Category Archives: word tasting notes

traminette

Posted on August 7, 2014 | 1 comment

I was off on a little wine-tasting excursion over the weekend. We went to Keuka Lake, one of New York State’s Finger Lakes. Wine has been made in that area for about a century, but it’s been only a half century since Dr. Konstantin Frank introduced vinifera grapes to the area – the kind of grapes usually used in the non-benighted world to make wine. The grapes that had been used in New York before – and are still used for some products – tend to produce what Tony Aspler has called “block and tackle wines”: one drink and you can walk a block and tackle anyone.

The climate in New York can be hard on some varieties of grapes, so the winemakers are always looking to improve their stock with something that tastes good and is also sufficiently hardy. Enter traminette, a pleasant little white wine grape that is now being used by a number of the wineries in the area. It is a hybrid created in about 1965 at the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign by Herb Barrett. It would be fun if Barrett had been trying to create a kind of urban champagne, but actually he just want to make a nice table grape that had some of the taste of Gewürztraminer. He made it by crossing Gewürztraminer with the hybrid Joannes Seyve 23.416 (does that look like a scriptural reference?). He sent some of it to the experimental grape breeding program at Cornell University, which is at the south end of Cayuga Lake, which is another one of the Finger Lakes. It has spread from there because it survives and it tastes good.

What does it taste like? Well, I’m not here to give you wine tasting notes. You would do better to go see for yourself. I will tell you that it’s reminiscent of Gewürztraminer but toned down, with some flavours that might remind you of pinot blanc or vidal or just maybe Riesling. Or, if you aren’t a wine geek: it’s a nice, moderately fruity white wine, not buttery and not too tart or crazy, but just a little quirky.

What I am here to give you is word tasting notes. Come on, now: we have the word right in front of us. Let’s taste it together. Say it slowly: /træ mi nɛt/. It starts crisp on the tip of the tongue /t/, with a little rolling release into the liquid /r/; the vowel can be realized a bit harder as /æ/ or a bit milder as /a/. The lips come together softly /m/ as though considering a taste. Then another vowel, which can be high and sweet /i/ or more restrained /ɪ/ or rather subdued, almost dull /ə/. The tongue tip presses in again softly and quickly /n/ to start the ending, which is strong and clear, medium-bright and dry /ɛ/ with a fast, crisp final stop /t/.

The word can’t avoid seeming feminine; it has that ette ending. But such a range of flavours swirl around: a mechanical conveyance tram, with a rough hint of tramp and a suggestion of jam; a tighter, tidier trim; perhaps a girl’s name, Tammy; a net effect that could be an ensnaring mesh or a tennis game. It may bring to mind a stern and hectoring martinet, or a dangling, dancing marionette, and perhaps something to marinate in the interim. Look at its shape on the page and you may get a glimpse of a mitten to make it handle the cold better, perhaps a bit of mint (absent from the wine’s flavour), a questionable marine influence, possibly inert, and a backwards look at the commercial mart. But you will certainly see how balanced it is, with the i in the middle and humps and crosses on either side – to the left one cross and two humps, to the right one hump and two crosses. It even looks vaguely reminiscent of rows of grape vines in an orchard.

Will all this affect how the wine tastes to you? I don’t know. It would be a fun experiment to have a number of wine aficionados taste a new hybrid and tell some of them it had one name – say, merlina – and some another – say, xenoraz – and see if their tasting notes seem to be influenced by the name.

But whether or not it would, it’s best to be conscious of all aspects of what you’re tasting. When you taste the wine, taste the word too.

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kerof

Posted on July 29, 2014 | 5 comments

I was still rather young, I remember, when I pointed to a percent sign and asked my mother, “What’s that called?”

“Kerof,” she said. Or maybe it was “kerrof.” Or “kerif”? I decided on “kerof.”

OK, sure, things have odd names. After all, & is called ampersand. (This turns out to be from and per se and, apparently, but how many people know that?) People can’t even agree on what # should be called. Why not kerof for %?

Look at it. Its line cuts through between the two circles like a kerf. It has an ornamental quality to it and is typographic, like a serif. It can seem as official as a sheriff or a seraph.

Not that I was fully aware of all these words at the time. I was, on the other hand, aware of the word carafe, so I knew when I saw carafe that it wasn’t a fancy spelling for kerof because I knew the stress was on the other syllable. Anyway, % looks more like two cups than one carafe.

I didn’t mind carafes. I took a dislike to the word decanter, though. Also to the word onus – actually I still don’t like onus, which seems like an average of anus and penis and would therefore be an apt name for the perineum (that’s the taint, for you plain folks). I decided that one of the most irritating sentences in English would be The onus is on the decanter.

And – here is where we come back to kerof – I discovered the word schwa (yes, I knew what it meant, and at first it seemed awfully self-important and prissy) and decided that Kerof Schwa would be a name for the sort of band that would sing annoying songs of all the things your teachers condescendingly tell you to do, and all those irritating phrases grown-ups say. Like “The onus is on the decanter.” With an instructional smile and over-gesturing finger. (If the phrase teachable moment had been around at the time, I would have determined it was the name of Kerof Schwa’s number one hit. Or maybe even a whole album.)

None of this told me, at the time, what the point of this oogly symbol was. All I knew was that my mother told me it was a kerof. And my mother was a teacher (one of the good ones, of course), so she knew.

Thing was, it wasn’t a percent sign actually that I was looking at. I realized a few years later that it had been a c/o on an envelope address.

My mom had said “Care of.”

Such a kerfuffle because I wasn’t kerof-ful…

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plash

Posted on July 28, 2014 | 1 comment

What is a plash? These days, it’s a rather precious splash: a pleasant plop, a pretty slap into the water; a word made for prose and poetry that is perused in plush places. I do not think an author could use it without seeming self-conscious. What, simply strip that sloppy starting /s/ from splash to make it a bit less conventionalized – or a bit more archaic-seeming? It may not please as planned.

But plash was not formed by taking the s off splash. No, in fact, quite the opposite: splash was formed in the late 1600s by adding the s to plash, which had already been around at least since the early 1500s. And somehow the sloppier, wetter spl version has prevailed, to make the set with splat, splatter, splodge, splotch, splutter, and the similarly sloppy splay and splurge. It is true that when you slap the surface of a pool of water, or drop a single thing into it, what you hear may be more like “plash” or “plook,” but we seem now to prefer our wetness less tidy and contemplative and more slap-dash. Or at least more conforming to other wet words.

There is actually an even older word plash, a noun meaning (according to Oxford) ‘area of shallow standing water’ or ‘marshy pool’. It’s been in the English language since before there was an English language for it to be in. It’s only used in certain regions of England now (Yorkshire, for instance). It has cognates in other Germanic languages; it may have an onomatopoeic origin – hardly surprising if it does. It may or may not have been the source of plash meaning ‘splash (but not so messily)’, or they may or may not have come from the same root. But really, when we have all these crashing, dashing, smashing -ash words and all these plopping or plucking pl- words, it really is an inevitable formation, isn’t it?

The more interesting thing, indeed, is just how splash has taken over by force of analogy, and plash has acquired a bit of a precious air in consequence. The sound symbolism may be the initial splash into the plash, but the splattered spots of mud and marsh will sometimes drain or dry in unpredictable ways and become more a part of the paint than mere fluid dynamics.

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chameleon

Posted on July 26, 2014 | Leave a comment

Would you rather be a chameleon? A little master of chamo— er, I mean camouflage? A lizard that comes with a million colours, and slips into whatever hue and pattern the situation demands? A smooth or rough operator, as needed? Crawling through the fruit garden of society, matching each lemon and each melon, sometimes a meh clone and sometimes taking a helm once and again, aiming to claim a meal and not become one?

A chameleon is not truly a master of disguise, I should say. The true master of disguise is the octopus, feeling its way through the marine environment, shifting to match coral, rocks, seaweed, by texture and pattern, or suddenly changing to startle – eight legs, thousands of sensitive suckers, tasting and tickling as it goes: smart. (Also delicious, just by the way.) See this and believe.

The chameleon, by contrast, does not shift shape, does not shift texture, and has a limited set of hues – though they can be vivid and vibrant. It changes colour as much by mood as by surrounding, and the changes take a little time, not a fraction of a second like an octopus. It shifts not to be invisible but to be appropriate or inappropriate, as the occasion demands, or just to suit its mood and never mind what’s around it.

And the chameleon always know what’s around it. Its eyes can see 360 degrees and rotate independently, ever on the lookout for what interests or threatens it, ready to focus accurately on a subject of interest. It can grasp and tickle with not only its feet but its tail, that famous curl. And its tongue! No other animal has such a tongue, capable of darting out twice the length of its body, capturing prey in an instant and retracting again. The only thing the chameleon is not so good at is listening.

So a chameleon can be the life of the party or a dark horse, a person who can be put into a place, scope it out, grasp the surroundings, snare prey with the tongue, catch the interest of others or pass relatively unnoticed as desired. Not necessarily an éminence grise; quite possibly a Boy George, a Karma Chameleon. Appropriate or appropriately inappropriate. Sometimes ambiguous and difficult, too, like the ch at the beginning of chameleon: you need to learn that in this case, as in chimera, it is hard and kicking as “k” and not catching as “ch” or soft and quiet as “sh.”

But a chameleon is not the dominant force anywhere it goes. It may be what the Greeks called a ‘dwarf lion’ or ‘ground lion’ – χαμαί khamai ‘on the ground’ or ‘dwarf’ plus λέων leon ‘lion’ – but the largest of them are not more than a foot, and the smallest can cling to your fingertip. A chameleon is not meant to be the leader, certainly not, but it is also not meant to be a minister or myrmidon. No, a chameleon is better suited to be a fine ornament of something – or someone – beautiful and captivating: like a flower, but much more fascinating.

And you know the ladies will love a chameleon, while few want to find themselves on a date with an octopus.

La Dame aux Chameleons

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roux

Posted on July 24, 2014 | Leave a comment

I’m listening to Trouble in Paradise, the new album by La Roux, and it has motivated me to pull off the shelf the large clothbound hardcover book inscribed to me by my parents for my 14th birthday. On page 782 I find only what I knew already:

ROUX – Mixture of butter or other fatty substance and flour, cooked together for varying periods of time depending on its final use.

The roux is the thickening element in sauces.

There are three kinds of roux: white roux, blond roux, and brown roux.

It goes on to explain the differences, which consist mainly in the means and degree of cooking: the flour browns variously much.

The book, I should explain, is The New Larousse Gastronomique.

My copy is in English, but I think it would read better in French. I say this because in French the three types of roux would be roux blanc, roux blond, et roux brun. Which mean, respectively, reddish-white, reddish-blond, and reddish-brown. Which are three appealing hair colours but are also three varyingly sensible descriptions of the colours of the flour-and-butter mixtures. As The Oxford Companion to Food explains, the first roux must have been roux brun: “These early roux were made by cooking flour and butter together until a reddish tint was obtained then using this to thicken a sauce or broth.” By “early” they mean in the 1600s; before that, various other things, including bread crumbs, were used to thicken sauces.

The great glory of French haute cuisine is its sauces; to make a proper sauce, you spend days roasting bones, boiling them, reducing them, making a roux, adding the stock, adding fried onions and vegetables and wine, and so on. At the end you have, stored in your fridge or freezer, sauce espagnole, which is the basis for sauce demi-glace, and both are the bases for a myriad of others. A white sauce (béchamel) is more quickly done but also uses a roux and is also a base for many others. (I find simply reading the brief recipes for these sauces in the Larousse therapeutic: “Cook 2 tablespoons chopped onion in butter. Stir in 5 dl. red wine, season, add a bouquet garni (q.v.) and boil down by two-thirds. Add 3 dl. Espagnole sauce, boil down by half and strain. Before serving, add 50 g. butter.” Violà, sauce bourguignonne – version I.)

I cheated on the days’ work of sauce making. I just used liquid OXO plus wine and herbs and the roux – different, I know, but quicker and easier and it pleased my parents well enough. These days I don’t cook French style much. But if I’m going to, I still know that a proper French sauce is made with a proper roux. The roux is at the heart of French cookery.

Which was an epiphany for me as an adolescent. I learned to make gravy from my mother, and she taught me the technique I still use for thickening pan drippings: put flour, cold water, and salt in a plastic container with a lid and shake; add some pan drippings and stir, and then stir the flour and water into the pan drippings. Not nearly as fancy as a roux and not at all buttery, but gravy with a roast is home-style cookin’. (Years later, volunteering in a soup kitchen in Harvard Square, I learned another fun trick: make a roux with flour and oil and, when it’s good and brown, instead of gradually whisking the liquid in so it wouldn’t lump, just splash in the whole lot of water cold and start stirring. Works shockingly well.)

None of this seems to have much to do with electronic dance music about affairs of the heart, which is what La Roux does, but words have the flavour they have and you cook with them as you will. And La Roux cooks, musically. La Roux is really Elly Jackson, who has red hair. Those who know French will know that roux is actually the masculine form, while la is the feminine article; this works with Jackson’s androgynous look.

And what would the feminine form of roux, ‘reddish’, be? Rousse. The proper French family name meaning ‘the red’ is embossed on the burgundy-coloured cover of my copy of the paper heart of French gastronomy: Larousse.

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cranny

Posted on July 23, 2014 | 3 comments

Obviously, if yesterday was nook, today must be cranny.

I think it’s safe to say you’ve said or written cranny. But have you ever used it without nook and before? And, for that matter, without every nook and before?

Can you even tell me the difference in meaning between nook and cranny?

It seems to fall into those double-barrelled-shotgun phrases: search every nook and cranny; in this day and age; every jot and tittle; this is your last and final boarding call…

What cranny really means is, as Oxford puts it, ‘A small narrow opening or hole; a chink, crevice, crack, fissure.’ It seems to come from French cran. So it’s not a nook per se, but it’s a similar thing on a smaller and perhaps more accidental scale. It is the tittle to nook’s jot.

But what if it meant something quite different? What if it meant ‘cranberry’ or ‘granny’? What about ‘narc’ or ‘cramp’ or ‘crane’? Look, if you Google “every nook and granny” (exact phrase) you get more than 25,000 hits. “Every nook and cranberry” gets more than 22,000 results. Even “every nook and crane” gets 29,000 hits, most of which appear not to be “every nook and crane-y” puns. Imagine! Imagine searching corners, alcoves, and grandmothers, or corners, alcoves, and cranberries, or corners, alcoves, and, for heaven’s sake, construction cranes (or the birds called cranes)!

Well, there it is. Cranny was once a word that people knew how to use, but it became just an attachment, a trailer, a little linguistic cranny in the wall of words. And you know what we do with those: fill them with available materials. Fill them full – don’t let them go half-caulked. Stuff them with your cranberries and grandmothers and little origami cranes. And you’ll spend all your time searching those berries and babushkas and birds for meaning, when in fact they’re what’s in the way of it.

Welcome to language!

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nook

Posted on July 22, 2014 | 6 comments

If you took a look in a nook, what would you see? And where would you be? Would it be a breakfast nook in a kitchen, or a book nook? Or some other nook and cranny? Or would it be an e-reader? I suppose you could read a cookbook on a Nook in a kitchen nook. Or you could look at a book that had every word ending in ook: book, brook, cook, chook, crook, forsook, hook, look, shook, took, kook… uh-oh, that last word doesn’t rhyme with the others.

Actually, neither did nook, originally. Until not much more than a century ago, the standard pronunciation rhymed it with Luke. And before that it had a long o: nok. But it finally nuked that and fell in line with the others; it didn’t want to be a kook.

What is a nook? It’s easy enough to picture, at least sketchily, in your mind’s eye. It’s a cozy little corner, an architectural diverticulum perhaps – a secluded place where you can escape from the madding crowds, even as they flow by (like trains rushing past in a tunnel where our heroine has flattened herself into the merest nook in the wall). A corner to wedge into when cornered by life. A quaint and curious dead-end byway in the village or countryside. A nook that is by a chimney or fire is an inglenook. A nook is to a person – especially a bookish introvert – as a small cardboard box is to a cat: it contains you comfortably in its hard but open embrace. It is a place where you can hide from a shnook or shelter from a Chinook or just hook up with a good book, a place where you can simply say to the world, “No, OK?”

If that seems bearish, well, think of Nanook: an English rendering of nanuq, the polar bear. But are there nooks in the Arctic? The great barren landscape, open and windswept, pimpled by pingos and reflected by frozen lakes, and at least formerly dotted by igloos, which, being circular, are apparently lacking in nooks… No, but there are always corners and nestling spots in everything, and just by the way some of those Arctic islands are exceptionally mountainous.

Where did nook come from? It’s uncertain – some long-forgotten historical nook, or nok anyway; it’s probably Norse. It has meant an assortment of things, but first and foremost a corner, seen and taken separately from the rest of the object, edifice, or lot. There is often a connotation of out-of-the-way-ness. It can be a triangle of land, too, and sometimes has even named a triangle jutting into the sea. And aside from being a corner of a yard, a nook has been a quarter of a yard, too: a yard being a standard measure of 50 acres, a nook was 12½ – or, elsewhere and at other time, 20.

It serves well, though, this word, wherever it came from. It is short and presses like a pillow into a corner: the soft /n/, the retreat to the back of the mouth /ʊ/, the abrupt stop against the hard wall at the back /k/; the shape of the book in hand n, the eyes (with glasses?) looking at it oo, the corner itself k. Kindle a fire and kindle some interest: this secluded nook is a portal to a world of imagination and escape; it is the corner of the mind’s eye.

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flautist

Posted on July 21, 2014 | 2 comments

What is a flautist? A flutist, but perhaps a little snootier. Fowler wrote, “Flutist is more than 350 years old; flautist (from Italian flautista) dates only from the middle of the 19th c., and there seems no good reason why it should have prevailed. … But it has.” Well, it has in England and perhaps in Canada, rather less so in the United States.

But what gust of linguistic afflatus would lead us to flout standard sensible English derivational morphology and the usual rules of English pronunciation just to flaunt a foreign word as the preferred form? Here’s a little thought experiment: Let’s say that you met someone who played the bassoon, or even just someone who seemed to know a fair bit about music, and he said not “bassoonist” but “bassenist.” Would you think, “Wow, that’s weirdly wrong,” or would you think something more like, “Huh, I guess bassenist must be the more cultured way of saying it, because it’s not the simple predictable way and there’s no reason for this knowledgeable person to say it unless it’s the more correct way, just like all those other weird exceptions we have in English”?

Linguistic insecurity is very common in English and tends to cause us to prefer what linguists call the “marked” form — our lexicon is a flock of odd ducks chosen for their oddness. We learn as small children that there are many words where the seemingly logical form is the “grossly uneducated and illiterate” one. We must learn to play the instrument of our language as carefully as a delicate and fickle fipple flute.

It also doesn’t surprise me that we would go for flautist more in Canada; Americans lean a little more towards the straightforward, dropping silent letters willy-nilly. We also retain greater ties to Britain in Canada. But there’s also the little matter of pronunciation. Oxford gives the pronunciation just as /ˈflɔːtɪst/ – as in “flawtist.” But the preferred pronunciation among North Americans who are “in the know” is the one modeled on Italian: /ˈflaʊtɪst/, the main vowel like “ow” rather than “aw.”

And why shouldn’t we take the word from Italian? That’s where we got flute, after all, isn’t it? Hmm, no, actually. Italian got its word flauta from Old Provençal or Old French, which didn’t get it from Latin. Now, yes, the form at that time was flaute. But it moved up through French to English and in so doing the vowel changed a little. Modern French is flute and flûtiste. We rather likely borrowed flautist from Italian later on because we borrow all sorts of musical terms from Italian. But we didn’t borrow it intact, flautista; we clipped the a off the end, making it not so much a borrowing as an affectation… and a mark of linguistic insecurity: we think it highfalutin’, but others may think it flat-out flawed.

Thanks to several of my colleagues in the Editors’ Association of Canada for discussing this word today on the email list.

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sparkler

Posted on July 20, 2014 | 1 comment

I like sparklers.

I don’t often buy the coated metal rods that, when ignited, burn down quickly, throwing off forks of sparks as they go, like a sprinkler of light. One time, for my brother’s bachelor party, I accidentally bought incense sticks instead, thereby giving my brother much more time to down a bottle of Coke than I had intended. He ignored me anyway.

But I do like sparkle-sticks. And things that are like them. Things that sparkle. Other things that are called sparklers.

Sparkling wines, for instance. Prosecco, cava, crémant, champagne: my kind of fizzy-o-therapy. Mixed with orange juice or Campari or taken straight and frothing, dotting my spectacles with picolitres of effervescence. Tasting stars? Tasting the evanescent asterisms of a sparkle-stick.

Sparkling eyes, too, green or grey or blue or onyx black, not staring but starring and sparring, promising solemnly that they are up to no good: a little mischief adds spice to life. Winking and twinkling, and more: literally glittering, sparkling with larkishness. And sparkling teeth below, white and smiling and sharp, inclined to bite just a bit. And sparkling wit. A mind that shoots soft little knives and bright feathers all in a flickering mix.

The first definition of sparkler in the Oxford English Dictionary is “One who sparkles or shines in respect of beauty or accomplishments; esp. a vivacious, witty, or pretty young woman.” That dates from the early 1700s. Also listed: a sparkling eye, a sparkling gem, a sparkling insect, a sparkling wine, a sparkling firework.

Sparkler of course comes from sparkle. Sparkle is spark plus the frequentative –le suffix, seen also on nestle, crackle, and quite a few others. Spark has been around as a word longer than English has been its own language, and it has always meant what it means. Sparkle dates back more than 800 years.

We have not always had sparkling wine, but we have always had sparklers, though we did not always name them thus. The word is so suited; it seems like an oral performance of what it names, with the crisp stops and just a bit of fluid. Even the shape of it helps, in particular the k, which shoots off a fork like the little sparks on a sparkle-stick. More complete still is sparkly, with the y for added shape.

And most complete is life when it includes sparklers, of all sorts.

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pingo

Posted on July 16, 2014 | 2 comments

It’s in the frozen remote north, so frozen and so remote that even Robert Service did not dream of it. Life and everything else stops here. Frozen earth heaping over frozen earth, ice capping on ice, growing, frozen from the top in, going frosty from the bottom up. A massive pimple of land and ice, swelling slowly, pinguid with frost.

And then something thaws. Deep below, the permafrost loses its perm. The gases in the ground expand, and bingo: with a “pingo!” the mounded earth is popping over the environs. And in place of the lumping obstacle is a gaping orifice.

This, anyway, is what some people think caused the 80-metre-wide hole in the Yamal Peninsula, surrounded by burst and spurted earth. No meteorite was seen that could have done it, and anyway the shape is wrong. Something erupted from below, a pocket of gas no longer held down by permafrost and the plug of ice above.

Was the eruption a pingo? Oh, no, how misleading. What was there before the eruption may have been a pingo. A pingo is a big mound of earth made by heaving and accumulating frost. It grows slowly, a fingertip’s length a year. Pingos may collapse, yes, but not normally so spectacularly. This was an exploding ex-pingo.

The word may seem to be expressive, a verbal performance of something pushing the flat earth up like a popping bump of plastic or metal. But actually it’s taken from an Inuvialuit word, Greenlandic dialect, and it first meant something like nunatak, except that a nunatak is a peak poking through the ice while a pingo is a peak perceptible under the ice. It was European geographers who borrowed it to refer to these permafrost pimples, which are especially abundant near Tuktoyaktuk. Europeans also added a /g/ to the pronunciation, so it now rhymes with bingo rather than thing-o.

So where is this Yamal Peninsula? If you’ve never heard of it, it’s not the end of the world. Or actually, it is, as the news media have been fond of pointing out in the stories today about this pit. In the local Nenets language, Yamal means ‘the end of the world’. But not the end with the penguins. Have a look at a map of Asia. Look at the top of Russia, the rough backbone of Siberia against the Arctic Ocean. There’s a canted eyebrow of an island east of Scandinavia: that’s Novaya Zemlya, which means ‘new land’. Directly south of its eastern tip, across the Kara Sea, is the Yamal Peninsula. New land lies above the end of the world, just like the heaped earth around the new crater that’s an empty pit, a pinhole somewhere in that gelid tip, the opening that perhaps was a pingo.

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