Category Archives: word tasting notes

crisp

Posted on September 22, 2011 | 5 comments

The Henry V concert was over, and I met up with Montgomery Starling-Byrd on the sidewalk outside Roy Thomson Hall.

“How was it?” I said.

“Crisp,” he said.

“As in Crispin or Crispinian?” These two were the martyred twin brothers honoured on St. Crispin’s Day, October 25, which is when Henry V won the battle of Agincourt. You may be interested to know that the brothers lived in Soissons, France, less than 300 km away from Agincourt (take the highway A26), but 1130 years before the battle.

“Yes,” he said. “Aside from the martyrdom bit.”

“No martyrdom for Crispus today,” I said. “I’m not wearing a tux.” I’ll explain that one: Crispin and Crispinian are derived from Latin crispus, which means “curly”; Crispus Attucks, a man of half-African and half-Wampanoag ancestry, is generally thought of as the first person killed in the American Revolution, at the Boston Massacre. And, yes, I was wearing white tie and tails, not black tie and tuxedo.

“Indeed, proper tails are a constant.” I suspect he was making a joke on Emperor Constantine I, who had a son named Crispus. Whom he had killed.

“Just as well,” I said, “my tux is going to hell in a handbasket.” That was a pun on Helena, the mother of Constantine, and also on Helena Bonham-Carter, cousin of Crispin Bonham-Carter, who is also an actor.

“Well, let us turn back to the future for a moment,” Montgomery said. I was surprised that he had seen Back to the Future, which starred Crispin Glover as McFly. “I ought to have gone once more into the breach in the concert hall; my intermission libations are catching up on me. Is there a pay toilet around here?”

“No pay toilets in Toronto,” I said. “We prefer to hold our manhoods cheap – or free, actually.” This was a reference to a line in King Henry’s speech before the battle. “We could go across King Street to Quotes – I’ll have a pint, and you’ll have a –”

“Yes,” Montgomery said, cutting me off, “that sounds good. A snack perhaps. All I’ve had is a packet of crisps. I wonder whether they have crêpes.” Yes, crêpe is cognate with crisp too. We started walking.

“More likely just French fries,” I said. “Calamari and Guinness are what I usually get. They might have curly fries, though.”

“Indeed, the original crisps,” Montgomery said. What he meant, of course, was that, as I’ve mentioned, crisp comes from Latin crispus – yes, “curly” – and came to mean “rippled, wrinkled” in the 1300s and “brittle” only in the 1500s. Lexicographers are unsure how it came to have the “brittle” meaning but speculate that the sound of the word had some influence. “But of course,” Montgomery added, “French fries are really chips, looking like wood chips. Whereas you colonials use chips to refer to crisps.”

“I do admit,” I said, “potato chips sound more like crisps. You can hear it when you eat them: ‘crisp, crisp, crisp.'” We walked on for a few seconds, pondering onomatopoeia. “So,” I said, returning to the original topic, “Crisp – I mean, Christopher Plummer was suitably plummy for you?”

“He has a voice one can curl up with,” Montgomery said. “And the orchestra and the two choirs could make one’s hair curl. And it was all, as I said, crisp and clear.”

“Marvellous,” I said. “I’m looking forward to doing it again on Saturday. But now,” I said, veering to the steps down to Quotes, “let it be in our flowing cups freshly rememb’red.”

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Caerphilly

Posted on September 21, 2011 | 6 comments

Montgomery Starling-Byrd, international president of the Order of Logogustation, happened to be passing through town and was pleased to have the chance to catch the Toronto Symphony Orchestra perform, among other things, William Walton’s Henry V featuring Christopher Plummer, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, and the Toronto Children’s Chorus. Today was the day before the first performance, and he was at Domus Logogustationis for conviviality with local word tasters. We had laid on some cheese and crackers and wine and so forth.

“I’ll have to be off to the dress rehearsal soon,” I said to Montgomery and to Maury, looking at my watch.

“Oh, yes,” said Montgomery, “you sing with the choir. Well, sing carefully.”

Elisa Lively was passing by. “You’re singing in something?”

“Walton’s Henry the Fifth,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “can I see the score?”

“English two, French zero,” Maury said. I reached down to my bag, pulled out my copy of the score, and handed it to her.

She flipped through it. “There’s quite a lot of tacet here.”

“Orchestra and narrator,” I said.

She kept flipping. “Oh, the Agincourt carol, nice.” Flip, flip. At the last page, she read a line at the bottom and remarked, “The layout was done in Caerphilly.” She pronounced the place name “care-filly.”

“Say that carefully,” Montgomery said. “The stress is on the second syllable.”

“Ker-filly,” she said.

“Now, when I hear that,” Maury said, “I think of cheese.”

“I’m certain the performance will not be cheesy,” Montgomery said.

“Because of Philly cream cheese?” Elisa asked.

“No,” Maury said, “Caerphilly is a kind of hard, crumbly white cheese. Named after the town it was first made in.”

“And the town’s name,” Montgomery said, “means ‘Ffili’s fort’.”

“Where is that, anyway?” Elisa asked.

“It’s a suburb of Cardiff,” Montgomery said, “down in south Wales. It is known for Caerphilly Castle, an excellent, almost archetypal example of the medieval castle. Thirteenth century, built for military purposes.” (The interested reader can see good pictures and description at www.castlewales.com/caerphil.html.)

“I daresay the English would have had a harder time attacking that than they did attacking Harfleur,” I remarked, referring to the first battle in Shakespeare’s Henry V, on which Walton’s piece is based. “They’d look at it and go once more into their breeches.”

Montgomery raised one eyebrow slightly at my off-colour pun on a Shakespearean quote. Then he said, “They would certainly have to do it carefully. But in fact, although it was built by English to intimidate the Welsh – at which it succeeded – the English did attack it too. Well, one set of English did it against another: the castle’s last real battle was when Queen Isabella besieged it in the early 1300s as an attack on her husband, Edward the Second, and his favourite, Hugh le Despenser.”

“It would have been either ironic or fitting,” Maury said, “for Henry to attack it, for though he was an English king, he was, as he declares in Shakespeare’s play, a Welshman.”

“Well,” I said, looking at my watch again, “today is St. Crispin‘s Day.” (That’s the day of the battle of Agincourt.)

“Tomorrow, rather,” Montgomery said.

“October 25, in reality,” Maury said.

“Well, today is ‘have some crispies day,'” Elisa said, and handed Montgomery a crispy cracker with a large dollop of cream cheese on it. “Be careful – that’s Philly.”

“You seem to have it in ample quantities,” Montgomery said.

“Oh, yes,” Elisa said. “We have a huge dispenser.” She snort-guffawed at her pun.

I made a small salute as I sidled towards the door. “Hold down the fort,” I said.

“And hold up the forte,” Montgomery said. “I’ll see you on the morrow.” And with that I left.

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whilst

Posted on September 20, 2011 | 6 comments

I saw the following sentence today in a little health calculator tool on the web, one of several options in a question about back pain: “I have no pain whilst travelling.”

I looked a second time to confirm that travelling had been spelled with two l’s. Of course it had. That’s the British spelling. And whilst is generally a flag for a British dialect.

It’s not that no one in Britain uses while. If I search the Telegraph‘s website, I see 2,970 hits for while in the most recent articles – compared to 6,710 for whilst. The Guardian, on the other hand, gives me 11,132 hits for whilst, and 446,935 for while. But of course while also has more uses (e.g., I haven’t seen you in a while). Cross the pond and you see that the New York Times has in the past 7 days used while more than 10,000 times – and whilst only 6 (not 6,000, just 6). The Globe and Mail gives me 343,369 results for while in all its contents, and 388 results for whilst. In the British parliament’s records (parliament.uk), while gets 158,169 hits and whilst gets 47,595; on parl.gc.ca, the Canadian parliament site, while as a simple search gets 55,296 hits and whilst gets 275.

In short, on the basis of these counts, use of whilst in relation to while appears to be an order or two of magnitude more frequent in Britain than in North America. And that matches what I think we all expect.

But what do we think of whilst? It’s cleaner, crisper, more definite; by comparison with it, while seems to wander. Of course, while has the effect of its other senses – noun (all the while; it’s been a while) and verb (while away the time), the latter of which in particular lends a laziness to it. But whilst also has the sound of a broom that doesn’t simply let time blow by, it sweeps it past. It has a taste of whisht (meaning “shut up” or “hush”) and whistle and wist (as in wistful) and, for that matter, whist (a card game, as you may know). You may also get a note of hissed and perhaps hilt.

I have no evidence for this – it would take me more time than I have right now to gather it – but I think it has a greater air of formality or correctness. At least in North America it is likely to, since it’s associated with British usage, and in particular more formal British usage.

It’s one of a family of words that also counts as members amongst, amidst, and even against: all have versions without the st as well (though again – or agin, as some people spell it – is not current in standard English to mean “against”). Now try each in alternation:

I have no pain while travelling.
I have no pain whilst travelling.

His money was scattered among the flowers.
His money was scattered amongst the flowers.

He remained placid amid a swarm of hooligans.
He remained placid amidst a swarm of hooligans.

You may also detect slight differences in shadings of meaning; amongst may seem more distributive, for instance. But what difference of tone do you taste?

Would you be inclined to think that the st versions are less formal or less correct? That they are errors, perhaps? Probably not. But you may be interested to know that they are newer.

Oh, they’re still old. Whilst, amidst, and amongst all showed up first around 1400. (Their shorter counterparts have been around as long as there’s been an English.) But originally they were whiles, amids, and amongs; the s was the genitive that was commonly used at the time for forming adverbial uses (you can see it also on anyways, besides, and similar words). But about a century later the t showed up.

And why did that t appear? Did something happen whilst they were speaking? Well, yes, the same thing that leads some speakers even today to add one to the word once (causing novelists the nuisance of having to decide whether to write oncet or wunst, neither of which looks right or reads smoothly). It may be by analogy with the superlative st ending (e.g, biggest, meanest), or it may just be a little phonological epenthesis like the /t/ or /d/ some people sometimes say after a word-final /n/: a post-stopping.

So, yeah, if today’s language pedants had been around in the 1500s, they would have been railing about these horrible new idiocies with the woefully uneducated st endings. But these words are instead entrenched in the language, time-honoured, whilom party crashers now wearing white tie and hobnobbing with the guests of honour. Language ever changes, and these are the sorts of things that go on whilst it does.

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benthic

Posted on September 19, 2011 | 3 comments

An article in the September 1, 2011, issue of Nature presents a ray of hope for the once and (perhaps) future toilers off the Atlantic coast. The fish that had once been thick in the depths of the ocean, notably cod and haddock, had been thinned out by overfishing, and a moratorium on their fishing had been imposed, but in the intervening two decades the balance had not been restored – the marine life forms that had flourished had been those that foraged higher in the water. The situation has seemed tragic, a plague, figuratively as well as literally abysmal, producing much unhappiness for many people; the losers have been those that feed at the bottom of the sea as well as those who feed on those that feed there. But surveys of the life forms under the sea (in particular on the Scotian Shelf) have shown indications of a return to the earlier balance: a decrease and stabilization of pelagic forage fish numbers, a normalization of plankton biomass, and the beginnings of an increase in large-bodied benthic predators – i.e., cod and haddock. In short, a period of misery and disappointment may yet turn out to have been the key to the best result for all concerned.

Pelagic? Benthic? These are two general levels of aquatic life. Pelagic (from Greek πέλαγος pelagos, “sea”) refers to the water of the open sea (or ocean, or a body of freshwater) that doesn’t touch any land – not even the bottom. The zone at and near the bottom of the sea (lake, river, etc.) is the benthic zone, and its inhabitants are called the benthos (from Greek βένθος benthos, “depth of the sea”). The bottom of the sea, of course, extends right up to where the water stops, at which point it becomes beach (or shore, anyway); as you might expect, the things that live on the floor near the shore are not those that live in the deepest depths. A broad division may be made between the littoral benthos, near the shore, and the abyssal benthos, down in the depths.

Benthic starts with a blunt /b/, belligerent or beautiful but at any rate bursting forth with voice in the breath; after a mid-low front vowel, it then softens into a nasal and further into a voiceless fricative, soft, whispering, but capable of subtle power; finally it pushes through a quick mid-high front vowel into a hard backstopping /k/. The echoes are many and varied: been thick, bent, nth (as in nth degree), benzene (which may have a familiar ring), bench (which the Scotian Shelf is rather like), bathyscaphe (something you can use to go see the beauties of the abyssal benthic zone), and perhaps even terebinth (an oak-like tree – and a good cure for mal de mer: if you’re feeling sea-sick, go sit under one).

Benthic also brings to mind Bentham, as in Jeremy Bentham, an English jurist and ethical philosopher of two centuries ago who held that the highest morality is the pursuit of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. And it makes me think of Benjamin, which is the name of the youngest of the sons of Israel – the one who would not betray Joseph – but also the name of many more recent people, such as Benjamin Lee Whorf, who suggested that the words we use for things can influence how we think about those things, and Walter Benjamin, a cultural critic who wrote many trenchant things, including this from The Image of Proust: “After all, nothing makes more sense to the model pupils of life than that a great achievement is the fruit of toil, misery, and disappointment. The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing…”

Must beauty therefore be immoral? Such a question may cast its nets too far from the waters of today’s word. But we do know that many a benthic fish has been kissed in St. John’s. And soon, perhaps, there will be more of them to kiss, and more reason to kiss them.

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sardonyx

Posted on September 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

This word really seems like a name for an Asterix character with a particularly mordant turn of phrase. Well, that would be Sardonix with an i, but you can see what I mean, anyway: it has an obvious taste of sardonic. And yet those people who use the word seem never to acknowledge that. Rather, it’s more likely to show up in some lapidary prose or verse where the author is talking a purple streak, and you just want to claw your way out of it. Something like this:

Within the car
Sat Pharaoh, whose bare head was girt around
By a crown of iron; and his sable hair,
Like strakey as a mane, fell where it would,
And somewhat hid his glossy sun-brent neck
And carcanet of precious sardonyx.

I didn’t make that up – it’s from “Joseph and His Brethren” by Charles Jeremiah Wells. Yes, he really wrote “And somewhat hid his glossy sun-brent neck And carcanet of precious sardonyx.” It’s OK, you can snicker: “Yeah, that’s good poetry. Somewhat good. Not.” It does inspire sardonics, doesn’t it?

I mean, really, that’s about as oily and dense as sardines. Which would be fitting, actually, since sardine may be related to Sardinia (the name of a Mediterranean island), which is also related to sardonic (there was a certain plant said to be from Sardinia that, if you ate it, would give you facial convulsions resembling derisive laughter and you would perhaps somewhat die; from that it came to be a reference to the actual kind of laughter that would produce those convulsions).

But is sardonyx also related to Sardinia? No, it’s related to Lydia and fingernails. I don’t mean Lydia the tattooed lady, though. Rather, the sard part is the name of a red kind of chalcedony, taken from the capital of ancient Lydia, called Σάρδεις in Greek and Sardis in Latin. The onyx part is from Greek for “fingernail” (as in onychogryphosis and onychophagia); as you likely know, it’s also a gem stone, a kind of chalcedony too – a streaky one. Usually it has streaks of black and white. But when the streaks are red instead, it’s sardonyx.

The word does have a sort of timeless or ancient quality to it, true. It makes me think of Sargon, the name of a king of ancient Akkadia and also of a character in a Star Trek episode. But it also makes me think of Sark, one of the Channel Islands and also a Scots word for a chemise (as in cutty sark). (That may in turn make one think of Nicholas Sarkozy.) And it brings to mind sarcastic and sarcophagus, Sargasso Sea and sardine and sergeant…

But it is the onyx, compact like a lynx, and sharp like its claws, that catches the eyes. Any word ending in yx is likely to, be it Styx or apteryx; this one has the added catch of being two pairs of letters each in reversed order (no and xy), and just incidentally it’s also the beginning of xynomavro backwards (but where sardonyx names a stone, orvamonyx would just get you stoned).

This word, then, takes the rounded sard, a word that may seem white like lard but that has sharp edges, and presses it in against onyx, red in tooth and especially claw, to name a stone made of red sard and white onyx in layers, pressed together, stratified like a Jell-O dessert, strawberry and blancmange, a little gem from a near-forgotten ancient world that you may set in the breastplate of your verse:

I behold
Dim glimmerings of lost jewels, far within
The sleeping waters, diamond, sardonyx,
Ruby and topaz, pearl and chrysolite,
Once glittering at the banquet on fair brows
That long ago were dust; and all around
Strewn on the surface of that silent sea
Are withering bridal wreaths, and glossy locks
Shorn from dear brows by loving hands, and scrolls
O’erwritten, haply with fond words of love
And vows of friendship, and fair pages flung
Fresh from the printer’s engine. There they lie
A moment, and then sink away from sight.

(From “The Flood of Years,” by William Cullen Bryant.)

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hauberk

Posted on September 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

What if someone were to spread slander about your good name – perhaps some chain mail questioning your mettle? How would you burke it? What defence would you don if someone called you shifty?

Today’s word, hauberk, is similar to my last name – Harbeck – especially when both are said by someone with an r-dropping accent. There’s even an easy orthographical transformation from one to the other: turn the u 90 degrees and swap it with the r. But aside from that little shift, I have no connection with a hauberk, which is a tunic – or shift – made of chain mail. (Not that I’m likely to get shirty about being linked to it.)

A hauberk is not the sort of thing you’re too likely to see in real life today. I’m sure I did see some when I was a kid – but not on the neighbours; in the Glenbow Museum. You may, of course, read about it, if you like your tales set in the middle ages (no, I don’t mean novels about people over 40 – some Teutonic romances, perhaps). Or if you read fantasy novels, for instance Tolkien.

A chain mail tunic made of mithril silver does save Frodo Baggins’s life at one point in that epic. But just now I am reminded of one of Tolkien’s pet interpolations, a long song, which I quoted yesterday in my post on chalcedony. He doesn’t mention a hauberk by name in that; rather, he names a haubergeon. What’s that? It may sound like a burgeoning hauberk, but actually it’s a smaller one – or just another word for one.

At any rate, a hauberk is something you’ll want if someone is after your neck. Neck? Well, that was actually the start of it: the word is from hals “neck” and bergan “cover”. It comes from Germanic roots but has been passed through Romance languages. Fair enough; all sorts people used to need them for fighting their multifarious feuds – with nothing to hold back a halbard, your family name might be cut short. Not that the fighters mostly had them: you can imagine that a chain-mail shirt would be expensive now (I mean a real one, not the kind you get as a giveaway in some game like The Lord of the Rings Online), and you may feel sure it would have been even farther out of reach for the ordinary person in feudal times.

A hauberk for a hobbit, of course, would be a shorter order. But a hauberk for a Harbeck? It may have a familiar ring, but it doesn’t quite suit me.

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chalcedony

Posted on September 14, 2011 | 10 comments

I went out for lunch at a Jack Astor’s with co-workers today. As they do at those restaurants, our waitress wrote her name on the brown paper on the table: CHELC. We thought she had stopped partway through because she was distracted by something, but actually she was just writing Chelsea (or Chelcey or whatever) in a cute way. I added a hyphen before the final C for clarity. And then I thought about chalcedony.

I didn’t think about chalcedony because of any connection with chalk (which CHELC also reminds me of, but which the waitress did not use – she used a crayon – and which is quite different from chalecedony) but just because Chelsea made me think of it, since chalcedony looks like it might be pronounced sort of like “Chelsea doney.” It also makes me think of chalice.

But chalcedony would more reasonably make me think of the French for chalice, câlice (a rude word in Quebec), or of calcium, even though chalcedony doesn’t contain calcium and it would be noteworthy to see a chalice made of it. This is because the opening ch is pronounced /k/. The second c, however, is /s/. And the preferred pronunciation has the stress on the second syllable, like “Cal said an E” (though you can also go with the flow and put stress on the first and third instead, as you probably want to anyway).

The liturgical air that chalice brings is not altogether inappropriate. As I remarked to my lunch companions, chalcedony is one of those minerals I can only recall ever having seen named in the Bible – specifically in its final book (Revelation), as one of the various precious stones of which the New Jerusalem is built: its foundations are made of twelve precious stones, to wit jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, carnelian, chrysolite (not chrysotile!), beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth, and amethyst.

Don’t you love that, when you’re reading something and they just mention some weird thing you’ve never heard of before as though everybody knows what it is, and in fact as though it’s one of the most important or valuable things going? Right there in between sapphire and emerald is chalcedony, and there’s also sardonyx (yeah, right!), carnelian, chrysoprase, jacinth… Not exactly as common as sand. In fact, mentioned nowhere else in the Bible.

It gets better: whatever they were calling chalcedony back then is almost certainly not what we call chalcedony now. (Latin versions of the Bible named the same stone as carbunculus or anthrax – ha, yes, ἄνθραξ anthrax is the Greek word for “carbuncle”.) But, then, although the name seems to clearly indicate that the stone is associated with Chalcedon, a town in Asia Minor (now a district of Istanbul), the OED tells us that this is actually very doubtful. It seems that earlier forms of the name had an r instead of an l, and may have been related to Carthage (Greek Καρχηδών Karkhedón) – but at any rate the name has changed stones since then.

The stone it now names is surely the one J.R.R. Tolkien had in mind. You see, one of those with whom I work, Christina Vasilevski, mentioned that she had seen it in The Lord of the Rings. And indeed it is there, in a song Bilbo Baggins sings at Rivendell about a mariner named Eärendil:

his bow was made of dragon-horn,
his arrows shorn of ebony
of silver was his habergeon,
his scabbard of chalcedony

Well, if a chalice, why not a scabbard, I suppose.  (Oh, by the way: habergeon? Hauberk: a chain-mail tunic.) But what is it, this chalcedony?

Silicon dioxide is what it is. Yup, silica. Same stuff that’s in sand. And in a whole lot of other things too. The way the molecules arrange themselves accounts for quite a lot of variety. Chalcedony is a version with a pearly lustre, and it comes in white, grey, brown, and black, and is translucent.

Oh, and it also comes in an assortment of varieties with different forms and different additions of other elements, and each with its own name: agate, aventurine, carnelian, chrysoprase, heliotrope, jasper, moss agate, mtorolite, onyx, sardonyx… Do some of those look familiar? Yes, nearly half of the foundations of the New Jerusalem are varieties of chalcedony. Which is itself a sort of silica. And silica is used everywhere in all sorts of things.

But, then, what the heck. English has so few letters and so few sounds and yet produces all these words with them…

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Styx, Stygian

Posted on September 12, 2011 | 2 comments

Another choir season has commenced. Tonight we were working on, among other things, Johannes Brahms’s Nänie, a fine piece which begins “Auch das Schöne muss sterben” (“The beautiful, too, must die”). One noun phrase in it caught my attention: des stygischen Zeus, which the English translation (which we are not singing) renders as the Stygian Jove.

The sounds of the two versions of this noun phrase are markedly different. In stygischen the fricatives are alveopalatal (“sh”) and the g is a real /g/ sound, and Zeus is said the German way, “tsoyss” to Anglo ears. Stygian Jove, on the other hand, stays at the tip of the tongue (ending forward of that with /v/) with its pair of munchy voiced affricates (“j”).

But there are a couple of questions the phrase raises. One would be “Why Jove and not Zeus or Jupiter?” I suspect not Zeus because of the assonance of Jove, and not Jupiter because the music calls for a single syllable. (Jove sounds poetic, old-boy-ish, or both; as it happens, it’s from the older Latin name for the top-dog god, Jovus, while Jupiter is formed from Jovus pater, “father Jove”. But I’m not on Jove today, by Jove, so I’m not even going to start on its similarities to names for the godhead in other languages… this time.)

Another question is “Whaddya mean, ‘Stygian Jove’? Zeus is up on Olympus. The lord of the Styx is Hades, a.k.a. Pluto.” And the answer to that is actually “Exactly. Stygian Jove or Stygian Zeus is a cute way of saying Pluto or Hades. Because what would the real Jove be doing down in the sticks? Hardly a very jovial place!”

Yes, by the way, jovial does come from Jove. But when I refer to the sticks, I don’t really mean the boondocks; I mean the Styx. If our recent dip into the Lethe has not erased it from your mind, you likely know that Styx is the name not only of a rock band but of the river that one crosses to enter the Underworld – it is a point of no return (not Point of Know Return, which is an album by not Styx but Kansas), and you must be ferried across by Charon (whom I associate with “Don’t Pay the Ferryman,” by not Styx but Chris de Burgh). In the Greek mythology, everyone ends up there, by contrast with the Christian version (which has actually gained a considerable Greek influence in our imagery), in which a person goes there only if he is unfit for heaven – for instance, if a criminal mind is all he’s ever had. (Oh, sorry, that’s from “Criminal Mind” by Lawrence Gowan, not by – wait! Lawrence Gowan is now the lead singer for Styx… with whom he does perform that song, though it’s from his solo years.)

OK, now, why is that rock group named Styx? Aside from that it’s the kind of name that sticks with you. It smacks of Hell, to be sure; it naturally leads a person to assume that Styx must be a heavy metal group. They have even been mistaken for one (they were accused of having backwards messages in their songs, too, and mocked this in their song “Heavy Metal Poisoning”). But they are not, not at all – what, the band that gave us “Lady,” “Come Sail Away,” “Babe,” “Mr. Roboto,” and “The Best of Times”? They chose the name Styx when, having to rename their band early on, it was (according to James Young a 1979 interview in Circus magazine) “the only one that none of us hated.”

That’s a delicious irony, because Styx is related to the Greek verb στυγεῖν stugein “hate” and adjective στυγνός stugnos “hateful, gloomy”. I don’t know that the word itself seems especially hateful or gloomy – it starts with St, a saint or the street (both things that are not found on the far side), and ends with that rakish pair, yx, a reverse male, an incomplete double-cross. What comes between st and xy, by the way? Just uvw: a set that looks like the waves of a river – and in fact they are all from the same Latin letter. It gets better, though: that y is actually a Latin representation of the Greek letter υ, which is actually also the source of u, v, and w, and which we represent in direct transliteration as u. Hiding in the middle of this word is the river itself, multiplying over time (soon to be legion?), waves getting rougher u v w as you get across.

It’s not exactly stagnant, then. Nope. And stagnant is an unrelated word. But you get from stugein a hint of how we get from Styx to Stygian: Greek has a derivational relation between the g and the x. From a word-tasting perspective, we may note that Styx is short and has a crisp, clean sound, while Stygian seems tighter, more pinched, more congested even. And longer. It makes me think a bit of a stinky pigeon (or was that just a Bat Out of Hell? Oh, wait, that’s an album by Meatloaf, not Styx). And the stigma of astigmatism.

But Stygian is often used to mean “dark” or “gloomy” and astigmatism doesn’t make things darker; it just blurs vision axially. Styes might dim your vision a bit more, if temporarily. But they wouldn’t lead to a truly Stygian darkness either. One needs the shades of Hades. By which I do not mean a pair of D&G or Oakley sunglasses worn by some plutocrat. Well, unless they’re wearing them as Charon takes their carry-on (picture Cerberus as a purse dog) – the beautiful people, too, must die.

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oligarchy

Posted on September 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

This word makes me think of a famous book that doesn’t exist: The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. It’s the seditious book in George Orwell’s 1984. I think it was in that title that I first encountered – well, not the exact word oligarchy, but a mark of its presence.

It’s not really a pretty word, is it, oligarchy? It has resonances of ugly and gawky and gherkin (though it does have a faint echo of olive garden). It makes me think of hold the car key, which is something that, in a family, only parents can do – the local oligarchy. (Well, big brother might get to hold the car key too.) The oli is oily, the lig might bring to mind ligament (and what ties bind a family or state together?), and the garch – well, I find it rather unlikeable, reminiscent of a harsh bird cry or a sound someone makes from deep within the throat just before expectorating.

On the other hand, the archy may seem more open and certainly is more familiar: anarchy, monarchy, and such like. It’s from the Greek root ἀρχός arkhos “ruler”. And the olig? From Greek ὀλίγος oligos, “small, little, few”. So oligarchy means “rule by a small group”.

Unsurprisingly, this is not a new word. It’s been in English at least since the 1500s, but was in Greek back in classical times. Rule by tight little in-groups – families, cabals, and so on – has occurred many times throughout history. Indeed, even in modern democracies, a small group may come to have power and to wield it largely unchecked for quite some time, helping their friends and doing things just the way they want with little or no regard for the main mass of the populace. And how rarely are they held to account – after years of depredations, they get re-elected yet again. And the announcement of the election poll results might as well be an “olly olly oxenfree” – or I should say “oligarchy oxenfree”: “Hey, power people, you made it without being caught out. You get to hold the car keys once again.”

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swarthy

Posted on September 10, 2011 | 6 comments

My wife and I went to hear the Red Army Choir the other night, and one of the songs they sang was “Smuglyanka,” the title of which they translated as “The Swarthy Girl.”

Swarthy girl. I understood what that meant, of course, but I found it a bit odd, because to me swarthy has something of a masculine air to it, and at the very least it seems to carry a heft (and muscle and perhaps hairiness) unexpected with girl. It may be from the echoes of sword and various swa words such as swashbuckling, swat, swarm, etc. (though note swallow and sway and a few others that may not have such a tone), but I really think it’s from the contexts in which I’ve generally seen it and the particular persons typically described as swarthy.

If we look at the common collocates of swarthy in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, we see some indication: by a fair amount, the most common collocate is man. Men is also common. Skin, hair, and face are all in there, of course; so are bearded, fellow, and guy. And there are various racial groups mentioned. But not any specifically feminine terms.

It’s not that one simply may not use swarthy with a female; Tennyson did – “A queen, with swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes.” But swarthiness seems to hint at a certain swordworthiness and, more to the point, the darkness of skin that it is associated with figured for a long time in English-language fiction as a characteristic of a foreigner either romantic (thus male, because female objects of attraction were long expected to be fair) or threatening (and so again male, typically).

What ethnic groups have been thought of as swarthy, by the way? Generally those surrounding the Mediterranean: Spaniards, (southern) Italians, Greeks, Turks, Arabs. Is it a racist or politically incorrect term? It seems that depends on whom you ask. It has indeed historically often been used as part of racial stereotyping and “othering,” but such usage does not invariably taint a word, especially not if it has enough positive or neutral uses.

We know that among the paler Europeans darkness of complexion was long looked on, um, darkly, and such denigration could be applied surprisingly broadly. Consider this quotation from Ben Franklin: “in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.”

Regardless of whether you find it racist or not, you almost certainly will find it archaic, literary, poetic or old-fashioned. And it is an old word, with long roots in English. It comes from swart, which was the originally more common word in English for “black” – all the other Germanic languages still have cognates of this for their word for “black” (e.g., German schwarz). But English has, as it sometimes does, been a bit perverse and gone with a different word – a word just as old, mind you, but out of step with the neighbours: black, of course.

Only swarthy doesn’t mean “black”, quite. Just dark. When not referring to people, it may describe a swamp or a shaded sward or (as Macaulay did) “bleak Hampstead’s swarthy moor.” When referring to people, it may well also refer to a “swarthy moor” – meaning Muslim. But in any case it means more olive-skinned and dark-haired.

And yet if I say Swarthmore (a name directly related to swarthy moor), you’ll probably think of a college full of rich white girls – and guys.* Go figure. Such small changes can put you into a whole new set of associations…

*Its student body is surely more diverse now. But established images take longer to change.

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