Category Archives: word tasting notes

umpteen

Posted on October 31, 2011 | 4 comments

In today’s Pardon My Planet comic, we see some pre-teen in a bedsheet dunning a dumpy pumpkin-possessing adult for a dump of candy; his line, in response to the adult’s pre-emptive guessing: “Why does everyone keep saying that! For the umpteenth time, I’m a mattress!”

OK, what’s wrong with this picture? To my eyes, it’s a pre-teen using umpteenth. It’s not that no one at all uses it anymore, but such a barely presumptuous exaggeration seems small potatoes indeed for today’s youth, used to living in a world of something like 7 billion people, where national budgetary gambits are measured in the trillions of dollars. We know we are in a universe with about 70 sextillion stars in observable range, and even the little easily loseable chip in my camera can hold more than 8 billion bytes of information – each byte being 8 bits, at that. Geez, when the word umpteen was coined, 8 bits was a dollar, and 8 billion dollars was an unbelievable amount of money, rather than about a ninth of the wealth of just one very rich person.

It’s not that large numbers were not used in prior times; 2500 years ago the classical Greeks often referred to the myriad and the Chinese to wan, both ten thousand; the Indians have long had a lakh, which is a hundred thousand, a crore, which is ten million, and even larger numbers. But consider that in The Maltese Falcon (1941) Joel Cairo offers Sam Spade $5000, and Spade says (sincerely) “Five thousand dollars is a lot of money.” In living memory a dime could get you a cup of coffee.

In England a century ago, which is when and where umpteen came into use, you could get into a fair bit of money before you needed to speak of a dozen of anything – after 11 pence was a shilling; although there were 20 shillings to a pound, you had crowns and assorted other intermediate amounts that kept you from often referring to more than a dozen shillings; as to a dozen pounds, that was a fair bit of cash – the equivalent of around a thousand dollars in today’s Canadian or American purchasing power.

Not to belabour the comparison, but to add illumination, consider that in the early 20th century Morse code was still being used commonly for communications – the original binary system, dot-dash, or, as those who used it sometimes called it, iddy-umpty (imitative of the dot and dash in signalling). Now we have phones and other media (including this one) that work by binary communication, but it’s ones and zeros, and they go several million times faster per one or zero. Even my sports watch manages a 2.4 gigahertz signal. That’s not umpteen iddies and umpties per second, that’s a zillion. A gazillion. A squillion. Not a googol, though, not yet.

But umpteen does seem kinda dumpy and dumb next to gigahertz, doesn’t it? It’s just lame. It lacks a certain umph. Heck, it’s a Morse code number. In fact, the ump in umpteen is from umpty – it’s a fill-in-the-blank-teen: if you don’t know exactly how many teen, so you want an umbrella teen term, and you don’t want to be silly and say eleventeen, you can present it as —teen, which is umpty-teen, or just umpteen.

Those of you who still use umpteen may take umbrage at this characterization, to be sure. No need to call an umpire to see if I’m making an ass with my umption: I use it sometimes too. But a pre-teen, still quasi-umbilical? Um, probably not.

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swizzle

Posted on October 30, 2011 | 5 comments

What is it that makes a word like swizzle stick in your mind – and in the vocabulary? What ingredients make it such a tropical cocktail of tastes and associations? Is there an umbrella term for such words? Is English stir-crazy, that it likes to stir crazy words of this kind into the liquor of our tongue?

It’s an electric word to look at, with all those angles: wizzl all lines and sharp points, and the only curves at the ends s e – and the s a softened view of a z, or the z’s a hardened and distorted view of the s, as though reflected in ice cubes. Out of it all one letter projects, l, like that little stick in your cocktail… the swizzle stick, of course (I add the explanation for the non-drinkers).

This word mixes the juice of a swi onset – as in swish, swing, swirl, swivel, words with a certain sway or swoop, that fluid motion – with the spirit of an izzle ending that can suggest busy activity: drizzle, fizzle, frizzle, sizzle, twizzle; there are also the tones of dazzle, puzzle, frazzle, nozzle, and especially guzzle and sozzle. Some come via a Latin-derived iller ending in French; some with the frequentative le suffix in English; some through onomatopoeia; and some evidently by imitation of other words. “What shall I toss in here? Oh, yeah, let’s try a shot of that!” This word is of that last sort and has been with us for a tidy two centuries.

So what is swizzle? Is a swizzle stick a stick you swizzle with? No, it’s a stick you stick in your swizzle. Swizzle is that with which you wet your whistle – it’s booze, especially a mixed drink. If you’d stick a swizzle stick in it, it qualifies, though it may have been a bit more specific at first: Dictionary.com (based on the Random House Dictionary, as opposed to a random dictionary in my house) says “a tall drink, originating in Barbados, composed of full-flavored West Indian rum, lime juice, crushed ice, and sugar: typically served with a swizzle stick.”

In other words, like a caipirinha but with dark rum. The sort of muddled tipple you’d like to guzzle when it’s sweltering out and you’re sweating and sizzling. Skip the little umbrella, and who cares about the frizzle frazzle on the swizzle stick: just sit in your swivel chair and tip this booze into your muzzle until you’re sozzled and dozing and all will be swell.

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ytterbium

Posted on October 30, 2011 | 1 comment

With a word such as this one, we seem to be at the outer limits of English orthography. It is indeed a rare bird. What is the y here? Consonant or vowel?

The answer, of course, as always, is neither: y is not a consonant or a vowel, it is a letter. Letters are not sounds; letters represent sounds, but – especially in English – they don’t always do so consistently. In some languages, y always represents a consonant; in others, it always represents a vowel; in English, it may represent either, and there are several vowels it can represent. It’s a real gold mine of phonemes… or if not gold, then something, anyway.

But we still tend to see it as a possible consonant, especially in unfamiliar words, and doubly so at the beginning of a word, where it nearly always represents a consonant. To see it followed by not just a t but a tt – ! It makes you want to trim some off. Hmmm… instead of ytterbium, how about terbium? or maybe erbium?

Aw, but where’s the fun in that? The word’s utter strangeness catches the eye. And as snarled and snagged as it may see, there’s something inside it that says I’m buttery. You want to read it backwards; you want to mix it up; you want to find rum, Betty, mutter, tribe, and even an incomplete muliebrity.

And what does it name? The ium ending should make it elementary… or anyway elemental. It’s an element, number 70 on the periodic table. It’s one of the rare earth elements, useful in combination with others to do quite a lot of tidy things. It’s also found mixed in with other rare earth elements, as rare earth elements tend to be. You will find it with, among others, terbium, erbium, and yttrium. Do these seem suspiciously similar? They were all originally identified in a mine in Ytterby, along with a few others (holmium, thulium, and gadolinium, named after Stockholm, Thule – a mythical name for Sweden – and Johan Gadolin, the person who originally identified them).

Ytterby! Where the heck is that? Look at those oarlocks, the Y and y – is this someplace you take a boat to get to? It had better be someplace nice, with a name like that! Well, but of course if you’re Swedish the name doesn’t seem so odd. In Swedish, by means “village” and ytter means “outer” (and is, yes, also cognate with utter), making its English equivalent something like Outerton. And those y’s in Swedish represent a high front rounded vowel, like in German fünf and French lune. And, by the way, in Swedish they say both /t/s – so not like in utter but like in coattail. But since that is quite outside the limits of English phonotactics, we say it with the beginning like “it” and the vowel after the b like the vowel in be.

Anyway, Ytterby is on an island (Resarö) near Stockholm, Sweden. It has – or had – a quarry, which existed for mining feldspar for use in porcelain. But a part-time chemist noticed an odd black rock in the quarry and sent it to full-time chemists for analysis. And it turned out that it contained a bunch of elements not previously identified – elements that actually took the best part of a century for various people to finally isolate and identify. Because sometimes something that looks kind of odd turns out to have a variety of interesting things in it.

One thing I like in particular, incidentally, is that yttrium (not ytterbium, but yttrium) is commonly found in the earth called yttria, which contains sesquioxide of yttrium: Y2O3.

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philtrum

Posted on October 29, 2011 | 5 comments

If you’ve read my note on aglet, you know already that this is a word for something that needs a name but doesn’t have it, but actually does. It’s something you see every day and might just occasionally wonder what to call. Don’t you just love those? Ha. As in they get up your nose.

Looking at this word, you can see classical origins – or perhaps pseudo-classical, in the mode of the Victorian/Edwardian era fads for inventions and fancies such as phlogiston and names such as Phineas. That ph bespeaks a Greek origin, probably brought down to us by way of Latin. And, come to think of it, that whole phil looks phamiliar – excuse me, familiar. Perhaps related to the Greek philos “love”, as in philosophy “love of wisdom”, Philadelphia “place of brotherly love”, and Philip “person with a lip shaped like the letter phi (φ)” – sorry, no, it’s from Philippos “horse lover”.

On the other hand, it also makes me think of plectrum, which is a fancy word for pick as in guitar pick – that triangular thing you use to provoke strings to vibrate. If music be the food, of love, pick on! And if it’s really groovy, take your pick.

Take your pick and do what? Or take your pick of what? How about taking your pick of people with upper lips with grooves in them? Well, that’s kind of everybody, isn’t it… though some people’s grooves are more pronounced than others. I tend to think of Roland Orzabal of Tears for Fears (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0TYun-Nq1Q for a version of the “Head Over Heels” video with lyrics describing the action – a digression but really funny), though his isn’t really abnormally pronounced; I did know a few other guitar pickers around that time who looked as though they had vertical equal signs under their noses. It always seemed kind of self-important to me, which is in some sense the opposite of groovy.

Anyway, yes, where I’m going with this is that the groove in your upper lip – anyone’s upper lip (except some with fetal alcohol syndrome) – coming down from the nose is called the philtrum. Some legends say it’s where an angel touches a baby’s lip before birth. But others relate it to Aphrodite (you will see the ph balance going up here, and that’s not baseless). Philtrum is a Latin word meaning not only “groove in the upper lip” but also “love potion” – taken from the Greek philtron, which has the same two meanings. The “love potion” meaning is now normally spelled philtre – although, frankly, love potions are more likely to bear the legend unfiltered these days. And then you can nose them, wafting the scent up past your philtrum. And feel groovy (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBQxG0Z72qM for that musical reference – though neither Simon nor Garfunkel has a pronounced philtrum).

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aglet

Posted on October 26, 2011 | 9 comments

This is a name for one of those things that need names but don’t have them – except that they do, but the average user is agnostic of them. Our daily life is certainly laced with such things; some people will call them thingies, others will make up cute nonce words (often called sniglets, a term and concept created by Rich Hall of Not Necessarily the News), while agelasts will simply describe them or say “Ag, let it go.” The capper, of course, is when we find out that there was a word for them all along.

I first saw today’s word in The Book of Lists, by Wallechinsky, Wallace, and Wallace, in a list called “16 names of things you never knew had names.” As I look again at the list now, after a couple of decades, I find that I might as well be seeing some of the words for the first time, while others are like old friends now. (I’m also surprised to see that the list does not include philtrum. Now, where did I first see that one?) And the top of the list is, yes, aglet: “The plain or ornamental covering on the end of a shoelace.” (Am I sorry for stringing you on for so long? No.)

It’s a strange little animal, this word, no? It tastes of piglet and eaglet (but not in the way an eaglet would taste a piglet). You know it’s something little thanks to the let ending, but what thing is it a little version of? It is in some ways a stringy word, its brevity nothwithstanding; it has a hint of ligate tied into a knot; the g has a look of a bow, and the l of a straight string. It’s a short word for a typically not-too-long thing, but, then, how long is a piece of string?

As long as it has to be, is the usual answer. And this word, too, has settled to a useful length – well, not quite settled: it’s also spelled aiglet. But it’s had half a millennium of erosion since we stole it into English. It used to be much longer, back when it was a French word, but why leave the speaker tongue-tied? You may find it (and its taste) ugly or elegant, but at least it’s efficient at less than half the original length. OK, I’m not stringing you along, just giving you a little needling – or rather a little needle: this word is knotted up from aiguillette, “little needle”, tracing back to Latin acus “needle” and cognate with acute. As in “That’s acute pair of shoes you have.”

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well-being

Posted on October 25, 2011 | 1 comment

Ah, just home from an evening at the spa. After being rubbed like an old lamp, I emerged into a cloud of steam like a genie and splashed around in the water like a naiad, and now I feel sprightly. My spirits are raised – not as in a séance, but as in bienséance, bienêtre. Well-being.

That’s the word in spas, displayed proudly in the logo of this one: well-being. I see it a lot, not just in spas but anywhere good health is being marketed or enjoined. I see it as an open compound (well being), a closed-up one (wellbeing), and a hyphenated one (well-being). Well, being a transparent compound of basic Anglo-Saxon parts as it is, its variety of forms is unsurprising. It’s almost as though it’s being re-coined every time.

Anyway, spirits come in a variety of forms. Spirits? Mmhmm. I can’t see this word without thinking of a sprite, a naiad, one of those wet spirits that dwell in wells. No, I don’t mean well drinks, i.e., the cheap wet spirits they pour at the bar. For the well-being you don’t leave your coins in a pool of stale gin; you toss them in the water and make a wish. If you’re lucky, you may get a message; if you’re at a spa, you may get a massage.

But, of course, since my vocation is equivocation, you may take it as given that all that is well is not “well”, and vice versa. We all want to be the well that is whole, but we mostly don’t want to be the well that is hole. Wellness is the wellspring of being, and water is the stuff of life, but we want to be true to ourselves, not trous to ourselves. And yet we can’t help being our own wells: not just the source of water but the hole we fall into. To quote a poem I wrote years ago:

Well it is like
water one moment your
head is above one
below sometimes you fly
high above the surface
sometimes you sink below
into the depths where
air and light are
barely more than memory
but always you return
when you stop flapping
you fall when you
stop swimming you float
(where did I get
this stone I’m holding)
Well I am in
the water and the
water is in me
I will not drown
or fall but sometimes
oh often I struggle

But remember that the only way we have water in the well is because it came down from above before. It’s always a cycle. You are your own well-being, and the water is in you as you are in it, but it all comes from somewhere else. To quote another poem:

I am in love with
the possibility, I can only
become by not being, I
choose to lose, I am
my own hole in which
all is lost so I
may find it, it may
spring forth like water I
have never tasted. But always
I must forget so that
I may see fresh, I
must believe I am not
well, I am not hole,
I am only the seeker
longing to find the way
to the spring, wandering through
the desert with the map
forgotten in my back pocket.

You can’t always get what you want, but if you get it it’s only because you didn’t have it – or thought you didn’t have it – before. Is that well-being? It may not seem to be the spirit of the spa, but I throw money into the spa and, after rubbing and steam and splashing, the genie emerges – and it’s me again.

Note: trous is French for “holes”.

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evening

Posted on October 24, 2011 | 3 comments

If the day has been odd, you need an evening out. Indeed, the evening evens out not just your moods and the odds the day has stacked against you; it evens out the light – gradually to nil – and the colours, too: as Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues wrote,

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is grey and yellow, white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion

You decompress and the colours desaturate. But the light levels are not so even – if you are near light sources, the light is reliable and directional, but highly contrasty. This is why I like photography in the evening: as Robert Browning wrote,

Was never evening yet
But seemed far beautifuller than its day.

The long /i/ that opens evening gives ease, but the /v/ vibrates still… and then it soothes as it fades back in the mouth from the /I/ to a final nasal, the tongue rolling out like a wave relaxing away from the shore (perhaps on Echo Beach). An evening may have verve; it may even bring a frisson (think of a sepulchral tone greeting you with “Good evening”). It is when you go to the theatre or the club. But it is not the bright yang of the day; all finally subsides into the yin, the valley spirit (v), the dark half. The bright masculine angel of the day falls (as in William Rimmer’s famous painting “Evening: Fall of Day,” well known in a modified form from the labels of Led Zeppelin records – see www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2008/07/19/william-rimmers-evening-swan-song/), Apollo recedes, to be replaced by the evening star – Venus. And Adam gives way to Eve.

The eyes grow heavy-lidded e and e, the only salience is the candle i, and at the end it descends further g to night… The evening stretches from dinner to bed, when mother night overtakes us and we are level.

Laurie Miller, in suggesting this word to me, wrote, “The ‘evening’ has a lovely sound. Does it reproduce the effect on a landscape of the daylight’s dying? Colours do even out, and differences in texture and elevation go away. Is that awareness, of diminishing differences as night comes, common in other languages?” Well… the first question is whether that is even where it comes from.

Of course, the homonymy with even as in “level, flat” has an undeniable effect in English. But it is in fact a coincidence. Evening comes from a word even that we still see in uses such as eventide as well as in shortened eve form; it comes from Old English æfen, cognate with Dutch avond and German Abend. Even as in “divisible by two” and “level, flat” (and “equally”, even) comes from efen, cognate with Dutch even and German eben.

In other languages, the form may be quite different from one for “level” or “flat”  (and some do not distinguish evening from night at all). French has soir, and Italian sera, but Spanish and Portuguese have tarde, focusing on lateness; Mandarin has wan (or more fully wanshang), which is also used in reference to lateness; Latin has vesper; Hebrew has erev (which makes me think of the song “Erev shel shoshanim,” “Evening of Roses”); Irish has tráthnóna (said sort of like “tra no na”), while Breton has abardaez; Slavic languages tend to have a “v-ch-r” pattern, as in Polish wieczór and Russian вечер vecher (which makes me think of the song “Podmoskovnie vechera,” commonly but not quite accurately called “Moscow Nights” in English); Finnish has ilta and Indonesian has malam… These generally have nothing in particular in common with evenness, but all have flavour sets of their own in their own languages.

But in English the two have come to have parallel forms, and so we may multiply the meanings. Think of two lines = and in them find equality, levelness, divisibility by two (and indeed the Chinese numeral for “two”), but also the horizon and clouds at sunset, and the table of food, and the body or bodies in bed. Two is the only even prime number; all others are odd. We may think of odd numbers and prime numbers as like the day – oppositional, singular, yang – and even numbers as like the night – receptive, cooperative, soft, yin, recessive in addition but dominant in multiplication – and we may see that there is one place that the two meet, the romancing of the numbers at the conjunction of the prime and the even: evening. The phrase at even and at prime means “at all times of the day,” but we know that evening is when it all comes together.

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crepuscular

Posted on October 24, 2011 | 8 comments

I went on a road trip with two friends today. As we were driving across the Burlington Bay Skyway, we observed the quasi-stygian landscape (Burtynskyesque) of the steel mills. But it’s really quite a tame sight now compared to what it once was; one has the sense of the steel industry gradually fading into twilight years. I recalled my first encounter with Hamilton, as a child, when a family friend, driving me and my brother from the airport in Toronto to my dad’s childhood stomping grounds in Buffalo, had us put on masks to protect our lungs from the air there; when we stopped for gas, the air had a definite orange cast.

My friend Alex’s response? “It made spectacular sunsets.” True enough: clear air makes for fairly plain sunsets – the more crap you have in the air, the more spectacular the sunsets tend to be (as long as you can see them), layered like crepe paper, sometimes with almost muscular striations (though, in the wrong smog, creeping and pustular). Your eyes tell you to breathe deep the gathering gloom (to quote from the Moody Blues); your lungs beg you not to.

But I mislead: crepuscular does not relate to sunsets, not directly. Rather, it relates to what follows them, something that comes in ample quantity in boreal latitudes and is brutally fleeting in the tropics: twilight.

Oh, great, now I’m going to get people coming to this page because they were searching for stuff on vampires. Ugh. I haven’t read the Twilight series, so I have no direct comments on its merits, but in general I’m not strongly inclined to read about creeps and corpuscles. It sounds craptacular to me. I’m not here for tweens (other than exceptionally literate ones); I’m here today to talk about the between times – between night and not night. When darkness covers us, it is not the vampire’s cape, not the shades we are dragged into by a creeper, but rather the dull crepe of the creper, which is Latin for “dark”. Make a diminutive of that and you have crepusculum, the lesser darkness: what we experience as the suddenly frantic half-dark.

The Romans tended to use the term more for dawn than for dusk, it seems, but dusk is more in our experience now. True, many of us in northern countries wake in the pre-dawn twilight for much of the year, but few people are not up and about and looking out during the dimming hours. It’s a time when we probably finish work and settle into our home-oriented routines, perhaps to settle in for a favourite sitcom, or go out for leisure and pleasure. The word twilight has a certain dreamy quality to it, an echo of night and a persistence of light. But the word crepuscular, an adjective for twilight, is more likely to send a shiver down the back, as though some unexpected furry thing were brushing against you, or perhaps a chupacabra were licking its chops in your carport.

True, this word hides sup and even super backwards, but in its crisp crackle and hiss (reminiscent of the sound from an old gramophone record set to play by a fireplace in a cabin in the grasslands a century back) we find no plenitude of positive associations as it passes over our tongues and by our eyes in a forward direction. Some people will like the taste of this word, but there are others who find it – as Elaine Phillips, in requesting this tasting, put it – sinister.

Still, even the not-pretty can have aesthetic value. The hazy air of Hamilton’s harbour presented a prepossessing picture. And from there we rode on, not into the sunset or twilight but just to Buffalo, where one of us owed the other two of us lunch (for losing a bet), at the Cheesecake Factory – we may not be Twilight fans, but we do watch The Big Bang Theory.

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Macon

Posted on October 23, 2011 | 5 comments

Mmmm… bacon. Salt, fat, protein… what’s not to like? But the question one inevitably runs into is, What kind of wine do you drink with it?

Aside from champagne, I mean. How about a nice chardonnay? I don’t mean one of those hello-sailor Australian or Californian oak-stick-in-your-face hyper-buttery chards – talk about gilding the lily. No, try something a little crisper to cut through the fat, maybe a little toasty, just a little edge of fried food in the nose. I won’t pussy-foot around this: you want a Pouilly-Fuissé, or some other chardonnay from the same region. I’m drinking one such right now: Louis Jadot Mâcon-Villages. The region is the Mâconnais, names after the city of Mâcon, in the Burgundy (Bourgogne) area of France.

You see? The name is perfect: Mmm + bacon = Macon. Of course it would be even more perfect (in word form if not flavour) for macon, which is bacon made from sheep (mutton + bacon), but who eats that outside of Scotland (or even inside of it, for the most part)?

Admittedly, you don’t want to build your culinary house on a masonry of graphemes (letters). It just happens that the wine in question does work nicely with the bacon. I’m sure, on the other hand, that far more bacon than Mâconnais is consumed in Macon. That’s Macon, Georgia, of course: note the a in place of â.

Does Macon, Georgia, have anything in common with Macon, France? Is it in fact named after it? Well, sorta and sorta. Both have hills on one side, so that’s something in common; in Georgia they have streams rushing down them that gave useful fuel to textile mills. In France they have grapes growing all over them. Those hills gave Mâcon it name; it comes from Ligurian mat “mountain” with the suffix asco, and that became Matisco in Latin, which became Mascon in French, and all those s’s that became silent over time got turned into circumflexes – that little peak on top of the a in Mâcon.

Macon, Georgia, was named after Nathaniel Macon, the sixth speaker of the US House of Representatives, a staunch opponent of the constitution and of a strong federal government, a man famous for voting “no” to practically everything (one may speculate bootlessly about sour grapes). His grandfather was Colonel Gideon Macon, an early settler who came from the Loire area of France. Which is where Mâcon is.

Of course Mâcon is pronounced the French way and Macon the English way, meaning the latter rhymes with bacon and the former does not. (Bacon, by the way, comes from a Germanic root cognate with back.) Another pair of words with the same sound pattern, different from this one only by having /s/ instead of /k/, is French maçon and its English translation mason, the English coming from an earlier or variant form of the French, which ultimately comes from a Germanic root probably cognate with make.

There is one other taste I get from Macon: in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, there’s this line: “No I was never in the Macon country! I’ve puked my puke of a life away here, I tell you! Here! In the Cackon country!” So… where is the Cackon country? Nowhere, actually. It’s a play on Macon, with a (frankly not obvious enough) reference to caca.

Does that seem like a stretch? Well, the thing is, Beckett, though an Irishman, wrote Godot in French first and then translated it to English himself. And in French the line is different: “Mais non, je n’ai jamais été dans le Vaucluse! J’ai coulé toute ma chaude-pisse d’existence ici, je te dis! Ici! Dans la Merdecluse!” You see, it’s not Mâcon, it’s Vaucluse – an area farther south in France. And the counterpart to Cackon is Merdecluse, which replaces vau with merde, the French word for “shit”.

Beckett also used puke in English where in the French he has chaude-pisse. It would be far too disgusting to relate that to chardonnay and bacon in some way, but I can’t help but be reminded by it of Pisse-Dru, which is a red wine made in Beaujolais, which is immediately south of Mâcon. I probably wouldn’t drink it with bacon. Maybe with a Big Mac, though.

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hatch

Posted on October 20, 2011 | 4 comments

“Well, that was a weekend down the booby hatch.” Marilyn Frack looked uncharacteristically like a tired wet hen. Her head was leaning against the heel of her hand, her elbow (in the usual black leather jacket) planted on the table, her whole body slumped in distinct disgruntlement. She lifted her head – and her other hand – long enough to toss a half glass of meritage down the hatch.

“We went sailing,” her other half, Edgar Frick, explained. I thought I heard an apologetic note in his voice.

Marilyn glanced up through her top lashes, which were leaking mascara. “And who hatched that plot, in mid-October?”

Edgar splayed his hand, palm up. “You saw the forecast.” He dashed back some of his glass of Hacker-Pschorr.

“What a hatchet job,” Marilyn said. “Sunny, my itchy cha-chas. The sky was cross-hatched with clouds in the morning, and by lunch we had to batten down the hatches.”

“Yes, well, things did get a little sketchy in the afternoon.”

“Sketchy?!” Marilyn raised her head, her eyes a bit wider. “I thought I was in the coney hatch!” I resisted the usually insurmountable impulse to ask whether she knew that this term for a madhouse came from the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in London, and whether she was a fan of the Canadian rock band Coney Hatch.

“The girls got especially excitable,” Edgar said, a touch ruefully.

Marilyn looked at me. “A clutch of chicks, barely hatched. That’s why he wanted to go on this wretched trip.”

“You seemed rather fond of the crewmen,” Edgar said.

“Chet and Chico? I spent all my time with Chuck. Up-chuck.”

“It was wretched,” Edgar allowed. “And I ratched my back in the parking lot. I was clutching the catch on a hatchback…”

Marilyn smirked. “I thought it was from catching your britches in a hatchway.”

“Well,” I said, hoping to switch the topic. “This is quite an affricate festival we’re having here. And all these Anglo-Saxon words…”

Marilyn looked at me and half-smiled. “Don’t lose your touch, hot-shot. Oh, I have some Anglo-Saxon words to hatch and dispatch at my match…” She glanced over at Edgar, who was doing his best to look like a sorry puppy. “But…” she said with a shrug, “ah, frick it.”

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