Got on the bus. Got a nice seat at the front of the raised section at the back. Nice and warm there.
Someone else got on and sat behind me. Then coughed. And coughed. And then coughed again.
I got up and moved to the back of the back, so no one could be coughing on my neck.
By the time we got to the subway station, there were three people in front of me all coughing. And one over to the right. All coughing forwards, at least, but coughing and coughing and also coughing and occasionally coughing.
Covering their mouths? No. All adults and yet somehow they felt that it was just fine to decorate the ambient atmosphere with their sputum.
Sputum. This is a wet winter word. It’s as medical (and indelicate-sounding) as scrotum, and as phonaesthetically expressive as spit and sputter and spatter and spurt and spew and perhaps spoor (which doesn’t have to do with expectoration but boy does it sound like it). It makes me think of Aquascutum, which is a British luxury clothing brand well known for their rain coats. The name means ‘water shield’: scutum is Latin for ‘shield’, and I sure wish I could have a sputum scutum to protect me from the expectorated phlegm of my fellow travellers. (Did you know, by the way, that Sputnik is Russian for ‘fellow traveller’? Did you also know that I wish these open coughers could be sent up into orbit just like Sputnik? Except of course then these sputumniks would be showering us with their space phlegm.)
In case you’re not quite disgusted enough yet, I think I really must quote the Oxford English Dictionary definition of sputum: “Saliva or spittle mixed with mucus or purulent matter, and expectorated in certain diseased states of the lungs, chest, or throat; a mass or quantity of this.” Oh, sorry, has that put you off your nightcap or your morning toast and eggs? If not, should I point out that sputum can be anagrammed to upmust and put sum and tum’s up? I can ease the tum a bit by mentioning that sputum is taken straight across from Latin for spittle, and is derived from spuere ‘spit’. Or, OK, I guess that may not help either.
Look, sputum is disgusting. It should have a disgusting word for it. I mean, OK, sputum is a reasonably crisp word, no worse phonetically than teaspoon or stooping; it gets its grossness by association. And yes, sure, splutum would be even grosser, because messier. But splutum is not to be found, alas. Well, not so much alas. If it were to be found, it would probably be found on the back of my neck on the bus.
This is a word that, for me, brings hiking, a backcountry lodge, a classmate, a cookbook, Will and Kate, a suburb of Chicago, and a figure skater.
I grew up in and near Banff, so for me Skoki is first of all a valley and a lodge. I knew of it and had read about it for years before we ever went there. You can’t get there by driving, oh no. You go to the trailhead, which is at Lake Louise ski area (the most scenic ski area in Canada, loaded with excellent and challenging terrain, and also the place I broke my leg when I was 12 – in one of the flattest and least scenic parts of the whole place). Then you hike almost 15 kilometres through the back country, over Boulder Pass, past Ptarmigan Lake, up and over Deception Pass and on down into Skoki Valley.
I love hiking. I really love hiking in the mountains. I love the scenery, the nature. I love seeing the pikas and the lichen and kinnikinnick and the great peaks and valleys. I love walking up and down. I need to have things well above sightline in order to be happy where I live, which is one reason I live in a downtown high-rise now. We went hiking many times when I was a kid, picnicking on Shake ’n’ Bake in Larch Valley and having strawberry tea at Lake Agnes. My high school grad class went on a weekend hike to Shadow Lake in the fall of our last year (thereby hang some tales! but I won’t digress now). Get me hiking and I’m happy.
But I hate camping. In my childhood and youth I spent many disgusting cold damp uncomfortable smoky mosquito-bitten wildlife-haunted nights in tents. Yuck. If I never sleep in a tent again I won’t mind.
Skoki Valley is a beautiful place, and a beautiful place to hike to. You shouldn’t try to do it there and back in one day; it will take you about five hours each way. You’re staying overnight.
But did I mention there’s a lodge?
Skoki Lodge is a beautiful log lodge. It’s two storeys and who knows how many stories – it holds an important place in the history of Banff National Park. It opened in 1931 and has expanded a little since then. It has no electricity or running water, but it has heat and they give you heated water and nice food and lamp light and all that. We finally went there when I was a teen. I enjoyed it very much.
It is now being run by one of my high school classmates, Leo Mitzel. Leo is from Lake Louise and has always been a backcountry kind of guy. (If you’re wondering what he looks like now, here’s a picture from our 30th reunion last fall. If I ever go into much detail about that reunion here, it will deserve its own post. It was every bit as hilarious as the hike, which I don’t think I will ever talk about in much detail on this blog.) It is also being run by Leo’s wife, Katie, who he met at Skoki. She has produced a lovely cookbook. I was very happy to receive it from my parents this past Christmas. It includes the menu they served to Will and Kate (i.e., the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge), who stayed there in 2011. I am also happy to report that they did not miss a chance to use Skoki in the name of a kind of cookie – not Skoki cookies, which would have been a perfect sound, but anyway Skoki warden cookies.
By the way, you don’t have to visit Skoki in the summer. It’s also open in the winter. It’s OK to ski there!
It happens that Skoki is an anagram of OK ski. That’s not where it comes from, of course. On the other hand, it’s clearly not an Anglo-Saxon word. It would probably be spelled scokie or scokey if it were. It’s the odd one out in its surrounds: Skoki Mountain, which sits above the valley, has neighbours named Fossil, Jericho, Ptarmigan, Brachiopod, Anthozoan, Redoubt, Richardson, and Pika. It has that nice crisp mix of voiceless fricative and stops that sound so, ah, “authentic” (I think of Kananaskis, and of Nakiska, a ski area with a name that was basically made up to sound authentic). It ends with an open i that’s pronounced /i/ (“ee”). And in fact (although it’s coincidentally a place name from Poland) it’s modified from a word for ‘marsh’ from a Native American language.
Which Native American language? Potawatomi.
A few of you may know where the Potawatomi live. I’ll tell the rest of you: in the central United States, west of the Great Lakes.
One of the first white people to visit the valley, in 1911, was James Foster Porter, who was from Illinois. The valley apparently reminded him of an area north of Chicago, the Skokie marsh, on which the town of Niles Center was built. He and his companions discussed names for the place and liked Skokie, and it stuck. The Banff version was later respelled as Skoki, probably because it seemed more appropriately non-English, but I don’t know really.
The people in Niles Center also liked the name Skokie. They liked it enough that in 1940 they voted to rename their town Skokie. Skokie is officially a village, although it has a population of 65,000. It’s right on the northern border of Chicago. North of it are the Skokie Lagoons. Near them is the Winnetka Ice Arena, which is the home rink of the Skokie Valley Skating Club.
That’s where Jason Brown is officially from. Who is Jason Brown? One of the best figure skaters in the US today (update: and 2015 US men’s figure skating champion). He grew up in Highland Park (another northern Chicago suburb, and coincidentally the name of a good brand of Scotch whisky). He lives in Colorado now, but his official home club is the Skokie Valley Skating Club. He’s why I thought of Skoki tonight: we were watching the US national championships.
But I have now put my wife on notice that we will be visiting Skoki Lodge some time in the future. She rolls her eyes at the lack of electricity and running water, but it was good enough for royalty, so I say it’s good enough for us. Plus the food looks delicious.
I must say I like to have the odd duck. It can be quite nice. Uncommonly among birds, it can even be cooked rare.
I also like to be the odd duck. And to know the odd duck. An unusual person. A rara avis: a rare bird. Not necessarily sui generis – one of a kind – but infrequently seen. A paragon, not an epigone; perhaps also a paradox, an enigma. An enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in bacon and glazed with an orange brandy sauce, and not overdone. Raring to go.
You can cook duck breast rare because ducks are tougher birds (have you ever tried to joint one?), less susceptible to infection; the meat is also better suited to it at least in part because it is better suited to flying. It can make it up to where the air is rarefied, and perhaps by consequence it can manage to be served rare. Indeed, if it is not rare I would rather say it is not well done. As it were.
Rare duck breast is not rare because it is hard to find but rather because it is like a soft-cooked egg. From Old English hrere, probably originally having a ‘shaken, agitated’ sense, we got a word rear that retained its old-style pronunciation, as bear has. It referred to the condition of a slightly undercooked egg. The sense transferred to meat by the 1700s, by which time it had been respelled rare.
A similar change took place later in the US (from the same people who gave us varmint from vermin and grits from groats): the verb rear, as in go up on the hind legs, became rare and is usually seen in raring, especially raring to go. To me it gives an image of a dragster peeling out from the start, the nose lifting up a little, because of the sound of it: “Rare. Rare! Rare rare rare rare rare!” This works better in North America, of course; the British pronunciation, as given by Oxford, is /rɛː/, which has lower air pressure.
But our rare for ‘uncommon’ is our rare for ‘sparse’. Rare soil is soil loosely packed; rare earths are minerals and elements that are sparsely distributed through the soil (specifically they are the lanthanide series of elements). Neither rare soil nor rare earth elements are actually all that uncommon; they are just not highly concentrated. Rare air is not uncommon, either; there’s quite a lot of it surrounding the whole planet – you just have to get up to a loftier level, high peaks and flight paths.
These rares come from the original Latin sense of rara (also rarus and rarum and so on depending on inflection): ‘loose, spaced, porous, sparse, few and far between, uncommon’… It all goes together. But with room between.
So, too, do my friends the rarae aves, the rare birds and odd ducks. They can be found in the loftier levels, sometimes up in the clouds and wanting in concentration, perhaps prone to ducking out of crowded occasions, but – like rare earth magnets – capable of exerting a powerful attraction, one that pulls over a long distance. They will not get or give a lot of rah-rah-rah, but they are always worth the effort to have for dinner – or drinks, or smart conversation, that rare art.
The first time I recall hearing this word was in a recording of an Irishman (middle east coast, I think) that I was listening to for accent acquisition purposes. He talked about dulse, which the fisherman liked to eat because “it gave them a good thirst for their porter.”
What I recall most particularly about his pronunciation was the intrusive schwa. Irish accents, due to a feature of Irish phonotactics, militate against adjacency of /l/ and any of several other consonants. You will hear “fillum” for film, for instance. And so dulse in that accent sounds like Dulles, as in John Foster, as in the Saarinen-designed international airport near Washington DC.
But there’s a good reason for that: the word it comes from in Old Irish is duilesc (in Scots Gaelic, duileasg). There’s an actual e written there. In the English transcription, it was dropped – because they’ll say it anyway. (The e on the end is likely there to keep the s as /s/ and not /z/.) All the non-Irish Anglos, however, seeing the spelling, make it rhyme with pulse and Hulce (as in Tom, the actor). Which actually results in a different sound for the phoneme /l/: back of the tongue higher, tip tense and touching less (if at all). Readier to swallow.
What is dulse? A vegetable, but not a pulse. It’s a kind of seaweed, and yes, it does give you a good thirst for porter or whatever else may be to hand that is wet and copious and dulls the desire. I will say it’s not the dullest thing I’ve ever tasted, nor is it dolce. A bit more like salty licorice painted onto a dishwashing glove. Not the sort of delicacy one fights duels over. In fact, it’s not really a delicacy at all – it’s available in quantity, cheap, and is not actually disgusting.
The phonetically inclined may notice that dulse in the Irish pronunciation, /dʌləs/, is very nearly a rearrangement (anaphone?) of /sæləd/. (A closer anaphone of salad would be dull-ass.) Well enough: you could make a salad of dulse. Mind you, you would probably find yourself wishing you had just eaten it by hand out of a bag. It’s not the sort of seaweed you get on your sushi (which, it occurs to me, I ate at Dulles when we were waiting for our flight home). It’s about as thick as the schwa between /l/ and /s/ in that Irish pronunciation. I mean, it wouldn’t be a dull-ass salad. But it schwa could be intrusive. Better to keep one hand free for your porter.
I do not want to devote my life to explicating someone else’s epic after they’re gone. I do not want to be one of the little piggies trotting along chasing the big one. I do not want simply to imitate some idol. I don’t even understand people who would rather argue about, for instance, exactly what Kant did or didn’t say rather than about the viability of this or that idea Kant might have said – people for whom the world of facts and information is just a world of warring planets, and they have chosen one to be an asteroid of, hoping perhaps for a promotion to minor moon by the end. I simply don’t understand people who just want to devote their lives to the work of some other person. It doesn’t matter even if that other person is really just the hydrant they’re peeing on; while they’re peeing on it, someone’s peeing on them.
To be perfectly honest, even if someone tells me I’m just like this or that other person, or have said or done something that is so [person X], I try to be nice about it but it drives me crazy.
Maybe this is partly because I have a brother who is three years older than me who always preceded me to the next level of schooling. I hit high school wanting to establish myself among new potential friends (after my previous disasters) and I’m instantly “little Harbeck,” judged by what my brother has done and measured against him. I move on to university and I’m “little Harbeck” again, the anticipated duplicate nerd who turns out to be a loudmouth spazz with a temper and a deathly fear of saying actual nice things to people.
I’m sure it’s also partly because I have always had an unassailable belief in my own potential. Does that sound obnoxious? I won’t say it’s not. See above. I’m not so obnoxious now. But I still have an abiding desire to do things that are in some way singularly new.
It’s also because I’m built to follow and handle ideas, not people. I’m still learning about people. The one thing I can say for sure is that the truth value of a universal proposition does not depend on who states it. (The perceived truth value does.)
This all may seem a bit funny if you know that my doctoral thesis focused entirely on the life’s work of one person, Richard Schechner. I have an excuse: my advisor told me that would be the best topic to pursue. I was pragmatic enough to know I should do what would get me the degree efficiently. Plus it came with a five-week sojourn in Princeton. It was really fascinating learning about this guy. But mainly it taught me some things I would need to do and be if I wanted to be someone, not just an epigone of someone.
Well, no one else is doing word tastings. Ha. Speaking of which: epigone.
Nice word, uses all three stop locations in English – lips, tongue back tongue tip – and all three kinds – voiceless, voiced, nasal. I want to pronounce this word “e pig a nee,” /ɛˈpɪgəni/, because it’s evidently Greek and Greek words and names usually get that treatment in English – it would rhyme with Antigone, for instance. But this word is actually said /ˈɛpɪɡoʊn/, stress on the first syllable, the last syllable rhyming with cone. Why? Because it’s not actually a Greek word unchanged.
We got it as the plural epigones from French épigones, from Latin epigoni, from Greek ἐπίγονοι epigonoi, which was the plural of ἐπίγονος epigonos. Which meant ‘born afterward’ (the epi in this case meant ‘after’; in some other instances in English it means ‘around’). There were seven heroes who led the war against Thebes, you see, and their sons were the epigones – the less-distinguished inheritors. Nowadays in English it means, as dictionary.com puts it, “an undistinguished imitator, follower, or successor of an important writer, painter, etc.”
So not only are those scholars who dedicate their careers to some author epigones, and not only are those no-lifer fanboys who spend all their money aping this or that sci-fi show or movie epigones, but so are all the lesser abstract expressionists, all the splash painters after Pollock, all the uninventive atonalists of the later 20th century, all the movie scorers who set Glass-like scales, all the fanfic authors… for that matter, so was I in my late teens, trying to produce something like Finnegans Wake (the results were vomitrocious and soporific). I think one goes through excusable phases of epigonism in one’s youth; ideally, at length one learns to be “inspired by” and “drawing on” rather than slavishly imitating.
Unless one builds one’s entire career on being an epigone of some greater light, of course. Many comfortable, even “distinguished,” careers have been built on such. But do I want my mark in history to come after e.g. or i.e.? Nope.
He got on the elevator just before the doors closed, that guy. Him again. An inch or two taller than me and probably 1.4 times my weight. A bit socially odd and hard to read; always seems like something is nettling him a bit.
It’s an elevator ride. Twenty-something floors. Stare at the door, the floor. Sometimes people talk. Fortunately not this time. But as soon as he exited the elevator, five floors before my floor, I pulled out my phone and made a note:
Stertorous
His most salient characteristic, you see, is that his breathing is very audible. Very. With occasional mouth noise, but mostly through the nose.
Usually if I’m in the elevator with someone who makes that kind of noise breathing, that someone is a dog. Probably a little bulldog.
More often when you hear a person breathing stertorously, you’re in their bedroom. Or near them on a bus or airplane. Or in church. Or maybe a meeting at work.
Stertor is loud breathing, one could almost even say stentorian breathing. Constricted breathing. Breathing as of one asleep. In particular, breathing like snoring, although it can be gentle snoring. Stertorous is the adjective. Of course.
The word stertorous does not have a gentle sound to it, does it? It sounds strained, terse, tense, tortured perhaps. There may be a stutter, but a restricted one, ingressive.
Here, do this: whisper “stertorous” as you inhale. Presto, stertor. Even better, move your tongue back a bit in your mouth, as though you’re about to clear your throat, and do the same thing again. Yeah. Like that. That’s some serious stertor. Not so much sonority as snority. Or just snorty.
That works particularly well if you’re a typical North American or someone else who uses the humped-up-tongue /r/. In that case, both syllables of stertor have no real vowels; the peak of each is a syllabic /r/: [stɹ̩ɾɹ̩]. (Doesn’t that transcription look like it could be a visual representation of snoring?)
The word stertor comes straight from Latin, of course. The Latin noun is formed from the verb stertere ‘snore’. That happens to be an anagram of resetter, as in resetting your sleep or your alarm, but I doubt the ancient Romans foresaw that fact. But of course stertorous is an anagram of sot rouster and rests or out and torture SOS and rots so true and to trousers and…
Well, anyway. It may be a sound often associated with sleep or coma on the part of the person (or dog) making it, but for those of us hearing it at close range, it is rarely ours to rest.
Say you’re writing a text for an introductory course, something just to make sure students are prepared for higher education in the subject. You want to use a diction proper to the level, right? Maybe some eidetic imagery? You wouldn’t want to prop up your vocabulary with opaque sesquipedalian escapees from an encyclopaedia. That’s not the proper way to do it. Might make you look like a professor, but won’t make you look like a pro at preparatory communication.
But every so often you’ll get a text, or at least an opening section, that will declare itself propaedeutic. “This course is propaedeutic for the more advanced study,” perhaps – or, as a noun, as in John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, “We can pass from this simplified propaedeutic to the problems of the real world.” Simplified except for what you call it.
It’s a word for those who consider teaching to be a bit infra dig; they want to be paedagogical. This is a serious course of study you’re embarking on, as witness the lexically luxuriant luminary who will be Virgil to your Dante (and remember, Dante went through Hell first before getting to Heaven). Switch on your academic propeller beanie; this is just the warm-up act.
It’s an impressive and almost balanced-looking word, propaedeutic. The paed could rotate 180 degrees and look much the same – in fact, write it with the digraph, pæd, and it would look the same. You could spin it like a propeller, and in fact “propaedeutic” sounds a bit like an old prop plane starting up. The p at the very start of propaedeutic would do well to be matched with another d at the end to make the whole word spin, but we just get c, which is literally 1 short of d, so we miss the stem – preparation not finished, I guess.
The pro at the start is the pro that means ‘before’, from Greek προ, which also helps us know it’s proper to start this word with “pro” and not “prop.” The paed is the root you see in words relating to children (from paedagogy or pedagogy to rather less pleasant ones); here, it’s part of a word for ‘education’: παιδευτική paideutiké, whence the eutic as well.
Not a great start to an education to start with a word you need an education to know, though, is it?
Well, it could be worse. It could always call itself cataskeuastic.
Up to today, this word would call forth four things for me:
Joss Ackland, British actor, male, who’s been in a gazillion things but who I remember best from the 1987 movie White Mischief, a murder mystery based on a true happening among a particularly debauched set of people in colonial Kenya, the true story of which was recounted (among other things) in the fascinating book The Bolter.
Joss Stone, British singer, female.
Joss Whedon, American director, screenwriter, and actor, male.
Joss sticks, a kind of incense.
Joss Ackland and Joss Whedon have in common that they are males, and actors. Joss Ackland and Joss Stone have in common that they are British and their names are both short for Jocelyn, which, like Vivian and Marion, used to be commonly borne by men. (Joss Whedon is Joseph.) They all have their spots in the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) pantheon, whether or not you would call any of them idols.
But then there are those joss sticks. I was never sure why they were called joss sticks. I was never in a position to look it up when the question occurred to me. The word just seems jaunty and maybe a bit exotic, in an Anglicized way. Was joss a word for something mystical? Was it borrowed from something to do with, say, horsemanship, or a sport like jousting or some kind of tossing, or something more functional? Or was it one of the ingredients?
Then, today, I was reading Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills, an early collection of short stories, in an Oxford edition replete with explanatory notes. I read the story titled “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows,” which is about an opium den in Lahore run by a Chinese expatriate. I read this: “In one corner used to stand Fung-Tching’s Joss – almost as ugly as Fung-Tching – and there were always sticks burning under his nose; but you never smelt ’em when the pipes were going thick.”
There was no explanatory note. Apparently Oxford assumed all the readers would know what a joss was. Or else they were just relying on their figuring it out from context – the Joss gets a further passage about it from which it is easy to tell that it is a statue.
A statue of what? A Chinese deity, as it happens.
Joss is a Chinese word? It most certainly is not. I have yet to encounter a dialect of Chinese in which that is a plausible word phonologically; although there are many more dialects than I have met, word-final /s/ is quite out of play in the ones I’ve seen.
No, joss is a word from Chinese Pidgin English, a language used for trade in south China, with simple syntax based on Chinese and with words largely taken from English and other European traders’ languages and modified to fit Chinese phonotactics more or less. The word pidgin, for instance, comes from the word business.
The word joss is, as I mentioned, a word for a Chinese deity (or similar) or statue thereof. You may know that deity comes from the Latin word deus. Also from deus came Portuguese deos (that’s an old form). From Portuguese deos came Javanese dejos, which was used for Chinese religious statues. From dejos came Chinese Pidgin joss. And joss stuck, in English as well.
Joss sticks still. Well, joss sticks still sell, anyway, and burn, more often in home incense holders than in front of statues of deities. Joss isn’t a word you’re likely to see applied directly to a Chinese statue in ordinary usage now. But you do see it on some members of the IMDB pantheon. And now you can take it as emblematic of how some word forms burn down like incense, in sense and in form.
This was once a word of the future, the bright, clear, future, full of shine, as emblematic for many years as its near-doppelganger cell phone was more recently. It names a smooth, glassy, pliable, diaphanous film made from the same general sort of thing as paper is: cellulose. It’s a smooth, slippery word, not a stop in it, just the /s/ and /f/ voiceless fricatives, the /l/ liquid and /n/ nasal, and three vowels, one or two of which are diphthongs. It’s a word that can bespeak silly fun or a subtle, profane phallocentricity, depending on what – or whom – it’s wrapping.
For me, cellophane will always call forth Plastic. It will call forth lower-case plastic, of course, because we often call it plastic wrap, though there are many kinds of things we’ll call that and cellophane is only one (cling wrap is another – not the same thing). But it will call forth upper-case Plastic too: Plastic Bertrand, the ultimate invented plastic pop idol from Belgium, presented shrink-wrapped for public consumption, complete with his first smash hit, “Ça plane pour moi”:
Plastic Bertrand was an epiphany for me in junior high: pop punk in French. Does he seem plastic? Sure. Cellophane? Well, if you listen to the second verse of the song, you may hear the words poupée de cellophane, which mean ‘cellophane puppet’. The song is not written for coherence, I should say, and multiple interpretations are available. When I listened to it in my adolescence, I thought I heard couper la cellophane, ‘cut(ting) cellophane’. But I didn’t really understand a lot of the rest either. It turns out it’s not really understandable, but anyway I didn’t get the right incoherent words. It was anything but transparent.
Transparency is a hallmark characteristic of cellophane. In fact, it’s in the name: cello from cellulose – the plant product from which it is made – and phane, from the Greek ϕαν root meaning ‘come to light, show’, which we see in words such as diaphanous (the French inventor of cellophane had the French word diaphane ‘transparent’ in mind) and epiphany.
So cellophane, which seems so artificial, is nonetheless made from organic matter (so are oil and gas, mind you: organic matter decayed and changed over millions of years). And the word cellophane, which seemed so modern even in the 1960s and ’70s, came into existence in 1912, with the product it names. Sometimes plastic things seem realer than real. And sometimes something is so transparent you don’t even notice it.
Plastic Bertrand has mounted a bit of a comeback recently. Here’s a video of him singing his top hit a few years ago:
Does he sound like the same guy as in the first recording? I mean, he’s older and all that, of course. But still. Now listen to this 2010 version by a different guy, Lou Deprijck.
Doesn’t that sound a bit more like the original?
Go find every TV performance by the young Plastic Bertrand and you’ll realize quickly they’re all lip-syncs to the studio version. If you happen to have a copy of Plastic Bertrand’s greatest hits album, as my brother did (I was listening to his copy), you may think at some point how it’s odd that his voice in the songs recorded at live concerts is a bit different. Or you may think nothing of it because you know studios do things with voices.
Such as use one person’s voice and another person’s face.
When Plastic Bertrand – real name Roger Allen François Jouret – was hired by a producer to be a start and sing songs the producer had written, the song “Ça plane pour moi” had already been recorded – with the producer and songwriter, one Lou Deprijck, on vocals. In fact, all four of Plastic’s first albums were with Deprijck’s voice. Plastic was a great face and a lively performer. But Deprijck didn’t even want him singing on the albums. He was a cellophane puppet.
This fact came to light quite recently. In fact, Jouret only admitted the truth of it in 2010.
And I read it and I said, “Huh.” And then I said, “Of course.”
Is nothing sacred? Well, maybe not nothing. But sometimes things aren’t just profane. They’re cellophane.
For one thing, I never knew what it meant. But when you’re young, you hear plenty of words that you don’t know the meanings of and you treat them as lexical units and assume they must mean something.
For another thing, it’s not so much a word as a magical entity that, as you pursue it, breaks into many, flaking off phantoms here and there, and you have to try to follow and find the word at the bottom – the one that, in reality flaked off all those phantoms as it headed towards you, and the word you started with was really one of the phantom endpoints. It is a one that contains a many, and it is one of many that lead to one. And what it leads to is not octozumba. Except in my version.
It’s also associated with a gesture. Or a set of gestures. Or nothing. Depending on who you’re asking. But always, always, always, it is associated with a song. How the song goes varies a little, mind you…
Let’s start where it started for me.
When I was in the early years of primary school, we lived in Exshaw, Alberta, a small town with a large cement plant set at the entrance to the Rockies and not too far west from the Morley Stoney Indian Reserve. My father worked on the reserve while my mother taught – at the time, at Exshaw School, but afterward at the reserve school. In Exshaw, my childhood experiences took place with playmates and friends and classmates and with my brother. My brother, Reggie, unlike me, belonged to Cub Scouts. Where he learned interesting things.
One of the things he learned was a song. Well, he learned more than one, but I’m talking about this one. I also remember a gesture, which actually goes with a different song about junior birdmen: you make goggles by making thumb-and-forefinger rings and then putting them over your eyes with your hands upside-down, palms against forehead. This had nothing to do with octozumba but I always remember it with octozumba. Somehow the gesture seems octozumba-ish, perhaps because ocular.
Octozumba came from a song that I remember quite clearly:
Octozumba zumba zumba, octozumba zumba zay
Octozumba zumba zumba, octozumba zumba zay
Hold ’em down, you mighty warriors,
Hold ’em down, you mighty chiefs
[repeat senselessly]
Clearly this song had something to do with Indians: warriors, chiefs, you know. The music sounded sort of like the music associated with Indians in western movies (you know, with cowboys). What was octozumba? I think I was too young to think “octo = 8,” but I recognized the octo, like in octopus. And zumba was maybe something like Montezuma or something.
Anyway, it had the air of the secret knowledge passed from one young boy to another. Reggie had learned this at Cub Scouts, and it was a new thing I was learning that seemed to have been passed down as special information. It was a thing. It meant a thing. It was a thing you did. Add it to the ever-growing list of Things.
Fast-forward four decades. I’m sitting in Toronto and I wonder whether someone has YouTubed this song or what. I start trying to find it.
To begin with, I find a site with some warm-ups for improv performers. It has the word(s) as ay kazimba. I also find a site with some Girl Scout songs. It has the word as akamazuma, and gives not “mighty warriors” but “Zulu warriors”…!
More digging follows. It’s a Boy Scouts song. It’s an army song. It’s a rugby song. It’s a drinking song. It was used during the Boer war. It supported the Zulus. No, it taunted them. It wasn’t Zulus, it was Swazis. The words are “Hold ’em down,” “Take them down,” “Haul ’em down,” “Get ’em down,” “See him dance,” “Hold him back,” “See him there”… The gestures are a complicated series of touching the leg and/or arm of the persons on either side; no, they’re a dance; no, it’s drinking; no, it’s hauling down your pants; no, it’s… what gestures?
In all this, and especially with the aid of a very replete discussion of it at The Mudcat Café, I come to find that the song is usually called “The Zulu Warrior” and was recorded by The Brothers Four. But not first. It was first recorded in 1946 by a South African named Josef Marais, who made a career collecting and singing folk songs, most of the time with his wife, Miranda. Here, give it a listen; the tune is just as I remember it:
Marais didn’t write it, though; he just wrote it down. It probably does date from the Boer War era, if not earlier. Among the people who fought in the Boer War (and lived in South Africa throughout that period, with contact with the Zulus) was Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts.
I will leave you to consider what the evolution of octozumba – I should say ai kama zimba – demonstrates about the nature and causes of change in languages and culture.
I’m still not sure what ai kama zimba zimba zayo means, though it does seem to mean something. One commenter at The Mudcat Café, Ewan McVicar, says a Swazi prince told him it means “a warrior should be brave.” It happens that kama simba means ‘like a lion’ in Swahili, which is a related language – not that closely related, though. Zulu for ‘lion’ is ibhubesi… not sure about Swazi; I haven’t a Swazi dictionary.
It is late now. I shall have to continue my hunt for the true meaning later… although I already know the meaning of octozumba. It’s all that I’ve just told you.
Sesquiotica 