Have you ever heard of someone being in low dudgeon?
When someone’s in a dudgeon, when they leave a party or premises in a towering snit, when their dignity has been endangered and they will hold more grudge than an ordinary curmudgeon, if the altitude of their derangement is mentioned – and it often will be – it is always high. Continue reading
This article was originally published in NINK, the magazine of Novelists, Inc.
Can you tell when and where (America or England) these passages were written? (And I promise the answers will be revealed.)
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged fiction, grammar, Novelists Inc., phonaesthemes, writing
I made a little trip (two blocks) to my greengrocer at the St. Lawrence Market to shoot this pronunciation tip, just so I could illustrate it. It was a one-shot deal… and not without technical difficulties. But hey, I say the words, I eat the peppers. What more do you want?
Posted in pronunciation tips
Tagged habanero, how to say, jalapeño, Pronunciation Tip
…Then we were wect,
Riding on the moment-stream
As twoseafarers moonlight-wrecked
And gazing after fading steam,
Naked on an unknown shore
And walking in a waking dream
Unmoored from after and before…
I almost want to stop there, with those lines from Emily Saint Christopher’s “Late Diversion,” but a characteristic of being wect is that you keep on going, drawn forward as by an invisible thread or wafting on a thin streamer of smoke.
Wect is a word that appeared in English almost as if from a dream made real: it’s not quite clear where it came from, but it may be related to wake – if by ‘wake’ we mean the feeling you have after parting the curtains of a deep afternoon slumber and wandering sleep-stoned in the waning daylight. But really it is, as Emily Saint Christopher wrote, “Walking in a waking dream Unmoored from after and before”: a timeless state of mind, narcotized by the infinite moment. Awake but as if dreaming.
It is a word for the most magical summer evenings, when every passing light is a fairy and every nearby voice is trapped in an amber of warm sorcery: an hour lying on the grass in the slowly swirling dark, exploring the contours of the ground and grass and of the person twined with you; a walk along the beach in viscous air through passing strands of talk and music, the only shocks of light coming from sporadic fireworks or distant electric storms; a stroll through James Joyce’s Circean Nighttown, the dimmer corners in orbit of Harvard Square under the dog star, a swim through the night crowd on Church Street in Pride, or the tail end of an evening at EPCOT; a dip in a warm pool lit by stars and underwater glow; a walk alone or in a pair on the high empty deck of a Caribbean cruise ship at midnight and a half, staring at the rushing white creases trailing away in the borderless bottomless rippling blackness. You are holding a little detached swatch of reality, and you will pocket it in your memory to take out later and rub gently in your hand and dab at the corners of your eyes.
It’s a crisp-ending word for such a smooth thing, but such is language. Not everything is as you expect it; take what comes to you. This word came to me tonight, drawn from random letters; the poem and poet are my invention. It is a new old word. Cherish it and walk with it.
Do you always get your accents and special characters right in non-English words? Or are you sometimes unclear on which is which, and maybe not sure what difference it makes?
Well, lucky you. I spent quite a bit of time recently putting together charts for a presentation I took part in at the 2018 Editors Canada conference. They list the most common ones, some of the languages you’re likely to see them in, and the kinds of differences they can make – cases where the presence or lack of a little mark can turn something innocent into something dirty (or vice versa, which is sometimes even worse).
Here they are. It’s a PDF, but it’s small: accents_characters_harbeck.pdf
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged accents, characters, diacritics, letters, special characters, typography
Is there really a Canada, or is it all a cantrip? Lines on maps can trip you up; best take a trip across so you can see.
Not that cantrip as a word is related to Canada or to trip. It refers to hocus-pocus, a witch’s spell, a charm, a trick, a mischievous device. But such captious catnip can come from maps and capitals. And since we are today celebrating 151 years of a country called Canada, let us just look and see whether it be not a trick of optics. Continue reading
Posted in word tasting notes
Tagged Canada, cantrip, Trans-Canada Highway, word tasting notes
I’ve been listening to classical music on the radio a lot lately. A perennially popular composer – for good reason – is Antonín Dvořák. Because English speakers are the way we are, I’ve been hearing a certain amount of “duh-vor-jack” for his name, which is… nah. So, for those who are wondering about how best to say it, here you go: both the way Czechs say it and the way ordinary non-Czech-speaking English speakers can reasonably say it. Because there’s a sound in the Czech that is deliberately difficult!
Posted in pronunciation tips
Tagged Antonín Dvořák, Czech, Dvořák, how to say, Pronunciation Tip, ř
Izzat is a word for reputation.
Sometimes your reputation precedes you: “Izzat who I think it is?” Sometimes you create your reputation with your presence: “Hey, who izzat?” And sometimes your reputation is subject to question: “Izzat so?”
This isn’t a word I’ve made up. It’s a real word, in circulation in English for a century and a half so far. The Oxford English Dictionary says it means “honour, reputation, credit, prestige”; Webster’s Third New International Dictionary gives two definitions, “personal dignity or respect : honor” and “power to command admiration : prestige.” And William Shakespeare says it is “an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving.”
Well, OK, that last quote was specifically about reputation, and it was words put in the mouth of the villain Iago from Othello. But Shakespeare liked to put uncomfortable home truths in the mouths of villains and clowns. And every izzat, whether it be “Izzat who I think it is?” (Webster’s first sense) or “Hey, who izzat?” (Webster’s second sense), is – or should be – subject to some “Izzat so?”
After all, we often get reputation by association. Perhaps we know the right people. Perhaps we come from the right place or the right family. Or perhaps we just look or sound the part – tall men tend to get much farther ahead in business and politics than shorter ones; people of any exclusive social set will judge others on the basis of their attire and their choice of vocabulary, grammar, and accent. A person who is near enough can often be pulled in and altered to fit.
Such happens, too, to the reputations and impressions of words. If a word sounds too much like an unpleasant word, it is likely to be avoided or at least altered in pronunciation (some may find this a niggardly harassment, but it undeniably affects usage more broadly than we think); if a word sounds similar to another more common one, there is likely to be some bleeding of sense and form (even though some may find such internecine interaction an outrage).
I won’t say that has happened with izzat. It did start as Arabic ‘izzah, meaning ‘glory’, but it became izzat in Urdu. Still, the crosstalk effect with “is that” is hard to miss (at least for those who like wordplay), even though its pronunciation is actually supposed to be like “is it,” not like a quick “is that.” On further reflection, one may even be tempted to say it means ‘the last word’ and associate it with izzard, a name for the last letter of our alphabet.
Well. I can try to steer it if I want, and if I’m the main press agent for this word for many people who have heard of it at all, I may even have some effect. But your reputation – and other people’s – is never entirely in your hands. Oscar Wilde wrote “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” But if you seek renown, you may, on gaining it, find yourself looking at clippings and quotes and the general evidence of your izzat – and the effects of your spending its credit – and asking yourself, “Izzat what you wanted?”
Toujours je fais le giparon.
As Rimbaud said. Or was it Baudelaire?
Every party, we all know, slides into the kitchen eventually. The dull polite people may stay in the living room; the hungry ones looking for crispier conversation find themselves leaning against the kitchen counters, opening the refrigerators of their personal discontents and desires and serving them like raided snack food to the surprisingly kindred spirits sharing the formica.
But every party also has its satellites. Give a balcony or a darker corner of the gardens or even an open window with a view and there will be one, then two or three, stepping away from the noise to watch it at a distance and reflect its light dimly, coolly, in the damp and petrichorean air seasoned with their night-blossoming thoughts. Those are the moments when you find yourself facing another and knowing you will kiss them or knowing you will never kiss them, retasting the cold leftovers of your shared histories or quickly flicking new ones on the flame.
And, always, there is a person or maybe two wandering ghost-like from room to room, sitting and facing, glimpsing sidelong and listening to three conversations at once. Perhaps they will end up in the kitchen, perhaps they will orbit on the balcony, or perhaps they will sit on a settee and soak in the local emotions, the music of voices. You may see them staring at the bookshelves, assessing the reading habits of the hosts. And at the end of the party, look for them to be there like starfish at low tide, but ready now to talk and to tie the knot and bow on the evening.
Some are satellites in space and some in time, but always there will be those who cannot blend in the thick heat of the social moment but have active valence in the more rarefied spaces. The giparons.
This word giparon has nothing to do with gipsy, be assured of that; nor are its designates peregrines per se, though they may wander as planets do. No, it is their spectatorial nature that seems to have given them the name. The word is a little peculiar; it fits the French form with the –on as in fanfaron, but it matches a Spanish conjugated verb, giparon, ‘they glimpse, they glance, they look at’. These are those who behold, those who like to watch, those whose eyes move in their orbits. But if at last they touch earth, they have had a view as from the moon.
And I, I am always a giparon. In fact, I am the first – the first to be called such. You see, this is a new old word. It came into being by random letter drawing just this evening. Please keep it.
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