Category Archives: word tasting notes

scapegrace

Posted on October 25, 2010 | Leave a comment

…we looked around through the detritus, strewn about the room like a hurricane-tattered landscape, and at length discerned a grey cloth heap in the corner in the shape of a cloaked lad. A nudge with the toe provoked a peek from inside the cape, and then the raffish ragamuffin threw off his covering, stood up with a wry smile, adjusted the ragged red scarf at his throat, surveyed the remnants of his uninvited sojourn and, without so much as a “please” or “thank you,” swung himself through the window and on to his next adventure. What a scapegrace!

Ah, scapegrace. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a likeable definition: “A man or boy of reckless and disorderly habits; an incorrigible scamp. Often used playfully.” And the quotations confirm the impression that this is a word of 19th-century literature – an era when scapegraces often showed up in novels, perhaps in a tattered cap and with a hearty “Wotcher, mate!” The word has a certain dash to it, not only through the internal echo of vowels but through the rough beginning – scape so much like scrape, and with its hissing catch and the dangerous echo of escape – followed by the smooth, nay, grace-ful ending, which subsides into another hiss but carries such a smoothness of sense.

And why would we use this word for that kind of person? Well, the idea is that he escapes, or has escaped, the grace of God – in other words, he’s a little heathen, ain’t he. Sounds kind of Huck-Finn-ish, dunnit? Or perhaps Oliver Twistish. So, yes, the scape is taken from escape (which ultimately comes from Latin ex “out of” and cappa “cape, cloak”, suggesting an uncloaking). It is altogether unrelated to landscape (which really ought to be landship if you want it to match the modern forms of its components). And the grace is of course the same grace as in grace of God (and also the grace of my wife when she’s in skates on the ice) – which traces back to Latin gratus “pleasing”, which is also the source for several words for “thanks” (grazie, gracias, etc.).

Just incidentally, scapegrace is also used for birds. I don’t mean female humans – it’s only very rarely used for them – but rather as a name for the red-throated loon, which is seen (among other places) around New England and the Maritimes, including Cape Race in Newfoundland.

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cachinnate

Posted on October 25, 2010 | Leave a comment

I have a CD from the mid-1990s of the Tufts Beelzebubs, the all-male a cappella group from Tufts University (where I went to grad school); it has a number of excellent renditions of popular songs (one of my favourites is Pink Floyd’s “Hey You”). Among those songs is Paul Simon’s “Late in the Evening.”

If you’re familiar with that song, you’ll remember the line “There was music coming from the room next door, And my mother laughed the way some ladies do.” Well, as it happens, I’ve always had a sort of idea of what that laugh might be like – a sort of pleasant closed-mouth chuckle. Other people have other ideas; Paul Simon didn’t imitate it, so it’s open to imagination. Well, guess what: one of the members of the Beelzebubs did imitate his idea of it in the recording. The sound that follows that line, in their version, is no melodius chuckle or titter. No, he cachinnates.

Cachinnates! I mean, how cack-handed! Like some cartoon witch! Most unpleasant; a fly in the ointment of an otherwise good rendition. Such cacklin’ ain’t my idea of a good performance.

From context, you probably have an idea (if you didn’t before) of what cachinnate means. You also may have a sense of how it’s pronounced (like “cack innate”). You may nonetheless have some questions about this funny-looking word.

First of all, there is no established link to cackle, though both likely have origins in imitating what they name, and some people believe there is a link between them. But lest I mislead you, cachinnate does not mean “cackle” exactly; it means “laugh loudly or immoderately” – in other words, the word’s tinny taste conveys accurately the unpleasantness of its objectionable object.

Secondly, it’s from Latin, if you weren’t sure – the ch may have led you to suspect Greek, but the Latinate ate suffix is gotten honestly, so to speak. So why the ch for /k/? Well, Latin didn’t have a k – it represented the sound with c. But later on the c came to be an affricate before /e/ and /i/, and so in order to represent /k/ an h was written after the c, which is just as they do it in Italian now.

The result, to English eyes, is of course a bit odd, though not necessarily risible. While the sound of the word echoes cackle and crack, the sight of it may bring to mind Cochin China (an old colonial name for southern Viet Nam) or perhaps not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin (a phrase that may be accompanied with cachinnation, but that is of course followed by huffing and puffing and, ideally, blowing the house down). And of course both sight and sound have a taste of tinny, as mentioned, the sight doubly so with the two tin cans c and c.

But although the cachinnation in the Bubs’ recording of “Late in the Evening” jars me, I suppose I ought not to be too hard on them. Cachinnation is at least a sign of a sense of humour. I will always prefer someone with an innate cache of cachinnation over an agelast.

Thanks to Elaine Phillips for suggesting cachinnation.

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Geronimo

Posted on October 23, 2010 | 1 comment

Sometimes (and not just when you’re bungee jumping) you have to take a leap of faith – you’re on the edge of a precipice, and your horse is waiting for you down by the river… The pursuers are closing in behind, so, with a great shout, you jump… And what do you shout? Some people might shout some holy name. Many will shout “Geronimo!” We don’t expect any will yawn.

Geronimooooo! Good thing to shout, no? Sounds kinda like “you’re on a roll” or part of “did you run him over”. It has the growling, clenching opening Ger, like gathering your nerves and muscles, followed by two quick running steps and then not the frighted /a/ but the determined /o/, sustained.

OK, but where does this word Geronimo come from? Well, you can see by the capitalization that it’s a name. You probably know it’s the name of a famous Apache warrior – this guy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goyaale.jpg. He sorta looks like the kind of guy who might have a name that can be growled or rumbled – or shouted with a sustained final vowel – doncha think? Sure, and that name was Goyaalé, also written Goyahkla or Goyathlay (the last consonant is a voiceless lateral affricate like the one at the start of Lhasa).

So how do you get Geronimo from Goyathlay? Well, you don’t exactly; you get it from Mexican soldiers whom, in one battle, he attacked with a knife even though they were shooting at him. They did what many people would do when a ferocious and possibly crazy person with a knife is attacking them: they invoked – shouted – a holy name. In this case, it was Saint Jerome. Jerome in Spanish is Jerónimo or Geronimo. And after that battle, that was the name that stuck with him. Is that an appropriate name? Well, he was said to have special spiritual or magical powers, and Geronimo comes from Greek Hieronymos, which means “holy name”. Goyathlay, by the way, means “one who yawns”.

But why shout Geronimo when jumping? Well, in 1940, the US Army were looking at the feasibility of mass parachuting of troops. The night before the first mass test jump, the troops at Fort Benning watched the 1939 movie Geronimo, about the eponymous Indian. In one scene in the movie, Geronimo gets away from the army by jumping off a cliff into a river to escape on his horse; as he does so, he shouts his name. The troops had some drinks after the movie, and one of them declared that he would shout “Geronimo!” as he jumped out the airplane door, to prove he wasn’t scared. And he did. And it caught on.

So… you are shouting a Greek name for a saint from where Croatia now is who translated the Bible into Latin, and you are doing it to invoke an Apache who was famous for fighting the American and Mexican armies, and whose real name referred to yawning; you are doing it because an actor (Victor Daniels, screen name Chief Thundercloud, part Cherokee and part European descent) shouted it in a movie directed and written by the American Paul Sloane, and the American paratrooper Private Aubrey Eberhardt imitated it.

Just something to think about while you’re jumping…

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integrous

Posted on October 21, 2010 | 5 comments

I was visiting my grandmother in the US last weekend. She lives in a Free Methodist nursing home now. She’s a very nice person, a woman who has always lived a life of utmost integrity but has never been an agelast. She’s unable to get out to church now, so we were looking for a suitable substitute on TV. We happened on a program on Inspiration TV called Campmeeting (when I was a kid living on an Indian reserve, we went to quite a few camp meetings, and they were exactly nothing like this program… but that’s a separate matter). The guy who was first singing, then talking, was a fellow called Mike Murdock. I won’t discuss my overall estimation of what he was saying, as this is not a theology tasting note (but hint: I wasn’t in complete agreement with it). But one thing he said caused me to pull out my Lett’s and write something down.

What he said was – he was talking about his father – he said his father was “an integrous man.” That’s integrous with the stress on the teg.

Now, he was speaking in a friendly, somewhat folksy style, one of those styles where you might interrupt and reframe a sentence midway through, but also with some degree of a sound of erudition. So maybe we’ll make some allowances. But, now, I want you to ask yourself, Is that a display of grammatical integrity? Is that an integrous use of English? Do you – can you – will you recognize that word, integrous?

Well, you know what it means. It’s obvious. It means, as a man, he was one – that’s one, the first integer, that’s integer as in whole number, because he lived his life in a whole, uncorrupted way. He was not divided – he didn’t say one thing one way and another thing another. Integrous comes from Latin integritas, “wholeness, completeness, purity, integrity”. And integritas comes from in meaning “not” and a root related to tangere “touch”. Untouched. He was not touched. He was not broken, or sullied, or even had a little fingerprint on him like you’d need to get our your handkerchief and wipe off. He was a man of integrity.

But again, are you asking, Why not just say “He was a man of integrity”? Well, I ask you, is there more integrity in using several words when you can use one? You say it’s not a word, but he used it and you understood it. So it’s a word. And maybe this is the one and only time you’ll hear it, but that doesn’t make it not a word if he used it and you understood. Write this down: this is the Law of Words: if one person uses an integral lexeme – that’s a thing used as a word, treated like a word – to mean something, and the person hearing it understands it to mean what it was intended to mean, then that’s a word, brother. You say it’s not in your dictionary? Maybe you just don’t have a big enough dictionary. I’ll tell you this: it’s in God’s dictionary. It’s also in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Now, those of you out there with your iPads and your desktop computers checking your OEDs, I know you’re about to say, It says “obsolete, rare.” And that’s true: they have just one quotation containing the word, and it’s from 1657. That’s not so long after the King James Version of the Bible was published. And that quote is, “That an action be good, the cause ought to be integrous.”

The cause ought to be integrous. You understood that, right? He meant something with it – he had a meaning in mind – he wanted to deliver a message to you. It wasn’t a maybe, it wasn’t scattered, it wasn’t I’ll-get-back-to-you-next-week. It was an integrous intention. He used that word, and you understood it. The action was good. It was good enough in 1657, and it’s good enough today.

But does it bother you? That’s not the way you say it, you say? That’s just a made-up word? Well, every word was made up sometime, and some of the words you use were made up a lot more recently than you think. You can keep going around through the garden gate and saying “He was a man of integrity.” You can use a prepositional phrase complement instead of a nice single adjective modifier, and I can’t stop you making extra work for yourself and everybody. But ask yourself: Is that an integrous thing to do?

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nunatak

Posted on October 19, 2010 | 3 comments

This word seems to me suited to some ogre with a spastic temper; can’t say exactly why. It certainly has two aspects to it: one is the rounded letters and nasal sound of nun, and the other is the sharp éclat of atak, the voiceless stops popping and the k looking like a blasting cap cracking a rock wall. And I confess that those two parts together always make me think of Sister Bernice going berserk.

But while this word does signify something that one may say bursts forth from something very staid, there is no actual explosive action involved. The very staid something it bursts forth from is the byword for slowness and cold: a glacier. But the thing that bursts forth – or rather juts out – is itself the acme of immobility: rock, solid cold hard rock. A nunatak is a peak of rock that juts out of a glacier.

And, like various other names for things associated with the great white north, this word comes to us from Inuktitut – you know, what they speak in Nunavut. And, yes, that nuna in nunatak is the same nuna as in Nunavut: it means “land”. And tak? In current Inuktitut spelling, it would be taq; it means “thing pertaining to”.

And should we spell it nunataq? Only if we want to present it as an Inuktitut word we are inserting in English. But that would stick out unnecessarily – it would be pretentious, in fact. We’ve had this word nunatak in the English language for a century and a quarter, rather longer than they’ve been using q in Inuktitut spelling. It’s also been in Swedish and Danish for as long (Denmark has plenty of nunataks – if you consider Greenland part of Denmark, which officially it is, though it is fairly autonomous). So let none attack our orthography.

Oh, and is it actually “noon attack” rather than “nun attack”? Well, in the original, it would be (but in the original the final stop would be uvular, not velar, and the a‘s would be rather as in father). But while these rocky peaks might seem to attack the noonday sun, we must accept that in the English version the pronunciation has gone the usual English way, and none other.

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katabatic

Posted on October 18, 2010 | 2 comments

Oh, this word looks and sounds like being pelted with ice cubes. That opening k is hard, hard… and the word ends with a /k/ as well, softened only in the mind by being written as c. You can hear the chattering teeth and shivering, kkkkkkkkk… And the /t/ and /t/, sounding like icicles snapping and written as two crosses from a graveyard t and t. The only voiced consonant is a stop /b/, not really voiced – just with a minimal voice offset and onset time (especially in English; some other languages do maintain a bit of voice during voiced stops, but in English normally not, unless of course we reduce them to flaps or taps).

The real kicker is what you see this word with: its common collocation is katabatic winds. Ohhh, now, does that not seem chaotic, like something hurled down from a nunatak by an evil tuurngaq – a howling wind, strong and cold enough to send an army of ten thousand into retreat.

But does katabatic sound like a word for a wind to you? It’s so hard-edged, and winds, as ill as they may be, generally buffet but do not cut. Yet I am put in mind of the song “Vihma” by the Finnish group Värttinä,* about being caught in a furious storm, which does not howl but chatters rapidly: “Upa-maita ulkkumasta taromaita tallomasta”; “Vihma silmäni virutti lumi kulmani kulutti”…

So is katabatic a Finnish word? No. Is it an Inuktitut word, like nunatak and tuurngaq? No. This word does not come from a cold country. Here’s a hint: one unusual thing about this word is that the kata is not spelled cata, as it normally is in English: catastrophe, cataplexy, catatonic… Yes, that kata is the Greek kata (κατα) meaning “downward”, coming this time not by way of Latin (which is the reson for those c’s) but straight into English about a century ago. And the batic? It is from batos (βατος), “going”. Katabatic thus means “going down”; its Greek source can also mean “retreating”, and its sibling katabasis or catabasis “retreat” has a particular historical reference: the retreat of the army of ten thousand Greeks described in Xenophon’s Anabasis.

So while the batic is the same one as in acrobatic, it has nothing to do with batik – with katabatic winds, you will not dye a fabric, though you might die a chilly death. In truth, though, you probably won’t. Most katabatic winds aren’t that strong, though some of them do reach hurricane force. It depends on the environment. Many are cold, although California’s Santa Ana winds often get warmed up by the time they hit bottom, for instance. The one thing they all have in common is just this: they are caused by heavy cold air being pulled down a slope by gravity.

Yes, katabatic winds are the air equivalent of a landslide or avalanche, except that they are not so abruptly triggered; air does not build up the kind of friction holding it back that snow or earth does (still, some katabatic winds are sudden, notably the williwaw, which has an ironically unabrupt name). But if you’re in, say, Antarctica or Greenland, with the air getting awfully cold high up on those ice sheets (and nunataks), it is quite heavy and has a long way to slide: at Antarctic McMurdo it batters and desiccates, and the piteraq of Kalaallit Nunaat can rack with a wicked and quick attack as it did to the town of Tasiilaq.

*By the way, in Värttinä the stress is on the first syllable and the ä’s are pronounced like the a in hat.

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agelast

Posted on October 17, 2010 | 7 comments

What can help a person reach old age last, or make their young age last longer? What could keep all those facial muscles that sag elastic? What might keep you in the la-la stage and out of some seniors’ stalag, eh? To my mind, it’s absolutely not being an agelast!

This is no laughing matter. I’ll explain: this word, first of all, has no relation to age and last. The morphemes that formed it in its Greek source were a (α) “not” and gelast (γελαστ), a root to do with laughing (γελαστος, “laughable”; γελαστης, “laugher”). An agelast is someone who doesn’t laugh. The word has three syllables, not two. And a now disused adjectival form is agelastic.

I bet we all know people like that: po-faced sorts who don’t think anything could possibly be funny. The people who piss in the popcorn of life. Sharing the world with those of us who think life is too important to be taken seriously are people of this sort who have no place for laughter. You might say they are the opposite of, say, thelemites.

Well, François Rabelais thought so. He was the one who came up with the term agelast (well, in French, agélaste), to characterize those sorts of people (whom he identifed with the Catholic Church of his time) who were life’s wet blankets – everything he liked least.

This is a nice, light, almost crispy word, like an expensive canapé on the tongue. At the same time, it has an overriding flavour of age and last, make of that what you will. The question is, is this a word we’re likely to keep and use for this? It has a flavour of erudition, certainly, and is suitable for scholarly discourse. Which is where it turns up: those places where one fears one would be looked down on for using a nice, lively, picturesque term like wet blanket – let alone piss in the popcorn. Ah, yes, the world of scholarly writing: the new bastion of the agelastic, and for that reason the place most likely to see the word agelast used…

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croissant

Posted on October 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

Croissants have been with us a long time, of course – their modern form was invented around the middle of the 19th century, though not without forerunners. (They were not invented by Viennese bakers commissioned to create them in commemoration of their having foiled a Moorish attempt at tunneling into the city during a siege; that’s a popular myth, but it is pure myth.) But my recollection is that they had a bit of a surge in the early 1980s, at least in Alberta, when some restaurants started serving not simple croissants but full sandwiches made with them. (The Oxford Companion to Food supports this notion, noting that in the late 1970s such sandwiches came into vogue in France in response to the invading hamburger; it would have taken a few years for the trend to reach Banff.)

The reason I remember the time with some clarity is that in my last year of high school, I wished to conduct a science experiment testing reaction times after intake of successive amounts of alcohol (inspired by an episode of WKRP). My subject, Dave Breisch, a good friend more than a decade older than I, a fellow who was never without his black leather jacket and always wore his hair in a ducktail, recommended one local establishment not simply for the relative ease of performing the test there but for the food – they had great croissants. Which he explained were not just the rolls but full sandwiches made with them. And which he pronounced “croy-sants.”

Well, how the heck do you pronounce this word if you’re an anglophone, anyway? The French way is just not available, not even substituting an English-style /r/: we don’t have /rw/ together in a syllable onset in our phonemic repertoire. (For proof, say Rwanda or ask anyone else to. Odds are very good they’ll add an extra syllable: /ru wan da/.) But, on the other hand, “croy-sant” just sounds, well, you know, uh, déclassé. We may do English-style spelling pronunciations of some loan words, but we all know enough about French to know that’s a bit too distorted. So, if we don’t wish to switch for one word into French phonemics, we will tend to just assimilate the /r/ into the /w/ and say /kwa/ instead of /krwa/. Some people, I believe, merge in the other direction and say /kra/ – especially in that synthetic macaronic word croissandwich, which can get to sound a bit like “crust sandwich” said sloppily.

Ah, crust… There’s a decent crispy taste of crust in croissant, isn’t there? Slightly less, true, if you say it more the French way, with a nasalized vowel followed by a glottal stop rather than the /nt/.

And of course the written form starts with the iconic c. It gets even better than that, though: say it the French way and the mouth goes from puckered to open, a fast dilation that matches the quick crescendo from voiceless to full voice. What has this to do with croissant? Why, croissant means “growing” (even in modern French it’s the present participle of croître “grow”). The source is Latin crescentem, also the source for crescendo and, of course, crescent. And how is a croissant or crescent growing? Is it because a croissant is thick in the middle and tapered at the end? Well, not per se, no. It’s because when the moon is waxing to full, that’s the shape you see. (Originally a waning moon was decrescent, but that’s now excrescent.) And crescent is so much nicer to say than convexo-concave, isn’t it? Which reminds me that the shape of a crescent is the same sort of shape as a cross-section of lenses for hyperopia (farsightedness) – that is to say, glasses one needs for reading.

Which are, of course, different from the glasses one needs for drinking. Which takes me back to Dave Breisch. I had a nice reaction timer ordered in by the school. We went to the pub (actually a hotel bar) and ate those nice croissants, too. But before we did, we ran four drinks through Dave and did the tests. And what I found was what was actually known generally to be the case: reaction times get faster at first (after a drink or so, depending on tolerance), as the person calms down and focuses… and then, with more drinks, the times rapidly get worse. The graph is itself a crescent shape, as the times are first decrescent and then crescent.

You may have noticed the irony of a leather-jacket-and-ducktail-wearing guy talking about how good the croissants were. I’m put in mind of a MAD Magazine parody of the TV show Simon & Simon, in which Rick (the country-style brother) asks A.J. (the citified brother) what he’s having for breakfast. “Espresso… and a croissant,” A.J. says. Rick replies that he doesn’t go for that fancy stuff, and he’ll just have a small cup of strong black coffee and a roll. And, yes, Dave was much more a Rick-style person. But I’m sure my tough-guy greaser-type friend who made a career as a nurse, and who died unexpectedly about a year and a half ago, would appreciate the fitting irony of my dedicating today’s word tasting note to his memory.

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retsina

Posted on October 13, 2010 | 5 comments

Retsina, as Tony Aspler points out, is an anagram of nastier. And, you know, that just about says it all.

OK, OK, millions of Greek people – and some non-Greek people too – like the stuff, even if others among us find it more suited for floor polish. I mean, seriously, wine flavoured with pine resin? It was a try-once thing for me.

But we’re not here to talk about the taste of retsina. We’re here to talk about the taste of retsina (you see, the italics there mean I’m referring to the word qua a word, not to its referent!).

Admittedly, anagrams are a part of the swirl-and-sniff of a word, and if they seem apposite – or even if they seem ironic, like stainer, which doesn’t really go for a white wine like most retsina is – then the taste of the word surely retains them. But there’s so much more. Say it: “re-tsi-na”. See how it stays at the tip of your tongue? If you’re among the many who use a retroflex /r/, then, yes, it starts more in the middle of the mouth, but even then probably towards the tip, in anticipation of the next consonants: /ts/ and then /n/.

Ah, that /ts/: a tasty pair, slightly sternutatory but anyway with a sense of salivation. English speakers usually say it across a syllable boundary, but in many other languages – including Greek – it’s an affricate and is all at the start of the syllable. Does it seem odd to start a syllable with /ts/? We start syllables all the time with just a slight change from that – move the tongue back a bit and you have “ch”.

One common way for an affricate to come about, by the way, is for a stop to occur before a vowel that causes the tongue to peel more slowly away from the palate. This is well-known in the development of Latin: for example, tio, originally /tio/, became over time /tsio/ (and then in some languages that borrowed the words went on and replaces the /tsi/ with a single “sh” fricative). But the same affricate can come about through other means, even from a /z/ or an /s/ in some cases. And that is what makes the etymology of this word a bit sticky.

It’s likely you’ve noticed the resemblance between retsina and resin. It’s for real: the words are cognate. The question is whether Greek retsina was borrowed from Latin resina or developed from ancient Greek ρητινη (rétiné), both of which meant “resin”. (Modern Greek for “resin” is ρητσινι, just one letter different from our word du jour.) The problem with the Latin source is that there isn’t any surviving Latin example of resina referring to resinated wine; the problem with the Greek source is that it would require an unusual morphological development – it would be expected to end in η, not α.

But no need to whine about it. Either way, we know what it is and we generally know what it comes from. And if you’re mixing grapes with sap, well, heck, that seems a bit less natural than some unexpected or unattested derivation, doesn’t it?

You gotta wonder, though, who came up with the idea of adding pine resin to wine. It’s not as though it leaches from the barrel – it’s added in small pieces to the crushed grapes and is filtered out with the skins. Seems to me a smarter thing to do with sap would involve boiling it, skimming it, and pouring it on your pancakes. But I guess if the Greeks don’t have maples… Well, they still don’t have to drink the stuff.

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abracadabra

Posted on October 13, 2010 | 1 comment

The magician has sawn in half the box in which his lovely assistant lies. Now he turns to the top half, from which her head protrudes, looking on expectantly. A lively tune by Steve Miller bounces and zaps in the background. This rabbit-grabber, who goes by the sinister name of El Maestro del Cadáver, raps his wand on the box and commands it in Spanish to open: “¡Abra!” And open it does, to reveal his assistant’s top half clad in nothing but an amulet with a paper scroll inside it. The assistant surveys her bust, folds her arms and, shooting El Maestro a look that could kill, says icily, “A bra, cad, a bra.”

Well, that’s what today’s word makes me think of. But mostly it makes me think of the Steve Miller song – “Abracadabra” (“Abra, abracadabra… I wanna reach out and grab ya”). And, of course, in the world of Harry Potter, the killing curse: Avada Kedavra.

This word is the quintessential magic word – or, anyway, the quintessential magic-trick word, the word you use to go with a little hocus-pocus. It has a bit of the incantatory quality to it in the rhyming, /æbrə/ and /dæbrə/, with an epenthetic syllable /kə/ giving it a feel in the same vein as thingamabob or tickety-boo with a taste of ka-ching, kaboom, and all those other words that cock before firing. The rolling /r/ gives it the necessary flourish for magic. The shape of it looks a bit like a film strip of a fancy trick with cups and balls. Even the fingers, typing it, may seem to be performing a little magic gesture, a dance that loops around and back with a central epicycle under the left hand – how sinister!

You may be interested to know that this word once was used as an actual charm – to be used in an amulet to drive sickness out of the body, written on a piece of paper in a triangle:

A B R A C A D A B R A
A B R A C A D A B R
A B R A C A D A B
A B R A C A D A
A B R A C A D
A B R A C A
A B R A C
A B R A
A B R
A B
A

It was mentioned by a Roman physician in the 4th century AD. But where did he get it from? A congeries of conjectures have been conjured forth. Some think it comes from the beginning of the alphabet, an abecedarian invention. Some think it’s related to Abraxas, a gnostic name for the supreme god. Various ideas have been put forth about origins from Hebrew, Aramaic, or related languages: perhaps from berakah “blessing” and dabar “speak”, perhaps from ab “father”, ben “son”, and ruakh akadoskh “holy spirit”, perhaps from Chaldean abbada ke dabra “perish like the word” or Aramaic avra kehdabra “I will create as I speak” – certainly J.K. Rowling seems to have been aware of one or both of the latter two. We do, however, run up against the absence of abracadabra from Jewish texts before the middle ages, which is a gap of several centuries.

But, really, if you take a set of basic sounds arranged in a reasonably straightforward way, regardless of where you got them from, you are likely to have many coincidences between your constructed word and plausible phrases in several other languages. You can conjure etymologies out of thin air with a wave of your word-wand… all the while leaving the real origin obscured in the mists of time.

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