Category Archives: word tasting notes

kudos

Posted on April 26, 2010 | 1 comment

Those kids in Keds didn’t cod when they claimed they could cozen a dozen kudus to cut the kudzu. Hey! Kudos to the kiddos who got the kudus to chew the kudzu.

Hmm. How many kudos? Would that be one kudo per kiddo? Could do…

Waitaminit there! This isn’t a coup of karate or judo done to the vocab. You cad! I must object: kudos is a mass object. You’d have me keening kaddish for the lexis.

Yes, kudos is not like dittos, it is like pathos. The final s is, to be correct, [s] and not [z], as it is not a pluralizing morpheme. Which has not stopped it from being backformed by reanalysis to kudo, just as pease was taken as peas and backformed to pea, and cherise was backformed likewise to cherry. So perhaps we should say kudos is like congeries: still in process of reanalysis, with some people putting up a fight. (And the existence of a cell phone company called Koodo is probably not adding clarity to the matter.)

This is an interesting word in that its exoticism, at least at first meeting, might seem to make it something either formal or, like kismet, apart from the English cline of formal–informal. Yet its usage is very often chummy or newsy or sportstalky. Indeed, it seems to have gained greater spread through journalistic use in the 1920s, though it was at first a word of loftier spheres.

Another interesting detail in its shift is that its meaning in the Greek original is not “thanks” or “congratulations” but “glory, fame, renown”. We see this in usage by, for instance, Benjamin Disraeli (1841), “I am spoken of with great kudos in ‘Cecil’.” On the other hand, Charles Darwin’s 1859 “Lyell has read about half of the volume in clean sheets, and gives me very great kudos” evinces a shift in progress.

And why stop the shifts with sense and number? Verbing is to be expected, and indeed kudos’d was seen already in 1799, but as a direct reference to its use in Greek. More recently we have kudized, as in “He kudized Louisa, who blushed when he compared her to Penthesilea.” Does that set your teeth on edge? Do you wish anything but kudos to the author of that abomination? No need to tar and feather him; Mortimer Collins, whose 1873 Squire Silchester’s Whim that is a quote from, died in 1876 – but received much kudos during his life. Or should we say he was greatly kudized?

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dingle

Posted on April 25, 2010 | 1 comment

Another international word tasting event was drawing to its conclusion. A few last lexical minutiae were being wrapped up; goodbyes and phone numbers were being exchanged. I was talking to Anne Wharton, of Buffalo.

“Next time I’m passing through, then,” I said, “I’ll give you a dingle.”

Ravi Ramakrishnan happened to be adjacent. “You will give her a wooded dell?” he said, leaning over from his conversation with Albert Denton. “The gift of geography! I know you Canadians have a surplus of it.”

Albert, who is from Sheffield, offered a correction. “A deep cleft between hills, rather, you mean.”

Ross Ewage’s ears are radars for opportunity, and he materialized instantly. “You two are fixated on the anatomy of the wrong sex,” he said. “A dingle is something only dudes have.” He looked at Anne. “He’s offering you a sex change.”

“I’m offering her a phone call,” I said, though of course all those present knew that already and were just being disingenuous.

“That’s a verb, lad,” Albert said. “Ding plus the frequentive suffix le.”

“There are plenty of verbs one may give a person,” I said. “Kick, slap, kiss, ring – of course those are all nouns too, but why shouldn’t dingle be allowed the same conversion?”

“And here I thaht you were affering me an Irish town,” Anne said.

“An Irish fort, perhaps,” said Ravi. “That Dingle is after all from the Irish Daingean Uí Chúis, ‘Ó Cúis’s fort.'” Ravi’s Irish was rather good – I made a mental note to ask him where he picked it up.

“Or you might well get some English characters,” Albert said. “The Dingles are a family in the popular British television series Emmerdale, set in West Yorkshire.”

“Emmerdale!” said Ross. “Well, we know what kind of place that must be, since the name looks like a blend of dale and emmerder, which is French for –”

Ravi cut him off. “We know what merde means in French, so we can work it out, thank you.”

“Maybe it should be Emmerdingle,” Anne said.

“Well,” Ross rejoined, “my point is that this farm seems like the kind of place they grow dingleberries.” He smirked.

Anne’s eyebrow raised. “They grow cranberries in Yorkshire?”

“That’s not the kind of dingleberries I think he has in mind,” Albert said. “These ones you might know as will-nots or clingons.”

“If you don’t mind,” Ravi said, “some of us intend to eat within the next twenty-four hours.”

“You will be relieved to know,” Ross said, “there’s yet another use for dingleberries, and in this case it’s for something that, among the group of us, only Anne has.”

“And so we return to anatomy,” I sighed. “Look, why don’t I just say that next time I’m in Buffalo I’ll look you up?” I glanced over at Ross and flinched slightly.

“In England,” Albert offered, “we’d say ‘I’ll knock you up.'”

Ross’s grin widened. I sighed, buried my face in my hand, and wished for a wooded valley I could go hide in.

Thanks to Jim Taylor for suggesting dingle.

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marijuana

Posted on April 24, 2010 | 1 comment

This word has a distinctive aroma, and one that varies notably depending on who’s seeing or hearing it. Mellow and friendly, or dangerous? Does the sense of illegality and opprobrium dominate, or is it simply moderately risqué, just a little louche? I must leave that much up to the individual word taster.

The taste also varies according to a few other factors. One is how you pronounce it: do you say it the fully anglicized way, which makes it sound like part of a sentence – “Does Mary wanna smoke some?” – and gives its beginning an echo of American too? Or do you say the vowels more like the Spanish way, which highlights its pun on the female name Mari-Juana, a familiar form of María-Juana, which translates to Mary Jane, which is one of many nicknames for marijuana (like all illegal or immoral but desired things, it has gotten quite a few ways of speaking about it)? Either way, it’s not too likely you’ll actually have a [h] or devoicing of the [w] in the middle of the word; we rarely do that even at the beginnings of words anymore (e.g., when, where), and it’s that much less likely between two vowels in the middle of a word.

Another factor is how you spell it. Its origins are still a matter of speculation, but older forms are mariguana and marihuana. Mariguana is generally not seen now, and just as well; with its clear taste of guano and the more squalid and fat air the g gives it, who would want it as much? Marihuana, for its part, is a current alternate spelling and one used in Canada by some branches of the government (Justice, Health Canada, the RCMP) at least some of the time. To my eyes, it gives them an air of official out-of-touchness, a starchy “correctness” that alienates them instantly from those who actually use the stuff. But for what it signifies, I must admit the spelling marihuana has a certain something marijuana doesn’t: the sense of inhalation or exhalation that the h presents, quite appropriate to something that is smoked. Compare the different tastes that could be gotten from different spellings of some other words: Cojiba instead of Cohiba, Tihuana instead of Tijuana, halapeño rather than jalapeño, or jabanero in place of habanero.

But the j has staying power. It sort of looks a little like a long doobie – the ij together in fact make a spliff-like form – but neither that nor the fact that a joint is also called a j (you’ll hear that one in Paul Simon’s “Late in the Evening”: “I stepped outside and smoked myself a j”) is likely why the j has been preferred. I am of the mind (though this is purely speculation) that it is probably actually because of the salience of j in that position (what linguists call its markedness): it stands out more and is more memorable; Anglophones have a habit of assuming that if there’s a more marked form and a less marked form, the more marked form is the more correct one; it looks Spanish; and it resembles Tijuana, which just incidentally tends to have a similarly louche overtone.

Marijuana has of late gained other overtones as well, however. While on the one hand you see use, using, and users right by it very often, and it is quite often featured in a list with cocaine, alcohol, and even heroin, one of its most common collocations in recent times is with medical (or sometimes medicinal). And you will not likely be surprised to know that legalize, legalizing, and legalization are also often seen near it (and that’s from the Corpus of Contemporary American English; I suspect that collocations might tip even a bit more towards the positive in Canada, a country where one of the great national historians and literary icons made a TV appearance explaining humorously how to roll a joint: www.geist.com/findings/how-roll-joint-pierre-berton).

Now here’s a little take-away thought experiment for you: which do you think would seem more favourable to legalize – marijuana, marihuana, or mariguana?

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Elvis

Posted on April 23, 2010 | 2 comments

This word is, of course, instantly evocative. One thinks first of the rockabilly star, in the beginning the great king of rock and roll, later on the king of glitz, and since 1977 perhaps the most impersonated entertainment personage ever and the subject of rumours that he’s not really dead.

One may also think of other famed Elvises: Elvis Costello (born Declan McManus in London), another star of music – if not exactly the comet that Elvis Presley was – and husband of jazz singer Diana Krall; Elvis Stojko, former world champion figure skater noted for his very guy-ish approach (including karate kicks) who, in retirement, while his peers are skating in star-studded glamorous touring shows, seems mainly to be filling his time saying worse-than-inane rubbish about the current crop of figure skaters (just because he was unartistic and had to rely on jumps doesn’t mean the same should be true for everyone); Elvis Grbac, star NFL quarterback; and Elvis Mitchell, movie critic for National Public Radio. All of them have a clear influence in image from some aspect of the overtones that Elvis carries with it.

Those overtones include a southern-US, almost hick-style image (the name Elvis has been used occasionally in cartoons and comedies, typically for a southern-hick-type character), a tone perhaps also influenced by Elvira and Mavis; the kind of fame that requires telling people that “Elvis has left the building”; the inevitable and frequent rhyme pelvis (and perhaps a subtle background influence from swivel, and the evils of that lusty grinding); and a taste of the Levis that pelvis is clad in. And of course the mutually anagramming protestation Elvis lives!

It seems that another overtone many people get from Elvis is a somehow Latinate one, at least for the -is part. This shows itself through one surprisingly common plural formation (after all, with all those Elvises, real and imitation, one does need a plural): Elvii.

Now, I’m generally more a descriptivist than a prescriptivist, but I do feel compelled to point out here that Elvii is just plain old wrong as a plural. Certainly people may find the adjoining alveolar fricatives at the end of Elvises to be a bit unpleasant and may want to avoid them, but let’s be clear about a couple of things:

First, only Latin masculine nouns (used qua Latin words) ending in -us in the singular (and their descendents, Italian masculine nouns ending in -o) take -i as a plural ending – any other ending, be it -is, -os, -as, what have you, or even an -us that is not from a masculine noun (e.g., ignoramus, which is an inflected verb in Latin, or mumpsimus, which is an erroneous version of an inflected verb) or is now fully integrated as an English word,  simply does not get changed to -i.

Second, it’s -i, not -ii. Those who have noted forms such as radii should take note that the singular is such as radius. The first i in the ii is the same i that was there in the singular next to the us. The us by itself makes only one i. (Ironic, isn’t it – in English I is one person and us is several, and in Latin -us is one and -i is several.) So even if the two i‘s seem (as my wife says) more sophisticated, using them is less sophisticated; and anyway, it’s even more sophisticated to be a four-eyes, but we don’t see Elviiii unless his convertible is going off a cliff.

Elvis, in any event, is not a Latin name. The Oxford Dictionary of First Names declares frankly that it is “of obscure derivation”: “It may be derived from the surname of an ancestor, or it may have been made up…” It may also have been modified from Saint Elwin, who came from Ireland to Cornwall somewhere in the Middle Ages; there are chapels in his name in Cornwall and Brittany. What we do know is that Elvis Presley got the name from his father, Vernon Elvis Presley. And when Elvis Presley entered his sainthood in his early middle age, it spawned a host of apostles and epigones, and chapels too (e.g., a wedding chapel in Vegas), which no doubt have corny walls showing many a Brittany making her match. And now, along with the ersatz Elvises, it seems that Elvis itself has taken on a late career as a rather iffy Latin impersonator.

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lung-bustingly

Posted on April 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

In the May/June 2010 issue of Canadian Running, coach Kevin Mackinnon writes,

Running on the track doesn’t have to be boring, and it doesn’t have to be lung-bustingly tough. (Yes, I know that lung-bustingly isn’t a word, but it seems like the perfect way to describe that can’t-quite-get-a-breath feeling at the end of a good, hard set.)

Well, coach, you have one thing pretty much right and one thing pretty much wrong there. I’ll start with the wrong: just because lung-bustingly isn’t in a dictionary you might happen to look in doesn’t mean it’s not a word. (Dictionaries are more like field guides than legislation – though people turn to them for guidance, even the most prescriptivist ones start by observing usage patterns, and they always have to make choices of what words to include and not to include.) You just used it, right? As an isolated lexical unit that is not internally modifiable by syntax (so one word, not several). And I understood it. So, too, no doubt, will everyone else who reads it (provided they understand English). So it’s a word. A nonce word, perhaps, but a word no less.

Not only that, it’s a word constructed from well-known parts by a standard, accepted derivational process. All the bits are ordinary English: lung, a good old English word; bust, a variant of burst, another good old English word; ing, a good old English suffix – actually more than one, but this ing is the one that forms the present participle and adjectives of action (Xing meaning the noun modified does X); and ly, another good old English suffix, also actually more than one, in this case the one that forms an adverb from an adjective. Put all together, they make a word just like heart-stoppingly, heartbreakingly, mind-numbingly, et cetera, all of which most often modify an adjective rather than a verb, and often one in the predicate position, as is the case here (not tough running but be tough). And it’s been used before – Google it and you’ll see.

On the other hand, I think you’re right about its being good at expressing how one feels after doing hard intervals or finishing a 5K race. Aside from the very clear imagery – lungs busting out of the ribcage, perhaps, or just breaking down internally, or bursting like balloons – it has a good sound, too. The stressed vowels are both the same one as you’re probably panting as you finish the run, and for a bit afterward: that deep-chest huh, huuh, hhuuuhhh. The lung also has echoes of lunge as well as perhaps of hunger and lust, and the velar nasal that ng represents is often almost the only consonant one can even articulate in that lung-busted state, and usually just as one attempts to swallow. Bust gives a nice puff of air bursting forth from the mouth. It fairly socks you between the eyes. (And see my tasting note on gangbusters.) And then the word goes back to that ng again. As a bonus, the form of the word suggests you have lungs like a bus and you’re all tingly now. And the rhythm is not the smooth-running rhythm of the middle of a race; it’s the stumble-stop as you cross the tape or pass the end point of your speed interval: dum da-da-dum, a tailless trochee and a dactyl.

In fact, it makes me think of a poem – in this case, one I wrote. It was published in TOK 3, and it’s also on my website, but I’ll include it here for you. Notice how many sounds and images hint at the same thing lung-bustingly communicates.

To the Finish
5k, Toronto Island

hot feet, boardwalk, legs blue sore
four thousand metres of panting so far
a bit of puddle spatter, a taste of salt spray
from hungry waves or the streaming body
running ahead, follow, thirst
now less than a thousand metres to go
boards riffling, crazing the eyes
each step cracking like aching joy
each breath a lust from the stomach
hoo, hoo, HAH, hoo, hoo, HAAH, ho
now nine hundred, now eight hundred
closing on body, white shirt, go past
a blue shirt slips by merely, but no
hold it, keep it, iron and acid
in body and water on boards, don’t slip
and five hundred metres now left
and it darkens below and is harder
and a line and people, shouts
a tree, a tree, another tree, grass
to curl up and lie on, stop, please stop
but hoo, hoo, HAH, ho
just sixty seconds now, less
gain no one else, admit no one more
when like a dream she overtakes you
yearning for the end like a lost baby
like reaching for her child in the taunting waves
nothing to do but follow her pull
go harder than you even can, burning
the greensward underfoot rolling, pitching
there is a space between the trees, and fifty
forty, hoo, HAH, thirty, grass
the banner, the sign, the clock
the time has all leaked out
and there’s just one second more, five metres
the length of three of her in a breath
and she is there, stumble stopped, gasping, coughing up
and you steam and shake and you have both prevailed
and the rest will fall in behind
but she has her metal, her ribbon
her shiny baby, and you have your time
three strides, three lengths of a body
a breath behind, and nothing you can hold

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ubiety

Posted on April 21, 2010 | 1 comment

Do I sense some dubiety about the propriety of ubiety in society? But everyone has somewhereness: you can only be in one place, and that you-be-one is U B I, which is Latin for “where” (as the pseudo-Latin joke goes, semper ubi sub ubi: “always where under where” – say it aloud). That where that you are, incidentally, may be called a ubity, and was as recently as 1964 by W.H. Auden. So ubiety means being in a unity of ubity.

Now, mind, if you are in one where and another where and some other where and every other where, then it’s “and where”, which in Latin (with its clitic conjunction que, as seen in senatus populusque Romanum, “senate and populace of Rome”) is ubique. And where does that end up, in English? Wherever there’s a Tim Hortons, Canadians might say: it’s ubiquitous, and the noun is ubiquity.

But it would be iniquity to replace ubiety with ubiquity. That would be to take e, which is natural enough, and push it to the limit until you want to quit. Unless, of course, you’re an omnipresent being, in which case your ubity is here, there, and everywhere – quite. Or, if your metaphysics is replaced with ‘pataphysics, you could have ubuity. You can also be in many places at once, of course, with the aid of YouTubeity.

Which reminds me of something this word illustrates: the vowel shift in English. English, when it was Old, had vowel sounds rather like those of Latin – plus some more, but when you saw a u you know it was [u] or [U] and when you saw an i you knew it was [i] or [I]. But then, over the course of more than a century, the pronunciation of long vowels shifted – they shifted upwards, so that [a] went to [e] and [e] to [i], and that forced [i] to scoop down at the start to emphasize it, [aI]. At the back similar things happened, and [u] ended up in many places as either [aU] (as in house) or [ju] (as in use). So a word that could have been “oo-bee-it-ee” was conformed instead to the English standards of the time, already largely in place in the 17th century when it was borrowed and, for that matter, already being used for Latin pronunciation by the English, too. And that straight, narrow locution was displaced by one that starts narrow and the front, then slides back and opens wide before narrowing to the front again – quite a tour of the mouth.

Do you buy it, eh? Well, it’s true. Sounds may be said in only one place in the mouth at a time, but that place moves – it varies a bit even within one speaker’s speech, and more between speakers, and over time the standard can simply move. So the ubiety of vowels is questionable at best, though the vowels of ubiety are just as one might expect.

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting ubiety.

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picrorhiza

Posted on April 19, 2010 | 1 comment

This word presents something of a melange of flavours. The pic naturally brings to mind a point or a sharpness, whether from pick or pique or piquant, and the picro in full reinforces this with a hint of, for instance, pico de gallo; the cr has that grasping, gathering, grabbing feeling to it; the ror more rolls than roars on the tongue, and is, like rural, a bit of oral effort to say because it quite lacks any points of clear opposition, just a rolling subsiding and resurging of the tongue; the rh we know is just another /r/ but gives the visual effect of a wheeze, reinforced by the iz; crorhiza may make a person think of coryza, also known as catarrh but commonly called runny nose today. Put together it may seem a bit like the various rumblings and groanings of unhappy innards. Visually there is also a certain sense of smoothness in symmetry, in the _i_ror_i__, but disrupted by sharp and unbalanced p c h za.

But does it taste bitter anywhere in the root? Well, it has a bitter root (but that root is not bitterroot, which is a nameused fora  few other plants, significantly Lewisia rediviva and also, according to the OED, Apocynum androsæmifolium). Specifically, picro is the Greek root (typically a prefix in English) meaning “bitter”. It happens to be used nearly not at all in ordinary English, reserved for taxonomic terminology and similar scientific usages. On the other hand, rhiza does show up a little in common English, mutatis mutandis, for instance in rhizome. What is it at root? “Root”, in Greek of course.

So picrorhiza names a bitter root? Yes, specifically Picrorhiza kurroa, a plant called variously katki, katuki, kutki, or katuka. It grows in the Himalayas (I know not whether it grows in a row on the peaks, but that would seem to lack reason, because Himalayan peaks are rather inhospitable to vegetation; however, it does grow at high altitudes); it has been used medicinally for ages as a treatment for heart and liver problems, jaundice, and asthma. It would appear that such other botanical names as mycorrhiza as well as its medical context, bringing with it recollections of words such as arrhythmia, lead it sometimes to be written picrorrhiza, which is nonetheless a misspelling. Its active ingredients include picroside I, kutkoside, androsin, and apocynin. Research indicates that, among other things, it protects the liver and stimulates bile production; it may also help the immune system and may lower blood sugar. And – and this is fortunate – it appears to help treat hypoxia. So if you get altitude sickness while up picking it, you could always eat some. But watch out: it’s quite bitter.

Thanks to Dawn Lowen for mentioning Lewisia rediviva and mycorrhiza.

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tempura

Posted on April 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

“O tempura! O morass!” Maury fumed, standing over some soggy shrimp fritters in his kitchen.

“O temper! O Maury!” I replied, coming over to look. “I take it the temperature was insufficient?”

“First there was the intemperately tamped tempeh, and now this trumps it! Deux fois trompé!”

“Trempette de foie?” I said, proffering pâté.

Maury dabbed a chip in it. “My culinary self-esteem is taking a dip.” He wandered into his living room and dropped himself into a chair.

“You’re just gaining seasoning,” I said, following him.

“Like a frying pan. I might as well have stuck with painting.” He gestured at a tempera of a temple. “Rather Apollo than appalling.”

“Where is that?”

“The Vale of Tempe, Greece.” He declaimed the beginning of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”

“Et in arcadia ego,” I said. “Beats its namesake Tempe, Arizona, anyway.”

“Where you can fry an egg on the sidewalk,” Maury said. His testiness tempered, he rose again and returned to the kitchen.

“Well,” I said, “your food’s not so unlike painting. Egg tempura and oil. It’s the same root, anyway, tempura and tempera.”

“For which we can thank those Portuguese missionaries to Japan of four centuries ago. Them and their tempuras, which were meat-free days.”

“Other sources say it comes from tempêro, ‘seasoning,'” I pointed out. “It’s a tasting kind of word, anyway, tip and lip, like dip – French trempette. Anyway, temper, tempera, temperature, tempura, all trace back to temperare, ‘divide in due portion’, ‘mingle’, ‘temper’, ‘exercise restraint’…”

“Whereas tempeh comes from Indonesian.” Maury stood over his counter again and contemplated his ingredients. Seeing that the oil had heated up somewhat, he began dipping vegetables into the batter. “Well, I might as well view this as just a temporary setback. No point in dumping it just because it’s a bit damp.” He glanced up at the clock. “Tempus fugit!”

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Eyjafjallajökull

Posted on April 18, 2010 | 5 comments

The sight of Icelandic can scare people sometimes. A word like Eyjafjallajökull might seem like a Viking war scream, something you’d hear coming at you across a wide-open rolling plain with mountains and glaciers behind, a rugged, untamed land – some of the youngest land on the planet (with more being spewed fresh from the mantle on regular intervals), but with an old language, one that has changed little in a millennium. Iceland: a land of incessant striking scenery (“stunning but nondescript,” as my wife put it after several hours – see our travelogue), a harsh land where for centuries people spent many long hours in small cold cabins, an island country where, thanks to a small population and an annual democratic gathering, there is no significant dialectal variation in the language. A land of very few trees, and not big ones either (what do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest? – stand up), where many of the population believe in the existence of huldufólk: hidden folk, for instance trolls, after whom a whole peninsula is named.

How do trolls hide in a place without forests? Iceland is a place where you can see for miles and miles and miles but whatever you’re looking for you probably won’t see until you’re practically on top of it. Its famous waterfalls, for instance – they don’t fall down to you from above you; rather, they fall from a river that has carved into the plain you’re on, down into a gorge even father below. And major sites of interest – historical sites and geological sites – are marked with little signs and small, mostly empty parking lots next to their two-lane roads. You’re just driving along, and suddenly, whoa!

The language likewise is plain and yet spectacular. Names for things are generally straightforward – they translate to things like Smoky Bay (that’s the capital), Island Fjord, North River, Lake Glacier (the biggest glacier in Europe – and the word for “lake” is the same as the word for “water”), and Midge Lake. But Icelandic has retained three letters that English lost long ago (edh, thorn, and ash: ð, þ, æ) and has retained an involved system of inflections too, and it has developed a tendency to devoice things (for instance word-final l and r) and often to pre-aspirate double voiceless stops (not only do you devoice the consonant, you cut the voice off even before you get to the consonant). If you see nn or mm, you’re looking at a voiceless nasal – and with the nn there’s a sort of [t] at the beginning too. These are sounds you really can’t even hear unless you’re at close quarters in a quiet place. And ll? A voiceless lateral affricate – the same as we see rendered with lh for Tibetan names (e.g., Lhasa) and tlh in Klingon. If you say “hotlips” making sure you actually touch the tongue on the t (rather than making a glottal stop of it) you’ll sort of get it. To all this relative exoticism add the tendency to make compounds and you get some striking words.

For instance, take “island”, “mountain”, and “glacier”: ey (said “eh” – y is just like English y), fjall (said “fyatlh” – one syllable, ending with that ll voiceless lateral affricate, not like the end of Seattle, which keeps the voicing), and jökull (the ö is like German ö and the u is similar but a little lower and farther back, like in French coeur). Since Icelandic puts modifying nouns in the genitive case, you add genitive suffixes to the first two nouns. Then you glue all three together, and whoa! Eyjafjallajökull, “ehya-fyatlha–yökuhtlh”! It’s like you’re driving along a wide-open space and suddenly a Viking horde comes at you from a hidden ravine, and they’re all screaming and whispering at you. Or you’re standing on a glacier and suddenly a volcano erupts from under it. The word looks sort of like a fall, a flight, a horde itself, or the onrush of smoke and ash, perhaps. But all those ascenders and dots and descenders are really your hair standing on end at the very sight of it.

And at the very prospect of saying it, if you’re like a lot of people. And, well, there’s the thing: just as out of nowhere there is all this ash filling the air that is keeping people from flying, likewise out of nowhere is this word, the name for the glacier on the mountain and for the volcano under it that’s burping up the ash. The ll sounds begin to sound maybe like burps of steam and pumice, in fact. And good luck finding another European language that can even deal with this word phonologically. Icelandic has retained and added sounds not found in even the other Scandinavian languages. English certainly just has to do its best with what it can. This word can’t become an English word, after all, unless and until it’s adopted English phonotactics. And it remains to be seen how people will agree on pronouncing it, if they in fact ever will.

People are surely wishing for something nice and simple like Krakatoa right about now. Even Popocatépetl is looking good… though it (in the original) ends with exactly the same sound as does Eyjafjallajökull: not with a bang but a crackling hiss.

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satisficing

Posted on April 15, 2010 | 3 comments

To at least some people’s ears, this word surely does not satisfy. What you see is a common English word (satisfying) with just a slight addition making it a blend with another word (sufficing) – like mocktail (a word that I confess pulls my nose hairs). But this has the added bitterness of business-speak, and of seeming to try to sound clever or superior by dint of a slight modification while not necessarily succeeding, at least in the utterance of its average user.

It’s not that the guy who invented this word was soft-headed. Herbert Simon was one of the leading American social scientists of the 20th century, a Nobel prizewinner, a Turing Award winner, a seminal figure in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and economics (among other fields). He knew how people really do things: markets don’t work with perfectly rational consumers making fully informed decisions, for instance; the cost of getting full information and the effort required to attain perfect results often outweigh the perceptible increase in benefit over a less costly, easier result that is close enough. And choices are often made by groups of individuals with conflicting desires and positions, and simply coming to an agreement is often quite enough, never mind coming to the best possible agreement. So people do what is sufficient to satisfy. Anyone who has worked in the world of business – or, for that matter, just about anyone anywhere who has done anything, really – knows this very well. “That’s good enough – move on,” and the great mantra, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Satisfice.

And no doubt the association of this word with business buzzspeak is a strong factor in its distastefulness to those who dislike it. I think the sound of it is also a problem. To start with, it sounds a bit like a razor doing something I wish it wouldn’t to some usable part of my anatomy. It’s a real hiss festival, and those three i-dots are sort of like one’s hairs standing up at the sound. But beyond that, there’s something satisfying about the word satisfying – that big, wide-open [aI] is like a sigh of satisfaction. But with satisficing, just when you get to that part, there’s an [s], slicing into it. And if you’re Canadian, the vowel sound even changes: the [a] part raises up a bit in the mouth (say eyes; now say ice; repeat) – and the voiceless consonant following it also makes the vowel shorter (a standard effect in most English phonology). So it’s like relaxing in your easy chair and suddenly getting a sliver of ice down your back.

And then there’s the question of redundancy. If we’re talking business, what does satisfy mean, as in “satisfy requirements”? It means “do enough” – not “do everything” but “do enough” (it’s always meant that; it comes from Latin satis “enough” – also the root of satiated – and facere “do”). And suffice means “be enough, be adequate” (from sub “under” – which is often shifted in sense as an affix – and the same facere). It would seem that satisfice is rather more than enough, especially for a word that means, as Oxford puts it, “To decide on and pursue a course of action that will satisfy the minimum requirements necessary to achieve a particular goal.” I guess satisfy, suffice, and various existing phrases had too much latitude for interpretation, and so Herbert Simon came up with this one to stand clearly for just the meaning he wanted. I do feel that he could have come up with a more aesthetically likeable word, but perhaps he didn’t see it as worth the extra effort.

Thanks to Adrienne Montgomerie for wondering aloud about this word on the EAC list.

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