Category Archives: word tasting notes

toilet

Posted on May 23, 2010 | 1 comment

My word tasting class was reconvening after a brief intermission. “Well,” I said, “now that we’re all back from our toilet…”

Eleanor, near the front, immediately shot her hand up, and proceeded without waiting for acknowledgement: “Please don’t be vulgar.”

Here we go again. “Vulgar?” I arched my left eyebrow.

“Graphic. You seem to revel in the foul. There is no need to assail us with such indelicate images.”

The right eyebrow joined the left. “You find my reference to a lace doily foul?”

“You said doily?” Eleanor knitted her brows. “It sounded like something else.”

“Toilet,” I said. “A word that originally referred to a little piece of fabric that was used to cover a woman’s dressing-table. From French toilette, related to toile, ‘fabric’. The same toile also came to English as toil, a now-uncommon word for a net for catching game. Of course, I’m being disingenuous; no one uses toilet to mean ‘fabric’ now. But, really, it is interesting that you find it so unacceptably graphic when it was originally intended as a euphemism. Washroom and its Latin-based equivalent lavatory are more literal, even if more polite-sounding to us now.”

Anna piped up from the back of the room. “Maybe crapper would be better.”

Kayley, next to Anna, raised her hand. “You know that’s from the inventor of the flush toilet, John Crapper.”

I was about to speak when Brian saved me the effort; he turned back to Kayley and said, “Too perfect to be true. Actually, though Thomas Crapper, the 19th-century British plumbing company owner, did make flush toilets, he didn’t invent them, and the word crap is much older.”

“Thank you, Brian,” I said, “you’re quite correct. The word crap has been in English to refer to waste since the middle ages. Michael Quinion has a very good run-down of the term and its relation to Thomas Crapper on his site, worldwidewords.org. And commodes have a long developmental history that was certainly added to, but certainly not started, by Thomas Crapper.”

“But it’s in Trivial Pursuit!” Kayley protested.

I shrugged. “I know. Their research was not quite good enough on this one. It happens.”

Eleanor was sitting with her face puckered as though she was sucking on a bitter lemon, shaking her head. “It’s indecent,” she said to the fellow sitting next to her, a skinny, beleaguered sort named Rupert. “And I fail to see the connection between lace and lavatories.”

“Lace and lavatories!” I said. “Well, thereby hangs a tale.”

Anna, at the back, sang, “Give to me your lavatory, take from me my lace.” Ah, Stevie Nicks. At least she didn’t make a comment on hanging tails.

“A woman’s dressing-table came to be referred to as her toilette,” I said. “We still see that in some usages. Eau de toilette, which is a version of perfume. Toilet soap, an old term for face soap and hand soap.”

Brian raised his hand. “There are many paintings with title such as ‘Lady So-and-So at Her Toilet,’ and they’re getting dressed or doing their hair.”

“You can get pictures with titles like that now on the web,” Anna said, “but they’re not getting dressed…” Kayley stifled a giggle. Eleanor turned and glared at Anna.

“The point,” I said, “is that the dressing-table was the toilet, and then toilet came to refer to the action of dressing, or washing and grooming, and to the room in which that was done. And then, out of delicacy, the fixture came to be referred to using the same word. And now the table has turned. We take the word toilet to be a literal word for the fixture. But, now, what do you think is the relation of the sound of the word to its developed sense?”

Rupert raised his hand. “Yes, Rupert?” I said, almost surprised.

“Well, sometimes you have to toil at what you’re doing there…”

Eleanor pulled a face as though someone had just held a fresh dog turd under her nose.

I laughed just a little. “True, sometimes. But is the ‘oy’ sound a contributor to the sense of indelicacy of this word? I mean, oily is not so nice, but doily is fine. Boil is somewhat neutral with a little negative shading. Boy is fine; goy – well, all that Yiddish oy has its own flavour which will probably vary somewhat by hearer. It also relates to the Brooklyn-style ‘oi’ kind of sound for syllabic /r/, as in ‘boid’ for bird, ‘goil’ for girl, and so on, all of which has a lower-class connotation.”

Brian raised his hand. “Hypercorrection from that has given us pronunciations such as ‘ersters’ and ‘terlet’.”

“Indeed,” I said. “Does it have the same feel to say ‘terlet’? Or to say it in the French style, ‘twa-let’?”

“French is much more elegant,” Kayley offered from the back.

“It tends to have that connotation, because of cultural images we have acquired, and the high-toned context of usage of French terms in English,” I said. “French itself has its highs and lows, and I don’t know whether I would call a language with so many inefficiencies elegant structurally – but that’s a more mathematical use of elegant. Anyway, French may get moved in a different direction thanks to less rarefied words such as poutine.”

“That would be a good word for toilet!” Anna declared. “Poo-tine! Like a canteen for poo!”

“Can you please stop!” Eleanor’s shout of disgust was taking on the pleading air of the delicate stomach.

“To return to the ‘oi’ sound,” I said, hoping to calm things down a little, “does it suggest a shape to you?”

Rupert raised his hand again. I looked at him. He waited for me to say something. “Yes, Rupert?”

“I think it’s like a spring, ‘boing boing boyoyoyoyyy,’ so I think it’s like a spiral.”

Brian smiled a little. “Like water swirling in the bowl.”

Kayley raised her hand. “Did you know that it swirls the other way in Australia?”

Brian was about to respond, but I beat him to it this time. “Actually, the direction of the swirl is really determined in the main by the positioning of the water jets.”

“But it’s like the bathtub drain,” Kayley said. “It’s the coriolanus effect.”

“Coriolis,” I said simultaneously with Brian, but we were both drowned out by Anna, who declared triumphantly, “Corral your anus!”

Eleanor was alternating between white and red. She stood and said, “Excuse me. I need to be excused. I require… to be excused. To go down the hall.” She rushed out, words failing her.

Rupert looked at her retreating form and smiled slightly. Without raising his hand, he said, “She has been caught in our toil.”

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

vade mecum

Posted on May 22, 2010 | 3 comments

When I look at vade mecum, associations invade me cumulatively. I think of Darth Vader, for instance. And, what, is he covered in talcum? No, no, he’s with Meco – you know, Meco Monardo, who came out with Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, a record that I, as a ten-year-old utterly enamoured of Star Wars, naturally listened to quite a fair bit, along with several other Star Wars–related things. (Anyone who was around in 1977 is sure to recognize this music – note that the video that has been posted with it uses clips from later movies in the series too.) I was always sure to have some Star Wars thing or other with me wherever I went, as an indispensable appurtenance.

Hmm. It occurs to me that my indispensable appurtenances have changed somewhat. Now I do not leave the house without my datebook. I use a Letts, but some people prefer to use a Quo Vadis. I also have a pen and pencil and handkerchief, but I do not, as some do, always carry a comb – another thing that arrives with this word, mecum not only sounding a bit like “my comb” but having those comb-like m‘s.

If I were to carry any other book with me, it would be a book too cumbersome to carry: the complete Oxford English Dictionary. As it is online now, I could actually have it with me if I had an iPhone, which, for those who have one, seems to be quite the ultimate vade mecum – a useful thing that one carries about everywhere. It goes with you – after all, vade mecum is Latin for “go with me”.

Perhaps the epitome of a vade mecum, certainly in science fiction, is nothing to do with Star Wars but rather the eponymous book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Of course, the galactic guidebook that Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent carry is not available to us now on Earth. For those interested in sci fi or fantasy, their vade mecum may be Marc Okrand’s Klingon Dictionary, or it may be a Dungeon Master’s Guide, or, if they play ChthulhuTech, they may use the Core Book – although there is a volume for ChthulhuTech called Vade Mecum, it requires the Core Book, ironically.

But a person interested in tasting words could do worse than to have a Latin reference (among a few others). That, at least, would make it plain that the plural of this word could never be vade meca – you see, mecum is not a neuter noun; it’s a pronoun plus preposition. The cum means “with”. So you treat the words as a phrase entire and pluralize accordingly. After all, the plural of go-with-me would not be go-with-us.

The two words that make up this compound have a certain contrast in pronunciation, with a vibe on the lips and teeth and a touch on the tongue tip in the first, a sort of wool vest of a word, and then in the second word a nasal with the lips bouncing to a velar touch of the tongue and back, making a word like a pillow with a table knife in the middle. Of course, that partly depends on what you make ’em; there are several ways to say this. Most likely nowadays you will hear a vulgate-ish pronunciation, “vah day may come”; formerly in England, the old British style of saying Latin would have prevailed, “vay dee me come”. Of course, in the original Latin it’s neither; it’s “wah deh meh coom”, but while a day may come when we say Latin commonly that way, I’m not waiting for it – or writing it in my Letts.

Thanks to Elaine Phillips for asking for vade mecum.

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

regatta

Posted on May 20, 2010 | Leave a comment

Grab yourself a glass of Pimm’s and pull up a chair; there’s a regatta going on. Ah, yes, a nice regatta, with white sails all rigged (tt) moving at a regal pace across the harbour. Well, it looks regal at this distance. In the Olympic coverage of sailing regattas, they don’t have the nail-biting, body-part-crunching second-by-second coverage that characterizes some sports; rather, they have relaxing piano or guitar music and a summary of who accomplished what. Rowing, of course, is entirely another thing, but even doing the sailing at boat level is not so serene – watch those guys hanging off the side, knees at 90 degrees and bodies  half upright: how long would your quads and abs last doing that? It’s competitive. It’s a race! It’s almost as vindictive as a vendetta.

But still, when you think of a regatta, what do you think of? Quite likely the view I had out my bedroom window this afternoon: a cotillion of white sails decorating the water and moving more slowly in the visual field than a mobile. Perhaps you’re watching it from a waterside bar calling itself Regatta.

This word actually is a bit on the pizzicato side for something that has that kind of white-pants-white-jacket yacht-club air. (Apologies to my fellow native Calgarians and other dry-land people, who may not be all that up on yacht clubs; there are several in Toronto and environs, ranging from the upper-crust to the merely rather expensive but accessible, and they are well known, especially the top tier.) But think of it as something one may attend after a light lunch of frittata. And focus as much on the reg, which is not the reg of register nor even the reg of regular; it’s the reg of regal and regale that sets the atta-tude.

Ah, yes, white-glove service, egg white frittata, white pants and white jacket, a few little whitecaps, white sails… Truly a regatta de blanc. But, oh, don’t call the Police: their album, Reggatta de Blanc, has two g‘s, and the title is a pseudo-French translation of “white reggae” (French for reggae is actually reggae; the tapping of the atta, like an opening riff from Stewart Copeland’s drums, shows up again with their next album, Zenyattà Mondatta). But then the album opens with “Message in a Bottle,” and how could you not think nautically? And the almost relaxed, almost spacey slow groove with tipping and tapping in “Walking on the Moon” – it takes me nearly back to the music for the television coverage of regattas.

Not that regattas were always quite so genteel; the original regatta was a race held on the Grand Canal in Venice and undoubtedly at least a little rougher, given that it was 17th-century Venice we’re talking about, the very chronotope of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and a town known for naval aggression and pride. The word, in the regional Italian dialect, meant “competition” and appears to have stemmed from the same Latin root that gave English capture. But then some 18th-century toffs decided to have one on the Thames, and, well, here we are. Do have some more Pimm’s.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

congeries

Posted on May 19, 2010 | 2 comments

Picture a congress of conger eels, all heaped together – perhaps several juries of them, dozen by dozen, but all in a pile, writhing as they may. Or not. Actually, make it a pile of paper cutouts of eels. Or, for eels, substitute whatever it is that’s piled up on your table or desk right now. I can tell you that before my very eyes is a heap with subscription renewal notices, bills, a candy wrapper with contest info, a photocopy of instructions on core exercises, a few pieces of note paper with things noted on them, and who knows what else beneath (I’m not peeking right now) – a real congeries of papers.

Did I make you stop and say “wait” there at a congeries? Ah, yes, this singular word seems as though it has had an s tossed on the end for no particularly good reason, just to add to the heap. It’s a word, like kudos, that appears plural when it’s not. But kudos, at least, is a mass object. Congeries is a countable: if one pile of accumulated detritus or assorted objects is not enough, you can have two congeries, three congeries, and so on… indeed, this noun does not decline (heaps never do, now, do they?), not for the plural anyway. But it just happens that people always seem to observe one messy heap – one congeries – at a time. Fair enough! Being faced with a whole series could give a person rabies!

We can see, though, that a person can get used to a congeries (the one on my desk has some archeological value) and perhaps also to a congeries – after all, we allow a series without batting an eye. But where series comes from Latin series “chain” from serere “join, connect” (which also gives us, for instance, insert and assert), all nice and ordered, congeries comes from Latin congeries “heap, pile, collected mass” from congerere “carry together” – which also gives us congest: a surfeit of stuff. The pertinent morphology is nonetheless identical; in both cases, the ies ending in the Latin is two syllables, with the e being long, meaning that this word in the Classical Latin would be said somewhat like “con Gary Ace”. In Modern English, unsurprisingly, it has mutated to “con juries”, “con jeeries”, or “conjure ease”.

Words, of course, are not formed of letters heaped together in whatever order (they aren’t formed of letters at all; they’re formed of sounds and represented with letters) – if you were to grab from this word as though from a bowl of popcorn, the results could make you cringe, even if with proper scoring and a good singer, no matter what region you may be in; best to ignore until it cries gone. But a congeries of papers on your desk can’t be conjured away.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

vellicate

Posted on May 17, 2010 | Leave a comment

You probably don’t know the meaning of this word – it’s not very common. So tell me: what effect does it have on you before I say what it means? It makes me think of velleity (a whim, a wish, an inclination) and Elise Velle, whose singing can send little frissons down the spine. But of course there are other things that may more commonly come to mind: vellum (crackling material to prick and tickle with your pen), jelly (which shivers and twitches), villain (who may make you shudder or simply irritate you), maybe lick and tickle – and perhaps even a hint of the horripilation that such things may produce.

Ah, horripilation: the hair stands on end. You see it in this word: the lli – ooh, that i looks like someone’s plucked one. Imagine! Imagine someone sneaking up behind you, running a feather down the back of your neck – and plucking a hair that happened to stand up! Would that not make you twitch a bit?

The connection, apparently, seems natural enough – or anyway used to. This word comes from Latin vellicare, the frequentative of vellere, which meant, as OED puts it, “pull, pluck, twitch, etc.” So its English senses started with “prick” and “irritate” and the related “pull” and “pinch” (the shapes of the v and ll seem to play with that sense as well); from there it readily proceeded to “twitch” and “cause to twitch” (all these senses are still at least somewhat current). And “tickle” and “titillate” proceed from that, it seems; we see Erasmus Darwin writing, in 1794, “So when children expect to be tickled in play . . . by gently vellicating the soles of their feet, laughter is most vehemently excited.”

Now, tell me, does that description not vellicate you, one way or the other? The dryness with which the classic childish activity is described may irritate you, make you twitch, or tickle you entirely. Try this next time you’re having an intimate phone conversation: say “I’m gently vellicating the soles of your feet.” See whether it doesn’t produce a frisson (or, indeed, most vehemently excite laughter). Do you have the pluck to do it?

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

muffuletta

Posted on May 17, 2010 | 4 comments

“Hey, Joe, come vai? Whatcha eating there?”

“Muffuletta.”

“Joe, Joe, swallow it first. Don’t talk with your mouth full. You sound like Marlon Brando playing a Sicilian. Now what is it?”

“Muffuletta!” Joe holds out a big round sandwich wrapped in paper. “Muffuletta for you!”

“Muffuletta for me? Hey! Muffuletta for you!”

So, OK, where are these two jokers? Let’s just say they’re at Central Grocery. Where, in New Jersey somewhere? No, in New Orleans. Of course, you can get muffuletta elsewhere, but that’s where the muffuletta sandwich was invented about a century ago.

Now, for the sake of accuracy, I should say that muffuletta is really the name of the loaf, a flattish round Sicilian loaf of bread. When you slice it through the equator, add olive salad, then capicola, salami, mortadella, emmentaler, and provolone to the bottom half and put the top half back on, you have what was originally called a muffuletta sandwich. But now it’s typically called just by the name of the loaf.

So does a muffuletta sound like a lotta mouthfuls? Well, it is. The loaf is about 10 inches across. You can feed more than one person with a muffuletta sandwich (but rest assured there are many people who will eat a whole one – like the farmers who came to New Orleans for the market and went to Central Grocery to get bread, cheese, and antipasto, and then ate them separately balancing them on their knees until the store owner, Salvatore Lupo, said why not eat them together). The word itself seems pretty stuffed too – it’s a meal with two loaf halves u and u and the cheese ff and meat tt (or is it the other way around?).

And it persists in the great tradition of Italian food names: it’s not too short; it has double letters; it sounds to English ears maybe a little rude (compare focaccia, for instance); and it’s subject to multiple (mis)spellings and (mis)pronunciations (compare focaccia and many others for the former and bruschetta, gnocchi, and various others for the latter). You will hear people say it as “muff a lotta”, for instance, rather than the “moo foo let ta” that it originally is. And of course you can imagine how many different ways it gets written.

But it’s hard to be pedantic when the loaf in its native Sicily has various variations according to the dialect: muffuletta, mufuletta, muffiletta, mufiletta, muffulettu, muffuletu, muffulittuni… Well, one thing you know for sure: it’s no muffin, and you don’t see no lettuce in it neither. And to yous in Quebec: don’t wear your moufles when eating it. You’ll just get olive oil on them.

But to any muffled eater, one thing’s for sure: it beats a mofette.

4 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

unununium

Posted on May 14, 2010 | 3 comments

Oh, isn’t it a cute little caterpillar of a word, this one! Or like a little train. Or some accordion-folding thing, like a party streamer. It also makes me think of some little kitten munching kibble: num, num, num. It would be a nightmare to read in gothic script, though; one could slip it somewhere in a sentence such as “mimi numinum nivium minimi munium nimium vini muniminum imminui vivi minimum volunt” (which means something on the order of “the very short mimes of the snow gods do not wish at all that the very great burden of distributing the wine of the walls will be lightened in their lifetime”). Actually, it’s a bit of a problem to the eyes in any type face, isn’t it?

But what nimiety of inimical mummery may animate a nominative noumenon so ominous in its limning of inanition? Oh, it is a phenomenon nonnative to humanity: a liminal element of minimal numerosity, not known in even nanomole amounts. The monicker unununium (Uuu) is an allonym from ere unanimity on its immanence; now it is known as Roentgenium (Rg). (But doesn’t Uuu look more like a train whistle – or a mother animal and two little ones?)

So why the mind-numbing union of un, un, un? Why eighteen vertical strokes, three cups, five caps, and a dot? Elemental, dear Watson. It is the 111th element. In the periodic table it sits in period 6, group 11. Some six atoms of it have been created through smacking together smaller atoms (lead and copper, for instance) – three at a time (one, one, one), twice. Others have come into being through the decay of higher-number elements. Does this seem base, ignoble even? Oh, no, I assure you: unununium – roentgenium – is more noble than gold.

No, really, it is. Group 6 is a column of noble metals – formerly three, now this one makes four – so called because of their nonreactivity: copper, silver, gold, roentgenium. The top (29) is copper. Next is silver (47), and below it gold (79); reactivity decreases as you go down the column and up the numbers – silver and gold are not decayed by oxygen, for instance, but are attacked by halogens, and silver is also affected by sulfur. Roentgenium (unununium) is likely not to react even with the halogens, but perhaps with fluorine. It is also expected to look like silver. Once there are more than a half dozen atoms of it, maybe they’ll find out for sure.

Oh – not that those atoms are around any more, by the way. It has a half-life of about 20 minutes. But perhaps at some time we will see evanescent medals made of it to nominate some inimitable numinosity.

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

canary

Posted on May 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

When I was an undergrad, living in student residence, several people on my floor were organizing an outing to a local bar called Cannery Row. One of them wrote the info on the blackboard in the floor lounge. But she spelled it Canary Row.

Ah, to think, Steinbeck’s Monterey place that is “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream” (a now-gentrified bit of former working seaman’s turf – a tourist location with a marine sanctuary hosting a population of sea lions), associated accidentally with dogs.

Wait, dogs? Do I mean birds? Oh, dogs, first – anyone who has played the original Trivial Pursuit likely knows that the Canary Islands got their name from dogs. The derivation is from Latin Canaria insula, “Isle of Dogs”, from canis, “dog”. The bird (originally canary-bird and originally green but better known in the yellow variety) is named after the islands, and the colour is named after the bird, as are most other things called canary – Australian jailbirds of the 18th century (they arrived in yellow), canary wood (it’s yellow), any songstress (because canaries sing) or stool pigeon (extending the sense of sing)… there’s a whole row of references, one, two, ten, a reef, eh…

Speaking of Tenerife (largest island of the Canary Islands), what kind of dogs were the islands named after, anyway? Well, whatever they were, the ancient inhabitants worshipped them, it seems. They may have been the forebears of the modern Perro de Presa Canario, often called Presa Canario for short; the name means “Canarian catch dog”, and the catch is that they’re freakin’ huge. They’re sometimes called Canary Mastiffs, which ought to tell you right there. They’re a kind of Molosser, which means they are related to the ancient molossus.

On the other hand, it has also been suggested that the original “dogs” after which the islands were named were actually monk seals, also known as sea dogs – a bit of a comedown from sea lions, which is what their cousin pinnipeds are called. (For real lions, one would have to cross east to the mainland of Africa and head south. The Canaries, remember, though they belong to Spain, are off the coast of west Africa.)

The word canary seems in the main to escape associations with cans by having the stress on the second syllable, rendering the first a mere skip up, like the modal auxiliary can – perhaps as in “On Tenerife can airy heights be scaled where yet can nary a dog be seen.” The only letter out of line in the word is the y, descending like the perching feet of a passerine bird, an insessorial incessant singer. It may serve to remind of the frequent following word yellow. Or perhaps it is an adit, awaiting the descent of the miners with their gas detector – the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

Or it may be an anticipation of a following w – if not in Row, then in Wharf. You know Canary Wharf, do you not? The great modern skyscraper development in the east end of London? That now-gentrified bit of former working seaman’s turf? The West India Docks used to be there, but the shipping traffic dried up by 1980. One specific wharf, the number 32 berth of the West Wood Quay, had been built in 1936 for Fruit Lines Ltd., who were in the Mediterranean and Canary Island fruit trade, and so the wharf was named Canary Wharf at their request. When the largest building in the UK – One Canada Square (yes, Canada, not Canary, and named after the homeland of the developer, not after Las Cañadas del Teide on Tenerife) – was built there, the development was called Canary Wharf. Which sounds perhaps more decorous than the name (in use since at least 1588) for the large lobe of land of which Canary Wharf now occupies the northern part: the Isle of Dogs.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

gotten

Posted on May 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

Should gotten be shotten, forgone and forgotten? Cast to the side like a thing that is rotten? Left on the shelf like a trinket unboughten?

Understand, first of all, that this is not a note on get. Get over that right off. I don’t have the time to write, and you don’t have the time to read, a tasting of that word – it simply gets around far too much. Perhaps sometime when I can get around to it I will write a little operetta about it or something. Now watch me get carried away…

Anyway, gotten is – or isn’t, depending on whom you ask – the past participle of get. (Those who say it is not say it is got.) It displays very nicely a feature of English phonology – a feature that, while not universal (and sometimes considered a mark of a casual pronunciation), is so common I have heard the Queen herself doing it: in any word ending with unstressed tten or tton – mitten, kitten, button, rotten, flatten, and on and on – instead of releasing the /t/ and saying a vowel (a schwa) before the /n/, we simply hold the tongue in place, lower the velum (opening the nasal passage) and say a syllabic [n]. (If we’re really being lazy, we don’t quite touch the tongue, and the sequence becomes a glottal stop followed by a narrow nasal vowel.) If we wish to emphasize the word and articulate it fully, we will of course release the /t/ and so on, but otherwise, the principle of economy of effort gets the upper hand.

So, then, why would not the principle of economy of effort also have gotten the upper hand with the past participle of get? Well, why should it? Past participles in en are quite normal in English. And indeed the en suffix is quite time honoured for this verb too. Getten was actually the first version, and could be seen up to the 16th century; Oxford tells me it’s still common in Yorkshire. But the ablaut series (the vowel moves down and back: drink – drank – drunk, for instance) exerted its influence in the Middle English ages, so that we had get – gat – gotten (which we still get in beget – begat – begotten) in place and taking over by the start of the Early Modern English period (16th century). Then gat shifted to got by influence of gotten. And then, in some versions of English, epsecially in England, it gradually took over altogether, except in some idiomatic forms. It would seem that gotten – with its two crosses in the middle – was double-crossed and gone. And so some people, on the basis of this British desuetude, believe it universally wrong. But it persists in North America – persists and is correct even in the most formal English in North America (except in the eyes of those few  who have decided it should not be).

Well, if the British can do without it, why can’t we? Are we just out of our gotten-pickin’ minds?  Well, heck, other people don’t have a chef’s knife, a carving knife, and a filet knife in their kitchens, but I can tell you there are things I can do with each of them that I can’t do as well with either of the others. So too with get, got, gotten. It is even possible to allow a contrast between got and gotten as past participle when you use have got where one could use have: I have got to see her etchings versus I have gotten to see her etchings, the former signifying need or desire and the latter signifying past attainment. The former could be said I have to see her etchings, but it loses the punchy emphasis. And the existence of the have got usage, even if you do not use it yourself, in fact necessitates gotten for clarity in many such situations, especially given that the have auxiliary may become aurally indiscernible in some contexts: We got it versus We’ve got it – clearly We’ve gotten it removes the ambiguity.

In any event, gotten has history and analogical patterns on its side, so just because it’s gotten disused in England doesn’t mean it’s somehow ill-gotten or misbegotten. It was good enough for Samuel Johnson (“If the money with which he retired was all gotten by himself”); it was good enough for Thomas Hobbes (“Reason is not . . . gotten by experience only”); it was good enough for David Hume (“The duke of Parma, who had gotten intelligence of their approach”); I really do think it’s gotten its place in the language quite honestly. We’ve gotten away with it this long. And let us hear none of that “Well, the Brits should know, it’s their language”; it’s our language too – my ancestors spoke it as surely as theirs did, and we’ve preserved some things that they’ve changed. Why would they get to set the fashion all the time?

Thanks to Jim Taylor for requesting gotten.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

desolate

Posted on May 11, 2010 | 1 comment

A word with a dry wind whispering through it /s/, speaking of a place full of empty (o), defoliated, deflated like a balloon. You’ll likely think of a dry plain, looking like the surface of Mars, a spot so sorry that even the sun has been stolen from it. The valley of the shadow of death, perhaps… no one around… you’re so late, too late; all is gone. Perhaps it never was there in the first place.

And one may feel desolate at heart, too. It is so easy to transfer the barrenness, the sense of desertion and desertification, to the heartscape and mindscape: no sun up in the sky… how a person might feel if isolated, cut off from all human company.

Indeed, although the word readily suggests the loss of sun (de and sol), it is solus that is the true Latin heart of this word originally, via solare, “make lonely”. The de is here in the sense “to the bottom; completely”, as in denude, derelict, deplore, deliquesce, decoct. Thus first of all it is the depths of loneliness, all around you boiled away and you left with you alone and no one to relate to. I’m put in mind of a poem I wrote in high school (apologies if the vagaries of formatting result in indelicate alignments):

Now I’m in an empty room tomb
Completely bare air
The walls so far between clean
The ceiling very high sky
And I so all alone stone
Just standing on a spot dot
In the middle of the floor more
And all that I say echoes knows
In this empty place space

But what poetry is there in a desolate place? In truth, barely the least ode. No doubt echoes of desert and perhaps the hint of lack of sun – and soil, also sol – contributed to the shift in sense to a place where there is not one but no one, no one and nothing. In the main, it passed from “lonely” to “lacking” to “barren”; at times it appears to have been confused with dissolute.

But just as the English sense has reduced from one person to none, a place without traffic at all, and emotional desolation is reduction to a sorry state indeed, we may look to another language to see how excessive traffic may rub a word nearly smooth of sense: French désolé, commonly the short way to say je suis désolé, which literally means “I am desolate” but has come to be a sorry statement – that is, a statement of “sorry.” As when (for instance in The Killing Fields) the officer hands back the passport with barely a shake of the head and a “Désolé, monsieur.” The “sorry” that really means “sigh, please go away” – if it means that much.

Well, as word taster David Moody has reminded me, Lena Horne has gone away, and there is no sun up in the sky. This is a new desolation, and not just a mumbled “Sorry for your loss”; as David writes, “To be truly désolé is to have the very sun snatched from out of the sky… as it was after Lena Horne’s last appearance in a picture or on a soundtrack.” Not simply loss; not merely isolation (which comes from Latin for “island”); desolation. On the date we look back and lose, we are desolate.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,