Category Archives: word tasting notes

nonce

Posted on April 15, 2010 | 6 comments

As I was on my nightly stroll through the Oxford English Dictionary, I spotted a word that quite fishhooked my eye: hirquitalliency. Needless to say, my hair Van-de-Graaffed. I clicked and looked. It referred to the state, in an infant, of acquiring a strong voice, and was ported over little changed from the Latin for the same, which in turn borrowed it from a Greek word for a male goat. I looked at the citations. How many times had it ever been used, then? Once! Yes, and the OED declares it a nonce-word. Apparently nonce-words used by Sir Thomas Urquhart in or about the year 1600 are worthy of inclusion (with the dagger of obsolescence clearly affixed), even if, in terms of actual usage, they are a non-see.

Of course, one couldn’t include every nonce formation out there. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake would blow the doors off the project from the get-go. But nonce words are perfectly good and useful things, suitable in their various cases for entertainment, display of erudition, filling out a line of verse, and plain old directness. They may be non-correct English, ‘n once is enough, but many things are worth doing for the nonce, and neologizing is among them.

Borrowing, compound, derivative, formation, and phrase also all attach to nonce. But outside of linguistic terms, it is seen almost exclusively in the phrase for the nonce (though I suppose it is nonced in here and there on rare occasion, when speakers don their noncing shoes). You will probably already have guessed that its present form arises from a reanalysis – a transfer of the n from word word to another. This is true. However, if you surmise that it comes from for then once, you are mistaken. The transfer happened in the Early Middle English period, back when we still had somewhat more inflection than we do now. The old form of the word one was ane, and the genitive of it was anes; it could be used adverbially in a prepositional phrase, and the definite article had a different form for the genitive, so the phrase was for than anes (to than anes was also used). As the inflections reduced in use, this established phrase became a whole nother thing: for the nanes. And that came to be for the nonce today, without ever actually involving the word once.

So… shall we nonce? It has a nice, light touch to it, doesn’t it? Like the tip of the finger tapping a moment in time, no more than an ounce of eternity (though, ironically, the tongue taps twice, holding the second time). It’s all small, round letters. They could be logical operators: the n is like the intersection sign, the c is like the subset sign, the e could be the “element of” sign, and the o a Venn diagram with only one circle. A single set, a set of one, arising at the unique intersection of specific circumstances, a subset that is an element of… what? Of all the possibilities of that word. Or perhaps the ce is the eyes of a person running a cups-and-ball game (cup: n; ball: o), one eye winking at you: just this once I’ll let you have it, and he flips the middle cup to show you: non. Like that ball, what is for the nonce has a sort of spatiotemporal ubeity; it is, we may say, ad-hocsome. It is a party of one.

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting nonce.

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bogus

Posted on April 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

This word may have that high-sounding Latin-looking us ending, but you just know that it’s the us that likewise graces (or disgraces) doofus, dorcus, and similar epithets – the extended index finger of its high sound is not apodictic or apotropaic but simply there to poke us, and so this word is less bonus and more onus. It has all the bluntness of the voiced stops, making what could be the end of hocus-pocus into something so much less clever-sounding, and its core is the ominous, odious, or simply moaning long puckering /o/. That bo is bumptious enough, bowling you over from the start, and then along comes its brother, not Luke but gus. Oh, and they’re big, those buggers – ahem, beggars. They come boogeying out of the bog with a bag of bugs and boogers, and, dude, it’s bogus!

Duuuude. Remember Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Of course you do, even if you never saw it. Unless you weren’t around in 1989 to see Keanu Reeves get his big leap into stardom. (Refresh your memory, or find out what I’m talking about – here’s the trailer.) Anyway, bogus was their word for “bad” – a word they liked enough that the sequel to the movie was Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (they go to Hell).

There was also another movie with Bogus in its title: Bogus, 1996, starring Whoopie Goldberg, Haley Joel Osment, and Gerard Depardieu as Bogus (an imaginary French musician). Never heard of it? Apparently it was pretty bogus – Goldberg got a Razzie nomination for it. But it was directed by Norman Jewison!

Bogus isn’t bad news for everyone. If you live near Boise, Idaho, and you ski, Bogus Basin will be your bag. And if you speak Indonesian or Malay, bogus will remind you of bagus, which means “good”. But for most people, bogus means “fake” or “counterfeit” – common words for it to modify include claims, checks (or cheques to non-Americans), cards, charges, argument, documents, bills… It’s pretty much equivalent to spurious, but where spurious spears, bogus bludgeons. Spurious sounds like spearmint, which still has a mint, but bogus is the kind of money that you get from a bogeyman.

Some people think it may have a connection to bogey, too. It’s hard to say for sure, though. The most standard account of its epiphany is in application to a machine for counterfeiting money, in 1827 (it transferred thereafter to coins made by such a machine). It has been suggested that it is a shortening of tantrabogus, an eastern American vernacular term for “any ill-looking object”. This might in turn be related to a Devonshire term for the devil, tantarabobs, which may in turn relate to bogey. But who knows? That could all be bogus.

mustelid

Posted on April 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

Hoo-wee! What’s that smell? Is that mustard gas? Man, someone musta let one, eh! Or musta left the lid off the composter… Whoever did it shouldn’t weasel out of it. It’s not fair at all; they oughta do the right thing without being badgered. …What?

Actually, that musty, not to say mephitic, miasma is wafting your way courtesy of a mustelid. So what’s a mustelid? Is it a kind of worm or mollusc? Perhaps a plant, like a mustard green? No, it’s closer to a mus musculus, but longer and larger. If your kind of vermin is ermine, or if you like to think of mink, you’re on your way to the source of the stink.

Yes, the mustelids are a family of carnivorous critters (in Latin the Mustelidae) with long bodies, short legs, fur – often quite luxuriant – and musk glands. The must in this word is not related to the musk gland, nor to the word musty; rather, it’s from mustela, Latin for “weasel”. And along with the weasel you have the ferret, the otter, the badger, the ermine, the stoat, the mink, and the wolverine… and, until recently reclassified, the skunk (now reclassified, fittingly, as Mephitidae).

The elid gives the word a fairly good biological – specifically taxonomical – flavour; one thinks quickly of annelids, for instance. But actually the morpheme boundary is at id, and there are plenty more taxonomic words included by that: hominid would be closest to home. The must is as down to earth in taste as the id is scientific; one may think of freshly crushed grapes, or imperatives, or some longer words: you must muster the mastery to remove the mustard from your mustache. In the middle of all this you may also see tel, which may seem delicate or may have the telling air of a report. Looking at the meeting of these two opposite ends with the telling middle, you may call it dualism, but with armed scent glands, I call’t duelism.

Thanks to Elaine Phillips for suggesting mustelid.

persiflage

Posted on April 11, 2010 | 3 comments

Here’s a word that immediately communicates two things (to those who understand it): the discourse referred to is light, and the person speaking or writing is erudite.

Persiflage refers to the sort of light banter one just breezes through, breezy talk to shoot the breeze, mere raillery: more flapper than sage; more purse than flag; a trifle, a siffle, mere piffle. To speak in this way is to persiflate, and indeed one may just as well purse one’s lips and inflate a balloon (you know how to persiflate, don’t you? you just put your lips and tongue together and blow smoke): it is flattery or flatulence, but no divine afflatus. It is prating parsley on the plate of locution (not so unlike the decorative starlets the Italians call prezzemolina, which means “parsley”). It is designed as prophylaxis against a slip, a gaffe, a slur – although it may mask a jape or a sly undercut.

And the breeze comes etymologically to it: it comes from French, per (from Latin for “through”) plus siffler “whistle” (which traces back to the same Latin root that gives us sibilant, a phonological term that describes sounds such as [s]). Thus, it is a high-toned means of blowing discourse away like dust. “Meretricious persiflage,” wrote D.H. Lawrence in Women in Love. “Infidelity and confections and persiflage,” wrote Walt Whitman in the preface to Leaves of Grass. “Smooth and shallow persiflage,” wrote Charles Kingsley in Hypatia. “This vertiginous persiflage, this gyrostatic amphigouri,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in a New York Times review of the 1920 play Where’s Your Husband? “Is this a time for airy persiflage?” wrote W.S. Gilbert in The Mikado.

Well, and perhaps it is a time for airy persiflage. Does not everyone, once in a while, want to pass the time flapping the gums, one hand waving lightly through the air, the other perhaps sustaining a martini? One may even all the while endeavour to sound frighteningly erudite. “Oh, do come join us for some syllabub, a pousse-café, a canapé, and a peck of persiflage.”

Thanks to Marie-Lynn Hammond for suggesting persiflage (quite some time ago).

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sough

Posted on April 10, 2010 | 9 comments

The first time I recall encountering this word – or, rather, its present participle, soughing – was actually when I was in graduate school. The drama department at Tufts University (that’s where I was) was performing Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, in the translation by Patrick Bowles. (I was playing one of the two blind eunuchs. It was not my moment of greatest glory on the Tufts stage – that was probably when I played Flan in Six Degrees of Separation.) There is a line in it, “Cool wood, and the wind in the boughs, soughing like the sea-surge.”

Which tells you well enough what soughing means, without your having to rough it out or tough it out yourself. What it doesn’t tell you is how you pronounce sough. You may guess, from the assonance evinced by the line as a whole, that it rhymes with bough, and that may be what Bowles had in mind. But Heather, the assistant director (the director was a native of Shanghai and left the English tips to Heather, an American grad student), told the actor to pronounce it like soft minus the t – i.e., soughing was to be “soffing”.

It happens that Heather’s is not one of the two pronunciations given in the OED, the Random House, Merriam-Webster, or the American Heritage Dictionary. All agree that the two possible pronunciations rhyme with how and stuff (or with bough and tough, if you will). The OED allows a third for Scots speakers, [sux] – where [u] is the vowel in loop and [x] is the same voiceless velar fricative you hear in loch (so it’s not a respelling of sucks).

The Scots pronunciation is actually the one least changed over the ages. The source of this word is Old English swogan, but the g is really a yogh and would thus be a velar fricative (though perhaps voiced). But velar fricatives have been lost in most kinds of English for centuries, and they have been replaced by a variety of approximations: [f], [w], [i], [ə], nothing at all. Consider that almost anywhere you see a gh there was originally a velar fricative: cough, rough, laugh; caught, bough, though, through; height, weight… The loss of this phoneme, combined with various caprices of vowel shift, has done much to loosen the connection between English spelling and pronunciation.

This word, for its part, was also in danger of being lost, at least south of Scotland. But it proved useful to the literary muse in the 19th century and so had a bit of a revival, and its persistence in the works of Wordsworth, Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Thoreau, and their ilk has given it a certain lasting presence. It shows up both as verb and as noun: “its branches soughing with the four winds” (Thoreau, The Maine Woods); “That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote” (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre). It can also refer to sighing or even to whining.

You may also see another word sough, unrelated, used to refer to a bog, a swamp, a gutter, a sewer, or a slough. Naturally, since it can refer to a watery slough, it’s pronounced to rhyme with the desquamation slough rather than the watery slough. What did you expect?

But, now, you tell me what sound wind in the boughs and the sea-surge make. Go dig through your 1970s LPs for the Environments series released by (fittingly) Atlantic in the 1970s, and play the first side of the first one, titled The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore (did I say 1970s!), 30 minutes of waves (recorded at Brighton Beach but significantly adjusted on an IBM 360) – or pick up any of the many relaxation CDs more recently made inspired by them (go to a spa and get a massage; odds are you’ll get rubbed to the sound of harp, pipes, or piano with waves in the background – here, listen to this, it makes me smell sandalwood already). Or – I know it’s out of fashion, and a trifle uncool, but I can’t help it, I’m a romantic fool – go to your nearest beach to watch the sun go down. (Don’t have a beach? Go find a slough, and lean close to see if you can hear a sough in the sough.) Listen to the waves: what do you hear? Sough, sough, sough… which sough? But then listen to the wind in the trees (that’s Environments 5, side 2, by the way), or perhaps the breeze in the heather, and again you’ll hear sough, sough, sough… but which sough? Is it the same one as the waves? And does either of them sound more like Heather’s version than the dictionary versions?

Thanks to Jens Wiechers for suggesting today’s word.

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lorem ipsum

Posted on April 10, 2010 | 4 comments

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Oops… was that all Greek to you?

No, no, you might say, that sure looks like Latin. And indeed it does. But it’s still what’s often referred to as greeking – it’s incomprehensible dummy text. It’s even incomprehensible in Latin. If it looked like English, it would go something like this:

Sires to obtain pain of itself, it is pain, but boccasing circum stanccur in which toil and pain can him some grea. To take a trivia example, which of un ever under takeslab ise, except to obtain sowe advantage from? Dut wh has any iright pain find fault man who choos esto enjoy a pleasurences voids a pain tha produces no resultant? Demoraliz by the charms of pleasu of the moent, so blindhat the cann forese nd trouble tha.

So OK, so what? Well, that bit of quasi-Latin up there is known as lorem ipsum, after its first two words, and it’s far and away the best-known dummy text in the world. Dummy text? Filler text. When you’re doing layout, and you don’t have the text yet, or you just want to display a layout design without people getting distracted by the text.

And it certainly seems like mumbo-jumbo, doesn’t it? Especially since Latin is the archetypal source for mumbo-jumbo in English. All manner of bogus incantations and assorted hocus-pocus is based on, or made to look like, Latin. Hocus-pocus, for instance. (Mumbo-jumbo, on the other hand, is based on a word from Mandinka, a West African language. There are always exceptions.) Anyone who’s read Harry Potter books – or any of quite a few other books in related genres – will recognize the pattern. And since very few people can understand Latin these days, Latin text – or, even better, garbled Latin – makes a very agreeable bit of filler to make your eyes glide right over it.

The term itself, lorem ipsum, rolls nicely off the tongue. The first word starts with two liquids and always made me think of it as meaning “when” because of its resemblance to French lors. The second word is real Latin that you might have seen elsewhere, perhaps in slightly different form – ipso facto, for one. On the other hand, it might seem like gypsum, which is fair enough since this text is a sort of literary drywall. Both words end in that nice hum of an m, with its soft weight.

This text had been in use for quite some time without anyone really wondering if it was based on something specific when, about a decade and a half ago, Richard McClintock, of Hampton-Sydney College in Virginia, did wonder. Since his expertise was Latin, he could tell at a glance what text was real words, and he zeroed in on the word consectetur, third-person singular present subjunctive passive of a verb meaning “pursue”, because it’s uncommon. Hey presto, he very quickly found a citation of it in Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum, “On the ends of good and evil.” Here’s the passage from which it is taken:

Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur? At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint occaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio.

And here’s the 1914 English translation by Rackham:

Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure? On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain.

Now, about that “for quite some time,” by the way. You will find it said in many places that it started being used in the 1500s. I haven’t yet found any actual citation, just a repeated assertion that someone said once and everyone else is repeating (just like the text itself). What is known is that its popularity comes from its having been distributed by Letraset in the 1960s in sheets that could be cut out and pasted in. McClintock (I learn from www.pri.org/theworld/) happens to have noticed that in the 1914 Macmillan edition of Cicero’s text, there is a page break right in the middle of dolorem, so that a page starts with lorem ipsum (What kind of a typesetter puts a page break in the middle of a word like that! But there it is). It’s his hypothesis that that is, in fact, the version of the text that the lorem ipsum was based on. This makes me speculate that, rather than a printer grabbing bunches of letters from a page of set type, dropping some, adding others, and so on, this may have been a deliberately imperfect typewriter transcription of a random page.

All of this doesn’t address one important fact about lorem ipsum: as a placeholder for English, it’s kind of imperfect. It doesn’t accurately represent English word length and distribution. If you need 500 words of placeholder text, 500 words of lorem ipsum just won’t give you an accurate expectation, and it doesn’t really look like English or break up lines like English. Several years ago, I decided to make some dummy text based on English. I took the beginning of a well-known novel by a 20th-century American author and ran a simple replacement algorithm on it: one sequence of vowels, another of different length of consonants, looping through the vowels and consonants repeatedly in their different phase lengths, a kind of typological minimal music. And I put numbers every 50 words so it could be taken in whatever needed quantity. Here are the first 101 words:

“Spe al Rist Sopl?” Lru setsp ler astisp, olr Ustes Pelrast siopl rus tespelraist spo lur’s tesp. Lre sat sip lour es tespla, ristous eplrestasp. Lir stos plu restes pal ir sto usp el rse tspail, rostus spelrs teaspl fis otus, epl rse atis pouler stseaplr is Otsue Pelrast, 50 siplors uts plers – et as pli roustees pal rios utspelres ta spi louresets apiolurest seplar sit. “Spo lur see tas plir?” ostus Eplea Ristosp, lur seets pilro. Stu sep learis otuespl rse tasi op lru seetsap; i lorsu et spelar stisp lorust sep lersatsip lro sutes pelras it spo 100 lru.

You can get the whole 500 words of it at www.harbeck.ca/James/texttest.html. It’s not perfect; I think I might do up another version. But it’s better for the purpose than lorem ipsum.

And yet, I must acknowledge the cultural hold of faux Latin, not to mention the incredible entrenchment of the lorem ipsum text. So why would I bother? Running those replacements is something I have to do by hand; it’s rather tedious. Does anyone care? Well, yes: I do – I also do layout, and I have on occasion needed truly useful placeholder text. I don’t do it because it’s tedious and laborious (though the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch might disagree with Cicero about choosing pain for pain’s sake); I do it because the tediousness and labour of it produce something that does me some good. And if that makes me happy, and doesn’t harm anyone, who has any right to find fault with it?

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fantods

Posted on April 8, 2010 | 5 comments

It starts with a faint odd sensation, like a phantom over your shoulder, a sort of haunted feeling. You feel like a toad suspended over a fan. Something’s not right… you get the willies, the whim-whams, the jim-jams, the jitters, the heebie-jeebies. Could it be mere fantasy? But you have that horrible hunch and horripilation; you are like a black cat with arched back, with fine dots of static fear in your fur. You look over your shoulder – not there, not over the other, but you can’t evade the black dog that pursues your penumbra. Then, from somewhere behind you, there is a pop and a hiss! You scream, or faint, or do first one and then the other or first the other and then the one.

Of course the sound was just a bottle of Fanta, odds are. But you have experienced an attack of the fantods. Oh, they are the fount-head of anxiety, and they always come in a group, like chills, willies, heebie-jeebies, and so on. Often we say something gives you the fantods, and often the fantods are modified with a present participle adjective: the flaming fantods, the leaping fantods, the galloping fantods, the swivelling fantods (like if you’re sitting at your desk chair alone in the office at 8:37 and a voice right behind your ear suddenly says “Hello”), or – as is also the name of a David Foster Wallace fan site – the howling fantods.

All of which gives you a sense of the growing extremity of this condition. It is, of course, a state tending to magnification; it happens that the sense has also magnified over its history. In the mid-1800s it was a fidgety state; by 1884, it had grown to the creeps, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn was remarking, “These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn’t somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me the fan-tods.” And on into the 20th century they only got worse, so that, for instance, in 1999 we could see in the Atlanta Journal “He is beside himself, in flaming fantods, screeching histrionics in the direst of foreboding and doom” (thanks to Michael Quinion for that citation). In its loosest sense it can refer even to the kind of state where you’re screaming abuse at a machine, such as when your software crashes, losing an hour’s work on, say, a word tasting note (which is why you didn’t get one yesterday).

It’s a soft-sounding word, though. The huffing /f/ and the echo of faint make me think of hyperventilation. The second syllable sets the mouth in a sort of half-round gape. To me, it sounds sort of like the sort of term Snagglepuss would use to describe some hapless hunter’s hissy fit: “Heavens to Murgatroyd! The fantods, even!”

Where does it come from? Ah, now, that’s a bit of a dark mystery. Some say it came from fantasy or fantastic; some say it came from the dialect word fantique; and I have heard tell that it was named for a razor-wielding fan of Sweeny Todd, fond of infanticide but willing to take all, lurking in the shadows looking for his next neck to slit, still on the loose… they say he’s… right there, over your shoulder.

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teetotum

Posted on April 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

Hmmm… is this fee-fi-fo-fum as said be a teetotaller on a teeter-totter? Or perhaps a tot of tea (trickling to tummy) taken by a toe-tapper singing along with, say, Rossini? I wouldn’t bet on it. However, many people would bet on it – a teetotum, that is, not the etymological misconjecture. A teetotum is a top often used for gambling, you see – a typically square top with a spindle in the middle, with a letter written on each side.

Some readers are now thinking, “Oh, a dreidel!” And in fact it’s the same thing, except that on a teetotum the letters are not the Hebrew nun, gimel, heh, and shin but the Latin A, D, N, and T. But they stand for the same things, basically. No, not nes gadol haya sham, “a great miracle happened there”; I mean the gambling use. A dreidel’s letters can be read as standing for Yiddish nite, halb, gants, and shteln, “nothing”, “half”, “all”, and “put” (compare German nichts, halb, ganz, stellen), while the letters on a teetotum stand for aufer, depone, nihil, and totum – “take”, “put”, “nothing”, and “all”. The idea being that everyone playing antes up and then each spins the top. Depending on how it falls, you do nothing (nite/nihil), take half the pot (halb/aufer – with a teetotum it could be some other specified amount, such as one coin), take it all (gants/totum), or put another coin in (shteln/depone). (Other versions can have more sides and more possible moves, but I’m not inclined to tout ’em.)

So how did this spinning object get such a tapping word? From what you want to come up when you spin: T – totum. (It was formerly called just a totum, which I suppose would make the spindle a totum pole, but I can’t assert that as a general fact.) This is very similar to how teetotal was formed: from total abstinence with a capital T, i.e., T-total abstinence. But I doubt the two tee words make good company: if my money is turning on a teetotum, I’m likely to turn to a tot of rum or other tipple when the top is teetering.

As the word turns, so turn coincidences, by the way – Teetotum is also the name of a hotel in Tulum, on the Mayan Riviera, near some Mayan ruins, and just about 250 km across the Yucatán Peninsula from Chicxulub (recently tasted here), where a large meteor hit our spinning planet, putting something and in consequence taking something: leaving nothing for the dinosaurs but all for humans. A great miracle happened there indeed…

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting teetotum, which she saw in the Telegraph crossword.

skirl

Posted on April 5, 2010 | 5 comments

“It’s no a skirt!”

Philip McCarr leapt to his feet, which were a fair ways down. He was not referring to his kilt, for once; the hapless Arthur Watkins had misread Philip’s entry for the word tasting. “It’s skirl, man!”

Arthur was slightly taken aback and tried to make sense of this. “A… it’s a girl with a skirt?”

Philip’s naturally red colour saturated a bit more. “It’s no girl and no skirt, it’s skirl! Th’ soond th’ bagpipes make!” He turned to the room and declaimed what at first sounded like a rather nasty imprecation but in fact was a descriptive passage from Robert Burns’s “Tam o’ Shanter”: “He screw’d the pipes and gart them skirl, Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment and said, “Nice word, that, dirl. Cognate wi’ thrill. Same meanin’, like, or ‘to ring or vibrate’.”

Arthur was still confused for a moment. “I’m sorry, I… Oh, s-k-i-r-l. Yes of course. What bagpipes do.”

Philip threw his hands up. “Theeeeere y’have it, man.” He dropped himself back into his chair and tended to his vocal cords with a glass of Scotch.

“A shrill sound,” said Montgomery Starling-Byrd. “Or, as a verb, to make a shrill sound.”

“Ah wonder,” interjected the gathering’s southern belle, Grace Sherman, “whethah shrill and skirl are cognate.”

Montgomery angled his head back towards her. “One might suspect it, given that an earlier form of skirl is skrill, and it came from Scandinavian, and sk before a high front vowel has in modern Swedish and Norwegian become a palatal fricative. But shrill is traced to German, and research does not go past that on this one.”

“You know, I’m sure, tha ither meaning,” Philip said to Montgomery, and I had the sense he was hoping Montgomery did not.

“Another meaning?” Montgomery said. “I’m sure I don’t use it enough even for one meaning.” He smiled pleasantly. Montgomery could of course never gladly give a Scotsman the upper hand.

“My quote fra ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ wis relevant tae this as weel,” Philip said. “For ’twas auld Nick himself blowing the pipes, and wee witchies dancing a twirl and casting off their duddies till they were ainley in their sarks.”

“Chemises,” I gamely translated, not sarcastically.

“And tae fly wi’ a sweeping or swirling motion – weel, th’ birds may do it, but so may a sark. And that, too, is to skirl. Different word, tho.”

“So,” said Grace, getting up gracefully, “if a girl’s skirt and shirt made a twirl or a swirl like a school of krill” – she began to swing and swirl her flowing garments – “and in the skirl caught a curl and hurled free” – she spun faster and threw off her shawl – “then the girl might skirl, too.” Which Grace immediately did – she let out a short shriek, which it soon became evident was actually involuntary: along with her shawl, she had lost her blouse and her footing, and she landed squarely in Philip’s lap.

Philip looked down at her with an approving smile and toasted her with his glass of Scotch. “Weel done, Cutty-sark!”

The full text of “Tam o’ Shanter” may be read at www.gutenberg.org/files/1279/1279-h/1279-h.htm#2H_4_0316.

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Chicxulub

Posted on April 4, 2010 | 5 comments

OK, just on the face of it, this word looks to me like a name either for something really dark and evil, or for a nightclub. Or both.

I mean, it could be a nightclub. It’s C…lub, and it starts with chic, too. And of course that x is kinda trendy. But it could also be something nasty. It seems somewhat unnatural to the anglophone eye to end a word with ub, just for starts (though it would look quite unexceptional to speakers of some other languages – Estonian comes to mind). It kinda makes me think of Shelob, the nasty big spider from Lord of the Rings, or Chthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft’s massive, ugly, squamous embodiment of pure evil, or maybe Anton Chigurh, the creepy guy in No Country for Old Men who kills people remorselessly whenever it seems at all useful to do so. And the x that may seem trendy may also be the crossing-out of something or someone.

The x may also be a point of rearrangement and transformation. Look at the letter shapes: with a little addition to each letter – maybe just a bit of dust – the i becomes the l, the h becomes the b, the two c‘s turn 90 degrees and become the two u‘s, and the outer two letters change places. X is where it changes – x marks the spot.

And where in the world is this x? If I tell you it’s pronounced like English “sh”, will that help you guess? (The word is pronounced like “chick shoe lube,” which sounds like something you could get at an especially dodgy, dark nightclub.) One country where x often spells a “sh” sound is Mexico, and Chicxulub is a little town on the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. You can go on vacation there. Your vacation may not be enhanced by learning that the name comes from Mayan chic “flea/tick” (or “pin/nail/fix in place”) and xulub “devil/demon/horns” (see? I told it you it looked evil). But it might be enhanced by learning what Chicxulub is really most famous for: massive destruction and mass extinction.

About 65 million years ago, a meteor 10–15 kilometres wide slammed into Earth at a speed of 20 km/second (20 times the speed of a bullet; Superman take note), producing an explosive force on impact equivalent to 100 million megatons of TNT, about 5 billion times as much as the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki. (Yes, you read that right.) It produced a crater 180 km in diameter, which in turn is ringed by a fault about 240 km in diameter (like the small c and the big C). It hit just where the town of Chicxulub now is.

This crater is not the Gulf of Mexico, which is much larger – in fact, the crater area now includes both land and sea and is not evident on a map. It was 65 million years ago, eh! But it sent up a huge cloud of pulverized material that spread over the whole earth and caused drastic climate change – a global winter that pretty much finished off the dinosaurs and a number of other species.

Now, of course, as with everything prehistorical, there is debate over this. Not all scientists are convinced that the extinctions were due to the Chicxulub strike, and some think there were multiple strikes. But an international panel of 41 experts has recently finished reviewing 20 years of accumulated research and evidence and has issued a consensus statement, published in Science (“The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary,” March 2010, pp. 1214–1218), that this is in fact what happened.

Talk about a reset button. The whole world was rearranged, transformed, turned on its side. This is like a Judgement Day, a Ragnarök, a Götterdämmerung. It’s wayyy worse than Chthulhu.

Well, it is if you’re there at the time. But without it, we might not have come to have nightclubs, Tolkien, Lovecraft, the Coen brothers, these word tasting notes… The mass extinction of dinosaurs as a result of it rather cleared the way for the dominance of humans.

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