Category Archives: word tasting notes

pinhole

Posted on September 19, 2012 | 6 comments

I recently acquired a pinhole cap for my camera. I’ve wanted something like it for a while, because pinhole photography produces some interesting ways of seeing things. I was happy to see that a company called Wanderlust makes pinhole body caps for Micro Four Thirds format cameras. Much better than making my own. And still much cheaper than a lens.

Pinhole photography is experiencing something of a resurgence in interest. There are various companies making pinhole “lenses” for your camera and entire pinhole cameras for a variety of film formats. Some of them are very nicely made indeed – see Zero Image’s website, for instance (yes, I do want one… eventually). And the pictures that can be made are often very striking; see the galleries at The Pinhole Gallery and the rather fantastical digitally manipulated nude photos by Dan McCormack, and the year-long pinhole exposure of the Toronto skyline done by Michael Chrisman.

In principle, of course, one doesn’t need pretty equipment to do pinhole. You can make a pinhole camera yourself using materials you likely have at home. Or you can buy a kit at some store catering to scientifically minded children. Shutters can be simple because the exposure times are so long, since the aperture is so small. You need no glass; in place of a lens you have a pinhole. If you have a digital camera that takes interchangeable lenses, you just need a body cap that has a little hole in it. Which is what I used – a precision-made one.

Pinhole. Pin. Hole. A hole made by a pin, or the size of a pin, or the size of a hole that would be made by a pin. Both pin and hole are old Germanic words that have not shifted substantially in meaning over the ages, hole long meaning both “hollow” (noun) or “indentation” and “aperture” or “piercing”. The central vowel shapes are illustrative: pin has that pin-like i; hole has the o with the hole in it. The sound of pin is high and tight at the front of the mouth; the sound of hole forms your mouth into a deeper concavity.

Do this: inhale through your mouth, but close it up with your tongue or lips so that only the smallest possible little hole is left for the air to pass through. You won’t be able to do this for long, of course, because so little air will get through. But what gets through moves fairly quickly; you can feel it moving. It’s sort of like when you put your hand over the end of a hose or a faucet and let the water out through just a little gap: you get a sharp jet rather than a simple flow.

That’s not exactly how pinhole photography works – although pinholes do let less light through, light is not speeded up by the passage through the pinhole; there is no “light pressure” – but there are analogies. The simple fact of the narrowing of the aperture sharpens the focus (like squinting does) – to a point. Why? Curl your index finger into a little hole behind your thumb and put a pencil in it. Put the point on some paper and hold your hand steady and you can draw a picture on the paper by moving the eraser – the picture shows up on the paper rotated 180 degrees from what you did with the eraser. Now loosen your finger a little so that the pencil has some wiggle room. Try to draw. There are too many different places the tip can be for every place the eraser is, so you can’t get a good picture. If you imagine the pencil’s positions as rays of light, you can get an idea of why a smaller aperture means a sharper image.

The original idea, as propounded by 19th-century Scottish scientist Sir David Brewster, who took the first pinhole photograph (though the principle had been known for centuries and sometimes used for drawing – look up camera obscura), was that you could get sharper and sharper and sharper images with smaller and smaller and smaller pinholes, and would be limited only by how small you were able to make the hole and how fast your film (or, at his time, wet plate) was (the materials of his time would have had ISOs in the single digits). This has an attractive simplicity to it: narrow in and get an absolute pinpoint clarity. Focus, focus, focus! (Actually, with pinholes you don’t need to focus; at so small an aperture, everything is in equal focus from right in front of the camera to infinity.) Restrict the opening through which you view the world. With sufficient constraint and discipline, all will be clear.

But that was before they encountered diffraction. Light comes in waves, you see, and waves have actual size, and when the hole is too small it causes interference effects that reduce the sharpness. This is why your camera is sharpest (in the area of focus) around f/8 to f/11, and then the sharpness falls off again. (You can read more about the details at Cambridge in Colour, among other places.) Likewise, in dealing with life, if you constrain your focus too much, you can lose clarity. It can give some beautiful effects, of course. And do remember that at f/8 you need an actual lens or you will not have any sharpness to speak of, whereas a pinhole can make an image simply by having a little bit of nothing there.

But pinholes also have another characteristic: vignetting. The film (or sensor) plane is flat, you see, and so it’s farther from the hole at the sides. This means that the same amount of light is spread over a greater bit of the film. Again, this gives what can be a very alluring image, bright in the centre and darkening off towards the sides, bringing the view quite definitely to the point of central interest while leaving the sides mystified in the shadow. This can be a quite nice artistic effect. But in life, while such views of the world can be very attractive, they are not always well adapted to the fullness of reality.

This effect happens more with wider angles – shorter distance from pinhole to film or sensor. You can get an idea why when you think about how, in the pencil experiment above, at a certain point the pencil doesn’t easily touch the paper. So this is the irony of pinholes: they let you see in equal focus at all distances, and they can let you take in a very wide angle of view, but you are absolutely limited in sharpness and things get gradually dimmer as you move towards the edges. The effect can be striking and beautiful, but – or because – for every gain there is a loss.

The word pinhole also makes me think of a line from “Nobody Home” on Pink Floyd’s The Wall, in which the protagonist sings of “the inevitable pinhole burns all down the front of my favourite satin shirt.” Pinhole burn: a small hole that was made by accident by little falling cigarette embers. A hole that is a simple little destruction. And yet if you intentionally make a small hole like that in an opaque material and put light-registering material in the darkness behind it, you capture the world by letting the light burn it in so slowly you could watch it happen. I am tempted to say something sententious about the little holes in our lives, the little burns, letting through light that captures a beautiful – if limited – image of the world. But instead I will say, “Here, look at this.”

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cadre, dacre

Posted on September 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

So I was thinking about the word cadre and how it has a cadre of anagrams: cared, raced, acred, cedar, arced, dacre – wait, is dacre a word? Well, if you accept archaic spellings, it is: it’s an old version of dicker, which has also been seen in the past as dyker, dycker, deker, diker, dikar, dickar, dikkar, dicar, and daker. But if you’re thinking of the verb dicker “bargain”, think again – this is the noun, meaning ten of something (from a Germanic root that in turn is related to Latin decuria). It’s a half a score, a standard commercial lot amount for various goods (hides, for instance).

So cadre doesn’t quite have a dacre – or I should say dicker, I suppose – of anagrams, but it draws near. But if you wanted to rearrange its sounds, you could have a bit of fun too, especially since it has a trio of pronunciations: “cadder,” “cadree,” “cadray.”

It also has multiple meanings. I must confess I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with the way I see it used most often now: to refer to an office-holder or Communist Party persona in China. I don’t mean that I think it’s wrong to use it that way; it’s just that I grew up with the understanding that a cadre was a group of people. To refer to a single person as a cadre still feels to me like calling a single person a committee or a triumvirate.

Or calling a single hide a dicker, I suppose. But then dicker did one better by going from the lot to something you do over the price of the lot to something you can do over the price of an individual item.

But let’s get down to the numbers on cadre. Before it meant a VIP in China, it meant a member of a communist worker’s group in any communist country, and that came from cadre meaning a communist worker’s group. Which came from cadre meaning the core complement of a regiment: its officers and so on, with necessary extra numbers fillable by recruitment. That in turn came from cadre meaning framework. And why would a cadre be a frame? Because a frame has four sides.

It’s not clear what four has to do with this? If you can spot the /d–k/ in dacre and dicker relating to the Latin dec “ten” root, surely you can spot the /k–d–r/ in cadre relating to the Latin quadrum “square” and the rest of the quadr and quatr roots relating to “four” (with the /w/ trimmed out like in catercorner). Ah, yep. Ten-four, good buddy. That’s ten, a dacre, as in the number of anagrams of the letters acder (seven) plus the number of ways people say cadre (three), and four as in the number of meanings of cadre (if you count tendentiously – it could also be five).

Of course, you could fill out the number of anagrams if you added to the letters: redact, cradle, farced, racked, dancer, scared, carved, crazed… and more. Sort of like filling out the cadre of a regiment. Or like how cadres in China sometimes fill their pockets and those of their families…

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peplum

Posted on September 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

This is a word for something you may see on a woman but you won’t likely see on a man.

It does sound like a not-well-known name for a common bit of connecting tissue, like philtrum or perineum, doesn’t it? But it’s not anatomical.

No, think hard about where you may have heard or seen this word. Perhaps in a growly-voiced narration from The New York Times’ Cathy Horyn overtop a video of the latest fashion shows from the runways of Milan, Paris, or New York. Peplums are a big thing these days. There’s even a little spat between Horyn and Oscar de la Renta that has some relation to whether he was the first to pair a peplum top with cigarette pants.

If peplum top with cigarette pants is a meaningless string of words for you, you’re in good company. Fashion is sort of like poetry: a collective hallucination that is all-consuming for those within it but makes about as much sense to those not in its psychedelic grip as the amazements of acid trippers or giggle fits of stoners do to those in more constitutive states of mind. I mean, yes, of course we pretty much all follow fashion to some extent; it’s inescapable (even the sartorially clueless and indifferent still wear clothes from something like their time and place). But the world of people who toss around words like peplum and gusset (not the bookbinding kind here) is to the daily-wear world rather like the world of bullfighting is to the world of farming.

High fashion is a form of modern art – it really is; it is a form of modern art that follows its own fascinations (as they all do) and delights in what some would call grotesquerie, and also to some extent in self-torture and especially the abuse of stick-thin young women (when people dress their dogs this way it ends up on humour blogs with captions like “Now we know why dogs turn on their owners,” but dogs don’t get lashings of champagne before hitting the spotlight), and it has its own detailed vocabulary and idiom that are Greek to most people.

This terminology arises out of its difference from other forms of modern art. Paintings, for instance, don’t all have a lot of little standardized bits because they don’t all have to fit on human bodies one way or another. Also, when you make a painting you make a painting; when you design clothes you need to get people to make them for you, in quantity, and you need to talk about them to the people who will evaluate them and buy them and write about them for all the people who would like to buy them or wish they could afford them. Painting has terminology, to be sure, but fashion has a lot of terminology. Fashion has every bit as much in-group geekery of terminology as you’ll get among the most unfashionable metal-listening physics-loving RPG-playing nerds out there. But this is terminology that somehow you the “normal” person manage to feel like you should have known (at least if you’re not an ordinary male). You don’t know what a peplum is? Next you’ll say you can’t tell mules from pumps!

So of course you know what a peplum is. You wouldn’t admit it if you didn’t. Everyone knows it’s that skirt-like bit that some tops have attached to them at the waist! (Or, as the OED puts it, “a short flared, gathered, or pleated strip of fabric attached at the waist of a woman’s jacket, dress, or blouse to create a hanging frill or flounce.”) It can be plump or limp, like an apple or a plum; it can add pep or amplitude. It can be as hierophantic as a phylactery or as puerile as pablum. It may resemble a pimple or a lamphsade. A top with a peplum is shaped rather like the sound of peplum, with two parts, connected at the top, attached in the middle, and then hanging soft. The peplum is, in its way, a modern answer to bustles and hoop skirts – much reduced.

Only the peplum is not modern, really. I mean, yes, peplum tops with cigarette pants are – next year they’ll be “so last year,” so that’s modern – but what we now call peplums have been around since Victorian times at least. And the original peplum is what the Greeks called πέπλος peplos (peplum being a Latinized version of the word), a long garment that was foot-length and folded over at the shoulder so that a second layer hung to the hips, with a belt at the waist – well, see the Met Museum on the subject.

But beware! If you want clothing names that are Greek to you, presented with diva-like pronouncements about what is and isn’t what, the Met gives you these gems: “a garment is not a peplos unless it has been draped with an apoptygma”; “Of all the identifying characteristics of a peplos, the fastening of its shoulders with fibulae is its single defining detail.” Well, zing! Darling, where are your fibulae? You call that an apoptygma? Please. Suddenly peplum tops with cigarette pants worn by anorexic over-made-up champagne-addled 15-year-olds don’t seem so daunting, now, do they?

Thanks to my mom for suggesting I do this word.

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klister

Posted on September 17, 2012 | 4 comments

Are you familiar with this word? If you are, then I know something about you. If you’re not, can you make a guess as to what it might refer to?

It’s not a very pleasant-looking word, I don’t think. Maybe this is because to me it looks like a popped blister. It also reminds me of keister (which means “buttocks”), cluster, and Listerine. And glister, as in all that glisters is not gold (yes, that’s the original). It has that klutzy Germanic kl at the start, so obtrusively blocky that you may not even notice at first that the rest of the word is like sister minus the first s. You’ll be busy rating its resemblance to strike, like, stickler, killdeer, and Rilke on a Likert scale of 1 to 5.

I also think klister unpleasant because it makes me think of clyster. A clyster is not like a shyster in a cloister; it’s rather more claustric. It’s a medication that you stick, um, up your keister, as it were – could be a suppository, but usually it’s liquid.

Gross? So is klister. But it’s unrelated. Whereas clyster comes from a Greek word for “rinsing out”, klister is from Norwegian for “paste”. But what sort of Norwegian paste-like thing would we be using where when?

Well, the thing I know about you if you know this word is that you’ve probably been cross-country skiing at least once – and likely more than that. Cross-country skis get waxed (they do sell skis that supposedly can do without it, I’m told, but I think wax will always help you – it’s been a while since I last went cross-country skiing). The kind of wax varies according to the temperature and snow conditions, from really hard stuff to fairly soft. And when the weather is really on the warm side and the snow is very soft, you don’t use sticks of wax, you use klister. Which is this gooey paste-like stuff. Kinda disgusting.

But not quite as disgusting as it sounds. I don’t think, anyway.

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around, about, approximately

Posted on September 15, 2012 | 3 comments

Dear word sommelier: I recently read an article on the AMA Insider about usage of around, about, and approximately. The author counsels people to reserve around for casual contexts and to prefer approximately almost all of the time in technical or formal writing. And the author says that approximately is the most precise and around the least. Is it really that clear-cut?

The author is, without naming it, discussing what linguists call register – variation in style of English usage according to context. He (or she) is quite right that around, about, and approximately bring with them a generally decreasing amount of casualness (respectively) when used in their interchangeable sense.

Now, that casualness is the tone of the utterance, but presenting something with a casual tone also connotes a casual attitude towards the topic. I think if we were to look at usages of the three words, we would probably find that the degree of precision they communicate mathematically is actually pretty much identical – for any given user, “about 3:00,” “around 3:00,” and “approximately 3:00” will likely indicate pretty much the same time span. (I do lack hard data for this assertion, however; this is my unscientific observation. It’s worth a real study.) It’s really the level of concern communicated about precision that varies – a more casual usage conveys a more casual attitude. Also, about is the most standard option, and is thus more plain-vanilla than the other two. If about is ordinary daily-wear clothes, approximately is like putting on a suit with a tie, and around more like putting on your comfy old jeans with rips and frays.

So let’s look at what the different words tend to convey in comparative usage:

“I’ll be there at around three o’clock”: I’ll get there between 2:50 and 3:10, and I don’t consider it a matter of great concern exactly where in there I arrive.

“I’ll be there at about three o’clock”: I’ll get there between 2:50 and 3:10, and I perhaps consider it a matter of courtesy to try to look like I’ve made an effort to arrive close to 3:00.

“I’ll be there at approximately three o’clock”: I’m trying to sound technical and impressive. I’ll get there between 2:50 and 3:10, and I want you to know that whatever time I arrive, it will be within the time period I specified; therefore, you may consider me punctual and scrupulous as long as I do not arrive outside of that time frame.

Let’s try some more:

“That’s about right.” In my estimation, that is pretty much right – close enough, at least. It may in fact even be precisely right.

“That’s around right.” I don’t think anyone would likely even say this; if they did, the hearer might not be sure of the meaning at first, thanks to the different meanings available for around.

“That’s approximately right.” That is not precisely right, and I want you to be aware that while it is within a not unreasonable margin of error of right, it could be more accurate.

“In any given week, approximately 175,000 Canadians are absent from work due to mental health issues.” This is a formal report, and we want you to take these numbers as authoritative; our estimates are rounded to tidy numbers because it’s not feasible to get exact figures on this, but you can assume that the real figure is likely within 5,000 of this.

“In any given week, about 175,000 Canadians are absent from work due to mental health issues.” This is an article in a magazine or newspaper, and we want you to know that we have this number that is not precise but is reckoned to be within something like 5,000 of the real number.

“In any given week, around 175,000 Canadians are absent from work due to mental health issues.” This is an article in a tone that is intended to be friendly and readable, and we want you to understand that this number is not precise – it may be off by as much as 5,000 or so – but it’s suitable for giving you an impression and so we can get away with using it.

“Mom, we’re heading out now, but I’ll be back in around an hour.” Don’t fret if we’re running late, because we’re not that concerned, but it’s likely going to be an hour plus (or maybe minus) 15 minutes.

“Mom, we’re heading out now, but I’ll be back in about an hour.” I’m making you a promise, but not a precise one; I could be up to 15 minutes late (or early).

“Mom, we’re heading out now, but I’ll be back in approximately an hour.” I want you to know that I’m paying attention to the time, but there are other factors that cannot be perfectly foreseen that may delay (or accelerate) or return by up to 15 minutes, and you can’t start tapping your watch in 61 minutes because I have told you this is not a precise prediction.

The thing to remember (aside from that words are known by the company they keep) is that every utterance always takes part in a definition of the circumstance, the relation of the speaker and hearer, and their attitudes towards each other and towards the circumstance and topic. (This is why people who defend rudeness with “I’m just being honest” are lying to you and to themselves. They could communicate the same information with greater respect for the other person. They just want to convey contempt and get away with it.)

So if you use around in a technical document, it will always seem like an injection of lightness or unconcern, a bit of a hand-wave. That has its place, but one has to be careful. On the other hand, using approximately in casual conversation is also potentially humorous due to its insistence on sounding responsible, but in any context it conveys that you’re covering your butt. As to about, it’s not especially technical but it’s not explicitly anything else either.

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crispy

Posted on September 14, 2012 | 1 comment

“How would you like your bacon?” Maury asked, leaning into the dining area from his kitchen. “Crisp?”

Arlene nodded.

“Crispy,” Jess answered.

Maury raised an eyebrow and retreated. Arlene smiled with approval: “Not just crisp. Crispy!”

“Aren’t they the same thing, though?” Daryl said, pursing his lips.

“Well,” I said, “easy to check.” Daryl had already gotten out his iPad and was doing some looking up, but that wasn’t what I had in mind. “Try swapping in one for the other.”

“‘They have chicken fingers,’” Arlene said, quoting an ad that was on TV a lot a couple of years ago. “‘Crisp ones.’ Oh, yes, not quite the same. Too technical. Not playful.”

“The diminutive effect of the suffix,” Jess said. “Sort of like the difference between a thing and a thingy.”

“Funny,” Arlene said. “If I talk about something as being orangey, it’s just orange-ish. Or a greeny-blue – more of a tendency. But crispy isn’t just crispish.”

“But try substituting the other way,” I said. “How’s the weather outside? In January it can be crisp. But when is it crispy?”

“Arizona in July,” Daryl said.

“Heat! It connotes overcooking!” Arlene said.

“If someone gives you a crisp retort…” Jess said.

“Icy,” Arlene said. “But if it’s crispy… ooh, tsszt” (she made as if touching something hot).

“Crisp consonants can be good for singing,” I said. “Crispy ones, not so much perhaps. Sounds kind of crunchy almost. And I like nice, crisp definition in a picture. I have no idea what crispy definition might be. Maybe over-sharpened.”

“I like a nice, crisp shirt,” Arlene said. “A crispy shirt sounds like high fashion. Or clubwear.”

“Maybe you’ve just gotten a little crispy,” Daryl said, miming smoking marijuana. I glimpsed Urban Dictionary on his iPad. “But crispy is a good thing if you’re going out. ‘You look crispy.’ Stylish, smart, confident. Not crepitating but scintillating.”

“And apparently with freshly curled hair,” Jess said.

“Crispy curls?” Arlene said.

“Crispus. Latin for ‘curly,’” Jess explained.

“Know when crispy was first used?” Daryl said, looking at his iPad.

“1300-something, wasn’t it?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “1398. That -y suffix usually attaches to nouns, but there was a little vogue for extending one-syllable adjectives with it. …Hm!” He smiled a little. “The OED says that this started in the 15th century, if not earlier. Well, 1398 is slightly earlier…”

“You’ll have to email Jesse Sheidlower,” I said. (He’s Editor at Large of the OED.) “He’ll probably say, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

Maury reappeared from the kitchen carrying plates of brunch, the first two for the ladies. “Crisp,” he said, setting a plate in front of Arlene with curly bacon on it. “And crispy,” he said, setting down Jess’s plate with just a little rap so that the bacon on it shattered.

“Crispy?” Jess said. “Frangible!”

“Friable,” I said.

“Over-fry-able,” Arlene said.

“Buon appetito,” Maury said crisply, and returned to the kitchen.

Thanks to Mark Mandel for suggesting crispy.

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earthling

Posted on September 12, 2012 | 4 comments

Kneeling in the darkling evening is the earthling, tending to his groundlings nestling in the gloaming. This is no science fiction; there are no aliens from other planets that this earthling must repel. He is an Old English earthling, an eorðling, a man of the earth, a plant-tender. He minds his roots and branches and repels aliens from other plants.

Is he a princeling or just a hireling, a mere underling? No matter: everyone is a gardener of the language. This one does so in his little corner of interest with more care than some, carefully handling and bundling, whether the lexis is prickling or fondling. So much is mixed in here, two kinds of stock mingling with so little to distinguish them. There are the words that have the old suffix for “thing belonging or pertaining to”, often with a diminutive or pejorative sense: ling. And there are the words that look the same but attach to the stem one letter later: the suffix is ing, and the stem ends in l. Among these are a goodly number that have a stem made of a root plus the le suffix: prickling, handling, tickling…

He tries, he really does, meddling with the fickle addlings of nature, not truckling, battling to keep a clear row of his darlings, his nurselings the saplings, his younglings and their siblings, needing no netting to save them from starlings and their nestlings – for those, too, belong, as do the little suckling pigs. He knows it makes little difference, sometimes none; when you blend these words into the wine or liquor of a document, the rootstock and the stem rarely make a difference in their contribution to the taste. He knows the flavour gets more influence from where people have tasted these ingredients before, for the feast of words is always a feast of worlds, the worlds of memories: where you have heard or read this and that word and phrase before will determine how you hear or read them now.

He knows it well, this earthling; it is not alien to him. He knows how a word, almost as a microcosm of the language it is part of, may start with an eye only to the soft moist crumbly earth and what comes from it, may widen its view to the world under heaven, and on the far side of a course of centuries may now turn the eye to the stars at every hearing.

The dark is done falling; the air is chilling and cold fingers are tingling. Enough shovelling and levelling and coupling. His stomach is growling, and inside awaits a warm helping of chitterlings.

But who, at last, is he, this tender tender, caring about details that so few can taste, fascinated with the parts that most people never see, gardening ling with ling but keeping them neatly hoed in rows? Who else but a linguist?

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pissant

Posted on September 10, 2012 | 2 comments

In the world of etymology there is also some entomology. And while many of us hesitate to incorporate insects in our cuisine, when we prepare dishes of words, we manage our little share of entomophagy. Nor is it one hundred percent unpleasant, though it can lend a peasant air to the discourse. But a little bit of that forest flavour (a mite of must, perhaps some rancio) can be used to various effect in the subtle hands of a master word chef.

Let us look to this hill here and to the micro-myrmidons that crawl to and from and about it. What do you smell? If you are reminded of certain sketchy doorways and various unflushed porcelain, urine good company – or bad. This anthill, thanks to its rotting vegetal composition and the formic acid that its myriad denizens the wood ants produce, gives off that smell. Small wonder that these largeish ants came to be called pismires, from piss plus mire, the latter being a now-disused word for “ant”. So in more modern times (since the 1600s) pismire has come to be supplanted by pissant. And other ants came to get the monicker more generally too, since ants are not well liked and are not all that carefully differentiated by most people.

It is not uncommon to use names of insects to insult people. It is also not uncommon to use words referring to excrement to insult people. Any word that combines the two is a natural for a put-down. A contemptible, irritating person whose utter insignificance you wish to emphasize is readily called a pissant. Pop that hard /p/ off the top, then hiss in the middle like the stream you might imagine dousing the person (and perhaps curl your upper lip as you do so), and end with an antagonistic /æ/ plus nasal plus stop. So close to pleasant but so far; so close to peasant and why not; so close to percent but so what. And never mind that pissants (wood ants) are big as ants go; ants are small, and that is all.

But that rustic flavour, that must, that wood, must or at least would come to be used in other contexts too. If one may be pissed as a newt, may one be drunk as a pissant? In Australia, one may, or game as a pissant, for that matter (meaning “very brave” – with or without liquid courage). Monty Python’s song about bibulous philosophers, supposedly sung by Aussies, starts with “Emmanuel Kant was a real pissant.”

Or split the word into two and it can be used in a positive sense in self-description – as in what Ron Ault of the AFL-CIO once said of their relation to the Pentagon, “Our job is to be the irritant, piss ant stinging them on their ankles at every opportunity.” Biting like those nasty little things with their formic acid venom.

My first enounter with the word pissant was yet another serving in a different dish. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, one character has his own definition of pissant, and it stuck with me for a long time – indeed, I still think of it first:

A pissant is somebody who thinks he’s so damn smart, he can never keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he’s got to argue with it. You say why you like something, and, by God, he’ll tell you why you’re wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a boob all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better.

Not just any irritating person, then. An extended meaning. No doubt influenced somewhat by pedant. And likely by the person’s capacity to piss you off.

All these flavours from this dysfragrant sylvan antheap, crawling with its seven-letter vermin, erstwhile pismire, now pissant, popping up even in popular songs (such as one in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas), and in diverse recipes – like musk in perfume, like salt in candies. Sometimes your language needs just that little saltiness – two syllables of it, please.

Thanks to Kristen Dolenko for suggesting pissant.

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snaggletoothed

Posted on September 9, 2012 | 1 comment

“Al Kholani was a squat man with a red-and-white kaffiyeh bundled at a jaunty angle atop his head. He had deep-set eyes, a hawk nose, and a snaggletooth that extended over his lower lip.”

Any guesses as to where that’s a quote from, and when it was written? And is there anything in it that particularly snags your eye?

The source is, first of all, non-fiction. Al Kholani is not a made-up person; he is a real resident of Wadi Dhahr, which is near Sanaa, in Yemen. The description of him comes from “Yemen: Days of Reckoning” (if you get the title from the first page of the article, or “Yemen’s Day of Reckoning,” if you get it from the table of contents), by Joshua Hammer, in the September 2012 issue of National Geographic.

I can’t speak for you, of course, but I can say what word snagged my eye: snaggletooth. It’s just a word you don’t often see. And it’s long. And has a double g, which (at least for me) has a greater-than-average association with plain or undignified or rakish words, and is part of a ggle, which smacks of boggle and juggle and giggle and such like, and is followed by a double o, which certainly doesn’t weaken the effect. It’s an undignified, impolite word, something you would not use to describe a person to their face.

Which makes it a bit of a surprise in National Geographic, which is a very thoughtful magazine. But you have to admit that it is the exact word you want to describe the jutting tooth, which is unavoidably salient on a person’s face – the description of Al Kholani is good enough that you almost feel you’ve seen a photograph of him. (The article does not include a photo of him. I imagine they would have spared the description if it did.)

A vowel can make quite a difference. Snuggle may not be dignified, but it certainly is comfortable and inviting. Sniggle and snoggle don’t exist in the lexicon, but they sound like they would refer to snickering and kissing, respectively, on the basis of their resemblance to other words. But snaggle? It sounds like snag, which is not more pleasant for its taste of nag, and which carries the sense of jutting out and catching.

Snag is indeed (as far as anyone can tell) at the root of the snaggle in snaggletooth(ed). The le is probably the usual frequentative suffix ­– signifying something done repeatedly. And we know snag – but did you know it was a noun before it was a verb? A snag is, first of all, a stump of a branch sticking off a tree, or a branch or stump sticking out of soil or water – in short, something that juts and that passing things can catch on. That catching got the verb snag derived from the noun. (Now we talk about a snag in one’s clothing, which is the effect caused by the verb caused by the original noun.)

So a snaggletooth is a tooth that sticks out like a snag. The noun snaggle-tooth has citations dating from 1820 in the Oxford English Dictionary. Does that seem suspiciously recent? The noun is actually derived from the adjective snaggletoothed (or snaggle-toothed, as the OED has it), which has a first citation from 1585.

One way or another, if you are snaggletoothed, if you have a snaggletooth in your puss (mouth, for those unfamiliar with that colloquialism), it’s generally viewed as unbecoming at best, and certainly not stylish or fun in a good way. And yet… there is Snagglepuss. That large pink bon-vivant feline from Hanna-Barbera (probably a panther, though people in the animations seem to take him for a lion – well, if he’s a mountain lion, he’s a kind of panther; also, he does not have crooked teeth). If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch an episode of the cartoon. He’s not your ordinary cartoon creature. He’s much more urbane and witty, charming even (yes, there’s his famous turn of phrase: “[x] even”), and perfectly happy to live and let live except no one else seems to want to. The humour is on the level of Hollywood Squares. A bit more sophisticated than the usual for cartoons. Adult even.

And rather different from the image one gets from snaggletoothed. And yet there it is. Heavens to Murgatroyd.

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yearbook

Posted on September 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

In some countries – notably Canada and the USA, but also, I am told, Australia and to some degree South Africa – this word will immediately bring to mind one’s youthful years of education. School days, school days, good old golden rule days…

High school is a landmark in our lives, and finishing it – graduating – is an apex, laden with rites de passage: the graduation ceremony, of course, and the dance and so on that go with that, but also other things done by the grad class (or the senior class, as they say in the US). I went to high school in Banff, so a great unsanctioned tradition was the grad hike: a hike to an overnight or weekend spent in a cabin somewhere up in the mountains, just the grad class students, no teachers, and a lot of consumables the teachers would not want to be seen countenancing. We also had a champagne breakfast at the top of the Sulphur Mountain Gondola on our grad morning (in Alberta, the drinking age is 18, and most of the class is old enough to drink legally at grad… the rest of us pretended we were). There were also dances, sports, and of course classes… And to commemorate all of that axial year, a yearbook.

The yearbook also includes the lower grades; I have yearbooks for all three years of my time at Banff Community High School. And they all have signatures in them, accompanied by narrations that make me look like I had a lot more fun and got into a lot more trouble than I really did. Fair enough. We tend to distill the small beer of experience into a whiskey of memory.

Unsurprisingly, I was on the yearbook committee; actually, after Miss Henderson said in class that she was looking for a yearbook editor, I went up to her and said that I was interested, and she told me she had just given the position to Leanne Pawluk. So I wrote the little capsule descriptions of the year’s highlights, laced with my rather rude attempts at humour. (And actually the yearbook was mainly put together by other students on the committee, whose photo collages were a kind of chaos resembling nothing that the yearbook company’s workshop suggested – but something like what I see in fashion magazines now – and who managed to misplace various things, including my submission for the grad class profiles: we could do it in the “pet peeve etc.” form or the “last will and testament” form, and they lost both. Looking now at the charm my other writing of the time exhibited, I wonder if they lost them on purpose.)

This is a good old compound word, made of two words that have been in English as long as there has been an English for them to be in. Year is in Old English as géar (pronounced like year with a British West Country accent), and book is bóc. Their mating has been around since the 16th century at least. Not that high-school yearbooks existed then; yearbooks of the year’s law-court cases did, which had in common with high-school yearbooks the element of recording misdeeds. Between then and now, various associations and periodicals also put out yearbooks. High schools have been putting them out in North America for about a century.

Year has a long, stretchy sound, a glide in and a liquid out, sort of like the Doppler effect you get when a car goes by you if you’re standing by the highway. When you say “The year just flew by,” you can sort of hear it whizzing past – “yyyeearrr.” Book is as hard and abrupt as year is soft and smooth; it has two hard covers (like most yearbooks) and its sound is similar to that of a hardcover book being suddenly closed (as, for instance, when a parent wanders behind you while you’re reading the signatures in your yearbook). In a yearbook, student’s lives are presented as though they are open books – but the yearbook does it to close the book on the high school career.

The vision presented by yearbooks is selective, of course, and erratic. I was in high school in the early 1980s, so the photos in it are mostly badly exposed and were taken at a time when people didn’t normally have cameras with them all the time and weren’t exceedingly shutter-happy because every photo had an incremental cost. I’m sure the quality of the photos in yearbooks has improved now, both in technical details such as exposure and in the likelihood of getting great pictures. But we still managed to have yearbooks filled with antics – distorted, incomplete, poorly exposed, dot-screened… But such is the quality of memory.

I’ve lately done a little photo project using macro photos of details from my high school yearbooks to play with visual representation of the quality of memory and its representations – the selective focus, the things that stand out more and less sharply, the ways the detail breaks down. The way things can look when taken out of context, too. I remember almost none of the hijinks pictured, and was probably not even present for most of them, but they are in their way both sharper and less detailed than the things I do remember. I started this note with one; here are a few more. See the whole set on flickr. (I recommend using the “View all sizes” option to look in full detail at ones that catch your eye.)

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