Category Archives: word tasting notes

dulse

Posted on June 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

What sort of thing is dulse? Is it a pulse? No, that would have been a bean. If you’re not sure, look on the shore. The shape of this word may be short and spiky, but its referent is rather longer, clumpy and stringy, or flaky or chippy when dried. It’s a red seaweed, and an edible one at that. If that sounds to you like the dullest, you may just be mishearing an Irish pronunciation of dulse with a schwa after the [l]. The original Irish Gaelic word is duileasg, the sound of which is approximated by the western Irish English variant dillisk. And many an Irish person finds its object delish as a snack. The attraction perhaps eludes some people, but they may be mixed up; on the other hand, one would be equally mixed up to engage in duels over it. Just grab a bag, or hit the shore and gather some. And then… a Guinness, of course.

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scion

Posted on June 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

When Terry Brooks came out with his book The Scions of Shannara, an installment in his popular Shannara series of fantasy books (not scions fiction!), he really put a cat among the pigeons as far as the pronunciation abilities of fourteen-year-old boys was concerned. I was working in a bookstore at the time, and it was not so common to hear the word scions pronounced correctly by those seeking the book – as though Brooks had blinded them with scions. It seems the rule most anglophones adhere to is “If it looks unfamiliar, it must not be pronounced like familiar words.” So the model of science just didn’t do it. “Skee-ons” was more common, in spite of the fact that [sk] for sc before e or i in English is, as linguists would say, strongly marked (marked is here a polite way of saying odd or weird). Oh well, sigh on, you erudite ones. At least those young men carbuncular had more coins in the piggy bank of their vocabulary, added by one of the icons of fantasy. I wonder what they expected scion to mean before they found out. Something like a scythe or scissors? It does have a knife-like quality, with the steel-hissing [s] at the start written with that slicing pair sc. On the other hand, the shape of the word suggests a sword or a candle (i) set among stones. But what is really rising up in this word’s referent is a shoot, a twig, a graft, an off-spring… or, in the more current metaphor, an offspring, in particular an heir. All things that could be cut off with a sharp shaft of steel.

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dehisce

Posted on June 7, 2009 | 2 comments

This word suffers from a surfeit of symbols for sibilants: why wrap it up in sce for a simple [s], especially when the preceding vowel is short? Well, it does come from Latin dehiscere, and the ere is the infinitive ending, which we don’t need in English. But the Romans didn’t say the sc as simple [s]; the c was [k] to the classical tongue. And so from the close, tight alveolar fricative the tongue dropped back to a velar stop and then opened up to a vowel, a trill or tap, a vowel, and the mouth was, by grace of the suffix, at the last agape. Now it simply closes down in a hiss, without taking the risk of ending in isc. How ironic. For dehisce means “open up,” “gape,” “burst open”; botanists use it to refer to what many seed-pods ultimately do. You may have seen it happen in alien horror flicks, sometimes to bits of anatomy that really shouldn’t. But it can also be a fancy term for what ecdysiasts do.

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umami

Posted on June 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

For some people, the heart of this word is the mm its object can produce: that savoury flavour of a rich broth, perhaps a bowl of miso soup. For others, the taste will have them asking “Um, am I tasting monosodium glutamate?” Well, ask your mommy… she probably used to use the stuff, at least in seasoning salt. Many people and products still do. But umami does not require MSG; it can be gotten from quite a few different kinds of food. A good aged Vermont cheddar will give you dose of it, as will nuoc mam (Vietnamese fish sauce). And of course miso paste and soy sauce. The word does come from Japanese, after all, even if it refers to a taste function some say everyone has (the “fifth basic taste” along with sweet, sour, salty, and bitter). Take umai “delicious” and add mi, a suffix that makes abstract nouns of adjectives (but then write the mi like the mi that means “taste” – how rich is that!), and you have a soft, humming word for deliciousness or savour – a lip-smacker, perhaps, though it does present to the eye something more like the teeth behind the lips, m m. There are echoes of Pop Tops (“Ooh, mamy, mamy blue”) and perhaps Al Jolson, but let that not jar your palate; think instead of Maui and stay mum. This is, after all, a word from the land that gave us Zen, and that means mu, ami. Shut up and enjoy your soup.

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bibliography

Posted on June 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

This word once signified the act of writing books; now it tells you you’ve gotten to the end of a written work. And if you’re the writer, the odds are good that by the time you’re to the end of the bibliography, you’ll be dazed and loopy and halfway to going bibblybibblybibbly too. It may seem all Greek to you, especially with the insistence on including the city of publication (“Honey, let’s go to Harmondsworth, I need to buy some Penguin books”). If it does, well enough; Greek is where this word is from: bibliographía, from biblion, “book” (or “paper” or “papyrus”), and graphé, “writing.” Since the early 19th century we’ve used this word for a list of books for a specific purpose (e.g., a certain topic, or a certain term paper). And this five-syllable Greek word, which sounds rather like a photocopier running off a copy of some reference you need, and which has a taste of Bible (the good “book”) and graphite (the mineral you write with), seems so much more appropriate to a library (bibliotheque) and its scholarly denizens (with their myriad other -ographies) and to antiquarian booksellers, lunettes, foxing and century-old dust than does the businesslike Latinate references or the half-Saxon, half-Latin proletarian works cited (which sounds rather like a way of saying “excited by work”).

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shampoo

Posted on May 31, 2009 | Leave a comment

It’s hard to see this word without thinking of rich suds being rubbed into your hair – or into the long, lush hair of some model on a TV commercial. Or just maybe into a carpet. There is nonetheless a clear taste of the sham in the beginning and of the poo in the end, neither a very pleasant thing by itself (although sham also has fabric senses), and combined seeming to refer to scam scat. Few people are likely to think of champagne too quickly, in spite of the bubbles and the identical first four phonemes, because of the different images of ch (in the French style) and sh. What they will think of, and mention, quite often is conditioner. This word has even been borrowed from English to French – but in the gerund form, shampooing. That oo [u] is quite atypical for French! But, now, this word in English is both a verb and a noun. Which came first, and where did it come from? Well, there’s the rub. Or, to be more exact, there’s the “Rub!” The Hindi imperative of “rub” – or, more correctly, “press” – is campo (“chaampo”). This is the verb that was used for massaging. So if your muscles got a good rubbing, this is the word that came with it, and by the mid-19th century we were using shampoo in English to refer specifically to massaging the head and hair with soap. Why did the initial affricate become a fricative? I like to think that the smoothness of the sh seemed more apropos, and the oo is also smooth and mousse-like. Pity that it didn’t stay with the [o], though – then the choices for a messy head could be shampo or chapeau.

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gorgeous

Posted on May 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

By George! This could be a word for a beautiful canyon or similar scenery (denizens of Ithaca sometimes say “Cornell is gorges”). But more often it’s used for someone of resplendent, immoderate beauty – full lashes, lush lips, bounteous hair, unstinting physiognomy. A diadem in the clavicle of a soirée. Beauty you could eat – and gorge yourself on. The stressed syllable of this word puts the mouth into an attitude of astonishment: not only are the lips rounded, the tongue is pulled back and down. So the vowel can be held long and it’s like saying oooooooohhh! And then you follow with the underlining echo of just – not just as in It’s just me but rather as in That’s just incredible! Say it: just gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous… Not that just shows up next to gorgeous that often (it doesn’t need to, really); absolutely is more likely. But the more classic lead-in is drop-dead (and if you see drop-dead it’s very likely to be followed by gorgeous). And what sort of thing does gorgeous describe? Such things as scenery, girl, woman, and – don’t pretend to be surprised – blonde. Now, where does this word come from? It looks like gorge, which is also the French word for “throat” (coming from Latin); are they related? Some sources say “yes” and some say “we don’t know because we don’t have data.” It is known that it comes from Old French gorgias, “elegantly or finely dressed”; this seems to connect to jewelry or kerchiefs, adornments of the throat, but the details are not entirely agreed on. Now, of course, the sense has shifted, and the clothing can be incidental; I defy anyone to say a person needs jewelry, a scarf, or even clothing at all to be gorgeous. Appropriate, yes; but gorgeous is a law unto itself.

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susurrus

Posted on May 29, 2009 | 4 comments

A word made to be murmured, whispered, rustled with the lips pursed, purred. Such a simple set of sounds and symbols: three soft hisses and a retroflex or trill joined by three vowels of decreasing definition (though the stress is on the middle one). Such a set of little lines, too, a row of low verticals interrupted only by three curves, so much like the unintelligible pseudo-script used in cartoons to represent whispering. It practically begs for an extra us on the end – or one less su at the start – to set the symmetry. This word has a Latin source, of course. It appeared in English in the 19th century. Meanwhile, its synonym (or near-synonym) susurration has been in our tongue since about 1400. That word, though, can have negative overtones (or should I say undertones): not just careless whispers but malicious ones, but less so now than in earlier uses of it. There is also a verb, susurrate, and an adjective, susurrous. Another verb, susurr, seems to have been cut short – in time, I mean: no one uses it anymore. Susurrus is not much spoken, either… but go to a library and you’ll be sure to seem to hear it everywhere.

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hijinks

Posted on May 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

Oh, now, here’s a word for something you get up to. And the word gets up, too: look at those three dots in a row, like high spirits, high hands, perhaps lighters held aloft or, well, who knows what – better duck. And they’re bookended by the h on one side and, on the other, what used to be an h but has gotten a bit of a kicking so that the lower part (n) has separated, and not without damage to the upright, which is splintered (k). Clearly damage accelerates quicker when aided by a lot of liquor.

Oh, but these are merely youthful high spirits! Well, high jinxes, too. Not etymologically, though – jinx comes from the name of a bird (jynx, better known as wryneck) said to be used in witchcraft (perhaps to curse a person with torticollis, given its other name), whereas the jinks in hijinks is a plural noun referring to a drinking game (yep), named with a noun referring to a tricky, elusive turn (as in rugby), which in turn is a conversion from the verb jink, which refers to the same action, the sort of move you would make with a 250-pound tackle aiming for you – or perhaps a machine gun emplacement behind you. It’s also somewhat like the moves your fingers make when typing hijinks. (The sudden change may also bring to mind hikinuki, a sudden change in kabuki – I mean a sudden change of costume!) And the verb jink? Just made up because it sounded right for the move. The Oxford English Dictionary calls it onomatopoeia, but the move doesn’t really go “jink, jink, jink”; it’s more in the way of sound symbolism: there’s that jumpy j and the quick-as-a-wink ink. As to the hi, it’s not a greeting (though the greeting “Hi, Jinx!” might lead to some hijinks), it’s high shortened and attached. The word was originally high jinks.

But, really, high jinks just does not party as hard as hijinks. Hijinks is a word for laughing off all manner of inebriated indiscretion and misjudgement, such as having some drinks on the links and using one of the lakes for a jakes, or going out for sushi, having too much sake and ending up dressed in hijiki (just don’t feast on the stuff; it’s slightly loaded with arsenic, dears).

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endive

Posted on May 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

There are several ways to say this word, and in the end I’ve no clear proclivity to one or another. It did come to us most immediately from French, so come on, diva, say it with flair if you wish. But you can also go with the Oxford English Dictionary’s suggestion and make an end of it. The French word came, after all, from Latin, as did Portuguese, Spanish and Italian endivia (no going “on” with that version; the beginning is the “end”). The Latin was intibus or intubus – now, that sounds downright surgical, and uncomfortably close to incubus (close to any incubus is uncomfortable) – and there’s a 10th-century Greek entubon which, pronounced like modern Greek, would be “en-dee-von.” Anyway, this word gives a different, softer, more elegant feel than chicory, the name for the genus of which endive names two species. Especially softer and more elegant if you stick with the French pronunciation, or at least keep away from the broadly anglophone one, which sounds like a short way of saying “nose-dive” and blends two rather downer words. Its object is a quite elegant-looking thing, too, among the most proper of the fancy greens, and as tidy and contained as the word: calm light green and yellow, and none of those ruffles or streaks (nor, perhaps ironically, is its appearance veined). And the leaves can hold a variety of choice spreads and mélanges, spoon-like. Or mix it up and the result is almost divine.

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