Category Archives: word tasting notes

mondegreen

Posted on November 13, 2011 | 10 comments

It was cleaning-up time after yet another lively word tasting at Domus Logogustationis, and our own especially lively word taster, Elisa Lively, was in the kitchen doing the wash-up while a few of the rest of us gathered dishes and brought them in.

I came in with a stack of bowls, set them down next to the sink. Elisa was sudsed up the elbows and singing Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” happily:

“Slow-motion Walter, the fire engine guy…”

I choked back a guffaw, pretended it was a cough, and headed back out. (The real words are “Smoke on the water and fire in the sky.”) Presently I returned with a stack of plates. She had switched to Abba:

“See that girl, watch her scream, kicking the dancing queen…”

I paused for a split second, goggled, set the plates and retreated. (The original words are “See that girl, watch that scene, dig in the dancing queen.”) I gathered an assortment of wine glasses, including my own nearly empty one, shouldered the swinging kitchen door open and headed back in. Just as I was tossing back the last of my Zinfandel, I clicked in to her rendition of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love”:

“You might as well face it, you’re a dick with a glove.”

I did what in the comedy business is known as a spit take. That is to say, I sprayed my Zinfandel across the tile floor and commenced coughing. I barely managed to set the glasses down without demolishing them.

Elisa turned, solicitous. She reached for a jug on the counter and poured me a glass. And with it she started in on Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”:

“You need Kool-Aid, baby I’m not fooling…”

I held up my hand and coughed and gasped and finally managed to swallow a bit of the Kool-Aid. “Good grief,” I said, “were you tasting mondegreen tonight?”

“Mondegreen?” Elisa said, fetching a mop. “No, I stuck with the Kool-Aid.”

“No, I mean the word. Mondegreen. I’ll take that as a no.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard it,” Elisa said. “It sounds kind of like a cheese. Or maybe a country – no, that’s Montenegro. Is it related to verdigris?”

“Not even to a fair degree,” I said. “It comes from a mishearing by the writer Sylvia Wright. When she was a kid, she enjoyed hearing her mother read from Percy’s Reliques, and the first stanza, by her hearing, ended ‘The hae slain the Earl Amurray / And Lady Mondegreen.’ But actually it was ‘the Earl O’ Moray / And laid him on the green.’ So in 1954 Wright published an article in Harper’s in which she gave such mishearings the name mondegreens.”

“Oh!” said Elisa. “Like when I was a kid and I sang in church about ‘gladly the cross-eyed bear’ – and every Christmas I’d sing ‘Good tidings we bring to you and your thing.'”

“Exactly,” I said. “Mishearings, typically funny, of song lyrics. Often they’re actually less plausible than the real lyrics. I don’t remember making any really funny mistakes, but I remember hearing Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’ and thinking the line ‘Russia’s greatest love machine’ was ‘Rickashane a slokashi,’ some kind of imitation Russian. It really says something about the human brain, the things we’ll fill in when we can’t quite make out the words. Sort of like the weird things we see in the dark – why would we think what we’re seeing is a house plant when it could so easily be a four-foot spider?”

“Well, Mondegreen does sound like a reasonable name,” Elisa said. “It has two recognizable parts, with the monde like from French for ‘world’. It’s like some… relic from a green world!”

“Or from the salad days of the listener, when she was green in judgement. We do have lots of words with m and nd, like mandate, mend, mind, Monday, mundungus…”

“Green Monday,” Elisa said. “Isn’t Mundungus just a name from Harry Potter?”

“Also a word for bad tobacco. Green mundungus would really be nasty, I’m sure.”

“Mondo bizarro,” Elisa said, possibly agreeing. “But speaking of salad… there’s some you could help put away.” She opened a cupboard to reveal a bunch of plastic containers suited for the task, and sang out, as from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Here we are now, in containers.” (It’s really “Here we are now, entertain us.”)

I smiled. As I started scooping some Waldorf salad into one of the containers, I started in a version of Toto’s “Africa” (the refrain of which really goes “Gonna take a lot to take me away from you / There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do / I bless the rains down in Africa…”): “Gonna take a lot to take me away from food…”

Elisa added the next line: “There’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do.”

We sang together, her washing, me scooping: “I left my brains down in Africa…”

Thanks to Allan Jackson for suggesting – a while ago – mondegreen, and to www.kissthisguy.com for most of the mishearings used above.

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ghrelin

Posted on November 11, 2011 | 6 comments

As you may have noticed, I have an ever-growing hunger for words. Actually, I hunger for knowledge of all sorts of types. Come to think of it, I hunger for food too… fortunately, I exercise, and have gotten better at eating less. Otherwise not just my knowledge but my weight and waistline would be growing.

Interestingly, there is something of a biochemical connection between, on the one hand, physical hunger and growth and, on the other hand, learning and memory. The link is something that demonstrates yet again that – as you may have observed in my note on Suzanniwana – scientists also often have a deep-rooted love for language. The link, you see, has a name that is radically original: ghrelin.

What is ghrelin? It’s a peptide that serves a few functions in the body. It is associated with hunger – it increases before eating and decreases after – and it also appears (based on animal studies) to stimulate learning and memory via the hippocampus, which suggests that you may learn better on an empty stomach. In fetuses, it seems to promote growth. Higher levels of it are also associated with short sleep duration and obesity – if you don’t get enough sleep, you are hungrier and get fatter. (Which means my frequent late nights writing word tasting notes aren’t helping my weight.) I don’t know how one resolves the apparent conflicting issue that short sleep is not generally associated with learning and memory.

And where does ghrelin get its name? Perhaps from those gremlins that chase around in your stomach – or in your head? Or the sound of your stomach growling? Maybe from the fact that if you turn LI into U, GHRELIN is an anagram of HUNGER? No, it comes from an original root – I already told you it was radically original. The hormone is associated with growth; it is a growth-hormone-releasing peptide. As it happens, the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root related to “growth” is ghre. (What is Proto-Indo-European? It’s the reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken roughly 6000 years ago. The language family has grown considerably since then, and our knowledge of it is still growing.) It’s a nice coincidence that ghre also looks like an acronym for growth-hormone-releasing. And the lin? A common suffix for hormones.

How do you pronounce it? Don’t bother trying to make a voiced aspirated velar stop at the beginning, and don’t linger on h – just treat the h as silent for the purposes of Modern English. And as you roll the idea of this hormone around in your mind, and as the hunger created by your brain use starts your stomach up, roll this word around in your mouth – a nice piece of PIE.

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Elton

Posted on November 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

Aina and I were just at a performance of Love Lies Bleeding, the Alberta Ballet’s homage to Elton John. The music was all Elton John, of course; the dance had a sort of through-line, but it was not narrative. (How lovely. We get so tired of story ballets.) The performance used a large company of excellent dancers, with one very good, very busy dancer playing an Elton-type persona, although at times it seemed there were multiple Elta… what?

Elton isn’t a Greek word and so doesn’t pluralize to Elta? Well, yes, I knew that. But if people are going to pluralize Elvis to Elvi (it’s not Elvus!) and even Elvii (it certainly isn’t Elvius!), well, why can’t I have some fun with Elton?  (Or with Elvis – plural Los vises, perhaps? Or, on the Greek model, Elveis or Elvines?)

Really, you’d think that Elton would have the kind of currency Elvis has. After all, Elton John has as much of a flair for showmanship as Elvis, if not more – think about the costume potential. And Elton (with his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin) surpassed Elvis’s record for most consecutive years of Billboard Top 40 hits. They have the top-selling single of all time (“Candle in the Wind”). More recently, he’s written musicals and film scores. In his career he’s performed more than 3000 live concerts. On top of which, Elton has El like Elvis, though without the swivelling pelvis of the vis – rather the crisper, perhaps lighter ton (aside from the obvious taste of “two thousand pounds”), a common enough ending for a name. So there are all sorts of reasons for there to be Elta all over the place.

Yabbut… he’s not dead, eh? I think that’s what it is. He’s still around, so he can’t be a timeless persona that everyone can take on. I suppose the set who would imitate him would be an at least slightly different set from those who do the Elvis thing, too. But that just means there’s room for both!

I need not discourse at length on the images Elton carries. Reggie Dwight set all that up nicely, with the great big glasses and flashy costumes, and all that music… Oh, yes, if you didn’t know, Reginald Kenneth Dwight was the name Elton John was born under. He took the name Elton John for a stage name (now his legal name – he’s Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE) from two bluesmen he had worked with: Elton Dean and Long John Baldry.

I’m sure many people, on first seeing or hearing his name, have wondered whether it should be John Elton. But John is also a real family name. And anyway, his birth name, Dwight, is also used as a first name. And Elton Dean’s last name is, too.

On the other hand, Elton certainly is a family name – now in use as a first name too, like so many others. But, as many of you will already have surmised, it was first a toponym: there are numerous places in England named Elton, with the ton obviously the same ton as everywhere (originally from Old English tun “enclosure, settlement”) and the El from the Old English masculine personal name Ella.

Yes, that’s right, Ella was once a masculine name in English. The feminine name doesn’t come from that – it started as short for Eleanor, Elvira, Ellen, or such like. But fancy that, eh – a male name that sounds like a female name that became part of a place name that was used as a last name and then converted to a first name and borrowed as a stage name and at last taken as an official name. Quite the journey. The central character in Love Lies Bleeding went through a progress of similar complexity too. And I’m sure Elton John did as well.

But, oh, notice how I didn’t say just Elton? He’s always Elton John. It’s not as though there are other famous Eltons out there to distinguish him from. Elvis Presley probably got trimmed in part because it has four full-value syllables (no reduced vowels), so it’s extra unnecessary effort to say it all. Elton, on the other hand, usually has its second syllable reduced to a glottal stop and a syllabic /n/. It’s more sesquisyllabic than bisyllabic – it calls for another full-value syllable after it to attach itself to.

But there’s another thing: John is so well known as a first name, it carries the most weight and gets treatment more as a head noun, with Elton as a modifier. Just as there’s Tiny Tim and Lil Wayne and Tenacious D and Man Ray, there’s Elton John. It also helps that the rhythm of English gives as much time to John as to Elton. But the Elton is what makes it special.

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pervicacious

Posted on November 9, 2011 | 1 comment

There are some words that just seem suited to highfalutin, word-flavour-savouring usage. This surely is one of them. I say that not just because it’s four syllables and not just because it ends in acious, which is generally a marker for a sterling-silver word. Nor is it just that it has that nice symmetrical section in the middle, icaci, and has the opening force of per (as in perquisite and perlocutionary and the more bleached peroxide), with tastes of vicarious and vicus (as in James Joyce’s commodious vicus of recirculation). Admittedly, the notes of vicious, vacation, and pervert do not raise the tone, but the clear echoes of perspicacious and pertinacious certainly do, and the whisper of curvaceous can’t hurt. But what convinces me that this word wants to be used in a specially selected salad of lexis is the places I’ve seen it used.

That’s not too many places, to be sure. Odds are that this word is new to you – it’s what linguists call a low-frequency word, and in lexis, low frequency tends to come with high tone. It’s the kind of word you may see first in a thesaurus, especially if the thesaurus in question is The Thinker’s Thesaurus by Peter E. Meltzer, which the Signals catalogue I just received today touts, encouraging readers looking for a new word to “use something delicious, like ‘pervicacious.'” A new word for what? Well, let me see if you can get it from the following quotes, all served up nicely by the Oxford English Dictionary:

“One of the most pervicacious young creatures that ever was heard of.” Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson. (Taste the similar gestures in pervicacious and creatures. But hmm… does it mean pretty? Curvy? Perspicacious or pertinacious?)

“At once funky and firm, a pervicacious horde of floating voters, they rush confidently to support the worst candidate on offer.” Daily Telegraph, April 16, 1973. (Note the steady rhythm and late internal rhyme in pervicacious horde of floating voters. As to the meaning, I guess it’s not precarious… does sound kind of perverse.)

“I’m a word nerd. I get a kick out of tossing a few odd ones into my column, just to see if the pervicacious editors will weed them out.” Technology Review, June 1, 2001. (Well, that sounds like they’re pertinacious – or perhaps just picky. Note also that the bumpy rhythm of the sentence becomes smoother starting at pervicacious.)

“The pursuit of pervicacious donkeys who diverged into the green barley.” Las Alforjas, by G.J. Cayley. (OK, we all know that for some reason many authors feel they need to describe donkeys as stubborn, obstinate, pertinacious, or what have you, even though everybody already knows that that is their most salient trait. So that’s a pretty good clue. Meanwhile, note that the donkeys diverged, which is a rather high-toned way of putting it, and note the echoes between pursuit and pervicacious and between donkeys and barley.)

“A pertinacity which some call firmness, but I call the pervicacious obstinacy of inborn inveterate self-sufficiency.” Celebrated Political Letters 51 (1794), by “Somers.”

And with that last quote we get the picture rather clearly – of the meaning of this word (“obstinate, wilful, stubborn, headstrong, pertinacious”, from Latin pervicax “stubborn, headstrong”, probably from per “thoroughly” and vincere “win” – suggesting tenacity as well as pertinacity), but also of its tendency to be used in contexts where the author seems to be particularly enjoying arranging the verbal knick-knacks. Enjoying it, indeed, to a rather perverse and wayward and, perhaps, pervicacious extent. After all, tell me what kind of obstinacy could not be pervicacious. And, on the other hand, why use inborn and inveterate together?

You know that I am not one to insist on the briefest possible version of something; the rhythm and sound of the words, and the little semantic nuances they bring, count for more than some people allow. But there really does come a point where delight in the form and its silver shininess can take you beyond where the semantics can sustain it. Oh, the sounds bounce around so nicely in that sentence – the rhythm is very chunky and jumpy, but it passes back and forth the the per and per, cy and cy, in and in, little echoes of /t/ here and /f/ there… But it’s not a vocalise, it’s a political letter.

Oh well. Writers, eh? They will stick to their Lucullan pick of lucubration and pyrotechnical expostulation, perverse vacations in the workaday flow of the prose. To the last, pervicacious.

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valour

Posted on November 8, 2011 | 5 comments

This is the week of November 11 – in Canada, we call it Remembrance Day, which I quite like: it’s meant to be not simply about watching parades of veterans and thinking of it as someone else’s issue some time ago; it’s meant to be about remembering. In the United States, there is a separate Memorial Day, but it is mainly treated as a long weekend, and November 11 is Veterans’ Day – it celebrates their valor and honors their actions and sacrifices, but if you are not a veteran, you may think it doesn’t relate to you. In Canada, when we remember their valour and honour them, it is a nice little coincidence that we make u a part of it, through the happenstance of spelling. We read the rondeau by John McCrae, the beginning of which is on our five-dollar bills:

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

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

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

I don’t wish to valorize war. War is an awful thing, and many who have never actually been involved in it (who may even have gone to considerable lengths to evade participation) take it too lightly, as a sort of calculation of loss and benefit, or even approach it eagerly, happy to send hundreds or thousands of young men – and, now, women – to their deaths. War ought not to be looked on as merely the continuation of business by other means. I would rather there not be another war, ever, and to my knowledge that desire is also common among those who have fought in them. And I think many wars have been fought without a valid basis, although when we are faced with a Hitler, for instance, there may not be another option to be found.

But what we need to remember is that, however little we may like war or even think it necessary, the people who have fought in it are, by and large, people like you and me – except that they went somewhere and did something that put their lives in genuine jeopardy, and they did it for the sake of others, some to their very valediction. They walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and you can bet they had plenty of evil to fear. Can you truly say you would do the same, for the cause of what you held dearest, or to protect others, or even just because you had made a commitment and were told to? We know there is a u in valour – the Canadian and British spelling, anyway – but is there valour in you?

What is valour, anyway? Certainly, we have learned from Shakespeare that “the better part of valour is discretion” (Henry IV, Part I, act 5, scene 4). But does this mean that people who were following orders – and thus were not granted the discretion to do otherwise – lacked valour? Of course not, not really; they could have turned and run. But if they had they would surely “hold their manhoods cheap” (to borrow a phrase from Henry V); what values would they have displayed, and what would have displayed their values?

Is valour about values and about value? Indeed, its origins are just that: Latin valere, which means “be strong” but also “have value” and “be healthy”. Romans said vale for “farewell” – a final wish of health, from which we get valediction but also, ironically, valetudinarian. French uses valoir to mean “be worth”, as in ça vaut la peine, “it’s worth the trouble”; valeur can be “value” as in “cost” (yes, value is also from valere), but also “valour” as in something that can cost you dearly; this sense shows up in the Canadian anthem: “Et ta valeur, de foi trempée, protégera nos foyers et nos droits.” (Note, just incidentally, that valeur is a feminine noun in French, in spite of any overtones of virility it may often have.)

But valour is not some simple Val Kilmer heroism, just as it is not villainy. Valour is close in sound to failure, but of course it is not failure, although one may have valour and yet still not achieve what one had hoped. Nor does it come down to the velour on a ribbon holding a medal – perhaps the Cross of Valour, awarded (rarely, and among those times often posthumously) for “acts of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme peril” to civilians or soldiers alike (actually, there is no velour on its ribbon). Value may exist by common agreement, but valour is valid even when unrecognized (and, yes, even when demonstrated at times other than war).

As with all words, the meaning of valour is somewhat fluid, and can be debated and spoken on by people at great length, and what it will mean for you may be quite different from what it will mean for another. But I’d like to quote Sandy McLeod, a friend of my father (Warren Harbeck), to give his perspective on it:

Valour is instantaneous in most cases and does not involve the person themself and yet it does, most forcefully. Facing certain death, instantly not caring for yourself, but giving all for others without their asking or even knowing you, out of nowhere, instantaneously you will do it for them, giving your life without questioning the reason why it has to be done – just to do it, in total one-hundred-percent unselfishness, in an instant of thought and call to action in defence of another or others: “It’s a calling.” Not everyone is chosen for that calling and in fact most are not. That call comes from somewhere much higher and greater than most of us can even imagine.

In my view valour is much more than just courage. In my view and experience of living and seeing all of that for so many years, valour is God’s Grace in action – not just courage, it’s beyond courage. In most moments of valour, a moment like a breath of air, the decision to act is “beyond or in destiny.”

I know that many of my readers will find things in this to disagree with: you may not believe in God, or in “callings,” or in destiny, or or or. (You can, however, be a pure pacifist and still value self-sacrifice for others.) What I want is for you to have a taste of the values behind this word for someone who values it – and what it signifies – most highly. There is much to be said for self-transcendence, for connecting to something bigger than oneself and doing things for reasons that go well beyond one’s own narrow interests (and may even conflict with them). Indeed, we would not have any sort of liveable society without such values. And for those who see value only in money, may I remind you that the value of money is only redeemed by its being spent; a mattress full of unmoving moola may as well be straw.

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murmuration

Posted on November 6, 2011 | 12 comments

Have you heard a murmuration – perhaps the murmuration of a herd? Is there rationality in murmuring? Lovers may murmur to each other, but when many may murmur the murmuration is not only a heard phenomenon but a herd phenomenon. One responds to the next responding to the next…

It can be a rum thing. Something coherent can be split apart and partially turned, as an m turned into an r and an n and then the n turned to a u and switched around; or unconnected things, u r, come to be construed as joined m. No single clear voice speaks up so all can hear; nothing calls back to ration, so it remains the unseeing hearing herd of the murmur nation. Who is in the herd? U r, among others. And the sound all around is not really “rhubarb, rhubarb” as some would render it; if you have a large number of friends over, get them all to murmur murmuration at the same time and see whether it doesn’t sound just right. And perhaps a bit creepy.

But, then, is it a herd, really? A herd is made of animals. We might discern it better among birds. And among words for birds. Consider: we do well enough with school for a group of any of many different kinds of fish, and with herd for several kinds of animals, but there are among us those who are unsatisfied with standard flock as applied to birds. Oh, there is fun in fancy: it is enjoyable to speak of a murder of crows, an unkindness of ravens, a watch of nightingales, a parliament of rooks, and (this would have changed the complexion of ’80s music) a wreck of seagulls. But the problem comes when someone murmurs that you are wrong if you use flock. These fanciful words, in truth, have (with just a few exceptions) always been just that: fancies. Toys. They ought not to be made into bludgeons.

It is true that among humans, the herd determines the use of the word, but individuals have influence, and sometimes they have quite a lot of influence. A medieval nun appears to have invented many of these words for bird herds, which are first seen – the whole flock of them – in The Book of St. Albans (1486). Thus these words were set, but mostly they are barely used, except among the murmuring set.

And when they are used, new flights of fancies, or just fancies in flight, may attach themselves to them. Consider the starling. The collective for starlings (other than flock, of course) is very rarely used: murmuration. (Yes, the word originally means “act of murmuring” or “continuous murmuring” – and also (though no longer) “spreading of rumours”. And murmur has apparent onomatopoeic origins in its Latin source.) But it happens that starlings can do something rather startling, a fascinating demonstration of complex dynamics: in places such as Otmoor, near Oxford, where large numbers of them come together at day’s end, there is a huge, fluid swooping, quite amazing to see, as thousands and thousands of birds make mass shapes that swirl like a sideways lava lamp sped up several times. They do this because each one is reacting to the ones near it, and they all have some particular pragmatics to follow relating to their role in the group hierarchy and their desire – and relative right – to go where they are safer. There is no one bird saying, “Hey, you guys, the old males come here, and the females go around there, and the younger males go over there.”

You can see this phenomenon in quite a few videos; my favourite is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE. Another is at www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/02/murmuration-starlets_n_1072687.html (note that the URL erroneously has starlets – but it’s the correct URL). But the Huffington Post writer at the latter has taken the exotic act and assigned it the exotic word: “A murmuration, which this is, consists of thousands of tiny starlings (birds) collectively flying and swirling about.” So now it seems, to this writer – and to his readers – murmuration is not simply the word for a flock of starlings but is the word for this remarkable flocking behaviour.

We may say “Fair enough”: there’s already a perfectly good word for a flock of starling – flock – and there hasn’t to this point been a word specifically for this thing that large numbers of starlings do that happens to amaze a lot of people. But whether we like the semantic shift or not, it’s happening; given that the article on the Huffington Post has been “Liked” by over 36,000 people (as of this writing) and shared, tweeted, and emailed by almost 20,000, I think we can assume that each one of those people will take from the article – and pass on again by word of mouth – the word mumuration as referring specifically to this act (and may come to use it not as a murmuration of starlings but as starlings engaged in murmuration).

One bird turns, and the rest follow; one writer murmurs murmuration to this person and that, and they all follow. Of course, since it’s in a published article, it is in a way as though one bird had given direct instruction to the many, but since most people who read it likely found out about it through friends rather than simply turning every day to HuffPost to see what lexical updates to assimilate, effectively the article is the word that is murmured, not the voice murmuring it.

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Io

Posted on November 5, 2011 | 6 comments

This word is not lo, as in “Lo, behold a cow-horned maiden.” It’s a capital I and a small o. In English, the spelling and pronunciation of this name sound the same: I-o, like “I owe,” as in “I owe one of my greatest stage memories to Io,” and perhaps sort of like “hi-ho,” as in “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s on the stage I go.”

Actually, though, it comes from Greek, and its pronunciation there is like “ee-o” – not exactly like “yo,” as in “Yo, check out the cow-horned maiden,” which would be oy backwards, as in “Oy, this gadfly is making my life hell” – although in classical Greek, the word io was also a lamentation meaning “oy” or “alas”. When faced with Io in a classical context, one is hard pressed to decide which way to say it, and might in vacillation say “ee-ay-ee-ay-o”, as in “Old Inachus had a farm, e-i-e-i-o, and on that farm he had a cow, e-i-e-i-o.”

At the same time, Io presents distinctly digital associations – likely what my mainframer brother would see in it first. It’s not just that I/O stands for input/output, it’s that IO looks like a 1 and a 0, the binary digits, a.k.a. bits (and also the international symbols for “on” and “off”, since 1 is something and 0 is nothing). In binary, 10 is equal to 2 in decimal (the joke goes that there are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary and those who don’t).

So is Io number 2? No – in terms of size, it’s number 4. By which I mean that the moon of Jupiter called Io is the fourth-largest moon in our solar system, behind Titan (which orbits Saturn) and Ganymede and Callisto (which orbit Jupiter), and just ahead of Earth’s Moon and of its fellow moon of Jupiter, Europa. But, oh, though Io, Europa, and our Moon are of similar size, they’re like fire and ice and cold stone. Actually, they’re not just like them: Io is very volcanically active, while Europa is covered in ice and our Moon is dry and inert.

Io and Europa, like Ganymede and Callisto, got their names – the moons, I mean – because their namesakes were all lovers of Zeus, the god also known as Jupiter. Well, perhaps I should say they were all seduced by Zeus. Actually, with Io, it’s not even quite that. Zeus saw this maiden and came to her and night and whispered to her, and though she resisted, her father (Inachus) finally turfed her out, fearing trouble, and Zeus came down and had his way with her. Zeus’s wife, Hera, came snooping, so Zeus turned Io into a cow to conceal her. But Hera knew what was up and asked for Io as a gift. Then she tied her to a tree and set a guard on her. But Zeus got her loose, and then Hera send a gadly after her… Anyway, Io wandered around quite a bit, and in her travels she stopped by Prometheus, who was bound to a rock. Many years later, one of Io’s descendants (yes, she had a baby by Zeus, after she got turned back into a human) – Heracles (a.k.a. Hercules) – would free Prometheus. (Meanwhile, on the moon Io, there’s a volcano called Prometheus. The moon Io has no horns but it sure has a complexion problem.)

Now, mind you, the Greek myths have various variations depending on the source. They don’t provide completely fixed, reliable, and consistent narratives; they practically invite new inputs and outputs. And a classical work such as Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, when performed in Canada in the modern era – an age where 1 and 0 are much better known than Io – will unavoidably have modern perspectives and modern inputs and outputs. Or postmodern – why pretend there’s a reliable metanarrative to adhere to? Mix and match and see what you can get. Flip from English to classical Greek in the middle of the play, for instance.

That’s just what Philip McCoy did when he directed Prometheus Bound at the University of Calgary in 1987. And I got the best bit: to the sound of Philip Glass’s funeral march from Akhnaten, I entered – in full classical Greek costume, including sandals, robe, and complete head mask – and recited, in a classical Greek dramatic style – keening, emotional, undilute, all-or-nothing – the monologue of Io, in classical Greek. It was a moment – indeed, a good two minutes – handed on a silver platter, from τίς γῆ; τί γένος; Tis gé? Ti genos? (“What land? What people?”) through ἰὼ ἰὼ πόποι, ποῖ μ᾽ ἄγουσι τηλέπλαγκτοι πλάναι; Io io popoi, poi m’agousi téleplanktoi planai (“Ah, ah, alas, where are you taking me, my far-wandering wanderings?”) to the final cry, κλύεις φθέγμα τᾶς βούκερω παρθένου; Klueis phthegma tas boukero parthenou? (“Do you hear the cry of the cow-horned maid?”)

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Europe

Posted on November 3, 2011 | 9 comments

At the time I’m writing this, the EU is saying to Greece, “You’re up!” As in “You’re up to bat,” “Your number’s up,” and, well, “Europe… are you in or what?”

Anand Shukla, who suggested tasting Europe (I’ve tasted Europe, and I’m quite fond of it, but I have not before tasted the word Europe), says “Europe, contrary to my expectations, has nothing to do with either eu or rope.” And that is a pity, since eu in Greek-derived words such as euphony and euthanasia means “good” or “pleasant” and with rope we could talk about “blessed be the ties that bind” with regard to the European Union. And, on the other hand, rope makes me think of ropa, which in Spanish means “clothes”, and since eu sounds like new we might be reminded of the king’s (or emperor’s) new clothes, which is about what some people think of the euro.

Speaking of the euro, events in Greece are becoming not only dramatic but potentially drachmatic (the drachma being the unit of currency that Greece forsook for the euro and is now, at least in some quarters, for seeking to return to). But some people think that the Greeks are being rather selfish (I’m reminded of eu, Portuguese for “I”), and taking all sorts of money from the rest of Europe without so much as saying thanks (in Greek, ευχαριστώ eucharisto – note that in modern Greek that’s pronounced like “efharisto”). One wonders whether that sound “europe” that you hear is just the sound of a colossal burp after digesting all that German dough.

But, then, what exactly is that sound we hear when we say Europe? It just happens that that first syllable varies somewhat between the various European languages: /ju/, /εu/, /ɔɪ/, /ø/, /εv/… Some rounded, some not; some diphthongs, some monophthongs; lips out, lips in, lips wide, lips narrow… And of course the rope is ropa in most countries too. But the pronunciation of the /r/ is another point of variance: retroflex, uvular, trill?

And somehow we expect all these different people, who don’t even pronounce the name of their common geographical unit the same, to get together and agree on all sorts of important things? Well, it’s not impossible. Or is it?

But where does this word come from, anyway? As befits any truly epic name, no one is entirely sure. It may come from Europa, who, according to Greek myth, was a Phoenician princess – descended from Io (the cow-horned maid) – who (like Io) was seduced by Zeus (a common occurrence in Greek myth), who came to her in the form of a bull. Mmm, yup, she took the bull. And the bull took her. (“Sometimes, señor, you ride the bull, and sometimes the bull rides you.”)

She also (again like Io) gave her name to a moon of Jupiter, by the way – the moon that is covered with ice, very smooth ice, which suggests that there is water beneath it. Which suggests that there may be life there. Not just in the mind of Arthur C. Clarke (read 2010 – it wasn’t historical fiction when it was written), but in a not altogether unreasonable estimation.

And where does Europa’s name come from? Uncertain. Many origins have been proposed. A longstanding account, now in doubt, is that it comes from words meaning “broad eyes” or “broad face”. (Pity it wasn’t “bright eyes” – then I would have had a Bonnie Tyler tangent.) Or perhaps “open-minded”. On the other hand, it may have been from Akkadian for “go down, set [as in the sun]”.

But of course, for most people, Europe has flavours that have nothing to do with mythic damsels or moons of Jupiter (don’t forget, incidentally, that Jupiter was just what the Romans called Zeus… so the two seduced maidens, Io and Europa, are eternally mooning over their seducer). If someone mentions Europe to me, I immediately think of my favourite place to travel to, a place with a cultural depth that I simply can’t get in Canada (well, maybe in Quebec, to some extent), a place that is home to the cultural mythos that I have inherited, a place I idolized and fantasized about before first visiting at age 16, a place my honeymoon and most of my other best trips have been to. Yes, yes, I know, for people who live there it’s just as ordinary as Canada is for me. The grass is greener etc. But all aesthetics are personal.

Which also means that Europe can have very different meanings for other people. I know that many Americans think of it as some kind of socialist hell (I will resist further comment, and let me tell you, that’s a real effort on my part). Some Britons see it as a set that does not at all include them; others disagree. Your own personal images, expectations, and experiences will certainly shape the flavour of this word for you. Common, important words like this have a markedly different history for every person.

Nor does it help that Europe names a continent that is really somewhat arbitrarily (at least recently, as in since the continents drifted to their current locations) a continent. If you think of Europe as the head and Asia as the body, you have to confess that there is no neck. At. All. Somehow Georgia and Armenia and Azerbaijan are Asian, while just over the mountains Russia and Chechnya and Ossetia are European… but Russia runs across the Ural mountains (and a non-salient line that stretches from them to the Caspian Sea) into Asia. It’s the largest country on both continents, without having to jump across water. (Turkey is also on both continents, but in its case they are separated by the Bosporus, which comes from Greek for “cow’s ford”, supposedly named – oh, here it comes again – for Io having crossed there.)

One thing is certain, still: whether Greece wants to be part of Europe or not, whether the sun is setting on the euro and the EU or not, Europe (and of course Europa) is from Greek.

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mainframe

Posted on November 2, 2011 | 6 comments

Well, this is a nice, simple, straightforward word, made of two simple, easily serviceable bits that have been in English as long as there has been an English: main and frame. The overt sense is “principal supporting structure” or “basic framework”. It was used first in application to heavy equipment – of course, it’s not the frame that does the glamorous part of the work, but nothing at all could happen without it.

But in 1964, two important things happened to mainframe: it gained a new meaning, and a future mainframe alpha-geek – my brother, Reg Harbeck – was born. The mainframe is now known as a kind of computer, a very big kind (these days, about 7 feet tall, 6 feet wide, and 4 feet deep – that used to be small for a computer, but it’s enormous compared to my Mac Mini. My brother, on the other hand, is about 6 feet tall and about a foot and a half wide and deep). I learned in high school that mainframes were big, old, dusty, clunky machines, hoary things that were the computer equivalent of dinosaurs. I also learned a number of other things that turned out to be false, but few so egregiously so – and yet pervasively believed – as that.

Let me quote from The Devil’s IT Dictionary:

mainframe
n. 1. An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year’s run twice as fast as last year’s. n. 2. A large PC peripheral

Let me put it this way: everyone you know uses a mainframe. Including you. Unless you don’t have an ATM card, a credit card, insurance, a bank account, a pension plan… or pay taxes. Getting out cash? That’s you, personally, operating a mainframe interface. What, you thought they used PCs to do that?

My brother has been so kind as to write a pocket encyclopedia entry for me on the topic (he writes quite a lot on mainframes, so this was an easy whip-off for him):

On April 7, 1964, IBM announced the System/360 mainframe. At the time, there were a number of other kinds of mainframe in use or in development. Mainframe, of course, refers to the “frames” of magnetic core memory which predated modern transistor memory. The cabinet containing these frames of memory led to the term main frame computer.

Over the past 47 years, that IBM mainframe computer has grown to become the one that powers the global economy, while the other types of “mainframe” eventually fell by the wayside after losing successive battles with IBM’s mainframe and then PCs. The IBM mainframe never blue screens or gets viruses or trojan horses. And IPLs (“initial program loads” – the mainframe version of a reboot) may be years apart. In fact, it’s common for mainframe downtime to average in the order of 5 minutes a year, i.e., 99.999% uptime.

Additionally, a given mainframe may be running hundreds – or thousands – of applications concurrently, at 99+% busy with no degradation in performance. That contrasts sharply with all other platforms still in common use, which tend to run no more than one data-intensive application per machine (office-type user-oriented applications are not intensive in comparison), and slow down to a crawl when they get over 30% busy (but average closer to 5% busy).

Interestingly, there are only about 10,000 mainframes in use in the world today, by the largest 4,000 organizations on earth – and there have never been more. The mainframe hasn’t gone away. Instead, it has worked so well that all the other computers can focus their processing power on user-oriented activity such as presentation, allowing those mainframes to take care of the massive data processing that keeps the world economy functioning, with any exceptions to that function arising from political and business, not technical, considerations.

Today’s leading-edge mainframe, IBM’s zEnterprise, is the highest-performing ever, and even has the ability to have other Unix, Linux and Windows computers “bolted on” to it as zBX Blade Centers to run all the critical applications in an entire enterprise, regardless of which platform they were written for. That way, those applications that were written for non-mainframe platforms can still benefit from the massive, secure, high-performing, reliable back-end processing of the mainframe while doing their additional work with that data and processing in a closely coupled and secure configuration.

Yes, Virgina, there is a mainframe, and it keeps the world economy running, and even plays nicely with every other platform out there, almost invisibly keeping the largest organizations on earth running their critical data processing smoothly and reliably.

But mainframes still don’t get no respect. And mainframers are typically somewhat older than the average computer person. This is in no small part because computer programmers tend to learn their craft at institutions that don’t have mainframes, so they’re used to smaller machines and thus tend to lean towards them in their careers and to push their employers towards them. This in spite of the fact that such computers are very inefficient because they were designed for very constrained applications and environments, and building a large application on such a basis is like trying to build a large castle with only ten square metres of land and a lot of cantilevers.

Or, to put it another way yet, consider this quote from The Economist in 1984: “Mainframes, which are used by big businesses for their centralised data processing, are slower than supercomputers (though still very fast).” Reg’s response? “That’s like saying a Bugatti is slower than a drag racer.” Supercomputers do one thing very well. Mainframes do tens of thousands of things very well, and they’ve always been designed to do so.

But they’re like those basic words we have from Old English, the ones that make up the core of our vocabulary. They seem unspectacular, and they don’t get a lot of respect or notice, but they perform a huge number of functions and perform them very efficiently. PC may seem sharp and crisp, and may rhyme internally, but it’s also small – those /i/ vowels are high, and it’s a tiny little initialism. Mainframe is longer, and doesn’t quite rhyme (but very nearly), but it’s warm and friendly and stable, with its easy nasals, and it has a powerful mid-front vowel. Fittingly, it’s not so outgoing (How do you know you’re talking to an extraverted mainframe sysadmin? He looks at your shoes when he’s talking to you), but  it does the job.

Mainframes are often called big iron. This puts me in mind of the title of a book by Anthony Burgess: Any Old Iron. The book is about the sword Excalibur, which was embedded in a stone until King Arthur pulled it out. The layman may look at such a thing and think, “Woo-hoo, a big rock with a fancy handle. Next?” But when you put them in action, mainframes cut through many a problem quite efficiently.

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hemistich

Posted on November 1, 2011 | 3 comments

Many a mortal || makes rhymes
But pompous poets || prefer apposition
Of available alliterations || alternating evenly
Central caesura || seizing suddenly
Hacking halfways || every hemistich

Thus runs the pattern of Old English alliterative verse, best known from Beowulf, but most entertainingly exemplified in Hrodulf Readnosa Hrandeor. I’ve indicated the pause in the middle – the caesura – with || for clarity (spaces appear with varying consistency). Many other kinds of verse also have a division in half with a break in the middle. One could argue that there is some of it in Robert Service, even (“There are strange things done || in the midnight sun”), but it is certainly a feature of classical poetry and of Anglican chanted psalms.

The pomposity meter really goes through the gothic arches with some renditions of those psalms. I’ve sung with a choirmaster who would have one line run right into the next, but have a two-second pause in the middle of the line. Think of a section like this (with : representing the pause, a convention in the Book of Common Prayer):

O go not from me, for trouble is hard at hand : and there is none to help me.
Many oxen are come about me : fat bulls of Basan close me in on every side.
They gape upon me with their mouths : as it were a ramping and a roaring lion.

Now imagine it sung like this:

O go not from me, for trouble is hard at hand

and there is none to help me.Many oxen are come about me

fat bulls of Basan close me in on every side.They gape upon me with their mouths

as it were a ramping and a roaring lion…

You want pompous, pretentious, and formally self-conscious? You got it.

But, ah, this is not about caesuras so exaggerated they seem like seizures. No, today’s word is about the halves that are meant to be stitched together, with the caesura as a hem, not riven like garments in mourning (and sewn to the next person’s garments).

But is it that you stitch them together, or just that you stick them together? True, stick doesn’t seem all that mystic, but think about the exoticism you get whenever you see a ch unexpectedly pronounced /k/. (I say unexpectedly because in choir and school you hardly think twice about it.) And in hemistich, which comes from Greek, the ch comes from the Greek letter chi χ, which as a rule ends up in English sounding as /k/.

The Greek word in this case is στίχος stichos, “line, row, verse”; ἡμι hemi means “half” as always. So then we may ask a couple more questions. First, as Stan Backs, who suggested this word, says, “A hemistich in time saves four and a half?” (He knew that the pronunciation was more sticky, though.) But then there is also the issue of what a sesquistich might be…

Well, macaronic, for one thing, since sesqui is Latin and stich comes from Greek. But we may consider that if a line is a foot in the meter, a line and a half is a meter and a half but also a foot and a half – sesquipedalian. But since a foot and a half is half a metre (roughly), we have made a loop between hemistich and sesquistich; loop after loop makes stitches, and hemistich sesquistich may be a mystic sadistic. Or perhaps a hamitic sasquatch… or a red-nosed reindeer. I mean readnosa hrandeor.

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