Category Archives: word tasting notes

mediochre

Posted on November 14, 2012 | 5 comments

I was reading a snotty restaurant review on TripAdvisor today (you can count on at least one snotty review no matter how good a place is), and I saw the word mediochre in it.

I’m sure most of you are thinking, “That’s mediocre. There’s no h in it.”

And indeed the person was not talking about a forgettable shade of drab. Nor was he making a pun. More’s the pity; it’s a perfectly good pun, and it’s not the first time it would have been made. In fact, it even has its own Urban Dictionary entry: “A shade of dark yellow that just isn’t living up to its potential.”

You can get more than 37,000 Google hits for mediochre, but most of them are not colour puns. No, they’re evidence of the effect of the weirdness of English spelling. In some languages, if something is spelled differently from how it sounds, you doubt the spelling; in English, the stranger variant is often likely to be assumed to be the more correct one. English even gets it in the neck – there are many people who assume that it’s spelled kneck.

Well, it’s not as though they lack precedents; there’s knock and knick-knack and knuckle to set a pattern for kneck. And for mediochre there’s euchre, sepulchre, Christmas, catachresis, and of course ochre. Since we don’t have a reliable, consistent system of spelling, if we’re unsure of a spelling, we think of other words of similar sound, and we will prefer the ones that stand out somehow.

Which is why mediocre is such a put-down. The definition of mediocre is supposed to be “middle of the road, neither good nor bad”; it comes from Latin mediocris, from medius “middle” and ocris “mountain, peak”, from Greek ὄκρις okris “point, protuberance”. So midpoint. The peak in the middle. The Romans didn’t have Gaussian curves, but the image is pretty much right on: the mediocre is the median, that big mass in the middle. It just happens that we generally despise that big mass in the middle. That’s where the shiny iron of excellence gives way to rust, and fails to “exceed expectations.” (Somehow we always expect that our expectations will be exceeded, and if something doesn’t exceed expectations, then it doesn’t live up to expectation. It’s a sort of Lake Wobegon Effect.)

So if someone writes “The food was mediocre,” it means “The food was really disappointing.” That TripAdvisor review I mentioned was a one-star review, not a two-star or three-star review. A mediocre talent is the worst kind: not good enough to be at all good, but not spectacularly, entertainingly bad. Mediocre stands right in the middle, and none of us want to be right in the middle, it seems, just not living up to our potential. We want standouts, exceptions. And, similarly, we want words with weirder spellings, silent letters and so on.

We want, in short, to paint the town red, not ochre. Well, rather, we want someone to paint the town red. Most of us do not really want to extend ourselves and take the risk. But we really do like those exceptions. Ochre is nice enough for decorative purposes, with its muddy yolk colour, and its name derived from Greek ὠχρός okhros “pale yellow” – nothing to really jump out at you there. But it’s, you know, rust. Literally – ochre colouring comes, historically, from iron oxide. You need some vivid accent colours to go with it, or you get a sort of ochlocracy (mob rule) of the middling.

And, likewise, your food has to have some spark of genius or insanity, or it’s just yuck, crap. Not that there’s any great spark of genius or exceptionality in using a middle-of-the-road word as a putdown. And, ironically, misspelling words in some exceptional way under the influence of other words with nonstandard spelling is an entirely too common and unexceptional thing to do. So a review that criticizes food for not going that extra mile as being “mediochre” is… well… need I say it?

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bulrush

Posted on November 13, 2012 | 4 comments

She sits by the reeds and reads. The water flows by, bluish, burbling, past the hedge of sedges. She leans on a bush, a shrub; behind is the brush land, subfusc, scumbled with stubble and rubble. But words grow even here. Words flow from the water; words grow in the tall grass, the cattails, these bulrushes. Grow? Well, she doesn’t know. They catch them, the words, and she plucks them out and dines with her eyes and mind.

Does she have the right to seize the incipient words? Is it not bullish, hubristic? An act of piracy, or papyrusy? Were they not meant for bigger things? Ought she not to blush?

She would sooner shrug. Send not to know for whom the words flow; they flow for thee, and they are filtered by these bulrushes. The water rushes them along and they are caught in the rushes, like the dailies from filming: words upon words. She needs no rush of motion; this other rush, that says hush as it soughs in the breeze, is only a coincidence of sound: a plant. Who planted it? Oh, these things just grow. They grow large, large as bulls.

And she grows, grows old, second by second, watches time and the words pass, reads by the reeds, reads the reeds. She does not seek a knot in a bulrush, as the Romans said: I mean, she does not look to make difficulty where there was none. But there are knots, and involutions, and forms that hold different senses, and Möbius strips of bulrushes. Thefts of form: piracy, papyrusy. She recalls “The Pipe-Player” by Sir Edward William Gosse:

Cool, and palm-shaded from the torrid heat,
The young brown tenor puts his singing by,
And sets the twin pipe to his lips to try
Some air of bulrush-glooms where lovers meet;
O swart musician, time and fame are fleet,
Brief all delight, and youth’s feet fain to fly!
Pipe on in peace! To-morrow must we die?
What matter, if our life to-day be sweet!
Soon, soon, the silver paper-reeds that sigh
Along the Sacred River will repeat
The echo of the dark-stoled bearers’ feet,
Who carry you, with wailing, where must lie
Your swarthed and withered body, by and by
In perfumed darkness with the grains of wheat.

Time will roll on, but every moment is a new birth. She has been impregnated by Etaoin Shrdlu, an act of lexical intercourse, and her gravid thoughts spawn new language, but still she wants a word that has some flesh.

Oh, the words are solid enough. When they are caught by the papyrus – this is what bulrush means here; there are so many things bulrush can mean, cattails, other sedges at the edges of bodies of water – when they are caught by the papyrus, they are visible, they darken the nature. But their every movement is a dance in her own mind. What she desires more is a new breath. Her word-love, the Morpheus of morphemes, uses only hers. And this Morpheus is a Möbius Morpheus, for he can hold the same form and change who he is. So she, holding her form, seeks to change who she is, by extending herself… to whom?

And then she hears a brushing, not a susurrus but a friction, as of paper, or future paper, rubbing against more of the same. She leans, kneels, walks on hands and knees, pushes aside the bulrushes. And sees a small boat, a boat made of bulrushes. A little papyrus ship, with a passenger, barely three months old. Not yet speaking. But so many words to come, inchoate, borne on this potential paper, breathing. What you may find in the bulrushes.

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evite, Evite, evitable

Posted on November 11, 2012 | 2 comments

The party, this time, was chez Maury: an evening of liquor, words, and liquor words. Most of the usual suspects from the local Order of Logogustation were there. I was surprised, given the paronomastic potential, not to see our local vulgarian, Ross Ewage, in attendance.

“I thought,” I said to Maury, “that he would inevitably be here, given the theme.”

“In fact,” Maury said, “he turned out to be evitable. Advertently so.” He gave a wry smile and sipped his Collingwood. Then he added, “Although only just. Thereby hangs a tale.”

“Whose tail?”

“Marilyn’s. And I have learned a lesson about not using arcane and archaic vocabulary too freely.”

Marilyn Frack. This was sounding entertaining – as long as I wasn’t the one being discomfited.

“I happened to be talking with Edgar,” Maury continued – he meant Edgar Frick, the other half of the leather-clad duo of incessant lasciviousness. “I said I was going to be hosting this party – I don’t know why I was talking with Edgar about this, but really, Ross may be evitable but Marilyn is inevitable.” He sighed. “Anyway, he asked whether Ross would be coming. I said we should evite him.”

“And for some reason,” I said, “you assumed that Edgar would know you were using the old verb meaning ‘avoid or shun’.” (It’s from Latin evitare.)

“Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson used it. Edgar is a well-read man. But he is also more used to current usage.”

“So Edgar sent him an electronic invitation,” I said. Of course Evite is a specific website, but it’s being generalized like Kleenex lately, surely to the annoyance of the owners of Evite.com.

“No, he wouldn’t have done that; he wasn’t in charge of the invites. But what he did do was mention it to Marilyn. What he said, however, was ‘Maury wants to send Ross an Evite.’”

Maury paused to let that sink in for as long as it took him to toss back the rest of his glass of rye. Then he reached over to a bottle of Balvenie on the nearby sideboard and reloaded. Wheels were still turning in my mind.

Maury raised an eyebrow. “Marilyn decided she would be the Evite.”

The penny dropped.

“Did she bring Edgar as an Adamite?” I asked.

An Adamite and an Evite, you see, are a man and a woman (respectively) who dress as Adam and Eve did. Which is to say with no – or very little – clothing.

“She may have asked him,” Maury said, “but if she did, he demurred, and she wasn’t adamant.”

“So she went over to Ross’s place…” I said.

“Unannounced,” Maury said, “and wearing only stilettos, a thong bottom, and body paint that looked like her usual black leather outfit.”

I clutched the sideboard so as not to collapse with laughter. Raising my glass of Old Sam, I managed to catch my breath to say, “That sounds like a rum thing!”

“It just happens,” Maury said, drily, “that it was a bit of a rainy day. And Marilyn’s paint was, shall we say, delible.”

“So by the time she got to his place” I said, “it was beginning to streak?”

“And so was she.” He nodded and sipped his drink. “When she reached his door, it was running. Shortly thereafter, so was he. And that –” he raised his glass – “scotched that.”

Thanks to Duane Aubin for inspiring this. As to his wondering why evitable and delible fell away while their negatives persisted, I cannot say for sure what inclines us more to the words that refer to permanence and inescapability, although the negatives seem always to have been more used in English and appear to have entered the language first as well. It’s something worth more digging…

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rondeau

Posted on November 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

We come around a round like o
Because what goes returns, you know
If mouth does not, then letter will
If letter not, mouth fills the bill
It always comes – it goes to show

That history’s a poem so
Involved in form we follow though
We think it free but if free will
We come around

In verse we make our garden grow
We do – forget – repeat – the flow
Is water in a turning mill
Or swirling step we dance until
As line turns back to make rondeau
We come around

This is a rondeau: a poem that comes around. Round like the o, round like your mouth when you say the eau. The poem is a fixed form, set as if to music – and there is also a musical form called rondeau. The word rondeau recalls round and French ronde, related words; by accident it also carries water, French eau.

The form has a most famous exemplar, one that is not so much a dance as a returning remembrance. It is the poem that is read everywhere in Canada – I don’t know where else – every Remembrance Day, November 11:

In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Either way, we come around.

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alcatras, pelican

Posted on November 7, 2012 | 3 comments

The pelican does not have an overwhelmingly noble image in the modern world. Comics have undoubtedly had an influence on this: the bird is portrayed as a large, ungainly thing with a great big pouch in its bill that it uses for stowing whole fish. As Dixon Merritt wrote:

A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week,
But I’m damned if I see how the helican.

It matters little or not at all that the word pelican is in its way delicate, with tastes of skin (pellicule) and peels and angel hair pasta (cappellini) and possibly even singing (a capella). The focus is now on the big garbage can of a bill.

Nor would it be served so well now by its alternate name, taken from the Spanish: alcatras. The taste of the prison, named (in archaic Spanish) for the island it was on, named for the birds that flocked there, is hard to get past, even though the word has a certain delicacy that could go either way – hints of scar and sacral but also alcohol and star and perhaps class… Both words have two voiceless stops and that liquid /l/ plus one other consonant, and both have three syllables with a dactylic rhythm. Neither has an easy phonological or orthographical resemblance to the big bird with the big bill. But we still no doubt view it better than we would if it were named, say, grackle.

I say alcatras comes from Spanish because that is its immediate source, but this word, like some others that begin with al, comes originally from Arabic, where al is a definite article. And like most of those others (including alcohol and algebra), it means something a little different from the original – in this case, the source, al gattas, referred to a kind of sea eagle. But an even greater shift shows up in albatross, which also comes from al gattas but with the Spanish influence of alba “white”.

But talking of shifts: this is the bird that is the national bird of Romania (and of the fictional Syldavia in the the Tintin books) and three Caribbean countries, and the state bird of Louisiana; this is the symbol of institutions such as the Irish Blood Transfusion service; this is the bird featured on the coats of arms of Corpus Christi Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, and used in heraldry as a symbol of selfless sacrifice, vulning, because of its use in Christian iconography to represent Jesus – the sacrifice of a parent for children. And to advert to the eucharist, the consumption of bread and wine as the body and blood of Jesus.

What? Well, the pelican (alcatras, if you prefer) was long thought to wound itself in the breast to feed its young its blood when food was scarce. You see, pelicans have a habit of pressing their beaks against their chests to empty their pouches, and this can look like wounding itself in the chest. Some kinds of pelicans also have red on their bills at certain times, which can look like blood. It is thought that these things, observed, were interpreted as the selfless act.

And thus we have, for instance, this verse from a hymn by St. Thomas Aquinas:

Pie Pelicane, Jesu Domine,
Me immundum munda tuo sanguine:
Cujus una stilla salvum facere
Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere.

Which translates (I’ll use Wikipedia’s version) as:

Lord Jesus, Good Pelican,
wash me clean with your blood,
One drop of which can free
the entire world of all its sins.

That’s a far cry from “I’ll be damned if I know how the helican.” And it’s also a bit of a trip from national symbols to a prison island… But redemption may come again. After all, Alcatraz is now a very popular attraction with beautiful flowers and plenty of birds surrounding its grim buildings.

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vuln

Posted on November 6, 2012 | 3 comments

Does this word seem somehow wounded? Truncated, perhaps, or otherwise cut? An eviscerated vulcan? Or a vulnerability that has been exploited? Or, if not wounded, then at least tightly wound?

Oops. Did you see what I did there? Tsk. How is a person supposed to know which wound I’m using when I do that? It would be like if we had the same letter to represent both a consonant and a vowel. OK, well, yes, we do, y. But what if we used the same letter for v and u? What if we spelled this word vvln or uuln?

As in fact we used to. After all, v and u have only been treated as different letters for a couple of centuries. They both come from Latin v, which, classically, had a [w] sound as a consonant and an [u] or [ʊ] sound as a vowel (as in “boo” and “book” respectively). Over the centuries, as letters developed cursive forms, there came to be an alternative u shape for v, but the sounds also pulled apart and its consonantal value moved to [v]. So some bright sparks recommended that, rather than having two interchangeable forms of a letter that stood for two different sounds, one form should go with one sound and the other with the other. (This happened with i and j too.) So back in the 1500s, this word could be seen written as vvln, uuln, vuln, or even uvln, though probably not so much that last one.

Fair enough, for three reasons. The second reason is that in some people’s handwriting – mine, for instance – the letter n looks pretty much like the letter u. The third reason is that the standard English pronunciation of this word is represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /vʌln/, yet another case of flipping shapes. The first reason – a longer, more important reason, which is why it’s the first but why I’m getting to it last – is that the word comes from Latin vulnus, i.e., vvlnvs (or uulnus), “wound”, as in the noun for what you receive from a sword. It’s also the root of vulnerable, the first syllable of which is identical to today’s word in pronunciation as well as spelling.

So why would we need another word for “wound” when we already have wound, aside from that it can be confused with the past form of the verb wind (which has a similar issue in the present)? It’s not as though we have a special need for another word with a swallowed /l/ in the middle. And actually it seems we wouldn’t need another word; vuln is pretty much not used nowadays. With one little exception. There is one preserve of pretty little archaic and rare Latinate words that is a natural resting place for this word, this vulnerable little fallen angle (that’s not a typo): heraldry.

Heraldic shields, after all, often feature animals. Sometimes those animals are wounded. Well, no, in heraldry they’re vulned – often stuck through with a spear as vuln is stuck through with the l. (I can see this catching on with the role-playing game crowd: “I seriously vulned him with my Ethereum phase-spear.”)

But there is also one bird that is said to be vulning. A vulture? A falcon? No, it’s a bird that is known for constantly picking at its chest, an act that is referred to (in heraldry) as vulning, on the idea that the bird is wounding itself. It’s a bird that happens to have given its name to a famous and forbidding prison. Which bird? The pelican.

What, you’ve never heard of a famous jail named after pelicans? Of course you have, and it even had a “bird man”… I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.

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futalognkosaurus

Posted on November 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

I was going along by foot up from Museum Station towards the entrance of the Royal Ontario Museum when I noticed something afoot – specifically, stick-on dinosaur footprints on the sidewalk, leading along underfoot towards the entrance. Almost entrancing. Each had the name of a dinosaur on it. But my head really turned when I saw a name literally sesquipedalian – a foot and a half long – spanning one. It was a name with which I was unfamiliar and it had a spelling that seemed all gunked up, like an orthographic logjam: futalognkosaurus.

Well. I knew that was something to look up. As it turns out, it’s also something to look up at: a futalognkosaurus is much, much more than a foot long. The skeleton that has been assembled from three specimens is 70% intact, which allows us to see quite surely that this enormous herbivore was about 33 metres long, and its head can be seen more than two storeys above your feet. (See “Futalognkosaurus was one big-ass sauropod.”)

So the word is quite fitting in magnitude, with its six syllables, fourteen phonemes, sixteen letters. But, oh, yes, how does one say it? Attempts to sort it out this funky chaos might seem futile or even fatal without some guidance. Who, after all, is at fault for this gnarly knot, gnk?

Well, when you’re digging up remains of very old critters that haven’t been identified before, you have to get a name from somewhere. Sources vary. Krister Smith, for instance, named a little lizard Suzanniwana patriciana after two colleagues of his. In this case, Jorge Calvo and his team named the lizard – well, the dinosaur, but the saurus part comes from Greek for “lizard” – with a compound word taken from an indigenous language local to where the bones were dug up: Mapudungun, language of the Mapuche people of the Argentinian province of Neuquén. Futa means “giant” and lognko means “chief”. This is thus, in its linguistic miscegenation, a name for a giant chief lizard. (But a vegetarian one!)

Oh, and lognko is pronounced as it would be were it spelled longko. As in fact it sometimes also is. The Mapudungun language has various competing orthographies. All of them are efforts to fit the language into the Latin alphabet, which is not perfectly matched to it. Does gn seem an odd way to spell that sound, /ŋ/? Well, so is ng – there’s no /g/ in the sound, after all – and so are pretty much all two-letter representations of single sounds: sh, ch, th in English, for instance.

Anyway, this massive critter from the Cretaceous is such an odd transposition into the present, such a startling juxtaposition, and all made of bones, why should its name be a simple no-bones-about-it spelling? Better to have something that stops us in our tracks. Or in its tracks, on flagstones along underfoot.

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rebozo

Posted on November 4, 2012 | 4 comments

Frida Kahlo with rebozo.

This is what the placard next to the painting says. Not Frida Kahlo with her bozo. Not Frida Kahlo with boozer. There is no one else in the picture. It’s Frida Kahlo with rebozo. And what you see is Frida Kahlo, the same face at the same angle as dozens of other Frida Kahlo pictures of Frida Kahlo, with no sort of painting or architecture around, just some clothing on her. What is a rebozo again? It sure sounds like some part of a gothic cathedral or its altarpiece or…

No, it’s that scarf, that shawl. That red wrap. You see it again and again; in the photos of her she’s wearing it very often. Sometimes she has it wrapping over and around her head and framing her face, as is traditional. But often she has it wrapped just around her shoulders and bust.

It says she’s Mexican.

Rebozos are most popular in Mexico. They were likely born there. The name is Spanish, with a proper Latinate pedigree. The immediate source is rebozar, verb, “muffle”; that draws from re plus bozo “cheek, mouth”, which comes from Latin bucca. The word shows up first in the 1500s, right around the time the Spanish colony of Mexico was coming into being, wrapping itself over the existing cultures, the Europeans smashing in like a cultural Chicxulub. But the cultures did not disappear; they contributed, or were taken from. There is likely indigenous influence in the design and fabric of rebozos, which can be solid-coloured or can have designs, either in small bands or as a pattern.

Frida Kahlo felt strong attachment to her Mexican heritage – from her mother’s side. Her father was a German photographer. Her name has nothing to do with Kahlúa, nor with Friday. She was a mix of imported and indigenous, exotic and domestic. She was a communist and wanted to identify with the salt of the earth of Mexico. A rebozo certainly wrapped her in that.

You know, since it’s Spanish, that the z in rebozo is, in the original, pronounced like /s/ (it would be different in Spain than in Latin America, but this is not a garment from Spain). But in English, we say it as /z/ because that’s how it’s spelled. It gives it a buzz. We are paying more attention to the externals as they seem to us rather than to where the word really came from. We’re very inconsistent about such things in English.

But this word, it looks somehow rakish or comic or otherwise exotic to us. The z is not an indigenous character for English; we didn’t treat /z/ as a different sound from /s/ until somewhere in the Middle English period, under French influence. Then we had to borrow the letter. Positioned between the o’s, ozo, it gives us an arrangement with rotational symmetry, a hint of ozone, a pair of eyes that call forth ojo (Spanish for “eye”), a z with two zeros flanking it, and something like a pattern to go on a robe or rebozo.

Romance languages are much more used to z. It shows up all the time in them. Words that end in o are also quite common in Spanish. This word may startle our eyes like Frida’s unibrow and moustache, but such things are not equally startling or exotic to everyone.

If you search rebozo on Google, you find quite a lot of references to its use for pregnant ladies to support their bellies, during labour as well, and then as a sling to carry an infant in. (I’m sure it’s a coincidence that Richard Nixon had a confidant, Charles Rebozo, nicknamed “Bebe.”)

Frida Kahlo had several miscarriages. Her rebozo is not filled with belly or baby. She wears it just around her upper body. It may be native Mexican, but hers has no Mexican nativity. It is just her, over and over again, sometimes with her husband, Diego Rivera. A piece of the past, not carrying the future. Just framing a gaze.

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e’en

Posted on October 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

’Tis Hallowe’en. Darkness falls o’er the land. Ah, if e’er there were a night for ghoulies and the deil, ’twere e’en this one. A night when all is dark poetry… and a gremlin goes about stealing v’s.

No, that’s not quite it, but one does wonder. Hallowe’en, from Hallow even (as in evening); deil, a Scottish version of devil; and then there’s e’er and o’er and e’en… But of course those are not confined to Hallowe’en. Rather, they are hallmarks of heightened, poetic diction to most modern English eyes.

Well, there’s a reason for that: the place we typically see them is in archaic verse, where even and ever and over have been condensed into single syllables to fit the meter. We see e’en in Shakespeare, to be sure, and not always in the verse – it shows up in some of the more casual speeches too, demonstrating that it was also used in ordinary speech. Hamlet uses this contraction e’en five times (and other characters in the play another half dozen); it shows up nearly two dozen other times throughout the Bard’s plays. (On the other hand, e’er shows up 85 times, but only once in Hamlet, while o’er is used 211 times, including 14 in Hamlet.)

But who would say it thus? Does it not seem forced? We’re used to contracting vowels, but less so consonants. In modern English, where we do drop or greatly reduce consonants, they tend more often to be at the tip of the tongue – /t/, /d/, even /n/, sometimes /z/, innit? We are not so much in the habit of leaving out /v/ these days. So this hollow e’en truly does seem like a creature from Hallowe’en. It may intend to be even, but, frankly, it’s rather odd. It looks like a claw has come down and plucked the v out.

What it really is is a sign of shifting phonotactics. Different languages, even different accents, have different possible versions of a given sound. In the kind of English I speak, /t/ can be reduced to a stop or left out entirely next to a nasal or some other consonants, but not usually between vowels; in some versions of English, it can be replaced with a glottal stop between vowels; in others, it has to have the tongue touch the palate everywhere. In some kinds of English, [h] is lost at the beginning of a word, and [r] after a vowel becomes a lengthening of the vowel. In other kinds, no. In Spanish, [b] and [v] are two versions of the same phoneme, but not [p] and [f], and [d] and [ð] are versions of the same phoneme, but not [t] and [θ]; in Dutch, you can drop the [n] in an en ending; in French, many consonants are only pronounced at the end of a word if there’s a vowel starting the next word, and in past times it became so standard to drop s (said [s] or [z]) before certain consonants in certain words that it was just replaced with a circumflex over the previous vowel; and so on.

Differences between dialects, differences between languages… also differences within a language over time. Or should that be o’er time? You see, it was at one time the case in English that lazy lips could let the [v] sink and slip, and accommodating listeners would fill in the blank – just as “’sup” can be understood as “What’s up”… Nome sane? (Nome sane? Ima let you figure that one out.)

Yes, yes, it was lazy speech, of course, just as contractions ever are: economy of effort. But accepted enough in its time and place, just as ’tis. Now, of course, ’tis is considered formal or, if in dialect, cute, while it’s is just casual. And e’en? Words are known by the company they keep, and e’en, like o’er and e’er – and of course ne’er – is only ever seen in hymns, Shakespeare, and lofty poetry. It’s moved up in the world.

Funny, innit, how current syncopations can be so casual and archaic ones so formal. It’s as though the ghosts of working-class toughs gained tuxedos. When I was writing Songs of Love and Grammar, my friend and colleague Carolyn Bishop (who, by the way, has lately come out with a book of wordplay called Meaningless Platter Dudes) suggested a novel punctuation mark especially for these elevated revenants (and all the nonce contractions made by lazy poets to cram words into the line). Here is what I made of it:

The gravitastrophe

for Carolyn Bishop

Had I it in my pow’r
e’en for a wond’rous hour
to let words solemn hark’d
in print be plainly mark’d,
the mark I’d use would be
the gravitastrophe!

Momentous situations
oft call for syncopations;
howe’er, a plain contraction
is plebeian detraction.
To keep solemnity,
use gravitastrophe!

Take ink plash’d from a fount
on ’Lympus’ heavn’ly mount;
’scribe it with quill-pen gain’d
from phoenix wing detain’d;
’gainst alabaster be
writ gravitastrophe!

Like cherub’s down, the curl
shall clockwise-turn’d unfurl
’til, widdershins returning
(profan’d convention spurning),
with circlet tipp’d shall be
the gravitastrophe!

This stroke shall through the ages
be ’grav’d on scepter’d pages
so humbl’d reader knows
that whilom mundane prose
is rebirth’d poesy
with gravitastrophe!

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bupkes

Posted on October 31, 2012 | 4 comments

Four years I’ve been working on this blog. Four years! One thousand two hundred seventy-six posts! And what have I earned from it? Bupkes!

Or bubkes!

Or bobkes!

Or bubkiss!

Or bupkiss!

Or… OK, you get the picture. Words, they’re their own reward. Fine. As we say in show business (I used to be a theatre person, you know), “Don’t clap, just throw money.” Ah, money shmoney. I’m doing it for the fame. With a beautiful sweet wife like mine, how much luckier or richer should I expect to be? Still, I wouldn’t object to a few people buying my book.

But enough about me. Back to this word. You can guess what it means from context, even if you’re not familiar with it. And the context you’ll hear it in might lead you to guess soon enough what language English got it from. That object-subject-verb syntax for emphasis, the shm echoes, the bantering style, the rhetorical questions – all are characteristic of Yiddish humour.

And I have to tell you, English would be that much poorer without Yiddish humour. Many of the funniest people in 20th-century America had Yiddish backgrounds (including some you may not have realized, like Rodney Dangerfield, born Jacob Cohen), and the Yiddish music-hall shows in the early 1900s in New York made very important cultural contributions that may not often be acknowledged but show through in many places.

Yiddish vocabulary shows up in more places than you might even notice, and sometimes creeps into everyday usage almost unremarked. (I think of myself in 1990s Edmonton playing a Spanish soldier invading the Americas in Peter Shaffer’s Royal Hunt of the Sun, improvising a little bit about stealing some gold – other actor: “It’s just a trinket.” Me: “Trinket shminket!” Did I mention that my ethnic background is WASP and, growing up in 1980s Alberta, I knew very few Jewish people?) When you read “40 Yiddish words you should know” from Daily Writing Tips, you will surely find that you do know several of them, and may not have thought of all of them as Yiddish.

By the way: Do you know what Yiddish is? Yes, it’s the language commonly spoken for a long time (but not so much anymore) by Ashkenazi Jews in Germany and nearby places (and America). You may not have known that it’s basically a kind of Low German (“Low” because from areas closer to the sea; “High” is from areas higher in elevation) with a fair amount of influence from Hebrew, and typically written using the Hebrew alphabet.

Which is why there are so many spellings of this word. You’d think someone could settle on one! But what do I know? When I first heard this word (and for a while thereafter) I thought it was buttkiss. You know, “What did I get? Buttkiss! (As in I might as well kiss their butts!)” But there are so many different transliterations of Yiddish words, depending on who’s doing the transliteration. The spelling of this word that I’m most used to is bupkes, but that’s more of a phonetic transliteration than a phonemic one. The original is באָבקעס, bobkes, which means “big beans”, but voicing assimilation causes the /b/ to become [p]. But actually that’s not really the original original. The original original is thought to have been a longer word, קאָזעבאָפּקעס, kozebopkes, which means “goat droppings”.

So there it is. It’s a good word for it, with that opening bop, like a hand flipped up abruptly (in colloquial Italian there’s a word boh that’s said like a bop, with maybe a shrug, to mean “dunno” or something of that order), and the backing echo of guess… Actually, what it really is is more the sound of something inflated (your expectations maybe) being punctured (bup!) and all the air hissing out (kiss…). All this and what do I get? Beans! Goat droppings! Bupkes! I’d be better with a bunch of latkes…

Funny, by the way, how “nothing” has such power to it (sort of like words for sex or drunkenness or other socially outré things) that we have come up with a variety of colloquial ways to express it – as though the strong emotion it calls forth demands some sort of trope or linguistic excursion. There’s buggerall, diddly-squat, SFA, zilch…

Say, how many synonyms for “nothing” do you suppose I can collect? A whole lot more than bupkes… I’ll be watching the comments.

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