Category Archives: word tasting notes

guillemet, guillemot

Posted on December 12, 2013 | 2 comments

When you read the sea of black on white that is a text, it is as diverse and full of different life forms as the sea itself. It boils with the fantastic fish of words, all their different shapes, and the plankton and krill of periods and commas, and the catching bird claws of apostrophes and quotation marks, and on and on. But just as different seas have different kinds of life, so different languages have different forms of life in their textual waters. Some languages – French in particular – have birds that dive into their waters and swim after the fish: « these ». You see the wings angle as they push through and catch the text they enclose. They are all cupidity, hunger, desire in the head.

Desire in the head? How about a helmet of desire? There’s a name for that: will plus helm becomes Wilhelm or William or Guillaume or or or. And Guillaume has its diminutives and derivatives, two of which being Guillemet and Guillemot.

A French printer of the 1500s, Guillaume Le Bé (“Billy the B” in English, I suppose), invented handy little marks for enclosing quotations, and so those marks, « », came to be named for him, guillemets. The name might have you thinking of gulls, but these marks are not like any gull I’ve met; they are smaller, and black. They are like black birds that dive into the water and chase fish for their dinner. Black (sometimes black-and-white) birds that are called guillemots, not because they have helmets of desire (though they desire fish and chase them with their heads that sometimes look helmeted), but simply because they are named after the French name Guillemot, about which see above. They might look like gills for your bons mots, but they aren’t to help the words breathe; they’re to devour them in the open air.

But, oh, a note of warning. Guillemet is still entirely a French word, occasionally lent to English, and we say it like the French – the English approximation is “gee a meh” (with a g as in guy). Guillemot, on the other hand, has been comfortably in English for centuries, quite long enough to gain a spelling pronunciation: “gill a mot.” It has that French look but sounds more comfortable with the dipping claws “ and ”.

Meanwhile, the real textual guillemots, the guillemets, continue their dives into the chill waters of the text, never coming out empty-mouthed. « Bon appétit ».

Thanks to John Eerkes-Medrano for inspiring this note.

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cakehole, piehole

Posted on December 12, 2013 | 1 comment

“Shut your piehole.”

“Shut your cakehole.”

OK, which is ruder?

Obviously, both are rude. Even “shut your bouche” would be rude, though also confused. But there’s something particulary nasty about piehole and cakehole. If we see them in a context other than shut your, it’s likely to involve a word such as cram or stuff: “He gobbled down as much as he could cram into his cakehole.” “He stuffed it quickly into his piehole.” Want further evidence that these are low, rude words? Compare this: “The queen took the most delicate forkful of camembert soufflé and placed it delicately in her cakehole.” Did you laugh? Proof: the contrast is absurd.

It’s fairly plain to see that hole is a rude word when applied to a mouth. A hole, after all, is a simple, round, inarticulate thing; other holes we have on the body are the earholes and the nostrils (which have a non-hole name) and one other hole, an especially vulgar one. The resonance is clear. Hole is, after all, a plain old Anglo-Saxon word, of the stock that for a few hundred years was associated with the ruder folk while the court preferred French and the scholars used Latin.

So is cake. It has cognates throughout Western European languages, especially Germanic and Balto-Slavic ones. Of course, cake is delicious – everyone loves cake, and some people gobble it greedily, cramming it in their cakeholes. But cake is also a verb that is not always pleasant. What sort of thing gets caked on? Exactly.

Pie, on the other hand, while having been in English since medieval times (think of Simon the pie man, from the nursery rhyme), is not an Anglo-Saxon word in origin. In fact, it appears to come from Latin originally, by way of a bird. A bird? Not four-and-twenty blackbirds, no; a bird that is famous for collecting all sorts of odd things: the magpie, formerly called just the pie, from Latin pica by way of some later Romance languages. It seems that a pie was conceived of as a sort of omnium gatherum dish (mincemeat comes to mind).

Pie has long been a popular dessert, of course, and in many ways a demotic one: there’s the old story of a royal visiting a small town in western Canada and being told, after the main course, “Keep your fork, Duke, there’s pie.” Not “Keep your fork, Duke, there’s cake,” though that would give a more consistent sound. No, cake is a more elevated thing: remember, Marie Antoinette was supposed to have said, in an oblivious insult, that peasants without bread could eat cake (actually brioche in the original). (This line had earlier been attributed to others, and most likely no one ever said it as such.) “Let them eat cake”? How rude. But “Let them eat pie”? Mmm, delicious. It’s true that royals have eaten lamprey pie (and many other kinds), but the associations are established: cake is a loftier dessert, but the word also has more unpleasant overtones, which lend further to cakehole. (There is also possible effect from K-hole, a bad trip caused by a particular party drug colloquially referred to as special K, but that’s in more limited circulation.) Cake is also a harder word, with those /k/ and /k/ stops kicking at front and back. Pie starts with a pop and then fades out.

In any event, cakehole is somewhat older – it dates from at least the early 1900s, while piehole only starts showing up in the 1960s and then more in the 1980s and on – and cakehole is by a long measure the more used of the two. I would say it’s also the ruder. If you disagree, just cram something in your piehole and shut your cakehole.

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xing

Posted on December 9, 2013 | 4 comments

Every so often I will see a sign on a street, PEDESTRIAN XING or STOP PEDESTRIAN XING. To me, these seem like names of communist plays from China: the first one about a man who walks everywhere talking about the virtues of the collective, and the second one where he goes renegade and must be stopped. Of course this only makes sense if you know that xing is not only a Chinese word but also a Chinese surname.

OK, no, actually, it’s several Chinese (specifically Mandarin) words, including a surname. Actually, in total, including all four tones, there are 75 characters that can be said as xing (the x is pronounced like something between “s” and “sh,” so the sound of this word is like that of a sword being unsheathed). Many of them are uncommon and used only in combinations. But you’ll really like what the most common of them is: 行, pronounced with rising tone: xíng. It means ‘walk, go, move, OK’ – the ‘OK’ being in the same vein as French ça va, ‘it goes’. A pedestrian, in Chinese, is xíngrén; since rén means ‘person’ or ‘man’, xíngrén 行人 is translatable as ‘walkman’ (and doesn’t 行人 somehow look like someone walking past a crossing guard or gate?).

But even if the pedestrian is named Xíng – since the Chinese for ‘be named’ is xìng 姓, we would say xíngrén xìng Xíng – it doesn’t quite mean it’s like calling him Walker, because the Xíng that’s a name is a different character, 邢.

Also among the different words in different tones that are xing are ones for ‘prosper’, ‘star’, ‘shape’, ‘punishment’, ‘pleasure’, ‘awaken’, ‘luck’, and ‘nature’, and a wide variety of derived senses that come from the combination of one of those with one or more other characters (for instance, xīngqī 星期 ‘week’ uses the ‘star’ one). Hardly pedestrian in its variety, I’d say!

But you won’t connect to any of that if you’re unfamiliar with Chinese – indeed, you won’t even think of it as being said like “shing” unless you know some other language that uses x for a “sh” sound, such as Portuguese, which gives us such words as Xingu, the name of a river in Brazil (probably not so named from someone saying “River, I am crossing you!”).

No, if you’re an Anglophone, you’ll probably go with the usual sound we make when we see x at the beginning of a word: “z.” So xing would be pronounced “zing.” And PEDESTRIAN XING could be a place where you zing pedestrians. Or something else – Mercedes Durham, @drswissmiss, Tweeted, “as a child I thought xing was the word for where animals crossed road (pronounced ‘zing’).”

Or it could be pronounced “exing,” as in “exing something out” – also spelled x-ing. Because, really, x is first of all an X; it’s crossed lines, but when we talk of a cross it’s usually more like a plus sign, +. But PEDESTRIAN +ING? No, that would be confusing, wouldn’t it. On the other hand, xing looks like it could be read “multiplying” – and that would be a whole other thing.

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sylphlike

Posted on December 8, 2013 | 1 comment

In my note on svelte, I used the word sylphlike (ahh) and said “I have to catch my breath after the frisson that runs down me saying that word.” As you can see, this is persistently true.

What is it about this word that gives me such a flash of soft delight, so unselfconscious? No doubt it has something to do with that softest of fricatives /f/ between the two liquids /l/ and /l/, like the sensation of sliding between two silk sheets. In fact, watch how you say the /lfl/: your tongue most likely stays touching its tip behind your teeth while your voice cuts out and your lower lip makes that delicate, hesitant but wanting gesture against your upper teeth as I described in svelte. The net effect is like a hand touch being surreptitiously maintained while lips brush your cheek accidentally on purpose. And at the beginning of the word is a whisper, and at the end the /k/ makes the tongue kiss the palate at the back, near the neck.

I think, too, that this word has a strong taste of snowflake, which is the most sylphlike form of water. There is also the airiness of soufflé. And that’s appropriate, because a sylph is, originally, an air spirit, a light sprite, the waif fashion models of the spirit world.

You may reasonably think that a sylph is a figure from Greek mythology, source of naiads and dryads and fauns, language that has given us so many ph and y words. And indeed sylph (and from it sylphlike (ahhh)) may owe something to Greek. But the word itself, like the thing it names, is a creation of Paracelsus, a 16th-century German physician and alchemist and generally interesting person (do look him up, won’t you). He described them as invisible elemental beings of the air, and the word appears to have come from a blend of Latin sylva ‘wood’ and Greek nymph (I am just going to assume you know the word nymph).

The modern application of sylph to a light, lean, svelte, slender, graceful girl no doubt owes something to the airiness and to the nymphiness. It is worth noting that Paracelsus’s sylphs had no soul, which adds further to the air the word has of waify fashion models.

But even if sylph has too extreme a sense for many a person, sylphlike (oh) may be applied with less self-flattery or self-flagellation, a word for a person who is not quite so airy-fairy or soulless but still occupies the ethereal realm of your mind and eyes, and a word that dives into the soft heather but does not stay there; it flies out again, a brush with a fleeting touch and withdrawal, a flicker, a flirt, a soulful afflatus. A word that is made to be whispered softly and closely into the ear. A word that looks as though its hair is standing on end – and that makes my hair stand on end. But in the best way possible.

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svelte

Posted on December 4, 2013 | 2 comments

Oh, to be svelte. To be as light as felt, a suave fellow or a lass as light as a velleity, not swelling like Elvis but sweltering hot: no thicker than the drop of sweat that falls down your brow at the sight or the plucked eyebrows of a stylish lady. And stylish, yes, svelte always seems stylish, fitted, bespoke tailored.

For this is a word thick with connotation. Look on Visual Thesaurus: svelte connects to three nodes, one of which branches to slight, slim, slender, another to lithe, lissome, lissom, supple, sylphlike (I have to catch my breath after the frisson that runs down me saying that word), lithesome, and again slender, and the third to polished, refined, and urbane. The svelte person may be lean but is not meagre; this is a person of substance as Cognac is a beverage of substance. To be svelte is to have the air of an eau-de-vie of humanity: a special one plucked out from among the many. I was in my youth slender by nature but could barely manage svelte at even the best of times.

Obviously the word seems to privilege leanness, although I would not say it necessarily implies that a person who is not lean cannot be attractive or of substance – there are other words for them; this just isn’t a word for those with much more than a whippet’s physique.

Look at the word: you can read into its forms the traits of its object if you wish, the lithe s, the plunging v-neck on the evening gown or the lapels of a tuxedo, the svelte tall man l and his svelte consort t, and the eyes e e that watch them pass. Say it: your lips barely move but your lower lip just lightly brushes against your teeth, making the small gesture that might pass over the soft, light lips of a lean beauty as she thinks carefully whether she can keep herself from kissing this dashing fellow, or over the fellow’s lips as he, too, uncertainly prepares for possible osculation with this sylphlike (ahhh) lass.

You can also guess that the word may have roots in Italian and French. The silent e ending that doesn’t make the previous vowel “long” is a sign of French, but the sv onset is not – much more likely Italian, since the word doesn’t overall look Sanskrit or Swedish. And in fact English got this word unchanged from French, which modified it from Italian svelto, past participle of svellere ‘pull out’, originating with Latin ex ‘out’ plus vellere ‘pull, pluck’.

There aren’t too many other words that have made it into English with sv at the start; the OED lists 12, of which half are proper nouns, and four are from Sanskrit, four Scandinavian, only one Italian. The fictitious character Svengali is one of the remainder: the mesmeric impresario of the chanteuse Trilby. The least svelte term of the bunch is the linguistic term svarabhakti, which is borrowed from Sanskrit. It names the insertion of an excrescent vowel sound into a word, as when one says “fillum” for film – or “sa-velt” for svelte: an unfashionable thickness.

Thanks to Hal Davis for suggesting today’s word.

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hallmark

Posted on December 1, 2013 | Leave a comment

I recently told a friend that Henry of Pelham’s Baco Noir was one of Ontario’s hallmark wines.

In retrospect, that may or may not have been the best word to use. Tell me what you think of first when you hear or read hallmark.

Um-hmm. Speakin’ of which, Christmas is coming, with all those greeting cards, many (though not all) of which are made by Hallmark. And some days – especially non-vacation-day “holidays” such as Secretaries’ Day and so on (is there a Project Managers’ Day or an Administrators’ Day or an Editors’ Day?) – are referred to derisively as “Hallmark holidays” because they seem to exist just to sell five-dollar pieces of cardboard.

Ah, what hath Joyce Clyde Hall wrought? J.C. Hall (a guy; Joyce was not always a ladies-only name) was the businessman who, in the first two decades of the 1900s, decided that greeting cards were going to be a big thing and started making and marketing them. In 1928, already well established, his company was renamed Hallmark. And thus a word for an attestation of quality started on its roll down the commercial hill to being a synonym for something trite, saccharine, and commercial. I imagine people named McDonald (and those uncommon people named Disney) have some empathy with this.

What, after all, is a hallmark? Well, in London, there is a building called Goldsmiths’ Hall, the home of the Goldsmiths’ Company, which was created to regulate the trade of goldsmiths in England and, since 1300, has been responsible for testing the quality of gold and silver articles – and, since 1975, platinum, and, since 2010, palladium. (The architecture of the current Goldsmiths’ Hall, built in the 1800s, looks just vaguely Palladian, but for no good reason.) The mark that is put on gold, silver, platinum, and palladium to indicate that its quality has been officially tested is the mark of Goldsmiths’ Hall, which is to say, the Hall-mark – now rendered hallmark.

It’s a nice word, really it is. It has that echoing thrall of hall, which can be many things (Kids in the Hall, hall pass, study hall), including some rather positive ones (deck the halls; all those noble buildings called ___ Hall). And it has the mark, which is a similarly common word that can name a blemish or a seal of approval (bourbon drinkers will think of Maker’s Mark) – or a person, including the author of a gospel. Hallmark starts with a breath, then rolls into a dark liquid /l/, firms further into the pillowy nasal /m/, and passes through that retroflex liquid /r/ to a hard stop at the end /k/. In short, its sound is reminiscent of the sight of the logo of a movie production company emerging through clouds or blur to resplendence at the beginning of a film.

And hallmark has good uses. A little searching on Bartleby.com pulls up a couple of examples of common figurative use: “Turgenev became the idol of all that was eclectic, and admiration for Turgenev a hallmark of good taste” (Maurice Baring); “the desirability of the aigrette as the hallmark of wealth and fashion” (Edward Bok).

An indicator of quality. Of good taste, perhaps. A stand-out; emblematic. A distinguishing trait. Imagine giving someone a Christmas gift that you consider a hallmark of taste or fashion: the perfect brooch or tie, perhaps.

Now imagine saying that you are giving them a hallmark.

Sigh.

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usher

Posted on December 1, 2013 | 1 comment

In my note on terpsichorean I mentioned that I met my wife ushering at a dance festival. Laurie Miller commented in response that I should taste usher.

Uh… sure! Why not? Usher is something I have been and done many times in my life. It comes with being a theatre person and, in my younger years, sufficiently impecunious that I couldn’t afford tickets to all the performances I wanted to attend. Ushers, you see, at least in Canadian and American society, are very often volunteers whose only recompense is getting to see the performance they are ushering, and occasionally getting tickets to other performances. And of course in university drama departments ushering is done by students under obligation. It’s part of that set of theatre functions known as front of house.

So I got very good at pointing things out using a flashlight, and at encouraging people to comport themselves appropriately (including occasional hushing, assuring, and keeping people from rushing), and at navigating vestibules and stairs in the dark. That last skill was essential, because you would not want to treat the audience to an impromptu performance of The Fall of the House Usher.

Usher is indeed a family name as well, probably based on the occupation of its first holders back in medieval times. Noted bearers of the name, also sometimes spelled Ussher, include the Irish bishop who determined through some Biblical number-crunching and interpolation that God created the world at the nightfall before October 23, 4004 BC. There was also Hezekiah Usher, of Boston, the first bookseller in British North America. And there’s a popular singer of our times who goes by the one-word name Usher (it’s actually his first name; his family name is Raymond).

But never mind bishops and booksellers and singers and horror-novel title characters. What everyone seems to want to know is, do ushers ush?

That seems sensible, doesn’t it? Editors edit, after all, and porters port and doctors doct and barbers barb and… hmm, wait, no. It doesn’t always work. Ushers usher. But it’s a very common jocularism among ushers to speak of ushing. In theory, an usher could threaten a noisy patron with “If you don’t hush up you’ll be ushed out.” Which looks like pushed out with the p left behind. But we know that people are not ushed out, they are ushered out. Out what? The door, of course; ushers are first and foremost doorkeepers.

That’s where the word comes from, in fact: Latin ostiarius, from ostium ‘door’. “Aw, sure,” you say insincerely, “that’s obvious.” Well, here’s how it got from there to here: the Latin was worn down to Old French huisier (modern French is huissier); that had variant spellings such as ussier; it came into English and became usser or uscher or ussher or usher. And for what they did they simply used the same word as who they were. Well, if you can doctor, why not be able to usher? Backform it to ush and you have a word that’s a little too close to hush – and it sounds like “a shh,” which of course ushers have been known to utter… in between the ushering in and the ushering out.

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terpsichorean

Posted on November 28, 2013 | 3 comments

I first heard this word in an episode of the CBC comedy radio show Doctor Bundolo’s Pandemonium Medicine Show – a couple of pretentious types were making love talk and one of them referred to “the terpsichorean twilight.” I didn’t really know what it meant, and the context was utterly unhelpful.

Also, they pronounced it with the stress on the chor. Which is probably how most literate Anglophones would say it on seeing it for the first time: “terp-si-cor-ee-an.” But that’s not the approved pronunciation.

Nope, it dances around some. What you need to know first is that this word is an adjective formed on Terpsichore. Does that look like it should be “terp-si-cor”? Nuh-uh. In the original Greek, it was Τερψιχόρη, “ter-psi-kho-ré.” But in the great (awful) English classicist custom of putting the accent on the antepenultimate in all Greek words, it came to be “terp-sickery.”

And since in English we usually try to avoid putting primary stress on the preantepenultimate syllable, especially when there would be no secondary stress after it, for terpsichorean we move the stress to the penultimate syllable because we can’t have it on the syllable before that because that one is utterly reduced and unstressed and it would be just so wrong to have it get full value after being reduced to zilch (even though it was the long syllable in the Greek original). So it’s “terp-sicka-ree-an.” As I said, it dances.

And dance is where the back half of it comes from: χορός khoros ‘dance’, root of choreography but also of chorus (because choruses in Greek dramas dance). The first half is from τέρπειν terpein, verb, ‘delight’. Together they made the name of the muse of dance: Terpsichore.

That’s a nice, light-footed word, isn’t it? Tapping as it does on the tip of the tongue, the lips, the tip, the back and tip again. It’s often used to refer to dance in general: “Do you fancy a bit of Terpsichore?” But it has a bit of hidden ill in it. Right in the middle is “sick”; in terpsichorean the end has an uncomfortable echo of diarrhea. And I can’t remember when or where, but I remember seeing twerpsichore. Which I guess is douchebag dancing.

Or maybe it’s a term for my efforts in undergraduate dance classes. I bet you didn’t know I took introductory classes in modern dance, ballet, and jazz dance. I got something in the order of a C in modern dance. My worst mark ever. Obviously it was a course I needed to take, because I knew nothing of it at all! And I was very tense and uptight. All my muscles were tight, everything was jerky. I showed a bit of what I had learned to one of my roommate’s friends, a dancer, and she burst into laughter.

In ballet, that kind of tension can pretend to be self-control. Sure. I got a B+, which was an A for effort and a B– for technique. In jazz dance I think I got a B or B–. Those courses destroyed my GPA (well, OK, not destroyed; they just kept me off the Dean’s List). And I’m really glad I took them. I’m still not a great dancer, but I’m better than I was, and I learned a lot more appreciation for it. And I love to watch dance.

So does my wife, who has a BA and MA in dance. In fact, dance is how we met. Not actually dancing – I don’t think my twerpsichore would have charmed her. We were just ushering a dance festival. And now we can usher ourselves out to a nearby theatre in the terpsichorean twilight to watch dance performances.

Thanks to Dawn Loewen for suggesting today’s word.

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drecky

Posted on November 27, 2013 | 1 comment

Ah, sleep: the nightly frontier. To boldly, or at least relaxedly, go where one has gone before, and yet every night a new hypnagogy, every morning a new hypnopomp leading to brekky. Dreams are when your brain takes out the trash, and every day’s dump brings new junk for the dogs of dreamland to strew over the lawn of your subjunct consciousness. Sometimes dropping into the nightly trek to Never-Never Land is as easy as splitting an infinitive. Sometimes it is rather more tricky. Last night was one of the latter for me. And today I felt drecky.

Drecky? Like junk. Like crap. Rubbishy. As though my hypnagog got run over by a dumptruck, and instead of hypnopomp I had an unappealing circumstance, washing back and forth over the limen while trying in repeated dreams to remember the Chinese character for ‘play’.

OK, so have you never seen this word drecky before? If you search it on the web you will find a few definitions, among which the Urban Dictionary one stands out – the others will tell you it means ‘trashy’ in a literal sense, but Urban Dictionary hews to the derogatory sense of trashy as applied to young women. Given that most of Urban Dictionary appears to have been written by adolescent boys, this is not so surprising.

But obviously drecky is an adjectival form of dreck. And dreck is what? A word I first learned long ago from MAD Magazine (which writer I can’t remember, but it may have been Mort Drucker). It’s a word we got from Yiddish (often spelled drek there; in German it’s Dreck). It’s normally used to mean ‘junk, garbage, trash’. Actually in Yiddish it literally means ‘excrement’ or ‘dregs’. It appears to have a common Indo-European etymon with Greek σκατός skatos as in scatological.

It’s a good word for derision. The /d/ grinds into an affricate and the lips round as it growls into the /r/ and the sound of a “wreck.” The tongue pulls back and crashes at the velum; the lips widen apart. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the motion of trash being swept into a dustpan.

And today I felt like a dustpan that hadn’t been dumped. My mental trunk was full of junk. The porcelain bowl of my mind had not flushed clear. I felt like dreck. I felt drecky. Fortunately, like Dracula, I come to life after dark no matter what. And the taste of a word will always do the trick for me.

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lumbago

Posted on November 26, 2013 | 1 comment

“Oh, my lumbago!”

You know, I used to see that line in cartoons and other fictional things fairly frequently. When? A lumberjack’s years ago… back in the time when Winnebagos were a big thing. But who talks about lumbago now? There’s a whole generation that probably doesn’t even know what it is.

So what is it? Just what’s now commonly referred to as lower back pain. Picture a person stooping forward a bit, hand on their lumbar region, little cartoon stars popping away from it like fireworks. When afflicted by lumbago, you lumber around, bagged, glum and stooped as Gollum, barely ambulatory and most unlikely to gambol. You are like one of those marionettes that are miraculously cured by the oh-so-crisp-sounding Robaxacet (a product of a time when no one says lumbago, though).

But what is the etiology? (Not the etymology – I’ll get to that in a moment.) According to the dusty definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s “A rheumatic affection in the lumbar region of the body.” But if you ask the newer entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Lumbago is considered by health professionals to be an antiquated term that designates nothing more than lower back pain caused by any of a number of underlying conditions.” Muscle strain, herniated disk, sciatica, scoliosis, even some osteoporotic kyphosis… all fall into this catch-all. No wonder it’s not used much anymore.

Well, it really is not a new term. It’s been in English since the 1600s, coming from Latin unaltered in form or sense (except that we say “lum bay go” rather than “loom bah go” as Latin would have it). The root is Latin lumbus ‘loin’. Which provides a good opportunity to remind everyone that although we often use loins to refer to the pubic area, it really in the main is the part of the torso between the hips and the ribs (on comestible quadrupeds too: this is where loin chops come from). The loins are the part you gird – for example, with a weightlifter’s belt. The vertebrae of this stretch are called the lumbar vertebrae. If the lumbar region is in good order, you are limber; if it is as stiff as timber lumber, you may have lumbago.

Except no one really uses that word anymore.

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