Category Archives: word tasting notes

fulculency

Posted on February 1, 2019 | 2 comments

I’ve dipped into the Dictionary of Archaic Words again, sorted through its starchy heaps of lexical refuse, all those old words the language has left behind like so much dried paste. Some of them are quite quaint and charming. Some of them have a kind of…

Well, look at this one: fulculency. The definition given isn’t even a definition, it’s just a citation: “Dreggie refuse and fulculencie,” a quote that it cites to page 41 of Topsell’s Serpents, a reference I easily followed to Topsell’s History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, a classic work from 1658 that is, for your enjoyment, available online. Continue reading →

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , ,

fyke-fack

Posted on January 28, 2019 | 5 comments

If this sounds like something someone from Scotland might say when having to do a lot of boring busywork for some pernickety pest, well, yes. But it’s not an expletive. It’s a word for the tedious trivial tasks themselves, or, as a verb, for busying oneself about them. Here’s a citation:

Yet after a’, wi’ this fyke-fack an’ that fyke-fack, this thing an’ the tither thing, it cost me tippence or thretty pennies by the time I got without the port.

Continue reading →

5 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

dinkum

Posted on January 26, 2019 | 1 comment

January 26 is Australia Day.

If you’re fair dinkum, you knew that five minutes after you were born. If you’re anyone else, though, count it as fair warning. Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

Tartuffe

Posted on January 19, 2019 | Leave a comment

The other evening I saw a splendid production at Canadian Stage of one of the great plays of the French theatre: Tartuffe, by Molière. It was in an excellent modern English version and a staging that happily and effectively made the play as current to our eyes as it had been to the eyes of its original audience in 1664. Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

sprunt

Posted on January 14, 2019 | 1 comment

I was just flipping through my paperback abridgement of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, as one does on a leisurely Sunday evening, and I happened on this stub of a word: sprunt.

Well, now. What could it was? It starts with the spr that we see in spring and sprinkle and spruce and sprain and sprawl, and it ends with the unt that we see in hunt and shunt and bunt and punt and runt. The word as a whole looks like an irregular past participle of sprint – as in I sprint, I sprant, I have sprunt. There are several ways it could go. Or, of course, the meaning could be entirely unrelated to what it sounds like it means, although with two sound clusters that have vivid associations, that’s not so likely; even if it started out unrelated, the sense would tend to drift towards what people think it should mean. Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

yarringle

Posted on January 12, 2019 | 1 comment

We use words to spin many a yarn. But a word, in turn, spins yarns around it: all the uses and places and users and senses it’s had, wound or twisted or balled up and ready to be ravelled for revelry or pulled piecemeal for prose. Even the way it’s balled up can be different from time to time, not always telling a true tale of where it came from, and the same word for the same meaning and function can have different shapes over time, some plain for function, some fancy for curiosity or to show ingenuity and splendour. A word is in this way a yarringle, and yarringle is such a word. Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

legion

Posted on January 10, 2019 | 3 comments

“My name is Legion, for I am many.”

I first read that when I was a child. I wondered how it could make sense. For one thing, in the little town I lived in, there was only one Legion. Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

ballicatter, frore

Posted on December 18, 2018 | 1 comment

As one does on a cold evening in early winter, I have slid my copy of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, second edition, off the shelf, looking for some nice words from a worse climate to warm me up.

It has not disappointed. Look at this lovely sentence it adduces for a citation:

I wasn’t frost-burned. My mitts were frore onto my hands. My face was frore, my collars was frore an’ everything was ballicattered.

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

snizy and snod words

Posted on December 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

Snow is snowing in this snizy season, even when you are out visiting. Be the house and the company ever so snod, and the room ever so filled with snapperdols, you will sooner or later have to snabble your snacks and slip out into the snivy snizeler, and soon enough you will snuist and snite a snevit until at last you can sneak into your own snug, snaste the candle, snerdle with your snugglebunny, and snouse… and hopefully not snuzzle. Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

focal

Posted on October 28, 2018 | Leave a comment

It’s all a matter of how you see it. In what context you see it. From what distance. And how much it contrasts with what’s around it.

This is the word of my life: focal. More than almost any other word.

No, wait. These are the words of my life: focal and focal.

Focal, in English (and French and Spanish and Portuguese), means ‘of or relating to focus’. It comes from Latin focalis.

Focal, in Irish, means ‘word’. Is é focal an focal i gcóir focail. (‘Word is the word for a word.’) It looks like it could come from Latin vocalis (source of English vocal), but it doesn’t – although it is distantly related. It comes from a Proto-Celtic word that traces back to a Proto-Indo-European root for ‘voice’, wṓkʷs. Along with the Latin vox set, that root also led to the Irish word fuaim, ‘sound, noise’, and to many words in many other Indo-European languages, such as German erwähnen ‘mention’ and Dutch gewagen ‘report’. Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,