Category Archives: word tasting notes

ghost

Posted on January 2, 2014 | 2 comments

Watch a video of me reading this ghost story, if you would like, or read it below. Or read along with me.

This word has a ghost in it, a little guest in the host: a letter h, symbol of a soft breath, here seen but not heard – like many a spectre.

In Old English, this word was gást, with no h. By the 1400s, it had changed to gost or goost. But it was not until William Caxton brought over the printing press from the continent that the h appeared: Caxton had spent much time in Bruges, and when he printed this word he added an h to match the h he knew in the Flemish gheest.

If Caxton had taken a freshly printed sheet, the ink still wet, and folded it, the ink would have produced another ghost: a light mirror image of the printed matter. This is one of many similar things called ghosts, such as phantom images on televisions and on radars. Things seen but not signifying the same thing.

But what, in origin, is a ghost? Let us return to that letter h. It stands for a breath. And breath has been equated with the spirit, the soul, in many cultures, languages, and times. The word for that part of us that is immortal was, in Old English, gást – not that your soul is a guest in your body, but it is the ghost that you give up when you die; it ascends to join the Holy Ghost and the heavenly host.

Over the centuries, we have come to prefer the Latin-derived spirit for that, and have reserved ghost for a spectral being – especially the echo of a person who has died. A haunted house may have a ghost that repeats the same action over and over again, something emblematic for that person, perhaps something fraught with emotion. It can be an ordinary action of an ordinary person, but to see something so eerie, so eldritch, as a bodiless spectre – a ghost without the machine – will leave us frightened.

But how are these ghosts wandering around if their spirits are supposed to be in Heaven or Hell? This is why I said echo. It has been suggested – I seem to recall by Kurt Vonnegut, but I have only the suggestion of a memory of where he suggested it – that ghosts are not actual beings but simply echo images. Something passed through and left ripples, and the ghost is the ripples. See it come… watch it go… st.

I wonder, too, whether the ripples may be not from what the supposed person saw or felt, but what we have seen and felt, perhaps what we remember or imagine of the person. A ghost could be of a living thing. I think of Laurie Anderson’s “Gravity’s Angel”: “Well, we were just laying there. And this ghost of your other lover walked in. And stood there. Made of thin air. Full of desire.”

There are many places I pass by where I can almost see, feel, or taste what happened there. Something that involved me. An argument. An accident seen or averted. A kiss. A casual touch or glance, full of intention. An understanding reached. I can stand in these places and look where I looked and almost see what I saw, almost feel what I felt. The person or people involved may be living or dead, near or far, but there is a ghost there, just for me. Made of thin air. Full of desire. Or dread. My desire or dread.

And ghosts can be things that should have happened. Or things that I think happened but did not. Things that I just wanted to have happened. For any person, their home town is a ghost town, a town not empty but full of the empties of pasts consumed and possibilities not realized.

And sometimes our ghosts create a reality. A thing that does not belong but sits there silently before our eyes because we think it should be there. Not a whole and not a hole, holy or unholy, not a sign but… a sigh, unrealized. The h in ghost.

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quadriceps

Posted on December 31, 2013 | 2 comments

My legs are bagged. Bagged like groceries. They’re wrecked like the Edmund Fitzgerald. They’re so sore I need to help myself with my arms when sitting down and getting up, and I grunt when doing either.

Don’t worry. It’s not permanent. It’s just the effects of exercise. I dealt the first blow to them at my niece’s wedding reception, dancing Russian-style to “Rasputin.” Then today I went skiing, and of course along with everything else I had to ski the high steep mogul runs: Memorial Bowl. The Lone Pine. Because bragging rights. And after that, my leg muscles were in pain.

Well, not all of my leg muscles. Mainly my quads. You know, quadriceps. Musculus quadriceps femoris. The muscle on the top of your upper leg, the big flat muscle that other people sit on if you let them.

Actually, the quadriceps isn’t one muscle. It’s four. Hence the name: quadriceps, Latin for ‘four-head’. The full name means it’s the four-headed muscle of the femur. And by four-headed, they mean there are actually four muscles. The one on the top is the rectus femoris; the other three beneath it are the vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, and vastus intermedius.

Tell you what, if you’re not entirely sure where your quads are, or what they might be feeling like for me right now, do this: plant your feet about a half a metre in front of a wall, and – without a chair – assume a sitting position against the wall, using just the force of your legs to hold your back against it, with your knee and hip joints at or near 90-degree angles. Hold that position for a while. When your legs start to shake, keep holding it. Eventually – within a minute or three, probably – you will have to stop. Congratulations: you are now feeling your quadriceps. Both of them. Or all eight of them.

So that’s why it’s called quadriceps rather than quadricep? Nope. Quadriceps is not a plural form, actually. In the Latin it modifies a singular noun, musculus. In Latin the plural would be quadricipites, but in English we just use quadriceps for one or more than one – although, as with biceps, people sometimes backform an s-less singular.

So we get the short form, quads, which has strong tastes of squad and squat (and squatting uses the quads!). And we have the fuller word, quadriceps, which will quite reasonably remind you of biceps, and which counterbalances the thick and broad quad with the sharp snipping ceps, joined by a ri bridge. The added length also changes the visual balance: from the rotational quasi-symmetry of quads to a mirror-style quasi-symmetry with quadriceps. Both of them have the little snake of an s on the end.

But snakes bite. Quads don’t bite, not exactly. They burn. But not spontaneously. Just as a bit of quad-pro-quo.

I wonder if having the right person sitting on them would help.

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cattleguard

Posted on December 30, 2013 | 8 comments

I’m back in Alberta for a few days, driving around through my memories. This evening we drove west on the Trans-Canada Highway. About 80 km west of the city, we passed a significant sight from my childhood: the sign on the Trans-Canada Highway that says North ↗ Morley Road. That was where we would turn off the highway on the way home from Calgary. Up the off-ramp, turn right, then two sounds: “krrrrchung” and then “khrkhrkhr” – the sound of a cattleguard followed by the sound of a gravel road.

What is a cattleguard? You may know it by some other name – cattle grid, stock grid, stock gap, cattle stop, or Texas gate (which is what some signs in Alberta also call it; I’ve never cottoned to that – we’re not in Texas, we’re in Alberta). Or, if you don’t live anywhere near where ungulate animals need to be kept on one side of a fence through which a road must pass, you may not know what it is at all. Here is what it is: At the point where a road passes through a fence, in place of the road is a stretch a couple metres long of metal bars over a trench. The bars are far enough apart that a hoof could slip through, but close enough together that a car can drive over it without too much trouble. It’s a brief bumpy stretch; the sound you hear as your tires rumble over it sounds something like “cattleguard” if you drive at just the right speed.

A cattleguard is the sound of being in ranch country. It’s an Alberta sound for me, and a piece of my childhood. I sure don’t hear that sound in Toronto. When I hear it, I know I’m driving back into a landscape of memories, memories that roam freely like grazing beasts. They could cross the road of my mental journey at any time. Sometimes I have to slam on the brakes for them.

But memories are memories; the past is the past. When, returning to your present, you drive back across the cattleguard, the animals of your past cannot follow you. Some of the places of the past persist to the present, but the memories of what happened there are forever in the past, forever just echoes. And some of the places of the past are simply gone. At the Morley Road exit, there used to be a restaurant, the Chief Chiniki; my brother worked there for a while. It’s not there anymore – it burned down a few years ago. So, several years ago, did the house I lived in 30 years ago as a teenager, a bit farther west at the foot of a mountain.

Not all changes are bad: the gravel road into Morley was long ago paved into a nice, smooth, safe two-lane road. The cattleguard is still there, of course. But we didn’t drive over it, because we didn’t turn off at the Morley Road; we continued west to the Highway 1X exit, south onto a snow-covered gravel road, over a different cattleguard and in to the Rafter Six Ranch, a guest ranch owned by friends of ours, full of memories for me. I worked there one summer; my family spent a Christmas there in one of their cabins after we had to move out of one house and were not yet moved into another; we’ve eaten in their restaurant I don’t know how many times…

The lodge at the Rafter Six is unchanged since I was a preteen. Everything looks the same. The log walls, the hand-carved signs, the wooden tables, the gift shop. The restaurant booth where I made a stupid comment about a co-worker’s weight. The spot in the hallway where I referred to a prospective employee as “scruffy,” not realizing he was right behind me. The table where I got a tongue-lashing from someone who thought I was a racist because he took literally a sarcastic remark I made about a news item. The place where I had a breakfast buffet of greasy food while afflicted with a horrible hangover induced by ouzo. Up the hill a bit, the place where I drank all that ouzo the previous night. It’s all still there.

For two more days.

After nearly 40 years, the Rafter Six is closing. Not because they don’t have enough business. No, because they made a deal with a resort company to expand and build more guest rooms, and then the resort company hit a rough patch because it was overextended in the economic downturn, and when it went under it it dragged the Rafter Six with it. Now the ranch is closing at the end of the last day of 2013. So we went there and had one last dinner in their dining room, chatting with Stan and Gloria, our friends, the owners. One more piece of my childhood and youth, disappearing.

After dinner and conversation we stepped out into the great cold country darkness, the glow of the lodge behind us, the stars up above and the black nothingness of the woods surrounding. Like the land of memory, where your piece of history is lit up with night lights while its context is gone from view. A threatening, consuming darkness. I never liked being in the country at night. But I did like the warm welcome of the Rafter Six.

Then we drove away, over the cattleguard and onto the highway.

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descry

Posted on December 28, 2013 | 1 comment

If you’re concerned about something, you may well want to have something to say about it. But before you can say something about it, you really should be able to give a detailed account or description of it. In order to do that, you need to be able to perceive it thoroughly. And in order to do that, you need to be able to perceive it at all.

Usually the order of things is thought to follow smoothly enough: first you notice it, then you see it in detail, then you are able to describe it, then you can give your opinion of it, good or bad. But sometimes it goes the other way: first you start by shouting about something, then you learn more and are able to give a detailed account of it, and then you pull back further and are just looking at it, and at length you find you are only just able to make it out… and maybe at the end it’s gone altogether.

Language can be like that. Decry, descrive, descry, scry…

And thereby hangs a tail. I mean a tale. A tale of two words that came from Old French, one descrier from des plus crier, making ‘cry out’; the other descrivre, cognate with describe and having the same meaning. Descrier became English descry, meaning first ‘cry out, proclaim’ and then ‘denounce’, but the alternate form decry has taken on that sense. Descrivre became English descrive, which got worn down a little bit and merged in form with descry, but by the time that had happened the sense had shifted from ‘describe’ to just ‘make out’ or ‘perceive’. And descry has been further worn down in occasional use to scry.

So it’s not just that one’s awareness of language in general tends to take the backwards route, from loud opinion to observation to having more and more trouble even making out the object. It’s also that certain words move in that direction, and this one most appositely so. At the end you’ll be squinting and craning your neck just to scry the word as it gets scrawnier… it the sort of thing that makes a person cry; it’s almost scary. But it’s a normal course for words.

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adventure, misadventure

Posted on December 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

Originally published in The Spanner, issue 0010.

“I will take you by a dear dirty back way, Miss Honeychurch, and if you bring me luck, we shall have an adventure.” —Eleanor Lavish, in A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster.

Thus was the devotchka invited by the diva to an adventure, a diversion. To venture forth to the invention of novelty, voler au vent… But they were overcome and when they came to, they were not in Florence but in Villa Verba, city of words, and their dear dirty back ways had happened to take a different cast.

For what is an adventure? Not a vision of a nun and a novena, no; it is a tour or turn of sorts; but how does it happen to be as it is? Nature or nurture? Does it simply arrive or is it sought? Or do we seek its arrival?

Miss Lavish ventured to find its advent. But what she came to was to come: venire. She sought an uncertain future, quod futurus est, ‘which is about to be’ – is becoming. And she wished ‘to come to’ it: advenire. And what it will ‘have come to’: adventus.

Such is her Vedanta, her path to self-realization in ultimate reality. She has a vendetta against stasis. But now she is looking down this alley of words, and although she has bundled the Baedeker away in her bag, she may be wishing that she had Roget – or at least Bartlett, Miss Lucy Honeychurch’s chaperone. For when etymology turns anfractuous, one may be heading for an accident.

An accident: something that has simply happened. So, too, is – was – an adventure. Simply a thing that happened; it came to pass. Chance, fortune, luck. If Miss Honeychurch brings luck, they shall have luck. But o, Fortuna, velut Luna (not Lucy): Miss Lavish seeks fortune, and it shall tell out as it will – lavishly or not. When you seek chance, if you find it, you shall indeed have adventure.

“Lost! lost! My dear Miss Lucy, during our political diatribes we have taken a wrong turning. How those horrid Conservatives would jeer at us! What are we to do? Two lone females in an unknown town. Now, this is what I call an adventure.”

In the back alleys of Villa Verba, the inversions will put in you a trance position. You seek adventure but you find it in broken parts: a turn, beyond which lurks a raven duet; if you evade it you will slip into the never; if you think your sense of direction is trued you will see it denature at a v in the road; in a fit of vertigo, you find yourself due in a tavern, and if you are naïve and invade further you will be mastered and can only hope that you will, through the stirring mist, find a rudiment to save you, but your number is up, a sum inverted… for you have drunk over your draft, and your fortune is misfortune: when the pieces come back together you have met your match through a misadventure.

Thus is the reality of our ventures revealed. We think adventure is something that we do: we go forth and happen to the world. But when the world happens to us, we are absolved of responsibility; there is no misconduct, no miscreant, no negligence. Simply death by misadventure.

Then something did happen.

Two Italians by the Loggia had been bickering about a debt. “Cinque lire,” they had cried, “cinque lire!” They sparred at each other, and one of them was hit lightly upon the chest. He frowned; he bent towards Lucy with a look of interest, as if he had an important message for her. He opened his lips to deliver it, and a stream of red came out between them and trickled down his unshaven chin.

Miss Honeychurch recalls later on how the spot came to her dress. It was no fault of her own. There was a young man, yes. So she says. But oh, where is the clever lady and her lavish words? Did she find her adventure? Miss Honeychurch remembers how she was misled by Miss Lavish, hoping for a happening but being happened to unhappily in the alleys and vialetti. Words were getting to her and yet had gotten away from her. So she made her choice: she stole a space so she could find her honey and a church, and when she came to, Miss Adventure had seen her end by misadventure as the word closed in on her.

The city of words is a casually acausally cruel place.

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squiffy

Posted on December 24, 2013 | 4 comments

Sometimes you just see a cute little word wandering around on the street and you pick it up and take it home. And you pet it for a little while, and then you use it in a sentence.

And then someone says “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”

I have the habit of looking up any word that is new to me. But I didn’t always. And one word that just seemed so cute – and its meaning so guessable – that I picked it up without checking it for fleas was squiffy. Oh, look, doesn’t it just have that squee factor? It’s like a little mouse called Sniffy. It’s squeezable and soft. The ff takes away any clear echo of squid, and most people won’t think of spliff right away. (The hair-conscious may think of quiff.) And that squ that seems ironically so un-square can draw your attention away from the rather iffy aspect of it.

So the 24-year-old me was working away in a bookstore and I came face to face with some unforeseen and undesirable eventuality (there are many of those in the quotidian existence of a bookstore), and I said “That’s just squiffy.” And my manager, Dean Thorup, a fellow who (like at least one other I knew in the book biz) demonstrated by his existence that you could have an unspectactular education but still be quite sharp, said “That word doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

So what does it mean? Let me just say that it’s an adjective that many people will have cause to use during the recycled Saturnalia of late December. To be less coy about it: it means ‘intoxicated’.

But of course there are so many levels of intoxication. To draw a parallel, it’s an old (and not really accurate) idea that the Inuit (also called Eskimos by people who are not them) have some huge number of words for ‘snow’. The idea is that if you have a lot of exposure to something and a lot of reasons to make distinctions between different specific types of that thing, you will have a lot of words for that thing. This idea may have some basis (but do think of the number of things we encounter all the time in many varieties and still have just one or two words for), but another factor that can come into play is that things that are socially outré or taboo but nonetheless desirable tend to accumulate a lot of euphemisms and rakish synonyms.

One or the other of those factors will account for something I noticed in an Irish Gaelic phrase book: Irish has a goodly number of words for different levels of drunkenness. Well, that just plays to stereotypes, doesn’t it? But if you’re going down that road, you cannot ignore the amazing number of words we have in English for different levels of drunkenness – easily enough to make a whole year’s worth of word-a-day. And one of those words is squiffy.

So where does squiffy fall on the scale? Generally on the lighter side: what you may get from a snifter or two, just a sniff of the stuff, a couple of quick quaffs and that’s all. But you do well to check context. You surely know that some people like to downplay the level of intoxication, and others to exaggerate it. The lines between semantic categories are not even as tidy as if they had been drawn by someone who was rather more than squiffy.

Oh, and where does the word come from? It dates from the mid-1800s. The Oxford English Dictionary helpfully says “Of fanciful formation.” Go figure.

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cataclasm

Posted on December 22, 2013 | 1 comment

We had an ice storm in Toronto last night and today. If you’ve ever lived through one, you know what follows: a lot of crashing, as the ice clinging to high things comes loose and falls off – or breaks those high things under its weight and falls down with them. It’s one thing if you’re in an area with a lot of trees: the ice falling off branches sounds like people dropping champagne flutes onto a hard floor. It’s another thing if you’re an urban cliff-dweller, listening from your high windows to the adventitious cornices breaking free from their holds 30, 40, and 50 storeys above the shiny pavement and clattering into the chasm. It sounds more like the fall of an icy archangel through the thousand glass floors of heaven and hell.

Surely there must be a word for this, the aftermath of an ice storm? Of course. Etymology buffs can confect it from roots and they won’t be wrong: when things break down, or break and fall down, your Greek parts are κατα kata ‘down’ and κλάσμα klasma ‘breaking’ (from κλᾶν klan ‘break’), translated into the English modular bits cata (as in cataclysm and catastrophe) and clasm (as in iconoclasm), making cataclasm. And since clasm is related to clastic (as in iconoclastic, pyroclastic, etc.), the adjectival form of cataclasm is cataclastic, which, if you say it loudly, sharply, rapidly, and repeatedly in an echoey place, sounds rather like a big chunk of ice breaking free from the top of a building and disintegrating as it knocks against widow ledges all the way down.

But cataclasm is not just or even primarily for the breaking and falling of ice from on high. Indeed, anything that is inelastic can be cataclastic. Well, the only real current use of cataclastic is geological, to refer to a structural character caused by intense crushing. But it’s a suitable adjectival form for cataclasm, and cataclasm means ‘break or disruption’. Which characterizes not just what happens to the ice falling off buildings, but what happens to life in the aftermath of an ice storm: transit is cut off, power is cut off, the normal run of things is cut off. Things break down, and the system breaks down, at least temporarily.

It’s not necessarily accurate to call an ice storm a cataclysm with a y – that really refers to a catastrophic (‘down-stroking’) deluge, or something suitably like one – but it’s quite reasonable to call it a cataclasm… one that leads to thousands of smaller cataclasms.

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anacoluthon

Posted on December 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

Sometimes, halfway through the forest path of a sentence, where did it go? There was a flow of syntax that – something ate it. But what? An anaconda? A python? Worse: it is that most uncouth lexical reptile – the anacoluthon. It slips into a syntactic constituent and devours the tail of it, and in its place leaves the tail of another constituent to be grafted on.

But what a word, a snake in its own right, eleven letters, crawling into the modern era little changed from ancient times, like a coelecanth in the net of your page. Yet it is not such an ugly fish as that; indeed, it has a soft, liquid sound with just a single hard stop. It would do well as a word from a Celtic language – or, more to the point, an invented language from fantasy fiction. It would fit right into Tolkien’s Sindarin: “Fanuilos, le linnathon, nef aear, anacoluthon” – though it would break the rhythm of that poem, since the stress is on the /u/, as in Lúthien.

In fact, it comes from Greek: ἀν an ‘not, without’ and ἀκόλουθος akolouthos ‘following’ (do you notice how yet again we’ve shifted the stress from its placement in the Greek, which would be more natural to us?). The word is for something that does not follow what came before. To use the Latin equivalent, it is a syntactic non sequitur. You all know people who speak like this: the sentence flow they started, it’s changed halfway through – bang, you know? It can be used for topic fronting: “That cake you gave me, the dog ate it”; it can be used for rhetorical or poetical effect: “If only I could have – how could that have been?”; it can be used just because the train of thought went through a tunnel and when it came out everyone had changed cabins: “I brought that fruitcake that she made it with the raisins and the rum is so tasty.”

It is sneaky and slippery, this anacoluthon. The one thing you can be sure of is that it retains the element of surprise. You do not see it coming. And if you look behind you, you will not see it there either. Yes, it is invisible. But you did not see it behind you because it was not there in the first place – it does not follow.

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nocturne

Posted on December 17, 2013 | 2 comments

Listen to the music of the night.

No, I’m not talking about some phantom. I’m not even talking about “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues. I mean a nocturne. A quiet, moody composition, often for solo piano, evocative of the night: a solo instrument like a single light, a sound perhaps reminiscent of the arpeggiated strumming of a guitar, perhaps the call of a nightbird floating on top of it. “A expressive melody in the right hand is accompanied in the left by broken chords,” says Michael Kennedy in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music.

Broken chords. The cords are broken, the bonds, the harmony. This can be a hard word, nocturne, giving you a knock and a turn; such things happen nocturnally… JK Rowling knows it, for she named the street of the darker arts Knockturn Alley. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow knows. And night is all shadow.

No, not all. Night is a beautiful time for photography: lamps are lit, and the light is clear, directional, moody, angular; I’ve taken many pictures I like at that time, such as this one and this one. Night is a beautiful time for painting, too: James McNeill Whistler painted several works he called nocturnes depicting nighttime scenes with a fantastic half-seen moodiness; see Night in Black and Gold, The falling Rocket. Night is when light is not taken for granted.

So night is not just the school of hard knocks. It is also the school of soft nox – Latin for ‘night’, related via Proto-Indo-European to the word night, and root of nocturnus, source of French nocturne. It is not all white satin, but sometimes we want the night of the soul, because night is a time for mystery and love and focus and quiet. Sometimes we want to savour the complex and half-known emotions, when we cannot not yearn and doubt; we want to taste the times when there is no turn or no return, when bonds are weak or broken and nothing can be taken for granted, when we do not know if we will ever again find the welcoming threshold, the times when the only answer is music and art. Music like one of Chopin’s nocturnes – this one, maybe: Nocturne no. 20 in C minor, performed by Valentina Lisitsa.

Can you hold a candle to a beautiful nocturne? You can hold a candle because of one: You are walking through the dark, holding a dim candle, the doubtful music playing in the distance, lightly trilling on your heartstrings, and you don’t know where you are going. You continue unsteadily forward, one hand barely able to see the other, a step, a step, a step, and before you, now, you see a door, framed with a soft glow. And so you knock, turn the handle…

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ornery

Posted on December 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

There’s plenty about Christmas to make people crusty. Of course, there are many people who don’t cotton to the religious side of it at all, and that’s one thing. But for those who do – and even for many of those who don’t – the whole rush and crush and commercial spectacle of it, really a reheated Saturnalia frozen dinner with an overspiced commercial junk sauce poured all over it, can be vexing. And we all know how we, as humans, can be so easily vexed. People are prone to wishing death over ambiguities of grammar that have no effect on comprehension. So of course the biggest holiday madness of the year is going to be prime provocation for making the ordinary person quite ornery. But then there’s the music.

Yes, OK, not everyone likes “Christmas music,” that’s true. There’s no music so wonderful that someone won’t dislike it. With Christmas music, there is indeed an awful lot of dreck and schmaltz (two Yiddish words, by the way, so I guess that’s irony). But there’s also a lot of really nice music that was written for Christmas or is at least mainly sung at Christmas. We really have to distinguish between disliking “Christmas music” and disliking all Christmas music.

One of my favourite tunes that are heard mainly at Christmas is “I Wonder as I Wander.” If you’re not familiar with it – or even if you are – have a listen to this duet do a sweet and not overdone version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQWqkOi175k. I rather think anyone who dislikes that song must be more than a little peevish.

The song, as you will learn in greater depth if you watch this little video, was “collected” by John Jacob Niles in July, 1933; he got it, or anyway some of it, from the daughter of a revivalist preacher in Murphy, North Carolina. The preacher and his family were about to be run out of town for being a public nuisance – camping in the town square, hanging their wash on the Confederate monument, generally being common and low-grade and disagreeable – but they needed money to buy the gas to get out, and the daugher, Annie Morgan, managed to get a couple of dollars off of Niles by singing him bits of this song that had been written who knows when by who knows who. Niles took what he heard and tidied it up and wrote some more.

Anyway, if you’re getting impatient to find out what on earth all this has to do with ornery, well, if you actually listened to the song – I sure hope you did, and if you didn’t, I think you should know I can see how many times people click on each link in my blog articles, so you’re not getting away with it – you will have noticed this line:

For poor ornery people like you and like I

Now, some people in their transcriptions of the lyrics have put that as o’n’ry or similar forms, the idea being that it’s just some poor-folks version of ordinary. But the thing is, although that’s where ornery comes from – an ordinary so ordinary that it’s lost some of its teeth and just sort of rolls through the mouth without a stop – that’s not the current meaning, and wasn’t by the the mid-1800s. It’s possible that the original author of the song may have just meant ‘ordinary’, but more likely he or she didn’t. No, the sense is – and already commonly was by the time the song was written – not just ‘common’ but ‘unpleasant’ and ‘mean’ and ‘willful’ and ‘cantankerous’ and ‘contrary’ and ‘disputatious’.

It’s a good word for that sort of thing. The orn may not sound pointed but it has echos of horns, and the word as a whole seems made to be growled in a curmudgeonly way by someone played by, say, Jerry Orbach. It curls around in the mouth like the spheres of an orrery (the motions of the celestial orbs reduced to a mechanism cranked like clockwork in a little space), groaning in mournful irony. The retroflex /r/ sound is often associated with the very common, from rural folk to pirates; posh people are thought of as dropping it.

This mulishness of ornery gives the song part of its force. It’s one thing to say that someone like Jesus came to die for ordinary people; it’s another to say plainly that he came to die for basic a-holes and rotten jerks. Those cretins who drive so rudely you hope they wrap themselves around a tree sometime. The people who can’t manage to be nice even for a couple of seconds in a shopping mall. Their screaming children, too. The public nuisances.

Also people who grumble about Christmas and Christmas music. People like you and like I. And, by the way, people who get exercised about turns of grammar such as “people like you and like I.” Ornery all. It’s very ordinary to be ornery.

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