Category Archives: word tasting notes

mulligatawny

Posted on March 5, 2012 | 5 comments

Imagine being a young Canadian and first seeing this word on a soup can. What crosses your mind? Probably first of all “That’s a long word” and, immediately, “What the heck is that?” Could it be some weird ingredient like gumbo, or weirder, like mongoose or alligator or tadpole? Or some creature from Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo? A check of the ingredients reveals nothing as exceptional as the name: just some meat, some vegetables, some spices, stuff like that.

So it must be some kind of eponym, perhaps? (I’m sure every Canadian youth knows the word eponym. If by every you mean “no”.) It does look like a Scottish or Irish name. Maybe this soup is what they serve at St. Andrew’s in the clubhouse to anyone dressed in tawny clothes who has taken a mulligan. Or is it a magic word uttered by the witches in Macbeth – something on the line of alakazam but with the duller, rounder sound reminiscent of the rumbling in a sheep’s gut, or in yours after an excess of haggis? Maybe it’s a place, like the Mull o’ Kintyre. It kind of has the sound of some burbling bog, actually.

But if you’re mulling a getaway to the home of mulligatawny, cold muddy bogs are not on your itinerary. Rather, take your tiger repellant. This word is another hangover of the British Empire. Tony Aspler, the noted wine critic, once wrote about how England has “phantom Raj syndrome” – they no longer run India, but they still eat curry by the bucket (or the takeout container). This soup is a product of the British domination of India; it’s a contact food – it came to being due to the contact between the British and the Indians. It is indigenous to India in the same way as a child born in India of an Indian parent and a British parent is. It’s a gastronomic creolization (but not what in gastronomy is called a creole), like South Africa’s bobotie.

The British, you see, particularly the officers and various other moneyed sorts, expected a soup course at their meals. Indians did not do soup courses. In fact, Indian food is normally served all at once, not in courses, and the soups they had – or the closest thing they had to soups – were really sauces to pour over rice or plain curries. So something was come up with. More than one something, really, but in Madras (now on maps as Chennai) this soup – or its progenitor – was come up with, and it spread as readily as that other great Raj invention, the gin and tonic (a palatable way of taking your quinine).

The something up with which they came has a lot of variations, it should be said. It usually has meat, and a yellowish colour, and a curryish flavour; there are normally onions in there somewhere. Expect a mixture of ingredients as heterogeneous as the mixture of letters in mulligatawny: humps, cups, lines, curves, rings, crosses and angles, and a dot. The mulligatawny I have in my fridge right now – I made it on the weekend and we will continue to consume it for a couple more days – contains chicken breast, chicken stock, onions, garlic, carrots, potatoes, red lentils, an apple, a chili pepper, an assortment of spices, and coconut milk. It’s yummy. But you could buy a can of soup labelled Mulligatawny and encounter something as different from mine as Richard Mulligan is from Tawny Kitaen.

Still, it will have at least a little pepper of some sort in it, one hopes, if only for the rectification of names. Etymology is no guide to current meaning, but your enjoyment of the soup and its name may still be seasoned a bit more by the knowledge that it comes from Tamil milagu tanni, “pepper water”. The word, like the food, has been adapted; it remains fairly close to the original, but it has been given a sort of bluff British officer’s walrus moustache and a touch of the throat-clearing “harrumph.” In fact, it’s an excellent word for evoking a moneyed British accent. Try it aloud and see for yourself. Then have a bowl of the stuff.

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bannock

Posted on March 4, 2012 | 4 comments

I was over at the house of my friends Beth and Keith for a party last night, and at one juncture Keith brought out, fresh from the oven, a nice round hot bannock: a griddle-baked soda bread made with, in this case, oats and flour. It was duly served onto the table next to all the other snack-type items (including a quartet of cheeses that served further to prove that Quebec makes the best cheese in the world), and maple syrup was set out for dipping it in. A small crowd of small children materialized instantly around it, but I did manage to get a piece.

It reminded me of my childhood, sort of. Bannock was a staple when and where I grew up. Not that I relished it as these children did. But I still ate it, a fair amount of it.

Why did I not relish it? And where did I grow up? Regular readers may recall that I have on occasion adverted to my formation in southern Alberta. From that you may speculate that my exposure to bannock was due to the strong Scottish influence thereabouts. This is actually only indirectly true. And in fact I had no idea that bannock was originally Scottish. I assumed it was Indian. As in Canadian First Nations. Specifically Nakoda, also known as Stoney, a branch of the Sioux ethnic group.

My parents worked on the Stoney reserve at Morley, west of Calgary. My younger years were spent in the surrounds of the reserve, and many of the things I went to with my parents were functions on the reserve: tent meetings and house meetings (evangelical gatherings with preaching and prayers and hymns accompanied by electric guitar, bass, and drum – and maybe accordion – late into the evening) and pow-wows (gatherings for competitive and community dancing in ornate costumes to the beat of a central group of drummers and singers) and, on certain holidays, feasts.

At any one of these gatherings, after and before endless rounds of handshaking and greetings of “Âba wathtech” and so on, and washed down with enough strong black tea to float the British navy, and – at feasts – nestled next to turkey and good canned cranberry sauce (I love canned cranberry sauce, especially when it’s still in its cylindrical shape from the can), there would always be squares of bannock. Which in this case was a fairly plain wheat-based soda bread baked in pans, and if ever in my life I had it at any temperature other than room temperature I do not recall it.

Nor would there have been maple syrup for dipping it in. Maples don’t grow in Alberta, and maple syrup is even more expensive there than it is in Ontario. We put Roger’s Golden Syrup (lightly flavoured corn syrup) on our pancakes and corn bread, but not on bannock.

The Stoneys and other First Nations people across much of Canada apparently picked up the concept, recipe, and name of bannock from fur traders. The fur traders brought it from Scotland. The word bannock may come from Old English bannuc and/or may be related to Scots Gaelic bannach, which in turn was probably borrowed from Latin panicium, from panis “bread”.

In other words, like the food, this word also follows a trail of borrowings. Just as the bread is economical and easy to make, the word is not difficult – it would never cause a speaker any panic, in spite of the rhyme – and transfers easily from place to place. You can take it to the bank, as it were. It touches all three main points of articulation in the mouth – lips, tongue-tip, velum – and brings a voiced stop, a nasal, and a voiceless stop. And, true to English form, it uses seven letters to spell five phonemes. It occurs to me that the shape of the word could be seen as a bit like a pan of bannock, with the risers of the b and k the sides and the letters in between the bready contents (have an n, won’t you?).

So was the bannock my equivalent of Proust’s madeleine? Did it bring childhood memories flooding forth unbidden? Well, not the taste of it; as I say, it was somewhat different from the kind I grew up with. But that word bannock, well, now, it took me back to Alberta’s dusty foothills, to a community hall in the Bow Valley full of people mostly talking a language I didn’t understand, who called me by the name Ûpabi Daguscan, “Son of Rock” (to my ears it was “pobby dowscun”) and all commented to me in English on how big I was getting, and to tea and tea and tea and bannock and bannock and bannock.

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ulu

Posted on March 4, 2012 | 1 comment

This word looks architectural, doesn’t it? Or, in a way, like an epergne. Or a post with a basin on either side. Or something, anyway, with a central stem and two cups on the side. But when you say it, the lips don’t show symmetry at all; they show a simple steady rounding all the way through, and the tongue, in its hiding place behind, manifests the symmetry: the tip starting behind the teeth, then flipping up to touch the palate, then dropping back, sort of like the motion with which you remove the skin from, say, a chicken breast or a dead seal.

Not that this word seems symmetrical to everyone. We in English tend to think of the spelling first, and if we have some linguistic knowledge or understanding, we may think in terms of phonemes or phonetics. But what if you think first in terms of syllables? Then you have two: [u] and [lu]. So if you spell this word with a syllabic orthography, you have two characters, one of which may be, say, a triangle pointing to the right, and the other of which may be, let us say, a fish hook lying on its side with the bottom of the hook to the right and the top of the stem to the left. Letter forms are, after all, arbitrary, as transparent as they may seem to the native speaker.

In either case, mind you, I would be able to point at a semicircle in a letter form and say, “Look! A resemblance!” Pure coincidence, but there it is. And what does a semicircle have to do with this word? Well, it’s like this. I have a pizza knife that has a semicircular blade and, attached to it at the diameter, a straight wooden handle. I tend to think of it as an ulu. This is not quite accurate, but there is a resemblance. And ulus are something I saw in pictures and/or videos in school long before I ever saw a pizza knife.

Why would I see ulus, or have seen them? Because I live in Canada and we are taught about the Inuit. For non-Canadians, the Inuit are the people formerly called Eskimos – calling them Eskimos is like calling the Deutsch Germans, or the Saami Laplanders, or calling Magyarország Hungary, or Zhongguo China: it’s using someone else’s term. Obviously we do that a lot, but it happens that we are increasingly tending towards calling people what they call themselves, and that is the case now in Canada with the Inuit.

Which reminds me: one Inu, two or more Inuit; one ulu, two or more uluit. I have been calling them ulus, going by English morphology, but since we now like to keep plural morphology on loan words where we can, we might as well call an ulu and another ulu together uluit.

So, oh, yes, what is it? A knife with a curved blade (now steel, formerly slate) and a handle made of wood, bone, or whatnot. The handle is, like with my pizza cutter, parallel with the tangent of the peak of the blade, but it is attached at one or two points, rather than at full width, as with mine. The curve of the blade is like the curve in your tongue, downward between tip and tail, when you say [ulu] (which does give a new meaning to “cutting remarks”). The ulu is used among the Inuit by women (at least traditionally) for skinning, cutting food, and trimming blocks of snow and ice for igloos (I won’t say igluit, though I could).

And what does the word taste like? I get halo and hula (as in hoop) and lulu and similar curved things, plus uhuru, the widely borrowed Swahili word for “freedom”. And perhaps yoohoo!

Oh, and the interior jungle portion of Malaysia. Which, as the OED tells me, has a word: ulu. We can assume that it’s not what the Inuit have in mind.

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epergne

Posted on March 2, 2012 | 2 comments

This word seems almost pregnant with possibility – especially, at least to my eyes, the possibility of food. Perhaps because it’s a French term, and in particular one that you don’t see every day, the assumption tends to the gastronomic. Of course, it could be some other stereotypically French thing – like an épée, say, or some diplomatic manoeuvre – but when I think of the land of Époisses and Bourgogne, my thoughts turn to cuisine.

I suppose this word isn’t obviously French to everyone. After all, epigone comes originally from Greek (via French, true), and we have a few cases of gn words from Greek as well (gnosis, for instance) – and Gnaeus was a Roman personal name (look as it might like the growling gruntings of Gnasher, the nasty little dog in the British strip called Dennis the Menace – no connection to Hank Ketcham’s American one of the same name). And in that light, the gn can look a bit gnarly. But if we can say lasagna and cologne, I think we can manage epergne.

Um, so how do we say it, by the way? Take it as a given that it’s not “ee-prrg-nee”; some will say it in the Anglicized way, sort of like “ippern”, and others will do the English rendition of the French pronunciation, like “eh pair’n”. If you know how to speak French, you know how it would be said in French; if not, never mind, just grab a cream puff and you won’t have to speak.

Cream puff? For what it’s worth, that’s what the three e’s in this remind me of. Of course, they could be serving bowls attached to a centrepiece or something like that. Serving bowls attached to a centrepiece? Who would have something like that? How about the sort of person who would have an epergne?

Yes, indeed. An epergne is a centrepiece, typically made of metal or sometimes glass or both, that has a larger central bowl with a number of smaller bowls (shallow or deep according to the design of the specific item) in orbit around it. The best way to get an idea of the thing is to look at lots of pictures of examples. For those of you who like to read classic fiction, you may recall it in a memorable scene in Great Expectations:

An epergne or centrepiece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.

I also like this charming snip from Our Mutual Friend, also by Dickens:

‘Here you have as much of me in my ugliness as if I were only lead; but I am so many ounces of precious metal worth so much an ounce;—wouldn’t you like to melt me down?’ A corpulent straddling epergne, blotched all over as if it had broken out in an eruption rather than been ornamented, delivered this address from an unsightly silver platform in the centre of the table.

Indeed, in general, epergnes seem to be associated with wealth and its display – hoi polloi may have lazy Susans, but voici une Susanne paresseuse. This is possibly a great irony, as, inasmuch as anyone has any idea what the etymology of the word is, it seems to come from épargne. Which is French for “saving”.

Oh, but above all, remember this: in French, it’s not even called an epergne (or épergne). It’s called a surtout.

Thanks to Carolyn Bishop for suggesting epergne.

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quirt

Posted on March 1, 2012 | 1 comment

“It’s such a cute little word!” Elisa Lively chirped, looking at the piece of paper Ross Ewage had just handed her.

I raised an eyebrow. Cute is not exactly Ross’s usual métier. Elisa held up the slip. “Quirt.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “quite.”

“No,” Elisa said, “quirt! Not quite quite! It’s such a quick little chirp, like a small bird. Like… quirk. Or quart. Or maybe even quiet.”

“Don’t forget squirt,” Ross said.

“You know,” Elisa said, rotating the slip of paper, “I’d never really thought before of how qu rotates to nb.”

“Note that well,” I said.

“Of course, the rest of the word isn’t much to look at rotated,” she said. “But that q… What does it make me think of, shape-wise?”

“A little whip?” Ross offered. “Straight handle, the whip curled up, awaiting use…”

Elisa snorted. “A little squirt of whipped cream, maybe. Oh, this is such a cute, charming little word. Does it have anything to do with quarto?”

“Latin for fourth? Yes, by way of Spanish, it seems. Cuarto, which is the source for cuarta, which slipped into English and became quirt.”

“Noun or verb?” Elisa was champing at the bit.

“Noun, and a verb derived from it,” Ross said. “Here, let me read you some sentences using it cited in the OED.” He pulled another piece of paper from his pocket. “Here’s C. Winterfield in The American Review: ‘“Davis can tell,” said some one, in a loud voice. “Yes, he knows all about it,” said Fitz—“lets quirt him until he tells.”’ Here’s one from Hopalong Cassidy: ‘He says you did—an’ somebody quirted him.’”

“It sounds like tickling!” Elisa said.

“Here’s from Where the Wagon Led by R.D. Symons: ‘So I quirted that pony a couple of times.’”

Elisa pulled a little quizzical smile. “Really?”

“Teddy Roosevelt in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: ‘A first-class rider will sit throughout it all…quirting his horse all the time.’”

“Ooohh…” Elisa said. “For some reason that sounds kinda sick.”

“Here’s one with the noun, from The Look of the Old West by William Foster-Harris: ‘The cowboy’s quirt was ordinarily about 2 or 3 feet long, of plaited leather, though sometimes of stitched buckskin or woven horsehair.’” Ross smirked slightly.

“Oh, now, I really am all at sea,” Elisa said, beginning to look marginally queasy.

“If you were at sea,” Ross said, “you might be less likely to see a quirt or to be quirted with it. Depending on the kind of ship, I suppose.”

Elisa held the slip of paper in front of her gingerly now, as though ants might start crawling out of it. “I’m not going to like it, am I?”

Ross shrugged. “It’s a braided whip with a short handle. It seems to be named after the length of its handle, since a cuarta was a unit of measurement.”

Elisa looked sad. “It’s such a cute, quaint word… Oh dear.”

“Sometimes a cute thing can really smart,” Ross said, and took the piece of paper from her, ready to spring it on another victim.

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hesher

Posted on February 29, 2012 | 9 comments

I was talking with my friend, colleague, and fellow word taster Amy Toffelmire today about the Oscar results, and how she had beaten me in the office Oscar pool by correctly picking the documentary (all the rest of our picks were identical). I had picked Paradise Lost 3. Amy commented that the characters in the movie were what she, growing up in Arkansas (where the movie is set) and California, had called heshers.

Now, if you know what hesher means, and you have read enough of my posts to know I have a certain liking for heavy metal music (many other kinds, too, have no fear), you will probably be surprised to learn that I was entirely unfamiliar with the term. Amy explained that they were metalheads, a particular breed thereof. She forwarded me the Urban Dictionary link.

I love Urban Dictionary. It shows very clearly that the way a lot of people approach semantics – trying to isolate abstract defining properties, and setting aside what they call “encyclopedic knowledge” – has real shortcomings. As a reliable dictionary, Urban Dictionary of course has its own shortcomings, but for a term like this one – a slang term used by just the sort of people who frequent the site – its assorted entries, which are contributed by whoever wants and voted on by site visitors, help to paint a pretty good picture of the way people picture the word’s object. I will quote several of its definitions at length, with vulgarities censored not because I have a problem with them but because I know they will unduly distract some readers:

Reebock-wearing, mulleted person in acid-washed jeans and a Judas Priest T-shirt who, at the age of 28, still lives in his/her parents’ basement and swears that he/she can really rock out on his/her Ibanez Stratocaster copy guitar and probably owns a Nova that hasn’t run in 5 years but you just wait, that ——er is gonna smoke those ——in Japanese rice burners once I put a new head gasket on it.

Long haired, usually mulleted person who listens and rocks out to Metal or Thrash music.Generally seen wearing acid-washed jeans, leather motorcycle or denim jacket covered with band and skull patches. Will often have a Molester Moustache

A grungy, long haired, plastic comb-brush in the back pocket stoner with an 80’s rock shirt. Sometimes, a little ‘off’ from the drug damage. Rides an adult sized BMX bike around town and knocks over trash cans by kicking out with his back tire.

By now you really have a pretty clear image, don’t you? It’s true that the definitions can be a little overly precise, but if you have the image, then you have the type, and you undoubtedly have seen that type of person. Not all metalheads are heshers. Not all stoners are heshers. Not all people with mullets (or similar hair) are heshers. Not all people who have a problem adapting to adult reality are heshers. But heshers exist as a subset in the intersection of those sets, and further characteristics are entailed as emergent or culturally determined properties.

To further define the type, a movie, Hesher, was made in 2010. The central character is actually named Hesher, but it’s after the type. The biggest-name actor in the movie was Natalie Portman. And yet you probably haven’t heard of it, let alone seen it. Neither have I. From what I’ve read, it sucked. Which seems oddly appropriate.

The term hesher itself has been around for somewhat longer than that. It seems to have come into being in the 1980s. The etymology is a little smoky, but of course there are plenty of ideas. The lamest one is one that I saw on Yahoo! Answers, suggesting that it’s from he+she+her in reference to the long hair. Other speculation is that it’s some kind of blend of headbanger or heavy metal and thrasher. Some think it was first a term for a drug user (possibly from a verb hesh, heshing), but aside from an obvious taste of hash there’s no particular account for this (nor any explanation for the necessary vowel shift). Certainly no one is attempting to say that the word comes from the sound and sensation of inhaling marijuana or the torrents of white noise you hear when too near a stage stack speaker, both of which hesher sounds a bit like.

Perhaps the most common theory attaches it to Hessian, which was a term that came into being in the 1980s, probably in self-reference first, for a certain aggressively masculine type of headbanger (metalhead), perhaps a specific subset who preferred German industrial metal and perhaps neo-Nazi imagery (metal in general is not a hotbed of racism), but Germanic and bellicose imagery are common currency in many metal circles. The reference is of course to the Teutonic mercenaries of the 18th century. Some references to Hessians (of the metal kind) use hesher as a shortened form. Given the frequency of -er words in reference to types of music fans (especially in these kinds of genres), as well as the palatalization of the /s/ before the /i/ in Hessian (and the frequent assimilation of the /i/ into that), the derivation is reasonable, though I do not have full proof for it.

Incidentally, the original Hessians were called Hessians because many of them were from Hesse, a state in Germany. It contains cities such as Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, and Offenbach. Hesse in turn gained its name from a Latin version of the original Germanic name of the inhabitants, the Chatti or Hassi. And there the trail runs cold. But it’s fair to imagine that the Chatti had long, greasy hair, wore leather jackets, smoked a lot of weed, listened to thrash metal, and drove burnt-out cars or BMX bikes. Not.

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tranche

Posted on February 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

If letters were legs, this word might be a truncated tarantula. But aside from the faint echo of arachnid (mainly in the spelling), to my eyes this word looks more like it is in need of truncation. Perhaps don’t take the t off; then you’re left with ranche, which is a somewhat hokey-seeming olde-style spelling of ranch. Rather, dispense with the e. Or, better yet, dig the a right out of the middle and drop the e in. After all, this word sounds like someone with a certain kind of accent saying trench.

But which accent? Some say it to rhyme with ranch. The more “proper” way has it more like “tronsh”. And some people hear it – and misspell it – as trunch. That’s not a fancy spelling for trunk; it rhymes with lunch, I guess. But trunch is found in dictionaries only as an adjective meaning “short and thick” (derived from Latin truncus, which refers to the trunk of a tree) and an obsolete noun referring to a post or stake – or a truncheon (truncheon also comes from truncus, which, incidentally, at origin means “broken off” or “lopped off”). However lopped off a truncheon may be, it’s not fit for doing any cutting itself, and it’s not really related to tranches, unless you use a truncheon to aid you in depriving someone of a tranche.

Now, if you did wield a truncheon to ill effect, it would surely be a trenchant moment, but if you then wished to make the victim disappear into a trench, you wouldn’t be able to dig the trench with a truncheon or a trunk. Fair enough: none of them are cutters; all three have been cut, and all three words come from the same Latin root – the source of truncus is in turn truncare, “cut”, and that gives us not just truncate but trench as well.

But never mind trench. Our word tranche looks French. Indeed, to my eyes, tranche is a slice – of pie or cake. Well, as Pink Floyd (specifically Roger Waters) sang, “Share it fairly, but don’t take a slice of my pie.” With or without the aid of a truncheon, and whether or not at a luncheon. But what is the pie that a tranche is a slice of in English? Typically stocks or bonds or perhaps a loan: if a block of money (or paper promises) is handed over not all at once but in bits over time or to several parties, those shares are tranches. And, yes, tranche comes from a French word that ultimately comes again from truncare. Are we counting how many legs this linguistic tarantula has – or how many shares it is divided into?

Of all these different words, we may make two broad groups (or tranches, shall we say): ones in which the Latin c has retained its original /k/ sound, and ones in which it has become a fricative or even an English affricate “ch” (/tʃ/). There is a distinct phonaesthetic difference between these two tranches – one may even say there is a trench between them. The trunk side lands with a hard clunk at the back of the mouth, like knocking against wood. The trench side seems to have more of a cutting feeling: what is “ch, ch, ch” but the sound of chipping away at something? Both endings come in for a softer landing with the nasal: the tree is soft wood, or the cutting is in the ground.

But also either way, it starts with tr, which in French and Latin is a simple stop and liquid but in English with its retroflex /r/ causes the stop to become an affricate – another “ch”. Indeed, trench sounds a bit like the act of digging a trench: “trench, trench, trench.” But tranche? Well, first you have to take stock of whether you’re going to say it like “tronsh” or like “tranch” (or “trunch”), and you have to get past any echoes of trance and trash – and any spare change (to say nothing of drudge and trudge and so on) that might be lingering. And then? Well, I’ll let you say your piece.

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stracotto

Posted on February 26, 2012 | 5 comments

With food, it’s well known that you can put something in a whole new light – even affect the way the taste is received – by giving it a different name. Preferably a foreign one.

To be fair, if you’re giving it a non-English name you’re usually also doing something at least a little different with it – gelato is not quite the same as ice cream. But sometimes, it’s just that, for instance, calamari sounds better to us than squid, or escargots sounds better to us than snails. I’m sure that that factor had a little influence, too, when the Frenchified English upper classes during the Middle Ages started calling the cows and pigs they ate by French names – beef (bœuf), veal (veau), pork (porc).

And it’s true, to look at it from the other side, that some of the things food can be called can seem rather unexciting. I was interested to learn, when touring the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, that one of the emperors of Austria (I can’t remember which) preferred boiled beef for dinner, reserving French food for formal occasions. Boiled beef! But of course it really matters what you boil it in and how you spice and what you serve it with. It doesn’t have to be boring.

Think of pörkölt, which is a Hungarian word meaning “singed” or “almost burnt”, and also the name of a meat dish that (with some noodles tossed in) is now known in English as goulash, which is mutated from a Hungarian word meaning “hunter”. It’s a flavourful dish, though the meaning of the name would mislead you. (As to the “hunter” name, consider the different catch you get from Italian for “hunter”: cacciatore. Chicken anyone?)

Now, look at stracotto. You can already guess that I’m going to tell you it’s something that sounds boring (you may even already know what stracotto is; if you do, ssshh, wait for it). But isn’t a lovely word? You may think of stracciatella, a name of both an egg-drop soup and a chocolate-chip flavour of gelato, or of ricotta, or some kind of frittata, or panna cotta, or, well, even terra cotta, I suppose.

Which leads us a little closer to this. Not just because cotta (and masculine cotto) means “cooked” but because terra cotta is ceramics (“cooked earth”), and when I made stracotto today I did it in a ceramic pot. Actually a slow cooker. Not a terra cotta one, but cut me some slack here.

So, now, what does stra mean if cotto means “cooked”? Here’s a hint: Latin ex, where it appeared, typically became Italian s. So, yes, extra cooked down, over time, to stra. “Extra cooked”? The English translation would actually be “overcooked”.

But we don’t call the dish “overcooked” in English. Even if, from the perspective of a lover of rare beef, it is. Say, I’m put in mind of something a friend of mine once told me. He was out for dinner with friends, and one of them ordered filet mignon. The waiter asked how he would like it done. The man said “Well done.” “Well done, sir?” “Yes.” As he walked away, the waiter was heard to mutter with disgust, “Might as well have ordered pot roast.”

I’m of the same mind as the waiter: filet mignon that’s not extra rare is overcooked. But not all cuts of beef are the same, and some cuts benefit from being incredibly overcooked. How incredibly? How about eight hours? Meet stracotto: Italian pot roast.

So here it is: This morning, I put five shallots cut in half and two chopped garlic cloves in the bottom of a slow cooker with two chopped sticks of celery, then put a 3-pound chunk of beef (with lots of nice fat) on top of it. Then I added about a quarter pound each of raisins and roasted plain almonds. I poured some tamari on the beef, and a bit more for good measure. (I don’t care that tamari isn’t Italian. My taste buds don’t care about “authenticity.” My kitchen is not in Italy, so that’s out the window already anyway. They only care about flavourful and interesting.) I poured a third of a bottle of Chianti over it all. And nestled four small potatoes around it for the sake of efficiency (in the time in which beef is cooked in a slow cooker to ultima ratio finis, or chicken to spreadability, potatoes are just past crunchy). And then set it on low and let it go for eight hours. (I did turn the beef a couple of times.)

Yes, there are usually more vegetables in with it. And maybe some other seasonings. Whatever. Faccio come voglio, io. The beef was splendid and juicy, the sauce flavourful but not oversweet (carrots might have pushed it over the top). I served it with celery fried in butter with more almonds and raisins. But does that sound like it should be called stracotto?

I mean, if you speak Italian, sure. Indeed, pot roast has a very similar level of crispness – stracotto has a voiceless fricative, a rolling liquid, and three voiceless stops (one of which, in Italian, is double-length), plus an /a/ and two /o/s; pot roast has a voiceless fricative, a rolling liquid, three voiceless stops, plus an /a/ and an /o/. But pot roast is ordinary to us, and rather demotic – of course, stracotto is about the same to Italians, but not to us: it’s Italian! We don’t know if they invented food and sex, but they sure have earned a reputation for both. Sometimes on the same plate. Eccolà: manzo a quel dio biondo!

And it reminds us of how crisp this word is, how spicy. Stracotto the dish is delicious, but in a distinctly different way than stracotto the word. Honestly, stracotto the word has a flavour that to my tongue is more like that of the dry sparkling shiraz from Australia that I’m drinking while watching the Oscars right now. Or maybe of the almonds and raisins if I had mixed them with the iced whipped cream I have in the freezer, and sprinkled some cinnamon on it all… hmmm… So, yes, I’ll have the stracotto first, and then the stracotto after. That seems like a good flavour progression. And in fact that’s just what I’ve just done.

Italian translations:
Faccio come voglio, io: “I do what I want.”
Eccolà: manzo a quel dio biondo! “Here it is: beef fit for a blonde god!” (a quel dio biondo is a stock Italian phrase of approbation)

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clerihew

Posted on February 25, 2012 | 4 comments

How would you like to be an eponym?

I suppose it would depend on how you came to be eponymous. Some people have diseases named after them because they identified them (Down, Parkinson, et al. ad naus.); others have diseases named after them because they had them (legionnaires, for instance). Some people have forms of humour named after them because they inspired them (Spooner); some have forms of humour named after them because they created them.

In this last set belongs a certain Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who, as a British schoolboy, penned a little loose-rhythm quatrain:

Sir Humphry Davy
Was not fond of gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

(Was not fond of was later revised to Abominated.) He subsequently penned a number of others on the same model. Another example:

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”

I think you can see the model. The first line is someone’s name (typically someone famous). This sets a pattern of usually two stressed syllables per line, but that is very loosely handled. The poem has two rhyming couplets, and tosses in some biographical detail about the person (Bentley’s books of clerihews include Biography for Beginners (1905), More Biography (1929), and Baseless Biography (1939)). It is important that the poem be amusing!

We note that the poems are not called bentleys. That would sound rather posh, and in particular would associate them with expensive cars typically driven by old-money types of people. (Even in Toronto, where Jaguars are a common sight and Lamborghinis can be seen driving by on infrequent occasion – and of course BMWs are more common than dirt – I see only a few Bentleys a year.) They are also not called edmunds. That would have some echoes of Shakespearean characters and a few other literary presences, and at the same time would be too well-known a person name to be all that distinctive. And it can’t help that it’s a sort of blunt sound with a dull vowel in the middle.

No, they are Clerihews, the least common of his three names. Clerihew is actually a Scottish family name, and in fact I know someone who comes from that family. [See the comments below for more on its origin.] You probably do not, as it really is not a common family name (neither is Harbeck, but I must say Clerihew has a certain idiosyncrasy that Harbeck does not). It seems almost to be the name of a bird, something like a curlew or a whippoorwill or perhaps a heronshew, or some other thing such as a creature like a fitchew hiding in the greenhew. Or perhaps an architectural feature like a clerestory in some mews.

The opening cl has a crisp clarity and cleanliness, a touch of class, though perhaps clerkish. All the vowels are front vowels (although the last one moves into a /w/), so there is a brightness to it, and the wheeze or sigh of the /h/ in the middle adds a softness, as of a pale or pastel hue – or a person breathing whew or phew.

The word as a whole anagrams to whericle, which is not a word but really should be; may I suggest that we now christen it one and use it to name a clerihew-type poem featuring not a person but a place, and (since the order of the word is reversed in four pieces) with the place name at the end, not the beginning, and starting (naturally) with where:

Where is an immenser
Historical dispenser
Of cheese, stone, and hassle?
Caerphilly Castle.

Where will you traipse
Over hills of peaches and grapes,
But find no cranberry bog in?
The Okanagan.

Where did the English entrench
Use of, and resistance to, French
More than at claret tastings?
The Battle of Hastings.

Most of the other words you can find in clerihew are not particularly related: chew, while, rice, rile, where, crewel; I do think rich is semantically relevant, but it doesn’t have much of the flavour of clerihew.

The big challenge of clerihews, aside from being witty, is to find a rhyme for the name; this can be on the difficult side at times. I’ve written a few recently for friends’ names, and you can see the contortions sometimes necessary:

Arlene Prunkl
Knew a little spunk’ll
Serve you in writing
And all kinds of uniting.

Antonia Morton
Waits for men to come a-courtin’:
Be they clients, be they lovers,
She knows her way between the covers.

Paul Cipywnyk
Doesn’t settle for what he’s giv’n: ich-
thyologic or prosaic,
He’s reliably apotropaic.

Margaret Gibbs
Keeps dolls in cribs.
She sees no analogy
Between that and genealogy.

They make a fun little challenge. (I also do them on request.)

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hubbub

Posted on February 23, 2012 | 2 comments

“What’s the hubbub, Bub?” said Bugs Bunny. But, buddy, what is a hubbub? Is it the murmuring rhubarb and babble of a rubbernecking rabble, or the bawdy hubba-hubba of bad boys eyeballing a bobbysoxer, or the blubbering and bawling some lub who’s been robbed? Is it simply general hullaballoo? Or is it something more threatening? A band of barbarians? A howling, perhaps as of a haboob?

If you look in Visual Thesaurus, you see only one node: “loud confused noise from many sources”; synonyms are brouhaha, uproar, and katzenjammer. But the Oxford English Dictionary, with its historical perspective, gives a small set of definitions, at the softer end of which is the rumbling murmur I remember from the mobs in the Banff Hot Springs, where I often bathed as a child, but at the louder end of which is a general hue and cry, even the shouting of a war cry. Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, used it thus: “They heard a noyse of many bagpipes shrill, And shrieking Hububs them approching nere.” Shrieking hubbubs! They sound almost like banshees.

Well, hubbub does appear to have something in common with banshee: an Irish origin. It is, by old accounts, an Irish outcry, cognate perhaps with the Scots Gaelic interjection of aversion or contempt, ub! ub! ubub! This is not to say we know its source ab ovo, but earliest citations lead me to think this purported source is no booboo.

But does hubbub sound threatening enough? There’s a reason it has shifted to a more general crowd sound, and I’m inclined to think it has to do with its greater resemblance to muddled incoherent speech sounds. After all, our word barbarian comes from the Greeks’ impression of the speech sounds of foreign rabble: barbarbarbar.

Still, for the Celts, ubub was not simple urban rumble, nor even some exuberance. Indeed, the war cry of the ancient Irish was abu! (Compare this to the war cry of the juvenile Anglophone, leaping out from behind a piece of furniture: Boo!)

It’s not the noise of a thousand tongues, though, not if they’re all saying hubbub, because this is one of those few words one can say entirely without the use of the tongue. Orthographically it’s at least as odd: almost a palindrome, except the h is an incomplete or burst b; its repeating sequences look a bit like one of those 3-D smudgeeos that used to feature in newspaper funny pages. Rotate it 180˚ and you get something spelling about as opposite a sound sequence as you could want: qnqqny.

But it hasn’t always been spelled exactly that way, as the Spenser quote hints. Other forms the OED lists through its history are hooboube, hooboobe, hoeboube, whobub, hubub, hobub, whoo-bub, whoopubb, hoobub, howbub, how-bub, and hub hub. Put them together and they make a regular whoop-up, more like a frat-boy noise than some hot pool conversation. And you thought word tasting was a subdued hobby!

Thanks to Carolyn Bishop for suggesting hubbub.

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