, listen to this, it makes me smell sandalwood already). Or – I know it’s out of fashion, and a trifle uncool, but I can’t help it, I’m a romantic fool – go to your nearest beach to watch the sun go down. (Don’t have a beach? Go find a slough, and lean close to see if you can hear a sough in the sough.) Listen to the waves: what do you hear? Sough, sough, sough… which sough? But then listen to the wind in the trees (that’s Environments 5, side 2, by the way), or perhaps the breeze in the heather, and again you’ll hear sough, sough, sough… but which sough? Is it the same one as the waves? And does either of them sound more like Heather’s version than the dictionary versions?

Thanks to Jens Wiechers for suggesting today’s word.

9 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,