Category Archives: word tasting notes

expiscate

Posted on November 18, 2014 | 1 comment

I am a lexical escapist; this is perspicuously the case. Each evening I pick a specific lexeme, expiscate it from the lexicon, and explicate it luxuriantly.

In the above paragraph, my copy of Microsoft Word puts a squiggly red underline beneath exactly one word. I suspect the same word hooked your eyes as they tried to swim past it. As David Astle (@dontattempt) tweeted last month, “There’s no autocorrect on god’s green earth that will recognise expiscate – to fish out.”

And yet it has all the right parts: ex – ‘out’; pisc – ‘fish’; and that suffix that makes it an act, a verb, ate (which may also be what happened to the fish after its extraction). You will have seen that pisc swimming through various words, though sometimes a fish out of water: an Episcopalian has no more fish than opals, nor are there fish in the flashes of an episcotister; there is nothing literally fishy about concupiscence, and pisco does not taste like fish (it’s Peru’s answer to grappa); but pisciculture, piscicide, and Pisces are all truly fishy.

But expiscate is not used much. A lad with a rod strolling down to the stream will not tell his mother “I’m going to expiscate”; he would get farther saying he was going to figure skate. The TV news talkers, describing a depleted fishery, will not say “It has been expiscated”; indeed, even if it were a technical term, they would not do one of their “It’s called expiscation” schticks on it.

Why not? Because they couldn’t fish it out of their mouths successfully. The sound of the word swims back and forth on the stream of /s/ between hard rocks at back /k/ and front /p/ and back /k/ again, and in the effort the tongue flops and flounders like a freshly caught trout. (Or it trouts like a flounder, as you wish.) If you can say this word ten times in a row without vexing and perplexing your lips and tongue, your lexical organ is indeed dexterous. It is such a crisp and succulent word, echoing spice and pixies and sex and expiate and so many others, it ought anyway to be reserved for such rare occasions, poetry and fine language, as merit the exercise.

But also, fish out is perfectly fine for something as earthy, watery, slippery, and smelly as dealing with real fish. A word such as expiscate escapes the surly literal bonds. Incidental expectoration notwithstanding, it sparkles best in a more figurative setting. It is a word for fishing out as you would fish a word out of a dictionary (or your Twitter feed). And I am happy to report that, while a dictionary is a fine pond for expiscating, it is unlikely to be depleted to the point of expiscation – being fished to empty. There will always be more excellent delectables to extract from the lexicon, as witness this word.

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egret

Posted on November 16, 2014 | 3 comments

The egret, it seems to me, is a bird for the future.

It is not that I think the future is exactly like a pretty little heron with an awful squawking voice. It is just that its name and some other things about it seem to be looking forward.

For one thing, we always greet the future with a bit of confusion. And egret is greet with a bit of confusion.

For another, its name comes from Old French aigrette, diminutive of aigron, ‘heron’, but doesn’t it look like vinaigrette – a kind of salad dressing – without the vin? The aigre in vinaigrette (and its source vinaigre) means ‘sour’. So if you take the vin (wine) from vinaigrette, what you’re left with is a little sour. I don’t think that the future will be a little sour and without wine; I think this bird just reminds us that without wine, things can get a little sour. So add a bit of wine in the future and you will still be in your salad days.

For another, egret sounds like it should be an eaglet, a juvenile raptor, lone and threatened and set to become a large, voracious, revered, rapacious, endangered predator. But actually it is a fairly innocuous thing (unless you’re a fish, or own a fish pond) that, even full grown, would easily fit standing under a table and perhaps even under a chair. Not such a threat.

And not so threatened. A century ago egrets were in danger because of the harvesting of their feathers for use in such things as dress hats and uniforms. But collective action by concerned people made a real difference; with the aid of legislation, rapacity was forestalled and egrets are no longer threatened – although loss of habitat due to encroachment and similar changes could still hurt them. Like the future, maybe: the threat is not overt aggression, just the creeping ignorant comforts of humans.

Egrets are nice, egalitarian birds. They take turns caring for their nest eggs; when one comes to take over from the other, it may even hand over a stick, like passing the baton. They are pretty birds, too, as said: they’re herons, lean with needle beak, and elegantly lovely plumage. Especially the snowy egrets.

Snowy egrets. It’s snowy here today. But snow greets you often in the dimmer half of the year around here. So it goes. I live here happily; I have no regrets.

There’s no regrets – there’s snowy egrets. Sounds good, no? That’s the other thing for me linking egrets to the future: they’re regrets that don’t start. That’s the best way to approach what’s coming. If you see a regret coming your way, just knock it off as soon as it starts and have a bird instead.

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bro-ffant

Posted on November 16, 2014 | 3 comments

The other day, it occurred to me that this is one of those eras where a future person could look at pictures of what we consider fashionable in men’s hair – what’s featured in magazines and seen seated at Starbucks – and date it within a year or two.

Part of it is the massive lumberjack beards. For some reason, these facial muskrats have become all the rage of late, and what was formerly a thing seen on nineteenth-century sea captains and some painting-worthy men of establishment is now panting-worthy and “hot.” (Well, yes, it is hot, in the literal sense. I had one for a while in my 20s and I can tell you that your face is never cold. Nonetheless, I was glad to be shorn of it.) In particular, I must infer that someone passed a law requiring all red-haired men between 18 and 30 to grow huge beards. For brown-haired men it is optional and for blonde men it is simply a serving suggestion. Now, my father has had a beard since I was a small child, and his beard is Dumbledore length, but he is also a generally Santa-Claus-looking person and frankly sui generis in many ways. He is also not 23.

But the other component of the current masculine tonsorial tendance is that hair on the top of the head. If the beard is a bouffée de chaleur, the hair is more like a buffet for the birds and insects. It is trim on the temples but the top looks like a field of heather or heath buffeted by strong winds but held steady by enough gel to stop a Sherman tank. If a mullet is business in the front and party in the back, this hair is marine corps on the side and marine coral reef on the top: trim and tidy by the ears, Paris sequence from Inception up above. Look, look, it’s this: just Google images for |hipster hair|.

But when I wanted to describe it to someone on Twitter, hipster hair was not a good enough term. No, I wanted something descriptive. This hair, this buffeted, almost buffoonish puff of hair – cream puff? powder puff? puff pastry? puffin? Puff the Magic Dragon? – is something of a bouffant, that hairstyle named with the French for ‘puffing’. But it’s not quite the bouffant you see on women. That typically has more on the sides and hanging down. This is a bouffant for guys. So…

…I reached for a portmanteau that would blend bouffant with something signifying ‘guy’. The obvious was bro-ffant, with a hyphen because broffant does not look like it should be pronounced the desired way.

Is it exactly apposite? Well, not completely; bro tends more often to refer to the frat-boy type, the backwards-baseball-cap guy, the stereotypical clueless male pig, not hip enough really. But there is a weakened sense of bro that can just refer to masculinity, and when making portmanteaux, it is most important to go for the right sound. It just is.

So bro-ffant. With that ff looking like the hair and also manifesting more clearly the origin of the parts. Because English spelling has not really been about phonetics any time this half millennium.

Is this a word for the ages? I hope not. I hope not because I hope bro-ffants will not persist unduly. Or undulatingly. Or, really, much at all. They can end in barbers’ wastebaskets along with those baby bears hanging off the guys’ chins. The latest hipster look, in my eyes, is a desperate cry for a lawn mower.

But, then, I’m a quarter century too old anyway. And I remember what was popular hair when I was in my youth, in the 1980s. Yes, yes, famously worn by A Flock of Seagulls. Well, the flock of seagulls is now resting in the bro-ffants, having mistaken them for bent bulrushes. They will surely fly away soon enough, no?

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kismet

Posted on November 11, 2014 | 4 comments

Ah, kismet. The ineluctable, inescapable, yet somehow eternally exotic fate. What has been decided for you by God, your every move just like a chesspiece until, finally… mate.

Mate? You are mated. You kiss your mate. Kiss me, mate: it’s kismet. The attraction is more than merely cosmetic. Though it be a bridging of a chasm, it will take you to the other side surely. Kismet makes no mistake.

Kismet is fate, sure, but fate with an air of the exotic: Baghdad and baggy pants, perhaps – a 1950s version, not the 2000s. Kismet is redolent of foreign spices, as much korma as karma, not mere garlic but a right forest of foreign spices. Which ones? Doesn’t matter, as long as they have an exciting otherness. When you fall in love, after all, you project so many of your own desires on the other person, just as when you swoon for the exotic and mysterious you are really looking at a painted mirror reflection of the back of your own closet. You may be captivated, but truly you are held captive by a fantasy of your own devising.

Well, such are the anfractuous – nay, Byzantine – ways of fate. What goes out the front door may come in the back door, or vice versa. Things you set in motion may end up where you never see them; seeds you sow may be harvested by others. On your way to escape your fate, you meet it. But when you call it kismet, it probably also involves a striking coincidence.

Most responsible for the flavour of this word, as you may know, is a 1953 musical play, Kismet, which became a hit movie in 1955, a heady romantic stew full of waspy orientalism, a plot full of remarkable coincidences, all happening in a single day. Its best-known song is “Stranger in Paradise,” which an incognito prince sings to a maiden who has suddenly captivated him. The musical was by Wright and Forrest, with book by Lederer and Davis, but it was based on a 1911 play by Edward Knoblock (who changed his name from Knoblauch, which happens to be German for ‘garlic’). And the music that made it so famous is based on music by the Russian composer Alexander Borodin. That most famous song is taken right from Prince Igor, from the Polovetsian dances: songs of enslaved Polovetsian maidens forced to dance for their captor, Prince Igor.

The word kismet comes to English from Turkish, which got it from Persian qismat, which got it from Arabic qismat ‘portion, lot, fate’, which comes from qasama, verb, ‘divide’. Divide because your fate is your portion, the lot that falls to you. But of course fate may join together as well as pull asunder.

Why was I fated to think of this word today? People have started decorating for Christmas. That makes me think of the Huron Carol. Which, for musical reasons, makes me think of “Paint It Black”: you can segue the one into the other – “’Twas in the moon of wintertime I want to paint it black.” I have mentioned this previously here on Sesquiotica, in my word tasting note on quodlibet, from the fall of 2009. I decided to mention all this today, with video links, on Twitter. Now, if you look at the video of the Huron Carol I chose to link to, you will see it was done in 2010 by a group called Quod Libet. It so happens that the rendition of “Paint It Black” I linked to – an a cappella choral version – is by a group called Kismet.

So it was fated.

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cartoon

Posted on November 10, 2014 | 5 comments

I really like cartoons.

The feel of newsprint makes me think immediately of cartoons. If you give me a newspaper, I will read the cartoons. I may or (more likely) may not read any of the rest of it. (I get my news online anyway.) Some of the most important influences of my youth were cartoons. MAD Magazine. Calvin and Hobbes. Doonesbury. I even used to read a magazine called CARtoons, which was comic strips about cars. (I loved cars. I’ve still never owned one, though. I love public transport more. I rent when I have to.)

Naturally, I wanted to be a cartoonist, too. I’ve always aimed to amuse others (I have not always succeeded). I’ve always liked art. And I had the idea that cartoons would take less work than other forms of art. Not true, of course, but I was very good at self-deception. I wanted quick results. I did five panels of a comic strip somewhere in high school. Didn’t do anything with it. Never even got around to inking it – it’s just in pencil, with guide lines for the text. Here it is, so you can see the kind of person I was as a teen (click on a cartoon to see a larger version):

Explains some, doesn’t it? I did a better cartoon once in university, for a theatre class. I saw it somewhere in the last year or so. If I can ever manage to find it (no luck so far, but I know it’s around here somewhere), you will see it. [Revision: Found it!]

More recently, I have done light drawings on various sorts for various purposes. I illustrated my step-grandfather’s memoirs of playing the hobo during the Depression (edited and published by my grandmother):

I even did some for the Literary Review of Canada years ago (I’m the designer, and they were lacking a real artist for an issue or two several years ago):

(The smudges weren’t in the magazine version. Not sure how they got there.)

But those are not comic strips. Not that all cartoons are comic strips; originally, none were. They were preparatory drawings for paintings, stained glass, etc., done on heavy paper – Italian cartone, from carta ‘paper’. We get the word carton from the same source. But cartoon has the oon, as in loon, goon, poltroon, spittoon, saloon, and so on: generally less dignified and often funnier.

Humour is the key to cartoons. They can have great art in them; Bill Watterson, who drew Calvin and Hobbes, is an unbelievably good artist (as witness strips such as the tyrannosaurs in F14s one): excellent technique but always in the service of most excellent funniness. But some of the greatest cartoons out there rely on their wit much more than their technique. Dilbert is one; a more extreme example is xkcd, which is ridiculously smart and funny and just uses stick figures (although some of the strips, such as “Click and Drag” [you have to click and drag on it to see more of it], show us that it’s not that Randall Munroe can’t draw, it’s just that he mainly prefers to keep the art simple). And there’s my editorial colleague Iva Cheung, who takes a similar approach in her comic strips: spare in the drawings, but very intelligent and funny, and it can’t be done without drawing.

So cartoon started with the heavy paper. Then it transferred to the kind of drawings done on the heavy paper. Then the linear style of drawing came to be known mainly for humorous or satirical drawings (as with editorial cartoons). They came to be printed on lighter paper. Now we often see them on screen rather than on paper; in fact, animated shorts are called cartoons, as in Saturday morning cartoons with Bugs Bunny (originally drawn on vellum and shown via celluloid) – and these are made with full-colour paintings, even if simplified (just like cartoon violence: exaggerated, vivid, without lasting harm). And now the key element of many non-moving cartoons is actually the wit behind them, not the artwork itself. This word cartoon caroms semantically around.

I wonder if I should try drawing cartoons for Sesquiotica every so often.

Or maybe I’m better off not…

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hobnob, schmooze

Posted on November 5, 2014 | 1 comment

I have reached the point in life, it seems, where hobnobbing is de rigueur. Aina and I were at another wine-and-nosh thing this evening at the Bata Shoe Museum, engaging in the willy-nilly give-and-take of politely bibulous conversation fuelled by canapés. It’s always a little bit of a raised-eyebrow thing, hobnobbing; it’s not the scuttlebutt you get with hoi polloi around the knob of a hot hob, it’s more of a respectable rhubarb, a bit of hemming and hawing and nobly nodding, not with the rabble but with the nobs. “Hobnob” is the sound echoing the halls of the local Olympus as the almost-somebodies enjoy being almost somebody.

But is it schmoozing? Oo. There’s maybe something a bit oozy about schmoozing. It’s the same kind of general polite conversation, but somehow there seems to be an oleaginous overtone to it, perhaps an avaricious intent. You can schmooze lightly with people, yes, but you can also schmooze someone into something or schmooze something out of someone. The ooze is unavoidable, but the schm also gives it a certain ludicrousness, thanks to other schm words – schmuck, schmendrick – and the dismissive reduplication: “Writer schmiter. He scribbles a bit.”

And where do all those schm come from? Yiddish. Schmooze is from Yiddish schmues ‘chat, gossip’, from Hebrew shemuah ‘rumour’. And here’s the thing. Less than a century ago, the nobs who hobnobbed were the rich WASPy sorts, and the people who schmoozed were not even permitted into establishments where one might hobnob. If you schmoozed you were Jewish, burdened with all the stereotypes that came with it. And still to some extent hang onto it. Which is a prime reason, I think, why schmooze has a different tone than hobnob. Entrenched prejudice.

Hobnob, by the way, comes from a phrasal adverb, hob and nob, referring to give-and-take and also meaning just ‘however it may turn out’ – because it’s from hab and nab, which is from have and ne have, with the old ne meaning ‘not’. Like willy-nilly from will ye, nill ye. To have and have not. To give and take.

Or to pretend there’s a give and take. Just passing the same goods back and forth above the heads of the have-nots. To take from those who give, and pretend that you’re the giver and they’re the takers. Look, I have a certain station in life! Oh, I shall bestow some largesse on you. Or maybe just some large s—.

Well, I’m being a bit overdramatic. Most of the people at the Bata this evening were associated with a local university, and most were not exceedingly well off, just comfortable enough to give a little money to the program. Nice people whose main priorities in life are something other than getting as much money as possible. We happily checked our coats and went in and had wine and nosh. I’m not sure we checked our privilege, though.

But we did schmooze.

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spate

Posted on November 4, 2014 | Leave a comment

As some of you know, I am on Twitter (@sesquiotic). Twitter allows you to post publicly, for the benefit of anyone who follows your feed or looks you up, messages of up to 140 characters each. This is not very much, and the terseness can lead to tenseness; Twitter is often like communicating in Morse code using car horns. So sometimes I will tweet sequences of tweets so I can fit in a larger thought. Instead of a message here about something, a message there about something else, I send out a spate of messages, six or ten or fourteen in a row, all in a sequence on a specific topic.

I’m certainly not the only person to do this. Actually, many tweeters do it from time to time. Some do it a lot. @HeerJeet practically specializes in it, numbering the tweets so they can be followed. He and some others of those who send such sequences call them Twitter essays.

The thing is, even if you send 14 tweets, that’s still less than 300 words. We’re talking about an “essay” that is less than a page. It’s a short essay, more like a fleshy thought. And on Twitter it’s experienced as a sudden burst of tweets, like a spring shower, a flash flood… a spate.

Yes, I think spate is the word we need here. It’s a word we get from Scots English, a word that may be related to spout. It referred first to a sudden flood, as from a heavy rain (we’ve had a few of those in recent years in Toronto, thanks in part to more extreme weather, and in part to paving over too damn much so the ground doesn’t absorb the rain before it flows into the sewers). It can also refer to a sudden and/or heavy rainstorm.

Or, more often, to a sudden intense pouring forth of something that comes in individual instances: a spate of books, attacks, bombings, shootings, incidents, mergers, murders, kidnappings, suicides, lawsuits; occasionally it refers to mass objects such as violence or publicity. But it is more often the raindrops than the flooding creek.

The sound of the word is so suggestive. Listen to its echoes: spit, spat, spout, spurt, also spite and spot. A spate can erupt from your pate until you are sated. What comes in a spate is no paste, nor is it even-paced. If it is words, it is a spatter of expatiation. And then, as quickly as it began, it is done.

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Ligeti

Posted on November 4, 2014 | 4 comments

What does space sound like?

What does the vast expanse between the burning stars sound like? What do the dark empty spaces around and between planets sound like? What does the space between my computer and yours sound like? What does the distance between me and the library on my wall sound like, what does the cliff gap between my window and the high-rise library of people across the street sound like? What does the space between an atom’s nucleus and its electrons, proportionally so much greater than the gap between sun and planets, sound like? The great unknown? The emptiness that is full of dark matter and potential matter? What do the spaces between thoughts sound like? The spaces between minds?

NASA has recorded electromagnetic pulsations in space and converted them to sound. Hear them at canyouactually.com/nasa-recorded-sound-in-space-and-its-absolutely-chilling/ if you wish; they are reminiscent of the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (such as Kontakte), and not altogether coincidentally.

But to me, space sounds more like Ligeti.

Ligeti György Sándor. The closest you can come to saying that with English sounds is “Liggety Jrrj Shahndor.” Hungarians put the family name first. Ligeti was a Hungarian Jew born in Romania who moved to Hungary and later Austria and Germany.

Ligeti was one of the great modern composers. Even his name is musical. It is three canonical syllables, licking and bouncing tip-back-tip of the tongue, the vowels all up and front. It sounds like legato and ligature, and it looks almost like light. And no one seems to know what it means. Like life and music, it is there and we use it anyway.

Ligeti will remind us of space because his music was used in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and some other films. It is music that I learned, in my youth, not to listen to when I was alone by myself at night in our large house surrounded by dark woods at the foot of a mountain. The foreboding, the voices so discordant and confused and full of empty and howling like the wind through the trees, building and swirling. The famous Kyrie that we hear when the monolith is first revealed on the moon. Kubrick’s movie, in so many scenes, keeps space entirely silent, amazingly so. But here, no.

But this is not why Ligeti’s music is the sound of space. Stanley Kubrick doesn’t get to decide everything for everyone. Listen to Lux Aeterna, “eternal light”:

And listen to the famous Kyrie:

Watch them, watch them sing, watch. They stand there, scores out, reading, counting, hitting every note.

The words are simple: kyrie eleison, christe eleison, kyrie eleison, ‘Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy’. It is from a requiem mass, the mass for the dead, those whose voices have stopped generating and are now forever dissipating into space. Can you hear that, the words, the supplications, the mercy, can you make it out from all of those voices?

I have seen the score to that Kyrie. Every note is written on it. Each voice has a line. Each voice has its own notes, its own bar divisions and rhythms. Every one of them has its plan and its clear line and purpose and statement. Every one of them has been rehearsed, has rehearsed carefully, sedulously, has burned the midnight oil to prepare for this. We hear them all together and we simply hear an enormous texture. We hear an ebb and flow and a hive of noise. We hear so many individuals and intervals that what we hear is not them but the relation between them, the attempt to reach and meet and join, the negotiations and failed connections. The space between them. The concert of solipsisms. Like a hundred metronomes, each in its own tempo, all making individual sense, together making… noise.

Space is voices. Voices express minds, minds that experience. Space is the experience of space, is the experience of reaching and not touching. It is full of the dark matter of the mind, the belief in distance and separation. Space is the only way that everything is not just one thing. And yet we are tied across the gaps, legato, with ligatures. We are all celestial bodies, burning in our dark suspension, and the reaching out is light.

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gallery

Posted on November 1, 2014 | Leave a comment

I love being in galleries.

Every city I visit, if there is an art gallery, a nice, large art museum, I will surely go to it. (Unlike museum, gallery can also name a place you can buy art; but the ones I go to are mostly art museums.) I will walk in the door and dive into the art. I will inhale the smell of old oil and acrylic and the myriad modes of preservation, mixed with the aroma of the cafeteria – they always smell the same, museum and gallery cafeterias, and the aroma of their coffee wafts through the halls and mixes with Matisse and Titian and O’Keeffe and Sheeler and Cassatt and Caravaggio and Degas and the gallery itself – and I will wander past these windows onto other worlds, the heightened moments and vivid observations of so many hypersensitive minds and eyes and skilled hands, and I will swim through and past the other people too, peering and photographing and sketching and resting. I will read placards and I will pull off my spectacles and lean close to inspect the strokes. I will soak in this inland sea, the water of life and breath saturated with the salt of artists’ sweat and fretfulness.

A sea? An aquarium. The paintings are the windows. But they are not the windows to the exotic tanks; I am a fish, we all in the gallery are fish, and the paintings are the windows looking out, through which we are seen or ignored by the people and plants and animals, the scenes and dreams, the abductions and abstractions, that we see through them. They are a view for us to the divine, the transcendent, the hyperreal, the world the way we always try to make it be but never quite succeed – and they are a view of us by that world, as it looks in for a moment and continues on. Every artist has been given a window, or several, to clean, and they have cleaned them in different ways so we can see differently, always at least a little obscured or smeared or diffracted; this is how we know we cannot allow ourselves to believe that we see it exactly as it is (a mistake we often make in the “real” world). We know we see layers and angles, freezes and melts, the slashing and dotting gestures of the painters and the hard caresses of the sculptors. All so that we may see, and all so that we may be looked into. Or ignored, pointedly.

Well, if we are ignored by some of the art, we at least do not always ignore each other. In a gallery I love the art, and I love the architecture, but I also love the art lovers, the gallery-goers, the human element. They are often so amusing, and some are so pleasing to the eyes. I hope it will not gall you too much if I say I like the gals in galleries, especially the elegant ones, lingering long, eyes open, looking well and looking good. There are often entertaining gentlemen too. When we were recently in the Rijksmuseum I took photos of the people looking at the art, like brightly coloured fish at the glass. You see, just as we tap on the glass to get the fish to respond, the paintings put on a show to catch our attention and bring us around in hopes of feeding on the soul food they promise. They feed us regal lies, but they tell us too that the world is not all grey, even if it largely is; they provoke our allergies with the lees of the grail from which we have drunk, but as we cross their sill we are eager still for all that is within their gyre.

Not all galleries are art galleries, of course. There are rogues’ galleries, shooting galleries, the cheap seats in a theatre (whence playing to the gallery, which the paintings too are doing), and assorted long arcades: architectural features with a wall on one side, a ceiling above, and arches on the other. Gallerias. There’s a galleria in front of the building I live in; it extends along the front of the hotel next door, too. It’s a great place on a weekend to watch people shoot their wedding photos. Yes, it’s not quite the same word, galleria, but that’s just because galleria is the Italian version of the word. A galleria is a good place for viewing art: sheltered but daylit. Now we may see art in a gallery that has the name but neither daylight nor arches.

Whence comes the word? Oddly, we are not entirely sure, but it seems it’s from Galilee. The porch of a church – next to the narthex – was sometimes called galilea, possibly because it was at the far end from the altar as Galilee (Galilaea) was far from Jerusalem. Its name transferred to the colonnaded form, as will happen (think of your attic). But while the galilea is far from the altar, Galilee is where the person came from that the churches are all about; he is the entry point to the faith.

Have you been to Galilee? It is hilly, but it is also laky: one big lake, to be exact. If you take the road there from the Mediterranean, you drive uphill for a bit, and across the plain of Megiddo, and drive back downhill for a bit, and you can reckon you are at about sea level. And then you crest an edge and see that you are going much farther down still, down to the lake, more than 200 metres below sea level. It is as though some massive gravity has warped the space-time of the landscape, and everything flows towards it. Well, not everything; it has one outlet, the river Jordan, which drains it and flows as the axis of the Holy Land down to the Dead Sea, which has no outlet but the air and is so saturated with salt you can easily float on it.

Galleries have a similar gravitational pull on me. I flow towards them and pool in them and swim in them. They are places where I can cast my glance to one side and catch nothing, and cast it to the other side and find it overflowing. They are places where storms may be bred by mistrust and stilled by rebuke. They are places where water is walked on. I am not the one walking; I am one of the fish holding up the feet of the walker, because I crave the touch of the transcendent.

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spondulicks

Posted on October 30, 2014 | 2 comments

Here’s a word to keep in your lexical change purse, a shiny coin you can slap down next time you have to shell out real metal or paper (or, in Canada and some other countries, polymer – shiny bills as brightly colourful as a coral reef). Perhaps when you spend the bucks and your paper ducks fly the pond you will be a little less despondent at the expenditure if you can sum up your simoleons lickety-split as spondulicks. Or, to seem more Belgian or Gaulish (perhaps if your wallet is bulging at the gall of it all), spell it spondulix.

One important thing to remember is that the stress is on the second syllable. It’s an amphibrach (nothing like a spondee, sux). So the emphasis is on the /u/, the big “do,” no foolin’. You can practically blow a whistle with that vowel, or hold it so long you drool. In that way it’s a bit like medulla, that part of the brain that makes your heart and breathing speed up when you spend your bux.

This seems like one of those classic 19th-century American phony-hifalutin’ words, doesn’t it? Like discombobulated and absquatulate and so on. Only maybe even a bit more hick-like, slappy and yuk-yuk. Maybe a word out of Mark Twain.

Well, it is that – he didn’t invent it, but here’s a passage from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

“I ain’t as rich as old Jim Hornback, and I can’t be so blame’ generous and good to Tom, Dick, and Harry as what he is, and slam money around the way he does; but I’ve told him many a time ’t I wouldn’t trade places with him; for, says I, a sailor’s life’s the life for me, and I’m derned if I’D live two mile out o’ town, where there ain’t nothing ever goin’ on, not for all his spondulicks and as much more on top of it. Says I—”

Yep, as homey as Horlick’s but much more American… in origin. Actually now it’s more popularly used in Britain (like Horlick’s). But where does this word for your clams come from? The Oxford English Dictionary says “Of fanciful formation.” But the Online Etymology Dictionary, available as part of dictionary.com’s results, tells us it’s “said to be from Greek spondylikos, from spondylos, a seashell used as currency (the Greek word means literally “vertebra”).” You know, as in ankylosing spondylitis. (That’s an uncommon kind of arthritis of the spine, with an expensive name.)

Well, ain’t that a sesquipedalian classic! Literally. A gen-u-wine silver dollar of a word. Sorry, scratch that: a gen-u-wine sand dollar of a word. Fine, whatever, you didn’t have to shell out for it. Take it for free and use it to expand your lexical repertoire – put it in your word wallet next to your moolah and simoleons like a Croesus of the thesaurus, a wordbook high muck-a-muck.

Thanks to Larry Cooper for suggesting today’s word.

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