You know what discombobulation means, right? It’s a jokey term meaning ‘upset, confuse, put out of order’. It comes from a 19th-century American fad for fake-highfalutin words. Absquatulate (‘leave, get out’) is another such. Discombobulation starts with clear, well-known parts – dis indicating an undoing, com indicating joining or togetherness – and ends with ation, which makes it clearly a noun formed from a verb of doing or making, and if you know your Latin bits well you may also recognize the probably diminutive ul before that. But in the middle is this bob that is just… um a thingamabob. Probably the same bob as in thingamabob, even. The earliest form of discombobulate, seen in 1825, is discomboberate; in 1834 there’s a discombobracate. But by 1839 we were seeing discombobulation for the noun.
Anyway. The general logic of English derivational morphology tells us that if something can be discombobulated, it was probably previously combobulated, and it may by implication in the future be recombobulated (provided the discombobulation isn’t irreversible). Neither of those latter two is in any standard published dictionary, but so what? They’re no less understandable than discombobulated, and I for one am perfectly gruntled by them. Continue reading →
Drawing out this word in oration is a sure sign of edumacation. It’s a true verbal decoration, not some dull coloration. It’s hardcore and may elude your readers, so ration it like sweets. Use it sparingly like sugar.
Which also, I suppose, means go nuts with it for a short time each year. Well, if there’s an edulcoration time, it’s…
Hallowe’en, frankly, with all that candy, but if you want to draw it out longer, make it Advent and Christmas. Or, if you prefer, use it quickly at Purim or for longer at Hanukkah. Or you could always go with Diwali, I guess…
Edulcorating your diet is fun, but you can also edulcorate your words. Sweeten them, is what I mean. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, right? Edulcorate comes from e ‘out’ (as in e pluribus unum) and dulcor ‘sweetness’, and originally it meant to bring sweetness out – not to draw it out and remove it, but to bring it to the surface for tasting, just as educate comes from Latin for ‘draw out’. Edulcorate can also mean ‘remove harsh impurities’. Both of these relate nicely to making your words pleasant to eat, always a wise consideration given that you may be the one eating them.
Interestingly, vinegar can be used to edulcorate other things. This is convenient, because it turns out that flies actually love vinegar. But vinegar is not sweet or smooth. Not even pure vinegar. On the other hand, you can sweeten vinegar with sugar and get sweet and sour, which is pretty nice. (Even salt-and-vinegar potato chips have some sweetness added, often using lactose.)
Edulcorate, then, your words, and your times, and your relations… and your palate. Take the festive season and sweeten it to pure pleasantry (perhaps with the aid of a little fun tartness). But go easy; under some influences, edulcoration can get mixed up into a loud reaction that could cloud or curdle your recreation.
I wear glasses. I need them to see at any distance past book reading. But that’s not the issue. If I take them off, the world may be blurry, but it is still bright and dark in the same measure. I lose only the ability to see the edges clearly. And with my glasses on, I can find my way in the dark, especially if the lights have been off for a time.
You probably know the term a dark-adapted eye. If you have gone out to the countryside at night, away from lights, perhaps to peruse the Perseids or, as last night, enjoy the Geminids (two of the meatier meteor showers), you will find that you can see a Carl-Sagantic quantity of stars, and you can also see more clearly the edges of the trees and fences and hills: earth and heaven, still there and yet nowhere, a silent utopia, a dark paradise. And if someone turns a light on, your eyes will water and you will wince. But to an eye fresh from the lit indoors, the stars are mostly invisible, the trees indistinguishable, the fence a blind hazard, the hills a mere border between black and blacker. Your dark paradise is lost in the afterwash of light; you regain your utopia when you regain your scotopia.
Scotopia. That oto may as well be your two wide eyes around your nose, scoping for photons. The start of it is from Greek σκότος skotos ‘darkness’ (related, way back in Proto-Indo-European, to shadow). You may recognize topia as in utopia, meaning ‘land, place’, but that’s not this; if you see that, you have the edge wrong. This is the opia in myopia and presbyopia (both of which I have), referring to eyes and vision. If you are in the land of darkness, you need dark-sight or you will go only by feeling. You need scotopia.
Light levels are relative, of course. Our eyes are made to handle a certain range, but they do adjust. If you are always surrounded by bright whiteness, you will be confounded by blackness until you have stepped in and away and adjusted your eyes. If something has always seemed too dim or obscure to be approached, a gradual reduction of the light levels may lead you to adjust and find many things you can discern. If the lights go out abruptly, at first you are lost, but at length perhaps you can find your way thanks to scotopia.
Some people are not so able, though. Turn off the lights and everything is flat and uncontrasting. And no matter how able our receptors, we still have our pupils dilated fully, which reduces sharpness and depth of field. A book I can read quite well in good light may prove too much of a challenge for me in dimness. Even if you are well endowed with sensitivity, lack of focus can lead you to lose definition and fail to see boundaries. You need the edges to see the things.
We are now in a time when scotopia is very useful. It is useful at all times, but the light is at its least in this season. Let your eyes adjust. But be aware: there is still much to resolve, and I don’t recommend going only by feeling.
On a snowy Saturday seventeen years ago, in a Scandinavian Modern A-frame church, I married the love of my life, Aina Arro. We’re celebrating that now with a long weekend out of town.
Seventeen may not seem like a significant number, not like 20 or 50 or whatever, but it seems to show up suspiciously often in my life – or at least I notice it in significant connections. My birthday isn’t on the 17th of its month, but my brother’s is, and so is my niece’s, and so is my sister-in-law’s, and so are the birthdays of some of my longstanding friends. And there are pairs of birthdays in my family that are separated by 17 days. I turned 17 when I was in my first year of university (and twice 17 – i.e., 34 – when I was in my first year of marriage). The longest I have ever worked anywhere is 17 years (and some months).
I could find significant things about other numbers, of course, but 17 cuts a figure. It has a presence in our culture too: it’s the last year before technical adulthood. It’s peak youth, epitomized by the magazine Seventeen. It shows up as such in quite a few songs and movies, too. You may think right away of the first words of “I Saw Her Standing There” by the Beatles: “Well, she was just seventeen.”
I think more directly of one of my favourite songs of all time, “Edge of Seventeen” by Stevie Nicks. A great song with a driving beat, steaming with the angst of late adolescence.
Seventeen is a prime number, and it’s tempting to say that at 17 you’re in your prime. But you’re not. You’re only beginning to enter your prime; you’re at the edge of adulthood, commencing maturity, with a long way to go. Consider the poem “To Critics” by Walter Learned:
When I was seventeen I heard
From each censorious tongue,
“I’d not do that if I were you;
You see you’re rather young.”
Now that I number forty years,
I’m quite as often told
Of this or that I shouldn’t do
Because I’m quite too old.
O carping world! If there’s an age
Where youth and manhood keep
An equal poise, alas! I must
Have passed it in my sleep.
Perhaps that poised age is 34, when you’re old enough not to be treated like a kid but young enough still to be youthful (in the eyes of everyone but naïve youths). Seventeen more years, at 51, you’re undeniably mature – in years, at least. You should be in full flush of your career. At 68, you may have wound it down; at 85, you may be winding yourself down. Few people make it to 102.
Seventeen is an interesting number in other ways too. It’s made of the number of completion or top quality (10) and the “lucky” number (7). It’s the longest of the teen numbers to say and the longest to spell out, but arguably the easiest to write as a figure. Like eleven and twelve but unlike any other teen numbers, it uses only one vowel letter, e (though it uses it four times, like two sets of side-eyes). Note that all three – and all other numbers involving 7 – are also the only ones containing v. Like eleven it includes the word even, though of course neither of them is even. Like every number from seventy to seventy-nine, it includes the word event. Like all the teen numbers, you say and spell its two parts in reverse of how you write the figure (since the 1 is the teen because it’s stands for ten).
And the quirky, questioning letter Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. So seventeen seems like a number for wanting to know more.
I must say I’m looking forward to getting to know Aina even more over the next seventeen years.
Light? We associate flames with light, though often with fire the first sign is the scent when something is ignescent. Ignescent means igniting, bursting into flame (just as adolescent is bursting into adulthood and somnolescent is bursting – or at least sliding – into sleep). Whether engine or incense or cigarette, the ignition produces smoke, which conveys its fragrance (pleasing or pestiferous) before the eyes see the fire. Indeed, the smoke may well obscure the light.
We like, and light, flames for many different purposes. In earlier times the heat was paramount; Shakespeare’s Polonius in Hamlet spoke disparagingly of fires that give “more light than heat.” In our times, when central heating lets us take temperature for granted, we more often think of fire for the look of it – a pretty little candle or crackling fire – and we think poorly of a discussion that generates “more heat than light” because we think of heat as anger and light as understanding.
We still get much energy from fire, though – car engines, power plants, and that big burning ball above that we sometimes see during the day. And occasionally we still need a fire for heat, as Aina and I were reminded last night when visiting friends whose heating system was on the blink and who thus lit a fire. It did smell nice, and it gave a lovely light, but we didn’t need the light so much as the heat; the electricity was working fine.
Be it for lighting or heating or scenting, we are now starting an ignescent season. The days are shortest and the temperatures are dropping, and we’re lighting candles and other small fires for holiday observances and festivities. We want to spark a little spirit, though we don’t want to set the world – or anyone’s hair or house – on fire. Spend a cent to light a penny candle and sing, but don’t singe.
This is the tenth chapter of my month-long fiction, album, made of word pictures.
resolution.noun. From resolve, ultimately from Latin re– ‘back, again’ or ‘thoroughly’, plus solvere, ‘loosen, dissolve’. Thus its senses trace back to a return to original parts or state, or a breaking down into pieces or components, or an undoing. Senses are many, including conclusion of an issue, story, or problem; end of an illness; decision to bring something about; amount of detail available in an image (as for instance in lines or pixels per inch) or through an imaging device or lens; working through of a mathematical equation; and musical progression from discord to harmony.
The subject of a photo stands out most clearly if the background is blurry, but sometimes to make sense of the subject you need to know what’s in the background. And sometimes to make sense of a moment’s action you need to know the decisions that led to it. The phone is ringing for Jacob, but there are some details I think I should fill in first from the past few years, scenes that he was not present for.
Jacob’s son Carl is an engineer; I told you that. He studied engineering at Dalhousie University, in Halifax. He now works for a construction company based in Halifax.
Ellen moved to Haifax; I told you that. She works in human resources for a corporation there that has several subsidiaries in Atlantic Canada. She’s back in touch with Jacob now, but she doesn’t tell him everything about her life anymore. She no longer wants to have her life rendered in such exquisite detail for the aesthetic interest of others.
Clara lives in Charlottetown; I told you that. She’s an accountant; I told you that. In the back of one of Clara’s filing cabinets, in a brown envelope, are two copies each of two photos. One of each is pristine; the other has rips, crumpling, looks like it was torn off a wall, pulled out of someone else’s hands. You know what those photos are. Continue reading →
This is the ninth chapter of my month-long fiction, album, made of word pictures.
braid.verb. Plait, intertwine, weave into a single strand, notably of hair. noun. A strand made of strands intertwined together. From an Old English word and Germanic root originally meaning to move with a sudden jerk to the side or in a twisting motion. It has also, in the course of its history, referred to a sudden change and to a deception.
Here’s a picture of a young, thin woman, dressed all in black, standing by a fence in rolling countryside. She’s on a path that slopes down to the left towards a river that we see in the farther background. There’s a railway bridge across the river made of black trusses, with a freight train heading into it, and farther behind are rolling hills with patchy trees. The young woman’s body would be facing the bridge but she’s twisting abruptly around to her left to face the camera, and her two long black braids of hair are caught mid-fling. She is staring at the camera and sticking her tongue out at it, a tongue like a cat’s tongue. In her right hand, reached across her body, is a small pocket film camera pointing right at the viewer.
This is Trina, Jacob’s assistant. The one who will find his body in four days. Continue reading →
This is the eighth chapter of my month-long fiction, album, made of word pictures.
reflex.noun. 1. Reflection; bending or bouncing back. 2. A reproduction or further development of a thing. 3. An automatic response. From Latin re ‘back’ plus flexus, past participle of flectere, ‘bend, flex’.
Here it is, the one picture of Jacob in all these albums. He can look at himself. And still not see himself. If you didn’t know what Jacob looked like, after looking at this picture you still wouldn’t. Most prominent in the photo is the camera, a Pentax 67, a medium-format camera, an overinflated SLR. His right hand grips the side and the shutter; his left hand holds the lens to support the five-pound heft of it all. Over one corner of the camera body you barely see his left eye, but it is not squinting, as photographers so often do; it is looking almost at you. Then there is a forehead, and a lush head of hair most often managed (if at all) with fingers. And below the camera is the bottom of his chin, and his neck, and his bare shoulders. And behind him, reflected obliquely in the mirror, is the bathroom door, open, and part of a mirror in the hall. Continue reading →
This is the seventh chapter of my month-long fiction, album, made of word pictures.
sparkling.adjective. Emitting sparkles; that is, giving off small sparks or similar scintilla, literally or figuratively. From sparkle, verb, which is formed from the frequentative (and sometimes diminutive) suffix –le added to the noun spark, which is an old Germanic word referring to a little bit of fire.
In this picture she is half-slouched in a folding chair, her head tilted well back, drinking a glass of sparkling wine. She is wearing a long sleeveless violet dress. Her legs are stretched ahead of her with one crossed over the other, and her left hand (the side closer to the camera) is pressed against the seat. Her right hand is lightly holding the glass, which is about half drained. Behind her in blurred lines is the jumble of a photographer’s studio.
This is Ellen. Blonde Ellen with the long hair and the almost-noble features, Ellen with the dancer’s feet and the magician’s fingers and the orchid skin. Ellen who may or may not have told Dave she was coming to pose for Jacob. Why would Jacob ask who she’d told? Continue reading →
This is the sixth chapter of my month-long fiction, album, made of word pictures.
blur.noun. An area of visual indistinctness, blending, smear, or similar confusion and lack of sharp contrasts or boundaries in a picture or on a document. verb. Make a blur. The source of this word is unclear: possibly a sound-symbolic coinage; possibly related to blear; first seen in print in the 1500s.
How many Zen masters does it take to change a lightbulb? Two: one to change it and one not to change it.
Jacob likes that old joke. He has his own version: How many people do you need to make a good picture? Two: one to be in focus and one to be out of focus.
It’s not really as simple as that, of course, and he knows it; you can have good photos with zero, one, two, or more people, and as many as all of them can be in focus (though it’s a rare photo that can look good with people in it who are all out of focus). But if you have two people in a photo and one is sharp and one is blurry, you have an essential tension that’s at least a starting point. Continue reading →
Sesquiotica 