Category Archives: word tasting notes

poring

Posted on April 22, 2021 | 1 comment

“So you’ve persuaded the famous Narcissa to join us,” I said.

It was our word tasting Zoom chat, and a few of us had already assembled – including Maury, whom I was addressing. But Narcissa was not there yet.

“Yes,” Maury said. “I did tell her when it was, and she’s usually punctual – oh, that must be her.” He looked to the side and picked something up. His phone. It had apparently vibed with a message. “Oh dear.”

“She won’t be joining us?” I said.

“No, she will, anon, but this makes me wince just a little.” He held up his phone so we could read the text message: “Sorry – will connect in a minute. Spent the afternoon pouring over cookbooks.”

Jess, in her frame, peered, then sat back. “Pouring. Oof. Good thing Margot’s not here.”

“Narcissa is usually more attentive to spelling,” Maury said. “Most odd.”

Arlene, looking over Jess’s shoulder, said, “It should be poring without a u, right?” Jess looked up at her and nodded slowly.

“Perhaps she’s saying she can live with or without u,” I said, and then sang a little quote from U2: “With or without you, ohhh…”

“More like can’t live without u,” Jess said. She had a point.

“So does this have to do with pores,” Arlene said, “like…” She held her sleeveless forearm forth to the camera.

“No,” said Maury, “that’s from Greek; this is not.”

“Germanic,” I said. “Related to peer and, somehow, I think, to spoor.”

“I’m not sure there are any real traces to connect it to spoor,” Maury said. “Just suggestive resemblances.”

“Anyway,” I said, “an old root for looking closely, examining. Not related to the word for flowing fluid.”

“It’s kind of amazing that the spelling hasn’t converged with that kind of pour,” Arlene said.

Jess looked at her. “It seems like that’s what it’s in the process of doing.”

“That was an alternate spelling in earlier centuries, too, when the spellings were less fixed,” I said.

Arlene giggled. “I just… what do people think they’re doing when they spell it that way? Do they think their attention is a fluid, and they’re pouring it over the books, or…”

She was interrupted by the boo-bleep of another person connecting. A woman, probably over 40, with carefully large hair, carefully bright lips, carefully shaded eyes, and carelessly loud glasses, appeared among us.

“Hello, Narcissa,” Maury said. “I take it you’ve been planning some cooking?”

“Hello!” Narcissa said. “Hello, hello,” she said to the others of us. “Not just planning, Maurice. I made a bundt cake, some zabaglione, and, just now, a cosmopolitan.” She raised a coupe with red liquid in it and red lip prints on it and had a sip.

“I wouldn’t think that would require too much bibliotechnical spelunking,” Maury said.

“Not at all,” Narcissa said. “Quick and dirty.”

Maury nodded. “…You said you had been poring over cookbooks.”

Narcissa looked at him over the top of her glasses – the ones on her face and the one in her hand. “Maurice.” She held up a finger, set down her glass and disappeared for a moment. She returned with three books, each one open to some spot in the middle. She held up the first: it showed a recipe for bundt cake, apparently well used, with batter droplets and smears on it. She set that down and held up the second: its glossy recipe for zabaglione was bedaubed with a streak of something frothy. She set that down and held up the third: a little red hardcover displaying a recipe for a cosmopolitan, with red liquid still dripping off it. She set that down and retook her seat. “I need a decent cookbook holder. Every time I work with liquids I end up getting some on the book.”

“Quick and dirty,” Jess said.

“Two of my favourite adjectives,” Narcissa said. “And that is why, Maurice, I said I had been pouring over cookbooks. Really, my lad… you’re usually more attentive to spelling.” She smiled slightly and raised her glass.

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stanch, staunch

Posted on April 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

Many a stanch defender of the language will try to staunch the flow of misspellings.

Wait. No. Many a staunch defender of the language will try to stanch the flow of misspellings.

Right?

It’s like a gauntlet/gantlet and pour over/pore over thing. Every lexical fussbudget knows that. The sight of the wrong one is like aluminum foil touching a filling.

And if you feel that way about staunch and stanch, you… are not going to like what you find if you look in, say, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary or the Oxford English Dictionary or, um, the ITP Nelson Canadian Dictionary, or… let’s see, what else is on my shelf here…

Now, yes, it’s true, for the adjective – as in a staunch defender – the spelling with the u is the more usual one, and the spelling without the u is the alternate, whereas for the verb – as in stanch the flow – as well as for the related noun (yes, there is one; it means ‘dam’ or a similar waterway impedance) the spelling without the u is the more usual and the spelling with it is the alternate. But “alternate” does not mean “wrong.”

So how did it get to be this way? Is this like one of those cleave and cleave things, where two different words happened to converge on a spelling? Or is it one of those isle and island things, where one word was mistakenly thought to be related to the other and got a letter added where it doesn’t belong (in case you’re wondering, isle is the one that has a historical s and island is the one where the s was mistakenly stuffed in)? Nope. It’s one of those things more like person and parson – or, for that matter, more like to and too. They come from the same thing, but the spelling has diverged with the usage. Only in the case of sta(u)nch, the split is still underway. It’s like seeing an amoeba in the middle of, you know, doing it. Or like seeing a stream at a fork. Though, really, it seems to have stagnated: both spellings have stood for both senses for centuries.

In the case of stanch and staunch, the source is words having to do with stopping the flow of water, damming up, et cetera, and, in adjectival form, being impervious to leaking – which is the same dam thing. The Old French form was estanche for the adjective and estanchier for the verb. Its ultimate Latin source might be sto ‘I stand’ or stagnum ‘pool’ – it’s not quite clear. But we do know that the related Italian word is stancare (verb) and stanco (adjective), both translating as ‘weary’. Which may seem suitable if you are wearying of all this lexical hair-splitting.

But if you are the sort who likes to make and maintain small distinctions – one spelling for the verb (and noun) and one for the adjective – well, this one is for you. Specifically, adjective is for u. But remember one thing: though Americans can get away with saying the stanch spelling to rhyme with ranch, you will always be safe (except from people who don’t know any better) saying either spelling to rhyme with haunch.

Although, really, you’ll be safest just avoiding the whole issue and using words like dam or stop up or stalwart.

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zenography

Posted on April 18, 2021 | 1 comment

Zenography looks like it should be writing about Zen Buddhism, or a Zen style of writing, or something like that. Which would be what, exactly? I remember happily reading books of Zen poetry from my Dad’s library (acquired in the coursework for his PhD in Religious Studies), but as enjoyable as they were, the point they all made is that studying Zen by studying Zen poetry is like studying astronomy by examining telescopes. I also remember there used to be a travel agency on Spadina Avenue in Toronto that declared itself to be Zen Travel, and I thought, “Oh, you go in, they tell you you’re already where you want to go, and in exchange you give them all you have, which is nothing.”

But no, by Jupiter, zenography is not that. Zenography is different from Zen. Zenography is not like studying telescopes, it’s true – but telescopes will help you with zenography. Because zenography is the study of Jupiter. As in the planet. The big planet. The planet with the eye. A planet that, given the right light, you can even see with your naked eye – though a telescope will help a lot.

By the way, the word Zen – not as in zenography – is the Japanese version of the Sanskrit original dhyana, which means ‘meditation’. Zen is not an idea or a philosophy; it’s a practice of meditation: don’t just do something, sit there. The aim is to achieve enlightenment, a true understanding of the fundamental oneness of everything (here’s a Zen joke: a monk goes up to a hot dog vendor and says “Make me one with everything”) – or, really, the fundamental lack of substance and permanence in everything, but at the same time and inevitably a unity: no two things are really two things. There are two main schools of how to achieve enlightenment. One school focuses on approaching it gradually, sort of like getting halfway there, and halfway there from that, and then half of the remaining way, asymptotically approaching complete insight. The other school focuses on paradoxes as keys for sudden awakening – the famous koans, such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” and “What was your face before your parents were born?”

But, again, this is not that. OK. So why is the study of Jupiter called zenography? Well, if we called the planet by the Greek equivalent, it would be easier to understand. You may remember that the Roman gods were basically rebranded versions of the Greek ones. Ares became Mars. Aphrodite became Venus. And Zeus, the top dog of the gods, the bringer of mirth and hurler of thunderbolts and assaulter of countless women, became Jupiter.

So you might think that the study of Jupiter could be Zeusography. And you’d be on the right track. But in Classical Greek, the combining form of Ζεύς is Ζηνο-, Zéno-, for reasons that would probably make your eyes glaze over. So writing about Zeus – or Jupiter – is zenography, and anything centring on Jupiter is zenocentric, and if there were a magazine all about Jupiter it might be called National Zenographic or something.

This might lead to a couple further questions. One is “Is this related to zenith?” The answer is no. Zenith  traces to Arabic samt, as does azimuth. Another is “What about that Zeno guy?” And the answer to that is… yeah! The ancient Greek thinker we call Zeno was actually Ζήνων, Zénōn, a name derived from Zeus, sort of like how Christian is derived from Christ.

Do you remember what Zeno is famous for? He was a clever thinker and liked his paradoxes, and the best-known one of them is basically that if you’re going somewhere, you first have to get halfway there, and then you have to get half of the rest of the way, and then you have to get half of that, and so on, so that conceptually, you never get all the way there – it’s asymptotic. But of course, in real life, you just defy the paradox and get there. Still, the idea is rather enlightening, isn’t it, by Jupiter? And so we find a connection between Zen and zenography after all… which was perhaps inevitable, as they were never really two different things, more than anything else is.

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defenestrate

Posted on April 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

If you’re like a lot of people, defenestrate is one of your favourite words. It has that marvellous scuffling sound, more finicky than finesse, looking like an ungainly portmanteau of defense, demonstrate, and perhaps a few others such as infestation and finasteride, and all of that going right out the window – for who does not appreciate the image of throwing things or people out of windows?

Its construction is straightforward enough. The fenestr- root comes from Latin fenestra ‘window’ and can be seen reflected in languages such as French (fenêtre), Italian (finestra), Portuguese (fenestra and also fresta), and even Swedish (fönster), German (Fenster), Dutch (venster), and Welsh (ffenstr). Not English, though – our window comes from Old Norse vindauga (‘wind-eye’), as does, among others, Irish fuinneog. The -ation suffixation is plain enough. The de- may seem odd; for one thing, fenestration refers to the windows of a building, and to fenestrate is to put windows in something, so defenestration might seem to refer to removing windows; but for another, the usual prefix for ‘going out’ is e-, as in eject, or ex-, as in expel. But oh well. Exfenestrate has not caught on, and the probably better-formed efenestrate just does not have that same something that defenestrate has. Anyway, the de- also connotes a downward trajectory, which is usual in such instances.

But if we have defenestrate for throwing out a window, why not words for throwing into a window, or other window-related actions? 

As it turns out, the field of such lexemes is not altogether barren. As Haggard Hawks tweeted, adfenestrate means “to sneak through an open window.” That uses ad-, meaning ‘to’ (e.g., administer). Others suggest themselves readily – and I and others have suggested them. Infenestrate, reasonably enough, means ‘throw in through a window’, and I didn’t have to make it up, although it has been pointed out that perfenestrate might be better formed for that (with per- as in perfuse). For completeness, I suggest that perifenestrate (with peri- as in periphery) would be ‘throw around a window’, parafenestrate (with para- as in paralegal) would be ‘throw in the general vicinity of a window’, antifenestrate (with anti- as in antipope) would be ‘throw against a window’, antefenestrate (with ante- as in antechamber) would be ‘throw in front of a window’, and profenestrate (with pro- as in projectile) would be ‘throw towards a window’. 

To all this Haggard Hawks added that presumably counterfenestrate would be “to throw someone back through the window they’ve just been thrown out of” (it occurs to me that refenestrate could also work for that, though perhaps that’s better to mean ‘put back into a window’ – or ‘put a window back in’, probably after you knocked it out with all this throwing of things). Mededitor threw in penultifenestrate, “throwing someone out of the next-to-last window.” I tossed on interfenestrate, ‘throw out one window and into another’. Brian Baresch suggested confenestrate “for throwing someone away from a window, possibly someone who was trying to escape thereby (efenestrate).” And Mary Hrovat pushed it towards adjectives: subfenestrate to mean ‘below the window’ and superfenestrate to mean ‘above the window’.

As I consider further, we could also have transfenestrate, ‘throw across a window’, abfenestrate, ‘get away from a window’, and, somehow, though I can’t quite picture it, intrafenestrate, ‘throw within a window’ (well, perhaps this word would be better as an adjective meaning ‘within a window’). And, just to get macaronic and borrow from Greek, if you throw (or perhaps even stick) something onto a window, we can say you epifenestrate it.

All of which is well and good, but of course we know that most of these have limited use. Not that defenestrate gets all that many occasions for actual referential use – but it sure has its aspirational value.

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enfarce

Posted on April 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

There are always rules, of course – rules about how to do things and rules within rules and rules about making rules. A common and important question is “Who enforces the rules?” But another question, not common but also valid – for different reasons – is “Who enfarces the rules?”

You don’t know this word enfarce? Of course you don’t; don’t pretend you do – no one uses it anymore. Until now, that is, because I, with my remarkable lexical activation power, say they shall. 

You can make a guess about what enfarce means. You’ll probably be wrong, but make a guess anyway.

Did you guess that it means ‘make a farce [out of them]’? As in take the piss, make a mockery, do the reductio ad absurdum? Good guess! It’s wrong, but it’s a good guess, because you’d think, wouldn’t you? But no, this farce is the same farce that is the source of the farce that means ‘a ludicrous piece of theatre’, and it happens that farces are called farces because they, too, were at first enfarced.

If you know French, you may be guessing where this is going. French for ‘stuffed’ (as in stuffed turkey) is farci, from the verb farcir, and the related noun for ‘stuffing’ is farce. It all comes from Latin farcio ‘I stuff’. The theatre pieces called farces got the name, as far as we know, because they were originally comic interludes, stuffed into performances of greater import (have you ever been to a Cirque du Soleil performance? think of their clowns).

So enfarcement is stuffing something in – into a turkey or a sausage, or less literally into whatever else (as when, for instance, a novelist enfarces an ideological monologue into a story). And when we talk about enfarcing rules, we can mean either of two things: (1) stuffing a rule in where it doesn’t really belong; (2) padding rules with extraneous material. Both of these things are quite common with rules. 

For (1), anyone who deals with legislation and contracts knows that extraneous details get attached as a way of accomplishing extra things with less effort. (I’m put in mind of how, when we made the offer on the place we now live in, I added a request that the microwave oven be included, because even though they’re inexpensive, I knew we might never get around to getting one otherwise.)

For (2), the typical jargon of rules lends itself to padded phrasing such as “The act of walking upon the lawns of these premises is expressly prohibited” where “Don’t walk on this lawn” would suffice. But also, often enough, sets of rules that could be simple and straightforward gain extra rules; for example, an office dress code that starts out as a single sentence prescribing “businesslike attire” gradually, in response to specific complaints, gains provisions specifying that bare knees are not to be visible; that no part of any toe is to be visible; that non-religious and non-medically-necessary headwear is not to be worn within the office space, excepting plain hair bands and barrettes; that bare elbows are not to be visible; that no sleeve shall have a hole in it other than the standard holes at top and bottom to allow the arm to pass through it eventuating in the hand; and so forth. 

All rules need to be enforced, of course, or they’re not really rules, and you need to know whose job it is to enforce them. Rules do not, on the other hand, need to be enfarced. But they will be. And when they are, it’s worth knowing who’s doing it.

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chrysalis

Posted on April 8, 2021 | 2 comments

Chrysalis, the disc said. 

It was a shiny, silvery, crystalline, seven-inch platter of clear vinyl. The word was on the bottom half of a paper circle in the middle of the disc, in white on a blue background that faded up to a white background on the top half. And the top half said “HEART OF GLASS.” There were other words as well, and above and to the left of “Chrysalis” was a butterfly.

I was on the stage of a dark gym/auditorium of the school in Exshaw, Alberta, Canada. It was a junior high dance, circa 1980. I wasn’t officially the deejay, but I was up there helping spin the records because it was something to do. There was zero chance I was going to be dancing. Not that I didn’t want to. But no. Rejects don’t get to dance. Instead, I was busying myself with the music and with developing a resilient shell to protect myself from the myriad insults and injuries of adolescence, a shell within which I could, at length and leisure, eat myself alive and cling to a world of imagination fed by paper and discs, all while still shining at my schoolwork in my pupil role. But hey, we’re all growing, and every cloud has a silver lining, right?

It was the first time I had seen the word chrysalis. Which, since it looked like crystal and was on a crystalline single of “Heart of Glass” (by Blondie), clearly impressed itself on me as having something to do with translucent, shiny things – and music.

Butterflies? What would they have to do with chrysalis? Butterflies start as caterpillars, then go into cocoons and come out all pretty and girly, right?

Butterflies do not emerge from cocoons. Moths do. Butterflies come from chrysalises – or, if you want to be shiny and perfect about that plural, chrysalides.

Butterflies and moths both start as caterpillars and have a pupal stage. And I’m oversimplifying things a bit here – there’s quite a lot of variety in these flashy little bugs – but whereas the pupa of a moth is protected by a papery cocoon it has spun, the butterfly’s pupa molts its last caterpillar skin to reveal a hard, shiny shell it has developed inside: the chrysalis. Within that chrysalis, it eats itself – quite literally: it digests nearly all of its body, leaving just a few imaginal discs, which are the framework on which its adult body is gradually formed from the ooze the rest of it has become (providing nothing disturbs or damages it). Ultimately, like a post-adolescent learning (usually painfully) to come out of the self-protective shell, the butterfly breaks through the chrysalis and comes out into the world.

Of course, a butterfly only has to do it once and for good. Humans do it gradually, over and over and over. (We seldom get eaten by frogs, though.)

But why chrysalis? Is it because the shell is crystalline? Because it is like glass with a heart?

No. It is not a crystal, nor is it a silver lining. In fact, it’s a gold lining. The Greek original of this word, χρῡσαλλίς, comes from χρῡσός, khrusos, ‘gold’ – passed through Latin, hence the spelling. You see this chrys– root in words such as chrysanthemum. Some chrysalides are golden in colour, hence the name. It’s not related to crystal.

So, now, I hope that is clear. And do butterflies have a heart of glass? Probably not; that seems more of a human thing. But as our hair gets more silver and our years progress towards golden, we may have to shell out a lot, but at least we get to dance from time to time.

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hux-word

Posted on April 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

What do you call a bad word when it’s not a “bad” bad word? I don’t mean a word that you dislike for aesthetic reasons (e.g., moist, onus); I mean the kind of word that your parents told you not to use, but not a swearword. You know, like poopy-head, or jackanapes, or nitwit: a word intended to mock, scorn, and deride. (And I don’t mean a word that is used that way only sometimes – for instance, while “OK, Boomer” is meant to convey that the addressee is ancient, smug, and irrelevant, members of the Baby Boom generation have happily owned Boomer for decades without any issue except, now, in that one context.)

We could say that these words are insults, and so they are, but insult is a broad term; it can include anything from a wordless gesture or act to an extended peroration. Is there no equivalent to swearword for these?

Of course there is, and you knew there would be as soon as I asked the question, because that’s why we’re here. And you undoubtedly have a good idea of what that word might be: the title of this word tasting – hux-word. Or, I suppose, huxword, though my one source for it (the Oxford English Dictionary) keeps the hyphen in, as it is wont to do.

It seems rather like a hex-word, doesn’t it? Which is not bad: a hex is a curse, and a hex-word is a word uttered in malediction, not unlike a hux-word. But hux comes from Old English, originally husc (those /ks/ and /sk/ sounds tend to swap around from time to time; acs became ask and, in some varieties of English, is now back to ax), and husc came from Old High German hosc, and all of them meant ‘mockery, scorn, derision’.

Meant? Past tense? Well… yeah, hux hasn’t really been in use for, um, several centuries. But what the hex. I mean what the heck. Blow the dust off it. Hux-word and its earlier spellings (e.g., huscword) was in use at the time to mean exactly what you’d think it would mean and exactly what we need it to mean.

And if someone hucks a huxword at you, what do you do? You could say “Aw, shucks.” Or you could just tell them to hux off.

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toruntila

Posted on April 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

I hate getting a toruntila. It’s like wanting an Oreo and getting an Oregardingo, like ordering a sausage and getting a saCanadage. The disappointment cannot be overprovinciald: you have been the victim of a reckless replacement; the filling you expected is not there and instead you have something… out of place and perhaps weirdly starchy. You look at your plate, wave over the waiter, and say “I’m not leaving till I get a tortilla” – but even as you speak your words are changed to “I’m not leaving until I get a toruntila.” Oh, the hupersonity!

Yes, toruntila may look like tarantula, but while it can be hairy and can have a nasty bite, it’s really what a tortilla becomes when someone decides that till needs to be replaced with until throughout the document (by the way, while preferring until to till is defensible as a matter of taste, till is by no means an error – in fact, until was originally formed from till, not the other way around). And, more broadly, just as a mondegreen is a misheard lyric (often containing a nonexistent word – classiomatic is an automatic classic of the type), and a Cupertino is an erroneous spellchecker replacement (because Word ’97 would suggest Cupertino in place of cooperation), a toruntila is a reckless-replacement sandwich.

Say, for instance, you tell your find-and-replace to change “re” to “regarding” throughout, and you neglect to check “Whole Word Only”; say you tell it to replace “USA” with “Canada” and neglect to uncheck “Ignore Case”; or say you equally recklessly replace “state” with “provincial” or “man” with “person” (or with “human”)… there you are with your Oregardingo and saCanadage and underprovinciald and hupersonity (or huhumanity). And if you run a second reckless replacement to make son into child, you may get huperchildity, which is a second-level toruntila.

Do you doubt that these things happen? Editors know that they do. But why take my word for it? You can easily Google toruntila and see for yourself. It’s not a word that exists in this world for any other reason than the reckless replacement, and every context you see it in clearly needs tortilla instead. As Jonathon Owen has pointed out on finding this particular gaffe in several books, “It takes multiple independent screw-ups to make something like this happen.” And yet happen it does. (And more easily on websites that have less rigorous editorial processes.)

So now you have a word for it. Every disuntilery, every unforreceivetable or forbecoming, every discomRobertulation, every denaTorinog, every schildmark, every dash of cardamother or kernel of fathercorn… they are all toruntilas, with an unexpected filling that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

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aprine

Posted on March 31, 2021 | Leave a comment

Oh, it’s the time – the time of April wine and spring rain, the time of aperture and Aphrodite. Have an apéritif; April is here, ripe as an apricot, and it seems a prime time to be aprine.

What is aprine? Has it to do with rapine? No more than with rapini. Or with pannier or nappier? Not even as mixed-up doubles. No, it is the adjective formed from aper.

Is that as in aperture? Something will open up, perhaps, but no. As in apéritif? For the same reason, no, but you may want one Aperol – ahem, after all. As in ‘one who apes’? It’s not the ape you need to watch out for. As in apricot? Neither in apricity nor in precocity. As in Aphrodite in April? Oh, I hope not. It’s not that it would be a crashing bore. But it would be a crashing boar.

Yes, though April is a singular time of the year, this word is about the sanglier time of the year: in Latin, aper is a boar (it even traces back to the same Proto-Indo-European root as boar). And it’s said like “opper” – and aprine is likewise said with a short a. But while you should answer when opportunity knocks, it would be inopportune and, frankly, importantly importunate to open the door for apertunity.

Still, it’s spring. Get out of your rut and rut. Go whole hog. Don’t go overboard, but don’t be overbored; just be a boar, and pig out on April.

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oikolect

Posted on March 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

As I was cooking today, I was thankful that the spatch I was using was silicon so it was like a… hmm, a spatula. Sorry, I mean the spatula was like a rubber scraper. Oh… I guess I mean the turner, or pancake flipper, or something, was like a rubber scraper. Apparently the use of spatula (spatch for short) I grew up with, to refer to any of a wide variety of kitchen implements with a broad flat part and a handle, is nonstandard, and officially only some specific kind of thing is a spatula. Well, it’s my kitchen, and you can’t stop me… as long as I’m not writing a cookbook or something like that.

We all have usages that are particular to our families, and we may not even know that some of them are idiosyncratic. There are particular uses of specific words (or even entire words that other people don’t use), preferred words for things (I have learned to call a remote control a clicker to assimilate to my wife’s terminology), ways of saying things (my typical vowel slur to my wife, /jɐ̃iʔɘʔ/, meaning “you gonna eat that?”), and also certain expected locutionary turns: for instance, in my childhood, as the car pulled into our driveway after a family trip, my brother and I would typically sing (to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”) “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here…”

You should not be surprised that there is a word for this kind of thing.

You know, of course, that a particular variety of a language as spoken by everyone in a particular region (or similar cultural division) is a dialect; you may or may not know that the equivalent as spoken by people in a specific social set (for example the factory workers in a particular small town, or the British upper class) is a sociolect; you might have heard that the particular speech patterns and vocabulary preferences of an individual are that person’s idiolect. All of these have -lect in common, which is from Greek λεκτος, derived from λέγω (legó), ‘I speak’. So what is the variety spoken by a family or within a particular household? 

It’s an oikolect.

That’s not because your family are oiks (though they may be). It’s because Greek for “home’ or ‘hearth’ or similar is οἶκος (oikos) – which, when it passed through Latin, became the root œco-, which generally shows up in English as eco-, as in economy, ecology, et cetera. It turns out that the home – the oikos – can be more broadly defined than you might think. And also that home economics is, etymologically, redundant.

But oikolect is not extensible to everything covered by an economy or ecology. It’s just you and those weirdos who you grew up with and/or grew up with you – and, as the case may be, those weirdos who currently share your domestic space. It’s yet another way that the language you use helps define your affiliations and belongings.

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