Category Archives: word tasting notes

oculus

Posted on December 29, 2014 | 4 comments

How does this word taste? Is it something succulent, even Lucullan, or is it more reminiscent of an occult octopus (or even Cthulhu)? Is it something from a deep and dark past? Or is it a messenger from the future, shining a light – or a beam of darkness?

It gives us so much to work with. Three syllables and only six letters, but look: in the heart, ulu, a word for a curved knife, shaped like a blade with a cup on either side; flanking that, c and s, one curve and two, related letters, passing through the ulu like an occult transformation; at the start, o, like an eye. This word seems made from Masonic symbolism like that pyramid on the US dollar bill. You know, the one with an all-seeing eye on it. Latin oculus omni.

That’s what oculus is: ‘eye’. If you have glasses, your prescription has lines for OD and OS. That stands for oculus dexter – ‘right eye’ – and oculus sinister – ‘left eye’. Hmm, dexter and sinister. Like the good and bad side of oculus. (Except lately people hear “Dexter” and think “serial killer.” Thanks, TV.)

What you may think of when you hear oculus will depend on the spheres you travel in. (Get it? Spheres? Eyeballs are… never mind, moving on.) If you geek out on virtual reality, you’ll immediately think of Oculus Rift, a virtual-reality headset for gaming. If you’re in it, everything is awesome. But to outside observers, you look like a complete dork. So it’s all in where you see it from.

The same is probably true for the movie Oculus, which is a horror film made in 2013. Some people seem to have liked it; others found it… ridoculus.

If you’re into wine, particularly fairly good Okanagan wine, Oculus is the name of a line of Bordeaux-style blends from Mission Hill, a very nice looking winery set high above the lake with a full line of reliable wines and a heckuva tour. They named their pricy red blend Oculus after the architectural feature that lets light into their cellars.

Architectural feature. Yes, that’s really where you’ll see oculus. The circular skylight (if there is one) in the middle of a dome is an oculus. Similar round skylights in other parts of roofs are also called oculus (the plural would be oculi, but it’s not common to have more than one).

And then there’s the World Trade Centre. The new transportation hub, designed by Santiago Calatrava, has a feature they call an oculus. It is indeed a skylight. But it’s not exactly a hole in a dome. It’s the whole thing that’s there in place of a dome: a large humped ridge with wings, or spines; some have called it dinosaur bones. It may be seen to resemble a closed – or barely-open – eye with long eyelashes. There are a few other analogies also available. What it does not resemble is a round skylight. Or anything small. (The ulus ending suggests smallness. Compare loculus, ‘little place’, from locus, ‘place’; a loculus is a niche, for instance for bodies in a mortuary or catacombs.)

Well, so be it. It’s a bit of a crisp, arch word, with tastes bright and dark. I find it succulent like coquilles. But what I wonder most is: Is there a locus with an oculus in Ucluelet?

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cuss

Posted on December 26, 2014 | Leave a comment

Welp, it’s time we was discussin’ cussin’. It’s a cussed subject an’ some folks can get mighty cussed about it. Use a cuss with the wrong person an’ you might get a cuff on yer head. Or yer hands! Or at least a stern discussion. Or some kinda repercussion.

Funny thing ’bout cuss. It jus’ has that percussive sound. Like a concussion. It has a hard stop at the start an’ then paffs off into a soft hiss passin’. Sorta like a box hittin’ the floor an’ slidin’. An’ the heart of it is just the most neutral an’ central vowel you kin get. So it sorta fits with the sound o’ the kinda word it describes, with that sound o’ hittin’ or a tire burstin’. I’m sure you kin think o’ some o’ them cuss words, with their percussive sounds, an’ maybe it won’t be too bad if I point out that “cuss” said backwards is “suck.” But if you wanna know more an’ you don’t mind readin’ a whole lotta cusswords, there’s an article on it on Strong Language, which is a whole blog on the topic. If y’don’t like the sweary stuff, yer better decussin’ that site. (That’s a fancy way of sayin’ “X it out.”)

Why do people cuss anyways? Seems like breakin’ a rule breaks a bit o’ tension too, relieves stress, accordin’ to some science (same blog, so watch out). Makes ya feel better, right up to the moment yer ma washes yer mouth out.

So this word cuss, it comes from curse. American dialect. Jus’ drop the r an’ y’get somethin’ much more percussive. No curlin’ or growlin’ like a scurvy cur, just a quick back o’ the hand. Loses the literal sense of callin’ down divine wrath, just becomes words workin’ like a hit to the head.

Heck, some people would say you kin give someone a cussin’ out without usin’ any actual cusswords. An’ a person can be cussed without ever bein’ cussed at, because cussed – that’s two syllables there – means ‘stubborn, pigheaded’. But cusswords, well, now, those are cross words, an’ words you don’t use in crosswords.

How about all those other cuss words, like discuss, concuss, percussion, an’ so on? All from the same Latin root, the cuss comin’ ultimately from quatere ‘strike, shake, dash’. The exception is decuss, which we usually say decussate (when we say it at all), which comes from decussis, which means the number ten, which was written X, which is what you make if you decussate. So you decussate to make a cross, but if someone makes you cross, well, then, you jus’ cuss.

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cabin

Posted on December 25, 2014 | 2 comments

It’s Christmas. It’s winter. It’s dark now as I write this, and the streets and roads are sparkling with starlight or decorations, with snow or rain. I feel sentimental, and am sent to my mental cabinet to retrieve some memories.

Here: a little cabin, glowing in the cold windy dark. A small space of light encased by night, a warmth to cross a frozen yard towards. Cold and dark, night, and beckoning light from a small wooden refuge, warm enough for the time: this, to me, is a Christmas picture, and one I have walked through more than once.

When I was an infant we lived for some duration in a cabin, though I don’t remember it. But we moved several times in my childhood and youth, and on two occasions we were in mid-move at Christmas and spent it in guest cabins, once at a motel in Canmore, once at the Rafter Six Ranch.

I can recall passing a jolly Christmas Eve in the main lodge at the ranch, with light and warmth and people and songs and food and beverage, and then stepping out into the cold dark, just by myself; my parents had already headed over to the cabin. The contrast was stark: light, warmth, sound; then the door shut, and none of the three remained, just me alone at night outdoors in winter at the edge of the Rockies. It was no Thomas Kinkade painting. The snow was windswept, crusted and gravelly, bare patches of dead grass peeking through. The sound was just my feet and the rustling of my jacket, and perhaps the buffeting of the wind. It was a familiar enough scene; I’d grown up around there. But this time I was heading not to a large warm home fully inhabited with stuff, so many rooms owned and furnished and worn easily like personal clothing. This time I was heading to a small cabin, not quite as warm, with just our suitcases’ capacity of effects, the rest packed up somewhere else to be delivered to a new place hundreds of kilometres to the north. We were moving away from where I had grown up, and this cabin was the last warm light at the edge of the woods.

I was already at university at the time, I should say. I was just home for Christmas. But this time there was no home to come to. Well, so be it. Many people spend Christmas at beach resorts, padding to cabanas in the sun to change into swimwear and refresh their beverages. They will end up back home, and all will return to its wonted ways. For me this time, home had stopped being one place and had not yet started being another. We were at a limen, in a temporary shelter, a glowing light across the cold empty snowy and stony night.

This was not a Wenceslas moment; the distance from lodge to cabin was much less than a league. I crossed the barren easily in a couple minutes’ walk and went in. It was not spacious; it was not as well heated as a home; the shower produced a stream less warm and strong than a horse’s relief. But it was there, a light across the frigid silent empty night, with the woods behind.

To me, that is the pattern of a cabin: a cozy remote space of transience, a refuge of light in the great surrounding dark.

I have spent other Christmas Eves in other cabins: the motel cabin in Canmore, similar but less isolated, and the passenger cabin of an airplane – a metal container of light flying through the windy night. I have been in other cabins not at Christmas – our cabin on a cruise ship, for instance: another transient box of light, from which you can look out at the vast darkness of the sea. And I have taken many a cab in the night. We also have our cultural images: little cabin in the woods, Lincoln’s log cabin, perhaps Uncle Tom’s cabin (no snow there, though); in Quebec, the cabane à sucre, a sugar shack in the maple forest.

Some people have lived permanently in cabins. My family lived in one, as I have said, when I was an infant. But originally a cabin was a temporary structure made of light materials, perhaps even a tent – something more resembling a beach cabana. Of course cabana comes from the same source, late Latin capanna. In English the term shifted over to refer to a more permanent structure made of rough materials. They are typically small, and it is from that that we get the ship and airplane sense (on the other hand, taxi cab is from taximeter cabriolet, not related). But the log cabin type can expand: the international airport terminal for Mont-Tremblant is a log cabin, but a very comfortable two-storey one. You do still have to walk across an open space outdoors to get to it, though – there are no jetways.

And a cabinet? A small cabin, originally. Our storage-space sense draws on Italian gabinetto, which comes also from capanna but more altered. Your cabinet is not a light in the dark but a dark space from which you draw things to bring them to light and use. Your memory is a cabinet, and you keep – among other things – the images of your past cabins in it. What better time to bring them out than Christmas?

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jinx

Posted on December 24, 2014 | 8 comments

We just watched The Theory of Everything. I noticed that the editor was named Jinx Godfrey.

Hmm. Jinx. Haven’t done that one yet. Until now.

Jinx Godfrey’s given name is actually Jessica (of course I dug up her info online; easily found, she’s a well respected film editor), but Jinx is much more catchy, don’t you think? I associate it with one other person in the movies: Jinx Johnson, a Bond girl played by Halle Berry in Die Another Day.

Jinx is also a name (I find) for a female supervillain from Wonder Woman comics and for a female soldier from GI Joe. The lead singer of the American metal band Coven is named Jinx Dawson – her given name from birth (after a family name, Jinks). There’s a line of clothing called J!NX.

Now tell me why Jinx would seem like a name more for a woman than for a man.

No doubt there are elements of traditional masculinist prejudices: women being bad luck and all that. The usual pain-in-the-neck prejudices.

But what else? Its rhyme with minx, perhaps? How about some desired hijinks? Any recollection of the Sphinx or perhaps of Syrinx, both female? Or of wry little winks? The final x has that promissory kiss of sex and just happens to show up on various words for female versions of persons: aviatrix, editrix, executrix… Such multifarious links.

Originally, of course, a jinx could be anyone or anything. The OED gives Jonah as an epitome of the type: the ship he was on was doomed to sink until he was tossed overboard. Even today, we have many jinxes not at all associated with women. If two people say something at the same time, a tradition is to say “Jinx! You owe me a beer” – whoever does so first supposedly collects the beer (although my ledger of beers owed and owing through this claim surely totals in the dozens and yet none has ever been paid).

Also, if a person makes a forward-looking statement that seems to presuppose a positive outcome of an uncertain endeavour, that may be thought to jinx it. Any time some Olympic commentator says something like “The only question is what colour {his|her} medal will be,” that is a jinx; I can’t even tell you how many times (but at least several in my hearing), after that has been said, some disaster has befallen the athlete in question, putting him or her out of the medals. I wish those bloody sportscasters would owe me a beer after doing that, and the athlete too, and pay up. A complete pain the neck – just torture to hear it. I have a bird every time they do.

A bird? How about a wryneck – the bird that shares its name with a condition also known as torticollis that is indeed a big pain in the neck? This wryneck, a kind of woodpecker, has a sinuous neck that allows it to turn its head nearly 180 degrees back, and they use this twisting along with hissing as a threat display. You could consider them Linda Blairs (of The Exorcist) of the bird world, minus the projectile emesis. They also have a history – no doubt related – of being used in witchcraft.

The Greek name of the wryneck is ἴυγξ iugx (pronounced “iunx”), which was Latinized as iynx, which in modern Latin – which differentiates j from i – is jynx. This jynx is the etymon of jinx; the word for the ill-fated person or thing is taken directly from the word for the bird, and respelled.

Actually I like the y spelling better. It’s true that the i spelling has the two dots, but the y spelling has the two tails (and how many tales!), and y is a less common letter, and anyway, maybe a bit of XY would balance out the sexes for this word.

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mattock

Posted on December 21, 2014 | 2 comments

When I was a kid, I noted a dirty heavy metal implement with a wooden handle in the basement. I recognized it from cartoons, movies, and so forth: it was a pick. Too heavy for me to wield well, if at all, and I was not so reckless as to try anyway.

Only I was wrong.

Not about wielding it, oh no. It was one of those truly obvious someone-could-get-hurt things. I was wrong about what it was. I learned a few years later its true name.

A mattock.

A mattock?

To this day, that word just doesn’t seem right for the thing. A mattock is like a pick but with an adze on one side of the head rather than points on both sides. It’s heavy and hard and sharp and dirty and seems just like the sort of thing some hapless miner would be found with buried in his head by a vanished enemy. I mean, any mattock I’ve seen looks like its apotheosis involves great gobs of drying, crusted blood all over it. And even in its daily use it is for hacking into earth and rocks and being covered in rust and/or dirt. Sure, the sound of its use might come across something like “ttock” (or more likely “thud” and perhaps “arrgggghhhh” after that). And sure, the trajectory of the word in the mouth goes past the soft /m/ at the lips, through a harder /t/ on the tongue-tip, to a sticking /k/ at the back, like a mattock burying into something (or someone). But the word mattock has completely different tastes and overtones for me.

Mattress.

Buttocks.

Two of the world’s soft, comfortable things.

Other such matt matters as matting and matte do not much harden it.

How about the ttock? Taken by itself it would seem to be the exact sound of that pointy end as it meets the unhelmeted skull of the grizzled gold-digger. But it shows up in other words that may not flavour it strongly for most speakers but don’t really reinforce the hardness: bittock, ‘little bit’; brattock, ‘little brat’ (hmm, I was one of those once); dattock, a West African fruit tree; futtock, a middle timber in a ship; hattock, ‘little hat’; kittock, a disrespectful diminutive for a girl or young woman; puttock, a bird of prey; rittock, a tern or small gull; and scuttock, a guillemot. (I thank the Oxford English Dictionary for those.)

Then there are name associations slightly farther afield. Matlock, a TV detective played by Andy Griffith (a favourite of my mother); Ford Madox Ford, born Ford Hermann Hueffer, a British novelist; Ford Madox Brown, a pre-Raphaelite painter and the grandfather of the novelist; Béla Bartók, a Hungarian composer. Indeed, Ford Madox Brown often painted rural folks and workmen, the sorts of people who might use mattocks (though I was unable to find a painting by him in which one is actually represented), and Béla Bartók loved and was strongly influenced by folk music, the music of such working people as also might use such earthworking implements. So perhaps if we crossed the painter with the composer we would get affordable brown mattocks.

Where did we get mattocks? Oh, heck, they’ve been around since time immemorial. As has this word. Actually, it’s a bit of a problem: there is a limit to the memory of where this word came from. We know that it was present in Old English (in various spellings). But we don’t know where Old English got it. Cognates in neighbouring Celtic languages are known to have been borrowed from English, not vice versa. The best we can do, though there’s an attestation gap between the one and the other, is a conjectural connection to Vulgar Latin matteuca ‘club’.

Perhaps with enough digging the attestation gap will be closed. Someone will need to spend the necessary time on their buttocks looking. Alas, it interferes with the necessary time on mattress sleeping. Right now, I know which one I’ll pick.

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xanthoxylon

Posted on December 18, 2014 | 3 comments

This word takes a lexical game of noughts and crosses to the nth degree. Indeed, looking at it, your eyes may be o o or x x; it looks as artificial as nylon, like something from sci-fi or fantasy. It reveals itself gradually, perhaps acrimoniously. Tell me how it’s even pronounced.

When I look at it, in a little moment I see xantho – from a Greek root meaning ‘yellow’ – and xylon – which might look similar to, for instance, xylophone, and rightly so, because they share a root – meaning ‘wood’. So ‘yellow wood’ – which is correct, that’s where it comes from – and because in English we have this idea you can’t start a syllable with /ks/, we say “zantho” for xantho and “zylon” for xylon. Which is how it strikes my eyes: “zanthozylon.”

But when the two parts are put together and read by people less familiar with Greek etymological elements, you get a single word that comes out as “zanthoksilon,” the dictionary pronunciation. Which kind of gives me a toothache. It sounds like a cross between an ocelot, an ox, and a Cylon (from Battlestar Galactica), from Xanth (a fantasy world created by Piers Anthony; most of the 38 books in the series have puns in their titles – I like Crewel Lye, subtitle A caustic yarn).

This word leads not into fantasy, however, but into botany. Which can be even more absorbing. Read this description of the plant:

Shrub 5 to 10 feet high, branches alternate, with scattered prickles, sharp, strong and straight. Leaves alternate, oddly pinnate, petiole round, often inerme, folioles 9 or 11 opposite, nearly sessile, ovate very sharp, with slight glandular serratures, somewhat downy beneath. Flowers in small sessile umbels, near the origin of young shoots, small and greenish. Diclinous polygamous, some shrubs bearing pistillate flowers, and others two kinds, both staminate and complete or perfect. These last have a 5 parted calyx with segments erect, oblong obtuse. Five stamens on the base of the gynophore, filaments subulate, anthers sagittate, 4 celled. Central gynophore divided into the stipes of the pistils, which are 3 or 4, oval, with a converging terete style and obtuse, stigma. Staminate flowers with an oval trifid abortive gynophore. Pistillate flowers with a smaller calyx. Capsules stipitate, elliptical punctate, reddish green, two valved, with one seed, oval and blackish.

That is from an 1830 book by C.S. Rafinesque, nicely quoted at Henriette’s Herbal Homepage. Such welters of technical descriptions have a curiously relaxing effect on me. I suppose they may cause some people to tense up.

Anyway, it’s a shrub with fairly standard-shaped leaves. It is noted for some medicinal qualities. It is used for, among other things, digestion and relief of rheumatism. It has a citrusy smell and taste, but is astringent.

The acrimony is not felt at first, when the bark or liquid is taken in the mouth, but unfolds itself gradually by a burning sensation on the tongue and palate.

Its stems may have a numbing effect, and it has a common name of Toothache bush:

In toothache, it is only a palliative, as I have ascertained on myself, the burning sensation which it produces on the mouth, merely mitigating the other pain, which returns afterwards.

But at least while you’re reading the botanist’s notes, the pain disappears. Or else, depending on your leaning, the pain appears, to disappear when you are done reading.

You will not find this word exactly as such in Wikipedia. The English pronunciation has trumped the etymology, and Latinate endings have trumped the Greek; it’s in there as Zanthoxylum.

The plant comes in a few different kinds. I will allow one more observation from our 1830 botanist – an observation that presents an acrimony that unfolds gradually:

This genus, whose name means yellow wood, and which many botanists write Zanthoxylum by mistake, has many anomalies, because accuracy appears of very little moment to the Linnaean botanists.

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clackled

Posted on December 17, 2014 | 2 comments

My friend Trish’s daughter Nenya is a neologist. I’ve tasted one of her creations before: scratchative. (Trish’s husband, Jaba, is likely where Nenya inherited this from – he’s the coiner of fugxury, among others.) Today Trish told me of another word Nenya has come up with: clackled.

You probably won’t guess what it means from the sound, although once you know what it means, it may seem suitable – and will surely tell you a little bit about Nenya’s perceptions. It’s obviously formed on a phonaesthematic basis – made of bits that just sound right because of impressions picked up from other words. Kids do that a lot, and adults do it a fair bit too.

Nenya obviously knows inflectional and derivational morphology; she has the –ed ending on the word, making an adjectival past participle and implying a verb clackle or, perhaps, a noun clackled (yes, we can make certain kinds of adjectives by putting –ed on nouns – the kind that signify the noun having been imposed on what it modifies, or being worn by it). Either way, the word means something has happened to its subject.

But Nenya also knows what just sounds right to her. So do most people.

Now, there are all sorts of words this word can bring to mind. Cackle, heckle, tackle, trickle, spackle, pickle, shackle… some of them are formed with the verbal –le frequentative suffix, like dazzle and twinkle; some of them (an overlapping set) involve binding or other forms of physical contact, and some (again overlapping) involve messiness. The cl calls forth cloth, clothes, class, clock, click, clap; some of them are things that may encompass or apply to the skin.

What Nenya uses clackled for is ‘all wrapped and twisted up in bedclothes’. If you’re the sort of person who twists and turns in your sleep, you may wake up with the sheets and covers all twisted around you and difficult to disengage from. To be in this condition is to be clackled.

That interests me. I find clackled rather hard, percussive, like clap and clatter, which bedclothes never are (well, if yours are, maybe don’t tell me about it). But yes, it has the close-to-the-skin cl, and it has the catching mess of ackled. It also crackles as words enjoyed by children often do.

But it’s not to me to say whether I find it suitable or not. Might as well say orange doesn’t seem very orangey. The word is clackled; it is there, and when you are awake to it, you already cannot escape it.

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W

Posted on December 16, 2014 | 9 comments

I guess I’m doing a letter tasting today. But this letter has piqued my attention a few times just recently.

On Sunday, for one thing, I was in the antiques market, and I saw a set of cloth bookmarks embroidered Warren. I could have bought them, but I didn’t see it as worthwhile. Why would I have bought them? For my dad. That’s his name. He has a lot of books, too, but some musty old cloth bookmarks probably wouldn’t be the number one thing he wanted.

So that brought the initial W to mind. Also recently, I noticed that one of my friends has a middle initial W. I have no idea what it stands for. I should ask.

But there’s so much more to W. It’s the beginning of some very common names (especially William, one of which I work with), though not so many other words. It’s in the bottom third of the alphabet in terms of frequency of use. It’s worth 4 points in Scrabble. And it has a few striking cultural associations.

One of them is George W. Bush, of course, who went by “Dubya” to distinguish him from his father, George H.W. Bush (the W’s stood for the same thing: Walker). For many people, that’s a rather bitter taste to the letter. But the buffed-down “dubya” version at least takes it a little away from the letter itself. I would rather have another W politician: Kathleen Wynne, the premier of Ontario.

Another cultural association is a magazine, W, originally Women’s Wear Daily, an oversized glossy fashion arbiter (but split the letter and you get VV, which at least among some Canadians stands for Value Village, which is a very economical place to get clothing). Another is a chain of modernist hotels (W Hotels, obviously) run by Starwood and aimed at youthful travellers (but just the ones with an adult amount of cash).

And there are Watts: you’ll see a W on every lightbulb. There is tungsten, which is found in some bulbs and has the symbol W on the periodic table (from German Wolfram). There is the first letter of every US radio station east of the Mississippi (versus K in the west). And of course there is the world wide web, www.

Which is… three letters or six? I mean, it’s a double U, right?

Well, now, in French, they call it double V. Doesn’t that make more sense? This pair of plunging necklines – or fangs, or notches, or or… It’s not UU, right?

Not now it’s not. But it’s time I broke the news to you about U.

You know how in Latin inscriptions all the u’s are v’s? SENATVS POPVLVSQVE ROMANVS and all that. Well, in Latin there was just one letter, shaped V, and it stood for a vowel in some places and a consonant (classically pronounced [w]) in others: VENI VIDI VICI. These days we render the vowels in Latin as u and the consonants as v. But just because that’s what we’ve been doing in English… for the last couple of centuries, but not much more than that.

Seriovsly! The shape u appeared several hundred years ago from scribes writing v cursively. It came to be a variant form of the letter. They were used interchangeably; some printers would prefer one for the start of a word and the other for elsewhere, but it was not formalized. Look at 16th and 17th century texts and you uuill see. Even in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755, they are treated as one letter – although by that time the practice was well established of the new u shape being for the vowel and the old v shape being for the consonant.

Old English didn’t actually need a v consonant, because there was no phoneme /v/ in Old English; [v] was just how /f/ was pronounced between two vowels. The French influence helped English come to treat /v/ as a sound in its own right, since French already had that as a separate phoneme and English borrowed a lot of words from it.

But one thing Old English did have as a phoneme was /w/. Yes, they had a /w/ phoneme before they had a /v/. How did they write that? Not with V! Old English used a character borrowed from runes, called wynn and shaped like a cross between a p and a y: ƿ. If you read modern editions of Old English texts, they use a w in place of it for reasons that are probably obvious.

So why did wynn lose? Continental type sets, mainly. Same reason we no longer have eth (ð) and thorn (þ), which would actually be very useful. Printing was invented on the European continent, and they didn’t have those letters. So eth and thorn were replaced by th (and, in a few instances for a while, y as in ye olde), and wynn was replaced by two U’s, which had been in use on the continent for some centuries already to stand for /w/, since the Latin /w/ had shifted to /v/ in many places, causing the consonant V to stand for, well, /v/. The two U’s could be shaped as either UU or VV at first, but the practice of using VV won out, and a single letter W came to be. English is certainly not the only language in the area to use that letter – although other Germanic ones used it for a fricative, not a glide. We got the practice from Norman French. Standard Parisian French, on the other hand, resisted the letter W for many centuries.

The result of all that is a letter that, unlike the others, has a three-syllable name (how ironic that it should be the one we have to say three times: double u double u double u dot whatever dot com) – and a name that does not use the letter itself in the spelling. It is a contrary, uncertain letter, redundant yet necessary, the letter of questions (who? what? when? where? why?), sharp in shape yet smooth in sound, an old sound with a new form but named after an old form of that new form, presenting to the eyes allure or threat: V-necks or fangs? Could be a fifty-fifty chance… or, in Roman numerals, a five-five chance.

Five-five? Yes, W can be a little pun on the US speed limit, 55. But you know speed limits are made to be transgressed. Take a risk: Double you or nothing.

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misophonia, misophony

Posted on December 15, 2014 | 2 comments

Doug Linzey has drawn my attention to the article “The Horrible Anger You Feel at Hearing Someone Chewing Is Called Misophonia.” Ah, misophonia. Not a word in the OED per se, but made of serviceable combining parts: miso, from Greek μισο miso, from μισεῖν misein ‘hate’ (verb), and phon, from Greek ϕωνος phonos, from ϕωνή phoné ‘voice’ but referring to sound in general, and the ia that makes it a noun of condition (like schizophrenia). We have misanthropy, ‘hatred of people’, and misoneism, ‘hatred of new things’, and we have telephone and microphone and all those other phone words. So hating sounds is easily called misophony, and a condition in which you hate sounds is misophonia. Sounds good, no? So to speak.

Now, I don’t feel horrible anger at hearing someone chewing. Heck, I was recently in front of someone on a bus who was chewing gum so loudly it was almost drowning out everything else (it sounded like a gruesome sci-fi sound effect), and I didn’t feel anything more than mild annoyance and greater curiosity. I do feel actual pain in response to certain kinds of loud, sharp noises, but not anger. If I feel distaste for a certain noise, it’s typically because of bad associations: it kept me awake or otherwise disturbed me several times, perhaps. I don’t like the sound a phone ringing, but just because it’s so demanding. I’m not sure any of that is misophonia.

Doug tells me he experiences something like misophonia in response to certain radio and TV personalities’ voices. Not horrible anger, perhaps, but certainly irritation. He has long disliked Jian Ghomeshi’s voice (way ahead of the curve on that one); he doesn’t like Rex Murphy’s either (I bet there’s a club for people who dislike Rex Murphy’s voice), but he tolerates it on occasion; and he used to be OK with Stuart McLean, but since McLean started trying to be a cross between Garrison Keillor and W.O. Mitchell he has to turn him off – actually, I’m right with him on that one: his theme music makes me dash for the off button before I can hear him speak. And if wanting to turn off the radio or TV as soon as you hear someone counts as misophonia, Ben Folds is on the list for me too, as are a number of singers featured in commercials, and, come to think of it, ukulele strumming too – just because of overexposure.

That’s not a medical condition, though. The misophonia – or, in Dutch, misofonie – described by the University of Amsterdam Academic Medical Center is a psychiatric condition, much stronger, not just a matter of taste. There is debate over whether it should be a diagnosis included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. So real misophonia would be to garden-variety misophony – just hating sound like we hate bad smells or certain foods – as, say, bipolar disorder is to moodiness.

Which means if you simply miss euphonia, if you’re mainly miffed at messy phonetics, if the sound of a phone musters your ire, if you’re nettled at slurping or munching, you are experiencing what we can call misophony but do not necessarily have a clinically problematic case of misophonia.

It’s a rather euphonious word itself, isn’t it, misophonia? Mellifluous. It has two nasal consonants and two voiceless fricatives, and the rest are vowels. If you feel misophony towards stops (/b d g p t k/) or affricates or even voiced fricatives, this word is perfectly fine for you. Also if you dislike mid or low front vowels or high back vowels. But, honestly, if you have a problem with those, you really have to recuse yourself from speech communication altogether.

Maybe we can add some extra morphemes to specify the kind of misophony or misophonia. Hate the sound of chewing? Misomasticophony, perhaps (though that does sandwich a Latin root between two Greek ones). Hate the sound of a phone ringing? Misotelephonophony. And if you are driven to rage at the sound of someone slurping soup in a sushi restaurant, that would be misomisophonia. (Also, if you have that, stay away from me.)

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descant

Posted on December 11, 2014 | 1 comment

Descant. For me, it decants to a song, a play, a magazine, a poem, a dance.

Of course to a song; descant comes from Latin dis ‘apart’ and cantus ‘song’ by way of French. It referred originally to part singing, especially the highest part, and these days usually refers to a special high line added above the melody. I first became aware of the term and the concept when I was a child at church in Banff, at Christmastime. On the last verse of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” Inge Sheppard – a good soprano of German extraction, and host of the glühwein party after the midnight service – would come out on the top with “O come! O come!” and a line of crystal diffractions of the melody following. This, I learned, was a descant, which I took to calling a “desk calendar.” To my father’s credit, though he was the one who taught me to pun, he never said “She descant keep herself from doing it.” Well, not in my earshot, at least.

The next distinctive sighting of this word, for me, was in the play Richard III by Shakespeare. The title character, a hunchback, in his opening soliloquy – the one that starts “Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York” – says,

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity

Obviously he’s not singing a high line. This is a figurative extension: he means comment on it, muse on it, wax philosophical on it. And so we have a paradox in action: the high-flown poetry and the word for a high-floating voice take an indecent descent into scandal, filling five acts before the scoundrel is chastened.

The next thread of sound that separates from the choral mass for me for this word is a magazine, Descant, a book-thick Canadian literary organ of considerable quality. Its candle is made all the more incandescent for me by its having published a prose poem of mine, in an issue focused on dance and edited by Mary Newberry (a lovely person worth knowing).

Alas, I have learned just yesterday that Descant is ceasing publication. Its funds are scanted, and now Canadian literature will likewise be scanted. This is sad. To honour it, or at least to remember it, I present here what they presented for me those few years ago, my descant on dance and dancer, dance as a dancer’s incandescent descant.

Your Feet

I have an issue with your feet. Your feet, your two bound servants, your two eternal cigarettes you snuff out on the stage with telegraphic stuttering, your feet, your feet, that you disown and bind to stumps, your feet that launch you into air and hold you hovering, drifting, fluttering, twisting, your feet, your feet, your feet feet feet feet arms are waving, hands sweep smoothly like gulls in glycerine, your nose your chin your washboard chest, your tits that are nothing but dots, your stomach like a soft-shelled crab, all pulling upwards, frightened upwards, lifting high and pushing, urging, all by force of repulsion and fear of your feet, your feet, your underlying unacknowledged candy ribbon-wrapped stilts, two bunches of cracked firewood, cracked and dirty tar-stained bloodstained ribbon-wrapped glue-bound dripping lit torches burning with a fire that creeps up, up, up and up your legs, the pain, the flames, the hellish earth, the planet, curling smoke from frantic tapping to snuff out the agony, everything fleeing, reaching to stay up above it, and the more you snuff it the fiercer it burns and the bones, the serpent muscles, brown dot nipples, chimney throat, razor chin, straining nose, gothic cheekbones, boiling eyes, hair, arms, fingers flickering into the smoky ceiling, all are fire, all are the flame and nothing but the flame that peels and curls and furls and arcs to the lighting grid, a body of flame that only wants to escape from flame, the fire from the wood from the feet that shoots through your insect legs and forgetting itself screams for heaven and cannot for even the length of a breath last away from the earth, but leaps and smokes and strives to lie in the blackening blue, and you flicker and burn like a moth with its wings on fire, and in all of this I can’t even see your feet. Take off those shoes, touch them to me, ignite me now.

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