Category Archives: Word Country

carol

Posted on December 29, 2012 | 1 comment

Carol tends a special crop, a crop of words that come with music, words that come with music at one time of the year, always at one time of the year, only at the one time of the year. They are lovely as calla lilies but as seasonal as a Christmas cactus.

But climate change is affecting them. They used to show up on the same day every year and last for twelve glorious days, ringing in the air, macaronic mixtures of English and Latin, syntactic inversions, archaisms sweet with the dusty-honey scent of old books, gleeful alexicals (falala), references to holly and ivy and boar’s heads and wassail. Now they blossom earlier and earlier, fading in rather than bursting forth, and some of them barely open up at all; and in most places they drop dry to the floor and are swept away on the very day they used to blossom, or a day later at most.

Carol does not rejoice at this. Although she loves the longer blooming, by the time she most wants to hear these words they are coming faded, their scent not so much heady as decaying or simply desiccated. She finds she has to keep a window box, a little yard garden or corral, so that she can still enjoy the blossoms for herself when they should be in peak, in the days after most people have stuffed them into plastic bags and left them on the curb.

How churlish people can be. A little care’ll keep the cute curls of these lexemes as bright as a new poinsettia. What is needed is not a cure-all but simply the food of attention. If people would but keep these delicious harks and God rest ye’s and in dulci’s and many kinds of joy on their lips a dozen days longer, they would have such an epiphany!

It is lonely work, this tending of Carol’s. Her sounds of joy are often snatched up in passing on the way to saturnine Saturnalias and plutomania stretched from here to Uranus. She spends most of the year disconnected from all. She waters, weeds, waits, for the chance to see, oh so briefly and for just once in a year, her friend, her soul mate, who issues forth in a long breath and dances lightly as though on eggshells (at dancing she excels): Gloria.

———

Carol. Noun and verb. A word now used mainly for celebratory verse songs about Christmas, though it was first used in reference to a ring-dance, thence to a merry occasion at which ring-dances were performed, and then to the modern sense by the associated music for the dance. Some users may extend carol to refer to the fuller set of Christmas songs, including such ones as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “White Christmas,” but many would see those as outside the idiom and scope. There are some extant carols for non-Christmas occasions, such as “The Agincourt Carol” (listen to two different versions by Lumina Vocal Ensemble and Silly Sisters), but the common collocation Christmas carol is now pretty much redundant, though useful for helping distinguish carol from Carol.

The name Carol is the obvious strong overtone for carol, but the words are not related. The song carol is of debated origin, possible related to chorus, or perhaps to corolla “little crown”. The name Carol is at origin the same as Charles and all the related ones (Carl, Karl, Carolyn, Karel, Charlemagne, etc. – though not Carroll as in Carroll O’Connor; that’s from an Irish word). It comes from a Germanic root meaning “free man” that is also the source of churl. Other tastes you may get from carol include curl, chorale, care’ll, cure-all, Clairol, calorie, and of course carrel.

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What we pay with in word country

Posted on December 16, 2012 | Leave a comment

In word country, words aren’t just what you buy. You can pay with them too. Not word by word, mind you; a word by itself usually doesn’t work as payment in a value exchange, except for words like “Thanks.” What people want are words in sentences. Words that signify obligations and expectations and negotiate status levels. The economy of social interaction.

This is pretty plain once you see it in action. Every child is taught it: a request with “please” in it is usually worth a little more than the same request without “please” because “please” acknowledges that you don’t have the right to make flat demands, so it doesn’t borrow as much status from the other person. And an indirect request, which allows the other person more latitude, costs you less – is worth more – than a direct request, which demands more of the other person.

Consider Mark, a word grower. He’s tending his words one afternoon in harvest season. He’s by the side of a dirt road, not too far out of town. People walk past every so often. Mark hasn’t set up a stand. He’s not out to sell his words to people who just walk past. But people come out this way not just to listen to the susurrus of the syntax trees and relax in the penumbra of a lexis vine, awaiting Morpheus. There is always the hope of some fresh words to bite into.

“Are you selling words?” A young guy in a hat and T-shirt is standing at road’s edge, looking down at Mark, who is busy pulling some weeds.

“Nope,” Mark says. He’s pretty laconic: he’s not in the business of giving words away for free either.

The guy strolls along a bit but doesn’t really go away. He stands inspecting a particular plant. “Some mighty nice-looking words you got here. Are these Greek roots here?”

“Latin,” Mark says, without glancing over.

“Could I buy one from you?”

Mark jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “There’s a guy with a stand up the road.”

Offer made and deflected without any direct request or rejection. You see: not “Sell me one” and “No, go buy from him.” Much less exposure and demand. This is all small-coin stuff.

“I’ve seen his stuff. Yours looks a lot nicer.” There’s something you can pay: a compliment. Coin in the bank.

Mark can see this guy isn’t going to go away so readily either. He stands up, looks up and down the road. He doesn’t want to commit to selling to anyone else. But there’s someone coming. More than one person, in fact. “If you can wait a few minutes, I might have something I can spare,” he says. Low commitment, low demand: not “Wait a few minutes and I’ll sell you something.”

“Okay, thanks.” The guy wanders just a little ways away and looks at the plants.

A young woman approaches. She is what one calls winsome and sporty. She has just a little bit of playfulness and naughtiness in the way she smiles as she walks up, stops abruptly, stands with her hands knit together behind her bum, leaning her chest forward. “Hi.”

Mark gives her an elevator look: top floor to bottom floor, back to top. He wipes his dusty hands on his jeans. “Good afternoon. Something I can do for you?” So far he’s gotten one word out of her and already he’s offering. This is because she has more that he wants: he likes looking at her and talking to her. Attraction is already partial payment.

“You wouldn’t have any words you could sell me today, would you?” She’s offering him lots of latitude. This is bigger payment than a simple request. She puts him in charge.

“Well, I don’t know…” It’s not that he doesn’t want to sell to her, and it’s not that he doesn’t know, either. He just doesn’t want to put himself in a weaker position with that other guy there, who can see this going on, and he also wants to draw out the interaction with this girl. He’ll get as much interaction as he can from her in exchange for some fruits of his labours. “I might have something.”

The girl wanders up to a vine. “These look nice. What are these?”

“Anglo-Saxon,” he says, and is about to step over and show her more closely, but a man wearing sunglasses and an expensive-looking suit has just walked up. Mark wants to ignore him but it’s too late; he’s already glanced at him.

The man pulls a fiver out of his pocket. “One word. I’ll have that one.” All demand, no payment – not in words, even if he’s offering money.

“No,” Mark says.

“I want that word. Give me that word.”

“I’m not a roadside word stand.” Mark isn’t interested in accepting this guy’s high-status positioning at all. If you let that sort of thing pass, it’s like giving a person a permanent line of credit that they don’t have to pay back.

“You’re selling to her.” He gestures at the young woman.

“I’m talking to her.” Pause. “She’s a lot nicer than you are.” Pause. “I already have buyers for all my words. There’s a guy down the road who has a stand.”

The guy thrusts his fiver at Mark. “That one,” he says, pointing.

“If you want Anglo-Saxon words, I can give you a couple you might already be familiar with.” Pause. “Go. Away.” The guy hasn’t once given anything of value to Mark. Mark doesn’t need the fiver, and there’s been no deference, no inconvenience on the guy’s part, nothing that advantages Mark or disadvantages the potential buyer. And he’s taking up Mark’s time.

“Some businessman,” the guy grumbles as he starts away, a last little shot to see if he can get Mark to open up a vulnerability, at least keep talking. But Mark just snorts a little as he turns back to the young woman. If he spent all his time taking fivers for a word at a time he wouldn’t have much of a business at all.

“So tell me about this one,” the young woman says, gently touching a nimshite.

“You don’t want to get any of that on you,” Mark says. He gently pulls her hand slightly away from it, which is exactly what she had designed the gesture for, and he knows it. Physical contact with an attractive person: that’s definitely coin of the realm. It may not be words, but it’s communication too. Value is given. “That’s not a word you can use in too many places. It’s rather rude. Crude.”

“What kinds of words are you growing here?” She steps back a bit and looks over the lot. She’s demanding time and information from him, but in this case it’s welcome because it puts him in the role of knowledge giver to someone he might want to have a positive balance with, and because she’s paying him something he wants from her: attention.

“Well, aside from the Anglo-Saxon, we have some Greek rootstock, lots of Latin rootstock, and I have a section over here that I’m really fond of, some borrowings from East Asia. Including some really interesting hybrids.” He starts walking towards that row and gestures forward. He doesn’t pat her on the back to encourage her to go forward: that might cost him a bit. “I like these ones. Here, look at this.” He points to sarariman. “And this.” Beisuboru. “Loans from English into Japanese. I’m looking at bringing them back into English.”

“Crafty!” she says. “Oh, what’s this one?” Bakkushan. “Could you spare this one?” She glances sideways at him, her head tilted slightly down: a submissive gesture. He knows he’s being played, but it’s fun, at least for now.

“Trust me,” he says. “You don’t want that one. It looks good at first, but I wouldn’t give it to my friends.” He doesn’t say “I wouldn’t give it to a friend” because that might seem too much like he’s calling her a friend. But he did say “give” – not “sell.” He’s loosening his position.

She makes a pouty little moue. She’s playing it maybe a bit too much: now it’s clear that she’s angling for something she wants, not just to spend time with him, so her currency is devalued slightly.

“These are interesting but not all that useful. You can sink your teeth into them, but you might find they don’t go with a whole lot of things.” He gestures towards the Latin section. Lots there that he can spare. That stuff grows like zucchini, courgettes, marrows. Cross-breeds spontaneously with the Greek stuff too.

They walk in that direction, a few accidental-on-purpose contacts between hands and hips as they walk. Just a little more flirting. He can’t be sure it’s of value to her other than for persuading him, but it’s of value to him and he’ll take it for a little longer before getting back to work. He’s not bored quite yet.

“Ooh! Look at this one!” She darts ahead. “I’ll take this one!” Before he can stop her, she’s run up to a word and grabbed it. “Callitrix! I love it! Like two little girls, Callie and Trix! So crisp and smooth and fast and stylish and… feminine! Oh, I just love it!”

Mark stands there, looking at her, lips pursed slightly. She’s overstepped a little, not paid enough respect in this interaction: her direct and demanding approach has taken money off her balance. But it’s done. He can’t unpick the word. He would have liked it to grow a little more – it’s riper with an h after the t, callithrix. But no point in saying that now.

She knows she’s presumed just a touch too much. But she doesn’t want to risk refusal now. She smiles at him, eyebrows lifted. Then she says “Thank you,” darts over and kisses him on the cheek, and scampers off.

Well. That was a brief bit of entertainment. And not all that expensive. And…

The young guy in the hat has been watching from nearby. He takes a few languid steps up, looking at the young woman as she scurries away. At first he’s not sure what sage or witty observation to make. Mark remains tacit. At last the young man says, “Hope you got a good price for that.”

Mark smiles a little. “If she’d given a little more she might have gotten a little more. Such as the definition of the word.” She gets less value, and he gets a little boost: even if she left with a bit of upper hand, he has the upper hand in the long run because he knows she might be in for a little surprise. Heh.

“What was the word?”

“Callitrix.”

The guy starts to laugh. “A little monkey.”

“Business,” Mark says.

“At least she didn’t take this one,” the guy says, pointing to meretrix.

Mark smiles. The young man has shown some interest and a certain degree of knowledge. A common bond is always worth a little something. He gestures towards the crop. “And what were you hoping might be ready for picking?”

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ilex

Posted on December 8, 2012 | 2 comments

You may think of the ideal ornamented evergreen as being some kind of pine, fir, or spruce. Branches like bottle brushes, well suited for being bedecked with garlands and tinsel and bulbs and balls and little sleighs and skaters and lights, lights, lights.

In word country, there is another yule plant that is preferred, a plant that you and I may use branches of for decking the halls but that we would not cut down whole and drag into the living room. Well, they don’t cut it down in word country either; it’s bad luck to cut it down – ask any druid – and decorating it could be painful due to the sharp points on the leaves, adding extra spots of red from your dripping fingers to match the winter berries. So they just appreciate it in its natural environment, like good linguists, and have their children draw diagrams of it. And they bring their gifts to its base.

The ilex. A magical tree, evergreen and bearing fruit in winter, beloved of druids and a symbol of fertility and eternal life; Romans associated it with agriculture and harvest and decked the halls with boughs of it during Saturnalia. Christianity naturally coopted it. Some carols sing of it – though usually by its more common Germanic name, rather than its Latin one. We don’t sing “The Ilex and the Ivy” or “Have an Ilex Jolly Christmas.”

Well enough. Although ilex is now fully borrowed into English, its Latin origin adds a bit of ambiguity: in Latin, the word names the holm oak, which happens to resemble the holly tree to some extent. The name was transferred, and by no lesser a light than Linnaeus.

So in word country the ilexicographers gather around the ilex, flower in the midst of a grove of syntax trees. They are very careful to watch the orthography of their ilex: a slip of the pen and it is the ulex, which is a different tree, or the ibex, a goat with huge arching horns that are alarming to behold. Add an extra letter – write this ilex sloppily – and you get silex, which is silica, and your evergreen life is evergrey and inorganic.

Where will you find the ilex in word country? Look to a series of islets, sewn like eyelets in the brook that bisects the plain. This is land where they grow lexis, often wild, rough lexis. They let it come uncultivated and then sell it in bunches with brambles and thorns still sticking out. Same words, same sound, but you can see that it’s rustic: it’s full ov ruff things sumwun sed, mite of sounded like normal speech but yew no there unejucated so it shoze up like this. The ilex and the ilex are different things that look the same; the eye dialects are the same thing but look different.

But it will ever be thus. And you will see, too, by the ilex, the Rolex-wearing Lexus driver. Growing near its base you will find lilacs. People picnic around it, some enjoying regrettable food as gallerized by James Lileks (lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html). They may drink mate (sometimes spelled maté), which is Ilex paraguariensis. Those wanting the harder stuff have lately taken a liking to Elyx, but there is many an elixir liked for luxuriating. They sing “lully, lullay” and relax (the younger ones listen to Skrillex and say goodbye to go watch flicks). Others circulate, quietly capturing pictures with the soft and surreptitious shutter of a Rolleiflex. And off in the corner is an exlex awaiting exile, allowed to prick his finger on a leaf’s circumflex-like apex and leave red specks of vital flux as a last look back at the land of lexis and syntax.

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painstaking

Posted on December 2, 2012 | 1 comment

He was splayed painfully on the hot, dry ground: a stake for each limb, stretching him like a Feynman diagram. She walked up, surveyed him from a distance of two feet, arms crossed. Kicked away an adder that was slithering towards his head. She was wearing an apron that had some fruit in it; she pulled one out. “Would you like an orange?”

“No, please, that’s what has gotten me into this in the first place.” But he did sound rather dry.

She started peeling the orange. “Who has put you here like this?”

He shook his head. “It was due to a grafting accident.”

“Grafting…”

“Compounding. Two words.”

“You are a word grower.”

“I used to be.” He said it oddly: not as most people do, with a voiceless [s], like “use to,” but actually as the two words used and to.

“You used to be…” she said, in the normal way.

“No, please, don’t say it that way.”

“I don’t have to.” She said this also in the normal way, as though it were “half to.”

The ropes tying him to the stakes seemed to tighten. “Please,” he said. “Have to.” He said it with the [v] voiced. “Just now, just for me here now.”

The orange was fully peeled. She broke a segment off it and knelt down by him. “Here. Have a wedge.”

“Thank you,” he said. She put it in his mouth, then another. Once he had chewed and swallowed, he said, “It’s phonology that has taken me to this pass. Devoicing by assimilation with the following consonant, like what happens to used and have before to. Shift of a consonant from one syllable to the adjoining one, like what made nadder, napron, norange into what they are now.” He looked at the orange. “Can I have an other?” Not another, like “a nother”; he said “an other.” Something had really spooked him.

Well, yes, when you’re staked splayed and supine on the dry, hot, hard ground, you may be a bit spooked.

“What would you give to be let loose?” she said quietly, close in, almost to his cheek.

“What would you like?” A little bead of sweat crawled down to the side of his left forehead.

She stood up again, looked him over. “Would you… stake your pain?”

The ropes seemed to tighten. He moaned a little, writhed as he could. “I think you’re a sadist.”

“I’m just… taking pains to see what the situation is.” The ropes eased a little.

“Please,” he said, “take my pains.”

“Yes,” she said. “I will not take pain, but I will take pains.” She took off the apron with the oranges, set it aside, and went over to his left hand and started undoing the rope there. “But have you been doing this long? Compounding?”

His hand came free. He swung his arm and held it in front of his mouth for a moment. “There’s a calm pounding in my wrist.”

She smiled, nodded to herself: Thought so. “A punster. You can get into trouble.” She moved to the right hand.

“If you take away my pain, I will take pains not to do it again.”

“I think,” she said, liberating his right hand, “you have done enough pains-taking for some time.”

He sat up, slid forward, managed to start undoing his feet. “But that’s the nature of the job,” he said. “It’s pains-taking work.” The ropes came loose and he rose.

“And sometimes,” she said, “pain-staking.”

And then, as if nothing had moved but everything had changed, it was she who was staked in pain on the ground… She had staked pain and lost the bet.

“Thank you,” he said, backing away. He turned towards her apron.

She grimaced. “Have an orange,” she said with some asperity. “Have another one. Have a whole nother one.”

He jumped back, then turned and started to walk, faster, speeding up to a run. She grimaced, was about to shout something. Paused. Shouted, “You don’t have to, you know!”

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mascarpone

Posted on November 26, 2012 | 1 comment

Plants have their mutations, and so do words. In word country, one that crops up from time to time is metathesis (that’s pronounced with the accent on the “ta,” by the way): sounds are transposed. This has affected some of our best-known words. Without it, you might aks for the thrid time what that birht brid is, rather than ask for the third time what that bright bird is, since our modern versions of ask, third, bright, and bird all got their forms by metathesis of the [r] and vowel sounds or, in ask, of the [k] and [s].

But you have to be careful. While metathesis is not normally harmful, you should watch out if you make yourself comfortable in some foliage to eat an hors d’oeuvre with mascarpone. You will not be harmed by being “comfterble” rather than “comfortable” – indeed, the former is a more comfortable sound. You may or may not be foiled by “foilage.” As long as you are careful with your “or durv” and it does not veer too close to ordure you will probably survive.

But if metathesis affects your soft Italian cream cheese, you will find yourself face-to-face with a gangster from the red planet: Mars Capone. Do not try to turn it into a candy bar with a capon; you are too late. The scar may be gone, but the consequences of its turning into rsca are simply too risky. A green man with a machine gun, making a bloodbath from the red planet – your only hope would be to send him to Alcatraz for syntax evasion.

Yes, better to keep it away from that cheese. As long as it’s mascarpone, it may sound like it wants to scarper, or like it’s wearing a mask, or you may hear a hint of a corn pone (for a NASCAR driver perhaps?) or get a clear taste of carp (you may even see one), but you are at no risk of its being crap or, well, that machine-gun man. You will in fact have a nice soft spreadable outcome of a liaison between cream and a curdling agent (such as citric acid). It can be part of a nice little “pick-me-up” – Italian tiramisù.

Never mind that the word’s origin is uncertain and subject to some speculation. Just don’t let that [r] shift from the unstressed syllable (such a nuisance to put that extra effort into what would otherwise be a simple schwa) onto the lengthened opening [a], no matter how natural it may seem. It could be your life we’re talking about here, you know.

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gallimaufry, salmagundi

Posted on November 18, 2012 | 4 comments

What have we got to eat tonight?

It’s gallimaufry or salmagundi, I’m not sure which. Maybe both.

You made it. How can you not know?

It’s a tosspot hotch-potch, a hodgepodge like hopscotch with a splash of balderdash, a farrago of foraging. Fish, flesh, flashes in the pan, catch as catch can. Potluck from a potlach. Edibles all agee, etymology unknown. As incongruous as a semolina filigree.

We can go through it and see what there is and decide what to call it.

There’s a gallon of small fry, silver and swirling, and some salmon gumbo, pink and green like a youth at the railing of a heaving ship. There’s gall and gum and a lamb sandwich and a sloppy Joe and maybe a muffuletta, all mingling like yesterday’s lunch in your gut; there’s a slop of slumgullion garbled with subgum and a muddled mug of mulligatawny, middling inelegant and glumly tawny. There’s a gamelan with a gun, banging through revolving scales. There are fumes from a fumarole and undies from a gun moll named Selma. A mafia gallant slammed some alms down in it: “For your family.” Swirling within I see dualism nag and a Gaul firmly in d’ slum again, a sad mauling à la filmy rug, as kooky as a coati mundi in the belfry… If I pick bits out like fishbones, I get a, a, i, u to go with the g, l, m; on the one side I am left with l fry and on the other with s nd. They are like hidden messages, partially obnubilated.

Sip it or gulp it. It tastes of two trochees, like Latin lines: confutatis maledictis, tuba merum spargens sonum, o Fortuna velut luna, testit David cum Sibylla. A bumping, gulping rhythm. It has an [æl] in the first syllable, a [m] in the second, a [g] somewhere in it, an [i] at the end. It sounds like a big jug of whatever-it-is being poured out, galumphing into overloaded bowls, glugging down a drain burping like mud pots.

You won’t get anywhere by comparing the original recipes. A gallimaufry is just a merry gorging of ragout or hash, any crazy stew; salmagundi has many different specific recipes, and they seldom resemble each other in any particular detail, although one might think of a mixture of meat, anchovies, eggs, capers, perhaps olives, oil, lemon juice… or not. Look them up in different sources and get different recipes. They seem to be culinary pranks, a sort of “aristocrats” joke of the kitchen.

Very well. It’s what there is to eat. A verbal smorgasbord for galloping gourmets: astonishing gastronomy, a Solomon Grundy, a gallery mouthful. Give it a name.

Fillmagasundry. Let’s just call it that.

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fry

Posted on November 15, 2012 | 4 comments

The streams of word country are sizzling with fry. Freyja has worked her magic, that goddess of love, beauty, and fertility, and will be back for her portfolios of war and death later. Now Frigg has bestowed motherhood on the waters (no naughty jokes about Frigging, please). The inchoate caviar has dehisced into a whitewater of whitebait. The Old Norse seed fræ has become first those eggs and now the young fish, the myriad glittering flutterings swarming the riffles and rills: the fry, stirring.

Oh, how they coruscate in the sun filtered through the water. You can see the flip of the fins in the f and the flick of the tail in the y; you can feel in your mouth the urge to fly, the recoil and wide hurl and return to the original liquid and glide, [fraɪ]. Yes: it is your tongue, the fry. Your native tongue, ever swimming in the stream of your mouth, ever longing to fly free, ever spawning.

And diving deep, deep sometimes. That vocal slouch, the low final growl, “creaky phonation,” vocal fry, something more common than we notice but lately often associated with young women, sounding like a rehearsal for senescence, the recollection of Freyja.

But words and tongues last variously long. Some fry early in the sun. Some get burned out, try and try until they’re fried. Some are elected for electrocution and fry: the char in the chair of elocution. Some are a flash in the pan, fish flesh in the pan, our native tongue battered and twinned with its forever frenemy: French fries too. The Old Norse word meets its Latin doppelganger, scion of frigere, and fry fry. Is it even Steven?

It’s even Stephen – Stephen Fry. The British wit of eternally youthful mind loves to let the fry free on the river of his tongue. When he expatiates on language – a celebration of the spangling brook of lexis and syntax and a condemnation of those who would dam it and damn its fly fishers – the stream of his consciousness enjoins and enfranchises us all to become what I would call streamkeepers of the language, protecting against those who would poison the discourse, fostering its fecundity, mothering its multiplicity.

Fry is free. Literally: the family name Fry is related to its German homophone frei, “free”. Fry is free, and the fry are free, and as they are free to leap to a fry height we are free to sauté in the fry pan, to catch and taste and enjoy our Freiheit, our freedom. It is love, beauty, and fertility; it is seed, caviar, and it is the million young; it is the ways of ending and cooking and the side dishes; it is firm definition finding itself friable and soon frittered; it is the war of words and the death of tongues. As you shiver in the river you sit with Shiva. But all is fervid and free in the cycle of change, this incessant gallimaufry.

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kwikluk

Posted on October 25, 2012 | Leave a comment

Word country is not one place; it’s wherever you find it. Words have their carefully cultivated ground, places where they are grown to be bottled and shipped and ship-in-bottled, but they spring up in the wild on the banks of everywhere. Where there are people, there are words. You may have a set of roots sprouting into syntax trees in your own backyard and not notice it. You doubt? Take a kwikluk.

What is a kwikluk? It seems to be a very common thing: people will often say, when they are uncertain of something but have – or hope to have – ready access to usable information or verification, “I’ll take a kwikluk.” If someone wants your instant opinion on something – or wants your approval without too much argumentation – they may ask you to take a kwikluk. And if you want to comment briefly on something, then too you may take a kwikluk. It’s always one, and you almost always take it – sometimes you have it.

Oh, you think I’m being cute. But this word grows in the wild. Take a kwikluk in your atlas. Where? Well, what kind of word does this sound like? I’ve always thought it sounded like Inuktitut, something from Aklavik, Inuvik, Iqaluit. Either that or perhaps Kwakiutl (a language and people from Vancouver Island). And in fact where you find a kwikluk is on the west coast of Alaska, in Yup’ik soil. Yup’ik is related to Inuktitut and Aleut. So there it is.

But I should not really say you find it in the soil there. You find it running through the soil, between banks of soil. This word may seem hard, with its three /k/s, but it has a liquid /l/ and a glide /w/ too; it could as easily be the sound of a trickling brook or of rocks clicking together in their liquid creekbed. You see, a river runs through it – but look quickly; the river changes course constantly. It is a stream on a flat alluvial plain, and it meanders. This word may seem the same, may sound the same, but it wanders far and wide, diverging into soil that had been dry the day before. Such is language change, such is the stream of language. Take the long view and you see not a neat fast canal but a lazy delta. And mathematicians know delta means change. So do potamologists.

And anyone who watches television knows that change also goes with channel. Do you want to take just a kwikluk at what else is on? Change the channel. But with the kwikluk, the channel will change unbidden. Kwikluk, you see, is a channel, a meander in a delta: the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, one of the largest deltas in the world. The name Kwikluk comes from Yup’ik kwikli, which means “river” – this river may meander, but it always flows kwikli.

How quickly can it change? Like this: in 1898 the name of the river, this 137 km meander, was written down as Kwikluk, on the basis of the Yup’ik name for it. By 1915 it had become Kwethluk, which is what you will usually find it under today. How we write what we hear can change, not just because language changes but because when we hear it first we don’t always get it right, and sometimes when we hear it second we don’t either. Different languages have different sounds. This is why we have ketchup and catsup, for example. So if you take a kwikluk you may need to change your view later.

This channel, flowing through an alluvial plain of a northern word country, has meandered as an unsuspected current in our language. We may think we are merely speaking of a quick look, but when you look again you find that you are standing in arctic waters that were not there a moment ago. The word has meandered into your mind and will move much soil in its sedimental journey. Now you know: when you take a kwikluk, you are taking a piece of a river, an ever-changing flow, just a cup out of water that will have moved on when you turn back – from a channel that itself writhes constantly in its landscape, ever changing course by inches, never going straight. You are taking a quick sip of the river of language.

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binder, bind, bound

Posted on October 17, 2012 | 2 comments

Ash nazg durbatulûk, Ash nazg gimbatul, Ash nazg thrakatulûk Agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. One ring to rule them all, One ring to find them, One ring to bring them all And in the darkness bind them. A three-ring binder. But what – or who – is bound?

Oh, yes, if you know your Tolkien you know his answer. But there are other binders, rely on it. We are in word country here now, and there is something I think you are ready to see.

You think the world is full of things, and then there are words that we attach to them. We see a thing, a creature, a person, and we turn to a book and we see a word there that we can use to bind it to the page, an ink tattoo on the paper. But we will now expand our awareness out of bounds, by leaps and bounds; where we were blind, we will now see. Take this pill. It is binding – yes, it can cause constipation, but I mean that it is a binding contract. Once you have bound yourself to it, we will be bound for a new world – without moving. We simply turn our perspective. It is a rebirth, and you’re going through the contractions.

And now you see in this view that it is words that are real. They grow freely, roam freely; the signifiers have no minders or blinders. But they cannot signify until they choose something to signify, or until something is chosen for them (but by who? everyone who chould choose is also a potential signified). And to find the object, we go to the binders. There are binders full of women, binders full of men, binders full of beasties and veggies and things, binders perhaps of brindled bandersnatches. They have been chosen to be bound, and now they are bound to be chosen.

The association is arbitrary: the objects are fungible. But when the words are bound to their objects, even though someone is bound to object, they are bound and tied, like Prometheus in binder twine: the rock his world, the eagle to de-liver him until Hercules delivers him. Bound for glory, bound for destruction, bound to set an example, bound in leather (deluxe edition).

Adam lay ybounden, too, ybounden to the Eve of destruction. Before they ate the fruit, did they know their names? Was it really Prometheus who gave them the fruit, the gift of words, the ability to bind a thing to a sign, to know where one thing stops and another starts by the semantic repulsion of their signs, Derrida’s différance? Be careful of that fruit; it’s binding. The only way to release the bonds is to prune. Unbind them and let them go free – but beware of verbal diarrhea. If the words detach from their binders, glossary becomes glossolalia.

But again you have been misled, led into bondage by what you have seen. Words are other words; in other words, you are out of bounds. This binder, it is a pigment of your imagination; it is the binder that causes the pigment to set, so that the colour stays together in the painting as you use your thousand words colourfully. This binder is the machine that harvests the words and binds them into sheaves or bales: the grim reaper, baleful but necessary in the circle of life.

The circle? The ring. The three rings: life is a three-ring circus, but when you snap the rings together you are back in the sheets… foolscap? Or night cap? Have you been dreaming? Are you homeward bound? When you awaken, when you rebound to awareness from sleep, are you re-bound to your body, bound hand and foot?

Are you awake? Look around you now, unbind your eyes from the screen. Yes, you. (Is there a you reading this?) You have been swimming in words. Where are their signifieds? Objects on the screen may appear closer than they are. These words you see, they are shaped by nothing other than absence: absence of their objects and absence of light – the letters are black. The darkness is the words, and everything is bound in them.

You are caught as in a web that spans the world wide. The web knows no bounds. But it knows no bonds either. Memes whirl like rubbed pennies, making three or four out of two; but when you stop the oscillation of species do you see there was nothing at all, not even two, and then you are left rubbing your eyes. Every thing is back in its binder. You too.

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Zugunruhe

Posted on October 1, 2012 | 3 comments

There is a season in word country when things rise and fall: some things fall in place, and others rise to go. All is changing, colour, temperature, movement. After springing forth, after flourishing and strengthening in the constant rounds of the estival festival, a direction is found, and that direction is either down or away. There is a hunger. All seems under the gun. There is an electricity, a summer’s buildup of static ready to discharge.

It happens in many places and with many things, this energy. Runners who have trained all summer now taper for their fall target race, skittish, antsy, almost overcome with an urge to run. Students’ long lazy summers end in a pile of unread, unwritten, uncounted work lurking on the thither side of a bell. Birds gotta fly: they’re skittish, they don’t sleep the same, they just want to go south like so many Canadian retirees at the first sign of frost.

Languages, too, grow into these seasons, these moods. Something that has always been with you but that you have never needed a word for, something that could easily have had a name from local rootstock, instead seeks abroad for its label. Somehow it feels better. The soil it grew up in is too plain, too ordinary, too expected and habituated. The familiar thing, to be seen apart from its surroundings, must go to another language for its word, returning in its new form after the winter of discontent.

These urges and these flight paths may at first seem incoherent. Perhaps you cannot make out the sense of the form: Zugunruhe. Is this Tibetan, Mongolian, Turkish? As your eyes focus you see it may be German. That ruhe, that’s something German, no? “Peace”? And zu, “to” – so is this, um, peace to the gun? But wait, what is gun in German? No, that’s not it. Your eyes zig-zag through the gauze, picking out hunger, urge, run, rotating shapes (three cups u u u and two caps n h and that electric bolt Z and…). This strange bird that we have brought back from our migrations, it has to do with…

Zug. What’s that? One of German’s more basic all-purpose words: “train, trend, way, move, push, pull, migration” und so weiter. Said like “tsook” to English minds. Plus unruhe, “restlessness”, said vaguely like “oon rooa.” Together, “migration restlessness”. Our restless need to go abroad has led to our bringing back a word for a restless need to go abroad – or, more exactly, to migrate: it’s a word for the birds.

Birds fly away, then come back, and they seem much the same. People often grow or change, though not always. The language, in its excursions, returns like a merchant ship laden with treasures. But as the exotic becomes familiar we must again seek to make the familiar exotic. Old words, fallen out of use, coat the ground and enrich the soil; new words will come to take root and add new forms and colours to the landscape.

And the time has come around again.

Thanks to Doug Linzey for suggesting Zugunruhe.

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