Category Archives: word tasting notes

foliage

Posted on October 8, 2012 | 5 comments

What word goes with foliage?

There are a few that it’s seen near. You’ll often see references to flowers and foliage or foliage and flowers. You will also see references to green foliage, dense green foliage, lush green foliage, dark green foliage, and so on, and to dense foliage too. But especially around this time of year, and especially in eastern North America, the collocation to go with is fall foliage.

I grew up in Alberta. In the fall there, the leaves turn yellow and then fall off. That’s pretty much it. It’s a sort of interesting little change from the green, but it’s really just a step towards the enveloping buff and brown. When I moved to Massachusetts for grad school, my parents kept asking me, in our weekly phone calls, “Have the leaves changed colour yet?” I could not for the life of me understand this overweening interest they had in the deciduous decadence of forest foliage. And then the leaves started changing colour.

Where I work in Toronto I have a view of the Don Valley. Lots of lush greenery – that turns to reddery and yellowery in stages this time of year. It’s a glorious sight. People always love a chance to see the eastern fall foliage in full follies. Hotels in Vermont are very expensive this time of year. If you go for a stroll on a weekend day in the Don Valley parks in Toronto you’ll see an incredible quantity and variety of cameras. The paths are full of photographers filling their portfolios.

Yes, the folio in portfolio is related to foliage. So, incidentally, is foil as in aluminum foil. It all has to do with leaves. Do you feel that’s it’s a failure to say “foilage” instead of “foliage”? Well, here’s a fun bit of history for you: Latin folium “leaf” became French feuille (earlier foille), from which was derived feuillage (earlier foillage); this came into English as foillage. Then, in the 1600s, when we were rediscovering the classical roots of some of our words, this word was “corrected” to foliage to match the Latin. It turned over an old leaf, as it were.

Is foliage a suitable word for its sense, phonaesthetically? Do you find the soft /f/ and floppy /l/, and the shapes of their letters, to be leaf-like enough? Is it somehow a bushier word than leaves? And what else – does it taste of agile redistribution of letters? Do you see it going with golf or declaring I age? How close it is to fragile? Does a leaf, reflecting, see in it the green days a whole life ago – before it turns a glorious colour and leaves us?

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uisce

Posted on October 6, 2012 | 2 comments

Words are a strange crop to grow, and an even stranger one to study. Oh, they have some common DNA, as it were, although there’s quite a lot of variation. Their soil is the human mind and the human vocal tract, and while there is a lot of flexibility and many options, there appear to be a few general parameters you can usually count on… usually. But where they can really fool you is when they go onto paper.

If you drink whisky or wine or brandy, you know that they don’t usually taste all that much like what they’re made from. Whisky doesn’t really give you a flavour of grains, not exactly; it’s been fermented and distilled. And it certainly doesn’t taste like water, its majority ingredient. Wine seldom tastes like grapes (there are exceptions) and brandy never does (a bit like raisins sometimes, but never like grapes). But at the same time, the grains and grapes can be cultivated for how they will taste after fermentation and, as the case may be, distillation.

Think of the written form of language as like the whisky, wine, brandy. This is not an exact analogy, but it has its uses. The written form does not always correspond reliably to the spoken form. Indeed, in a language such as English, what you get when you write a given sound can be very inconsistent from word to word. And once you compare writing from one language with writing from another, all bets are off. But sometimes the way we say the word – and the way we think of it – is shaped by how it’s spelled. And sometimes there are very interesting feedbacks even crossing from one language to another and back.

And that’s not even saying anything about the interplay of meanings. It can all get very intoxicating. There’s a certain magic in language… Watch as it turns water into whisky.

We start with uisce. This is not an English word; it’s not even in the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s a Gaelic word. You will find it in both Irish and Scots Gaelic, in the same form or as uisge (the two kinds of Gaelic are reasonably closely related, but there are certainly differences). Does it leave you wondering how to pronounce it? If you know the rules of Irish or Scots Gaelic pronunciation, it’s actually quite clear, just like what it refers to: depending on dialect, something like “ishkih” or “wishkey.” And it means “water”. If you say “Tabhair dhom gloine uisce,” which in Irish sounds sorta like “trrum glinna ishkey” to Anglophones, it means “Give me a glass of water.”

But there’s water and there’s water. In Slavic languages, add a diminutive ending to the word for “water” and you get vodka or wódka or similar, and you know what that is. In France, say “water of life” – eau-de-vie – and you are referring to a distilled spirit, such as brandy (the word brandy, not a French word, comes from Dutch brandewijn, “burnt wine”). The Irish and Scots follow the French in this – a diminutive added would just make uiscín, “a little water” (if you would even say it), but you’re talking about whisky when you say uisce beatha or uisge beatha, which means “water of life” and sounds like “wishkey bah” or “ishkibeh” or something on that order depending on dialect. When they started distilling their fermented grains, that’s the name they gave the result.

That name clearly was not going to transfer to English unaltered. Some words come over to English with spelling intact and sound changed, some with sound intact and spelling changed, some with both changed, only a few with everything intact. In this case, the sound was adapted moderately to suit English tongues, and the spelling was based on the English pronunciation. Actually, there were two different English versions at first: usquebaugh and whiskybae.

And we know that what has prevailed and made it down as the normal word in modern times is a cut version of the latter: whisky. It is also spelled whiskey. The two are pronounced the same, but it is very, very, very, VERY! important to some people that you get the spelling right (you know how some people are about these things – if they were concerned with fashion rather than words, they would be the ones tearing strips off you for wearing white after Labour Day). If you are drinking Scotch, it is whisky, no e. If you are drinking Bourbon, it is whiskey, with an e.

But the story does not end there. Let’s turn back to our Gaelic dictionary. The one I have ready to hand is Irish, because that’s the kind I’ve studied. You will find in it the word fuiscí, pronounced (to English ears) like “fishkey” with perhaps a hint of “w” after the “f”. I should say that the /hw/ that English sometimes (more formerly than now) has where we write wh is not a sound one makes per se in Irish. So that English sound was rendered in Gaelic as /f/ – and they spelled the word accordingly. They may not export their whisk(e)y to England and reimport it before drinking it, but they did export the word and reimport it. Sort of like if the French exported wine to another country to be made into brandy and then reimported it for drinking as such.

These are crazy crops, these words. You may want to tread with a light foot around them. Perhaps a Gordon Lightfoot – he sang “Whiskey and wine help me pass the time / I don’t leave no evidence.” Well, these words, with their Zugunruhe, do show evidence of their travels. They come back aged and transformed. And then we sit and sip them.

Tá tart mór orm anois. Cá bhfuil an fuiscí?*

Thanks to Roberto De Vido for suggesting uisce.

*I’m very thirsty now. Where’s the whisky? Pronounced sort of like “taw tart moor orum anish, caw will a fishkey?”

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kex

Posted on October 4, 2012 | 3 comments

Look at this stylish little word. It has lines vertical, horizontal, and diagonal, plus an almost-circle. It’s almost architectural. And it has such a snappy crisp sound. It looks like it could be a brand name – shoes, maybe? (That’s Keds.) Some kind of stock exchange symbol? (KEX is the NYSE ticker symbol for Kirby Corporation, and it also stands for the Kansai Commodities Exchange in Japan.) Perhaps a sci-fi character? (Actually yes, Kex is a Mandalorian in the “extended Star Wars universe.”) Does it mean complain? (That’s yex.) Annoy? (Vex.) Curse? (Which is hex.)

Could it be a slang word? (In northern England and southern Scotland, it means “trousers” or “underpants” – also spelled kecks.) Is it perhaps something from Greek? (Well, it is part of the sound the frogs make in Aristophanes’ Frogs: brekekekex koax koax.) Maybe Icelandic? (Indeed: in Iceland kex means cookie or cracker.)

I’ll tell you what kex makes me think of, or what makes me think of kex. You know when your throat feels like one of those hollow dry plant stems, and you just have to cough, and the cough catches and leaves your throat feeling even more like that hollow stem, perhaps ready to snap? That sound makes me think of kex, or kex makes me think of that sound, or both. (Aina and I are currently coughing back and forth at each other. It’s like a battle of the kexes.)

Any dry, hollow stem of that sort can also make me think of kex. Plants that have them – cow parsnip, wild chervil, marsh angelica, poison hemlock, and other large umbelliferous plants – are called kexes. They get the name from their stems, which bore the name kex first (by the 1300s), though the OED tells me that the usage to refer specifically to the stems is obsolete except for dialectal. No one seems to know where the word comes from; I doubt that it is any more than coincidence that a kex, when broken, might make a sound like “kex.” (So do many other things, such as a finger snap.)

Oh, was there a word back there that might have been unfamiliar? Not everyone knows what umbelliferous means, so I should say it means “having an umbel”. And what’s an umbel? Here’s the OED’s definition: “A mass of inflorescence borne upon pedicels of nearly equal length springing from a common centre.” Isn’t that nice and clear and helpful and easy? Here’s a plainer picture: it’s a plant that has as its head a whole bunch of little flowers spoking out from the main stem like the ribs of a blown umbrella. As it happens, another word for umbel is umbella. And it is unrelated to umbrella. Aren’t words fun?

Sure, kex kex, lots of fun, kex kex kex. Could I just get to sleep now? Where’s that hemlock? That oughta fix it. Oh, no, no, no… Relax and delectate the lexis. Go have a snack. Perhaps an Icelandic cookie. Or some cake mix.

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whippersnapper

Posted on October 3, 2012 | 1 comment

Look at this word: it looks like a long bridge, with two piers – perhaps two double piers. It has a nice visual rhythm to match the rhythm of saying it. It starts with the lips out, then they bounce together, then you go to the tongue tip, then the lips again; the vowels match, with a higher forward /ɪ/ to go with the forward /w/, and a lower /æ/ to go with the pulled-back /sn/, and in the off syllables bouncing from /p/ you have that syllabic /ɹ/ with the tongue bunched up in the middle. If you say the wh as /hw/ then you have a voiceless consonant at the start of every syllable, giving it an appealing contrast and crispness – but even without that touch, it still cracks.

Cracks like a whip? Perhaps, or should we say snaps like one. After all, that’s where this word seems to come from: whip-snapper, extended for the echo and rhythm in a similar way to fixer-upper and quicker picker upper. But what has this to do with what the word refers to? Its object might seem to be more like a wimpy little whippoorwill of a person, or at most an impertinent pipsqueak. Look at what the word most often goes with: young whippersnapper (and you can hear a creaky old man’s voice saying it, can’t you?). Sometimes it’s little whippersnapper. You wouldn’t expect such a snippet to snap a whip at anyone.

But that’s just the point: this insignificant personage is attempting to order around his (or her) superiors, or, by extension, to behave towards them as though they were inferiors. (It is possible, however, that the word was first a word for a ruffian of whatever age and size, and that it subsequently narrowed to refer to rambunctious youth, and shifted to indicate impertinence rather than violence.)

Whippersnappers have of course been around from the dawn of time: impertinence is a characteristic of youth, and resentment of the impertinence of youth is common for some types of older people. Interactions that would give occasion to use the word whippersnapper can be found in comedies throughout the ages. The word whippersnapper, however, dates only from the later 1600s.

What did they call them before that? Hm. The options are plenty. I immediately hear John Gielgud’s voice: “You little shit.”

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting whippersnapper.

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prior

Posted on October 2, 2012 | 1 comment

You’ve seen this word before. Many times. You have prior knowledge of it prior to seeing it here. You may even have seen it a few too many times – it sits like a brier in laboured formalese, all those documents by assorted office staff who issue stiff directives and think before is too informal somehow. How could a good old English word be as good as this Latin one? Formalese hews, as though driven by an anxiety disorder, to prepositional phrases rather than the nice, direct verb phrases: Please remove shoes prior to entering rather than Please take off your shoes before you come in. It sallies forth with a breastplate – nay, an escutcheon – of nouns and Latin-derived words, not to mention telegraphic omission of articles.

Not that prior to is the only place you’ll see prior. It shows up in a variety of collocations: prior knowledge, prior research, prior experience, prior approval… These do make nice, compact phrasings. They also have the arched tone of authority, the sound of police-speak – prior convictions – or the starchy formalism of someone writing for people he or she wishes to speak authoritatively to. Prior is inescapable superior. It has the loftiness of prayer, but with the beginnings of rotation of an eye orbit.

A prior, noun, is a superior officer of a religious order. This is from the same origin: Latin prior, meaning (as the OED has it) “in front, previous, former, earlier, elder, superior, more important”. It is related to the prefix pre and comes from the same root, way back in Indo-European, as English fore – as in foreman and before. So our synonyms have not only prior acquaintance but prior identity.

But it is from the noun prior that I get my favourite prior: Maddy Prior, the folk singer. (I’m OK with Richard Pryor, too; there are various other Priors and Pryors that I’m less well acquainted with.) If you have no prior acquaintance with her music (as a soloist, with June Tabor, and with Steeleye Span), here are a few songs to take your mind off monkish formalese:

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Zugunruhe

Posted on October 1, 2012 | 3 comments

There is a season in word country when things rise and fall: some things fall in place, and others rise to go. All is changing, colour, temperature, movement. After springing forth, after flourishing and strengthening in the constant rounds of the estival festival, a direction is found, and that direction is either down or away. There is a hunger. All seems under the gun. There is an electricity, a summer’s buildup of static ready to discharge.

It happens in many places and with many things, this energy. Runners who have trained all summer now taper for their fall target race, skittish, antsy, almost overcome with an urge to run. Students’ long lazy summers end in a pile of unread, unwritten, uncounted work lurking on the thither side of a bell. Birds gotta fly: they’re skittish, they don’t sleep the same, they just want to go south like so many Canadian retirees at the first sign of frost.

Languages, too, grow into these seasons, these moods. Something that has always been with you but that you have never needed a word for, something that could easily have had a name from local rootstock, instead seeks abroad for its label. Somehow it feels better. The soil it grew up in is too plain, too ordinary, too expected and habituated. The familiar thing, to be seen apart from its surroundings, must go to another language for its word, returning in its new form after the winter of discontent.

These urges and these flight paths may at first seem incoherent. Perhaps you cannot make out the sense of the form: Zugunruhe. Is this Tibetan, Mongolian, Turkish? As your eyes focus you see it may be German. That ruhe, that’s something German, no? “Peace”? And zu, “to” – so is this, um, peace to the gun? But wait, what is gun in German? No, that’s not it. Your eyes zig-zag through the gauze, picking out hunger, urge, run, rotating shapes (three cups u u u and two caps n h and that electric bolt Z and…). This strange bird that we have brought back from our migrations, it has to do with…

Zug. What’s that? One of German’s more basic all-purpose words: “train, trend, way, move, push, pull, migration” und so weiter. Said like “tsook” to English minds. Plus unruhe, “restlessness”, said vaguely like “oon rooa.” Together, “migration restlessness”. Our restless need to go abroad has led to our bringing back a word for a restless need to go abroad – or, more exactly, to migrate: it’s a word for the birds.

Birds fly away, then come back, and they seem much the same. People often grow or change, though not always. The language, in its excursions, returns like a merchant ship laden with treasures. But as the exotic becomes familiar we must again seek to make the familiar exotic. Old words, fallen out of use, coat the ground and enrich the soil; new words will come to take root and add new forms and colours to the landscape.

And the time has come around again.

Thanks to Doug Linzey for suggesting Zugunruhe.

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Swansea

Posted on September 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

Yesterday, @PopeShakey tweeted:

“Swan” is a nice word. “Sea” is a nice word. Why is “Swansea” such an ugly word?

Of course, tastes in words vary; I’m sure not everyone finds Swansea to be so ugly. But the question is still valid: what is it about Swansea that makes it different from simply swan plus sea?

Naturally, if you happen to be familiar with the place – any place with that name, be it the original city in southwest Wales or someplace named after it, such as the southwest Toronto neighbourhood (between High Park and the Humber south of Bloor) – your images of, and attitudes towards, the place will surely colour your taste of the word. But so will the pronunciation of the word – if you’re familiar with it.

You see, Swansea is not made from swan plus sea, nor is it pronounced like it. The s in the middle is said as /z/. This changes the feel of the word quite a bit. It moves the word away from any taste of sea or swan song or perhaps come see to echoes of many things ending with that /zi/ sound, especially with a nasal before it: quinsy, flimsy, pansy, clumsy, mimsy, also queasy, sleazy, frowsy, drowsy, and maybe even donzerly, and it likely allows in some echoes of such things as swinish and smarmy. And of course Swanee, but with that crazy z in it.

Look, too, at the difference in the vocal gesture between this word as a whole and those of its syllables. Swan makes a quick kiss of the air, almost like a fish. Sea (with /s/ or /z/) really is a lazy word; there’s just a little movement of the tongue. But Swansea is like a swan dive of the mouth – or rather the reverse: a sweep first forward and then back. The syllables contrast strongly, the lips pushing forward and round, then pulling back to wide and straight. If you’re just looking at the lips, it’s about the same as if you say “Why?”

So, incidentally: why Swansea? Is it a place where you can see swans on the sea? No – when I said it’s not made from swan plus sea, I didn’t just mean phonetically. Although reanalysis of the second syllable as referring to the sea may have influenced the spelling (Swansea in Wales is indeed on the sea), the place name most likely (though not absolutely certainly) comes from a reference not to the sea but to an island (Old Norse ey), specifically one pertaining to a Norse commander named Sveinn: Sveinns ey. It was a Norse trading post, you see. And where does the name Sveinn come from? Originally “boy” or “lad” or “servant” – yes, cognate with English swain.

@PopeShakey most likely had the Toronto neighbourhood in mind. It gained the name Swansea after the Ontario Bolt Works factory there was bought by James Worthington in 1889; Worthington, originally from Swansea, changed the name of the factory to Swansea Works, and that spread to the environs, which ultimately became a village that was annexed to the City of Toronto in 1967. What was the neighbourhood called before that? Windermere. You know, I’m not that big on wind, and mere is not such a great word, but I’ve always liked the place name Windermere… even if it does come from Old Norse for “Vinandr’s lake”.

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floccose, tomentose

Posted on September 29, 2012 | 5 comments

Today, a song: 

My darling, as I nuzzle
you close against my cheek,
a little bit of fuzz’ll
brush me – oh, that’s what I seek!

Floccose, tomentose, floccose, tomentose,
I love those mementos,
those little downy furs,
be they its or his or hers!

Tomentose and floccose, tomentose and floccose,
not crispy like tacos,
so fuzzy and so woolly,
you know they thrill me fully!

I find your fuzz so succulent,
so esculent, so poculent;
I hope you won’t be truculent
if I dare call you flocculent!

Floccose, tomentose, floccose, tomentose,
how to represent those
little hairs that cover you –
oh, darling, tell me true!

Tomentose or floccose, tomentose or floccose,
packed all chock-a-block, o,
say are they flocked in tufts,
or groomed to go to Crufts?

Your surface so tomentous,
it gives me such momentum –
it would be so momentous
if you’d give me some tomentum!

Oh, my darling, your fuzz gives me joy beyond belief;
you know that I could nevermore turn over a new leaf.
No flat tomato, you; you chloro-fill my heart with glee;
you put the beau in botany; yes, you’re the vine for me!

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beefcake

Posted on September 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

“These are a bit unusual for hors d’œuvres,” Jess said, looking at the plate Maury had just set down.

“Beefcake,” Maury said.

Jess raised an eyebrow. “Looks like meatloaf to me. Quartered slices of meatloaf.”

“It’s a cake made of beef,” Maury said. “Pâté de campagne. A bit of a terrine, even: you will find whole pieces of beef, plus prunes and almonds, and the whole macerated in Armagnac.”

“It’s not dessert,” Jess said.

“Your unfailing eye has… not failed you,” Maury said. “That would be cheesecake.”

“I could take a bit of cheesecake,” Jess mused.

“So could I,” said Daryl, who had gravitated to the food. “It’s kind of early for that, though. First the hors d’œuvres, then the word and wine tasting, then dessert.” He looked around at the other members of the Order of Logogustation slowly gathering for the monthly event. Then he picked up a piece of Maury’s offering. “This is what, again?”

“Beefcake,” I said.

“Doesn’t look like Chippendale dancers,” Daryl said. He bit into it. “Hm. It’s got a piece of beefsteak in it, though. Maybe it was a mis-steak?”

“Not all cakes are sweet,” Maury said.

“Not all beefcakes are male,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” Jess said. “Female beefcake? Now, I would like to see that.”

“Well, you should go see Cirque du Soleil’s Amaluna,” I said. “There are some very stacked, muscular female gymnasts. Aina called them beefcake.”

“Why doesn’t your wife ever come to these word events?” Daryl asked, while chewing (how uncouth).

“She thinks you’re all figments of my imagination,” I said.

“I think a female usage of beefcake may be a figment of hers,” Jess said.

“Oh, no,” Maury said, “I’ve dated one or two women who could fit that definition.”

“Am I right,” Daryl said, “that beefcake is modelled on cheesecake, as in an alluringly presented female physique?”

“That seems to be the consensus,” I said. “Cheesecake was in use by the 1930s to refer to pin-up pictures of pretty women with much exposed flesh. I don’t know whether it was meant to make a direct equivalence between the pale thighs and the pale cheesecake, or whether it was just the standard connection between sex and food. Beefcake came around by the late 1940s, referring to bare-chest poses of hunky men.”

“As opposed to meatloaf,” Jess said, “which would be chunky men. Like the singer.”

“Beefcake men are beefy,” I said. “Whereas cheesecake women are not normally called cheesy. I think the sound of beefcake is a bit more suited to its object: percussive. ‘Biff!’” I picked up a piece. “I wonder if you could get something like this in Bishkek.”

“More likely than a cheesesteak, I suppose,” Maury said. “Although I am not much familiar with Kyrgyz cuisine.”

“Say,” Jess said, picking up a piece, “didn’t you have a little date last night?” She bit in.

Maury paused, pursed his lips. “Yes, this was made for that. Someone I had encountered online. I thought we were going to meet and have a picnic. She said she would bring the cheesecake if I brought the beefcake.”

Jess swallowed. “Well, what happened?”

“At the appointed time and place, she arrived, dressed very lightly and not apparently carrying food. I set down my offering. She looked at it and me and said, ‘Beefcake? Looks like meatloaf to me.’ And deserted.”

“Well, we get our just deserts, too, even if it’s not dessert,” Jess said. “It is yummy.”

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pipe dream

Posted on September 20, 2012 | 5 comments

The things that may be made with the blending of words… He knows the words; he tends them, he cultivates them, he cuts them here and there, puts one beside another, tries them out loud and in quiet, discovers in loud and out quiet that some simply don’t work together. And sees that some pairs produce something more or other than their parts when juxtaposed.

Here he tends a patch of pipe. These are words a little like reeds, but hollower: a reed has the membrane, you can see it in e, and it makes a more piercing sound. A pipe has length and hollowness – you get both views in p – and it does what it does by the unimpeded passing through of air, water, other fluids. The pipe and the air vibrate; you get a hollow sound, but one that can pierce.

That useful emptiness, that holding. A pipe is only a pipe because it can be filled, but never with exactly the same thing from moment to moment: it moves, it passes, it changes. It is the solid walls /p/ and /p/ between which is the “eye,” the hollow, the hole. But it also owns a silence, e. From the oldest times – back in Latin – this word has had to do with music, but the name has long been used also for tubes instrumental in carrying other stuff of life: water, effluents, blood, gas, oil, smoke. Sometimes lava. Blood vessels are pipes, and pipes are found in many organs.

He irrigates the pipes with pipes; he plays pipes for them; he fills his pipe and sits and smokes it in the quiet and watches the pipes grow. He dreams.

He cultivates dreams. This patch, here, a myriad of small joys, fancies majestic and minuscule. Some blossom, some come to fruition, some go to seed. He has a set of them in the corner that seem to come from different seeds: the Old English dréam, meaning “joy, pleasure” or “a sound of music”. They seem dreamy enough, but where did they come from? These other dreams, the ones everyone uses and knows, those are the fancies and aspirations we know, growing from the subjunctive world of the unconscious, and sprung from another Germanic root, the same one we see in German Traum – but though some dreams are traumas, there is no connection at the source; they are simply two dark flowers that look much alike.

Dreams come, dreams go. When you are asleep they pass through your mind like music through a pipe, and then they escape and are usually long gone by the time you reach for them awake. But some leave echoes. Sometimes you can catch the thread of the threnody. Sometimes you are aware, awake, and blowing in the pipe… but the dream will escape still, streaming away on the wind.

No. No, that is not how it happens. He puts pipe and dream next to each other, and he sits and ponders the phrase, inhaling. And he knows what flavour it has. He realizes that a tune you play on a pipe may escape you, but it reaches others. But what you inhale from a pipe goes nowhere but your head. It is a mere opiate.

He knew there was that extra taste. Pipe dream: such a pleasant pair of words, one crisp and one smoother, naming two lovely things, talking of another lovely thing that is ever evanescent, a hope far too removed from reality. A term that carries, then, some bitterness: it is used never approvingly, often insultingly. And it carries the sweet, floral reek of opium smoke.

Smoking opium is not like smoking tobacco; you do not sit and puff at leisure. Rather, you use a small amount and inhale it all at one time. The smoking is done within a half a minute. Then you recline into a bed of flowers in a beautiful meadow on the most lovely day of the year and all is bliss for a quarter of an hour. You may be in outer squalor; indeed, your chasing these opium dreams may increase your outer squalor. But they are so sweet.

Yes. Put this in your pipe and smoke it. When what you smoke is opium, you have delightful dreams. You float on clouds of fancy. Your outer form is inert; you romp through inner worlds that have no issue. They are nowhere, will go nowhere, will take you nowhere, though they are so nice. These… these are pipe dreams.

He tastes the two words together. They are well blended. They produce such flavour. He knows where he can use them, and how. He has the genius; he will put it to work. He has plans. He inhales, smiles, relaxes.

My source for some of the information on opium is Opium: A History, by Martin Booth – read www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/booth-opium.html to learn more. My source for the etymology is, as usual, the Oxford English Dictionary.

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