Category Archives: word tasting notes

gutta-percha

Posted on May 11, 2010 | 6 comments

This may sound like something one does with a freshly caught fish, but look beyond that to its echoes of the old British empire and its South Asian trading. For me, the word always brings to mind the play Mr. Price, or Tropical Madness, by Stanislaw Witkiewicz, set in Rangoon (and written on the basis of a 1914 trip by Witkiewicz and Bronislaw Malinowski to that area of the world). Rapacious colonials straight out of a crazier version of Conrad spew (or, in the version done at the University of Calgary when I was a student there, sing) lines such as “We’ll drink to the success of our General Rubber and Coffee Trust. Long live coffee and gutta-percha, united in an invincible mass of power and glory. Long live tropical fantasy!”

It seems to me that that play was the first time I encountered the word. Of course, a boy growing up in Alberta in the 1970s and ’80s would not have had so much cause to hear of gutta-percha. This is indeed a tropical word, a Malay phrase rendered in English style: getah “gum, sap” plus perca, the name of the tree that makes the sap (in English it tends to be called the gutta-percha tree, it seems).

And it is a word of the height of British imperial glory, that excursion that also gave us punch, bungalow, dungarees, pajamas (all from Hindi), amok, bamboo, gingham, kapok, launch, orangutan, rattan (all from Malay), and many others, all washed down with gin and tonic (invented to help make the quinine go down easier) under the midday sun – which, of course, only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in.

You can just hear the plummy colonial officer’s accent saying this word, the rhythm and final vowels of it already signalling foreignness, something that had come from some Singaporean gutter perchance, and beating its tattoo on the tongue with a tap at the back, one at the tip, a pop at the lips and a catch on the tip: back-mid-fore-mid, like a military march or whatnot. Not so unlike a vocal warmup I learned in acting class: butta gutta butta gutta butta gutta.

Gutta-percha’s virtues for such things as sealing roofs, gutters, and perches had long been known to the Malays when, in 1842, westerners first noticed that the sun-dried sap of this magnificent tree made a latex that could be made flexible again with the aid of hot water, and which would not become brittle like unvulcanized rubber. More gloriously still, it did not react with things like acid or enzymes, conduct electricity, or taste good to fish. It thus enabled the first undersea cables (in 1851) once a means of extruding it as an insulator had been invented.

Many other things were also made with it, thanks to its plasticity: pistol grips, rifle butts, furniture, jewelry, canes… In 1856, U.S. Congressman Preston Brooks used a gutta-percha cane to beat Senator Charles Sumner so badly he required three years to recover fully. (Brooks did this in the senate chamber; he had originally thought of challenging Sumner to a duel, but a fellow representative counselled him that Sumner, though a senator, was of lower social standing and so did not merit a duel.) Speaking of sports, gutta-percha golf balls (known as gutties) were quite popular for half a century.

So this fruit of imperial excursion made possible commercial and cultural excursion and assorted ballistic activities. Many of gutta-percha’s uses have since been supplanted by newer, better materials (vulcanized rubber, polyethylene, etc.). But it still has a few applications. Most notably, if you have a root canal, gutta-percha will be used to fill the resulting space.

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hung

Posted on May 9, 2010 | 2 comments

“So,” I said to Albert Denton, of the Sheffield branch of the Order of Logogustation, “how about that election of yours?” We were lunching at a restaurant on Spadina on the first day of the E8 word tasting summit (the eight main English-speaking countries), held this year in Toronto.

“We haven’t got a proper government,” he said. “Our parliament’s bloody well hung. Pardon.” He ate a spoonful of soup from a bowl the size of his head.

Also at our table was Ross Ewage, who heard his cue. “Well hung?!” he said. “Then I’m sure they’ll all be men enough to rise to the occasion.”

Albert glanced at Ross. “And you should be bloody well hanged.” Ross raised an eyebrow and mounted an assault on his soup.

“So nice of those judges of past centuries to have used the archaic weak form of the past tense in passing sentences so we could have that distinction persisting to the present,” I observed.

“Ironically,” Albert said, “the weak form was the intransitive.” He paused for another sip. “Our modern hang actually came from three different verbs, as you perhaps know: an Old English strong transitive, an Old English weak intransitive, and an Old Norse causal verb. But in the end they all merged into one… and, funny enough, though they all merged into the weak form, they moved towards strong vowel-changing inflexion, and the past tense hung was actually invented then by analogy. As they say, Who would have thunk it?” (This discourse was given an extra resonance by Albert’s Sheffield accent, which has u‘s as in hung and thunk said like the vowel in book.)

“So,” I said, “three parties, as it were, all coming together to a common agreement by finding a third way… with just a little dissenter off to one side.”

Albert allowed himself a chuckle. “As if the Tories and Labour got together and shut out the Lib Dems.”

“I’m quite amused at the level of dismay your situation has been greeted with in England,” I said. “It’s rather common in Canada, with four parties sitting and a first-past-the-post electoral system. Some people say minority government should be the accepted norm, most likely with set times between elections to preclude such things as bullying the other parties by making any chancy vote a confidence vote. But I really do think an important difference in the way we see things is the term we use. Minority government: Well, it’s still government, and in Canada, minority doesn’t have such a bad sound to it, since nearly – or perhaps actually – a majority of our citizens are members of identifiable minority groups.” I looked around us; more than half the people in the restaurant were East Asian. “Whereas hung parliament means it’s suspended, hanging in midair, perhaps by the neck…”

“Or it has the sword of Damocles hanging over it,” Albert said. “It’s as though the election campaign was a great binge, and now we’re all hung over from it. Well, it could get to be like game meat that’s been hung too long… It gets very ‘high,’ which means ‘rancid’. But the term hung parliament only dates back to the last hung parliament we had, in 1974. Simon Hoggart, of The Guardian, was really the one who spread it. It just happens that in England, after an election, the ruling party doesn’t automatically change; there has to be a resignation or vote of no confidence first, which is a matter of course most of the time but not when, as in 1974, no one had a majority to force the loser out. And Edward Heath, prime minister at the time, tried to stay and build a coalition. Well, his party did get more votes, though fewer seats. In the end he had to resign in favour of Harold Wilson. But it was contentious, as I hope this one will not be.”

“Well,” I said, “one would think that everyone would want those who are hung to agree.”

“Speaking of which,” said Jess, appearing over my shoulder, “I’m hungry. Sorry I’m a bit late.” She grabbed the remaining chair. “I see it’s pho all around. What’s the topic of discussion?”

“Hung,” said Ross, with extra lung.

“Huh,” Jess said. “What’s the preposition?”

“An indecent one,” Ross said.

“Well, is it hung up, hung out, hung over, hung around…?”

“Well,” said Albert, “we’ve hung in there.”

“A couple of blocks that way –” Jess jerked her thumb towards the door – “there are paintings, hung by the curators with care. And no doubt curtains hung too.”

“Down the block, I think I saw a store called Hung Far Low,” Ross snickered.

“Yeah, you probably didn’t,” said Jess, “though this is Chinatown, with lots of Vietnamese places, too. Like this one. You’ll see Hung here and there.” She held up the menu that the waiter had just handed her. “I case you forgot where we were.” The restaurant’s name was, of course, Pho Hung.

Thanks to Sheila Protti for asking for something on hung parliament.

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peregrination

Posted on May 8, 2010 | 3 comments

I wouldn’t be surprised if this word made you think first of peregrine falcon. That would seem to give it a somehow nobler air, that aloofness of birds of prey, with the possible hint of patrician and the distinguished air that many words starting with p can seem to have. The /gr/ in the middle of course has a bit more grip; it here makes for echoes of green and plants a grin in the heart of the word. But the pere brings back a French father – and an English pear, perhaps. The scope of the word gets a boost from the expanse of the nation. And perhaps that nation is one you cross on foot, as one makes one’s pilgrimage across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela.

One need not be making a pilgrimage to be on a peregrination, but anyone who is on a pilgrimage is making a peregrination. This word comes to us little altered from Latin peregrinatio, “travel”, “journey”, “being abroad”, but the same root – or its noun form peregrinus, “journeyer” – has wandered a little farther to show up also as pilgrim and pilgrimage, the first /r/ now transformed to an /l/. A peregrination thus will always be a journey or wandering, most typically by foot (although in the modern world cars and airplanes are not proscribed), and sometimes symbolic.

Which leads me to what this word makes me think of first: the text of the music by Sergei Prokofiev for the battle on Lake Peipus in the movie Alexander Nevsky, directed by Sergei Eisenstein. The words sung over and over, a leitmotif for the Teutonic knights, are peregrinus expectavi, pedes meos in cymbalis. When first encountering it (and having to sing it), I understood the first part – “a pilgrim I waited” – and thought the second part had something to do with feet and with something that looked like cymbals but clearly couldn’t be. Well, in fact, it was – Prokofiev had snipped words from four places in the text of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, and stuck them together to make something meaning “a pilgrim I waited, my feet on the cymbals”. It starts comprehensible but then kind of wanders off (in the grand tradition of lorem ipsum)… neither you hearing nor I repeating can make it not clash; whatever you’ve awaited, what you get is just symbolic. So don’t have a bird; just relax – go get a glass of San Pellegrino, which will have journeyed from Italy just for you.

Thanks to Elaine Phillips, currently on a peregrination of her own, for suggesting this word.

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costus

Posted on May 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

OK, with a plant – actually a whole genus of tropical herbaceous plants that produce pretty flowers – with a name like this, the first question is quite obvious… is it costive?

Actually, we may assume that it is not – it’s related to ginger, and while that’s a non-binding relation, we may assume that something runs in the family.*

The various species of costus are in fact used for various medicinal purposes. Costus igneus (fiery costus, or spiral flag) is thought to build up insulin in the body. And Costus speciosus has been claimed to be good for treating fever, rash, asthma, bronchitis, and intestinal worms. The Kama Sutra says put it on your eyelashes to be sexier (would Benylin do?). Of course, that claim may be specious.

For the ordinary flower buyer, however, the main feature of costus species is that they are pretty. They often have a flame-like look to them (which would remind one of the word holocaust except that that word is not now used to refer to burnt sacrifices, as its transferred meaning has become entirely dominant). They are lively, hot-looking flowers, suitable for adorning a señorita’s hair – or the coat of arms of Nigeria. In short, they seem almost utterly at odds with their Greek-derived name, which is rather cold and a bit hard, echoing cough and a bit of tussive and mixing up scouts.

There are probably other echoes and wordplays available; I will leave you to work them out. Perhaps you may wish to do so while meditating on a potted Costus speciosus (you can easily buy them – in the US they cost $15–$20 potted).

* For those unfamiliar with the word costive: it means “constipating” or “constipated”.

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however

Posted on May 4, 2010 | 4 comments

Montgomery Starling-Byrd, lately elected Grand Panjandrum of the Order of Logogustation, was in town and made a stop by our local Domus Logogustationis for the monthly Words, Wines, and Whatever tasting event. We took this as a chance to generate a little extra interest and invited various parties to come be addressed. And so Montgomery stood in the middle of our Rather Good Hall (not quite up to the level of a Great Hall) surrounded by students, journalists, and student journalists, and gave a rousing and mercifully brief discourse on why English should be viewed as a game, and not one with tightly fixed rules, either. He then entertained questions.

One young fellow in a red shirt piped up: “Why does the name of your society mix Latin and Greek? Doesn’t that seem a little sloppy?”

Montgomery arched an eyebrow slightly. “It’s hardly the first macaronic word in the language. In fact, we mixed logo and gustation partly as an expression of the sort of play I was just speaking of. It’s true that a more cleanly Latin formation would be verbogustation. However, that would have far too strong a taste of bogus.”

The assembled scribes scribbled. One said to her friend next to her, “Comma with the however?”

Red shirt looked back over his shoulder. “Never!”

A green-shirted young woman said, “What do you mean, never? Always!”

“No,” said a slip of a thing in a black dress, “a period.”

“A period?!” said the first. “Oh… no, I meant after.”

“Not a period!” said red shirt. “Always a semicolon. One should not start a sentence with a conjunctive adverb.”

Montgomery’s eyebrow raised a titch more. Before he could interject, the first woman’s friend, a girl in a pink button-up, said, “People don’t speak with semicolons. Didn’t you learn that? Any journalism professor will tell you that.”

“I speak with semicolons,” Montgomery interjected. “And I believe some journalism professors do as well. However, in this instance, I intended however to be the start of a new sentence.”

“Boy,” said red shirt, “you really are a lot of descriptivists, aren’t you? Throwing Strunk and White out the window?”

Maury, in the background, had anticipated this, and had plucked a copy of the very book off the shelf. He handed it to Montgomery open to page 43. Montgomery read aloud: “Avoid starting a sentence with however when the meaning is ‘nevertheless.’ The word usually serves better when not in first position.” He handed the book back to Maury. “Two observations: first, even were Strunk and White holy writ, which it certainly is not, that is a recommendation, not an absolute rule; second, as just mentioned, it is not holy writ. It is opinion. And whoever told you never to start a sentence with however is terribly misguided.”

“We need rules,” protested red shirt.

“We have rules,” Montgomery said. “Otherwise me to able you understand wouldn’t be.”

A chorus of “What?” broke out.

“Exactly,” said Montgomery. “Now, let’s see what you all have for the disputed phrase. However you may have it, it is likely to be understood; however, you may have it in a way that transgresses the expected norms of standard English.”

Those assembled surveyed their transcriptions. Aside from assorted other errors and inaccuracies, the following renditions were found:

…verbugustation, however that would have…
…verbogustation, however, that would have…
…verbogustation however, that would have…
…verbogustation. However that would have…
…verbogustation; however that would have…
…verbogustation; however, that would have…
…verbogustation. However, that would have…

“Formally,” Montgomery said, “only these last two are correct, and it is the last which I intended. Conjunctive adverbs are offset from their clauses with commas. If they come first in a clause, the preceding clause boundary is marked with a period or semicolon, as always. A however without commas setting it off is the other however.” Montgomery paused for the briefest of moments. “Which, however,” he added, “is the same however. It is simply differently used.”

Several of the scribblers were darting their eyes around at their friends to see if they had successfully parsed Montgomery’s latest utterance.

Montgomery continued, warming to the subject. “The ever – which, incidentally, is as etymologically puzzling as dog – is attached to wh-words to give them a sort of generalized, indefinite force: whoever said whatever whenever wherever however. (There may seem to be no whyever, but whyever shouldn’t there be?) As a conjunctive adverb, however is shortened from however this may be, which is why we treat it as a dependent clause. We see a similar shortening, for instance, in the use of as far as: whereas formerly all would say as far as ‘however’ goes, now many will say simply as far as ‘however’. Goes to show, doesn’t it?”

Montgomery smiled slightly and gave his little round button of office a tweak. “Clearly there is some confusion over this word; faced with it, we hover between certainty and despair, and know not how to veer. But let its form serve as a mnemonic to you: just as it has a w and then a v, you may think of it as having a single mark – a comma – after, and a double mark – a semicolon – before, or a double-strength pause – a period. Then your usage will not change as the weather.”

Another pause. Most of those who had been writing were no longer certain whether to write or not.

“However,” Montgomery added, “those are the formal rules, required of editors; linguists have the luxury of simply observing the variations. And in the Order of Logogustation we usually hew slightly more to the linguist’s side, with a healthy dose of fun tossed in.” He smiled. “Are we having fun yet?”

Red shirt, stuffing his materials in his bag, looked up. “Whatever.”

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trifle

Posted on May 4, 2010 | 1 comment

Other organizations have cake sales or bake sales or similar events. At the Order of Logogustation we’re just a little more paronomastic in our purveyance for mastication. This fact was gradually dawning on one of the visitors to our little sale, who was finding at every table nothing but variations on the same theme: a layered dessert, with a base of sponge cake or Swiss rolls soaking in peach juice and sherry, fruit and fruit-flavoured jelly next, then custard, and whipped cream on top.

“Lovely desserts,” said the gentleman, finishing his fourth bowl, “but it’s a bit odd that it’s all versions of the same dessert.”

“A bit odd?” said Maury. “A trifle bizarre, I’d say.”

He pointed at the sign hanging at the back of the room, which read A Trifle Bazaar.

The gentleman arched his left eyebrow, then peered at it again over his glasses, presumably so that he would not have to see it in focus. He made a sally of his own. “You’re trifling with me.”

Philippe, at an adjoining table, leaned forward and said, “Would you like to try fol another one? Mine is marked with a trefoil.” He displayed a three-ring shape.

“That could be trouble,” the gentleman said.

“Foiled again,” Philippe replied.

“At least you didn’t make it with truffles,” Maury noted.

Philippe was unruffled. “I was going to use the chocolate kind, not the fungus.”

Jess joined in from the other side. “Deviation is not brooked. No trufflemakers here. Trifles are very tribal.”

“So,” the gentleman said, “are you getting much traffic?”

“There may be later, when we have the raffle,” Jess said. “Then there may be a kerfuffle.”

“There was one last year,” Maury said, “because there was a mix-up. The winner took home not a trifle but a lifter.”

“Went home,” Jess said, “had some t, and came back with a rifle.”

Philippe rejoined. “I thought it was a filter that was won.”

“You don’t seem to have much in the way of filters around here,” the gentleman observed. “The language is open to an e flirt.”

Everyone paused and looked at him. They were all thinking that the Order of Logogustation could suit him to a t – he could become a lifer.

“But surely you are not saying,” he continued, “that truffle, trefoil, et cetera are all related to trifle.”

“Naturally not,” Philippe said. “We just jest.”

Maury explained. “Trifle comes from trufa, Spanish, ‘jest, leer’, or truffa, Italian, ‘cheat, con’. Now, however, although it is on the books as meaning ‘an insignificant thing’, the great majority of its use is as an indefinite quantifier. Like a bit, only fancier.”

“Well,” said the gentleman, stepping over to Philippe’s table, “that seems fitting enough, as I fancy a bit more.”

Thanks to Marie-Lynn Hammond for suggesting trifle and passing on the idea for the opening joke.

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pissaladière

Posted on May 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

Mmmm… does this sound appetizing? I had some yesterday and it was good.

Whaddya mean, no?

OK, look, it has nothing to do with piss. And it’s not a salad (but see below: there is a cognate relation). And it has nothing to do with your – or anyone’s – derrière.

It’s also unrelated, as it happens, to pis (meaning “worse” or, vernacularly, “then”), picalilli, saloperie, palais de glace, the Salpêtrière, Place Pigalle, Camille Pissarro, or pizza – pizza the word, that is; it sure looks an awful lot like pizza the thing.

So what is the object of this word? It’s the Provençal answer to pizza, in fact: it’s a flat bread with onions, black olives, and anchovies. There are other seasonings, too: thyme and basil, perhaps, salt and pepper, and garlic.

Ah, now I have you a bit more interested, eh? Well, good. It’s not too often we taste an Occitan word.

Oh, stop. Occitan has no relation to occult. It’s a language, and its name actually comes from its word for “yes”, oc (whence also the area of France called Languedoc). It’s a romance language closely related to French and Catalan that is still spoken in the south of France. (Well, it’s not standardized, and there’s a fair amount of arguing about what version people should be speaking, and whether to call it Occitan or Provençal, but, hey, look, food!)

Anyway, where does this dogpile of a word come from, this overloaded verbal salad (two of everything: two a‘s, two i‘s, two e‘s, two s‘s, two loops with stems – p and d are the same form at 180-degree rotation – and two liquid consonants) that looks like it should be naming something more closely resembling, say, muffuletta? Well, the first part is from pissalat, which may look like what you’ll do after a few pints of beer, but you might do a bit less after eating one, because it’s Occitan for “anchovy” and comes ultimately from Latin piscis “fish”. Merging into it is salat, meaning “salted”, cognate with salt and, as I said, salad (an essential feature of salads used to be that they were salted). The ière is just a noun suffix comparable to the English agentive er suffix.

So if you don’t like the overtones of this word to English ears, just think of it as being a pizza légère. And just have a frickin’ bite, eh? And a glass of Tavel rosé to wash it down.

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nitty-gritty

Posted on April 30, 2010 | 11 comments

Well, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty without shilly-shallying or dilly-dallying: we’re looking at another victim of phonetic profiling here, that kind of pseudo-etymological flim-flam that seeks to control others by imputing guilt for the very use of a word that just happens to bear a vague resemblance to a racist term. (See picnic – specifically, see Help stop a word-lynching.)

I mean, imagine. An innocent word is just walking down the street. Some self-appointed language cop sees it and says, “Hey, that word looks suspicious to me. Don’t like the colour of it. Looks a little bit too much like this bad word here. So it must be related to it. In fact, I’m gonna conjecture a story about it so I can bust it and toss it in the cooler.” We all know what happened to niggardly, eh? A word with purely Germanic roots tracing back to proto-Germanic and cognates in Germanic languages all meaning “stingy”, and it just happened to sound like the wrong thing. Well, here’s another victim.

Now, yes, I’m the first person to point out that you can’t escape the echoes and overtones of words. Niggardly pretty much can’t be used without a little hint of you-know-what-word. But – and this is the most important thing – it doesn’t automatically equate with intention. After all, no one has a problem saying suffocate or country even though they contain within them phonetic strings identical to those of very vulgar words. If you know someone will be offended by the use of the word, then, yes, intention comes into it; but one cannot escape asking what reason they have for being offended.

Typically the justification given is an etymological one, and that is where the arguments break down. Once someone claims picnic or niggardly or nitty-gritty is offensive on the basis of racism in the etymology, they have holed their argument below the waterline, because there is no racism in the etymology of any of these words. Moreover, they are committed to being offended by nice (which used to mean “foolish” or “ignorant”) and not being offended by silly (which used to mean “blessed”). Which is only lucky for them because I say that they are being very silly and not at all nice. But I mean that in the modern senses.

Today, class, we are going to learn rule number one of etymology: Coincidence is nothing. Evidence is everything. It is beyond easy to find sound coincidences. This was famously satirized in My Big Fat Greek Wedding where the father invents an etymology for kimono on the basis of its sounding like the Greek word for “winter” (kheimón) and a kimono being a garment one may put on to keep warm in cold weather. True, I fill my word tasting notes with word plays, but while sound coincidences can (especially if you’re paying attention to them) affect how you receive a word (and they do sometimes affect the meaning of a word over time), they simply are not reliable guides to the origin of a word without further evidence. Oh, they can lead you to look for evidence. But if that evidence is not there, then you can’t make an assertion. And if there’s abundant counter-evidence (as there is, for instance, with picnic), then your theory is toast.

So, for instance, nitty-gritty is a word first attested in the 20th century. The oldest printed use of it so far found is from 1940, but it is generally considered to have been in use for at least a couple of decades before that. It was popular among black jazz musicians in particular back then, and it has always meant “the fundamental issues” or “the most important things”. Now, it happens that there is a conjecture being passed around (by people who don’t seem to think research is important) that it originated as a term for the dirt (grit) left behind after African slaves (ni…) had been unloaded from slave ships. The problem with this conjecture is that there is not even the merest scintilla of support for it. It is not really believable that this term could have been in use for two centuries without so much as once being documented. (There is also the matter of its documented uses always being positively toned and referring to essential things rather than negatively toned and referring to waste, but meanings can shift over time, as I have already pointed out.)

So, now, let us put that frankly obnoxious unsupported etymological conjecture about slave-ship origins behind us and let us taste this word on its own terms. Obviously there is an enough of an echo of “the n-word” for many people to have noticed it. On the other hand, no one is protesting that Niagara is racist (or if they are, I haven’t heard it), so we need not consider this word poisoned. The strong taste of its elements nit and grit, along with the tapping of the /t/s, gives it a certain get-dirt-under-your-fingernails edge, the kind of focus on specifics that can involve sifting through a lot of itty-bitty particles.

And then, yes, there’s that reduplication. We do like reduplication in English; it adds an ideophonic touch, that performative aspect to a word. There’s an insistence in nitty-gritty that isn’t there in nuts and bolts, for instance. Just as super-duper is a greater degree than super, and teeny-weeny is smaller (and cuter) than teeny or tiny, likewise nitty-gritty is more fundamentally fundamental for being reduplicative. And, hey, you want to dot the i‘s and cross the t‘s? Well, here are two i‘s and four t‘s – double your specificity!

And where else will this word lead us? I think Jamaica in the moonlight… What? Oh, those are words from “American Dream,” a song by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Jamaica is also where the reggae singer who called himself Nitty Gritty hailed from. So take your pick: country-folk-rock or reggae… and let’s get down to the nitty-gritty!

Thanks to Elaine Freedman for asking for nitty-gritty.

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eh

Posted on April 28, 2010 | 1 comment

A fellow member of the Editors’ Association of Canada recently posted a link to the New York Times “After Deadline” blog on usages that should have been corrected. The January 12 post referred to a news headline from December 31: “Good Players, Eh? / New Met spurs discussion on best Canadians.” The blogging editor’s comment: “This use of ‘eh’ as an all-purpose Canadian reference is both clichéd and condescending. Let’s stop.”

Condescending? What’s up with that, eh? Next they’re going to say that Canadians don’t like being called Canucks or that Canadians are Americans too or something. I mean, yeah, when I was in the US, it got a bit annoying whenever I would say eh and my friends would exclaim, “He said ‘eh’!” But, still, I wear that eh like a badge of pride! It’s Canadian, eh? (Or, as that famous book by Mark M. Orkin puts it, Canajan, Eh?)

I mean, think about the quintessential Canadian humour: SCTV‘s Bob and Doug Mackenzie, with their archetypal “Take off, eh!” For that matter, think about how often Canadian newspapers use eh to emphasize Canadianness. (How often? Go to a Canadian newspaper’s website and do a search on eh. Here are some recent examples from The Globe and Mail: “How Canadian was that, eh?”; “Canada 150, eh”; “A Canadian eh-book reader”; “Welcome to the Walk of Fame, eh?”; “What’s the score, eh?”; “More than bacon, eh?”; and many, many more…)

Why is eh so quintessentially Canadian? Probably for the same reason that sorry is the other quintessentially Canadian word (you know, what you say when someone bumps into you or gets in your way): we just don’t think it proper to be so cocksure of ourselves and disregarding of others (translation: we’re passive-aggressive). After all, eh started its life (by the 18th century in England) as specifically an interrogative, which is still its only current definition in the Oxford English Dictionary: asking for repetition, or inviting assent. It is as the invitation of assent that it has taken root in Canada. We’re not a nation hard of hearing; we’re just always wanting to show we’re listening. We seek the assurance of the other.

It’s like a verbal reach-out-and-touch. It’s actually functionally similar to uptalk (that way some people – especially young adult females – talk as though nearly every sentence is a question, which is really just to keep drawing on the interlocutor’s assent), but of course it’s much less annoying, partly because we don’t use it that much. As the American Heritage Dictionary says, it’s “Chiefly Canadian Used to ascertain or reinforce a listener’s interest or agreement.” Or, as Marion Johnson (“Canadian Eh,” Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics 21 (1976): 153-60) puts it,

The general conversational function, of eh, therefore, is to question the situational assumptions associated with different speech acts, thereby showing that these assumptions are held in a weak rather than a strong form. In this way, a speaker can avoid an attitude of officiousness and at the same time avoid unfriendly formality. This interpretation of eh fits well with Canadians’ general conception of themselves as a rather cautious, rather retiring, but basically good-hearted nation. We are not afraid to form and express our own point of view, we just don’t like to force it too much on other people.

And there are so many ways we use it, eh! How do we use it? Let me count the ehs. Actually, I don’t need to; Elaine Gold has done so already (see her paper “Canadian eh?: A survey of contemporary use“). Here are her ten usages, with her examples:

1. Statements of opinion Nice day, eh?
2. Statements of fact It goes over here, eh?
3. Commands Open the window, eh?
Think about it, eh?
4. Exclamations What a game, eh?
5. Questions What are they trying to do, eh?
6. To mean ‘pardon’ Eh? What did you say?
7. In fixed expressions Thanks, eh?
I know, eh?
8. Insults You’re a real snob, eh?
9. Accusations You took the last piece, eh?
10. Telling a story This guy is up on the 27th floor, eh? then he gets
out on the ledge, eh . . .

The most commonly used types, according to a survey she did, were I know, eh; Thanks, eh; What a game, eh; and Nice day, eh. The narrative style, in the last kind, was generally seen as a mark of a less educated user.

But the general use of eh is certainly not the mark of an uneducated user. I think we can all accept that members of the Editors’ Association of Canada are not insufficiently educated, and I’ve had no difficulty finding instances of eh in emails to the EAC’s listserv. For example, “Jelly bean houses, eh? Very cool.”; “Okay, I stand corrected. Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, eh?”; “Well, it’s all relative, eh?”; “Let’s hope there are no more, eh?”; “Pretty rough treatment for dissenting senators, eh?”; “Kind of dense, eh?”; “I guess that’s not the correct way to go about it, eh?”; “Yes, I know that’s no excuse, but … everyone needs editors, eh?”; and “how ’bout them verbs, eh!”

As the last example shows (in case there was any doubt), eh is colloquial. In fact, it’s the acme of colloquial: it clearly implies, even demands, colloquy (which is from Latin for “speaking together”). But it is, at least, our word – it may have come from elsewhere, it may be used elsewhere, but no one else uses it as a badge of identity, eh? Consider this quote: “Canadians will readily acknowledge this tag as being quintessentially ‘Canuck,’ but many will then go on to either disclaim usage or to make disparaging comments about others’ usage of it.”

Wait, does that sound not quite right? Well, that’s because it isn’t quite right. The quote, from an article by Miriam Meyerhoff in Language in Society volume 23 (page 367), actually begins “New Zealanders will readily acknowledge this tag as being quintessentially ‘Kiwi,’ but…”

Uh-oh. Not only are they claiming it as theirs, they’re even being more self-effacing about it than we are (some Kiwis even think it vulgar, apparently). What’s up with that, eh?

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ziggurat

Posted on April 28, 2010 | Leave a comment

Imagine the scene in a black-and-white B movie: James Cagney is playing a gangster, again. He’s hiding out in a step pyramid. He thinks he’ll never be found. But his trusted lieutenant Ziggy, a round little bulb-nosed schlimazel, has led his arch-nemesis right to him. Cagney looks up at the door of his secret chamber deep inside the Babylonian building and sees Ziggy leading in a group of men with Tommy guns and a mysterious trench-coated feminine figure, and he exclaims, “Oh, Zig, you rat!” But how was Ziggy seduced to betrayal?

Well, OK, no. Ziggurat doesn’t really have anything to do with gangster movies. Nor, for that matter, with Ziggy, whether we be talking about Ziggy the cartoon character created by Tom Wilson, or Ziggy Stardust as played by David Bowie, or some other person whose birth certificate probably reads something like Sigmund. (There was a recent contretemps involving Ziggy and a rat, however; the rat was from Pearls Before Swine and it was protesting Ziggy’s lack of pants. See comics.com/pearls_before_swine/2009-12-13/. See also www.gocomics.com/ziggy/2009/12/17/.)

It also doesn’t have anything etymologically to do with zig-zag, at least as far as anyone knows – zig-zag may have referred early on to battlements, but it comes from a Germanic word, whereas ziggurat comes from Mesopotamian ziqquratu, from the verb zaqaru, “be high” (and we don’t mean be high on the stuff you roll with Zig-Zag papers).

But the shape of z plays nicely into the zigs and zags of the stepped sides of ziggurats as well as of any crooked jaggers one might call zig-zaggers. The gg, on the other hand, can give a more earthy feeling, as from digger, or a bluntness, as with mugger, or even silliness, as with giggle. The gur could be from figure but just might also call in gurgle or gurn – or augury, perhaps as performed at the peak of a ziggurat. At the end, though, it smacks sharply with rat, like the zap of a lightning bolt, or like the hapless rodent the bolt has just frazzled.

And just think how much more wicked – and foreign-looking – it would be if we spelled it ziqqurat. It would also sound like a crack of lightning, or a lock breaking… or like Marlene Dietrich requesting a cigarette as she holds her gun steadily pointed at Cagney… and the little bulbous guy, hand shaking, flicks his Zippo and lights her one.

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