Category Archives: word tasting notes

lightning

Posted on August 21, 2009 | 4 comments

Once, when I was learning Spanish from a book, I came across the following translation: hace lampara – “it is lightning.” I made a note to myself: Spanish has three existential predicates, to wit a) ser “to be” (essential), b) estar “to be” (transient), c) hacer lampara “to be (lightning).”

But, oh, to be lightning! And yet such a word for such a thing. This word, lightning, is a long word, a word that takes rather longer to say than lightning takes to strike. We could have named it zap! This word, too, has such an intricate arrangement of shapes – that dance of the i‘s, g‘s, n‘s and h and l and t – but none of them are jagged. And it’s such a, well, light word – shortened from lightening, as you may have guessed, and starting off all on the tip of the tongue, with that unavoidable effect of light, for something that might better have been named blam! Oh, the echo of frightening is there, certainly, and one might feel that with it Thor is smite-ening someone for their temerity (say, in going jogging in the thrashing rain). But would not a more perfect word for this thing have been shock?

German has it better: Blitz. And we see what combining power that has: Blitzkrieg. The American equivalent was not lightning war but shock and awe. See? Latin called it fulmen – brought to English as fulminate, which sounds more like smouldering. In French, one may call it éclair – oh, dear, just a little puffy dessert – or foudre, which bears a strong resemblance to an impolite verb suggestive of what lightning will do to you if you don’t get out of the way. The Hebrew word for it – you will like this – is barak. (Hebrew for thunder is not obama, but doesn’t that sound like thunder?) The Mandarin is diàn, which is also used to mean “electric” and the character for which looks a bit like a kite – but the Chinese characterized lightning as coming up from the earth two millennia before Ben Franklin did.

Still, because of its object, this word has quite a presence in our language, showing up in well-known phrases such as white lightning, greased lightning, lightning quick, lightning chess, lightning rod, and Tampa Bay Lightning. Of course, flash, strike, and bolt are often seen next to it, all nice, short, shocking words. And yet lightning can cross a kilometre in about 1/300,000 of a second (and thunder can cross one in about 3 seconds), while Bolt still needs more than 9 seconds to go 100 metres.

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grizzled

Posted on August 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word may have been formed from French gris and now-obsolete grisellé, but simply saying “it means ‘grey'” doesn’t begin to cut it. You can see a gristly old sea salt, as grisly a sight as a buzzard or grizzly, his face frazzled and his muzzle drizzled with hoary stubble… Not someone you’d want to nuzzle, not a sizzler, but perhaps a bit of a puzzle.

Oh, we can see that buzz-saw zz cuts both ways: sometimes a dazzle and sometimes a fizzle – could be lightning, could be a short circuit, as it shifts from the alveolar buzz of the /z/ to the steady-state, almost guttural hum of the syllabic dark /l/ (not the light one, made with just the tongue tip in action, but that English syllable-ender with both back and tip of tongue raised, as though cupping and containing the sound in its central hollow). And likewise the growling gr, which greets with great or a grunt, can be grand or gross, bright green or dull grey… Join the gr and the zzle and the result, with all its echoes, is the grey not of shiny silver but of sooty snow.

Some people will write of a gray, grizzled something or say a thing is grizzled grey – evidently envisioning grizzling as an act with greyness as a possible result. (Could you have something grizzled pink? But even some noted literary magazines have printed an instance or two of this double coating.) But inasmuch as there is a verb grizzle, it’s backformed from this adjective, which has the ed suffix not of verbal past tense but of noun association and effect. And what is grizzled? Most often, beard, hair, face, head; the type of person is old, a man, perhaps a veteran.

What we have here, then, is a word that drags itself in from the awful weather, sits grimly at the counter, drinks a cup of burnt black coffee and, with a voice like wet rocks grinding, speaks of the battles of a life scraped from the bottom. The grey that got that way the hard way.

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munch

Posted on August 18, 2009 | 1 comment

I’ve long wanted to write a satire of restaurant reviewing called “Munching Thick, Crusty Slabs.” Except that treading through the emetically hackneyed clichés of kitchen hacks would really be too much for me very quickly: a world where every slice of bread is a slab, as many things are thick or crusty as you can possibly imagine, and one can munch eggs… or squash? I could just scream. But munch really does seem to get used ever more widely, and not just in restaurant reviewing. Apparently not everyone finds this jarring, as not everyone has a present sense of the onomatopoeic origin of this word.

Oh, it’s a word for eating, alright, with the teeth involved and the jaw visibly moving, and making a perceptible noise or at least a clear sensation of crushing; it carries the sense easily in the saying (and one may, if one will, discern some hints of teeth in the shape of the word, but of course that’s adventitious). Since the class of food most marked for its munchiness is that on which we snack, however, the sense has extended to other snackable things. Munching is apposite for snacks: the satisfaction of the crunching amplifies the effect of the food, bringing suitable satiety with less quantity. But the notion of noshing seems to supersede the sound in some quarters, so that one may be said to munch a canapé even sans crepitation.

The rhyme with lunch is unavoidable; bunch can enter in, and even hunch, but somehow punch seems to have less influence. But what words is this one seen around? Ah. Well, a look in the Corpus of Contemporary American English gives us such as Oslo, painting, museum, Edvard, and Scream. Hm! That’s the painter, Munch, whose name is not even said the same way. But he does come to mind when one sees this word. Especially if one is seeing a restaurant reviewer speak of, say, munching ice cream.

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sybaritic

Posted on August 18, 2009 | 2 comments

This word has a different feel from its near-synonym voluptuary – that word erupts like cleavage out of a tight V-neck, where as this one seems somehow softer, more insidious, but also perhaps more subtly negative in tone, and more feminine. Does it not lead to visions of, perhaps, some barrister’s parasitic sibling named Sibyl, living in the lap of luxury and soon to be a candidate for bariatric surgery?

She’d be borrowing her reputation from a sort of Sodom of southern Italy, a former Greek colony named Sybaris (the y stands for an upsilon in the original), a prosperous place with a lot of money and a lot of luxury too. Its citizens were known for fine clothing and, supposedly, effeminate manners. But a dispute between Sybaris and a neighbouring town, Crotona, in 510 BC turned more than just ugly; the Crotoniats trashed the city, put inhabitants to the sword, and diverted the course of the local river to inundate and erase the city. Now archeologists can’t find anything there.

Crotona, for its part, is now called Crotone and has about 60,000 people. Its name comes from Greek kroton, which names both a tick and a castor-oil plant, the latter of which has lent its name to croton oil, derivatives of which are called crotonic (e.g., crotonic acid, C4H6O2). Croton oil is not something you’d want to eat; small doses can cause diarrhea. If you rub it on your skin it causes irritation and swelling. So we may well say that it is anti-sybaritic!

But let’s go one better. Crotona seems similar to Croatoan, the word found carved on a tree at the Roanoake colony in Virginia, AD 1590. The colony had been thriving when last seen three years earlier, but when a ship finally got back by to check on them, there was nothing left of it, just Croatoan on a tree. Was Roanoake a New World Sybaris? Actually, Croatoan was a name of an island nearby to the Roanoake colony and a modification of Croatan, a local indian tribe that was on good terms with the colonists. So what happened? Well, we don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing for certain: a colony in West Virginia in the late 16th century was no place you could be sybaritic.

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naïve

Posted on August 17, 2009 | Leave a comment

Oh, look at that diaeresis on the i, two dots like two eyes goggling at the sights – someone from a backwater in the big city, with nothing to rely on but native wit: a real diamond in the rough. Backwater? Of course by now just about everyone knows Evian spelled backwards is naive. Native wit? Well, naïve is from the French feminine form of naïf, which came from Latin nativus to mean “without artifice; imitating nature.” In the diamond biz, naïf refers to a flawless diamond in its natural state, or to a part of the natural surface of a diamond deliberately left so during cutting and polishing. (Remember that a diamond in the rough means “in the rough form,” not “in rough surroundings.”) We might even find it is a diamond of the first water, on its way from the vein to the vain. But just as the diamond will have its world turned upside down, cut and polished, so might the naïve person; certainly in the word the n is turned and cut to v, and the a to e. Well, that’s reality – or is it naïve realism, a perspective that in philosophy makes you a rube (and not a ruby)? Other words that are often seen showing naïve around include reader and optimism (why does no one ever speak of naïve pessimism? there’s far too much of it, pretending to be realism), and it brings with it hopelessly, incredibly, totally, somewhat, and politically. The sound of the word can be fun – that break from the /a/ to the /i/ may remind one of the Cajun version of “whee!” (as heard in a TV car commercial). But don’t forget that this once anglicized word has been refrenchified, as evidenced by the double dot; say it as one syllable and it’s you who will be the knave.

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bitch

Posted on August 15, 2009 | Leave a comment

Ouch! What a nasty word this is! Of course, it’s originally, and still, a word for a female dog – any female dog, not just an ill-tempered one. But one can’t use it naïvely; the human reference barks out at every turn. One may see a poster in the window of a store that sells clothing for dogs: one prettily primped Pekinese says to another, “Nice dress, bitch.”

The sound doesn’t resemble barking (though there are a few small pooches that make sounds like this), but the final voiceless alveopalatal affricate carries a taste you get in kvetch, retch, snatch, botch, itch, snitch, and other burrs on the pant-leg of daily life. The [b], with its burst, bark or bite, is the sound most suited to a pugnacious mug: hold your lips as though about to say [b], but build up air pressure behind them until they pucker a bit, and you will find your face becomes bitter. And the shape of the word? Three ascenders and a dot are a bit like horripilated fur on a furious pooch.

This word has come down to us from somewhat murky Anglo-Saxon origins; the oldest spellings we have of it are bicce and bigce. The exact historical nature of its connection to French biche is uncertain, but it doesn’t come from the French; more likely from Nordic roots.

It does not keep the best of company, of course. Although its most common collocation is with the phrase son of a, and it has shown up in sewing circles (including magazines) in a rhyming phrase with stitch, it is frequently found with an assortment of words that I simply don’t think I should include here. And then, of course, there is D.H. Lawrence’s classic phrase from Lady Chatterly’s Lover: the bitch-goddess of success. But is success really so bad? Can I just find out firsthand, please?

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mercaptan

Posted on August 13, 2009 | 2 comments

This word might seem to have a nautical air to it, with its resonances of mermaid, capstan, and captain, but the nose of its object tends more towards the mephitic – or Stygian. Indeed, it names a whole family of chemicals that have in common an SH (sulphur-hydrogen) group. The ugliest sister of the family is surely ethyl mercaptan, which sounds like a name for a singer but is actually C2H5SH, which is coming up not roses but rotten eggs. It has been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the foulest-smelling substance in the world. Other mercaptans are generally also noted for their pungency, but they are not necessarily all as noisome.

This is not a word one hears often, but I did hear it once on CBC Radio 2: Jurgen Gothe (a man with a fine palate for words – and wines) spoke of the “faint whiff of mercaptans” one gets when opening a new CD. He could have said “faint whiff of thiols” and meant the same thing, but the two words do taste quite different, don’t they? Thiol comes from the Greek theion, “sulphur,” while mercaptan is a portmanteau word distilled from corpus mercurium captans, “body that seizes mercury,” so named because the SH group binds tightly to the element mercury.

But where mercaptan has the sea sound (“Oh captain, mercaptan!”) and the ripply shape and those crisp stops bookended by the nasals and padded with short vowels, thiol has letters that stand up and the sound gives just a lisp and a liquid and swivels on a long central tripartite vowel movement: a floppy, arch word that sounds of sigh and thigh and vile, and less of sea and more of, say, seat of pants. Which may be more fitting given its referent. But would you really want to say ethane thiol instead of ethyl mercaptan?

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perk

Posted on August 13, 2009 | 2 comments

Here’s a word that sits up erect and peppy. Actually, it’s more than one word, and the different words have different sources and different meanings – and yet they all have a similar, um, perkiness. There’s the perk that means a perch for a bird (or a staff or similar thing); that’s apparently a variant of perch and no one uses it much anymore. But then there’s the perk that’s a verb formed from the just-mentioned noun. The literal sense is also not used much, but the verb perk that seems to be a metaphorical extension of it is used quite a bit: originally to behave proudly, now to be or become lively, smart, happy, et cetera. As though one had just had one’s first cup of good coffee in the morning.

Which leads us to another verb perk, which comes from percolate. Although percolation itself is a rather passive, gravity-driven activity, coffee percolators make the percolation happen by burbling water up through a spout, which makes the lid pop a bit, and so there’s this jumping sound to go with your jumpy beans. And that sense has tended to merge with the first verb perk in the figurative sense, so that whether it’s coffee or a dog’s ears – oh, no, that’s prick up the ears, but some people do use perk up your ears instead, and you can see the two-way influence – when you are perked, or perky, you’re happy as though you’d received a nice little bonus.

Bonus? Perhaps a perquisite, a benefit arising from a position or situation. This is usually shortened to – yes – perk, as in “One of the perks of this job is the free coffee.” A natural to go with the other senses, since perks perk you up.

And just saying it can get you a bit more excited, as though you were being pumped up with a bicycle pump, no? Say it: perk perk perk perk perk! Percussive with its voiceless stops, but with the eager vigour of [r]. Almost like one of those peppy little purse dogs. This is even a little purse dog of a word in its visual aspect, especially with the k like the tiny legs and pointy tail at the end sticking up.

Oh, yes, up – that’s the word that comes so often after perk, adding to the confusion with prick up as in ears. Lively, happy, bouncy, caffeinated, of course it’s up! Where else could it be? Only one other location: as your Friends will tell you, Central Perk.

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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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