Category Archives: word tasting notes

dewildered, smartfounded

Posted on October 8, 2013 | 5 comments

Today, watching Toronto city council in action and live-tweeting it, @cityslikr tweeted, “Crowdsource: We need a word that describes being surprised but not being at all surprised. Anyone? Everyone?”

Several people made suggestions, most of them portmanteau words and the remainder based on humorous reanalyses. My first effort was subprised, which I wasn’t altogether satisfied with. Surprise is actually formed from Latin parts meaning ‘overtake’; replace the sur with sub and you get parts meaning ‘undertake’ – but in this case the sense seems really more like ‘underwhelmed’. But that’s not what @cityslikr had in mind.

I knew just what was intended. I’m sure you know too. The city hall instance that provoked the question was not likely a pleasant surprise, but the same word could serve equally well for a pleasant one. I think of the time when a very capable, intelligent, calm, steady, and devout young woman who had been one of the leading lights in the production department where I work (she programmed websites) announced she was resigning to pursue a life as a nun. It was (for me) quite unexpected, and yet at the same time it made perfect sense for her. It was not astonishing at all, simply unforeseen and rather momentous. (She is, incidentally, progressing well in her path to her chosen vocation. It happens that convents need webmasters too, for one thing.)

One suggested word that seems to have gotten at least a little traction was from @squideye: mehbergasted, a blend of flabbergasted with meh. But to my mind the not-at-all-surprised part is not necessarily a “meh” – that’s a dismissal born of disinterest and uninterest and boredom. I think what we need here is more in the line of a “Well, whaddya know… of course.” Or, for Toronto city council, perhaps “Good grief! And of course. Sigh.”

One I particularly liked was from @MayorNPhillips (an account named after a now-deceased mayor after whom the plaza in front of Toronto city hall is named): dewildered. A lovely construction: a simple change of articulation from lips to tongue in the opening consonant, and a flipping of the letter b to d, and the engaging be becomes the disengaging de. The wilder is the same one as in wilderness; if you are bewildered you are left in the wilds – a landlubberish version of all at sea. Dewildered would be expected to be a reversal of that, which is certainly not what is intended; this is not an anagnorisis or de-astonishment. But it still has a certain nice something to it. And clever words often go elsewhere than expected.

I made a second effort that I like better than my first: smartfounded. This is patently jokey; the dumb in dumbfounded refers to muteness, not unintelligence. That word is actually already a portmanteau word – it grafts dumb onto confounded. This replacement of that part with another plays a false reversal and at the same time has smart that can signify the awareness, the not-at-all-surprisedness.

None of these is quite perfect, though. In earlier times, of course, some confection of Greek and/or Latin parts would have been made, perhaps something like the breathtaking ugly triskaidekaphobia (‘three and ten fear’ for a phobia focusing on the number 13). One possibility here would be something like isoecstasis. But that is not a fun word, nor, at present, anything other than an opaque tangle of letters for most people.

I think this question needs more thought. And suggestions.

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embargo

Posted on October 7, 2013 | 2 comments

I’ve just come back from a long weekend in Cuba. Lovely, fun tropical place. Of course it is, as it has been for quite a long time, under embargo from the United States. Nonetheless, it’s doing pretty well – not perfectly, to be sure, but in many ways much better than several other Caribbean countries I’ve been to.

The US has lots of money, of course, and one might think that the absence of its tourism and trade dollars would hurt a country. Notwithstanding the value that US tourism money can bring, though, US tourism also brings a level of US control and cultural imperialism, not to mention hordes of American tourists – you can see them barging in wherever they want to go. I really wanted to get to Cuba before the embargo was lifted, so I could go to a country that was relatively free of that American presence. As you may imagine, Cuba is hugely popular with Canadian tourists. Who, it should be admitted, are not always all that different from American tourists in many ways – but there are differences, I assure you.

So while the embargo has contributed to some key elements of Cuban culture, such as the large number of very old cars somehow still running (and sometimes on the side of the road being repaired on the spot), the main flavour of embargo we had there was the bar we would go and get our drinks from. We had some truly delicious piña coladas. Almost from our disembarkation, we were imbibing bargain rum drinks (rum is stunningly inexpensive in Cuba). And we had all the sun, sand, warmth, and humidity we wanted, and then some.

The tourism business is burgeoning in Cuba, although the country does have its problems – much more tangible to those who live there than to those who visit, however. But the embargo is porous; the US actually does quite a lot of trade and aid with Cuba, and Americans do visit. It’s not entirely the blockade it can be made out to be.

Blockade? Here’s the fun linguistic thing: notwithstanding that embargo is a Spanish word meaning ‘seizure’, ‘arrest’, ‘impediment’, or – yes – ‘embargo’, in Cuba the US embargo is called el bloqueo.

I should say that embargo has another common use in Spanish: in the phrase sin embargo. Now, in English, a sin embargo might be a boycott or blockade of naughtiness. But in Spanish sin means ‘without’, and sin embargo means ‘nevertheless, notwithstanding’. Perhaps that’s one reason they call the embargo el bloqueo: Cuba goes on, sin embargo.

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kep

Posted on October 3, 2013 | 2 comments

Think of a vowel as a projectile launched by the consonant before it. In this word, the [k] at the back is like a spring-loaded lever popping out the ball of the [ɛ]. But it doesn’t get far – the lips cut it off, closing with an unreleased [p], and the vowel is kept in.

Kept in? If the past tense is kept, then the present must be kep, right? It keps the vowel?

No, no, keep your hat on. I know that kept is the past tense of keep. And kep looks more like kepi, a French military cap (the name of which comes from Swiss German käppi) – which actually sounds in French like English “KP,” which is not something a military person wants (it stands for kitchen patrol and means that today you’re doing scut work).

But guess what: kep is Northern and Scots English for the present tense of kept – but just when we’re talking about something being intercepted: stopped from falling or proceeding forward, by being blocked (as by throwing oneself in the way) or caught (as with the hands cupped). And guess what else: it comes from a backformation of a present form from the past tense form kept. Yep. It’s not that they don’t have keep. But this is kep.

There is, by the way, another kep – or, rather, KEP. It stands for kinetic energy penetrator: a projectile that does its damage not by exploding on impact but just by force of kinetic energy. Which means it’s heavy and is fired fast. Cannon balls were the original KEPs, but today a KEP will be in the line of an armour-piercing round, probably shaped like a thick arrow and made of very heavy metal. It’s something even metal armour inches thick can’t kep.

But if you want to use kep in real life, think of a person kepping a bullet, baseball, or thrown cream pie – or cup your hands and kep some pouring water or grain. Or sing along with Pretty Poison or Real Life, just slightly modified: “Kep me I’m falling…”

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prerogative

Posted on October 2, 2013 | 1 comment

Say this word.

No, no, say it the way you would normally say it (inasumuch as you would normally say it) in a sentence. “Well, that’s your prerogative.”

We know how it’s supposedly pronounced: /pri rɑ gə tɪv/. That’s what we think is called for. But I can tell you how I say it most of the time: [pr̥rɑ gə ɾɪv]. The first two syllables collapse into a sesquisyllable at most; the aspiration of the /p/ devoices the /r/, but then it runs at least briefly into a voiced /r/, having utterly ditched the first vowel. And of course as is usual in North American English, the intervocalic /t/ is flapped – it sounds more like a [d], though it’s not actually that either.

It’s that retroflex /r/ of ours, making the tongue hunch upwards like a cat stretching itself. Words like rural are more exercise than they should be. It can seem an undignified sound, but I find it wry, curling, almost purring. I do like languages that use it: many dialects of Irish, some versions of Dutch, Mandarin Chinese, some versions of English…

Well, de gustibus non est disputandum: there’s no arguing about taste. What you like is your prerogative. And what I like is my prerogative. Just as my choice of dialect and accent is my prerogative. No sweeping it under the rug.

So, now, about this word prerogative: where does it come from, anyway? Jim Taylor, who suggested this word, had the following thoughts in his email to me:

Pre- is easy, ‘before’.

-rogative? Apparently to do with writing something, perhaps on a shard of pottery in Athens, for a vote. But rogation is also a litany of the saints. Rogation Sunday, I vaguely recall, has something to do with agriculture. And then there’s rogue, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the other definitions above.

And, of course, roger, with a soft g, connoting the use of an appendage that is no longer soft.

(Does that seem a touch off-colour? Uncalled for? Well, that’s Jim’s prerogative – and mine.)

But what does this rogative come from? It looks odd so bald, sans prefix – it seems to need some lexical Rogaine. If not pre, how about inter? Of course. Interrogative – is that the question? Yes. The root is Latin rogare, ‘ask’. The original meaning of prerogative is ‘prior choice’ or ‘prior election’ – or, more to the point, ‘preordination’ or ‘inherent advantage’. Your prerogative was your talent, your advantage, your superpower.

Now, of course, your prerogative is your say-so. If something is your prerogative, that means you get to decide. You are not beholden to anyone else on that score. It’s your right. You’re king of that thing, or queen of that scene. No one else is the boss of you. This comes to us by way of royal prerogative – the “divine right” of kings and queens.

It’s sort of like being a cat: master of all you survey, and entirely free to ignore all and sundry at your leisure. Your purr-rogative.

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glitch

Posted on September 30, 2013 | 3 comments

To me, this word sounds like a bug meeting an abrupt demise. Or perhaps someone stepping into something they really didn’t want to. Something slippery. Ew. It has that /gl/ onset that often comes with things wet and/or shiny (like glops of glossy glue on glass), and it ends with that voiceless affricate that can be splashy or scratchy or aggressive… and there’s just a short high vowel between them. It could be a sound effect from a sci-fi movie.

We know what a glitch is, right? We use it to mean a brief error, a blip, a flaw. A bug in the program, maybe? Legend has it that bug as in computers came from a problem caused once by an insect that had worked its way into the wiring and sent everything haywire with its self-immolation. Bzz bzz bzzz glitch! But glitch doesn’t come from that.

But glitch does relate to computers and other electronic things. We generally talk of a computer glitch or a software glitch or more generally a technical glitch, or a glitch in the system. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation of it is from 1962, when astronaut John Glenn defined it as “a momentary change in voltage in an electrical circuit.” Just a little flaw in the current, but one that can cause problems.

The use has broadened considerably since then, but it is still used mainly for electronics and computers and such things. Can we use it for other things? Errors and oversights? Momentary mental or editorial lapses? That might seem a bit of a stretch, especially since an error is more likely the product of a glitch rather than the glitch itself.

Say, for instance, a dictionary has a word in it for which it lists the etymology as “unknown.” Say you go to another dictionary and find the etymology traced with good probability to a word in Yiddish and German (Yiddish being a variety of German with significant Hebrew influence) – a word with a different but quite plausibly related meaning, pronounced the same and spelled nearly the same. That’s a bit of an oversight for the OED not even to make mention of that, isn’t it? Perhaps the product of a mental glitch?

Or maybe not. We don’t want to slide down that slippery slope of extending glitch too broadly.

But what is that German word that glitch likely comes from? The verb glitschen, ‘slip’, with its related adjective glitschig, ‘slippery’. My Oxford Duden German dictionary doesn’t have a noun Glitsch, but at dictionary.com I find a reference to Yiddish glitsh ‘slippery area’ or ‘slip’ (noun). We can talk in English about a little slip-up or slip of the tongue; in Yiddish that figurative extension is also possible. So a bit of Yiddish appears to have slipped into the technical jargon to refer to a little slip-up in the circuits.

Glitschen and glitsh are also related to gleiten, which is related to English glide. But aside from that, and aside from what else it sounds like, glitch does communicate suitably the sound of slipping, too, doesn’t it – perhaps on a banana peel? And maybe the sound of a circuit shorting out…

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seclusive

Posted on September 29, 2013 | 3 comments

On the ferry to the island to hit the beach for one last sand and spash, Aina and I looked across the water at the island owned by one of the city’s yacht clubs: a lush green retreat, just across the harbour from the city, nestled in with the busy popular parkland but not connected to it – not even a bridge. We talked about how nice it could be to be able to go right from downtown to a nice little secluded and exclusive retreat like that.

Secluded and exclusive? “Seclusive,” Aina said.

Which sounds like a made-up word blending secluded and exclusive. But actually it’s a real word. If exclusive is ‘tending to exclude’, seclusive is ‘tending to seclude’ – seclude oneself, that is. If you are seclusive, you are disposed to close yourself off.

That’s from Latin se ‘apart’, as seen in separate, segregate, secede, and claudere ‘shut’ – also seen in exclude, include, preclude.

So the ex pushes out – just like your tongue saying it: lifting up and touching at the back and then pressing forward. A yacht club can certainly seem exclusive – though the one we were looking at across the water came into being from being excluded: the grand old yacht club excluded members of certain ethnic and religious groups, so this one was founded to be more inclusive. But it’s still exclusive in that you have to be able to afford a membership, and you can’t go there unless you’re a member or guest.

The se, on the other hand, starts with the tongue on the tip and then releases – not exactly pulling in and closing off, but not pushing out either. But seclusive is an easier word to say than exclusive; it’s less plosive, and can be whispered quietly in the ear without causing a wince. It can even be whispered while inhaling.

And to be seclusive is rather less offensive than to be exclusive. If you are exclusive, you are pointedly pushing away others. People value exclusive things precisely because they leave other people out: it’s about feeling good because other people feel bad. But if you’re seclusive, you’re simply drawing yourself away. You’re not with an exclusive in-group above and beyond others; you’re in an out-group – perhaps an out-group of one. You’re not pushing everyone else away; you’re pulling yourself away. Off to your mountaintop or cloister or island.

Ah, an island. Your own little island, perhaps. Quiet, lush, away from the hustle and bustle, a comfortable chair to sit in, surrounded by bookshelves…

Seclusive people are much more my kind of people, I think. But they can be so hard to find.

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curt

Posted on September 27, 2013 | 3 comments

Is succinct the boldest kind of counsel? Is terse the least courteous manner?

No.

Think of when you are cut short. In fact, shot right out the middle. Cut short… Cu…rt… That is what kind of reply does it. Curt.

Curt is so curt it does not even start with “If I may be so bold”; it just is so bold. Curt sounds like the beginning of courtesy, but that is quickly curtailed, and uncourteously at that. The curtain is pulled.

Curt looks like it could be a rude word. A word that is curt is a rude word, you can bet on it. It can hurt. Get your knickers in a twist, even.

It sounds crisp and cutting. The tongue kicks at the back, passes arched through the middle, taps cold and hard at the front. That is all. It has a sound of a short skirt, but it is not. A short skirt may be interesting. Curt rebuffs.

Now tell me what sort of a fellow is likely to be curt. Is it a fellow who is likely to be Kurt, or Curt?

Two names identical in sound but different in feeling because of their spelling. Also because they come from different origins. Both are short forms of something else. Curt is short for Curtis, which originally came from Old French for ‘courteous’ but was later associated with curt hose ‘short leggings’. Kurt is originally a short form of Konrad, which originally meant ‘bold counsel’.

And curt?

Latin.

Curtus. ‘Short’, now so short it cuts us out. Shows up in French court, Spanish and Italian corto, but also German kurz and Swedish and Danish kort.

If you are being curt, you are being short with someone.

Obviously.

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terse

Posted on September 26, 2013 | 4 comments

Succinct may be succulent or have a shiny sound like a knife, but terse cuts worse. Terse is tense. There is no tergiversation in terse. No time for verse, not terza rima, not even the tierce of it (one third). You can see the e and e giving you the cut-eye.

The word starts with a little spit of exasperation, the aspiration on the /t/. Then it’s straight into a syllabic liquid (or a neutral vowel for the non-rhotic), and quickly thereafter a hiss that can last as long as the other two phonemes combined. A jab, a sound, a hiss. And that’s it. Pressed reset. Wiped clean. Polished like a cut diamond, and just as cutting.

Whence comes this tight insertion? Where else but Latin? From tersus, ‘wiped’, past tense of tergere. Wiped? Wiped clean, polished, burnished, shining smooth without dirt. Spruce. Trim. Pithy. Visual Thesaurus gives three synonyms: Crisp. Laconic. Curt. You may be succinct without being impolite, but it is hard to be pleasant when being terse… though it’s perhaps not quite as rude as curt.

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succinct

Posted on September 25, 2013 | 2 comments

Look, someone’s left nail clippings in this word, cc c. You can hear the clipper: “succinct, succinct.”

Maybe I’m wrong, though. Could be bellows, this word. It sounds like “sucks in,” as in breath. And you can whisper it well while sucking in your breath.

It slices the air around your tongue like a scalpel, this word. As Jim Taylor puts it, “Such a nice word, with all those sucking sounds, and those pursed-lip c’s, ending with the distinct smack. Sounds of suck, of course, but also vestiges of sphincter locking tight. Argument sucked dry, closed, no loopholes left…” Quick. Tight. A cinch.

Literally a cinch. A cinch, after all, is a sort of girdle on a horse to help hold a saddle on. The word cinch comes from Spanish cincha ‘girth’, which can be traced to Latin cingere ‘gird’. And it is that that undergirds this word: sub ‘under’ plus cingere is succingere, and the past participle is succinctus. Undergirded. Girdled. A bit of verbal belt-tightening. (Economic belt-tightening may be because of lean waists from lean diets, but verbal belt-tightening is more like corseting, tightening up to display to greater advantage the more salient parts.)

Still, as succulent and sexy a lexical succubus as succinct is, it’s not as terse as terse. Nor as curt as curt.

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chaff

Posted on September 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

The NPR affiliate radio station KPCC in Los Angeles broadcast an interview with me today (listen to it here) about my article “Kill the apostrophe!” (as republished on Slate). Their website has drawn a few comments, pretty much in the same line as the comments the article has gotten on TheWeek.com.

One comment I particularly liked in defence of the apostrophe was “I like it because you get to separate the people as wheat from the shaft.” Ah, honest: the apostrophe is there so you can look down on some people. It shows who doesn’t know English well enough!

Mind you, so does making an eggcorn error in a common phrase. “Wheat from the shaft”? Um, heh heh, as two subsequent commenters quickly pointed out, that’s chaff, not shaft…

It’s an understandable error: we just don’t thresh or winnow grain by hand anymore; chaff is something most of us have no literal personal experience of. On the other hand, we know what wheat looks like, kernels of grain on a stalk – that is, a shaft… So this commenter has reanalyzed it to make it something that makes sense to him.

There we go, one of the great sources of error in the English language: “It’s obvious!” Something looks like it should be so, so it is assumed that it must be so. Another great source of error, on the other hand, is “It’s too obvious!” (or “It’s too simple!”). We have a tendency to prefer the marked (the less obvious or less usual) in many cases, especially thanks to our perverse spelling and our heavily idiomatic usage patterns.

Our perverse spelling… Oh, we do chafe at it. And yet we look down on anyone who has not achieved sufficient mastery of it. At one time in our history we added an erroneous s to iland because we thought it came from Latin insula. Several attempts, some very persistent, have been made by various parties at various times since then to remove that s, but the ordinary user won’t tolerate it – that would be wrong and uneducated! – and so it stays in. We do love our mumpsimuses. And we do love to use the perverse rules of our language as means of social control and exclusion. And we have a long and popular history of language complaining (the link is a PDF).

How about the spelling of chaff? That’s easy, isn’t it? Sure, no problem. We just take it as a given that [f] at the end of a word is represented by a double letter as a rule. Why? Because it is! Sshh! Look at the nice ff like heather in the breeze.

But of course it wasn’t always thus. The Old English spelling was ceaf, which for the pronunciation and spelling rules of the time was a perfectly phonetic spelling (they said it almost exactly as we do, but with the tongue moving towards the middle of the mouth during the vowel).

It’s such a nice word, in its way, isn’t it? It really has a sound rather like what I imagine winnowing would sound like, throwing up the grain and letting the wind blow away the undesired light bits while the grain falls to the floor to be collected. Or maybe like threshing, beating the grain to separate the useful from the useless.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that with language? Have the unnecessary crap and the silly fake rules blown away in the breeze, or flail it away? But, ah, what is and isn’t unnecessary, and why? How much of these assorted accretions lends flavour and interest, too? And what about the people who would like to keep the chaff in just so that fools can choke on it while the wise simply pick it out?

Such as our commenter. Yes, sure, let’s keep apostrophes just so we can see who has learned how to use them and exclude those who have not. But let’s make sure we extend that reasoning to every bit of English: all idioms, all grammar, all spelling… Our commenter would surely not be chuffed to find he’d given himself the shaft.

Well, let those without error thresh out the first chaff. (This is where, as with the biblical precedent, all should retreat, ashamed. In reality, several will charge forward… and give each other a good thrashing. Oh, by the way, thresh and thrash are in origin the same word.)

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