Category Archives: word tasting notes

fissiparous

Posted on December 24, 2009 | Leave a comment

Word taster Roberto De Vido, reading an article in The Economist, observed this sentence: “Mr Van Rompuy has been a surprisingly effective Belgian prime minister, holding his fissiparous country together well enough for some to fret over his departure from domestic politics.”

Fissiparous! Oh, it has that hissing sound, like a bed of snakes wanting to attack each other, or at least like a hissy fit; the éclat of the [pa] after all that might even suggest a bomb with a fuse. Or it could be the sound of slate or shale sliding apart – the sliding gets visual reinforcement from the twin s‘s holding apart twin i‘s (perhaps the s‘s are the sliding of the i‘s). The fissi accurately suggestions fission, which many people may know best from nuclear fission, which again can give the word a taste of explosion.

So it has to do with splitting? Indeed. And do we know the parous? As in viviparous and oviparous? It comes from Latin parere, “bring forth,” and refers to birth, literally and metaphorically.

And in this word’s case, the metaphorical meaning seems currently supervenient. I’m sure biologists use fissiparous mainly to refer to cell division; few others seem to do so. Many of the instances of usage one will find for it are speaking of politics – Iraq, for instance, and political parties, and assorted nations. Actually, fissiparity is also sometimes known as balkanization when the various entities formed by division are mutually hostile as well, as the Balkan countries so famously can be.

But I think many people who use it really want another word, sometimes perhaps fractious or factious. Now, those words don’t have quite the length and hissiness, and the meanings are different – fractious means “unruly” (disposed to infractions), and factious means “inclined to form different parties.” But not every instance where we see fissiparous used really speaks of a case where something has been formed by division or is inclined to divide into two new independent entities. The Democratic Party in the US has been described as being fissiparous or having fissiparous organization, but from what I can see it’s still one party, and its members still part of one country.

And, turning back to The Economist, Belgium, like Canada, has a linguistic divide, and there is occasional talk of separation. But will there actually ever be separation? Actions and words are different things, and one ought not to count the pieces before the fission has occurred. Sometimes the purportedly fissiparous are just in need of pacifiers.

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pattern

Posted on December 22, 2009 | 1 comment

I was on my way home from the World Congress of Logogustation. I looked out the airplane window. Little lines of frost were making a lacy pattern on the glass. I was in a position to peruse them at leisure, as we were in a holding pattern caused by a weather pattern. Funny, I was delayed by weather last year around this time, too… it’s getting to be a pattern.

The frost, anyway, was all I had left to look at. The movies and other entertainment were done and the monitor in front of me offered little more than a choice of test patterns. I’d read through the magazine the airline provided for its patrons: the science section on pattern recognition, the psychology section on behaviour patterns, the sports section with its analysis of defensive patterns in football, the puzzles in the back in their various grid patterns… There wasn’t a whole lot to look at beyond the seat upholstery pattern. Which, on inspection, held a spatter pattern from someone’s coffee… turbulence, perhaps? Over the top of the seat I could see a reflection on the head of an evident victim of male pattern baldness.

I glanced over at the passenger on the aisle side of me, a woman around 30 years old. Her lap was covered with a quilt that she had, with foresight, brought, and she was working on some needlepoint, resting it on a box that apparently held her needles and thread. Under the box I noticed a book of dress patterns.

“That’s an interesting pattern,” I said.

“Which one?” she asked. She held up the needlepoint and a corner of the quilt.

“That one,” I said, pointing with my left hand at the box, which was done in a sort of diamond pattern, with floral patterns winding in and around, rather like a Harlequin being eaten by ivy. She lifted the needlework and I saw a unicorn in the middle of the box lid.

She half-smiled and indicated the unicorn. “That’s my patronus. You know, Harry Potter. If some needlework is going seriously awry, I say, ‘Expecto patronum!'”

“Does it work?”

“It seems to,” she said. “Anyway, it’s quicker than a Pater Noster.” She looked at my left hand, specifically the ring finger. “Now, that’s a nice pattern.” She pointed at my gold and silver wedding band, which has poinsettias cut into it all around.

“My wife has one just like it,” I said.

“I really like that you’re not afraid to wear a ring like that. To think that guys used to not wear rings at all… so paternalistic. I’m so glad we’ve escaped those old patriarchal patterns.”

“It’s not surprising that patterns would be patriarchal,” I mused, “or that the patriarchy would have a pattern. Pattern does come from patron, which comes from Latin patronus, which in turn derives from Latin pater, ‘father.’ Pattern first meant a guide or example.” I indicated her book of patterns.

She looked at her unicorn, a vague queasiness downturning her mouth. “I kind of wish you hadn’t told me that. My unicorn is supposed to be a father figure now?” She looked at her various appurtenances. “And my sewing patriarchal, and my…” I sensed an aaagh might be coming.

“Naw,” I said quickly. “Meanings change. Established forms and patterns persist but are turned to new uses. Many of the words you now use meant something at least a little different, if not completely different, centuries ago. Think of it as co-optation. Or subversion. After all, you’re a patron of this airline.”

A little smile returned to the corner of her mouth. “And I wouldn’t want to be a matron of it.”

“Just to give you an example,” I continued, “do you like Gilbert and Sullivan?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “The Mikado and Iolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance – some of my favourites.”

“You like their patter songs, then? ‘Modern Major General’ and all that?”

“Yes. …Wait. Are those supposed to be pattern songs?”

“No, but the word patter meaning ‘rapid speech’ comes from the rapid way people used to say certain prayers…”

Now she was really smiling. “Such as the Pater Noster!” She set her work on her box and patted it happily. “I think I see a pattern developing.”


Thanks to Jens Wiechers for suggesting pattern after seeing it used to mean a model of a gun in a translation of a Chekhov short story.

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narthex

Posted on December 21, 2009 | 6 comments

In “Stairway to Heaven,” Robert Plant sings, “There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west, and my spirit is crying for leaving.” It occurs to me that he could be standing in a cathedral. You see, the altar in a cathedral is, in the liturgical schema (though not necessarily in real-world orientation), the east, and the door through which one enters and exits is at the west. So if you want to leave, “west” is the direction. And on your way out, you will pass through the narthex.

Nowadays, the narthex is just a vestibule (some may say foyer), a sort of lobby to the church, and typically not a very big one. Not all churches have them, either, but you’ll only find them in churches – one does not have a narthex in one’s house. The reason for this is the function that they formerly filled: to provide a place to hear the service for catechumens, pentitents, and others who were not eligible for admittance into the congregation. (These days, such a place is more often separated by glass from the nave and called a cry room, and ineligibility is determined by the volume of the infant’s protestations.)

I remember first seeing this word applied to the foyer of an ordinary-size Presbyterian church. My brother and I were still young and callow, and I recall my brother saying “Narthex!?” with that tone that indicated it was the silliest thing he’d seen in several days at least. As indeed it does seem sort of silly. It’s kind of like the noise you’d expect from a pugnacious little prognathous dog; to adolescent me, it produced an image of sniffling and snuffling with a snotty nose. The nar may make those who know German think of Narr, “fool.” On the other hand, it may seem corporate to some (with that ex on the end, as in AmEx and FedEx). It might seem like a word from some ancient hex. Or the sound of an arrow being fired and finding its mark. It might even sound like north exit. But of course it’s the west exit that it’s by!

And does the juxtaposition of Led Zeppelin and liturgical architecture seem a bit improper? Well, it gets better. Robert is not the only plant that narthex is associated with. In fact, narthex comes from Greek for “giant fennel.”

Yes, “giant fennel.” No, it’s not entirely clear how that came to be the name for the halfway-in part of a church (which, by the way, in Byzantine architecture is further divided into an esonarthex and an exonarthex). Some have speculated that it is because the space is long and narrow, like a fennel cane. Others note that narthex by extension also meant “schoolmaster’s cane,” and so there was a connection to the catechumens. It also was a word for an unguent box, and catechumens were anointed with oil in this part of the church.

But never mind that. You want improper? Pick up the play The Bacchae by Euripides. You will find that Bacchus (Dionysus) and his followers wielded wands of – yes – giant fennel. The giant fennel, narthex, was a symbol of this god who stood for, well, golly, a whole lot of things that the Church has over the ages stood against.

But there’s also another connection that’s even better. Consider Adam and Eve. They fell from grace by coming to gain knowledge that was promised to make them see as gods – to have knowledge of good and evil. This coming to knowledge has a story attached to it in classical Greek mythology, too, but the angle is a little different. Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give it to mankind – he was not just the fire-bringer but the bringer of knowledge, the person who gave divine insight to humans. For which he was a hero to humans (quite unlike the snake of Genesis). Not to the gods, mind you; they bound him to a rock, where he was daily de-livered by an eagle until he was ultimately delivered by Hercules. (Since I’m talking about the Greeks, though, not the Romans, maybe I should say Prometheos and Herakles.) But the reason I mention this is just that when he stole fire from the gods, he hid it in a fennel stalk. And this learning, this enlightenment he brought, has obvious parallels with the learning of catechumens. They get their knowledge thus from the fennel stalk of their schoolmaster and from the fennel stalk of Prometheus. It’s not exactly buying a stairway to heaven – learning to climb one, rather – but there they are, by the door, in the west: you can hear them, the voices of those who stand looking.

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pibgorn

Posted on December 19, 2009 | 1 comment

A few years ago, I happened on a comic on the web drawn by Brooke McEldowney, the guy who draws the popular newspaper strip 9 Chickweed Lane. This strip featured a fairy, a pretty chick with insect-type wings and a mottled green body, which just happens to be lithe and frankly pretty hot, like more or less every female McEldowney draws. The strip is sort of still going, though it seems to have transmuted to an illustrated serial novel. Anyway, the fairy’s name, and the name of the strip, is Pibgorn.

It’s really pretty easy to misread that as Pigborn, isn’t it? Weird to suggest that a hot-looking chickie with wings is born of a pig (about as weird as calling a figure skating jump “sow-cow,” I suppose). But of course it’s not suggesting that, since it’s not Pigborn, it’s Pibgorn. It still seems to me to have a sort of “hee-yuk” feel to it, the gorn like “I’ma gorna gitcha” or just somehow corny. The pib puts me in mind of carbonated beverages in cans, partly because it’s just slightly reminiscent of the sound of one opening, partly because Mr. Pibb is the name of a soft drink (Coca-Cola’s Dr. Pepper–style drink), partly because Pabst is the name of a beer. Put pib and gorn together and you get something vaguely reminiscent of popcorn.

But actually it’s a Welsh word. As I mentioned in my tasting of crwth, it’s the name of a musical instrument. What kind of instrument? Well, pib means “pipe” and gorn is corn modified due to its position (Welsh does that a lot) and that’s the Welsh word for “horn.” So pibgorn = pipehorn, except in English morphology we put the words together as hornpipe. But why call a fairy Hornpipe if you can call her Pibgorn?

So does a pibgorn sound like, for instance, a tin whistle, or a flute or piccolo? Nope. It’s not transverse blown and it doesn’t have a fipple. It’s a reed instrument! It has a body that’s somewhat like that of a recorder or other finger-stopped pipe, but it has a horn stuck in each end, point in, so that you blow into one and the sound comes out the other. The reed is inside the blow-in horn, which is smaller. It has – I was about to say a reedy sound, but duh – a sound that will be familiar enough to aficionados of medieval music and fans of groups like Corvus Corax (drums and reed instruments for headbangers), and is a bit like a bagpipe minus the chorus of drones (more than a bit – you can use a pibgorn as the chanter on a set of Welsh pipes). Actually, it will be reasonably familiar to people all over the world, as many cultures have similar instruments.

Does the word sound like the object? Well, the finger-stopping can make the notes sound as though they start and end with [p], [b], and [g], but the reed sound has a higher, buzzier sound to it, almost as though one wanted to make the vowels [i] (“ee”) but say a [v] at the same time. So only kinda sorta, I’d say.

And just in case you like weird plurals – imported forms not like the standard English – this word gives you two great options other than the standard English pibgorns: you can call multiples of this pibgyrn, or you can go all the way and use what the Welsh would: pibau cyrn. (Remember, as an added treat, that c is a [k].) Impress your friends! Intimidate new acquaintances at parties! “Yes, I had two pibau cyrn, but I sold one and bought a crwth.”

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salchow

Posted on December 18, 2009 | 4 comments

Some of you may know that my wife, Aina, is a figure skater. She used to skate with touring shows; now she’s a coach. So, although I’m not a particularly good skater myself, I always welcome the opportunity to go skating with her, because it means I can watch her skate, which she does with an unwordly grace (yes, unwordly: not everything can be suitably conveyed with words). Tonight we went down to the nice rink at Harbourfront and I watched her, after a bit of warm-up footwork, take advantage of a patch of cleaner ice off in the side lobe to reel off axels and double salchows.

You may remember my mentioning salchows in my tasting of cognoscenti. (You will notice that I capitalized the jump names there. Now that I’m actually focusing on one, I find that although it’s named after a person, as the name of a jump it’s lower-cased.) The salchow is the jump with the memorably odd name. When I was first watching figure skating, in my youth, I heard them talking about “sow-cows.” It’s a funny word when you hear it like that – images of fat, slow animals spring to mind, quite at odds with the twiggy little things (and buffer but still lean guys) you see flying over the ice in conjunction with this word. It was some time before I saw it in print and connected the word with what I had heard. (Seen out of context, salchow is more likely to remind many people of Selchow and Righter, the original makers of Scrabble and Parcheesi. And the chow may make one think of something figure skaters don’t appear to eat too much of.)

So why is this jump – which has been referred to by some as a “half-axel” because, like an axel, it involves taking off and landing on different feet, but instead of taking off forward (only an axel does that) the skater instead three-turns from a forward outside to a backward inside edge, then swings the other foot and takes off – saddled with this odd name? Add toe pick and it’s called a flip. Take off on the other foot and it’s called a loop. But done as it is, it is among the ranks of eponymous jumps: like the lutz and the axel, it’s named after the skater who first did it in competition. The jumps’ originators were Alois Lutz, Axel Paulsen (funny they don’t call it a paulsen), and Ulrich Salchow.

Who was Ulrich Salchow? Geez, you people! How soon they forget! He only won the world championships ten times – a record, tied with Sonja Henie. I mean, OK, that was from 1901 to 1911, so maybe a little while ago, but still! He landed the first salchow jump in competition in 1909. (The first woman to land one in competition did so in 1920, but it was called “unladylike.” I beg to differ.)

And where does this name of his come from? Well, he was Swedish. That doesn’t mean his name was originally Swedish – actually, you’ll more likely see it in Germany, but it looks originally Polish to me (I don’t have solid evidence of that). Anyway, in Sweden, it was said, roughly, “sal-kov.” But it’s one thing to get Anglophones to say a ch as [k] and quite another to get them to say a w as [v], it seems. And how did the /l/ become a [w] on many tongues? Anybody who lives in Calgary ought to have a line on this one – listen to a Calgarian (or most any Canadian) say Calgary and you will hear that the /l/ has been relaxed so much that the tip of the tongue doesn’t touch, and you just get the raising at the back (characteristic of English /l/ after a vowel in a syllable), like [w] but less rounded. This is really a very normal and expectable phonological transformation. The extra rounding to make it a real [w] is just the cherry on top.

And the cherry on top is just what my beautiful Aina is when put in a rink. No sow, no cow, nothing half-axel’d about her: just an irruption of grace into the wintry scene, performing a jump that, by happenstance, has a remarkably graceless-looking and -sounding name.

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theorbo

Posted on December 17, 2009 | 5 comments

This year’s performance of Handel’s Messiah at Roy Thomson Hall is under the able baton of Jean-Marie Zeitouni (no, that’s not a German name, it’s Arabic in origin and he’s French-Canadian, but so many people seem to see the Zeit and just assume…). He is using a baroque orchestra, rather smaller than the usual full-stage cohort. And sticking up among them is something I don’t recall ever seeing in a Toronto Symphony performance before: a theorbo.

“Theorbo?” you think. “O, bother. Is this yet another one of his weird instruments? The boor.” Well, yea and nay. It was very common at one time in England – and, for that matter, on the continent (and perhaps all across the orb – o!); it did originate in Italy (in which part of Europe, then? in her boot!). What it’s doing in the Messiah is playing the basso continuo, not throughout but in parts, including the recitatives. And basso continuo was just the sort of thing it was designed to play.

Well, let’s look at the word first, and then I’ll turn back to the thing. It’s a bit of a strange word, isn’t it? Words that end in o have a way of coming from Romance languages, while words that start with a th that’s actually pronounced as a fricative are typically Germanic or Greek. Because the fricative is voiceless, it doesn’t really seem like the, even if it looks like it; it appears to have more affinity with theo, as in the Greek root referring to god(s), and that may have influenced its English form. I find the orbo to have a certain vibrating feel to it. And the rounded back vowels suggest a larger size.

Well, large it is, anyway. It’s the biggest lute you’ll ever see, big enough that you would expect it to be played by some he-robot. A good-sized theorbo is about two metres long. It has fourteen or more courses of strings – which usually just means fourteen or more strings, but some use double-string courses like on a mandolin. There’s one set of strings that have stops (i.e., frets, like on a guitar); these are the smaller ones, not quite a metre long. Then there’s another set of strings, stretching farther up the neck to a second pegboard, without stops. This is an instrument that can produce some quite low notes, though the tone can still be rather bright. If you want to learn more about it, I suggest Lynda Sayce’s theorbo.com.

Oh, and where does this word theorbo come from? French théorbe or téorbe, which in turn comes from Italian tiorba, the source of which is disputed – some say it’s from a Venetian word for a travelling bag, borrowed from Turkish; others speculate that it was named after its inventor, whoever that may have been.

Well, whatever, wherever. I prefer to take the counsel of Thomas Jordan, a seventeenth-century poet:

Let us drink and be merry, dance, joke, and rejoice,
With claret and sherry, theorbo and voice!

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crwth

Posted on December 16, 2009 | 1 comment

At first this word may strike one as sort of like “This sentence no verb.” Missing a vowel, innit? Well, of course it’s not. Really, do you still think that letters and sounds are the same thing? How uncouth! Which, by the way, rhymes with crwth. That’s the truth!

What is a crwth? Oh, let’s play a little guessing game. Does it seem like it might be some geek slang, like cruft, perhaps based on a typo and/or an acronym, like zOMG? Is it perhaps the ordinal of some new number, crw? Is it an archaic third person singular present indicative conjugation of crew or crow? Or is it the sound of some bird in the woods, or some utterance by a person with gobstopper in mouth? Or a Welsh way of spelling the last name of Penélope Cruz? It does have the ring of an abstract noun (truth), or anyway a noun of quantity (width, wealth).

I could not say any of these is true; I am not a born liar. A crwth, in fact, is a bowed lyre. (Don’t confuse this with Bowes-Lyon, the maiden name of the old Queen Mum. This is a Welsh instrument!) It has six strings, two of which angle off and aren’t over the finger board. In appearance, well, say you were to get a big piece of wood shaped like a slice of canned meat and decided to make a violin with it, so you carved out holes so you could get your fingers in to finger the strings, but then you decided you were pretty much done. And how does it sound? Um, like a traditional bowed instrument. Search it on YouTube if you want to hear it. You will likely run across the name of Cass Meurig, who seems to be its leading modern exponent.

Now, you might wish that this instrument had a less bunched-up-looking name. If so, join the crowd. By crowd, in this case, I mean the same instrument, as it is named in other parts of the British Isles. Crwth and crowd (not the crowd everyone knows and loves or avoids, mind you) are cognate; they come from a Celtic root meaning “hump” or “hunch” (or “belly”), a reference to the shape of the instrument (not so much anymore, however). If you know someone named Crowder or Crowther, an ancestor of theirs played this instrument.

But crowd is just asking to be misunderstood. And it’s not so pleasant, really. Crwth, on the other hand, along with having those whispery tones, can really spice up a passage – give it a bit of Welsh flavour, and everyone knows that no one’s as “folk” as the Welsh. So, for instance, we see Dylan Thomas, in Under Milk Wood: “He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn.”

Wait, pibgorn? Ah-ha-haa… one word at a time!

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missile

Posted on December 14, 2009 | 1 comment

Pow! A snowball connected with my skull behind my right ear. I turned to see young Marcus Brattle, one of England’s less staid exports, already making another.

“Like a missile!” He said.

“Enough with misconstrued similes,” I said. “Not like one. It was one. Something that’s thrown can be called a missile, though we use the word mostly for rockets these days.”

“No, but like a ballistic missile!”

“It was ballistic. You threw it; its course was not under continuous correction. Ballistic comes ultimately from Greek ballein, to throw” – at this point I ducked his next snowball and he started to scoop snow for another – “and missile comes from the past tense of Latin mittere, to send or throw. So ballistic missile is a tautology – and an etymologically paradoxical name for something that is not thrown but launched under its own power, and that in more recent times may have continuous guidance systems.”

“Yes, well,” said Marcus, hurling his next projectile and forcing another evasive manoeuvre on my part, “every time I miss I’ll make another one. Whereas you, apparently, are stuck hurling prayer books.”

He was referring to my North American pronunciation of missile with a schwa in the second syllable, making it sound like missal. “You know,” I said, “in the nineteenth century British dictionaries also gave my pronunciation as the only one. The ‘long i’ version didn’t crop up until about a century ago.”

“Right,” he said, hurling another, giving me cause, as it cruised past my hat, to consider whether my pacifist approach was really effective here, “we finally got it right. ‘Cause we don’t think hurling and churches necessarily go together.”

I looked for, and did not see, an effective missile shield. I continued to try the disarming power of facts. “Missal comes from the same Latin root as missile, though,” I pointed out, “albeit by a less direct route: the word missa, ‘mass’ as in Catholic, comes from the same verb, perhaps from the sending away of catechumens before the eucharist –” Marcus hurled another with a shout of “Away, catechumen!” – “perhaps –” I leapt aside as it scudded by – “from the dismissal of the congregation at the end: Ite, missa est. That past participle became a noun and from that the adjective missal was formed, which has given many a Canadian Catholic the occasional bellicose pun.”

“Well, I’m aiming for your dis-missal,” Marcus said, hurling on the dis.

“You could be on a sticky wicket, sport,” I said, gradually drawing nearer to him.

“I’ll make this missile whistle – past your ear!” He hurled another and indeed narrowly missed my left ear. “And now –” he started packing one more carefully. I considered my options for missile defense. He held up his ball, which was a rough cube. “The cubin’ missile crisis!” he shouted. I leapt forward, took it in the chest at close range, and promptly put him in a headlock.

“Hey!” he said, as I squeezed my biceps against his cranium. “What’s that got to do with this? You’re changing the topic!”

“It’s a guided muscle,” I replied, and gave him a good grind on the scalp with my knuckles.

Thanks to Ted Witham for suggesting British versus American “missile” conflict.

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tussive

Posted on December 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

There’s something percussive about this word, the way the stop blows out at the start into the voiceless fricative /s/, with a second pulse ending voiced with /v/. It’s a little reminiscent of a tussle or a tossing, but somehow rather more of coughing – that’s coughing the word and coughing the act. And well enough it should be: tussive is the Latinate adjective relating to coughs, from Latin tussis “cough” (which also gives us the rather good but obsolete tussicate for “cough”). You’re more likely to see its antonym, antitussive – on a box of something you’re taking for a cough (could be dextromethorphan, with its name that sounds like a coughing fit, but if you want your cough down, and I mean down on the ground, well, she’s alright, codeine). Of course, you could take tussive as an encrypted suggestion on how to help head off coughs and colds and obviate antitussives: use vits (as in vitamins). On the other hand, we see suggestion of a plurality of Vituses, and no one is saying dancing relates to coughs!

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Mesopotamia

Posted on December 12, 2009 | Leave a comment

“They sure made a mess of Mesopotamia,” Daryl said, blowing steam off his chai. “A hippopota-mess.”

“And traded peace for a mess of pottage,” Jess added, a bit of whipped cream from her polysyllabic latte on her nose.

Daryl, Margot, Jess, and I were discussing Stuff Happens, a play we had just seen by David Hare about the US invasion of Iraq. “Interesting,” I said, “that someone in the play referred to the area as Mesopotamia in the present, as we’re doing. I mean, it’s still there – the area between the rivers, meso ‘middle’ and potamos ‘river’ – but usually you see the word Mesopotamia somewhere near the word ancient. Civilization and years B.C. show up often with it too.”

“Interesting, too,” Margot said, “that everyone says it ‘mess-o,’ even though the same prefix in other places is said differently – mesomorph and Mesozoic, with ‘me-zo,’ for instance.”

“Both of which are said with ‘mess-o’ in England,” Jess pointed out. “And can be said as ‘mez-o’ in North America.”

“Which would seem to be a happy medium,” I chimed in.

“Well, it’s a rare medium that’s well done,” Margot said, which Jess parried with “You speak as though you have a stake in it.”

“Anyway, if we’re going to be particular,” I said, “we can’t forget meson, which can have ‘s’ or ‘z’ and ‘ee,’ ‘eh,’ or ‘ei.'”

“Well,” Daryl said, with a pause for a sip, “there’s sure a whole pot of them.”

“And perhaps that’s a reason that it doesn’t seem to carry a very strong associative effect from word to word,” Jess said. “I mean, Mesopotamia, what does it make you think of? Not mesons or mesomorphs or the even more ancient Mesozoic period, and probably not a hippopotamus either.”

“Since they don’t have them there,” Margot interjected, dunking her teabag.

“A mess of petunias, perhaps,” I said.

“I’d like to tame ya,” Margot replied.

“It makes me think of ancient civilizations, and friezes of battles and bearded kings,” Jess said. “National Geographic kinds of things.”

“Ziggurats,” Daryl added. I pulled out my little black book and made a note to do a tasting of ziggurat.

“Cuneiform,” Jess said, relishing evey phoneme.

“Hittites,” Margot said.

“Et in Akkadia ego,” I added.

“You can’t be Assyrious,” Margot shot back.

“Babylon,” Jess said. “The moment you bring in Babylon you have a huge variety of associations, all the way from hanging gardens to figure skaters.”

Daryl looked up. “Figure skaters?!”

“Tai Babilonia,” Jess explained. It occurred to me that not too many people now would have heard of her; her world championship in pairs skating was in 1979. (But she did get back in the news a couple of weeks ago doing a PETA promo stunt at Rockefeller Rink.)

“But Sumer is icumen in!” I punned.

“In some area” – or did she say “Sumeria”? – “but not here,” Jess replied. “I think Ezra Pound’s parody of ‘Sumer is icumen in’ is more appropriate for today’s weather. ‘Raineth drop and staineth slop, and how the wind doth ramm!'”

Daryl knew the poem too. “‘Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us, an ague hath my ham!'” He raised his coffee to toast the weather.

“Well,” I said, raising my decaf, “we’re a long way from Mesopotamia now. It may not be confined to the impossibly distant past, but it’s nowhere near here.”

“And we’re nowhere near its temperature,” Jess said, raising her fancy coffee. “But I’ll take Canada anyway. And our freezes don’t last as long as their friezes.”

Margot raised her tea. “Stone cold either way.”

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