Author Archives: sesquiotic

roger

Posted on November 22, 2008 | 1 comment

A word that purrs like a tiger – a big masculine one. Although the visual hint of rogue is weakened by the pronunciation and the sound of Raj is mitigated by the spelling, the r‘s have it here – the same growl we learn as kids from “They’rrrrre grrrrreat!” and produce when imitating race car sounds, with the voiced alveolar affricate in the middle standing in for the gear shift (or any other mechanically connecting working). Nor does the chest hair stop there. The word begins with the raw ro and then the ger could be starting jerk – another quintessentially masculine word – or even German, calling on the Teutonic testosterone. It’s renowned as the rough and ready word of flyboys. It has had a few other senses over the ages, including a ram (male sheep) and a man’s todger. From the lodging of the latter, by 1711, came a still-popular verbal use, a very laddish way of referring summarily to an act that female writers sometimes require whole paragraphs to circumlocute. Look to the collocations for further piss and vinegar: Jolly Roger, the sign of a pirate, yet another archetypally laddish occupation. And what morphemes were mated to make this macho murmur? Germanic hrod “fame” and ger “spear.” Say no more. Say no more! Or, rather: Roger that!

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fatuous

Posted on November 21, 2008 | Leave a comment

You could guess at this word’s meaning by appearance, but that would be silly. It does seem to ask disingenuously, “Who’s fat? You? Us?” And certainly it seems a bit pudgy, with its baggy-cheek u‘s and its o like a hungry mouth. But clap the s on like a hand, Benny or Culkin style, and you know the mouth is agape in daft wonder. And if the uous is a head, the fat is its metaphorical descriptor. This is a lovely word in that it can make the object appear foolish (perhaps in a John Candy kind of way) and the speaker appear pretentious simultaneously. No wonder it’s so useful to academic argument. It is quite promiscuous, though it does have one regular flame – fire. That coupling is really a pair of Latin lovers, however: ignis fatuus is the more standard term for what is also called Will-o’-the-wisp, a spectral mirage caused by, well, swamps farting and lighting it. Does that sound dreadfully inane? Well, fatuus, after all, is Latin for “foolish” or “idiotic.”

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silly place name limericks

Posted on November 20, 2008 | 2 comments

These limericks are all based on dual versions of well-known place names (well, except for one, which uses a disjunction between spelling and pronunciation). You read the one and say the other…

Thanks to Antonia Morton for inspiring me.

A lively young miss from Bombay
Sent a note to her beau to combay.
She said, “Have a look –
I’ve learned how to cook!”
But she burned him while making flumbai.

A man with a flat in Peking
Was forever inclined to reking.
“The bathtub is leijing!
The neighbours are beijing!
This place is all just gilded ceking!”

A teak cutter living in Myanmar
Came down with quite bad sclerodyanmar.
He found it a bon
To lie low in Yangon
Getting rubbed by a tart named Miss Yanmar.

Two newlyweds visited Ho Chi Minh City,
But the bride soon asked, “Where’s my go chi minh city?”
He was found with another.
Quoth she, “I’m gone to mother!
I just can’t let bo chi monh citys be bo chi minh city!”

A young lass who lived in Krung Thep
Went out one fine night for a wep.
She soon happened bhai
Her Thai sweetie-phai
And they stayed up until three o’clep.

A rude dude who visited Kalaallit Nunaat
Declared, “This is such an obsalallit nunaat!
Just come up to Godthab
And have a quick lodthab!
Next time I’ll just go to maralaallit nunaat!”

A Philly lass known to be fruylkill
Was taking a walk by the Schuylkill.
She picked up a dollow
Stashed away in a hollow –
Which she’d found through a map search on Guylkill.

A moocher who hung out in Báile Atha Cliath
Said “I surely don’t mean to be tràile atha cliath;
Begorrah, ’tis true,
I ate all your stew,
But I couldn’t just let it sit dàile atha cliath.”

Late addition: two more on pronunciation:

There once was a fellow from Worcester
Who had slept with a school-friend’s sorcester.
He explained to his mate,
“She’s so saucy and great,
Man, I’m sorry – I couldn’t resorcester!”

A jaunty young fellow from Cirencester
Saw a pretty lass and blew a kirencester,
But the poor silly fool
Was so gobsmacked with drool
That he just managed to spit and hirencester.

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sconce

Posted on November 20, 2008 | Leave a comment

Does this word conceal, inset, or fortify? To hear it is to hear a hiss of hush (or of magician’s steam), in the middle of which – a con? ‘S gone! Sss! But you can only see once. And yet, as secretive, dim or elegant as this word’s reference may be, it carries with it a bread-and-butter overtone. (But butter your scones improperly at Oxford and you may be sconced – oxonian argot for fined an ale). Interestingly, we get this word from more than one source. Best known is the one from Latin absconsus, “hidden,” referring to the shield for a light (and the ab us? absconded with, evidently). But there is also the fortifying earthwork, from Dutch schans, which over time came to refer to protective shields and other things more resembling the sense of the word whose form this one had taken. This word dances most often with wall, but it is much more often seen ensconced (comfortably, safely, firmly, happily) in (always in) ensconced, sitting like the flickering light behind the en and attached to the d.

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cacophony

Posted on November 19, 2008 | Leave a comment

A word like an awful evening at the symphony. This word brings you the bad music (caca), the bad composer (phony), the bad audience (cough), the bad tuning (off), the stuttering singer (c-c-), the bad conductor (cack-handed), the bad date (get your hand off my knee), the poor intermission beverage selection (coffee only), even the irritating bird outside the concert hall (caw!). And it doesn’t even have a pleasant rhythm – it’s not a nice bar of 4/4 with the ictus on the first syllable; it’s like tripping on a step in the aisle and stumbling for the next three. This word came to us from the Greeks, of course (via Latin), caco from the word for “bad” and phony from the word for “sound” (not the similar-sounding Greek word for “murder,” though one might wonder).

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punch

Posted on November 18, 2008 | 1 comment

A short, punchy word, on the whole – or, rather, several identical short, punchy words. One (or two, counting noun and verb) comes from puncheon, a tool for poking holes or, by extension, stamping into (as with a die), which comes from the same Latin source as puncture. From this application of direct force came the sense with the fist. One comes from a commedia dell’arte character, Policinella, with a big paunch and a hooked nose, who became Punchinello, an English puppet character, shortened to Punch, who became best known for beating his wife, Judy, with a stick. One comes from the Sanskrit and Hindi word for “five,” as in five ingredients – in a beverage that was adapted by the English to something that rather caught on. (And began drifting semantically quickly once unmoored from the Raj – rum punch, big in the West Indies, has four ingredients classically: “one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong and four of weak” are the measures.) But a good glass of punch packs a punch (and may punch a hole in your stomach if you have H. pylori problems). Hole is certainly a common collocation of this word, and ticket comes in often enough with the same sense, but outside of specific uses – and even to some extent within them – the puncture sense is bested by the pugnacious force of the word. Other collocations include pulling, packing, drunk, press, card, in, out and up. Even the letters have more the rounded shape of a blunt object (fist, wife-beating stick*) than any reminiscence of an awl or similar piercing object. Only a vowel separates this word from pinch, but the broad u and the narrow i are as opposed as the two actions. This word has the opening phonaesthetics of abrupt words such as puff, punt, pug, and punish, and the closing impact of crunch, bunch and hunch and the crisper munch and lunch. But when you’re quaffing a glass, it may make you think sooner of quench.

*The story that “rule of thumb” comes from the size of a stick a man was allowed to beat his wife with is not true; that account was invented long after the phrase, which came from estimating measurements. See www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-rul1.htm .

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vertex

Posted on November 17, 2008 | 1 comment

A word that starts and ends with angles: v, x. (It is perhaps ironic that this word lacks an A, since it was first of all not just any angle put the apex of a triangle – ah, APEX: there’s the angle to take.) Even in pronunciation you can find an angle: you start at the lips with [v], pass the alvolar ridge at [t] and proceed to [k], but then turn back forward to [s] – in [eks] the tongue closes the angle like a tapping telegraph key. And this word may have a flavour of narrowing in other ways, as other verts may seem narrow because tall (vertical) or simply reminding one of the angle of a v (divert). Others have a more vicious vibe (pervert). And of course there are the ones that turn to the point of dizziness (vertigo), true to the turning origins of vert. But somehow this word does not whirl like vortex, which forces the mouth into a funnel and has the roar of voracious and the lethality of vorpal. Yet vortex comes from vertex, which in Latin meant both the top of the head (and the highest point of anything) and a whirlpool. The o version took the swirl and the e version has taken the whorl on the top of the head. And so we find that the true tellers in the shapes of this word are the t – which has the highest point – and the two e‘s, which are the closest thing to a spiral.

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ersatz

Posted on November 15, 2008 | Leave a comment

This word, to look at it, could be something spectacular or chintzy. There’s something of the lightning bolt in it, but that diamond twinkle, it seems, is Brummagem – not coruscating but coarse. The sound of satz is not an electric spark but mere air – and that coffee in your cup is, well, not. Indeed, coffee was once a particularly common collocation of ersatz, but now this word gets around rather widely – but always with a cheesy (Velveeta?) or cheating tone. The roughly synonymous spurious is like a sneaky, curious snake that spears you with its fangs from behind, but ersatz is more of a whoopee cushion, or a phonaesthesis for the taste in your mouth after eating a dry, overcooked turkey wiener. It makes out better in its native German, where it cleaves closer to the norm; there, it’s simply a word for “replacement” or “substitute.” But who in English would refer to a one-day fourth-grade fill-in as an ersatz teacher, or a ninth-inning mound step-up as an ersatz pitcher?

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mêlée

Posted on November 14, 2008 | 1 comment

A mellifluous word, like a stream-smoothed pebble, that exists to prove that anything, shouted with enough guttural force, spit and testosterone, can be violent. The twisting arc of a body swinging a broadsword – is this not, too, the feeling of mêlée? If you may lay your enemy about and asunder with lashings of mace in malice, why not do so with a word you can sing while you swing? Or would that be too male, eh? But there are hints when you look at the word: those diacritics, arched like angry eyebrows or perhaps perched like helmets or carried like rucksaks and rifles. But why is that circumflex there? In French – the immediate source, of course – it always attests to an absence of s: so meslee, which in turn comes from Latin misculatus, “mixed.” And with that word we hear the military cutlery clashing and slicing. How those edges have blunted and polished over the centuries! Other words have come down, too, as the s has alternated with l and d: meddle is a killing cousin, but a sibling is medley, which first meant the mixing of forces in combat. Now it brings to mind music. So death is bookended with melody: the trumpets sound at the start of the battle, mêlée, mêlée; at the end, by the bleeding field, the birds reply, medley, medley.

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dandelion

Posted on November 13, 2008 | Leave a comment

It sounds like a character in a kids’ book, but it stands for an overly successful flower. Many lovers of flat, grassy lawns have exclaimed that there’s nothing dandy about these plants, and whoever says they are is lyin’. Certainly the first word association many would come up with for this one is weed. The plant is hardy, rough-and-tumble like its rounded, bouncing word (all at the front of the tongue, and all voiced), but pretty, too. Its floating seeds, signs of later summer, make guest appearances in feminine hygiene ads, but a cue from the name would make them seem more like dander or dandruff. This word has always seemed yellow to me – of course I knew the flower before the name. Its two d‘s give me an image of the cheeks of a cartoon lion, but what is leonine about this flower? You may think it’s the bush of yellow florets, somehow like a mane, but in fact it’s the leaves, like lion’s teeth – dent de lion is the French source. Next time you sink your teeth into a fresh dandelion green, see if it bites back.

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