Category Archives: word tasting notes

hack

Posted on January 19, 2011 | 9 comments

So there was this hack hacker who was hacking away while hacking some bricks – a guy’s gotta earn a living; he also drove a hack – when some guy come up on a hack with a hack-hawk and asked, “Hey, can you hack a hack with that hack?” and pointed to the hacker’s hack. “Don’t you know the hack for that?” said the hacker. “You put the hacks in before it freezes.” He started hacking and hacking away again. The guy on the hack was pretty hacked off. “Too late for that, now, isn’t it? Look, if you can’t hack it, can I borrow your hack?” The hacker stopped hacking and hacking and said, “Go hack yourself.” So the guy set his hack-hawk on him.

So there was this second-rate computer hacker who was coughing nastily while putting some bricks in a drying frame – a guy’s gotta earn a living; he also drove a cab – when some guy came up on a hired horse with a young hawk in training and asked, “Hey, can you cut me a curling foothold with that mattock?” and pointed to the hacker’s mattock. “Don’t you know the shortcut for that?” said the hacker. “You put the footholds in before it freezes.” He started racking the bricks and coughing away again. The guy was pretty annoyed. “Too late for that, now, isn’t it? Look, if you’re not up to doing it, can I borrow your mattock?” The hacker stopped coughing and racking bricks and said, “Go hack yourself.” So the guy set his young hawk in training on him.

Was that a piece of hack writing, or what? I think the word hack was getting pretty hacked – meaning hackneyed – by the end. But it’s just a fact that there’s a lot of hack out there. It’s a short, convenient word, easy enough to say – unless your native tongue doesn’t have the sound /h/, of course, and allowing for considerable variation in the realization of the vowel, depending on accent. It nonetheless has one letter more than it has sounds; in English (unlike in Dutch, Danish, or Swedish), hak would look like bare hack-work, and frankly foreign. And of course hac would just be wrong – well, it’s a Latin word meaning, roughly, “over here”, but that’s entirely separate – partly because it wouldn’t look quite right but in the main (for my tastes) because it would lose that nice look of the h getting hacked into a k.

Almost all of the various senses of hack above come from two sources. One is a Germanic root, which has shown up in cognates in the various Germanic languages (mainly spelled hack, hak, hacke, and hakke), and it has to do with hewing and striking and implements for so doing. The other – relating mainly to the for-hire and transport senses – is as a shortening of hackney, which some trace to the British place name Hackney (“Haca’s Isle” or “Hook Isle”) but others (including the OED) trace to Romance sources such as French haquenée and Italian acchinea, “ambling nag”. There are also a couple of other hacks in there, including the drying rack for bricks and the table on which meat is set out for a young hawk in training (whence hack-hawk), which appear to have different origins, though etymologists can’t quite hack the sources of those.

Hack certainly has lots of echos (especially if you do it in a canyon). Many of them come from other meanings of hack. There are also all the other words that rhyme with it, plus words such as hap and hat, and hick, heck, huck, hock, hook, hike, hake, hark, hork… /h…k/ is a very useful frame for those linguistic bricks, phonemes. And it has an undeniable flavour that colours, to some extent, every usage it has, with its shortness and sharpness, starting with a quick chest pulse and staying stuck at the back of the tongue (well, except for the vowel – hock would be all back, all the time).

I am also, just incidentally, put in mind of Hakka, which is a dialect of Chinese and an associated ethnic group within the Han Chinese. That’s not pronounced like “hacka”, though – the a is as in father. And while you might be led to expect a dialect with a sort of hacking sound and rhythm, Hakka is actually pretty even and smooth overall (I have a couple of friends who speak it).

And I suppose it makes me think of my last name, if I drop the rbe from the middle. But I don’t expect anyone else to make that association!

Thanks to Doug Linzey for suggesting hack.

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concatenate

Posted on January 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

This word has quite the interesting dry sound, with its voiceless stops (two back, two front) and its four-beat rhythm stressing on the second syllable: perhaps mechanical, like an assembly line, the raw goods coming through conca and being formed by a stamping or bending machine into the final result tenate (the c’s pressed and formed to t’s – or to e’s with the t’s inserted; vowels inserted, removed, or reshaped); perhaps like a chain of tapdancers or stomp-dancers stamping a finale; or perhaps like the sputtering of someone with a mouthful of dry feathers – maybe Sylvester spitting and hacking as Tweety has escaped from his mouth (and left a little something behind as a lesson). He’ll never be the cat that ate the canary, but you can’t keep a cat from its innate disposition, not even with a chain.

Concatenate can’t avoid sounding like a technical word, but at the same time with a little tinge of taste of something out of whack or collapsing, discombobulated, perhaps (or maybe with a cry of “Suffering succotash!”) – a half-heard echo of catastrophe, plus the sense, like one gets with procrastinate, of being a useful long word for something that could of course always be said with a set of shorter words rather than a chain of morphemes.

And what are the morphemes? It’s Latin, of course, and you will know con: yes, “together” again. The ate ending is a verbal suffix, and a very common one in English; we still make new words with it on occasion, all to do with making something of something or changing something from one state to another or simply engaging in an activity of some sort (I leave it to you to meditate on examples to illuminate, such as your mind may prestidigitate when you cogitate). That leaves us with caten, which comes from Latin catena “chain” and can also be seen in the geometric term catenary, which names the graceful curve produced by a chain hanging from both ends.

So what are the shorter words we could use? Well, chain together would be one possibility. If you’re devoted to Anglo-Saxon roots, however, you’ll have to let chain fall; it, too, comes from catena. An alternative would be string together.

Concatenation is a useful thing. We use it a fair bit in English word derivations; it’s common in many languages, and some use it quite liberally (those long German words spring to mind, but agglutinating languages go even farther – meanwhile, isolating languages don’t use it for making new words). But it’s also useful in other areas. Concatenate happens to be one of my favourite commands in Microsoft Excel, for instance, because you can take sets of text in different categories (be they names and addresses or variable components of a URL) and string them together to coherent outputs. It’s saved me a lot of time from time to time.

But a difference between how we tend to think of concatenation and how real chains are actually made is the matter of overlapping. Chains work precisely because they overlap (though I suppose if you used glue to hold the parts together that wouldn’t technically be overlapping), while concatenation in Excel and in many other things is a matter of packing and sticking.

As it happens, concatenate has a bit of an aspect of overlapping: there is the a from catena and ate. And, of course, there are bits you can see in it that aren’t really source parts, just adventitious strings: cat overlapping with ate overlapping with ten (the cat ate ten what? Canaries? Ha – nary a one, not even the one on the catenary. But we do know he ate ’n’ ate. Maybe it was conch. Maybe it was just at a chain restaurant).

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remunerate

Posted on January 17, 2011 | Leave a comment

This word confuses quite a lot of people. It’s as though it’s been stirred or something – remunerate? Shouldn’t that be renumerate? As in numeral? Or perhaps related to Latin nummus, “coin”? We’re talking about paying here, after all, settling accounts.

Well, that may be, but we’re not talking about it on the basis of numbers or coins. It’s a question of giving here. The Latin source is munus, “gift” – and the re made it mean, originally, “give back” (there was once also a word munerate, but that one has gone by the wayside). So this word is related to munificent. It’s also related, just incidentally, to municipal, because the same root munus could also refer to “office” and “official duty” – making it also the source of communal and community. The connection between gifts and offices is obligation and being obliging.

So this word might lead a person to think of giving back to the community, for instance. Remunerate can of course refer to any kind of payment (and especially wages), but when we think of the benefits we receive from our community, and the obligations we have to help maintain it and its benefits, we really ought to be so obliging as to think about giving back rather than holding back. (I cannot hold back from observing also that anyone who thinks that their community can maintain or increase services while receiving less remuneration must be innumerate – though, alas, such people also seem almost innumerable.)

This word is, however, in the main a ten-dollar word for “pay” – especially “pay wages”. And its far-more-common noun derivative remuneration is correspondingly a ten-dollar word for “payment” – or the noun “pay”. You give your work, you get money back for it. Do you get fair pay, or just fair words? That depends on your employer, of course. But I am put in mind of a scene from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Costard (a comic servile knave) is set to a task by a rather pompous fellow, who presses some money into his hand and says, “There is remuneration; for the best ward of mine honour is rewarding my dependents.” Once the fellow has left, Costard inspects it and says, “Now will I look to his remuneration. Remuneration! O! that’s the Latin word for three farthings: three farthings, remuneration. ‘What’s the price of this inkle?’ ‘One penny.’ ‘No, I’ll give you a remuneration:’ why, it carries it. Remuneration! why, it is a fairer name than French crown. I will never buy and sell out of this word.” (A farthing was a quarter of a penny.)

Later in the scene, Costard is set to another task by another, ironically more munificent, fellow, who gives him a shilling and says, “There’s thy guerdon: go.” Costard’s response: “Gardon, O sweet gardon! better than remuneration; a ’leven-pence farthing better. Most sweet gardon! I will do it, sir, in print. Gardon! remuneration!” Ha – marry, quite contrary, no? How does the guerdon go!

The best thing I can think of to help a person remember that it’s remunerate rather than renumerate (and remuneration rather than renumeration) is to think of money (not nummy), although it’s not actually a related word. Or you can think of your municipal community! For me, I am actually put in mind of French remuer, “stir” – also unrelated, but it is fun on occasion to mix it up a bit.

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adnexa

Posted on January 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

OK, yes, this word caught my attention when it crossed my eyes in no small part because of the x. (I’ve since uncrossed my eyes. Also undotted my tease.) You can just picture the effect of an unexpected word on the ordinary sleepy eye: sleepy eye e sees word, blinks for a moment x, then opens wide a. If it’s a really good word, the hairs on your head and neck might even stand up d. Safe to say, though, that your fingernail on your fingertip n won’t extend to be a claw, unless you’re a cat.

Adnexa seems like it could be a name for a girl, doesn’t it? Or perhaps for a consulting company or advertising broker. Or a model of car. At the very least it seems to me to have an air of almost studied sexiness, the sort that comes with wavy hair, long eyelashes, painted nails…

On the other hand (the one without the painted nails, I guess), the sound of it, I must admit, also makes me think of sinus congestion. It’s the /dn/, for sure, but amplified by the sticky-throat and harder-swallow sound of /ks/ at the x. That sense is a sort of awkward appendix to the rest of the word.

Hm, well, perhaps appendix isn’t the right word, quite. In literature, an appendix is something extrinsic but useful, but in the body an appendix is simply vestigial and without apparent function. And anything that bears on the taste of a word has a function – or should I say an effect. Even the off tastes come in subtly.

So what is the word for those parts of the body that are peripheral to an organ but also have functions? Like the eyelids on an eye – and the eyebrows, tear ducts, et cetera? The hair growing on your skin, and even the muscles that horripilate (make it stand on end)? Fingernails too? Oh, I know. It’s from Latin ad “to” plus nectere “tie, bind”. Is it annex? No, though annex also comes from that. Nope, the word I want is… oh, yes, you guessed it… (I guess I am dotting my tease after all…) It’s adnexa, noun, plural.

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fatigue

Posted on January 16, 2011 | 2 comments

I’m listening to Jan Kaczmarek’s soundtrack for Washington Square, the movie directed by Agnieszka Holland in 1997. It’s really a nice piece of work, and one I do not tire of (except for the short children’s song “The Tale of the String”). In particular, there is one song in it, sung by Catherine and Morris as they play the piano, that is quite lovely. The words are in Italian; they are actually a poem by the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, “Tu chiami una vita.” (I feel quite certain that the song is not in Henry James’s book, although I have not read it. The book was published in 1880; Quasimodo was born in 1908.) The opening words are “Fatica d’amore.”

Ah, now, what is fatica d’amore? I’m sure you know that amore is “love”. Fatica, for its part, happens to be related to English fatigue. (It it also pronounced with the stress on the first syllable.) So is fatica d’amore “fatigue of love”? It could mean that; it could also mean “hard work of love” – you could say “labour of love,” though more in the sense of “love’s labours.”

But how is it that the word could mean both the labour and its result? Well, at least the senses are connected. The Latin source, as it happens, is a verb, fatigare, which means (according to the Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary) “weary, tire, fatigue; harass; importune; overcome” (and of course we have an English verb fatigue, which you now know was not formed by verbing the noun). Verbs that denote the causing of an effect can be nouned into the effect or the cause. Or, sometimes, both, by choice.

In English, we mostly don’t use fatigue to refer to things that cause fatigue, though in the past it was an available sense. The modern exception is in military usage, where non-soldierly grunt work, often assigned for punishment, is called fatigue (and the kind of clothing one wears to perform such work is called fatigues). Otherwise, it refers to a weariness that comes from sustained exertion.

Indeed, it almost seems a word made to be said when fatigued. It starts with the puff of /f/, and then a reduced vowel in an unstressed syllable; after that is the /t/, which may be crisp but comes with a puff of air after it that, in a fatigued condition, may become an escaping sigh. The main vowel is that /i/ that we hear in please, gee, yeesh – the tongue still able to tense, but the incipient exhaustion and perhaps exasperation is forcing its way through. And then it ends with that back-of-the-mouth stop /g/, as in words of tossing up one’s hands as with ag! or just trying and failing to swallow. Put all together, it moves from the front to the back in a sort of fading away, evanescing.

The written shape has a certain something that way too, if you wish. The f is already bent over; the t is shorter; the i is more reduced again; and after that nothing stands up, and in fact it sinks in a slump into g. The last two letters aren’t even pronounced. (That’s because we got the word from French, but I will not tire you with a history of French pronunciation and orthography.)

Of course something may be a labour of love without being laboursome or fatiguing – these word tastings are an example for me. But I have a hunch that Salvatore Quasimodo, in his poem, meant something deeper. The poem speaks of sadness and of naming a life that within, deep, has names of heavens and gardens (and Kaczmarek’s music repeats a lovely sequence on “di cieli e giardini”). But then it adds, “E fosse mia carne che il dono di male trasforma”: “And it would be my flesh that the gift of evil transformed.”

Evil? Well, or misfortune, harm, pain, ache… just like French mal. Heavens, gardens (to labour in?), flesh transformed by a gift of hurt… indeed, the fatigue of love. And, not incidentally, quite apposite to Washington Square.

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vertigo

Posted on January 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

You’re up, high up, high in the vertical, eyes diverted, extraverted – outside at the railing – and then you look over the verge, and o, view forever; you are riveted, shivering at vividness of the overt elevation, but, no, git over, your ungoverned gogglings have given way to a riven, gyrating vigilance, and with a vagitus you divagate dizzily to an ogive or trave, a rivage above the gorge, and are revisited by gravity.

Hello, hello… you’re in a place called vertigo. It’s everything you wish you didn’t know… (U2, eh?) But question: what part is the vertigo? You have found yourself in vertiginous heights. Were you overcome with a fear of falling? You may or may not have been, but that wasn’t the vertigo; that’s acrophobia. Oh, millions of people are no doubt under the impression, abetted by the Hitchcock film Vertigo, that vertigo has something to do with heights. But it ain’t necessarily so.

What I mean is that heights can cause vertigo in some people, but so can many other things. I daresay more people probably get it from excessive alcohol consumption. The vert, you see, is etymologically the same vert as in vertical, but the root refers to turning. Turn up and it’s vertical. Turn back and you revert; turn aside and you divert. And if you feel like you’re turning – your head spins right round, baby, right round, like a record, baby, right round, round, round – when you’re not actually moving, that’s vertigo. (And I don’t know about you, but when I get it, I go vert – that’s green, son, green.)

Vert is really a sort of angular root – think of vertex, for instance (whereas vertigo is more like a vortex) – but in the end you can see it go round. And in your mouth you can feel it go round, your lips rounding. Not only that, you can feel it go around your mouth, starting with the teeth and lips /v/, coming next to touch at the tip of the tongue /t/, then bouncing off the back /g/ back up to the front /o/. Say it over and over, vertigovertigovertigovertigo, and you can feel it whirl around in your mouth like a carnival ride, until, perhaps, at last you end up with fatigue. It ain’t easy bein’ dizzy.

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omnibus

Posted on January 12, 2011 | 2 comments

Where to start with this word? I’m not sure I’ll be able to cover everything…

Well, I can’t remember what my first encounter with it was – whether it was in reference to a transit vehicle or in the phrase sol lucet omnibus. I know I learned the Latin phrase (for some reason) when my age was still in the single digits, and I knew it meant “the sun shines everywhere,” though I didn’t actually grasp the figurative value of it, and of course I said it in like English.

I naturally knew the word bus for the vehicle before I knew the word omnibus (which I might have first seen in a Richard Scarry book), and so I inferred not unreasonably that an omnibus might be some special kind of bus – perhaps one of those red double-decker ones I saw in Scarry’s cartoons. It does have a sound of some greater quality. Once I had learned that it was really just the same vehicle, I concluded that it was a fancier, more British way of saying the thing, like motorcar or automobile. And indeed it does have a higher, more archaic (even quaint) tone, and I would say sounds more British to North American ears.

How did this word come about, anyway? Was the omni grandiosely tacked on to the humble bus? Well, no, of course it went the other way: just as automobile became auto (now itself a rather dated-sounding word), omnibus became bus. Actually, a closer analogue would be trimming helicopter to copter. You see, the roots in automobile are indeed auto and mobile, while the roots in helicopter are helico and pter – and as to omnibus, it’s actually the noun root omn(i) with the inflectional ending ibus (as in pax in hominibus, “peace among people”). It means “for all” – it’s the dative plural of omnis.

And what that means is that it’s not a masculine singular, and so it doesn’t pluralize to omnibi. This puts it in the same set as mumpsimus (which comes from an inflected verb), vade mecum (in which mecum is a compound meaning “with me”, so it doesn’t pluralize as meca), and arguably octopus (which is a Latinization of a Greek word wherein the source of pus is pous, meaning “foot”). Although, as Ross Ewage lately tweeted, “If the plural of omnibus were omni-bi, they would take everyone,” it’s not and they don’t. Well, not in the sense he undoubtedly meant, anyway.

They do, of course, take all comers when they’re part of a transit system. And, tangentially, if you ride a bus often, you will likely see people reading from an omnibus every so often. By which I mean the book they are reading is an omnibus edition – not an edition made for reading on the bus, but a volume of collected works by an author. (This is a more British term, generally.) For instance, on my shelf I have The First Rumpole Omnibus, by John Mortimer, which is the first anthology of tales of Rumpole of the Bailey.

I think it quite possible that Mortimer (or whoever named the book) also liked the added legal overtone of omnibus. You see, another common use of omnibus is in omnibus bill, which is not the name of a bus driver or anthology editor but rather a bill submitted to legislative approval that is a collection of unrelated pieces (what Kurt Vonnegut, among others, has termed a blivet: ten pounds of shit in a five-pound sack).

By the way, omnibus has been shortened to bus in another application independently of its use with transit vehicles: a main connector in computer circuitry, originally an omnibus bar, became bus bar, and is now often just called a bus.

Ah, well, this magic bus. More to the point, this magic omnibus. Wherever it goes, it makes people think of busing (which I am careful not to spell bussing), be it in legislature, computers, books, or random bits of Latin such as mottos (Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno – Switzerland; Justitia omnibus – Washington DC; Omnia omnibus ubique – Harrods). It can thus be used for good or ill effect in dog Latin, such as this classic, meant to be understood in light of the English it sounds like:

Caesar adsum jam forte
Brutus et erat
Caesar sic in omnibus
Brutus sic in at

Sol sure don’t lucet on that omnibus (but Caesar did). Oh well, sick transit gloria…

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hippopotamus

Posted on January 11, 2011 | 2 comments

The full length of this word rather splutters and pops, doesn’t it? Perhaps like your outboard motor coughing violently as you frantically try to restart it after it has stalled out perilously close to a hippopotamus. Its four-horsepower engine is ceding to the four horsemen of the hippocalypse. You are mere seconds away from having your head bitten off – quite literally (and perhaps littorally, though rather more likely riparially, but not reparably). You can try praying to St. Augustine, but he’s not the patron saint of hippos; he just was from Hippo.

Ah, now, hippo, that’s a word that sounds a bit more apposite for these beasts, doesn’t it? Heavy, round, big in the hips – and everywhere else. It’s a short word, a mere four phonemes, something even Frankenstein’s monster could manage to grunt out of his gullet. But hippos are not thought of as hideous; they seem so big, round, and goofy. Many Canadians will remember a cell phone commercial that made use of the song “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” sung by ten-year-old Gayla Peevey (well, she was ten in 1953, when she sang it), with an endearing hippo waddling around.

Well, I’ve got some bad news for you, sunshine. Hippos are the most murderous animals in all of Africa. They’re huge, they can outrun you, and they are, as an article from Science Digest (November 1974, by George W. Frame and Lory Herbison Frame) puts it, wantonly malicious beasts. Oh, and they like to fling their poo around. Actually. At other hippos and whoever else is in the vicinity. (I’m sure it’s mere coincidence that within hippopotamus you can find letters for several words for excrement.)

There are some redeeming factors, though. Not for actual hippos – to heck with them – but for the word, to start with. It actually comes from Greek hippos “horse” and potamos “river”, Latinized slightly. Yet again we must conclude that early Greek explorers, such as there may have been, were terribly nearsighted. I mean, why not river cow? Then the beast would have been a bopotamus. But thanks to this unpleasant jungle ogre, when we see the Greek word for “horse” now elsewhere (for instance in hippodrome), we think of… yes… the unpleasant jungle ogre. Though we probably think of it as big, fat, and cute.

And then there is T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hippopotamus,” which it would be copyright infringement to reprint here in full, I think, but which I can tell you contrasts the earthly, sluggish, frail hippopotamus with the glorious True Church, and, in an ending that carries the same moral as some well-known parables, sees the hippopotamus take wing and sing with a harp of gold –

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

Well. The hippo may yet be redeemed. It needn’t worry about its image among consumers, meantime; idealized and fictitious hippos can be plenty cute (just like Mickey Mouse isn’t a vermin you want to kill with a spring-loaded trap). Witness, for instance, Hroshi, the sweet hippo created by Elaine Phillips (who suggested today’s word and provided research on the unpleasantness of real hippos). Hroshi is an endearing stuffed sort who has corresponded with an equally endearing, equally stuffed unicorn (see www.harbeck.ca/cww/cww_071128.html – and ebooks.ebookmall.com/ebook/332634-ebook.htm and search.barnesandnoble.com/Hippo-and-the-Unicorn/Lindsie-Haxton/e/9780595436705 for the book).

As to the word hippopotamus, it doesn’t really need redemption; it’s a perfectly fine, fun word, that starts off with a hi, and proceeds into a little game of lacrosse (or is it merely bubble wands?) before finishing off with tamus. It has a nice five-syllable cadence that peaks in the middle. And it’s just itching to be used in a tongue-twister.  Hmmm…

How do you stop an optimistic hippopotamus on the Appomattox? With a copper pot, but take apposite pity: a hippopotamus in captivity is not apt to be optimistic.

How’s that? More of a warm-up than a tongue twister, but ah, it’s a start…

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fervent

Posted on January 10, 2011 | 1 comment

There is a time-honoured unholy trinity of topic areas that one is supposed to be very careful of raising in conversation (and that are banned in some establishments): religion, politics, and sports. In all three, discussion can quickly reach a fever pitch, and those involved can build up quite a head of steam, primed for venting. Indeed, these are the realms of fervent beliefs.

Ah, fervent. My earliest recollection of this word is from a Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoon wherein a man was described as having prayed fervently (OK, yes, fervently, not fervent, but that’s an easy derivation); the illustration was a man with head bowed, lips slightly parted, a look of concentration on his face. I got the sense that fervent was something involving intense murmuring rather than wild shouting, something earnest and motivated from the heart but as quietly hot as, well, a fever. The word felt warm to me like my chest felt when I had a fever; the /v/ vibrates, and the /r/ is close, quietly urging; the nasal /n/ adds to that air.

This is not to say that that is how everyone sees it. But when I look in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, what things do I find most commonly described as fervent? Hope, prayer, belief, wish. The word by far most often seen with fervent actually comes before it: most. As in my most fervent hope and even the most fervent believers – and, yes, many of the most fervent supporters and had always been the most fervent defenders, so fervent can be associated with action as well as with an internal state. But the table tilts towards the internal. The most common types of fervent people are supporters, believers, and admirers.

And where do we get fervent from? Latin fervere, “boil, glow”. It also has a sister word in English meaning about the same, fervid – which, however, takes on a more active aspect, maybe (or maybe not) because of its taste of fevered, vivid, rabid, avid, and so on. We might reckon that fervid is more of the boil and fervent more of the glow. But probably most people who use either word are unaware of the exact Latin meaning of the etymon.

Either way, though, fervent (and fervid too) is a word that has a certain tone of gentility to it, or at least of erudition. That is not to say it is not encountered in the rough-and-tumble of debate on hot topics; in fact, I rather suspect (and see a trend in the search results I’ve seen, but cannot verify persuasively within a sensible amount of time this evening) that it is most often encountered in such contexts (probably less so with sports than with the other two). But even when it is used with a tone that is fevered or urgent, indeed even when used for venting, it bespeaks in its user – rightly or wrongly – a degree of intelligent analysis (something I wish most fervently for more of in such debates).

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thurifer

Posted on January 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

There are some words that are more frank in sense than others. This one, to most eyes, is not exactly a thoroughfare from form to meaning. It’s likely that you’ve never seen the word before, even if you’ve seen its referent (which you may or may not have).

Looking at it, what does it bring to mind? Perhaps it smacks of Lucifer, which is certainly a name that comes with an unpleasant smoky glow. Some might wonder if it relates to Urim and Thummim (what’s that? um, something from the Bible; high priests wore them…). Not exactly. Others might suspect it is some kind of musical instrument, like a theorbo. It is not, though a thurifer may know how to swing.

If you’re a word geek like me, you’ll fix immediately on the ifer. Yes, that’s the same as in Lucifer, which means “light bearer” (remember that Lucifer was chief of the angles angels before his fall); it’s also the same as in crucifer, which means “cross bearer”, and aquifer, which is from “water bearer” (yes, so is aquarius). In short, fer bears the sense “bearer” (and the i is connecting tissue). So, given that, I further wonder what that thur there is. So I look it up and find it’s thus.

Thus? No, not thus, thus. Don’t get incensed; it’s not “therefore”; incense is what it’s there for. You see, Latin for “incense” (in particular frankincense) is thus – which is also an English word, even if almost no one knows it is: the th voiceless, as in thin; the us is either like us or rhyming with goose. The shift from the /s/ to a /r/ in thus > thurifer – which happened by way of /z/ – is due to a phonological transformation called rhotacism: the fricative trips lightly to become a liquid when it’s between vowels (it verily purrs, though rhotacism is not eroticism). We North American English speakers do something similar with /t/ and /d/ in similar environments.

So is a thurifer a thing that carries incense? Hm. Well, a thurifer might be incensed at being called a thing. Actually, the referent of thurifer is the person. (In Medieval Latin they used the longer thuriferarius… probably until the scribes complained. I mean, really, holy smokes.) The incense burner that a thurifer carries (and likely swings on a chain) is in fact a thurible. Another name for a thurifer is thus thuribuler, though that’s rather terribler, I think. The thing is that thurible, like – for instance – chasuble, has that little niblet or dribble of /bl/ at the end, and while that might seem more technical or detail oriented in flavour, it lacks the smoothness of thurifer, with its soft brushing fricatives issuing forth like smoke. True, it also lacks the smack of Lucifer, but with richer flavours come inevitably some dark and contrasting tones. It was ever thus.

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