Category Archives: word tasting notes

carnival

Posted on February 22, 2012 | 2 comments

I grew up in Canada, so my first acquaintance with carnival was in reference to a travelling fair – merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels and so on are called carnival rides, and the archetypal sound of a carnival is that of a calliope. It all tastes and smells of candied popcorn, and has that air of dizziness and queasiness from grease and sugar and circular motion.

But outside of Canada and the United States, carnival has not really slid over to that meaning. No, it’s still the original: something else, much bigger, less like Disney and more like Dionysus. I imagine that we all, as adults aware of the world, know of the carnival in Rio de Janeiro and many other countries (notably in the Caribbean): a massive festival of music and dancing and masked parades, and an incredible spree of consumption. A real Mardi Gras.

Exactly a real Mardi Gras. Carnival is an event that takes place on, or leading up to, Mardi Gras, “fat Tuesday,” the last day before Lent: today. Shrove Tuesday (shrove is not an old word for “pancake”, by the way). Look, if you’re going to have to spend 40 days being lean and austere, you really want a blow-out beforehand. And so carnival is a time of unrivalled carnality, of craving and devilry, with more pyrotechnics than Cape Canaveral (and perhaps more pirates than old Cornwall). Never mind the calliope: here come the bands and drums. It’s like being on a cruise ship (a Carnival ship, to be precise) times a thousand.

And then you wave goodbye to the meat, all that fabulous fat and flesh, and put it away. Which is where carnival comes from. Not from carne vale, “farewell to meat”, as I (like many others) thought for a long time, but from Italian carne levare or Latin carnem levare, “putting away (or removing) flesh”. It passed through carnelevarium and carnelevale before trimming down to Latin carnevale. The word as we have it has a smorgasbord of consonants: voiceless stop, liquid, voiced fricative, liquid, dancing from the back to the tip of the tongue to the teeth and lips to the tongue tip again (with the tongue raising up at last in back like the massive feathers attached to many a carnival dancer’s backside).

And so people remove a lot of clothing (and put on some costumes that don’t even cover the navel) and put away a lot of flesh (i.e., eat a lot of meat) – and drink a lot, and eat fat, and so on – in a celebration that is named for what happens right after it. But first, the dizziness and queasiness from all the consumption and dancing!

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plump, steatopygian, zaftig, buxom

Posted on February 20, 2012 | 3 comments

“Last time I buy leather from him,” Marilyn Frack said. She was recounting with dissatisfaction the acquisition of her latest black leather jacket and skirt. “He called me plump.”

I sucked in my breath and raised an eyebrow. It’s true that Marilyn isn’t exactly a stick figure, but that did display poor judgement on the part of the salesman.

“Pleasingly plump,” Edgar Frack, her other half, said. “I do believe he misjudged.”

“It’s not that I think I’m skinny,” Marilyn said, “nor would I want to be, but plump is just not right. It suggests fat, round about the middle. Like a big plumped-up pillow. Or a purple plum. Or a pink lump. Someone who just plumps down on the couch. I get out and around, you know.”

Yes, you do, I thought, but said nothing. Maury, also sharing a bottle of wine with us around a high table at Domus Logogustationis, added a little lighter fluid to her flame. “Not that etymology is any guide to current usage,” he said, “but there is also the fact that plump comes from a Germanic root originally meaning ‘crude, clumsy, stupid’.”

“I think the salesman was plump!” Marilyn snorted. Then she snorted back the rest of her glass and refilled. “Then there was that guy – do you remember him, Edgar? – who thought it would be amusing to call me steatopygian.”

I remembered that guy. He was a guest at one of our word tasting events. He fancied himself witty, but he leaned a bit too far towards the rude in erudite. I seem to recall him having to leave early to remove a wine stain from his shirt.

“It doesn’t matter how expensive the word is,” Marilyn continued, “it still means ‘fat ass’.” True: from Greek στέαρ stear “fat” and πῡγή pugé “buttocks”.

“It sounds a bit like a dinosaur,” Edgar added. “Or an obese prehistoric bird.”

“Some people like large buttocks,” Maury offered. “Some cultures value them quite a bit. I’m not saying that you have a lot of ‘booty,’ but if you did, there would be fellows out there who would want it.”

Marilyn leaned close to Maury and purred into his ear, “Leave the booty for the pirates.” She lingered a moment or two longer, just to make sure he was beginning to feel nervous, and then settled back onto her stool. “They don’t call Dolly Parton plump or steatopygian.”

“That’s true,” I said. “They do call her zaftig.”

Marilyn pondered this for a moment. “Isn’t zaftig just a Yiddish way of saying ‘fat’?”

“Not really,” I said. “Nor even necessarily ‘Rubenesque’.”

“Rubenesque in Yiddish refers to a sandwich,” Maury interjected.

“Zaftig means ‘juicy’,” I said. “Dolly Parton, Gina Lollabrigida, Marilyn Monroe, all zaftig. You might recognize Saft from German – as in Orangensaft, ‘orange juice’.”

“Thus referring,” Edgar said, “to someone you would like to squeeze like an orange.”

“But that zed,” Marilyn said. “Zaftig seems a little too zany. Or like Ziegfeld of the follies. And it’s an anagram of fat zig. No, I know what I prefer. Buxom.”

We all nodded. This was the perfect word for her figure. “It occurs to me,” I said, “that if we pronounce the u as in rude and the x as in xenial, then b-u-x-o-m can be said like ‘bosom’.”

“I like the x,” Marilyn said. “It sits in the middle like in a cross-your-heart bra. And the /b/ is like breasts about to burst out of a bodice. It’s happy, smiling, pleasing.”

“Goes with wench,” Edgar added. Marilyn seemed to like this.

“The xo recalls a kiss and hug,” Edgar continued.

“And right in the middle of a bum,” Maury observed.

“Well, then,” Marilyn said, “kiss and hug my bum. Now, how did that limerick go… ‘I know of a lass who’s quite buxom; You should find her and go try your luck some. You won’t have to chase Her all over the place; Guys she likes, she just throws down and—’”

She was cut short by Maury having a sudden coughing fit from having aspirated some wine. She reached over and patted him on the back. “Dear Maurice,” she said, “surely you’ve heard naughty limericks before.”

“Yes,” Maury gasped, and cleared his throat. “I was just going to add that the limerick matches well with the etymology of buxom.”

Edgar pursed his lips and glanced upwards, pensive. “On the model of winsome, fearsome, noisome, bothersome, and so on, does it mean prone to bucking or to being bucked?”

“In fact,” Maury said, “the buck comes from Old English bugan, which has become bow. Someone who was buxom was easily bowed, and therefore compliant.”

“So the idea is the stereotype that chesty women are easy?” Marilyn said.

“No, actually,” Maury said, “from ‘compliant’ it came to mean ‘blithe’ and ‘gladsome’, and from that ‘healthy’, ‘comely’, and so on.”

“The perfect word,” Marilyn said, smiled, and sipped her wine. Then, just as Maury was in mid-sip, she leaned over, settling her chest into his shoulder, and purred into his ear, “Not that I’m not easy.” Maury gagged and coughed, spraying his wine over the environs, including his shirt and mine.

“You see,” Marilyn said, settling back onto her stool. “This is why Edgar and I wear black leather. It’s so easy to just wipe wine right off it.” She smiled pleasantly, raised her glass, and tossed the rest back.

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grackle

Posted on February 20, 2012 | 8 comments

What’s the difference between crackle and grackle? I don’t mean “tell me what the dictionary says.” Look at them and listen to them: the only difference is that first letter, that first phoneme, and in fact the only difference between the two sounds is that one is voiced and one is not. Indeed, it’s not even that much, since “voiced” stops just have less voice onset and offset time – we don’t actually use our voice during a stop in English, or in most other languages – and, in English, the voiceless stop is aspirated, meaning that in this word the /r/ after it is also devoiced. That’s it. So they should seem very similar words, no?

Well, as similar as grow and crow. Now tell me how often you think of those two words as similar. How about good and could? Gable and cable? Glue and clue? Grab and crab? Each of these pairs has just that one difference: /g/ versus /k/, voiced versus voiceless (and aspirated). Oh, they rhyme; easy to hear that. But so do tackle, wood, stable, blue, and flab, respectively. And the /g/ words hardly seem much closer to the /k/ words than those other rhymes do. The /g/ words lack the crispness of the /k/ words; they seem blunter, or more colourful, somehow a bit more like that guy in the loud polyester suit than like the lean woman in the black dress.

And, now, let’s imagine for the moment that both words, grackle and crackle, are onomatopoeic: we know what a crackle sounds like – a fire, a candy wrapper, a sparkler, a newspaper crumpled perhaps. What does a grackle sound like? More like some ugly bird, no? Or a toad?

Well, crackle is sort of onomatopoeic – it’s formed from crack, which has an onomatopoeic origin, and the le suffix indicating that it’s a bunch of little cracks in sequence. And grackle? It may be sort of onomatopoeic, but way back in its Latin origins. The word it comes from is gracula, which may be imitative of the sound of the bird it named.

Gracula! Goodness gracious! That sounds like it should be something black and vampiric, no? Well, it somewhat is. The grackle is a large-ish black bird, larger than a blackbird; it may be found flocking with starlings, though its sound is no murmuration – depending on the specific type of grackle, and the time of year, it might be something like “chewink” or “oo whew whew whew whew” or “jeeb” or whistles and whines… unpleasant in any event. And loud. Oh, and they are also known to imitate humans, though not as well as mockingbirds, with which they sometimes flock.

Ah, but its feathers are sombre, yes? Well, no, actually: they’re iridescent; up close, they shimmer with different colours. Common grackles even rub ants on themselves to add to the sheen. And grackles are aggressive and grabby. They eat pretty much anything. Even things that other birds had in their beaks just a moment ago. I gotta tell you, these birds can be like having the worst neighbours with the loudest party not just next door but coming into your kitchen. No wonder a guy named Michael Berry made a short film called Day of the Grackle about a guy grappling with a grievously grating grackle (view the trailer at www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfCRBW-V0V8 – it has a link to the full 15-minute version).

So avian Dracula indeed, eh? Oh, except that gracula was the Latin word for jackdaw. Which is a different bird. And in fact grackle in Europe refers to a different bird from the North American birds called grackles. Is the European grackle a jackdaw? No, it’s a kind of myna. Or actually any of a few different kinds.

So how the did the name shift? It seems that at first grackles were thought to be of the same family as jackdaws. Now, though, the North American ones are all known to be icterids, and most belong to the genus Quiscalus. But naw, dude, never mind the formal classification. That black bird with the loud voice and loud black feathers is a grackle. The name suits it.

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littérateur

Posted on February 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

The annals of literature are littered with letter writers, each person pumping out parcels of epistles for publication: epistle-palians hoping to be converted to press-byterians. Some are like Les liaisons dangéreuses, tracing lusty and louche escapades for millions of readers; others check into the chick-lit section – Griffin and Sabine, The Colour Purple – or name your favourites. And of course there are many literary loiterers, never making it into the action. But is a letter-writer who’s never made a red cent still a littérateur? Or is their work raté or at least overrated?

I came to wonder about this after chatting with my friend Elaine Phillips, who is working on an epistolary novel tentatively titled Letters Only My Mother Would Read. Now, if the title holds true, she’s hardly likely to make a living on them (although it doesn’t claim that only her mother would buy them), but then again, perhaps she will prove a profitable liar. But the question is this: we know that your writing doesn’t have to be epistolary for you to be a littérateur – any kind of literature will do – but does it have to be profitable? Oh, and what does and doesn’t count as literature?

You see, it’s like this. If you look into the Oxford English Dictionary, a littérateur is simply “a writer of literary or critical works.” In Wiktionary, it’s “A person engaged in various literary works: literary critic, essayist, writer.” It comes from Latin litterator “critic”, from littera “letter”, by way of French. Le Robert Mini says simply “Écrivain” (“Writer”). But if I look in, say, the French Wiktionary, I get “Celui qui est versé dans la littérature, qui en fait profession”: “One who is versed in literature, who makes a profession of it.”

That, of course, also leads us to the question of whether you have to make money at something to be a professional at it. Which is another point of argument that goes different ways in different professions – and what, anyway, is and isn’t a profession? Can you be a professional littérateur if there’s no professional designation or governing body? You can be a “professional actor” if you make money at it, but you can’t be a member of the medical profession without the necessary qualifications and memberships – but if you have those, you are a professional even if you don’t currently make any money at it.

And if you think that’s a cussèd question, well, let’s just think about the definition of literature. Heh heh. If you write the stuff that people hand out on street corners saying “Please take some of our literature,” are you a littérateur? If they pay you? Even if your writings rate no more than litter? But how about if you write poems for a living? What about if those poems are tripe that goes in maudlin greeting cards? To be a littérateur, must you be a great writer or can you be a little writer whose writing grates? What does literature extend to? Could, say, Richard Littauer, @richlitt, “A linguist branching out into computational linguistics, ecology, evolution, open knowledge, and leaves of poetry,” be a littérateur? How about Ricky Opaterny, author of the blog “The litter in littérateur,” who “has worked variously as a literary agent, book designer, journalist, copywriter, fact checker, tutor, and bookseller”?

I will say this: it seems to help to live in India. In a Google search on littérateur, many of the hits come from newspaper stories from India. It seems that the word is rather popular there for referring to writers of note – and sometimes even those who write to notes. I don’t mean notes as in brief letters; I mean they write lyrics for movies – for example, Jayant Kaikini, author of lyrics for songs in movies, including the hit “Anisutide yaako indu…”; an article on him in the Deccan Herald declares, “Intense living makes a litterateur.” (They leave the accent off the e, as is optional in English.)

So is that what makes you one? Not letter writing or lucrative creativity but, at least for all intents, intense living? Is the quick patter of littérateur not simply the drumming of fingers on a tabletop as inspiration is sought but in fact the distant thunder of a beating art? And is it grand and imposing, the opening statement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “Lit-té-ra-teur… Lit-té-ra-teur,” or is it the erotic iterative rat-a-ta-tat of Ravel’s Bolero, “littérateur, littérateur, tip top, littérateur, tickle to titillate littérateur”?

It stays on the tip of your tongue, this word, but surely to be a littérateur your words must come off the tip of your tongue, and into others’ ears, others’ eyes, and trip delicately too across the tips of their tongues. Is it enough to be a person of letters? Of personal letters? Of French letters, perhaps? Must you be a master not only of your tongue but of other people’s?

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trail

Posted on February 18, 2012 | 1 comment

This word has a lot of associations and collocations and senses – but even more if you live in Alberta, because many major roads in those cities (especially in Calgary) are called trails (as Wikipedia says, “A particularly unusual use of the term is in the province of Alberta, Canada, which has multi-lane freeways called ‘trails’”). In Calgary, main roads include Crowchild Trail, Sarcee Trail, MacLeod Trail, Deerfoot Trail, Barlow Trail, Stoney Trail, and the one that makes British people laugh, Shaganappi Trail (“shag a nappie? haw”)… When I grew up, it was as though there were two words trail, one being a thing you hiked on, and the other being a major road (or in a few cases ordinary streets that were once more important: Edmonton Trail, Banff Trail). Trail is often used for skiing, too, but I grew up calling downhill ski slopes runs – they were never narrow enough to qualify as trails.

For most of my readers, naturally, that second sense is not part of the usage set of this word. But trail has a whole bunch of other collocations and senses. We might as well follow the trail from the beginning, or at least from as far back as we can see in English. And that is a verb meaning “drag behind” – as in trailing and trailer and trail along. The oldest English noun senses are in reference to things that drag behind, such as what we now call trains on dresses; from that came a sense of the mark left by something dragged behind, or more generally the path or, um, trail of evidence left by something that has passed by: hot on the trail. And from that we get a worn path… and for those of us who live in or near mountains, a trail is not something you leave behind you but something you walk on to go somewhere you have not been (obviously someone else was there first, of course, and left the trail for you to follow).

And so we get an interesting web, not trail, of interconnected meanings. If you look at Visual Thesaurus, trail has eight nodes it connects to; four of them interconnect, and another two join together to lead to “train”. The original “lag behind” sense is one node; “move draggingly or slowly” is another. But the ones that form a web are three noun senses – “evidence pointing to a possible solution”, “a path or track roughly blazed through wild or hilly country”, and “a track or mark left by something that has passed” – plus a verb sense, “go after with the intent to catch”. There are more than a dozen various synonyms, but the one that is a nexus for these four nodes is track.

And what words does trail show up with? Go to Word and Phrase .Info to find out: campaign trail, paper trail, mountain trail, trail blazer, trail map, blood trail, nature trail, follow the trail, leave the trail, hike the trail, hit the trail, trailing wind, cross-country trail, groomed trail, marked trail, scenic trail, historic trail, rough trail… and of course there are terms such as trail boss, trail bike, trail head, trail-riding, trail mix, and such trail names as Trail of Tears, Appalachian Trail, Lillooet Cattle Trail, Dalton Trail, Oregon Trail, Bruce Trail, Chilkoot Trail… and a few towns named Trail, notably one in British Columbia. (There’s another in B.C. called Field. And yet British Columbia is full of much less plain place names such as Illecillewaet, Okanagan, Koocanusa, the Bugaboos, Spuzzum, and (of course) Vancouver.)

So naturally trail has tastes of all this; it also has echoes of betrayal, tail, rail, and perhaps even chill and jail. The word in its written form doesn’t have much iconicity of its referent. It doesn’t by itself present anagram opportunities. It’s a five-letter, four-phoneme, one-syllable word, yet three of its four phonemes are allophones that are not the usual sound of that phoneme: the /t/ is affricated before /r/ and sounds like “ch”; the /r/ is devoiced because of the preceding syllable-initial /t/; and the /l/ is the version we use at the end of a syllable, with the back of the tongue raised high and the tip possibly not even touching. And even the vowel may have an added slide to a schwa (neutral vowel) at the end, moving into the /l/.

Well, trails do go from somewhere to somewhere else, after all. And this word has left an interesting trail of just that.

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Glenbow

Posted on February 15, 2012 | 2 comments

Some words have a strong personal and local connection – place names especially. I thought of this today when, as Aina and I walked down the street near my parents’ house in Cochrane, Alberta, we passed the Glenbow Elementary School. It’s so called because the neighbourhood is called Glenbow. But for me, the name Glenbow has a strong sense of one particular place, and all that comes with it, and it’s not an elementary school or a neighbourhood. It’s a museum.

In the southern Alberta of my childhood, there was one museum that was the museum. My brother and I always looked forward to a chance to spend some hours in it in a trip to downtown Calgary. That museum was the Glenbow Museum. It presented a massive mid-20th-century modern solidity, with concrete outside and wood and carpet inside. To me, the name Glenbow has a similar warm, heavy feel, like wood and carpet, in no small part thanks to the association – though its voiced stops, with the liquid and nasal, and the /gl/ onset shining, and the handsome /bo/ end, certainly work with that.

But there’s more detail that comes with the name, like memories flooding in at the taste of a treat from childhood. In the lobby, surrounded by an angular grand staircase, was a brushed steel sculpture, an impression of the aurora borealis, that every so often would have a gentle light show on it to the sound of a synthesizer version of “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” Up the stairs waited a panoply of wonders – including some wondrous panoplies: medieval suits of armour. There was also a recreation of a frontier town, including old vehicles, scales, other commercial things, and even little machines you could put a nickel in, turn the handle, and watch a dancing girl for a few seconds, set in motion by a series of little photographic prints on something like a rotating file. There were quite a few other historical displays. And of course there was art.

I say was but of course it’s all still there, the building, the contents (revised over the years), the sculpture. It’s been some time since I’ve been to it, and I probably won’t make it back there this trip either, but it remains a centre of cultural importance in Calgary. And an important part of my childhood. But this name Glenbow… Where does that come from?

In southern Alberta, anything with a Scottish taste in the name is fairly common, as many of the Europeans first to set up ranches in the area were Scottish. But there is no Glenbow in Scotland. Nor is it a family name. Actually, it’s the name of the ranch owned by Eric Harvie, who endowed the Glenbow Museum (I know his name first from the Eric Harvie Theatre at the Banff Centre). Harvie made his fortune from oil discovered on his ranch. How classic southern Alberta is that – ranching and oil. The ranch is now a park stretching along the Bow River in the narrow stretch of valley between Calgary and Cochrane.

But where did the Glenbow Ranch get its name? Well, I pretty much just said where. It’s in a glen, on the Bow River. Glen – that’s not just a male name (such as the name of the principal of the elementary school I went to, Glen McKenzie), it’s a Gaelic word for a narrow valley. And Bow? I grew up in the Bow Valley and was never sure what the name referred to specifically – was it some curve in the river? But all rivers have curves. From the Bow Glacier and Bow Lake, which it flows from? The other way around, actually. No, apparently it is from the reeds growing on its banks, which were used by local First Nations for making bows. Not for putting on gifts or shoes, of course – for shooting arrows.

But could you imagine Reed Valley Museum or something of that order having the same taste as Glenbow Museum? I couldn’t.

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benighted

Posted on February 14, 2012 | 2 comments

I was listening to CBC radio today and one of the talking voices was going on about what would happen if Chinese factory workers started getting paid decently – she suggested the jobs might be sent to “some benighted African country.”

My second thought was, Mmm, benighted. I’ve been meaning to taste that word for some time.

But my first thought was, I wonder if someone is going to send in a complaint about her saying that. The implication, after all, is that there is a set of countries in Africa that are benighted. It’s a vague slur, but it’s nonetheless condescending. And reeks of the colonial worldview and first-world hegemonism.

Oh, yes, benighted has that taste. That taste of arrogance, condescension, imputation of moral and intellectual darkness. I’ve used the word myself, but always to refer to specific persons whose particular character or political theories I find distasteful, or to specific objects that seem to be possessed by the prince of darkness. But there was a time when it was ordinary to see not just princes but kings and their kingdoms descibed as being in darkness. After all, you are probably familiar with the phrase deepest, darkest Africa. Do you suppose that the speakers really thought the sun doesn’t shine there? Or simply that these poor souls were as yet unacquainted with the shining sun of civilization and enlightenment? Oh, how soon shall the white reign be nigh? My, oh, my.

Do you think that this was just a view held by the nastier sorts of colonialists? Not something you would hear from a free-thinking poet? Try on this passage from Walt Whitman’s universal embrace of the dignity of all peoples, “Salut au monde,” from Leaves of Grass:

You Hottentot with clicking palate! You woolly-hair’d hordes!
You own’d persons, dropping sweat-drops or blood-drops!
You human forms with the fathomless ever-impressive countenances of brutes!
I dare not refuse you—the scope of the world, and of time and space, are upon me.

You poor koboo whom the meanest of the rest look down upon, for all your glimmering language and spirituality!
You low expiring aborigines of the hills of Utah, Oregon, California!
You dwarf’d Kamtschatkan, Greenlander, Lapp!
You Austral negro, naked, red, sooty, with protrusive lip, grovelling, seeking your food!
You Caffre, Berber, Soudanese!
You haggard, uncouth, untutor’d, Bedowee!
You plague-swarms in Madras, Nankin, Kaubul, Cairo!
You bather bathing in the Ganges!
You benighted roamer of Amazonia! you Patagonian! you Fejee-man!
You peon of Mexico! you slave of Carolina, Texas, Tennessee!
I do not prefer others so very much before you either;
I do not say one word against you, away back there, where you stand;
(You will come forward in due time to my side.)

My spirit has pass’d in compassion and determination around the whole earth;
I have look’d for equals and lovers, and found them ready for me in all lands;
I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.

This poem is about Whitman’s ideal of human brotherhood, of democratic equality. And yet he might as well be saying, “We’re all alike, even the little, insignificant, stupid people.”

The word benighted is not, of course, intrinsically racist; it can certainly be used in non-racist ways. Anyone, including oneself, can be described as wallowing in intellectual or moral night. (I’ll stick to using night in its usual negative figurative way, even though I actually quite like night – because I live in a big city, and that’s when a lot of the most fun things happen. I must concede that, growing up in a large house at the foot of a mountain surrounded by trees and wild things, I was rather less fond of the night.) Consider this line from Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady: “‘Do you know you are the first lord I have ever seen?’ she said, very promptly, to her neighbour. ‘I suppose you think I am awfully benighted.’” Or this line from David Copperfield by Dickens: “The poor, benighted innocent had never seen such a man. He was made of sweetness.”

For that matter, it has an original literal sense too. You will see it in, for instance, Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan: “How far might I have been on my way by this time! I am made to tread those steps thrice over, which I needed not to have trod but once; yea now also I am like to be benighted, for the day is almost spent.” It was used in this sense into the 19th century: “overtaken by darkness where no bed is nigh” – a real concern in previous times, when one might be forced to ride a road after dark or to bed down in a field. These days we just wait for a Motel 8 to show up in our headlights…

But in the literal sense, the original condition is daylight, and the darkness – temporary, even if threatening – overtakes, whereas in the figurative sense the people have not yet been in light; they are still in a primordial darkness, awaiting the delivery of lux by fiat from those who will bring it to them. That’s in spite of the be prefix, which, when attaching to a noun to make a verb, signifies addition, entering into, or overtaking by: bespeckle, beguile, bewitch…

Benighted, in spite of its general negativity, does have a certain loveliness; although the gh is silent, it always seems to me to insert a breathy sigh in the sight of the word. The whole word suggests the shape of a bed with a foot and a head the b and d; the sheets are rumpled and hanging loose in the middle, ight. But the word also has much potential for other words to find in its letters: bed, bend, bight, end, thin, thing, hinged bet, the big end…

The big end: is it bright, or is it dark? Does darkness overtake us, or do we emerge from it? Or, in thinking we bring the light, do we ourselves bring darkness? In wanting to be knights in shining armour, are we not benign but benighted and benighting?

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galangal

Posted on February 13, 2012 | 4 comments

When I was growing up, one of my favourite cookbooks from my mother’s collection was the More-with-Less Cookbook. And one of my favourite recipes from it was Nasi Goreng, which is a fried rice dish from Indonesia. It is made with a half-score of spices, but among them are two that, in the Bow Valley of Alberta in the early 1980s, were not readily available: “sereh powder (lemon grass or citronella)” and “laos (Java galingale root).” The recipe had a note that those two could be omitted, “but the dish loses some of its Spice Island authenticity.”

So omit them I did until, one day around 1990, after we had moved to Edmonton, I spotted a section of spices imported by the Dutch company Conimex, and among them were serehpoeder and galangal. Score! I was not surprised by how lemon grass tasted; the name gives a pretty good hint. But galangal? Huh. Really! Whaddya know.

What would you guess from the taste of the word? Does it taste somewhat of guggul? Is it something that might be eaten by Gargantua and Pantagruel, perhaps by the gallon? Does is jingle and jangle, like shang-a-lang or bangarang? Or two western girls, gal an’ gal? But what about the other form, galingale – what does a nightingale taste like? Or a farthingale? The word may have a little echo of angular, but I don’t find the sound of it sharply angular; the voiced stops are blunter, and the second one has a nasal before it for added cushioning – and the liquids are no more angular than flapping sheets of paper or thin slices of ham. Nor are the letter shapes angular. The l and l are straight, no angles; the other letters prefer curves, in the main.

The thing itself is a rhizome. It looks rather like ginger – so rather knobby and round and tawny – and in fact it is related to ginger. But it doesn’t really taste link ginger. Ginger (that good old Zingiber) is a zinger: pungent, somewhat zippy, even hot on the tongue. But galangal? No zip; more like a dusty mustard flavour. As a flavour by itself, about as charming as pure turmeric, but it works in combination.

And whence this word? The form galingale gives some indication that it’s been around English for some time, and even if it couldn’t be found in the Bow Valley in 1982 it could be found in Chaucer in 1405 and Caxton in 1480: “A Cook they hadde with hem for the nones To boille the chiknes with the Marybones And poudre marchaunt. tart and Galyngale”; “Ther groweth galyngal, cytoual, gynger canel & encens.” But English got the word, like the spice, from distant lands. What distant lands? South Asia and Southeast Asia and East Asia… such a broad designation is not problematic for a herb; they do grow over various areas. But one does like to be more precise when it comes to languages.

Well, one does when one can. The problem is that words mutate much more quickly than wild plants, generally. If you have a plant that grows in one place and it spreads to another place, it stays pretty much the same. But when you take a word from one place to another, it gets changed. And, for that matter, even in its own native soil (as it were), it changes too. And the trail is much muddied for this word. But most likely it comes from ultimately from Ancient Chinese – and has spread to Arabic, Persian, Latin, and on to many other Western European languages.

As the spice did to their kitchens. Over time, the spice and its name became much less in evidence in common cookery in Europe, for whatever reason (other spices certainly held on). But things get around much more readily these days. Spices need not travel by hazardous ship journeys or long camel overlands. And the world wide web has become an enormous spice cupboard of words.

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retiarius

Posted on February 12, 2012 | 6 comments

In a fight between a heavily armoured guy with a sword and a guy without armour (more of an air-suiter) but carrying a net, a long trident, and a dagger, who would you favour?

This was once a viable real-life question, and you could ask which of each: which secutor and which retiarius? In the Roman circus, such match-ups were common. The retiarius, with his net and trident, would face off against a secutor, or even two of them. Secutor meant “follower”, and mayhem would typically follow; retiarius meant “net user”, and he would try to retain the secutor in order to retire him and hope to return, as there was no retreat. Nor any retrial – nor trial at all: no judge, jury, or prosecutor, just one pro secutor. Ready or not, ready your net. And try to retain it and use it on your adversary – don’t be reticent.

The retiarius would actually do the damage with the trident or the dagger, but it was the net he was associated with – that’s what the arius is about, often showing up in English as ary: actuary, apothecary, secretary, adversary. Or, of course, in the original in Aquarius, the sign of the water-carrier. And the ret? That’s the net. It’s not made of flax – ret may mean “soak flax”, but that’s unrelated, Germanic. This ret is from Latin rete, “net”. As in reticulated. There are numerous other English words that start with ret, but pretty much none of them are derived from rete.

This word has that pleasant tongue-tip effect that Latin often gives: the consonants are /r/ /t/ /r/ /s/ – a trill, a stop, a tap, a hiss, but all at the tip of the tongue. In form it has little resemblance to a net; its most salient visual trait is the two i’s sticking up. Actually, what makes me think more of a net – or specifically a web – is the trident. After all, the w in world wide web has the three upward points.

And today’s net user is not a gladiatorial contestant, not exactly. No, the net user is you – and me. And I cast my net on the web, the www – a triple trident – by my blog and via Twitter. Which is where I hope to ensnare followers. Who will, I hope, retweet.

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monoubiquitination

Posted on February 9, 2012 | 3 comments

Oh, you do see some of the most eye-grabbing words in the pages of journals such as Nature. In the last issue of 2011, I was snagged by this article title: “GlcNAcylation of histone H2B facilitates its monoubiquitination.”

What a smorgasbord of dishes bigger than your head! I won’t even dive into GlcNAcylation other than to say that it is addition of GlcNAc, which is O-linked-N-acetylglucosamine, to an organic molecule in a cell, and, really, if you want to know what that’s all about, it’s more space than I can reasonably take here. But in spite of its long and arcane name, it happens a lot.

Now, histone is in a way an easier thing. It may seem like it’s a man’s note (his tone), or an elevated rock (hi stone), but it’s actually the name of a kind of protein found in cell nuclei. And, speaking of things that take more space than is reasonable, or taking long things and making them shorter, one thing that histones do is act as spools for winding DNA around them. This may sound like a nice bit of tidiness, but you don’t know the half of it. You may not even know the ten-millionth of it, which is the ratio of a DNA strand’s width to its length. Yes, the DNA in each one of your – or my – cells would, if stretched straight, be about as long as I am tall, and I’m six feet when standing straight. That’s quite the spool job.

But the word that caught my eye in particular was monoubiquitination. It’s made of such clear Latin parts (and so many of them), but the sense of it is not immediately certain from its parts. What are the parts? We start with mono, “one”; then ubiquit, “everywhere”, from ubi “where” and que “and” (so it’s literally “and where” – que tacks onto the end of a word but means “and [that word]”); the in is a suffix used for naming certain organic molecules; ation is a normal English suffix (based on Latin) that typically refers to making something into something or adding something to something. So, really, is this a one-word expression of the joke, “A Buddhist monk goes up to a hot dog vendor and says, ‘Make me one with everything’”? Or is it some three-musketeerish thing, “all for one and one for all”?

In fact, ubiquitin is a small protein – small is relative, of course; it’s made of 76 amino acids and can be represented in one-letter code as MQIFVKTLTGKTITLEVEPSDTIENVKAKIQDKEGIPPDQQRLIFAGKQLEDGRTLSDYNIQKESTLHLVLRLRGG (seriously, James Joyce would have stuffed that one into Finnegans Wake if he could have – take the time to look and see how many English words just happen to show up in it). It’s called ubiquitin because it’s sort of like the Tim Hortons of the body: you find it everywhere. (That’s a Canadian reference, for all my international readers.) And what does it do? A whole bunch of different things, but a key one is marking certain kids of proteins for recycling.

What does that mean? Well, you could think of it as being like when parks department guys go around spraypainting X onto trees that are to be cut down and mulched: having a ubiquitin attached is like having that X. Or you could think of the old Steve Martin routine where he plays a “wild and crazy guy” from Czechoslovakia talking about their way of breaking up: “You say to the woman, ‘I break with thee, I break with thee, I break with thee,’ and then you throw dog poop on her shoes. Then me and my cousin, we go looking for women who have dog poop on their shoes.” Ubiquitin would be the dog poop on the protein’s shoes.

So what’s with the mono? Well, you can add one ubiquitin, or you can add more. If you add more, it can flag other things to happen. When you’ve added just one, it’s monoubiquitination. When you add more, the word becomes macaronic: it mixes Greek and Latin – polyubiquitination.

But monoubiquitination is enough as it is: one a, two u’s, three o’s, four i’s, three n’s, two t’s, plus m b q. That’s classically sesquipedalian. Actually, sesquipedalian means “foot and a half long”; that would be 18 inches, and this word is 18 letters – but three metrical feet: two dactyls and a trochee, da-da-da da-da-da da-da, like the chorus of “I Like It Here in America” (from West Side Story) but missing the last syllable. Try singing it if you know the tune (if some guy near you has perfect pitch, follow his tone):

Monoubiquitination: it
Flags things for recirculation; it
Causes a word nerd elation; it
Leaves you unclear where to station it.

I defy you to facilitate that with GlcNAcylation!

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