Category Archives: word tasting notes

shellac

Posted on August 11, 2009 | Leave a comment

A word that seems made for the shiny and crackly. It ends in ac, but this is not the ac of Cognac nor the ac of celiac; it’s the ac of lac, which names a lustrous resin. And when that lac lustre is purified in thin sheets, the shell-like sheets are called shell lac. Mix that with solvent and you can apply a coat of shellac, that common collocation. The look of that clear c without the blocking k gives it a lightness and triturability, and that combines with the light shine of the sh and the liquidity of the ll, along with the frangible hardness that shell brings with it. The lac may also make you think of a lake, with its glassy surface and late-day sheen. Yet how different it could have seemed if it had the modern transliteration of its Hindustani source, lakh: that seems positively lacklustre by comparison. And, now, what do you think of when you hear the name Shelly? Does it predispose you to a certain image of the girl in question? Does she have any shininess to her? If you think she might be, as the Brits say, a slapper, then that takes us to the other use of shellac: to beat or punish someone. It does have a bit of a slapping sound to it, but the guess is that it came to that sense – in the 1920s – because something that is shellacked is finished.

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undertaker

Posted on August 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

This is a word, of course, for one who undertakes – that is, one who initiates or takes charge of an action. But one may be hard pressed to understand how the word could undergo the kind of lugubrious shifting and narrowing of sense it has. The under does not come from underground; it is just a specialized use of a preposition, as we often do with others such as over, up, and out. This sense of sustaining or supporting is also present in understand and undergo. The reason it came to be associated with gaunt, black-hatted men with sepulchral voices is that they were first called funeral-undertakers – i.e., they undertook (put in action, made happen) funerals. For brevity and, no doubt, nicety (let’s not say “funeral”), that came to be shortened to undertaker. But we see the way of all euphemisms: they take on the odor of their objects. And one may suspect that association with taking people under the ground has reinforced this, even if it is not the source. The opening u is a dim beginning (if you’re thinking it’s not so different from usher, think of The Fall of the House of Usher), and the hollow, rumbling voice is called forth with the nasal and stop: und. Then you have the earthy syllabic /r/s piled up on either side of the tak (“take”) with its dry, voiceless walls and its centre the heart of grave. We may not find it enlightening that it rhymes with thundermaker, but this word does rumble like the report of the anger of Zeus… and one does not wish to mention Hades too near it. For that matter, one may well undertake not to use this word at all; its former referends are now normally called funeral directors, which, ironically, seems less lugubrious.

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dioecious

Posted on August 8, 2009 | 5 comments

I was having a session with that noted word-tasting couple Edgar Frick and Marilyn Frack, well known for showing up at logogustations in matching black leather. We turned to the books and were served up diœcious.

“Die-o-ee-shus,” Marilyn said.

“No, dear, that’s a ligature. A digraph. Die-ee-shus,” Edgar replied, rolling the word around in his mouth, starting wide open and easing down into a closing pair of dewy voiceless fricatives.

“A ligature,” Marilyn said, glancing at her wrists. “Digamous? Mmm. Delicious.”

“One would think it might be spelled like diet with an i-o-u-s,” Edgar mused, omphaloskeptic (to the extent to which his omphalos was skeptible, his figure more global with each year).

“I think,” I pointed out with a glance at my etymological dictionary, “that digamous might be on the mark, given that it was first with the Greeks and then with the Romans.”

“And now we get to party with it,” Marilyn chirped, an had another sip of it: “Dioecious. How edacious.”

“Well, I rather think it is the spice of life,” Edgar said. “Vive la différance.”

“Oh, back off with the Derrida,” I said. “Well –” I turned to Marilyn – “this ten-dollar word really is a two-bit word: your bit and his bit.”

“Hmm. I’ll bite,” she replied. “It sounds sexy, yes?”

“Characterized by two sexes in separate individuals,” Edgar explained. “Like certain kinds of flowers. The ones that need bees.”

“Or birds.” Marilyn leaned forward, creaking her leather.

“Or people,” I said. “And, as I adumbrated, the Latin œc comes from the Greek oik as in oikos. The literal sense: having two houses. In this case, one for each sex.”

Marilyn was now on Edgar’s lap. “We have two houses,” she purred in his ear.

“Sex in one and sex in the other,” he half-snickered.

I nearly sprained my eyes rolling them. “A plague on both your houses,” I said, and headed back to the stacks.

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onus

Posted on August 6, 2009 | 1 comment

This is a word that says who the a**hole is who’s responsible. I don’t find it a pleasant word – in fact, I took an instant dislike to it when I first heard it in my youth. (I was not surprised to hear CBC’s Rich Terfry declare a dislike of it as well today.) It’s the word that beheaded your bonus. It has the obvious echo of anus, which, aside from being Latin for what everyone knows it means, is also a different Latin word meaning “old woman” – perhaps like the old woman who wags her finger and says “Oooooh! Own up!” This isn’t a broad word like blame or a panicker like fault (as in “It’s not my fault!” and with its echoes of halt and fall); it’s a prissy word, made for saying with a turd under the nose, and it comes complete with the Lain us ending to remind you that it’s an important word, come entirely unchanged from the mouths of the great Roman patricians. And it’s physically indexical and sonically iconic: the mouth starts with the pucker of disapprobation (as if booing) and then withdraws through a quick nasal tap of the tongue to the sustainable final hiss. The word as written could be rotated 180 degrees and look the same, except that where there’s o at one end there’s s at the other, like someone popped someone’s balloon. Oh, and whose fault was that? Hm! Don’t put the blame on us. Those tut-tutters think they own us.

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curlicue

Posted on August 6, 2009 | Leave a comment

Such a Q-type word, and yet no q in it. Not to see, anyway; the cue may be referring to the letter Q – specifically the cursive capital, which is the curliest letter when done nicely, but can be more banal when done indifferently. I recall one of my junior high teachers explaining to us that the capital Q in handwriting looked like a 2 rather than a Q for some reason. The reason was simply failing to start the stroke far enough down, of course, but it took me a long time to see the Q in it (not as long as it took me to see the B in the logo for The Bay, though).

Well, so I missed my cue, but that’s a separate tale – and perhaps this cue is a separate tail, French queue; that’s the other possibility. One thinks of a pig’s tail. Which reinforces this word’s taste of barbecue, another often (but not always) q-less Q-type word (and that one has no q in its origin; it comes from a Caribbean word, barbacoa). But where that doll has Barbie, this stooge has Curly. And the curli here really is curly mutatis mutandis, a word that has always meant what it means and has changed only a little in form over the evolution of our language. Curl (verb) shows up in other Germanic languages as krollen, kröllen, and krullen. And we come back to food again, only this time to cruller, which does indeed come from the same source. Ah, doughnuts and smokepit hog: dude food, not so dainty as a curlicue, more a smorgasbord for a cur like you. Will you follow it with a liqueur? Maybe some curaçao?

Well, never mind – the sound of this word may almost show up in the middle of finger-lickin’, but in real life it has more to do with typography and design, and curl more with hair. There are a couple of little curls in it to see, the c and c, and the cu and cu look like clippings of ringlets on a barber’s floor. But the li in the middle? Only there to make the tip of your tongue curl up for a moment and lick your alveolar ridge.

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barque

Posted on August 4, 2009 | Leave a comment

The shape of this word is no worse than its bite, though we may say it is atavistically augmented, perhaps so readers would not be up the wrong tree (or the cortex thereof). It came from the same Latin as barge, and has referred to an overlapping set of vessels, but how could anything ending in that nice French que be so boorish? (Never mind that barge is also a French word.) That’s what keeps this word from seeming just like the outcries of Fido – or Phydeaux – and makes its brusque sound, with the blunt plosive /b/ (no delayed voice onset there!) and the harsh /ark/ (an “arrr!” plus that kicking k), seem more elegant, or brave and adventurous (or like a boat by Braque, on which is a barbeque?). Well, that and a certain line from Shakespeare, perhaps. But if you prefer to spell this word bark, you and old Will are in the same boat: in his Sonnet 116, love “is the star to every wandering bark,” never mind that curly que. And indeed that is the form this word had adopted long since when it came to be pushed back to the old French spelling (which does look nice, doesn’t it? with the rotational symmetry of b and q, and to a lesser extent of the r and u and of the a and e, and you may even imagine a mast and keel in the ascender and descender). But do not like this word less for its changeable form; “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds.”

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semelparity

Posted on August 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

Ah, this looks like a nice, fair word, no? Whatever semel is, it seems soft enough, perhaps like flour (semolina? there is an obsolete word semel for a fine flour cake). The whole word flows nicely on the tongue and lips, with fricative, nasal, liquid, then stops and another liquid, and a nice open trochee/dactyl rhythm. And of course we recognize parity: it’s that word of evenness and fairness, like wage parity! No, this isn’t a word for the salmon life – you know, work like crazy swimming upstream and fighting millions of others, spawn once, and die.

Actually, it is. “Spawn once and die” pretty much sums up the sense of this word. So sorry – this is not the parity of equality. That comes from Latin par “equal”; this one comes from parare “bring forth.” And semel? Latin for “once.” Guess what: you got suckered. Oh, it looked nice enough, sounded sweet enough, so you signed on. But never mind: if you’re semelparous, you were born to do it just once. At least it’s simple – and simple echoes nicely in semel too. So do semi and semen, neither of which is etymologically related. And salmon too.

So many false leads! Well, at least you’re not subject to salmon parity, heading like the universe to a big crunch and big bang (Pacific salmon, to be specific; the Atlantic ones get several shots). But though you may not see this word often, you’re actually surrounded by semelparous things: most annual plants, for starts, and a lot of insects too, not to mention protozoans. Not us, though, and good thing: so much of the arts and crafts of humans – from countless songs and novels to a variety of appliances and applications – exists solely because of humans’ iteroparity, the converse of today’s word.

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qi

Posted on August 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

A short word greatly beloved of Scrabble players – a word that can breathe new life, or at least a sigh of relief, into one’s game. How lucky we all are that the Pinyin system of transliteration was adopted in Mainland China. Before it, the Wade-Giles system was used, and the word was spelled ch’i. And before that it was the Yale system, which rendered it as k’i. So you should say it like “key”? No, actually, the closest English sound to the Pinyin q is “ch,” so the English plural of this loan word, qis, is pronounced the same as cheese.

And Scrabble isn’t the only place Anglophones can use this word to display their IQ. If you’re into natural medicine, especially (but not limited to) Chinese medicine (notably acupuncture), this is an important term. It is used to refer to life force, the flow of energy. (It’s not the same chi as in t’ai chi – that’s ji in Pinyin, a different character meaning something else.) If you have health problems, it’s because of a blockage or imbalance in your qi. Fittingly, in a serif or semi-serif font qi looks a bit like a person standing on the right massaging the head of a person on the left.

Also fittingly, this word – even more so in Mandarin than in English, because of the palatal affricate and the falling tone – sounds sternutatory: I’m sure you’ve said it many times in the act of sneezing. Why is that fitting? Just because literally qi means “breath,” “air,” “odor.” Chui yikou qi means “blow out a puff of air.” The breath is vitally important, of course; other languages and cultures have used it to designate life force: Greek pneuma and Hebrew ruah, for instance. Air is also what makes down and similar fluff so soft and warm… which is not why the fluffy underwool of the muskox is called qiviut (an Inuktitut word, and a [k]-like sound), another word you can play in Scrabble.

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splanchnic

Posted on August 1, 2009 | 1 comment

Ohhh, this is a messy-looking word. It seems sort of like the sound a Foley artist would come up with for some alien creature’s evisceration of a particularly pyknic space cadet. The effect is as gruesome whether you construe the ch as an affricate or say it properly as [k]. Dear, dear… that spl seems so often to come with messes: splat, splash, splatter, splodge, splutter; even splay and split can be messy, and spleen has its own unpleasantness. And Let me ‘splain, officer is just the beginning of a mess that will take some guts to deal with.

Which brings us back to splanchnic. No, it’s not an alien’s picnic in a splatter flick. If it provokes a visceral reaction, then that’s appropriate: it means “visceral” – of, involving, or related to your innards. It comes from Greek splagkhnon (the g – gamma – is pronounced as a velar nasal before the kh – a chi), which refers to those parts which, when we find them in edible animals, we refer to as organ meats (ignoring the fact that muscles are also organs).

Hm! Well, this word does seem to have sent them through an organ grinder, or at least to have monkeyed around with them so that they’re wurst for the wear. In any event it doesn’t have much vowel movement; in fact, with three consonants, one vowel, three consonants (we’re counting sounds, not letters), one vowel, and one more consonant – that’s seven to two – it has quite the case of consonantipation. Yet mixed with that partially eaten lunch is some panic; if you hoped your plans would be a cinch, you have some sorting out to do… in order not to snap at the clinch you need to get your guts in order. And that takes heart, intestinal fortitude, and, well, lungs, liver, kidneys…

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nimbus

Posted on August 1, 2009 | Leave a comment

Classical music lovers, on seeing this word, may think first of one of the best-quality labels in the business. (I used to fantasize about buying their entire catalogue.) In uncapitalized usage, this word is halfway to contronymic: it refers to two things that, while in some ways related in nature, are really quite different. In art and sacred things, nimbus names what is more commonly called a halo: that lambent circle sitting on a saint’s head (one sees no nimbus on bimbos – you’ll want to be there in the nimbus when the saints go marching in). It is often seen spoked like a motion picture reel, or even as a full-body glow such as on the Virgin of Guadalupe (she didn’t need a tanning bed, either!). In more mundane matters, however, nimbus refers to a rain cloud.

Funny to think that there are two contrasting things commonly depicted above people’s heads in cartoons – the one a golden ring indicating innocence, the other a dark cloud, perhaps raining, indicating a glum or bitter mood or state of fortune (perhaps getting a B minus) – that can both be called nimbus. Does either really seem to match the word? The glow is typically called halo now, which is less equivocal and has that air of heavenly breath in its saying, and that leaves nimbus for the clouds – but it’s no longer a formal meteorological designation by itself; it shows in compounds such as nimbostratus and cumulonimbus to indicate that the kind of cloud in question rains (though the rain may be virga, not necessarily of Guadalupe). But, again, does nimbus sound like rain? Rather more like distant thunder, perhaps, with just a last hiss of preciptation on the [s]. At least the shape of the word has some cloudiness or raininess to it in the n and m. And can you guess which language has lent us this word? Yes, of course. It’s classical, naturally.

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