Category Archives: word tasting notes

mogul

Posted on January 19, 2010 | 2 comments

Oh, how the mighty may become small – a glorious rise, then downhill… Think of Temüjin (“Ironworker”), a Mongol who overcame many obstacles to become such a great leader that he was named Chinggis Khan, “Ocean Ruler” (“ocean” seems to be a term of great approbation in the high mountains and plateaux of east Asia; Tibetan dalai as in Dalai Lama also means “ocean”) – better known to us as Genghis Khan. He took an army west and conquered vast domains. Some of those who came with him stayed and settled northeast of Persia. They took on some Persian customs and languages, and converted to Islam, but were still called Mongols (Persian mugul). From these muguls came a line of emperors who conquered India and established a dynasty that flourished for centuries before slowly fading and finally being displaced by the British: the Mughal dynasty – better known to us as the Moguls.

Wait, do you still have that glorious image in your head, of great palaces, of the Taj Mahal and many other splendid edifices, of a great empire of the subcontinent that lasted centuries? Or are you thinking of a movie mogul, media mogul, music mogul, or real estate mogul – Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, David Geffen? (It seems that while czar has managed to stay in politics, mogul has moved entirely out of it into entertainment – but also, yes, buildings.)

Or are you thinking of a bump of snow on a ski slope?

While the first great Mogul emperor, Babur, was expanding his rule into the subcontinent, Austrians were using a word for a lump of bread, Mugel (from Mocke, “lump, clod, chunk”, probably from the same Indo-European root as mow) to refer to little hill. In the 1960s, that word was borrowed into English to refer to the bumps that may form on a ski slope, usually on the steeper bits, due to the way skiers push snow where they turn. The existing word mogul, already in use for at least three centuries in the general “bigshot” or “high muck-a-muck” sense (and does not mogul seem large-ish, with its big m, heavy /g/, and back vowels?), evidently exerted an influence on this borrowing. And so a great race of great rulers are reduced not even to Ozymandias’s stone in the sand but to one in a field of hundreds of ultimately evanescent, slowly mobile obstacles – bumps on the side of a mountain, made of an ocean of snow. O, glum!

But the moguls nonetheless provide thrilling viewing for winter sports fans, and I will surely be watching the mogul competition at the Vancouver Olympics, as skiers make their way down scores of these bumps (each one a brief rise, then sharper drop), with jumps in two spots: rise, turn in graceful splendour, come down again, and hope for a smooth landing so they can continue to mow down the lumps in speed and style.

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acromegaly

Posted on January 19, 2010 | 1 comment

This is a nice, long word for a not-so-nice condition of length. And look at it: the letters start at the normal size, but then grow outside the lines at the end. The word seems brutish, especially with the overtones of mug and ugly, and one might be led to imagine perhaps some Cro-Magnon hominid.

Now, if we decompose it into parts, we may or may not come to an accurate conclusion as to its meaning. Mega is a popular morpheme these days, and an increasingly unbound one; since huge can be turned to hugely, can mega to megaly be far off – “He megaly kicked your butt”? And acro is well enough known: acrobat, acrophobia. Gotta do with heights, right? So if he kicked your butt halfway to heaven, he acromegaly kicked your butt, right?

Uh, no. For one thing, the ly is not the adverbial ly. The Greek root of megaly has a combining form megal, and that became megalie in French for a noun, and thence to English megaly. And the acro actually isn’t referring specifically to height; it’s not from akros, which means “the highest, the most extreme”, but from akron, which just means “extremity” (it can also mean “at the top”, which is why they named a city in Ohio after it – though you may as soon find yourself in extremis there as singing “You’re the Top,” and though it’s the seat of Summit County, it’s not especially elevated). Acromegaly is a medical condition in which your extremities – hands, legs, fingers, toes, nose, chin – overgrow.

Well, yes, your body does tend to overgrow, too. Acromegaly is almost always caused by a pituitary adenoma – a non-cancerous tumour on the pituitary gland that causes it to ovesecrete growth hormone. (Acromegaly is basically the same as gigantism, except that its onset is after puberty rather than before.) So people with acromegaly manifest it not only by overgrowth of these extremities but by, well, extreme overgrowth. Height over 2 metres is quite common. Do you remember the character Jaws in the James Bond movies The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker? The actor who played him, 7’1.5″ Richard Kiel, has acromegaly. So does famous motivational speaker and writer Tony Robbins.

So if being tall is so impressive (just as being long makes a word impressive), is acromegaly a bad thing? Yes, not only because being too tall is more of a disadvantage in many ways, but because acromegaly brings with it a host of complications. The famous wrestler André the Giant died of cardiac complications of acromegaly at age 46. Fortunately, it is treatable – not reversible per se, but the overproduction of growth hormone can be stopped.


Elaine Phillips saw this word and it grew on her, so she suggested I taste it.

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mucous, mucus, nauseous

Posted on January 17, 2010 | 11 comments

Mucous makes me nauseous.

At the sight of this sentence, the hairs on Margot’s neck stood straight up. She pushed the paper back towards her student, Marcus, and, jabbing her finger at the sentence, said “That’s wrong.”

“No it’s not,” he said. “It really makes me sick. Can’t stand to look at other people’s snot.”

“No,” said Margot, feeling vaguely queasy, due more to the grammatical infraction than to the imagery, “you have two incorrect usages in that sentence. Here –” she pointed to Mucous – “you’ve used an adjectival form where you should use a noun. The noun mucus is spelled m-u-c-u-s.”

Marcus scratched out the sentence and rewrote it: Mucus makes me nauseus.

“No,” Margot said, “now you have mucus right but there’s no such word as nauseus without the o. It has to be an adjective.”

“But you said it was wrong!” Marcus protested.

Sigh. “It’s the wrong word there. Nauseous should not be used to mean ‘nauseated’; it means causing, not feeling, nausea. You could write mucus is nauseous.”

Marcus pulled a face. “That’s really gross! That sounds like the mucus is about to puke!”

“But using nauseous to mean ‘feeling sick’ is a mark of an insufficiently educated user,” Margot said primly.

“Try telling that to my mother,” Marcus replied.

“Your mother is paying me to improve your English. If she were paying me to improve hers as well, I would. Now, you could say mucus nauseates me. That avoids the issue altogether.”

“You know,” Marcus said, looking at the paper, “I don’t like that, mucus without the o. I think it looks slipperier and grosser with the o. Also without it it looks too much like my name.”

“Well,” explained Margot with obvious patience, “it’s a noun-adjective distinction. The o before the u makes it an adjective. Like callous and phosphorous.”

“So I could become an adjective if I added an o in my name,” Marcus said. “Marcous. …What’s an adjective?”

Margot paused for a moment to decide exactly when to have the splitting headache she could see in her future. “An adjective,” she said, eyes closed, hand on forehead, “is something that modifies a noun. So you have a callus on your hand, no o, but you exhibit callous indifference with an o.”

“And calloused hands, with an o, right?”

“No, because in that case you’re taking a noun and making it an adjective with the ed. So callus with no o gets the ed to be callused. Likewise, phosphorous with an o means ‘containing phosphorus’ or ‘glowing.'”

“So,” Marcus said, nudging the paper forward, “this is Marcous writing, with an o.”

Margot almost smiled. “Unfortunately, we can’t do that with proper nouns. Names, like yours.”

Marcus pursed his lips. “Nothing wrong with a bit of fun now and then,” he muttered. Pause. “So where do we see mucous with an o? Like ‘I don’t want that Kleenex, it’s all mucous?'”

Margot was about to say something and then realized that what she was about to say was not true. “Em… you could. They might not understand you. The most common place to see mucous with an o is mucous membrane, a membrane in your body that has mucus as an essential part of it. Like the inside of your nose.”

Marcus remembered something. “Or mucous relief.”

“No, in that case it’s mucus with no o because it’s really what’s being relieved – like cough suppressant: cough is a noun, not an adjective. If it were mucous with an o, it would suggest that the relief itself was like mucus, or had mucus in it.”

“I don’t think you’re right about that,” Marcus said.

Margot opened her mouth in astonishment at the impudence and was about to set him right on the likelihood of his knowing better than her. He held up a finger. “Hang on.” He jumped up, went into the bathroom, and reappeared in record time. He was holding a bottle of cough syrup, which proclaimed itself Mucous and Phlegm Relief.

Margot took the bottle in her hand, stared at it, and, trying not to hurl it through the nearest window, trying not to scream, and with an overwhelming sense of betrayal, hyperventilated herself to unconsciouness.

Poor Margot. Hard to blame her when a rule of usage proclaimed by all the dictionaries and taught as revealed truth is wantonly trashed by a very large corporation. But the poor lass didn’t even get to expostulate on the origins of mucus and nauseous; by the time the smelling salts were brought out and she came to with that splitting headache she had seen coming down the street, the hour was over.

Well, mucus isn’t a difficult one; it’s Latin, straight down – spelled the same, with the same meaning. Mucous is from Latin mucosus, which could also mean “slimy”. You may remember a slimy glue called mucilage that you used in rubber-tipped bottles in kindergarten and elementary-school days. That’s also derived ultimately from mucus. (Marcus, for its part, is not related.) You may find something gluey about the [mju] or [miw] at the beginning of mucus, and the [k] may bring to mind the closed and phlegmy velum one gets when one has a cold. You may or may not agree with Marcus that it’s slimier with an o.

Nauseous, for its part, comes (as you may now guess) from nauseosus. Of course, there is no nauseus and never was; the noun is nausea. (Needless to say, Mucus makes me nausea is not good.) As to whether one ought to use nauseous to mean “nauseated”, well, be aware that many people will consider you not merely wrong but grossly ignorant and offensive if you do. People can be so touchy about language. And indeed, Latin nauseosus means “causing nausea” and nauseous has been used to mean the same in English since at least 1628, while it has been used to mean “nauseated” only since the later 19th century – though it was in use by 1618 to mean “inclined to nausea; squeamish”.

Still, meanings shift; there are many words that have changed quite completely in meaning over the centuries. And what a word is used for is, ultimately, what it is used for – we can try to enforce specific meanings, but if everyone ignores them and goes with a different meaning, then the language has shifted, which it does all the time. And nauseous is now used almost exclusively to mean “feeling sick”. It is very commonly preceded by feel, feeling, or felt, as well as by become and became, and may also come with forms of make, as in Today’s word tasting note made me nauseous. Who but the “It is I” crowd would ever say, or expect anyone to understand, Today’s word tasting note was nauseous to mean the same thing?

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pale

Posted on January 14, 2010 | 3 comments

“I tripped the light fandango, turned some cartwheels across the floor…” Elisa paused and shrugged. “But apparently I was supposed to stick with the pole, because the instructor said, ‘Pal, that’s beyond the pale.'”

Maury raised an eyebrow. “In a pole dancing class? That’s hardly harem protocol.” He took a sip of his pint of pale and grabbed some peanuts from the pail on the table. We were at a Mexican-bar-style pub that also served Spanish food.

“Far from it, I’m sure,” I said. “In such a performance, the pole is the pale.”

“Well,” Elisa said, “I didn’t have much at stake.” She shrugged again and smiled insouciantly.

“But you were at a stake,” I said. “The pole is a stake, because a stake – a boundary stake, especially – is a pale. Latin palus, originally a stake that stood in for an opponent in practice sparring, but then a boundary stake, and then the area enclosed by a boundary.” I reached to the tray the waitress had brought and took another drink.

“As in the Pale of Settlement,” Maury added, “which was in Russia the area in which Jews were allowed to live. Or the English Pale, which was the British-occupied turf in Ireland, beyond which dwelt all those terrifying Celts.”

“Beyond the pale, the metaphor, seems to have come from a general reference to the use of pale to designate a a safe area, rather than as a specific reference to either of those,” I said, and picked a peanut from the pail. “That’s how the evidence goes, anyway.” Crunch.

“So is pole cognate with pale, then?” Elisa asked.

“Yep,” Maury and I replied simultaneously.

“An how about pail,” she asked, shaking the bucket.

“Nope,” Maury said, and had another pull of his pale.

“But your kneecap is,” I said, “and so will my supper be, when it arrives. Patella and paella.”

“My supper would be related to your pole, if they had shish kebabs,” Maury mused. “Impaled. But my ale is not. That kind of pale comes from Latin pallidum.”

“The more popular kind of pale, for sure,” I said. “Pale blue, pale yellow, pale green, pale pink; pale face, pale skin, pale eyes… All the most common collocations. The post kind pales in comparison.”

“Pale Fire,” added Maury, ever the Nabokov fan.

The waitress brought a plate of nachos mounded with melted cheese. “There’s another kind of pale,” Maury said: “A cheese scoop. From a French word for ‘shovel’.”

“Say,” said the waitress, looking at Elisa, “weren’t you in the pole-dancing class?”

Elisa looked up and blenched slightly. “Yes!” She looked at the waitress for a moment and recognized her. “You were two poles down, weren’t you?”

“That’s right! You, me, and the sixteen vestal virgins.” She smirked and turned to me and Maury. “Your friend here is a wild one.”

“Yes,” Maury said, “she seems to have managed a bit of a blot on her escutcheon, we understand.”

“If you’re talking heraldry,” I said, “better to say she has a pale on it now.” I looked at Elisa and the waitress. “A vertical bar.” The waitress looked at me uncertainly. I was afraid she was about to cut me off. “Anyway,” I added, “we know she’s quite lively.”

That was Elisa’s cue. “That’s my name!” she burbled. “Elisa Lively.” She extended her hand to the waitress.

“Shelly Miller,” the waitress said, shaking hands. “Hey, your food’s about ready, but you guys –” she turned to me and Maury – “did she tell you about where her shirt ended up?”

We looked up, eyebrows arching. “I think she was about to get to that,” I said, suppressing a wicked smile.

“I’ll come back when it’s calmed down a little and fill in any missing details,” Shelly said. She leaned a little towards Elisa and said, in a loud whisper, “I think something of yours ended up in my bag.” Elisa smiled, but she was beginning to look kinda seasick.

And so it was, much later, as Shelly Miller told her tale, that Elisa’s face, at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale…

The reader may find it useful to glance at the lyrics to Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” at www.procolharum.com/w/w9901.htm.

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wretched

Posted on January 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

This is a good word for someone in a state of dejection – or someone we would like to see ejected! It growls in with the opening /r/ (do you notice how you round your lips when saying it? it’s not because of the w – we always round our lips some when saying /r/). Then it releases roughly into the aggressive lax mid front vowel, closer and tighter than an /a/ but not so high and light as an /i/. And then it snatches again with the affricate, the teeth set as though ready to rip with the incisors. And finally, after a bounce, a thudding stop with a /d/. It’s like a large, nasty dog lunging at you in hopes of ripping your jugular. And perhaps a little like a sharp blast of thunder, and the rending of fabric. And then there’s the double resonance of retch – the sound of the word and the sound of the action. And the harshness of the echoes of ratchet.

The effect of this word thus varies from a bit of verbal dyspepsia to a corrosive condemnation. No wonder there are at least three musical groups called Wretched – one punk, one doom, and one death metal. Oh, and a TV series, Wretched with Todd Friel, which is at the exact opposite end of the spectrum – it takes its name from “Amazing Grace”: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.”

Well, we assume that Todd Friel and his listeners and viewers are not intending to be among those cast out at the last judgement. But they may see themselves now as dejected specimens needing salvation, or perhaps outcasts of some sort, and that would be reasonable, given the word. Dejected is from Latin “throw down; cast down,” and wretched is formed from the noun wretch, which comes from wrecca “exile, banished person”. (The same Germanic root that made this word wandered in a different direction in German, becoming Recke, a fairly rare word for “hero” or “warrior”.)

So we have conditions and people we may describe as wretched because they are in a terrible condition, downcast, perhaps decrepit – a wretched hovel, perhaps. And often we want to make it clear that the described thing or person is most wretched – a common collocation.

But we also have things that are not downcast but are vile and utterly demeaning or demeaned, as for instance wretched excess, a common collocation referring to unbelievable prodigality of expenditure (Google |”wretched excess” dubai| and you will get almost 2000 hits).

And of course we have things that we wish to demean, that we see as base and beneath us (perhaps we want to eject them – eject being from Latin for “cast out”), and for these we reserve the phrase wretched little – often to describe things or people that are not in fact physically small. It’s a phrase one almost has to spit after saying.

Also seen out with wretched fairly often: life, thing, man, and refuse. Refuse? The noun, not the verb (so note the echo in the first syllable). It’s on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty, near the end of the poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus (written for the statue):

…
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Thanks to Dawn Loewen for suggesting wretched.

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chillax

Posted on January 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

It is the deep midwinter, somewhere between Chilliwack and Halifax. A bucolic, nay sylvan, logophile is out hewing wood to warm his hearth – mainly by pulping it and making paper, so he can read books made with it, which warm the heart so much longer than a simply incendiary log. But as he surveyeth his piles of literature, chill axe in hand, our logophile – let us call him Alan – spieth a grating neologism, a forced blending of two words that, in colloquial use, mean the same thing. Alan knoweth what to do with gilded lilies: cut them down. He raiseth his weapon, when the very word crieth itself out from the page: Chillax! Chillax to the max!

But we are in medias res. Let us commence ab ovo (Horace be damned). In the beginning was the word, and the word was cool. From the very beginning, cool readily transferred its literal sense to an emotional one; various uses developed – cool out by the mid-19th century, and cool it by the mid-20th. But by the later 1970s, a need for something newer-sounding (and perhaps more specifically African-American-sounding, for those who like to emulate such usage) was needed, and so chill and chill out became current.

But, ah, chill, though it does seem to shiver as one says it, is not truly as relaxed a word as the easy cool, and it can be a bit abrupt. One needs something that can draw out into a dénouement. What word is a relaxing word? Well, relax, for one. Its power of relaxation is such that its sound is borrowed into brand names of laxatives – for instance, Dulcolax, the very sound of which is enough to loosen the bowels. Relax has not one but two liquids, /r/ and /l/, and that nice open /æ/ that ends with the released hiss of /ks/. This, surely, is the sound suited to add to chill – first the frisson, and then the ease. And so, by the mid-1990s, chillax was easing the shoulders and innards of the same set as would soon enough be wearing sweatxedos in which to do their chillaxing. And undoubtedly it was created consciously to be trendy. It appears to have succeeded.

It may seem ironic that this word is used principally as an imperative – a verbal mood so unrelaxed that in German it is compulsory to punctuate it with an exclamation mark. But sometimes one simply needs to be told, no? It is also an interesting contrast that the word’s appearance looks very excited: the hill in the middle looks like horripilation, and the x could be the pucker of a mouth, clashing swords, cuts in wood or skin, or, well, yes, perhaps closed eyes.

But, ah, this word, what she has in euphony and semantic double dipping she lacks in elegance. For one can never chillax in elegance – can one? “Alan, old sport, verily thou chillaxest most thoroughly upon my divan. Wishest thou a tankard of chill ale, or perhaps a white Russian, to enhance thy chillaxation?” But doth the dude abide, or doth he dispatch with quick whacks the churlish lexis?

Thanks to Alan Yoshioka for sending me his vexation with chillaxation.

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bosky

Posted on January 11, 2010 | 5 comments

You’re looking for the sky, but there’s something in the way. Who’s this bo? Is it some bolshy, stroppy youth, one of the Bos of Kentucky (KY) or a boy from Saskatchewan (SK)? Perhaps it’s Ivan Boesky, the famous insider trader of the 1980s, noted for telling Berkeley students that greed is good.

Ah, nope, it’s more bush-league than that. Boesky may have been rubbishy, but this is shrubbery. And not just a shrubbery, suitable for delivery to the Knights Who Say Ni!, but a whole condition of it. A bosky wood is a wood that’s plain old bushy.

Which is reasonable enough. After all, this word – and bosk (its related noun) and busky (a synonym) – are closely related to bush, which was originally busk. All of these, and similar words in other Germanic languages, are related to late Latin boscum, which is not that scum Bo again; it means “wood.”

But we’re not out of the woods yet. If you’ve bought Boesky’s belief that you can be greedy and still feel good about yourself – in hopes, perhaps, of getting a “boss” key to the office – you may, like Boesky, end up someplace boxy where the closest to this word you get is a Bosc pear to crunch on – which is named after Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc, a French botanist. Ah, if only instead of greed you had listened to someone like St. John Bosco, a nineteenth-century priest and educator who focused on love and prevention (based on reason, religion, and kindness) rather than punishment.

But it’s not too late! You can yet escape your brush with the dark side and return to nature – to Shakespeare’s bosky acres, Milton’s bosky bourn, or Scott’s bosky thickets, where perhaps mountain men wear Melville’s bosky beards. And then, if the sky is still obscured, you may do what one does when lost in an Icelandic forest: stand up.

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scotomata

Posted on January 10, 2010 | 2 comments

“Yet here’s a spot.”

Lady Macbeth saw spots on her hands: “Out, damned spot! out, I say!” She scrubbed but could not get them out. “What! will these hands ne’er be clean?”

But what if the spots were in her eyes? If the blood she saw on her hands could not come out because it was spots of darkness in her vision instead?

We know about seeing spots. It’s a recognized medical condition. The term for a spot or dark area in your vision is scotoma. The plural is scotomata. That looks suitable: you can see the spots – o o a a. (And are those t t crosses or daggers?) The word may make you think of tomato. (Well, that’s red, like the blood.) It may bring to mind automata – plural of automaton, which can refer to a person who is acting mechanically or involuntarily. (Perhaps compulsively scrubbing while walking in her sleep.)

Scotoma comes from classical Greek skótos, meaning “darkness.” There are other scoto words in English, none of which sees the light of day much: scotoscope, something that lets you see in the dark; scotophor, something that darkens when bombarded with electrons (the opposite of a phosphor, and usable in “dark trace” cathode ray tubes); scotopic, pertaining to vision in dim light; scotography, taking pictures with X-rays…

There is plenty of darkness in Macbeth. Many of the dark deeds happen in the dark of night; visions of daggers and the dead, too, come in dim light, scotopic as it were. People are killed.

In modern Greek, “kill me” or “take my life” is skótose me. There are a few songs by this title; you can find them on YouTube – sung by Nino, Despina Vandi, Eleni Peta. Mostly they are romantic: take my life so I can’t love you anymore; away from you life is not worth living… You may happen on “Skótoseme” by Diamanda Galás and John Paul Jones. It is not a romantic song. It would, in its way, form a good soundtrack for the murders in Macbeth. Diamanda Galás has a way of singing that is not persuasively human. You have been warned.

So is that what’s the matter with Lady Macbeth? Well. she is a Scot, yes? And consider this: mata is Malay for “eye” (mata hari, literally “day eye,” means the sun). Irish eyes may smile, but Scottish eyes – scot-o-mata – see darkness.

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Somerset

Posted on January 9, 2010 | 2 comments

OK, picture this dream: Alanis Morissette is in the bath, taunting you by singing “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” (from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by the Beatles). And then she does a backflip from standing! What could it mean?

Well, perhaps it means you have your summer set out for you. One way or another, though, you’re dreaming of Somerset. (Or, as denizens of that county are famous for saying it, “Zomerzet.”)

Somerset is historically a county of England, over on the west side, across the mouth of the Severn from the south side of Wales. Significant cities in it include Bath and Taunton. Bath, ah, that famed spa, popular with the summer set coming from London in times past. Well, why not summer? Somerset comes from Sumortunsæte, meaning “Sumortun’s people,” and Sumortun for its part is now Somerton (not as important a place in itself as it once was) and is thought to get its name from being, originally, a summer settlement – a farmstead abandoned in the winter.

OK, but the song? In “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” – which is modeled on nineteenth-century advertisements for popular entertainments – you will hear this: “And Mr. H. will demonstrate Ten summersets he’ll undertake on solid ground.” Now, summersets is an uncommon spelling. You’re more likely to see somersets.

But that’s misleading, because somersets is itself altered from somersaults. Oh, well, now, that’s helpful, isn’t it? I’m not saying the county is named after a flip; that would be rather flip of me. No, it was just a word confusion, a bit of folk-etymology reanalysis. And in fact somersaults is in its turn a mutation of sobersaults. Which are not so called because you can’t do them when drunk (perhaps on some Meursault); rather, it’s by way of French from Latin suprasaltus, from supra “over” and saltus “leap”.

It’s not that the articulatory gesture of saying somerset or somersault is highly reminiscent of a flip; there’s no flap of the tongue – the tip touches for a hiss, the lips meet, the tongue passes through the liquid /r/ and the tip touches again, and it ends in a stop, again at the tip. At most there’s that little back-and-forth, which is repeatable indefinitely, as we see in singing “Summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime.”

But, now, put that into French phonotactics and you get a bit of a turnover. Some places in Quebec had been given English names, and one of them was Somerset. Well, the English aren’t the only ones who can do folk-etymology reanalysis. Say Somerset with a French accent and what do you get? Something that easily enough slips towards a more recognizable French form. Morissette is one of the grand old pure laine Quebec family names (along with Tremblay, Paquette, Bouchard, Duceppe, Dion…), and the merset sounds rather like it when you put it into French phonemics. And the first syllable? Well, must be saint, reduced as it tends to be. And so was invented a saint who never existed: Saint-Morissette, a place in Québec. (But, hey, Stanfold became Saint-Folle!) But, given that Alanis Morissette has played God (in the movie Dogma), that’s close enough to a saint, no?

So! How do you like them apples? If you like ’em well enough, make cider with them – it’s popular in Somerset.

Thanks to Roberto De Vido for suggesting somersault.

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prorogue

Posted on January 7, 2010 | 2 comments

This word is all the rage in Canada lately. Until late 2008, it was something that happened without anyone outside of Parliament really noticing: when a legislative session was done, or when it was anyway a good time to wrap up business for it and start afresh, the queen (or king) would – or rather the governor general, the queen’s (or king’s) proxy in Canada, would – on the advice of the prime minister prorogue parliament. There would perhaps be a little wrap-up speech, and any bills not yet voted on would die and would have to be reintroduced the next session if they were to see the books.

And then Stephen Harper did it in an unexpected situation, to end a session when it had barely begun, just to avoid a vote of no confidence. Everyone suddenly had heard this word prorogue. And now, a year later, prorogation is being used not in such a dire situation but nonetheless in what had appeared to be the middle, not the end, of a legislative session. Although technically the governor general is not obliged to assent to the prime minister’s request to prorogue, it would appear that the current governor general views the decision as the prime minister’s proroguative.

This is leading some people to say Stephen Harper is a pro rogue. Not just any amateur rogue – he’s making a career of it! But prorogue is not actually related to rogue (nor to that Irish – and subsequently military – term of abuse, pogue, which, like rogue, has a French-style spelling but does not actually come by way of French). No, it comes from Latin pro, “for”, and rogare, “ask”. (You’ll see the latter root in interrogate and abrogate, for instance.)

It’s a funny word, prorogue. Certainly it sounds kind of funny; the two /r/s give it a Scooby-Doo sound, or perhaps something like an engine failing to start on a January day in Ottawa. It may seem like an altered pronunciation of prologue (as in “what’s past in prologue; what to come, in yours and my discharge” – from Shakespeare’s Tempest, avec ou sans teakettle). It may seem to want to be followed with “row your boat, gently down the stream,” in a round. It has that strange double-vision of the roro (“This again?!”). It may seem like an out-of-order poor urge, or like watching an ogre pour confusion.

But beyond all that, it is also a contronym of sorts. It has a – now obsolete – meaning “make last longer” and a similar – still current – meaning “formally extend (e.g., an appointment in office)”. And yet, pretty much from the beginning of its use in English, it also has had a meaning “defer, postpone” and a related more specifically legislative meaning “discontinue meetings (for a period of time or until the next session)”. Both meanings can be in operation simultaneously on the same act with different recipients: in 2008, Harper prorogued parliament (the discontinuing sense) and in so doing prorogued his party’s term as the governing party (the lengthening sense).

So, really, what you mean when you use prorogue – “ask for” – depends on what you’re asking for. And this is one thing that brings Canadians together: they all agree that Harper’s asking for something. And they all want him to get what he’s really asking for. They simply don’t all happen to mean the same thing by this.

Thanks to Rosemary Tanner for asking for this one.

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